The Big Sting

Gather round for a sad tale of woe and tragedy shot thorough with deception, all to prey on one person's best instincts for another's lowest intents and purposes. You've heard the story of Bonnie and Clyde now sit back to hear the one about the Libs and Cons.

Once upon a time there was a proud, lower middle class church going, god-fearing man named Joe. Now Joe happened to run across a down on his luck beggar one day and to help him out hired him to do a few odd jobs around his house. The jobs were done oddly, true, because this man preferred to talk above everything else and his gift of gab usually got squarely in the way of his ever actually getting any of the jobs he was assigned done.

Now mainly this stranger loved to talk about himself and how badly he had been treated by life, by liberals, he called them, and do-gooders who always, to belie their nickname always did more harm than good and thus became classic harm-diders. Joe was as shocked at these stories as he had been at the Book of Revelation and found that his heart went out to this strange stranger, especially when he started to explain how these dirty liberals were out to get Joe too.

  It took the stranger a while to identify and fasten on the one aspect above all of the liberals character that particularly incensed Joe but once he had he never failed to include it in his litany of crimes and larcenies purportedly perpetrated by these libs.

“Really, they hate Jesus?” Joe exclaimed. “Well why would anyone do that? You say they are commie sympathizers or excuse me, were commies lovers and now they love terrorists too? My word, why would anybody love terrorists and hate Jesus? That's just not right, it's perverse and insane. Are they dying for Hell?”

The stranger would just shrug innocently at such questions, “I don't know Joe. I honestly don't, I wish I did. If we could just talk some sense to these people you know?”

“I know, I know,” said Joe, shaking his head sadly, “it's tragic.”

Now it turned out,coincidentally, that Joe had a car, a real good car, he'd put all his savings into fixing up. It was his pride and joy and though it wasn't intended for that purpose it also happened to be the fastest car in the vicinity. But Joe was a shy, self-effacing fellow. He had worked on this car in secret thinking that only when it was finished to his satisfaction would he unveil it at auto shows and special events like Fourth of July parades.

Somehow Joe's guest seemed to know all about the existence of this car and one day he came to Joe confidentially, while as usual shirking the other more tangible duties for which he was actually being paid his room and board. He hemmed, he hawed, he shuffled his feet in the dirt as if he were embarrassed.

“I'm so ashamed,” he said, “and I hate to ask but I love the Lord so much. The truth is I haven't able to go to church for so long. It's so far away and I don't like to walk and I despise buses. Oh if somehow I could find someone to give me a ride I would be so happy and so grateful. But I don't know why I'm telling you this because you don't even have a car.”

Joe's heart overflowed. “What faith! Though he had never even taken his car out of the garage, saving it for a special occasion what, he asked himself, could be a specialer occasion than church? But I do have a car,” he exclaimed, “and I'd be proud to drive you to church on Sunday.”

“You do, oh that's wonderful. But uh, I can't go to church right away on such short notice. How about in three weeks, uh on the fourteenth?”

When that Sunday arrived of course Joe had to lend his boarder his best clothes so the poor guy would be presentable. Joe was beamingly proud of himself for his rehabilitation project. He had to admit that the poor man looked better, was better fed and now he was even taking him to church?Wow, he felt pride and even a certain sense of responsibility and ownership, even partisanship, in wanting to see this miserable,lonely, humble specimen of a man do well in the world. It would indeed be a miracle.

On the way to church though, the boarder surprised Joe by telling him there were a few other passengers he wished, if it were at all possible, to please to pick up, because they wanted to go to church also. What could he do? Even though he felt imposed on, a little bit used, Joe couldn't possibly refuse. On the contrary, when he thought about it he was overjoyed to be sending more fallen souls on the long, narrow,torturous path to righteousness. Even if it was just driving them a few blocks to church. If this is how God wishes to use me, he thought, let him do it a thousand times more.

But when he stopped to pick up these forlorn fellow travelers and they piled into the back, Joe at first was slightly shocked at how rough and crude these characters were, leather jackets, tattoos, body piercings,crude language, unkempt and smelly with a certain indefinable pungency emanating from them he couldn't quite (and certainly didn't want to) put his finger on. They looked more like criminals and con men than spiritual aspirants. Joe even asked about some of the weird bulges he saw under their shirts and jackets.

“Oh,” his tall strange employee assured him, “it's the good book, Joe, and other devotional materials. But they are so shy about their faith and they are afraid liberals will see them and beat them up and take their good books away that they must keep them hidden.”

Joe was shocked again at the depths to which these libs would stoop and was more determined than ever to help these poor pious souls find their way back to the bosom of the church. But then, in another unforeseen occurrence, one of the new passengers barked, none too kindly and actually rather harshly, that they had to stop by a bank on the way.

“The bank?”Joe asked naively. “Yes, yes,” his pushy boarder interjected quickly, “to get some money for the donations box. These guys are so devotional they are afraid to show up empty handed at God's house.”

Joe couldn't stop the tears from welling up in his eyes. He felt himself so lucky,blessed really, almost as if he were an instrument of God. Imagine this, old Joe thought, being part of something larger than himself and put in the way of being able to help such saintly, sincere men,fallen to be sure, but so darn sincere, find their way back to the spare doorstep of salvation.

But the affair at the bank was beyond anything he could have expected. First the men in the back seat were very particular about where he should park the car and were explicit in telling him that he should keep the motor running. This seemed odd to Joe for a simple bank transaction but these men were very insistent, even a little bit scarily so. If they hadn't just been on their way to church he might have been more resistant.

After about thirty minutes inside Joe had been wondering what was taking them so long.If they didn't rush they might be late for services, he was just thinking to himself when all of a sudden here they came and my sweet Lord, the commotion was more than a little unsettling as, excuse the expression, all hell broke loose. His church going passengers came pouring out of the bank all at once. Police were shooting at them and then – where did they even get the guns – they were shooting back! My goodness gracious god. When they piled into the car,throwing big bags of cash in the back while others were laying down withering cover fire, Joe demanded his boarder tell him what the hellfire was going on.

“Liberals, Joe.They found out that we were going to church and tried to keep us from getting our money. Because it's all our money in there, yours too.It's not a real bank, it's a treasury bank. A government bank. But these liberals want to be sure it doesn't go to do God's good work but want to keep it in reserve for degenerate causes.

My God,” excuse my name-vaining you, Sir, but my God but that's just evil. Who are these people? Why was I never aware that such people, my own neighbors, who always seemed decent enough, could be so demented and debased.”

“You're too good, Joe. Guys like me and my friends here are all that separates you and other good moral folk like us from the godlessness that lives and breeds all around us. But, uh, we can't exactly talk any more about this now, Joe, so step on it will you, the liberals are calling in reinforcements.”

As the car tires squealed and Joe raced them away he found time to ask,“reinforcements? Who?”

“Government, Joe. The liberals control city government and the police and the newspapers, too.”

“My good God Almighty, excuse me again god, but I thought conservatives now ran the city.”

“We try, Joe.Believe me we try. You know what good moral and saintly people we conservatives are. But government is just too big. Even when we conservatives are in charge government often behaves liberally against our will and the public's wishes. It's uncanny.”

“You mean even when conservatives are in charge liberals still run government.”

“Only when it does bad things, Joe. We take credit for the good. But now at least you see what we're up against.”

“You betcha, I do.” With that Joe jammed on the gas pedal even harder. He was a former stock car driver, a real gear head when he was younger, and he soon left those lousy pursuing liberal cops in the dust of his new found outrage.

Can I tell you or can you even begin to imagine what a relief it was for Joe to finally pull up in the parking lot of his own church, his new churchgoers in tow. He never felt so holy and alive. He was doing God's work now for certain. He introduced his new parishioners to his pastor who was skeptical at first, to be sure. But in the weeks that followed as Joe explained the plot against Jesus that these good men had uncovered, he would become just as outraged as Joe.

He too had one question. “But why, Joe,” he wondered aloud?

“Well pastor we believe it's because they are in league with terrorists and hypocrites.”

The pastor gasped. You mean in addition to everything else they are traitors too, Joe?”

Joe said, sadly,that it was true.

Meanwhile, many Sundays, even while they were still sitting in church, they would hear the police sirens speeding by outside in search of the perpetrators of some spectacular bank robbery or other. Joe marveled at their luck. After all, who would think to look for bank robbers sitting nicely and quietly and calmly in church on a Sunday morning?When Joe mentioned this divine, or so it seemed to Joe, piece of good fortune, his boarder only smiled.

“Yeah, yeah that really is a very extraordinarily lucky coincidence for us that I went to work for you and all of a sudden discovered that you had the fastest car around.Isn't it lucky? Wow, we couldn't have planned this caper better if we'd thought of it ourselves in advance.”

“Yeah, wow it's true then, God really does work in very mysterious ways,” Joe said shaking his head in wonderment. When he thought how God could use such imperfect vessels as he and these crude men to do his divine work – which was apparently robbing the American treasury blind –his faith was enhanced even more. Admittedly for a while he had been slightly concerned at the lack of piety his passengers showed. For as they did this same type of god's work many times thereafter -dirty liberals always right on their tails - sometimes at a string of convenience stores, or even at individual's house, a number of savings and loans, or corporate offices or multinationals where they'd ream the liberal shareholders on behalf of the godly corporate executive officers, or even national parks – he noticed a certain pattern emerging.

In each instance,invariably, as soon as the commotion died down and the liberal police sirens faded in the distance and the danger had passed (Joe's friends told him the conservative police must have been locked up by the liberals in their own jails - “What!!!” Joe exclaimed when he heard this, more and more indignant with each and every example of liberal perfidy.) these guys would suddenly get up and go outside, not even bothering to stay for the entire service. There they'd just stand around, smoking, drinking whiskey surreptitiously,but Joe saw them, (The pastor did to but he just looked the other way) from flasks in their belts right next to their assault weapons(Yes Joe saw those too and he looked away as well).

As they gleefully divvied up the money of the day's haul among themselves, recalling how they had told him that this money they stole from the treasury was really his money too, Joe was always a little surprised they didn't offer to share any of it with him now that they had it. But he didn't care too much because heaven would be his best reward.Later these guys would start to exchange winks and nods and trysts with some very loose women (and, truth be told, even a few men) who,for some reason were always blond and often had their own radio programs, who had began to congregate out in the bushes around the church at just this time like camp followers.

“Liberals sent them,” Joe's boarder explained when Joe expressed his concern about the women, “to tempt us and then they try to suggest that there was somehow something untoward and dirty going on. Damn libs. True, some cons would fall prey to the rapturous temptations the flesh is heir to, but then wasn't it even worse, that the libs would try to use suggestions of wrongdoing to discredit God's work and to further the liberal agenda which, to hear the con's tell of it, sounded very much similar at least to Osama bin Laden 's if not Satan's.

But then, despite all of his good and upstanding work, things got worse for Joe.Because Joe lost his job. In fact, many in the church did. And those that didn't had to accept steep pay cuts and they lost their health insurance and pensions. And many businesses had to close.

It seems there had been a big crime wave in the area and many business had been hit hard and some even robbed and they their insurance rates rise and the bank which had been particularly hard hit had nearly failed and the whole town had to chip in to save it because a town their size with no bank couldn't function. So not only did many lose their life savings in the bank collapse but then taxes had to be raised and services cut to be able to afford the big bank bailout as fees were raised on the entire population to save the bank from collapse.

The only ones this helped were the largest depositors and speculators and share holders of the non-treasury banks. Joe was quite surprised that the winners in this economic redistribution didn't include him but did include the very people who he had helped to rob the treasury banks and all those other places that he was told were in league with the libs in their shadowy war against god and country. To Joe's amazement these guys, these very people that Joe had felt so sorry for and had selfishly helped in the good fight against all the liberals, had all become astonishingly, one might even say selfishly, prosperous.Furthermore, he almost came to believe that despite their rudeness,bad manners, crude behavior and tearful identification with the 'little people'” that they had been quite well off all along.

They only needed his car and his help now and then after that, every two or four years, when they needed a special ride to church which always entailed a few stops along the way and always there were liberals and shootouts and mayhem and money bags and daring white-knuckle getaways to the security of the church. And as the police sirens wailed away outside unable to figure out where these robbers had gone –yet again – the boarder and his buddies just smugged and smirked and told lewd jokes among themselves.

Otherwise although they would still treat Joe like an old friend when they saw him they never really acted like old friends and never seemed to want to stay around him any longer than they had to. Because they always seemed too busy now, in their very big stretch limos and fine clothes and lavish life styles and often, he thought, would pretend not even to have seen him when he'd wave. And when he would call on them, they'd act confused momentarily before they'd put on their faux furs of false excitement shake his hand and slap his back, looking over their shoulders as they did so as if they had somewhere else to be and someone more important to do it with and didn't much want to be seen with a guy like Joe anyway.

Deep down Joe and a few of his fellow church goers were hurt and confused. But by then the liberals had taken over the city from the cons and so they knew they had to be even more vigilant and still support their friends right or wrong in the death to the finish fight against the stinkin' libs. But deep down they wondered how things had turned out so well for their friends and so badly for them. Even the lousy liberals were doing better than they were.

Finally, and this was the unkindest cut of all for Joe, attendance at church had started to wither. All their shrill railing against libs and against poor people and immigrants had struck more than just a few people as too political, hypocritical and unchristian. Meanwhile while all the projects the church goers had helped the cons with had turned out famously, all the church projects the cons promised to help them with had seen few if any successes.

In fact the only group that had seemed to do well were the banks and chief executives of giant corporations. This was fortunate for the cons for they all seemed to sit on the boards of giant corporations and hang out at the same clubs as the bankers did. Since they had always pretended to be against the banks, at least government banks, in favor of the “little guys” it was then surprising that they actually turned out to be against any meaningful bank reform once the private banks later got so far out of line trying to bankrupt the world.

When confronted with these anomalous facts the cons responded not with reason and remorse but by merely escalating their attacks on libs. Gum everything up, hold rallies, sit-ins, sit-downs, hang arounds and mug-ins for cameras was their new strategy for logical governance of the nation. For it seems that now the libs were pushing nefarious schemes like health care reform. Could anything be more sinister?They weren't just commies and nazis and un-American anymore but some now suggested that they weren't even human beings. They had actually become aliens – like Clingons – and were determined to take over the whole planet after they destroyed the country, though it was hard to tell what vehicle they would use to control the world if they had destroyed the country they were running first.

But Joe was feeling lethargic. He was worn out and wasn't buying their reasoning so much anymore. After all, the first thing that happened when he got laid off was the insurance company canceled his insurance. And besides these spontaneous “remember the little people rallies”were organized by the same bank robbers and corporatist millionaires who had proven to be so completely wrong about everything before.

But, after railing against libs for all these years how could Joe possibly reunite with them now? He had always prided himself on his loyalty and constancy, so in the end Joe went dutifully to the rallies like he was told and booed and bleated as speakers ripped into libs as convincingly as a herd of sheep throwing a tantrum. They claimed that first libs had helped the banks rob us and now they wanted to regulate the banks so they could bail them out again. It didn't matter that their arguments didn't even make sense, the cons were against them no matter what, so Joe was too.

Finally, one day,running into his former protege as he went to the unemployment office Joe couldn't help but voice his dissatisfaction with the way this entire movement had turned out for him and his friends.

“Don't you think this is ironic? I gave up everything to help you and you wound up a powerful multimillionaire and I've got nothing, less than when I began. You were going to do all these great things for us – prayer in school; overturn Roe v. Wade; have the Ten Commandments posted on every street corner; see all foreigners run out of the country; fight easy wars to glorious victories that we would never even have to pay for; beat up, legally speaking, gay people; engineer a constitutional amendment against the awful scourge of flag burning; eliminate separation of church and state; undo social security, dismantle the departments of education, energy, environmental protection, welfare, etc.; and do it all according to sound conservative economic principles, fiscal policy, constitutional strict constructionism and moral exceptionalism. But somehow you delivered on none of it.”

“It's not my fault you believed all of that Joe, after all, just about everyone of those things you listed is either entirely unconstitutional or wildly unpopular. But don't blame us, blame those damn liberals, Joe,see what they do to good god-fearing Americans like us? And you'd sure better not blame me. It's not my fault you ran after all these quixotic moonbeams nobody had the heart to tell you you would never catch. Meanwhile me and friends just happened to keep our eyes on a more practical, attainable prize – money and lots of it.”

“But somehow even though I thought we were in this together you always seemed to manage to land on your feet, huh? While I get thrown under the wheels of your limos as they leave town. In fact, walking around town I see you and your friends going into clubs I can't even afford to enter with the heads of the very bankers and elites of society you always told me we were fighting against.”

“That's a very cynical attitude Joe. We're always sunny and optimistic about the future of the country. You should be too.”

“There you go again accusing me of an attitude you are guilty of yourself. You are the most cynical people I've ever met. You even pretend to religious beliefs you neither personify nor possess merely to gain others' trust and occasionally use as cover for some less than admirable lifestyle decisions.”

“Joe, I'm shocked. Let me ask you this, do you want government agents of our liberal, anti-god, Nazi-socialist-commie government breaking down the door to your house in the middle of the night to take your money from you just so they can give it to shiftless poor people?”

“But man, I'm one of them. Now. Thanks to you. I'm one of those poor people at the bottom of the economic scale you seem quite willing to dismiss as bad or worthless or forgettable Americans. I'm not sure I want to keep being forgotten.”

“No not at all,you're different, you're special, you go to church unlike those dirty tax and spend commie terrorists libs. I told you they were trying to keep you down and steal your hard earned money. And look, it's come to pass.”

Yeah, I suppose it has at that, just like you said. But let me ask you this. If it's the liberals who have been working so successfully all these years to take my money away from me and give it to someone else then how come you and your friends are the ones who always wind up with it?”

“This last remark was a little bit  too much on the nose for Joe's conservative friend and seemed to flummox him a bit, suddenly he recalled he had an important meeting to attend somewhere else, but before he could leave, Joe continued.

“First you robbed and bankrupted the federal treasury where, true I had some money there too that I begrudged and no it was not perfectly managed but at least when it was spent it might accidentally go to serve some public good that would eventually benefit the country which might even benefit me too. Because though I disagree with some of our government's spending when you break it down I agree with 90% of it. So while a little reform was necessary you have tried to destroy everything. That's liking burning down our house just to get rid of a few cockroaches, or burning down the outhouse to get rid of the the stink.

“And now the public treasury is so indebted, understaffed and deregulated that it can barely function at providing the services which the country needs to survive without borrowing vast sums of money from foreigners or cutting vital services at home. How's this better for anyone? That ultimately makes us all weaker. Meanwhile you and your cronies have redirected this public money which was held in trust to provide for the public good and funneled it directly into your own accounts and superior care and feeding of private banks which only a few control. And then you use a fraction of this money to fight using any of the rest of these funds for any public good. I don't pretend to know of high finance or grand geopolitical economic theory but it sure seems you cons have impoverished the nation solely in order to enrich yourselves.

“My daddy told me a long time ago, Joe, always remember, 'there are no patriots on Wall street and few Christians, when push comes to shove it's we the public they push around and shove down,' and now I think I see what he meant.”

“No Joe, you've got this all wrong. You see it's liberals who aren't like you and me. They're bleeding hearts, see? They 'd take your money and give it away to some one else.”

“Or back to me, in greater sums when I need it, than I ever paid in in taxes to begin with or that I ever had the foresight or ability to save for. The Bible tells us that when money is given generously it expands but when used greedily it contracts. It seems these public monies - and I didn't fully realize how much benefit they provided until I started to see them shriveling away - when they are well spent glue the country together in a shared experience. But you and your kind just want to drive wedges between us to keep us down and divide us all for your own profit, country be damned. You look at history and see a dog eat dog, anti-Christian, greed driven world where everyone is just out for themselves, just because you happen have bigger dogs on your side than anyone else. It's a cold, hard, class-ridden unforgiving world you envision which I don't recognize as my country at all.”

“But Joe it's the liberals you're thinking of. That's what they do. They hate Jesus and...those rotten libs...we cons, you know, have got to stick together now.”

“Yeah, I hear you, you're cons all right. But you are cons not as in conservative, because you aren't conservative. Conservatives believe in upholding and sustaining our finest traditions not in watching them implode so they can steal the remaining pieces like an unfriendly take-over of a corporation that is perceived to be of more value, at least to a few shareholders, if its broken up into smaller and smaller parts. No, you are cons the way confidence men are cons.

“You earn people's trust the old fashioned way, by lying.  You do it by telling them things you think they want to hear and then worm your way in, rob them blind and get away before they even know what hit them. Then you are ready with a prearranged frame to point to someone else when they discover their loss. You squeal and say look he did it, they did it, everyone did it but you when you're the one who did it. That's a con man.”

“Joe's old friend shook his head. “Ok, I see what's happened here, you are no longer one of us my friend. You are dead to us, you are our enemy now. I hope you know. And we may be willing to forget our friends and and impose on them and even cheat them from time to time but we will never, never forget and forgive a one time friend who dares raise a finger of doubt in question of our activities. I'm writing your name in our book now, my friend. We will bury you.”

And they tried too. When the friend he had only done everything he possibly could to help turned his back on him and walked away Joe felt limp and depressed, empty inside. What a world that would have such people in it. And as the guy walked away, Joe realized that he never even knew the guy's real name or what he did for a living. And then it hit him. That's why the sting worked. Nobody knew who the cons were or what was real or what wasn't beneath all the artifice and persiflage and continuous moralizing and constant misdirection. That's why half the people helping them in their sting were doing so unwittingly, not knowing what their real purpose was in the grand scheme.  It was diabolical, a play within a play within a play. After it was over and you discovered you'd been cheated you hardly even knew where to point the finger of blame.

After that Joe, to his total dismay, even found himself shunned at church. His pastor, the same one Joe had first alerted to the threat posed by the libs, screamed at him from the pulpit as a turncoat.  Former friends looked the other way, others blackballed him when he tried to find a new job. He was banished. I'd like to say that in the end Joe was sadder but wiser, but he wasn't. He was most assuredly sadder but never really any wiser because he never could quite figure out what he had done that was so wrong to deserve such heavy punishment. He had only wanted to do good.

The moral of this story is: Doing the wrong things for the right reasons may have exactly the same result as doing the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. But the punishment will be even steeper for the one who does it. You still wind up with all the wrongs you did weighted against you but you will pay an even heavier additional fee for the self-righteousness and arrogance you displayed while doing it than a mere crook who never had any such pretensions.

 

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