(November 21, 1938) – With brass polished and valves oiled, our columnar time machine traveled into the past, asking the 20th Century’s greatest detective to solve the 21st Century’s greatest mystery – who shot the Republican Party?
After perusing the newspaper clippings brought from the future, Charlie Chan replied evenly, “I’ll take the case. But if you want me to talk in that stupid, Hollywood, Chinese-laundry accent, it’s going to cost you double. And every time I quote Confucius, it’s $50 extra.”
I nodded. “Confucius say,” the detective began. I plastered his outspread palm with a portrait of Ulysses Grant. He smiled quite scrutably, as he stuffed the greasy paper into the pocket of his impeccable, double-breasted, yellow lawn suit.
“Confucius say cherchez la femme,” he continued. “Actually, Confucius didn’t speak French. Hercule Poirot said it.”
“So, Sarah Palin killed the GOP campaign?” I asked. Many inside sources claimed the same thing.
Mr. Chan struck a match on the sole of his spectator shoe and lit a Lucky Strike, because he lives in 1938 where cigarettes are still good for you.
“I think not,” purred the oriental gentleman. He did not tell me to breed with myself because he lives in 1938, where nobody talks like Rahm Emanuel except white gunsels on Death Row.
“Look beyond Governor Palin to the break-ins that followed the electoral defeat,” he said softly. “Her office, her family home, their log cabin in the woods, her husband’s ice-fishing shed. What was reported to the police as taken?”
“Nothing,” I stammered.
“Precisely,” whispered Charlie Chan, fixing me in the kind of knowing gaze that, even back in 1938, costs us ordinary mortals a crisp Ben Franklin every hour.
“But she told the newspapers,” he said. “They took her husband’s only pair of dark socks and his only necktie without a cartoon character on it.”
“Then her designer panties. Her seamed stockings. Her copy of Adam Smith. The bottle of expensive scent. The fetching little red leather jacket that displayed her figure so…so…effectively.” Not without effort, the detective halted his erotic reverie.
“Who took it all and why?” he asked rhetorically. It was suddenly clear, even in bigoted, 1930s Hollywood, why Chan got the big bucks. He stood looming over his carved, coromandel-wood desk, his voice hissing like a bad radiator.
“Whose goondas bought her the stuff she never asked for? Whose schtarkers took back the unwanted stuff? Whose toadies quietly launched the character assassination against her? Whose cronies stood to benefit from poor old McCain’s promised socialist bail-outs, while he hypocritically accused his opponent of socialism? Who!”
He sat down and formed a little tent of fingertips. “I’ll tell you who. Since Phylum Chordata crawled gasping from the Primordial Ooze, the stupidest, greediest and most venal of all associate members of the human race have been the Republican Establishment. That’s who.”
“Bottom-feeders from Congress and trouser-monkeys from The Republican National Committee pimped for Bush as he squandered Clinton’s budget surplus, and put government spending on steroids. Meanwhile, Republican fat cats made billions in noncompetitive Pentagon contracts. Then,” he continued, “they offered America that pathetic, senescent, ten-cent maverick, John ‘Bail-Out’ McCain.”
“GOP bosses killed their own party’s chances. Now, they want to quietly sabotage Palin and every other Reaganesque populist, leaving nobody for 2012 apart from cirrhosis-ridden, corporatist, tax-fed, country-club parasites like themselves.”
He added scrutably, “Confucius say let’s have lunch. I can’t stand Chinese food, so let’s do Mexican.” He held out his hand, waggling his fingers until I slipped him another $50 bill.
S. J. Masty is a communications advisor based in London. The Time Machine reports each Wednesday.
