The Gift of The Wiseguy

This isn't a very nice prank, but it does have some seasonal appropriateness:

A man who appears to be the person who left a gift-wrapped box of horse manure outside the home of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Saturday spoke with AL.com via phone late Sunday evening, calling the incident an "act of political theater."

L.A. psychologist Robby Strong provided AL.com with convincing evidence that he is the man behind the now-infamous incident, which attracted the LAPD's bomb squad and other law enforcement personnel to Mnuchin's home in the city's Bel Air neighborhood.

He defended his decision to drop the box of manure - which he says he got from a horse-owning friend - off at Mnuchin's house as a "prank" aimed at raising the awareness of Americans about the idea that "Republicans have done nothing for the American worker" and other political topics.

"The thing I live by is a rule of transparency and I was exercising my First Amendment rights," Strong told AL.com. "A few years ago when [a Supreme Court ruling] said that corporations are persons and money equals free speech, that is so absurd and my rule of thumb is now that if corporations are free speech, then so is horses***t."

He also likened his act to that of the individual whose birthday we now celebrate, who became famously irate at the money changers who gouged regular folks in the name of religion.

It makes a certain kind of timely poetic sense--if this tax bill was rushed to be signed for the holidays, then it is practically simple good manners to return a gift to the Trump Administration in kind. And while we enjoy the benefits of a court ruling that labelled money as "speech", and then produced politicians who would only recognize their big money donors as their true constituency, how then are we to discern why boxes of poo or any other physical item of value, can't be speech, if it is used as a means to convey grievance to the effect that people in high places have forgotten the people who don't have dollars at their ready disposal, but can bestir great loads of shit?

And why not horseshit? For twenty years, we have known of the great good Christmas spirit of Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo, and for years before him, there was the Caga Tio of Catalan.  Christmas, lest ye forget, is based on the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which represented a turning of the tables where the rich and poor would change places and prank gifts were a part of the merry-making.

I rather hope, then, that Robby Strong is granted a little leniency for his high spirits .In fairness to the family Mnuchin, I do believe it would have been fairer had he spread it around, though. Surely there are many others who deserve something carbon-based, and not actually coal, in their stockings.