The Parable of the Great Anti-Communist

One day while teaching, Josh was asked, ”Teacher, agree or disagree with his policy stance, wasn’t it great to see Rand Paul physically stand and filibuster in the chamber today?”

Josh spoke thus:

The Great Anti-Communist was preparing for a long, long speech.  

The Great Anti-Communist had a powerful voice, and the Great Anti-Communist had great endurance.  The joke had long been that the Great Anti-Communist was a natural for the United States Senate.  The Great Anti-Communist was born to filibuster.

The joke had not always been funny.  The Great Anti-Communist’s neighbors were not appreciative of the Great Anti-Communist’s ability to speak at great volume, and neither were they appreciative that the Great Anti-Communist would speak at length, often at inconvenient times.

The neighbors would have their dinner parties interrupted by the Great Anti-Communist’s opinions on Central Asian satellite states and South American banana republics.  The neighbors were forced to turn the volume of their television sets to uncomfortable levels to avoid the Great Anti-Communist’s repeated explanations of the relationship between appeasement in Palestine and nuclear holocaust.

The Great Anti-Communist’s rhetoric was, frankly, racist.  Anti-racist policies were, according to the Great Anti-Communist’s rhetoric, blatantly Marxist in origin, and the Great Anti-Communist’s rhetoric besmirched the Race Card almost as strongly as the Great Anti-Communist’s rhetoric gainsaid the purported egalitarianism of Affirmative Action.

Any mention of Progressivism could set the Great Anti-Communist off on Wagnerian tirades.  The United Nations was a puppet of the Soviet Union and Communist China.  UNICEF was a covert Stalinist redistributive mechanism set up to drain the West of resources in order to arm leftist rebels in the Congo and Zulu insurgents in Rhodesia and South Africa.

The Equal Rights Amendment and the national fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit were slippery slopes to unionism and the Nanny State, the Great Anti-Communist would holler.  

And where was the Gold Standard? the Great Anti-Communist demanded.  The Great Anti-Communist’s entire neighborhood could be held accountable for the collapse of the dollar in European exchange markets, if being within hearing range of the Great Anti-Communist were equal to culpability.

An open window was an invitation to pontification for the Great Anti-Communist, and the reaction of an audience, positive or negative, was license for expansion equally of argumentative scope and of agitative tone.

The Great Anti-Communist was indeed preeminently qualified for the United States Senate.  The Great Anti-Communist was indeed born to filibuster.

The most impressive thing about the Great Anti-Communist, though, was that the Great Anti-Communist could orate at all, given that being a parrot the Great Anti-Communist had no real vocal chords, but merely mimicked speech through manipulation of air passing through its throat.

“Come on,” the Great Anti-Communist’s keeper said, moving the Great Anti-Communist’s cage away from the sill, “Let’s give the neighbors a break today.”

The Great Anti-Communist replied, “Shut down the Fed!  Shut down the Fed!”