Dream shows it's time to cut, er, pare pizza at night

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© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 5, 2001

I had this weird dream in which the governor was explaining why we are not really cutting the state budget, even though he is about to summon the Legislature into a special session to whack it by $1-billion or more.

"This is not a budget cut," Jeb Bush said, with great insistence. "Anybody who says this is a budget cut is a negative naysayer, and quite possibly a liberal."

"But governor," I asked respectfully. "If you were going to spend X, and now you can only spend X minus $1-billion, isn't that a cut?"

"Not at all," Bush replied. "You have been listening to the Democrats. If you compare what we will be spending this year to what we spent LAST year, it is still an overall increase."

I considered this logic for a second, and it made a certain sense.

Trying to be helpful, I eagerly volunteered that we also could cut $10-billion out of the budget, and that still would be more than we were spending, say, five or six years ago. So that would not be a cut, either.

"By the way, governor," I said, respectfully of course, "did you just get a haircut?"

"I absolutely did not,"' Bush said. "I merely reduced the rate of growth of my hair."

At this point the lieutenant governor, Frank Brogan, burst into the room grinning. By itself, this fact was not news. However, he was carrying a small book and seemed excited about sharing his findings.

"Gash, rent, slash, stab, pierce, nip, trim!" Brogan cried out. "Snip, incision, chip, chop, clip, groove, trench, rabbet, notch, slot, slit, whittle!"

"What are you doing?" Bush asked.

A look of confusion crossed Brogan's face. "It's a thesaurus," he explained. "You asked me to look up synonyms for the word cu-"

"FRANK!!!!"

"Oops," Brogan giggled. "That was a close one."

Bush sat down behind his desk to sign a series of executive orders:

In all Florida textbooks, the play Julius Caesar, Act III, scene ii, line 187, must be changed to quote Mark Antony as saying, "This was the unkindest "reduction in growth' of all."

From now on in Florida, football players who do not make the roster will be described as "making the SPECIAL special team, if you know what we mean."

All decks of cards must be dealt immediately after shuffling.

Students may only "negatively attend" classes.

The verb "dancing" may not be replaced with any figure of speech referring to a floor covering.

"Governor, aren't you taking this a little too far?" I asked. "Hard times happen. Besides, you could make a good case this isn't your fault. The Democrats will probably try to blame your tax cuts for this, but jeez Louise, if you hadn't cut taxes, those guys just would have blown all the money anyway. Right?"

"But these are not hard times!" Bush shouted angrily. "There are no hard times while I am governor! NOTHING bad happens while I am governor! Everything is fine, do you understand? FINE!"

Brogan was about to burst. "Carve!" he exclaimed with a jerk of the neck. "Sculpt, hew, chisel, cleave, sever, rive, split, chip, chop, clip, hack, dice, cube, mince, shave, dissect, gash, incise, scarify!"

Out the window, I could see a short woman with black hair and a bullhorn organizing some sort of parade. "Teachers' union with horror stories, over here!" she shouted. "Laid-off child-abuse investigators, over here! Critics of cutbacks at the Department of Environmental Protection, over here!"

"That's some parade they're putting together out there," I told the governor. "You oughta drag 'em in here and make them say how THEY would cut the budget."

Bush snapped a pencil. "I'm going to tell you one more time," he said slowly. "It is NOT a cut."

At this I figured, hey, who am I to argue, so I woke up ... only to find Frank Brogan leaning over my bed, his nose inches from mine. "PARE!" he shouted. Then I woke up for real.

No more late-night pizza for me.

-- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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