On the Lighter Side...

As you have seen, gentle reader, your scribe relishes the occasional opportunity to flex his literary muscles in the vein of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. For those unfamiliar with this time-honored competition, a click on the link will prove enlightening.

Also to be noted is the annual Bad Hemingway contest, as set forth at the International Imitation Hemingway Competition article. Romps such as these bring joy to your scribe's heart, as they show that the age-old art of parody is not dead in our time.

Parody and satire are important tools in the battle against authoritarian institutions, largely because said AIs are incapable of understanding them and thus treat them as of no consequence. But consequential they are, dear reader, and they invariably outlive the AIs they skewer.

Consider, for example, Orwell's classic satire of Stalinist Russia, Animal Farm. It is still on school reading lists everywhere, while Uncle Joe's body and beliefs have long ago been eaten by worms. Or Swift's amazing Modest Proposal, which some in 18th-century England took literally, finding it an excellent solution to the "Irish problem". Gulliver's Travels, of course, pokes fun at many other aspects of English life of the period, including the then-current hot debate between Transubstantiation ("big-enders") and Consubstantiation ("little-enders"). Today, the Anglican Church has far more serious issues on its plate, some of which threaten its very survival as a world-wide entity.

So let us always keep our literary tools of irony and satire bright and sharp, for with them we can endeavor to change the societies in which we live for the better. Ah - I hear you ask, gentle reader, does that mean there is hope for the Greenwich Gestapo? An excellent question. It depends, to some degree, on what you mean by "hope". Some of the individual members, such as the one who spewed a barrage of four-letter invectives at your scribe in the Cos Cob Library parking lot the other day (as clear an example of disorderly conduct as you could hope to see), are beyond the pale and will remain there forever. (I leave it to the theologians among you to decide if there is a special place in Hell for crooked cops.) Others are just trying to do a job, despite indifference or corruption at the top. Now that Petey Robbins and Jimmy Walters are history, perhaps there is indeed a chance for the organization as a whole to improve.

It has always struck y0ur scribe as ironic that Greenwich, which should arguably have one of the best police forces in the country, instead has one which is unarguably among the worst. They are the jest of their counterparts in other nearby cities and towns, and as the faithful reader of this blog already knows, Greenwich is the safest place in the country to commit murder, or even to steal millions. Both happen with monotonous regularity around here. Arrests, if any, are almost always carried out by other police departments, such as the cops in Antwerp, Belgium, who arrested Marvin Frankel (you may recall, dear reader, that he operated a boiler shop and a love-slave operation on Lake Avenue, under the protection of off-duty members of the GG).

Oh, and let's not forget the cop who called a well-known interior decorator a "faggot" on Greenwich Avenue not long ago. Some cops in this Town, like the two stormtroopers in the library story, set themselves up as self-appointed judge and jury, even while they themselves break the laws of this state and our country. It doesn't tend to give one a lot of hope.

So your scribe is somewhat pessimistic that the GG can ever become the police force that the Town of Greenwich by rights should have. But the good news is that there is certainly plenty of room for improvement...so we shall see, dear reader...we shall see.