The Parable of the Plants

 

            Odd as it may seem and hard as it is to imagine, once upon a time there were three Bushes in the same boat.  These bushes weren’t just ordinary bushes, they were luminaries in the plant kingdom of their day.  Two of them, the two oldest, father and son, had been named Best of Show at the infamous, quadrennial South Dade Horticultural Exhibit.  The other Bush was chief judge and governor and vote counter extraordinaire of the same show.  The older plant, in whose seed pod the other two had germinated, was an Azalea Bush.  His oldest offshoot was a different variety altogether – a prickly pear cactus who liked to go by “P”.  The third and younger Bush in the boat was a dwarf palmetto.  They just called him Chad.

            For common little Bushes they were uncommonly full of themselves, at the top of their game.  Many observers thought that, global warming, hurricanes and all, the quality of the south Dade plant show had been much degraded over the years and frequently pointed to the success of these three as proof of the degradation.  Others, while agreeing that the beauty and bloom had long since gone off the plant show rose, thought the relative success of bushes like these was just an aberration, more a matter of strategy and structure and circumstances, than a lack of brilliance and general decline of the plant kingdom itself. 

To which critics riposted that nowadays ugliness was as likely to win these shows as beauty, and crude utility and exaggeration more frequently were honored than purity, excellence and ideals.  When pressed all agreed that the current flower show procedures gave more advantage to the manure side of horticulture, the means to an end, rather than the production of beautiful blooms at the end of the stems.  Old time professional pointed out that these days the stalks were strong but the fruit bitter and flowers brittle and pale compared to the glory days of the horticultural past.

If they ever cared to consider such abstractions, these Bushes didn’t care.  To their “minds” success was its own reward and validation.  The two Bushes who had received the President’s Cup as best of show, lest anyone forget, each proudly wore their lapel pin with the number of their reign specially engraved upon it.  The elder Bush was 3,196 while Bush the lesser’s number was 3,198.  In between had been another winner all the Bushes despised who had been known more for his prodigious propagation propensities and blooming gall than his durability and ability to sustain a trend, a mere flash in the flowerpot of plant show history. 

            Despite the heady responsibility and theoretically difficult work of promoting and leading the whole free plant kingdom; as part of the privileged positions they held, these Bushes were in the Florida Keys, Chad’s liquid backyard, on one of their many, many, many, many vacations they deemed themselves entitled to.  And of course, unlike ducks that were born to water, these three were like ducks out of water, or bushes in it and as plants at sea, were completely lost away from shore.  From there all the shore lines looked the same, all the horizons too far away to be reached and the mystery of the water’s imponderable depth, like most things in life to them, stayed impenetrable to their comprehension. 

            “What do we need to fish for anyways?” Chad asked. 

“Because the greatest accomplishments in life are overpowering and outsmarting creatures smaller than yourself.  Our proudest achievements lay in the size of the creatures we kill,” P responded blithely.

            No, no now, never say that.  That sounds selfish and hard.  Say we fish for nutrients.  We do it for them.  We fish for the acquisition of nutrients to fertilize our roots and they should be honored to do it,” Azalea Bush cautioned. 

“Oh that’s right,” Chad replied, “the compassionate consumer theory where our predatory piscatorial prowess is really supposed to be good for its victims.  And if any fish buy that they deserve to eaten.“

“Oh yeah, I ‘member now,” P added, “we gotta keep nutrie, uh, nuter, um, neutra-al-izing ourselves.  Fish have to sacrifice for the public good, in other words, us.  That’s only fair.” 

“Close, P pear, close, actually the word is “fertilizing”, but you almost got it that time,” Azalea praised generously.  

“Yeah but shouldn’t we be working somewhere at something sometime, I mean we’re supposed to do something aren’t we?”   Chad could barely finish for the astonished looks of the two older, wiser Bushes, who then burst into laughter. 

“Work?  Right!” P ridiculed.  “Look here, Chad, its thinking like that that’ll keep you a small time governor of the South Dade plant show forever.” 

“Right, you gotta break out of the box boy, dare to be inexcellent.  Look at P here, he’s mastered the unartfulness of the job entirely, right 3,198?” 

“That’s right, 3,196.  From my position now, for the first time, looking from the top down, I finally see that the world works upside down from here, it’s all backwards and reversed.  Watch and learn, Chaddo, from this vantage it’s the more you learn the less you know, the more you work the less good happens and the worse you are the higher you rise.  You’ll get it one of these days… Not!” 

P and Azalea laughed at Chad bad humoredly with the sort of cruel abandon that only two undeserving Bushes at the top of the plant world could.   Chad hated it when they did this and started pulling their numbers on him.  It really chafed Chad’s chaps when they treated him like a second rate Bush and his resentment grew.

              So they kept fishing, even though of course, they never caught anything.  Each always seemed to get their hooks caught up in one another’s limbs, stuck in each other’s ear or the back of their heads, or tangled in their own foliage.  So as it turned out they were more a danger to themselves than the fish for their hooks very seldom hit the water.  “Ouch,” Chad yelled, as P pear Bush, leaning across him to get one of his lures out of one of Chad’s limbs punctured him with one of his many cactus spines.  “Dammit P, you did that on purpose.”

            “No I didn’t,” P said, smirking and cackling as he leaned up against Chad again, intentionally this time, leaving cactus spines all over him.  “Oops, Bro, looks like I did it again.  Now how you hanging there, Chad?” 

P never tired of making everyone else around him grimace at his insensitivity.  He thought it the height of good humor - for him anyway.  In fact, nobody ever liked being around P.  He was immature and insecure and insufferable and was forever using his one talent, his thousands of sharp and painful cactus spines, to prick everyone else.  Sometimes behind his back, others were even inclined to drop the “ly” on his first name when they referred to him, generally prefacing this with “the little” murmured under their breath. 

“Ow, now I’ll be an hour getting these out.  Poppy Azalea, make him cut it out, will ya?  Tell him to make like a tree and leave.”

            “OK, little Bushes that’s enough now, cut it out now.  Don’t get your bark in a bunch, Chad, P’s just having some fun.”

            Chad seethed.  The cactus never grew far from the seed.  Azalea always protected P and let him get away with being a bully to everyone else.  He should have been spanked more growing up, but then where would you have hit him without getting stuck yourself?  With him it really had been a case of “this is going to hurt me more than it is you, boy.  So P got away with murder.”

            Besides Azalea Bush was too distracted just then to care as he was trying to extricate himself from all the infernal fishing line he was tangled up in.  But then suddenly a larger problem distracted them all.  All at once they became aware that the boat was beginning to fill up with water.

            “Wasn’t me,” P Bush claimed preemptively, out of habit, when the other two looked at him.  Leave me alone leaves.  I didn’t do it.”

            “OK P, who did then?  The water’s coming in right where you were sitting and you’re the only one with thorns in your butt.  You and you damn needles, You’re always sticking them in where they don’t belong.

            Wasn’t me.  Wasn’t me.  Wasn’t me.” He kept repeating to drown them out - in this case literally - as the water continued to rise while they argued.  Besides I hate leaks.  Whoever did this leak, we gotta find ‘em and prosecute ‘em.  Maybe it was one of you potheads.”

            “Dammit P, quit being a child and denying everything.  You’re the only one who could have done it.  We know you’re responsible.” ( “Nunh uhn,” he said.)  The problem is now how to get the hole fixed.  First we need to start bailing before our roots get so soggy we can’t stand up.”

            “No,” P said, “forget it.  The best thing to do is stay the course.  That’s what I do.  Makes me sound tough like I know what I’m doing like a uh, uh, real leader or something.  So no, I don’t see any water.  Deny.  Deny.  Deny.  It’s not my fault.  Someone is distorting all the good news in this situation and ignoring all the progress we’re making.  Anybody who naysays is the enemy.”

            “You nitwit, you’re captaining a sinking ship and there’s nobody here but us three.  We are lost and our boat’s sinking, there is no progress to distort,” Azalea Bush yelled, exasperated.  “God, how I ever raised such a cactus ass I’ll never know.  His mother is still sore from giving birth.  Talk about painful.  She’ll never forgive you that, boy!”

            ”Well, OK, so let’s say I do admit that our situation since I poked a hole in the, I mean since someone, not naming any names here, Chaddy, but someone screwed up here, big time.   Mistakes happen and so if do agree to help fix the problem I want to insure that that doesn’t mean I accept any responsibility for causing it.  Now I have some disclaimers here in my creel if you two…”

            “Look pa how fast it’s rising, faster than we can bail,” Chad yelled.  “Here’s the hole in the side.  We’ve got too much weight in the boat to get the hole up above the water line.”

Suddenly grasping the situation, P Bush screamed like a little girl and cast aside his bravado and his legal documents.  “But I can’t even swim.  We had that training in the national guard but, well you know how that turned out, and besides, cacti, like oil men, have an aversion to water.  But quick we gotta get outa here before we get all wet.”

            “We’re two miles from shore P, how are going to abandon ship and not get wet?”

            “Well, then maybe you can just get out and get under the boat and push it up so the water can’t leak in and get me wet.”

            “The water here is a hundred feet deep, how’re you going to get leverage to push the boat out of the water?”

  Or wait, how about this, maybe here, we can just each grab ahold of a side of the boat and pull it up real, real hard until we just lift it out of the water from inside.  Then we won’t even have to get wet at all.”

            “Lift the boat from inside with us still in it?    

“Yeah, sure.  What’s wrong with that?”  

The other two Bushes could only exchange glances, and gaze at him in wonder for what seemed like an eternity waiting for him to grasp the inanity of his suggestions before finally, deciding he never would, going back to consideration of their primary problem.

            “It looks to me like two of us are going to have get outside of the boat and swim alongside.  The reduced weight in the boat ought to allow the increased buoyancy to raise the hole above the water line.  The two in the water can swim alongside until we’re rescued.”

Plants have never been known for their quick wittedness, but self-preservation is a universal quickener of even the smallest mind.  This being the case, Chad was worried.  He was out ranked in the boat.  Both the others were older and more honored by the world than he was.  Therefore he knew, albeit weakly, in the way plants do, that if anyone had to perform a selfless act it would be him and self-sacrifice was something no self-respecting Bush would ever do voluntarily.  Thinking (plant-wise) quick, he made a proposal. 

“I think it’s clear that we have to take a vote, to see who gets out and who stays in.”

            “Rats, I mean weeds,” the elder Bush grinched involuntarily.  Bushes hated elections or anything else that smacked of fairness and gave no advantage for undeserved privilege, “I must be getting autumnal to let one of my own offshoots outthink me.  He started to demur.

            “Now, now let’s not be hasty, boys.  I don’t think it would be prudent at this time to…”

            But before he could get any farther, P enthusiastically, avidly, interrupted.   “Goody, yeah, votes, I do good at ‘em.  Let’s have a vote.  I’ll even give a speech, but, no wait, who’d write it for me?  But anyway let’s hurry it on up, my roots are getting all waterloggy.”

What could Azalea Bush do?  All their prominence and prosperity, the very plant food they ate, the osmosises they cherished, their very photosynthesis, was predicated on winning so-called free elections at the plant shows.  If in a moment of crisis the Bushes were to say that elections weren’t good enough for them wouldn’t it seem hypocritical, as if they had really secretly hated democracy all along?  This was Azalea’s quandary.  Truth is he hated elections and debates, all of it.  But he knew that if they ever get out of this and word got out that he had nixed the idea of a vote, it would soil their family name.  He knew full well all those damn broccoli eaters and rose hips and chamomile drinkers and all the other democratic flowery plants and huggable trees would just use it against them.  Heck, some of them were already claiming that the Bushes helped foster global warming, as if that weren’t a contradiction in terms.  Finally he realized he was trapped.

            “Yeah, yeah, sure, OK, I guess if we have to, we’ll vote on it.”  Secretly he hoped that with his luck and family loyalty built up over a lifetime would ensure the loyalty of his offshoots, but way down deep he knew better.

“Good,” Chad said, “tell you what, since it’s what I do at the plant show, I’ll be in charge and count the votes.  You all know you can trust me, right?” 

“Yeah, sure, right, sure we trust you boy, sure we do,“ Azalea Bush replied unenthusiastically.

“Yeah, just don’t leave us hanging like chads here, Chad,” P chortled manically, we don’t want to have to resort to the Courts here, let’s just get on with it.”

            They each made their crude little plant marks on the backs of leaves that had fallen off in the course of their fishing and passed them to Chad.  Chad proceeded to turn his back to the other two and make a big elaborate show of high math as he counted the votes.

            “Well come on, what is it, boy, my little cudjo,” Azalea urged gently, thinking the iteration of this affectionate childhood name might inspire Chad to count the votes in the old Bush’s favor. 

“OK, OK, I got it.  Let’s see now, just to be clear, the one with the most votes stays in the boat and the other two go swimming right?  And the one vote is final, right?  Just want to make sure.”   

Sure I’m sure, I sure am, rules and rules, tools and fools, Chad, we don’t have time to study details, you fern you, I’m a plant of action, just read the galdarn numeros, will ya,” P said.

            “OK, here it is then.  P you got one vote.  And Daddy Azalea you got two.”

            “Alright!” P exclaimed with joy, for some reason thinking that meant he’d won, slapping his hand on his thorny thigh flesh.  “Ouch,” dammit, I always do that,” he cried, rubbing his hand free of all the cactus needles.  Then , in a realization that came unusually fast for him something, who knows what, seemed to click in P’s brain, “Wait, did you say one vote?  I don’t get it, when did one vote start to beat two.  How’s this going to mean I win?  I’m always supposed to win.”

            “So I win then?”  Azalea asked dubiously, doubtful, mournfully, fearing the worst from Chad’s upbeat body language.  He felt that sick and sinking feeling any electorate felt knowing an election was about to be stolen and knowing that everybody would be to gutless to do anything about it.

            “Well no, you gotta wait for all the votes to be tabulated, Poppy.  That’s only fair.  So let’s see, hmmm.  Chad drew out the denouement purposely, enjoying himself enormously as he ostentatiously held each one up against the sun to scrutinize it, as if he were slowly counting them up.  If they were so proud of their numbers he’d beat them with a few numbers of his own.

“Yup, that’s what I thought…  Like I say, there’s one for P and two for you and what do you know, eight votes for me.  Well what do you know about that?  Isn’t that amazin’?  Looks like I win and I don’t even have a big number on my lapel.”

            “Wait a sec,” P dimly pondered, “let’s see, there are three of us, right?  We each have one vote each…“  He seemed to count, pointing to the three of them and then looking back at the four fingers he was holding up, “and the vote was uh, eight to two to one.   But daddy, I…”

            “P just shut up, will you.  I’ll explain it later.”

            Later, in fact, found the two older Bushes dog paddling alongside the boat.  Inside Chad was sunning himself with his roots propped up on the side of the boat puffing on an illegal Cuban cigar with a large albatross perched atop his head.   Drenched alongside, P was still puzzled, his cactus crown was furrowed, his eyes empty, as they often seemed to be, of comprehension.  But Poppy, I still don’t get it.  How’d he get eight votes when there’re only three of us?   It sounds like fuzzy math to me, like one of our voodoo budgets.  I didn’t think we were supposed to do things like this to each other only to others outside our genus.  And I know for a fact I cast three votes for me, where did they go anyway?”

            “P, you idiot.  God bless ya, you really are dumb as potting soil aren’t you?  How many times do I gotta tell ya, we never, never, ever, let your brother count the votes.  Don’t you remember how you won your election to Best in Show?”

            “Hey I won that fair and square.”

            “P, you’ve never won anything fair and square your whole life.  None of us have.  There’s always been somebody helping you along.  You never earned any of it on merit, it’s all been rigged by me or your brother or your privileged upbringing.  We’re plants, boy, just for show, foliage meant to disguise what’s really going on behind the scenery while we provide cover for it up front.  Don’t you get it? 

 

The lesson of this parable is that, though satire is the insincerest form of flattery, even so, for some people no distance is too far to go to retrieve an old punch line.  But in addition, just because you’ve got the job doesn’t mean you still don’t have to do the job you’ve got.  And just cause you got the job unfairly doesn’t mean you don’t have work twice as hard to earn it as the effort it took you to get it.