Dear Editor:
Republicans just threw out their own Speaker of the House of Representatives for committing the unpardonable sin of working with Democrats to keep our government functioning. One newspaper editor way up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony referred to it as Kevin McCarthy’s “defenestration,” calling it, “a shocking event,” considering McCarthy is the first Speaker in history to be thrown out in the middle of his term. Defenestration: the act of throwing a thing (or esp. a person) out of a window. I suspect the origin is German (as their fenster is our window), or maybe not.
I’m not especially shocked, or even surprised, considering the present political climate and the overabundance of transgressions the Republican Party is willing to perpetrate on unsuspecting naive Americans as the GOP journeys, morally unrestrained, downward toward the nadir of a seemingly bottomless pit.
In the absence of a Speaker, the House will find it difficult to conduct the “people’s business,” even if they were so inclined (which the Republican Party obviously isn’t). Perhaps if the electorate was less concerned with Senator Fetterman’s wardrobe and more attentive to how useless the House is right now we could insist the rest of government begin debate on whether or not to continue to fund Congress itself.
I’m sure they’ll figure it out. If not, well … we can continue to scroll aimlessly and haphazardly through life.
By the way, did you ever wonder why we call Grandfather Clocks, Grandfather Clocks? Grandfather Clocks are Grandfather Clocks for much the same reason M.C. Hammer pants are M.C. Hammer pants: It’s all about pop music. In 1875, American songwriter Henry Work checked in for a stay at the George Hotel in North Yorkshire, England. In the lobby was a large pendulum clock that had belonged to the inn’s previous owners, both deceased. The clock was said to have stopped dead, to the minute, on the day the last surviving owner died. Work thought this was a great story and went on to fictionalize it in a song called “Grandfather’s Clock.” The lyrics centered around a clock that was “taller by half than the old man himself” and that “stopped short never to go again” when the grandfather died. It was, obviously, a runaway hit. Work sold over a million copies in sheet music, and eventually, the term “grandfather clock” became attached to the style of clock that inspired the song.
David L. Snell