Well, not really.
I have fond memories of the Spaceman, Bill Lee, former Red Sox pitcher. It is my firm belief that when the Red Sox went into their 1978 tailspin, which ended in the infamous Bucky Dent homer (may his name forever live in infamy), Bill Lee could have stopped the slide had the gerbil, Don Zimmer, not benched him. Toward the end there, he was the only one loose enough to do the job.
Bill is long since retired. This year he is running for governor of Vermont, as you can read here. He’s running as the Liberty Union candidate, and he’s running an old fashioned campaign, as in the type of hands off campaign people like Jefferson used to pretend to run. No campaign appearances, no fund raising, no nothing really, except appearing at debates. The Republican candidate has insisted he be present, presumably figuring that any votes he gets will come out of the Democratic candidate, but that’s not really all that clear.
The Spaceman’s platform is pretty incoherent, but I loved this line:
I don’t believe in hand guns. I have a 36-caliber Colt conversion Jesse James gun. I couldn’t hit jack diddley with that thing, you know? But it will kill close range,” Lee said. “If you’re afraid, go out and get two grey geese, put them on your front steps and I guarantee you no one’s going to come up to your front door without you knowing about. We don’t need more guns, we need more geese. Thank you.”
Now, this just shows how highly educated (or well read) Lee is. He was undoubtedly making an allusion to ancient Rome, the citizens of which were, in fact, warned that someone was at their front door (or maybe the back door) by Juno’s sacred geese. The Gauls were turned back. Rome was saved. The Roman Republic (like all Republics?) eventually collapsed, but it gave way to Imperial Rome, which gave us Christianity and the Dark Ages, which eventually gave us the Renaissance and Protestantism, which gave us dueling persecutions, but also gave us the Age of Reason, which fizzled out pretty rapidly, giving way to fascism, nationalism, racism, authoritarianism, and capitalism with a heaping helping of global warming on the side.
We owe a lot to those geese.
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