Impartial Fish-Man

We turned on the TV.  Charlie Rose was on.  He was interviewing a Fish-Man.

"Turn it off," my sister said.  She was burping her son.  "I hate those slimy Fish-Men."

I didn't particularly care for the language she used.  Calling a Fish-Man "slimy" seemed to me to call back to hateful stereotypes of less enlightened times, when Fish-Men and their families were barred from buying homes in certain parts of the city.  Even if it is true that Fish-Men must keep their scales moist to avoid drying out when spending extended periods of time on land.

But still, I can't deny that I felt the same reflexive disgust towards Fish-Men that my sister, and other less-educated Americans still feel.  I think we all do.  It's not because the Fish-Man, with his unblinking eyes or stinking gills, is physically repulsive.  It's because Fish-Men cannot be impartial.

Just look at Congress.  Whenever a Fish-Man is elected to Congress, it's the same old story -- he refuses to work with his colleagues on anything that is not in the interest of his gerrymandered, Fish-Man dominated home district.  And as if that weren't enough, the Fish-Man doesn't go to Congress just to fight for his own issues.  He has to band together with the small minority of Fish-Man and Fish-Man-sympathetic lawmakers and disrupt the entire legislative process, with self-glorifying speeches, hopeless amendments, and time-wasting procedural moves.

And of course the same is true of the Fish-Men we deal with in our day-to-day lives.  I worked with a Fish-Man once and he was impossible.  Ask him to solve a tricky highway access problem (this is when I was working at the transportation department) and instead of brainstorming possible solutions, he'd just go on and on about how highway spending is a massive waste (because Fish-Men don't drive cars, they only swim) and how we should be spending that money instead to solve more important problems like repainting the bottoms of certain buoys to make them more reflective and Fish-Men would be able to see them in the dark.

And I would never ask a Fish-Man to change his opinion, or go along with something he didn't believe in.  But Fish-Men are just incapable of understanding that other people ("Land-Dwellers," they call us) might see an issue differently from them.  You try to explain it to them and they just get confused -- they don't understand.

It's because their brains aren't developed in the same way.

But I didn't change the channel.  I put the remote down.  My sister left the room in a huff.

Charlie said that his guest that day was the world's first and perhaps the world's only Impartial Fish-Man.  I turned the volume up.  The Fish-Man sat quietly across from Charlie.  He looked like a typical Fish-Man -- scaly, moist, with frills and fins styled on his head; wearing the unofficial Fish-Man uniform of a plaid button-down shirt and conservative khakis; with a huge clear fish bowl filled with water on his head so he could breathe.

Charlie thanked the Fish-Man for being on the show.  The Fish-Man didn't say anything, he just sort of nodded abruptly, but that kind of social awkwardness is normal for Fish-Men.

Charlie and the Fish-Man started talking about military expenditures.  The Fish-Man believed we spend too much on the military.  I scoffed -- this kind of position was typical of Fish-Men.  Of course they want the country to spend less on the military.  They don't need a strong military because, faced with any outside threat, they will just abandon the country and slip into the sea.  But I realized the Fish-Man hadn't called for the country to cut all military funding, like most of his brethren.  He was simply calling for cutbacks, and pointing out that much military spending was wasted on foolish projects and unnecessary foreign conflicts and, hell, I can agree with that position.

Charlie smiled.

The Fish-Man rattled off numbers, explaining how many billions of dollars had gone to waste on equipment that was obsolete before it reached the battlefield, or vehicles that were designed to fight the wars of the past but were useless in the small-scale conflicts of the future, or corrupt government contractors.  I don't remember the numbers, but they were big.  He was making a persuasive case.  The Fish-Man said we shouldn't be spending all this money on draining wars overseas when we had so many needs here in the homeland.

He looked at the camera on the word "homeland," hoping to drive home the rhetorical point, without underlining it too much.  Fish-Men typically didn't use words like homeland.  They typically described the United States as their "dry-spots," emphasizing that it was not their homes, but merely a place they were staying temporarily, or as a "sandy hell."  This Fish-Man was shrewd, in a way most Fish-Men weren't.  Even though I knew what he was doing, I had to admit I liked him.

Charlie asked the Fish-Man what kind of projects he would like to see military savings spent on.  The Fish-Man said "eliminating algae bloom."

Charlie stuttered something in disgust.  The Fish-Man crossed his fin-hands defiantly.  I reached for the remote and changed the channel.  The lesson was clear to me: never trust a Fish-Man to be impartial.