Look, Nothing Up Their Sleeves!

Ventriloquist: Good morning, Mr. Representative.
Dummy: Good Morning, Mr. Adoption Industry Lobbyist! Boy, am I glad to see you! What ideas do you have for me today to keep the adoption money flowing?
Ventriloquist: Boy, am I glad you asked, Little Buddy. We have some shucking and jiving to do!
Dummy: Oooooh, Goody! Do I get to pretend to be a great orator and thinker??
Ventriloquist: Sure, you do, Mr. R. Let's get started, shall we?

And on and on it goes. That is, of course, until the ventriloquist gets out his good barfmuggle (natural mother) dummy (which is a total fake because the only one that would talk like that is hiding in her kitchen pantry with her own secrets and lies) and puts a few choice words in her mouth. The first dummy is part of the program, and the second one is a fake. But hey, it's all about the bottom line, isn't it?

I just loved Bastardette's post on the machinations behind the IL bill. She quoted Tennessee Williams and the wonderful line he gave Big Daddy in "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" about the odor of mendacity  and how it smells like decomposition. "Mendacity" has become one of my favorite words along with "Obfuscation." From IL to NJ to FL and even unto some of the fractured factions of our own sister moms and adult children, it is amazing how many different ways there are to say absolutely NOTHING and lie about it.

Just like there are legislators in states facing open records bills who hope those ungrateful, whining bastards will go away if they throw out  some convoluted phrases worth nothing, so are there those who have done a presto-chango and an alakazam and attempted to create the illusion that the EMS never was. It has become a bad vaudeville show. And, while all the rabbits are being pulled out of hats and the smoke and mirrors divert the audience, behind the scenes it is business as usual for the all-powerful Wizard of Adoption.

One of their greatest acts is the simplest. They are just sitting and waiting for the mothers of the EMS/BSE to die out so that they don't have to bother with us uppity sluts. I am thinking of looking for that fountain of youth so that I can out-live Chuck, Tom, Sara, NCFA and the rest of the gang. After all, I am still here in the Adoption Capitol of the nation, Florida, for a while longer while the Rock-Man has his cancer treatments. Maybe while they are radiating his poor little po-po, I can struggle through the sago and scrub and find that spring of everlasting life. It would be fun to be around long enough to bug the mendacity out of these ijits.

I would love to see a group of illusion-shatterers arise, maybe a group like "Uppity Sluts and Whiny Bastards For An End to Mendacity by Obfuscation." There isn't a catchy anagram there, but saying the whole thing out loud is fun. We could draft simple OBC bills that allowed unfettered access by adopted adults and their natural mothers (who were, after all, the legal parents when the OBC was created) and pass them out, every day, in every legislative body in the country. We could blind these pompous popinjays with logic on paper. Whenever they start trying to pull the unending stream of colorful scarves out of a closed fist, we could rip off the jacket to show the neat contraption that folds those scarves up into a flat package that doesn't show on the outside. We could rip open the curtain that conceals the man operating the smoke and illusion machines and generally have a rip-roaring, good time.

I once read a short story about a little boy, sort of an outcast, who had a neighbor who was a ventriloquist. He would visit the neighbor every day and the dummy became his best friend, offering sympathy when things went wrong and lots of good advice. One sad day the ventriloquist died and the little boy, fearful of what might happen to his beloved buddy, sneaked into the house to look for him. When he found the box containing his friend, he was overjoyed and began to talk to him. When his friend didn't answer him, he picked him up, amazed at his floppy head and body. They he saw it...the hole in the dummy's back and it all became clear to him. His parents found him, sitting on the back steps of the neighbor's house, the dummy next to him, in a near-catatonic state. All he could say was, "I never had a real friend and now the not-real friend is dead."

I think the industry and its mavens and toadies and other well-compensated hangers-on are good at being "not-real" friends. There are some among us who actually believe we can work and make progress with adopters and industry reps among the workers. That makes me think of another magical character...the Push You Pull Me from Doctor Doolittle, the Rex Harrison version. (Sorry, but Eddie Murphy's version is not up to the original.) Two-headed beasties with heads on either end never make much progress. It's all a mess-up with a cast of characters that range from the pompous to the inane.

All this makes me wish that Burl Ives were still with us to stand in the halls of each legislature and utter those wonderful word about odoriferous mendacity. It's time for the vaudeville magicians that call themselves legislators to retire. Poof!