a sad and true tale of a 47% decline
Birth of a Weasel
by Polly Reynolds
I’d never lied about anything.
Now I’ve lied about everything.
It started when I lied to my mother: “Everything’s fine; the job is great.” Truth was, the job was gone and things were decidedly ungreat. Truth was, I was sliding into poverty and uselesness on a greased pole. Truth was, I was becoming the ultimate shame that could ever befall a good Yankee family: I was becoming an entitlee. I was dangling from the weave of the promised American safety net.
It was worse that the effects of ‘Reefer Madness’. Before their very eyes I would lose teeth and hair and start rifling through garbage cans for Muscatel. I’d start dropping participles, and acid, and my kids on their heads. I’d have a pet snake and a boyfriend named Wha’?.
This was when they would lie awake at night and pray for the gods to be merciful and swift and end the bloodline immediately. Stop the spread of shame. Sacrifice for the good of the few. It was the only solution a good Yankee could think of.
I felt terribly guilty about it all – like the poor old dog who knows he’s not supposed to pee on the carpet, who knows his transgressions attach in real senses to you, but, dammit, can’t find a single tree in the house ….
So, I felt sheepish, but I still told the truth. That would change.
Families, even good Yankee ones, are one thing; government bureaucracies, even human ones, are quite another. The humiliation I was inflicting on the former caused me regret; the humiliation inflicted by the latter on me caused me rancor, rambunctiousness, and the sweet hunt for revenge.
Such is the life of a weasel.
Call a child a failure and you make him one. Call a rebel one and she might just call your bluff.
Everyone knows, or should, that decency and respect dwindle proportionally with monetary assets. Everyone knows what talks and what walks. Everyone knows that when you go to get your money back you better read the fine print on the vault. And the fine print is signed by the Devil who, it seems, ghost wrote the laws we all thought we were passing.
Like the bullies in the playground, those who guard our high principles are very poor sports. I guess it’s not for nothing that the bullies always make you cry ‘uncle’ before granting mercy.
“You win,” says the Devil. “Now beg.”
When you beg for money you must first de-power yourself. Shave that head, Samson. Lose those clothes, Delilah. Trash the Mazda, Marcus. We only help losers in this country and you don’t look lost enough yet.
Pride goeth before the fall. Possessions go before the pride. We only help the fallen in this office and we don’t make appointments. You haven’t fallen far enough and you’ll just have to wait ’til we get to you.
The fact that the Devil’s ‘help’ is puny and punitive anyway becomes irrelevant. The game is afoot. The weasel’s snout is growing like Pinocchio’s – lies are about to be bargained over and he who lies best may get to the truth of the hypocrisy.
That, after all, might be the greatest secret of all in this great nation. We’re all at war with our notions of our own goodness. It’s a personal, painful, war – that is really waged only when the money stops talking.
and the weasel keeps sucking on the sheaves shuffling through the sludge feeling proud, even joyful, always grateful.
