Whigs and Squirrels

Squirrels making strides .. Poster courtesy of Wikipedia

by Trebor Snillor
Today is hotter than Hades – both of the nearby Starbucks are full to capacity with people drinking iced coffees, escaping the heat. I’ve now landed at the Highland Park Whole Foods. I’m drinking an Allegro ice coffee flavored with almond milk and Truvia.

SQUIRRELS

Before I launch into today’s topic, I have to comment on the squirrel situation. I have two nice bird feeders in my back yard.. in previous years they attracted sparrows, cardinals and blue jays. Nary a bird comes by anymore – the squirrels have taken over. I guess squirrels have to eat too.

My newest feeder is called the “squirrel stumper”. It has a metal grill surrounding the cylindrical body. The squirrels are not stumped by it at all. They can hang upside down on the grill and eat out of the dispenser tray. They even appear to have figured out how to remove the screw top. It’s eerie – can a rodent be that smart?

There is a cable that runs from a telephone pole in my alley, past the hackberry tree (with feeders) over to my house. It runs about two feet above the feeder and a foot or two to the right of it. Yesterday that cable was hooked under a short tree branch next to the feeder. It’s as if the squirrels engineered a bridge directly to the feeder. They weighed it down and swung it over. Those little brown bastards! Little, brown, innovative bastards at that.

WHIGS

If squirrels are smart, Republicans are showing signs of devolution. Never mind Donald Trump; he’s amusing but he’s not the main GOP issue right now. The main issue with the GOP is immigration – a topic which succeeds in splitting the GOP right down the middle. Companies like Walmart and Gemcraft Homes benefit highly from immigrant laborers with their reduced wages. Wealthy stakeholders (who trend Republican) embrace the immigrants. Populist middle class Republicans are angry with immigration and even hostile toward Latinos in general. They abhor immigration and it’s a central theme of theirs. These two groups cannot live in the same domicile for long – history even has a precedent dating back to the 1850’s.

Our man Abraham Lincoln was a Whig in the 1850’s. Whigs were a conservative, pro-business party but they were riven by the issue of slavery. President Millard Fillmore was a slavery apologist and the anti-slave Whigs could not tolerate his re-nomination. It’s a rare case in history where a party name, “Whig” came to have a nasty connotation to its own members. It could signify a slave-freeing Lincoln or a slave-justifying Fillmore. By 1856, the Whigs were destroyed as a party. The anti-slavery Whigs founded the new Republican Party and the pro-slave group glommed to a failed “American” Party. They next gravitated over to a Democratic Party that had a stretchier (albeit hypocritical) view of humans owning humans.

I have trouble imagining anyone who his young, female, gay or minority voting for the GOP. The party is a fossilized, ossified vessel of Old White Man ideas. I typically think that third parties are a bad move – but I can actually see a 3rd Party now supplanting the GOP with fiscal conservatism that accompanies a sensitivity for human and animal rights. It would be in some ways a sequel of the Whigs in 1856.

© 2015 Snillor Productions