«Posted for RED EMMA!»
.EIGHT OF US FROM THE CANYONS met with Congressman Gary Miller (R-CA) on Wednesday, April 11, in beauteous Brea, at his district office, which is decorated with vintage Nixon election posters, I shit you not. The 42nd district is Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Wally George country, friends. It is gerrymandered (thanks also to the Democrats) to include only the most reactionary of the right-wing in a dozen cities and three counties!
.Attending this meeting were attractive and handsomely dressed citizens Jan, Steve, Debbie, Ed, Linda, Lorraine, Dion—and Red Emma. Miller shook hands with everybody and insisted on asking us our first names. He then repeated our names to us, as if reminding us of them.
.We all thanked each other for being there and I opened by asking the Congressman to hold a TOWN FORUM or TOWN HALL MEETING on the war.
.Yes, Red likes a challenge.
.I suggested that everybody there at the big shiny wooden table was against the war and eager for it to end and that the Congressman should host a public discussion on that theme. I had already been discouraged from this very proposal by his aide a few weeks earlier. Miller, who offers a kind of Reagan-Chuck Heston-cowboy-jock persona, opined that nobody ever comes to his town forums (he didn’t seem disappointed) and that he did not have time for that since “the Democrats have us on a five day working schedule to do two days’ work.”
.That was supposed to be funny. He grinned, which frightened me. But I persisted, offering what I thought were some winning reasons for both educating and hearing from his constituents, people like us (well, exactly like us, maybe only us) with sponsorship from the League of Women Voters or anybody he liked. I mentioned media sponsors like the OC Register, LA Times and OC Weekly. He responded by stating that he was planning some kind of telephone conference call mass-meeting—if I understood him correctly—which seemed to me to be a whole bunch of people listening to him instead of listening and watching—as we were doing, god help us, the big gasbag.
.He just would not stop about how darn busy he was. I interrupted (interrupting him turned out to be easy, and fun!) to ask if this planned virtual-meeting would focus on the war in particular, and he said—surprise!—“No,” and then told us that immigration was in fact his constituents’ number one issue, not the war.
.He summoned a chubby and fawning aide (Miller is a big man. Weirdly, everybody on his staff is small. Think Willy Wonka and the tiny Oompaloompas) to nod at this assertion. I tried again to suggest that the war should be a priority, regardless, and that we wanted a forum, and that it would be good for Miller to make it an issue because he was our elected representative and George Washington had wooden teeth and Betsy Ross knitted a horse.
.Somebody from our band of citizen lobbyists bravely offered that we could get “a hundred people, easy” to come out for such an event in the canyons alone, which was so frightening an announcement that Miller turned from arguing with me, and asked to hear from others. Steve jumped in, identifying himself as a Vietnam-era veteran, opposed to the war, the lies, the waste.
.Steve was thoughtful and beautiful, and he wears a suit nicely. Miller, who is not only large but physically quite painful to look at (big white teeth, orange hair, skin courtesy of Madame Tussauds) offered some pro-military bromides about sacrifice, identifying a whole cemetery-full of wounded and dead family and friends. He was, pathetically if unshyly, trying to out-military our vet. It was the obvious “Support the Troops” red herring, meant to shame us into—what, I wonder? Changing our minds? Enlisting?
.Thankfully, Ed jumped in, dislodging a few body parts and military dead now strewn across the shiny polished table, with an eloquent economic critique about the failing health of the nation’s markets and trade, offering that the war was harming our status and financial future. Miller disagreed, though I was not sure with what, exactly. It was hard to follow, and since I read only Paul Krugman in the liberal capitalist paper of record, perhaps the dismal science lesson here eluded me.
.Or maybe Miller is just full of shit. At any rate, he disagreed a lot. And talked a lot. Jan had warned us that, during a recent lobby day, she had met with him and couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Miller said he disagreed with Steve too, by the way, and that “win or lose” he was not in favor of a “date certain” end to the war. He said he supported benchmarks.
.I thought of a bench. Thinking of the bench made me want to carve my name or a dirty word on it, and I had to hold my hand back so I wouldn’t start whittling away on the big shiny table. Still, I couldn’t get that phrase “win or lose” out of my head. It sort of wiggled around in there like a small insect or, increasingly, a big insect and then a real big one, maybe Mothra.
.Interrupting, I tried to get Miller to explain what “win” meant, and what “lose” meant. I really did. I should have asked what a benchmark might look like—say, 100 more dead for a month, two hundred dead in six weeks?
.Linda asked him to consider the war profiteering, and he responded, unbelievably, by saying that fraud was built into all programs. He pointed to fraud and abuse surrounding—yes, hold on, wait, here it comes!—Hurricane Katrina relief. This is, of course, ironic for so many reasons, not the least of which is named George Bush.
.Linda, who does not suffer fools, tried to link the war to the opportunism and theft of the war industry, going all cause and effect on him, whence Miller, no slouch, reminded us that he was on the oversight committee (more irony), and that there was abuse and fraud everywhere!
.I think “everywhere” includes his office, but I did not mention that, nor did I mention the part about him being investigated by the FBI for, yes, fraud. (See Most corrupt, Ex-Aids allege abuse of power, Gary Miller can always get what he wants.)
.I did mention Blackwater and KBR, but he looked at me like I had just stepped on his toe or eaten his puppy, which I would have at this point. I kept going back to his job of discussing the war with his constituents, but he again said that immigration and not the war was “our number one issue” and that he was only one Congressman, and that the war was not his committee and that he got along with Democrats, and was a pal of Barney Frank, and that they wrote legislation together, how about that?
.That was pretty darn subtle political insider stuff, I guess, as I think I read somewhere that Barney is gay while Miller is a member of the Sonrise Christian School, whose mission it is "To create an environment where children can experience the love of Jesus as they grow in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man." So see what a cool guy Gary is. Some of my best friends are homosexual illegal immigrants.
.I recalled his foolish views about punishing undocumented Mexicans. I almost interrupted to say that immigration was also not one of his committees. I wanted to make sure of that fact. At home, later, after taking a few recreational painkillers, I looked it up. No, in fact Miller is not on any committees directly dealing with immigration. (See committee memberships.)
.I interrupted again (I was getting good at it), advising him that I understood how committees worked, and didn’t need a civics lesson. He got a little pissy. I went back to the town hall forum idea (the only horses I ride are dead ones) and he said, finally, that he would take it under consideration or something to that effect.
.Soon a cherub or some other flying creature, perhaps one of the monkeys from Oz, arrived to tell the Congressman that our fifteen minutes were over and his next appointment (no doubt the Ghost of Richard Nixon Support Committee) was waiting for him. After shaking and thanking again, I made a bee-line for Steve T, the tallest little aide, with whom I’d met earlier, and asked him when Miller would be in the district again, and when we might think about a town forum. Meanwhile, my fellow citizen lobbyists chatted with Miller, Debbie giving him some moral and political instruction about not killing people. She made direct eye contact (brave woman!) and gave him what she calls the “John Nichols 10-10-10” in an attempt to bring a sense of urgency to ending what she calls “this senseless carnage” (I don’t think she meant the meeting). Here it is:
• Every 10 minutes an Iraqi dies
• Every 10 hours an American dies
• Every 10 days we spend 10 billion of our national treasury
.Thus ended our citizen lobbying effort. Methinks we showed a lot of restraint. Nobody once mentioned the bit about Miller being investigated for fraud as the result of not one, but two bogus land deals. (Naturally, he was a “developer” before being elected).
.Of course, if you visit the above link you could choose to embrace further despair (and who doesn’t need more of that?) by noting that this crook is, yes, a member of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, where he is the Ranking Minority Member.
.Which is just pretty darned perfect. —RE
Andrew Tonkovich
