The Babble Belt
Filibusters, faith and the Washington tradition of faking it
By Gene Weingarten
which is why I rise today to speak on behalf of the filibuster, a noble parliamentary device that has come under grievous assault in recent weeks for being a supposed tool of those who would do battle against God Himself; that, by threatening to filibuster, the secular-humanist minority in the U.S. Senate is supposedly blocking the appointment of judges of faith, and that faith is good and wholesome -- as American as apple pie and Mom -- which may be true but is a contention that belies the critics' central argument, since it is a hallmark of the beleaguered American mom that she often has to talk until she is blue in the face, which is precisely what filibustering is; moreover, once one condones the discrimination against the blue of face, one may just as well condone discrimination against the brown of face, the yellow of face and so forth, which is not only un-American but a slippery slope of bias leading inevitably to discrimination against people with big, hairy moles on their faces, like my grandma, and I, for one, resent it; furthermore, if one examines the root of the term "filibuster," one finds it comes from vrijbuiter, a Dutch word for piracy based on the word vrijbuit, which translates to "free booty," which unfortunately sounds like a commodity with unknown yet disturbing strings attached that one might be offered on the street by persons in tight sequined skirts and purple eye shadow seemingly applied with a painter's trowel, who just might be working for some guy named Turk who is around the corner in a full-length fur coat and cowboy boots and a shiny suit and is bootlegging a pair of brass knuckles, a line of thought that, come to think of it, does not help my argument much, so I am going to abandon it, which is okay since no one listens to the particulars of a filibuster, anyway; what is important are not the words being spoken but the length and density of the speech, which customarily contains extraneous facts, extemporanea and odd musings, such as lamenting the unfortunate and unfair plight of some respectable woman in Nigeria today who might have a legitimate need to use the Web to get someone to help move her murdered father's bank account into a Western country; that person would be flat out of luck, though she would likely fare better than some poor, hapless skyjacker who really only wants to go to Cuba but finds himself instantly impaled by twelve Bic pens and forty airline sporks, since airline passengers are very jumpy these days, possibly because airport Milky Ways for some reason are sold only in portions the size of a porterhouse steak -- "steak" being one of those comical food euphemisms employed to avoid unpleasant realities, which raises the reasonable question of why we are comfortable eating "roast turkey" and "roast lamb" but not "roast cow," a question culinary experts cannot explain, and a practice they simply accept on its face as one of these inexplicable oddities, such as why Americans have stupidly and happily incorporated into our everyday speech the word "o'clock," as though we were all leprechauns; still another oddity is why, among Christian peoples, only Hispanics seem to routinely name their children "Jesus," which is a curious fact about the use of Biblical names but not nearly as interesting as the fact that although there are plenty of men named Adam, and plenty of women named Eve, neither you nor I has ever heard of a marriage between someone named Adam and someone named Eve -- an observation the meaning of which we are all too willing to consign to the realm of the unknowable; in fact, many things we blindly accept as unknowable (say, the innermost, never-expressed thoughts of now deceased historical figures) are, in fact, quite knowable in the sense that it can be confidently stated that at no point in his life did Aristotle feel regret for never having muscled an outside pitch into the gap in left center to drive in the winning run in the World Series; similarly, when Strom Thurmond was dragged from the Senate floor, hoarse of voice and large of bladder, at the conclusion of a 24-hour filibuster against a civil rights act on August 29, 1957, it can be confidently stated that he was not thinking, "I sure would like to do some jumping jacks and squat-thrusts right about now"; nor would he have been delighted to learn that in just a few years the act of performing a filibuster would have become irrelevant, since the mere threat of one would become enough to doom a measure, period, the previous word appearing here as prose and not punctuation, since
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