Weasels

I was a little shocked to see the massive headline that adorned my hometown paper – The Oregonian – yesterday: STATE REP DRESSED AS WOMAN ENGAGED IN SEX ACT IN ADULT BOOKSTORE.

Of course my first reaction was, “oh boy, they caught another closeted horny gay Republican. And although that was true, it really isn’t the real story here.

Despite the fact that this was probably the largest headline I had ever seen in the Oregonian (the last time they used a typeset this large the Japanese had just surrendered) – it was really just a non-story with a particularly salacious subject. A male state representative from Eastern Washington with a penchant for dressing up like Cher and spending time with buffed male porno actors had gotten into a little hot water. And even though the event occurred hundreds of miles from The Oregonian’s home base – in a different state – and had little or no effect to Oregonian readers, it was just too nasty a story for the paper to ignore. So, in a day when American soldiers were dying in the Middle-East, children were being slaughtered in Darfur, billions were still missing from Iraq, and the world was being dried up by global warming, The Oregonian decided instead to report on cross-dressing, and along the way destroy the life of some poor guy from a little town in Washington.

Of course, this is wrong on so many levels. The fact that the Pulitzer-prize winning Oregonian degraded itself in such a manner is a shame and an insult to its readers, but also another indication that journalism in America is all but breathing its last breath.

Of course, we are all fascinated with the sexual exploits of our politicians, and I am sure it sells a lot of papers and magazines. But the truth is – unless a politician’s actions somehow negatively impact their ability to do their job, or break the law, it is really none of our business how they spend their off hours. I would much rather have a President who blows off steam late at night by dressing up like a pony while the First Lady rides him around the Oval Office, than a President who illegally conspires to take away our civil liberties.

Sure, sexual activities are newsworthy when they are clear indicators on the Weasel meter. I want to know when my elected official is a blatant liar, or uses their position to attack others while secretly enjoying the activities they condemn. But right now we desperately need talented people to enter public service, and conducting public witch hunts to sell papers potentially scares off those that could help us the most.

Here’s another one to add to the growing list of “Bad Bush Administration Decisions That Kill People.” Since taking office our President has slashed the budgets for programs that promote condom use among teenagers to prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease. Instead, the administration has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting abstinence. As a result, according to the Center For Disease Control, for the first time in fourteen years there was no increase in condom use last year among high-school students. Of course the Christian right will probably try to make this into a positive statistic, but nationally, experts are concerned about rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS. (One can only hope that Mark Foley wrapped his Weasel before going on Page patrol.)

Convincing young people not to have sex is a little like convincing starving people they aren’t hungry. Consider the success of the Catholic Church’s “vow of celibacy.” If educated adult men that have committed their entire lives to religious service and vowed celibacy can’t refrain from sex, I seriously doubt that a hormone-laden seventeen-year-old that watches several hours of racy MTV videos per day while surfing internet porn will be more successful.

But Bush’s silly policies grow more insidious internationally. In Africa and much of the developing world, condoms are an essential tool in fighting an AIDS epidemic that continues to kill thousands of people every day. Through budget cuts and political pressure, Bush is making the life-saving little Jimmie much harder to get, and accordingly, people die.

Carl J. Truscott, the former Director of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, was forced to resign his position earlier this year when it was revealed that he ordered his staff to help with his nephew’s homework, a documentary that took approximately ten months to complete. An estimated twenty bureau employees were assigned to assist with the project, spending dozens of hours performing research and pulling film from the agency’s library. The good news for tax payers that invested thousands of our dollars into the assignment – the nephew did receive an A!

This leads me to believe we have been taking the wrong approach towards government. Perhaps we should somehow see that President Bush’s nephew receives an assignment to get us out of Iraq for his class project.

I try to differentiate between criminals and Weasels. Certainly there are a lot of criminals that are Weasels – but criminal behavior is motivated by many factors, so the two are not always synonymous. Weasels can often be nasty, deceitful, and dishonest without technically breaking any laws.

However, occasionally I see criminal behavior so heinous and reprehensible that it could only be committed by someone with the true soul of a Weasel. Such is the case of Roberta Lillie, who was recently sentenced to life in prison for beating her 88-year-old mother to death with a wine bottle and an oxygen tank. Lillie testified she went to her mother’s apartment to return credit cards she had stolen from her. She also told the court she had told her mother and aunt she needed money for cancer surgery, when she actually was just behind on her debts. Instead of apologizing and returning her mother’s credit cards, she chose instead to beat her Mom to death while the old lady sat in her recliner. Lillie justified her actions by saying once at her mother’s apartment she "began to ponder all that had gone wrong in her life". One can only hope Lillie continues to ponder her situation for the next forty or fifty years from an 8 by 10 cell.

In my book one of the Weasels I profile is The Grave Robbing Weasel, a particularly nasty fellow that literally stole the boots off a dead guy. I find Weasels that choose to torment the defenseless a particularly nasty breed of vermin, and there are few more vulnerable than the elderly, the dead, and their mourners. We need a special part of the prison for the folks that con old people out of their life savings, rob the homes of mourners while they are at funerals, and sell overpriced air tight coffins to poor people distraught over the death of a loved one.

According to an article I read in The Oregonian, Carolyn Franklin, co-owner of Woods Funeral Home in Oakridge, Oregon is alleged to possess some of these exceptional Weasel qualities. She was arrested last month and charged with five counts of first degree theft and forgery. Investigators claim that Franklin was filing funeral policy claims for people that had not died yet, and collected over $34,000 by forging signatures and billing for services that had not been rendered. The scheme was discovered when one of the elderly policy holders did pass away, and when the family tried to collect on the policy they were told the death benefit had been paid three years earlier. Since death is inevitable and someday all the policy holders will die, Franklin’s alleged antics seemed doomed from the beginning. But I guess a Weasel doesn’t have to be smart.

Unfortunately every culture has to endure the antics of the Weasel – even the southern Oregon Indian tribe, the Klamaths. According to the Dictionary of Klamath Language, the Klamath name for Weasel, or more specifically the Weasle, is Tchashkai. The Tchashkai’s curious pranks and tricks are often alluded to by Native Americans, and in fact the Klamaths even named a minor deity after the Tchashkai, and there is a section on the Southside of Crater Lake named in honor of the Weasel God. Of course this small amount of nearly useless information probably leads to a couple big questions. First and foremost, why am I reading the Dictionary of Klamath Language? Well, it came recommended on Amazon when I bought Funny Sioux Sayings. Also, I am considering developing a Klamath version of the book, Warriors, Workers, Whiners, and Tshashkais. It would be the only new Klamath language book introduced in a hundred years, and I have a feeling the language is due for a renaissance. Anything to sell a few more books.

One might also wonder why a culture would name anything after a Weasel. I’m certainly not familiar enough with Klamath Indian culture to comment specifically on the Tshashkai, but in our world there is a Nixon library, and the Nobel Peace Prize is named after the man that invented dynamite.

In my book I borrow the above quote from my nephew Auggie Smith, a stand-up comedian who finds very funny ways to preach personal responsibility. And isn’t that what being a Warrior is all about – taking responsibility for your actions, be they good or bad? As Mel Gibson should probably attest to, drinking to excess doesn’t make you different – it just makes you more of what you are – and it sometimes leads to very bad photo opportunities.

Last week another Weasel crawled out of his hole and into the bright lights of forced personal responsibility and a public revealing of sexual peccadilloes. Congressman Mark Foley, who previously had not been shy about condemning others for their less than responsible activities, was revealed to have been harassing young male pages with sexually explicit e mails. In a Washington version of the Vatican pedophile scandal, it was also revealed that other members of congress might have known about Foley’s penchant for perviness, but chose not to address it.

In a classic response, Foley is "blaming the booze", saying he is going in for treatment. He also has indicated he had undergone some childhood trauma that placed him in his unfortunate position. In Foley’s "Devil Made Me Do It" world we are all potential victims that victimize others. It’s like some sick multi-level marketing pyramid – where everything bad resonates from the evil doers that victimized our great great grandparents as kids five or six generations ago.

We shouldn’t buy it. Certainly alcoholism and abuse can permeate and infect the family tree – and as a society we need to do all we can to break the cycle – but it doesn’t justify continued victimization of new generations. Foley is a smart and connected guy that had the resources to get the necessary assistance to temper and control his creepy urges. And if others in Washington knew of his penchant for the barely post-pubescent, and chose to do nothing, they should be sent back to their home states in disgrace to work the late shift at Burger King, alongside the former Catholic Bishops that failed to police the priests.

Of course, in fairness to both Catholic Priests and politicians (though I am not quite sure why I feel compelled to defend either), I guess I should state that as a young man I served as both an Alter Boy and a Page, and neither Priest nor Politician coerced me into an uncompromising position.  Of course, I was pudgy and a bit mean.

Since I started writing Warriors Workers Whiners and Weasels, I’ve noticed that, as a culture, we have recently been confronted with an abundance of particularly heinous Weasels operating on a large scale. They range from the white-collar thugs who ran Enron and WorldCom and robbed thousands of unsuspecting people of their life savings while pillaging their companies, to the most dangerous kind of Weasels who periodically rise to haunt mankind – namely, the terrorists who killed thousands of people on September 11th and who continue to plague the world by killing innocent people in the name of fanaticism.

Although I would never dare equate the run-of-the-mill nasty folks each of us may encounter in our daily lives with the kind of individuals who randomly slaughter innocent people, both are Weasels of different degrees. History is filled with the unfortunate rise of social, religious, political, and military Weasels—individuals and groups who cause tremendous pain to the masses and who temporarily stall society in its tracks, as we all attempt to deal with actions that are almost impossible for us to comprehend. Instead of channeling their energies to change the problems they complain about, they instead focus on harming others in retribution.

In their fanaticism, they exhibit typical cowardly Weasel tendencies, although on a much larger and more dangerous scale than the con men and creeps that we more commonly encounter. They are blind to the concerns of others, and they justify any action they may decide to take. They whine about the injustice they perceive is heaped on them, and they use it to explain their immoral and criminal behavior. Yet despite their pontifications, they refuse to take responsibility for the havoc they wreak.

As Americans, we have been raised to loudly proclaim the superiority of our political system over less free and forthcoming governments, which made the terrorists’ actions all the more baffling. They feel strongly enough about their cause that they commit suicide while murdering thousands, seemingly with no regret, yet they are so cowardly that they refuse to publicly acknowledge their actions. Although the atrocities of other groups and governments are not often more tolerable, as a culture, we at least find it more palatable to have enemies who have the courage of their convictions to publicly identify themselves.

As previously explained, weasels are not only annoying and sometimes dangerous, but they are also incredibly expensive! In fact, we all pay essentially what amounts to a Weasel tax—and this tax is probably a lot more than most of us imagine, plus it’s increasing every year. In the past I talked about the impact of petty crimes, such as vandalism on society. Now let’s take a look at the impact of more serious crimes.

Moving way up the scale of seriousness is gun violence. The cost of gun violence in the country runs more than $100 billion a year, and much of it is paid by taxpayers. In fact, each gang murder ends up costing taxpayers more than a million dollars, once all the costs for enforcement and trials are tabulated; when you add in the cost of incarcerating the murderer, that number goes to $1.75 million per gang murder. In Southern California alone, there were more than 3,100 gang murders in the last five years. Over the last fourteen years, Southern California spent $271 million treating gunshot wounds—96 percent of which was paid for with public funds.

And when we do catch these criminals, housing them is the next huge expense. The budget just for the Federal Prison System in 2006 is estimated at $4.8 billion.

There is nothing more disgusting than a Weasel who takes advantage of the disadvantaged—the elderly, the young, the handicapped, and those in need. And unfortunately, there is no lack of such stories—about creeps who deal in human slavery, pedophiles, con men who steal an elderly person’s last dollars—the stories go on and on.

But one must really wonder about the kind of Weasel who decides to take advantage of his own elderly grandmother. A fellow passenger on a plane told me about the black-sheep Weasel in his family. His brother, a rather “down-and-out” young man, had taken a renewed interest in visiting their grandmother. Knowing the disreputable character of their brother, the siblings were a bit suspicious, but the elderly woman was so enjoying the attention that they all felt it might be okay.

It was only when the grandmother fell ill that they uncovered what a Weasel their brother really was. The doctor discovered that the creep had been stealing the grandmother’s vital medication and replacing it with vitamin pills. When the family did a little more investigation, they found that the thief had also slowly been stealing the old lady’s possessions and selling them to buy his own drugs.