Backside candidacy

Who’s on first?

To dispel some rumors about who is and who is not running for the soon to be hotly contested and unquestionably too highly paid non-voting Delegate seat, here is the list.

As of last week there were 10 people who had picked up a candidate’s validation packet at the Election Commission Office. This is the necessary first step to tossing one’s hat in the ring. Here they are:

-Greg Sablan

-Ray Yumal

-Pete Tenorio

-John Gonzalez

-Juan Lizama

-David Attao

-Luis Chrisostimo

-Paul Wm. Camacho

-Me

-Juan Guerrero

I think there will be plenty more where those came from.

We won’t know until deadline day, Aug. 6, who has actually turned in their paperwork and voter petitions and will even be trying for validation. We won’t know who has actually succeeded in being placed on the ballot until Sept. 20, which is the final day for the Election Commission to act on and validate nominating petitions and candidacy documents.

***

Noted author and economist William Stewart has proposed David M. Sablan as the best candidate for the new post of non-voting Delegate to the U.S. Congress. Uncle Dave has a track record consisting of a highly successful business career coupled with 40 years of meaningful community service, and is one of the CNMI’s brightest and most talented people. He has the moxie to recognize the crooks in D.C. and not be steam rollered by the politically powerful as would most of the other candidates currently interested in the job. So I tend to agree with Bill Stewart, Mr. Sablan would be the best man for the post.

Problem is: Why would he run? A successful election would probably result in a pay cut for him. His various business interests here would suffer in his absence. He is smart enough to see the futility in a lackey’ssecond banana position as a delegate without a vote. Where he now enjoys almost universal popularity, as a politician he would of necessity make a lot of enemies no matter what his actions were. For these reasons and many others, I don’t think we could talk him into running. We could draft him, but he would probably be smart enough to head for Canada.

***

Pete A. Tenorio should change his middle initial to Z for Zorrie. As the flip-flop king, he should take on the correct identifying moniker. When elected he stood for CNMI self-governance and used to play golf with the pro-Commonwealth labor lobbyist, now-not-his-friend-anymore-so there, Jack Abramoff. When the political guard changed a while back he dumped all the above and jumped on the pro-federalist bandwagon. His price? A non-voting delegate seat outside in the hallway next to the bathroom of the U.S. Lower Congressional House is all it took. He didn’t have the skills to get the seat on its, or his, own merits so he sold himself, his country and his constituents for it.

Now he wants to run for the office he sold us out to get. What ideology do you suppose he will switch to if we are foolish enough to elect him to not-vote for us in DC?

***

Certain freedoms are allowed children that just aren’t available to the adult population. My son (aged three) likes to run outside sans clothing and sometimes cannot be persuaded to see the “civilizing influence” that wearing pants, as an example, confers upon him. Why Dad?

I’m not sure where he acquired the phrase ‘naked butt butt” but acquire it he has. It aptly describes his favorite mode of dress. He has no time for embarrassment. He has no patience with convention. He has a direct and obvious self-interest position: it’s cool and comfortable. Nothing needs to match anything else color wise. No pants leg to tangle in the bicycle chain. No fear of parental retribution if the shirt gets snagged on an inconveniently placed tree limb and rips.

I am a bit surprised that Mom’s don’t climb on this naked butt butt bandwagon. Think of the hours of laundry it would save if all the children just un-dressed for success. You don’t need to iron an arm or a stomach. Collectively, jillions of hours could be saved just on getting kids dressed and off to school each day. There are other obvious advantages.

What brings this line of rumination up is power outages. Never-ending, inconvenient, uncomfortable and untimely CUC induced power outages. It came to me in a flash the other evening as I tried to sleep in my 150° F oven-like concrete house during the 14th power outage of the day. I could get up and go sit on the porch and enjoy the cooling breeze, butt butt just think how much more comfortable it would be sitting out there with all those skin pores exposed. Nature set us up with a natural evaporative cooling system which we inhibit by wearing clothes. We sweat; the moving air evaporates the moisture and cools us down. But when we wear clothing, we sweat; the cloth become soaked and we swelter.

While a 3-year-old can enjoy the freedom and comfort that nudity confers, we adults would only run afoul of a puritanical, European-based legal system that prohibits allowing nature’s cooling system to function unfettered by clothes. No shoes, no shirt, no service. No pants, no serape and it’s off to jail for “indecent exposure.” Just which part is the indecent part? Before the Spanish came along and conquered this place with canons and muskets 400 odd years ago, there weren’t any indecent parts. That traditional system of un-dress makes perfect sense when your body is located 15 degrees above the equator and temp/humidity heat index makes it feel like it’s a 110 degrees outside instead of only 85. While reading to my 3 year old from the excellent CNMI textbook History of the Northern Mariana Islands by Don Ferrell, we learned about the smart indigenous solution to hot, humid, tropical weather…nudity. See, Dad?

There may be one saving grace in sending us off to jail if we adults are caught without all the politically correct items of clothing: it’s cool inside there. As a local assistant attorney general has pointed out, we would not want to inconvenience our prisoners so they have a taxpayer paid generator to keep that A/C humming and those TVs a clamoring when CUC flubs the power yet again. It’s the least we can do for thieves, child molesters, murderers and …nudists.

***

Quote of the week: No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
—P.J. O’Rourke, writer (1947-)