Watching Hawkeye football this season is far too much like trying to read a particularly dreary British novel of the 1800s. The prose style is ponderous when it’s not monderous, the story line goes nowhere, but excruciatingly slowly, the characters can’t do anything but take tea breaks, slowly, and at the end of four hours, you wish you had spent the hours tying, then untying, then tying, then untying your shoes. At least you would have gotten something done.
It’s not that I’m a Hawkeye-hater or anything. I grew up a Hawkeye fan. My father was on the Iowa Athletics Board, as it was called back in those Model-T times.
So I’m not anti-Hawkeye. I merely can’t stand 19th-century British literature. Yeah, I know, I know. I’m going to get kicked out of the Brontë Club. Mercy me.
If only the Hawkeyes would ditch the Brits and adopt something more like Robert Coover with three wideouts stacked right, a tight end in the slot, and T.C. Boyle in motion, I’d probably yell “Read on.”
But no, it’s Brits, Brits, Brits. It’s like a boiled kidney diet.
And boiled kidney always reminds me of tax policy (don’t try eating that at home). Though usually it’s announced as TAX POLICY — more earthshattering than plate tectonics.
Right now, the Big Trees in Washington (the GOP branch, anyway) are getting ready to unveil TAX POLICY involving tax cuts, which always remind me of death by a thousand tax cuts.
There’s only a little bit known about the coming tax cuts because the GOP Big Trees are working out the policy behind closed doors, much in the same manner in which they worked out the details of their super plan to repeal Obamacare. How’d that work out for them?
But from what has leaked out, in dribbles and drabs, the Tax Policy Center analysis says 80 percent of the cuts will go to the top 1 percent.
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Yeah, you’re right. That sounds like a tax cut for the middle class, if by middle class you mean those who pick up Lamborghinis in their spare moments.
Pretty soon, the whole tax-cut thing seemingly boils down to he said/she said, or she said/she said, or he said/he said, or someone said/someone else said, or or or — till all you want to do with your life is find a theater with some professional actors putting on a production of Waiting for Godot.
Oh, well. What can you expect when your leaders are Big Trees? They’re rooted in the past.
For those rooted in the future, which sounds somewhat tricky, the big news has nothing to do with tax cuts or boiled kidney, it’s indictments. Yes, special prosecutor Robert Mueller and the grand jury have moved, and former Trumpster campaign director Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, his deputy and business partner, face a slew of charges.
Also, former Trumpster foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about trying to set up meetings between the campaign and Russians who had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
The White House reacted by saying any collusion with the Russians was committed by Hillary and the DNC. Of course. Hillary and the DNC colluded with the Russians so that the Russians could leak batches of emails that made Hillary and the DNC look bad, if not worse. That’s the way human beings work.
Sheesh.
