Congratulations on your purchase of your new 110th Congress! These care and feeding instructions will help ensure many years of future enjoyment of your Congress: please read them carefully.
CONTENTS
As packaged, your new Congress contains:
- 1 Capitol (white)
- 435 live Representatives (also mostly white)
- 100 live Senators (mostly blazingly, translucently white)
- Congress Chow, in the form of hundreds of billions of dollars in cash
- A variety of checks and balances. You may set these aside: they don't
actually do anything.INSTRUCTIONS
- Soon after installing your new Congress, a green, cash-rich buildup may occur. This buildup is a normal part of the ecological balance in your Congress; the murky green colors will fade slightly as the ratio of legislators to beneficial lobbyists finds a natural balance.
- Do not expose your Congress to direct sunlight, as this may cause excessive "loss" of Senators and Representatives. In order to best ensure the health of your Congress, keep it in a dimly lit place, preferably near a variety of restaurants.
- If your Congress begins looking drab, place an American flag behind the tank. This will stimulate your Congressmen into a variety of unusual displays. When the effect fades, add more flags.
- Do not taunt your Congress. Their feelings are easily hurt, and may result in uncontrollable, deafening wailing. If this happens, add additional flags.
- A certain amount of sexual perversion is normal. If your household includes children, place your Congress in a location where children will not have direct access to it. Positioning your Congress away from telephone and other communications equipment will help prevent a buildup of prostitutes.
- As normal behavior, your Senators and Representatives will travel in schools. You may notice portions of your Congress from time to time erupt in panic over an unseen enemy, usually hippies or communists. This is normal, and will usually resolve itself through a series of sternly worded but ineffectual bills.
- Your Congress is a carefully organized hierarchical society. Watch them work together to build highways, bridges, and overfunded vanity projects. Do not, however, expect them to show interest in you or acknowledge your presence in any way. If that's what you wanted, you should have bought a dog.
- Under optimal conditions, your Congress may develop one or two Presidential Candidates. The bright colors and dramatic displays of these creatures can provide hours of entertainment. While Presidential Candidates may add excitement to your Congress, note that they are territorial and prone to fighting: keep Candidates separate as much as possible. Also, be aware that Presidential Candidates require ten times the amount of nutrition of other legislators, so feed regularly.
- Clean your Congress every two years to remove buildup and prevent disease. Wipe your Congress with a disinfecting solution made up of cursory debate, weakly contested primaries, and embarrassingly shallow campaign coverage. It won't make the slightest bit of difference, but what the hell -- it will give you something to do.
All sales final. No refunds. May exchange for identically dysfunctional Congress only.
And then I read this over at Girls Are Pretty, and it sort of make sense:
Today you’re going into the jungle to hunt and kill some toucans. Along the way you’ll stumble upon a tribe of savages who will think that you are their God because you look like the cave painting someone did of their God one time, and they’ll all bow down to you and tell you you can have anything you want as long as you finally make the trees bear fruit again. If you don’t make the trees bear fruit again, they’ll burn you because that’s what it said to do within the instructions someone once wrote on the cave wall near the painting of God.
“Okay,” you tell them. “First thing I need is as many dead toucans as you can bring to me.”
They run out into the woods and start strangling toucans. They bring back to you a big pile of the birds and lay them all at your feet. You start to bag them up when the savages ask about the trees bearing fruit. You’ll say, “I have to confess, I don’t know how to…”
Just then, one of the savages will point up at the trees. Bananas will be growing from their branches like you’re looking at them in fast-forward. God, the real God, must have made that happen. He must hate toucans too and he’s rewarding you for getting so many of them to die by letting you keep your life as well as all those toucans. Congratulations and have fun eating toucan salad sandwiches for the next year and a half.
OK, it's an analogy stretch, but it makes sense to me.
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