Let's Start Sending Canned Ham to Our Congressional Leaders
We have a class project here in the shebeen for this week. I noticed not long ago the story of an educator from Salt Lake City named Julia Silge, and Ms. Silge would rather not have Betsy DeVos as the next Secretary of Education, a feeling she shares with the Democratic caucus in the U.S. Senate, which is planning an all-nighter in opposition. Since said opposition has pretty much banjaxed the Capitol Hill phone system for about five days, and since it's doing pretty much the same thing out in the country, Silge couldn't get through to her senior senator Orrin Hatch with her plea that country's schoolchildren be spared Ms. DeVos.
So she hit on a way to get his attention: She sent a pizza to his local office. And not just any pizza-a ham-and-pineapple number that would get you executed on the spot if you ordered it at Santarpio's in East Boston.
Anyway, The Salt Lake Tribune picks up the story from there.
The note she requested be taped on top of the greasy cardboard box? "From a Salt Lake constituent in 84105: Please vote NO on Betsy DeVos. She is an inappropriate choice to lead our public schools." But it didn't deliver. About two hours after Silge placed the order, a federal security officer reached out to her. "I got a call about a suspicious pizza," he said over the phone. Hatch's office, it turns out, had refused the delivery and reported it to police - and Silge's name and number were on the receipt. "I definitely had a sinking feeling in my stomach," she reflected. "At this point, I'm starting to realize this was maybe not my best thought-out plan." But though the pizza was trashed, the senator's office saw Silge's post on Twitter - a screenshot of the online order which has been retweeted more than 5,000 times - and informed Hatch about the message. "We appreciate all creative efforts to reach Senator Hatch, particularly as we deal with a large volume of out-of-state callers that are preventing Utah constituents from reaching us," the senator's staff said in a prepared statement. "Unfortunately, the pizza did not make it through security screening because the office had not ordered it."
OK, so I can see the point about security. Pizzas come in boxes and are easily tampered with.(Plus: ham and pineapple? Really?) But, thanks to a person whose Internet shopping skillz far exceed my own, there is another way to engage what we may call The Silge Gambit. It seems that Amazon Smile will allow you to ship canned ham and canned pineapple-no security risk to those at all-to the congressional recipient of your choice. Not only that, but it will allow you to donate .05% of the purchase price to a charity or worthy cause of your choice. And you can add a personal note, too.
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For example, were I to send a can of ham to Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, I could send the following note:
Dear Speaker Ryan: Unlike yourself, I actually was educated in Wisconsin, under the auspices of the Society of Jesus. As onetime cardinal, and current Super Bowl pregame host, the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio once said, "I believe that the devil exists....his greatest achievement in these times has been to make us believe he doesn't exist." In your name, .05 of this purchase price as been donated to the Wisconsin ACLU. Please leave Medicare the way you found it."
Here are the Senate addresses. Here's the House. (You'll have to find the local ones yourselves. This ain't no gut course here.) Be creative. Send along your accompanying notes, which should be nice and peaceful ones, and we'll put 'em up here in the wall of the shebeen.
Aux armes, citoyens!
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