(Book One of the Fifty Shades trilogy. This is weird. Or maybe it is the new normal. The tie is used…oh, hell, I can’t do it. Photo E.L. James)

‘Alice felt there was no denying that. ‘Of course it would be all the better,’ she said: ‘but it wouldn’t be all the better his being punished.’
‘You’re wrong there, at any rate,’ said the Queen. ‘Were you ever punished?’
‘Only for faults,’ said Alice.
‘And you were all the better for it, I know!’ the Queen said triumphantly.”

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I was just waking up in my brown chair around Midnight, and was no longer competent to do anything except relocate to the eiderdown. It was a good night, with snow.

I had intended to be at Willow, but my son cancelled on me.  I would have liked to have seen him, but he had additional ambitious plans for the evening, and I was in comfortable clothes, since I had come home mid-afternoon, frustrated with the office back-up computer’s inability to process email.

It was much easier to work at home, and I changed into something comfortable to do it.

I would have been happy to go out again, but on the other hand, it was snowing and there was a great temptation to just sit down, watch the snow fall and finish an adventure in popular culture- “The Fifty Shades of Gray.”

I was curious about the minor sensation the book had caused in the publishing world, and bought Book One of the trilogy to see what the stir was about.

I was astonished by the whole thing, which appears to be an attempt to mainstream the whole bondage-fetish thing. A best seller, I thought, in fact a number one bestseller on some charts, and as I read, the words that complete the phrase “WTF” flashed periodically before my eyes.

I understand this is in the realm of the bodice-ripper school of literature, targeted to the over-30 female demographic, like the ones that have Fabio on the cover.

I barely understand my own sexuality, much less that of the stronger gender, but this was amazing. Apparently it also resonated to a major degree, selling more than 60 million copies worldwide, and which displaced Harry Potter’s author J.K. Rowling as the fastest seller in some accounts.

As a scribbler myself, it is sort of inspirational, since “Shades” started out as an ebook with no agents, publishers or other traditional support and it has made the author very wealthy indeed. As a reader, I am appalled by the whole thing. Violence is bad, no one likes pain- I think- or maybe I am wrong about that. The lead dominant character in the narrative, Mr. Christian Gray, claims to be “fifty shades of F**ked up,” and I have to go with his assessment.

There is a lot of that going around, and so much to be appalled about that I will just let this one go, celebrating the First Amendment right of author E.L. James to write whatever she wants. Though of course she is a British citizen, but never mind.

I put that aside as a social phenomenon that I don’t understand, but decided to incorporate it as part of my standard morning routine to believe six impossible things before breakfast, I attempted to comprehend the court ruling about overturning the President’s Recess Appointments. That was the big news flash late yesterday afternoon, and the talking heads were talking, even as presidential press spokesman Jay Carney was attempting to downplay the significance of the ruling.

As I understand the judicial reasoning, recess appointments can be made without Senate consent only when the Congress is not in session. The case was brought by the Chamber of Commerce due to the fact that the Senate was- technically- still working and there was no recess.

The business conducted by the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body was largely pro-forma, and clearly intended only to deny the President the window to make the appointments that were blocked by a Senate in session. The work being done was only a few minutes of procedural action taken before an empty chamber, but the principle was clear: the Senate will determine when it is in session, not the Executive Branch.

I am fascinated by the ruling and its implications. Mr. Obama is only the latest of the last three Chiefs who have maneuvered the recess appointment thing. It is more than a bit like A-not-A, a phrase that bit us on the butt back in the 1990s.

“Authorized but not appropriated” was what the phrase meant. It caused gridlock one crazy budget year- back when Congress still considered its duty to actually produce the operating budget of the United States. They don’t, any more, and from this distance, the whole A-not-A struggle seems a bit quaint.

Anyway, you recall that the Appropriators nailed the Authorizers to the wall in the next cycle and reminded them that the Committees of jurisdiction over the purse strings had the real power. Money talks and BS walks, as the saying goes. The Appropriators included a simple phrase in their bills: “all appropriations are considered to be authorized,” and the matter went away.

The routine business of Presidents waiting until the Senate leaves town to install controversial appointees was addressed through the same sort of legislative slight of hand. Recess appointments have been going on for a long time. The more egregious examples of late, targeting the National Labor Relations Board, provoked the same sort of answer that A-not-A did.

The Senate simply decided to stay “in session” by having a couple of the local Senators come in to the office in the morning and declare that they were open for business. The President called their bluff, and made his appointments. The NLRB has issued hundreds of decisions since then, and now the courts have said the appointments were unconstitutional. What that really means is open to speculation.

I will be interested to see how it goes, and don’t know how it will turn out. It certainly seems to be part of a larger continuing Constitutional crisis. From the Second Amendment to the basic separation of powers, the government has wrapped itself in a pretzel attempting to do either the right or wrong thing in fifty shades of legality, depending on your perspective.

I might be in favor of a new Constitutional convention to talk about our rights and the nature of our Republic, since nothing seems to be working anymore.

The problem is that we might just get something that we cannot live with, and on the whole, the founding documents have served us pretty well for more than two hundred years.

Some people seem to want fundamental change, and a lot of other people don’t.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. The Constitutional Crisis goes on. Jeeze. There is so much craziness that it is becoming normal to wonder what our elected idiots are doing from day to day. It is at least fifty shades of lunacy.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com