It was the cheese that most worried me. In fact, in the USA Today story about the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general -- the guy who was named after Superman but who won't be returning to his post because he kept leaping into phone booths and emerging as Paul O'Neill -- you might even say that, among the other problems therein, the cheese, for my money, stood alone.
And this was even after the departure of Tom Ridge to the Misty Realm of Honoraria, Muse of Public Speaking. Which left the DHS looking for a new boss -- and they did first settle on Bernie Kerik, except it turned out Bernie couldn't become the new big cheese because he was too, well, cheesy.
You may have missed it in all the hoo-ha, but, according to USA Today and this fellow Clark Kent Ervin, it seems there were some high times to be had around the DHS. Some of the air marshals were discovered to be sleeping on the job, perhaps because they were drunk, which some of them apparently were. Some of them lost their guns, which at first seems unfortunate, especially around airports, but, if they're drunk already, maybe it's all for the best.
Undaunted, the DHS gave executive bonuses of nearly $17,000 to 88 of the department's senior managers. There is no evidence that upper echelons were sockless at the time they agreed to ladle out the goodies or whether the senior managers found some of the lost guns that were lying around and decided to renegotiate. In any event, that's nice money for getting Americans to take off their shoes and say, “Ah.”
In any event, the bonuses made sure that folks could turn themselves out handsomely at a $500,000 awards banquet back in November 2003 -- or, at least, that they could all afford the soft drinks at $3.75 a pop, as it were, which is a price not unfamiliar to either anyone who has visited those dimly lit places where dance young ladies who do not go to Bible camp, or to the regular customers at Bronzo's Chateau de Kiquebaque along the Jersey Shore. But, as my grandmother used to say, what's a watery overpriced soda pop without a little nosh?
Which is where the cheese comes in.
At this same extortionate wingding, the department apparently spent $1,500 for three cheese displays. Here is my first question.
What in the name of god is a cheese display?
I mean, I'm occasionally a sportswriter, so it's not like I haven't seen an ice sculpture or three in my day. (I once spent about three hours watching Michael Jordan -- I think; could've been Dell Curry -- melt into a shrimp bowl, albeit at an event where the drinks were neither soft nor as highly priced as apparently was customary at the average Homeland Security hooley.) And I know that, elsewhere in this favored land, people use butter to recreate great works of art.
(Buffets can be actual hell. Once, at a tennis tournament in New Hampshire, the table used as its centerpiece a vintage Volvo. This worked splendidly until a friend of mine bribed the bandleader to announce that it was “time to raffle off the car.” I think one of the organizers drove the thing right off the stand, over the crudités, and out into the night toward Stockholm.)
But three cheese displays? Averaging five bills apiece? What did they do? Display the cheese on the flight deck of the Nimitz?
I will grant you that my first (and only) idea of a cheese display is a brick of cheddar delicately festooned with Triscuits. (In college, the cheese often was delicately festooned with several of my friends, like a Nativity scene, but that was never until the next morning.) Still, in all my years of grazing buffets, every cheese display I've ever seen consisted of a pile of cheese sitting there next to a pile of things on which to put the cheese. These were functional, easy for even the foggiest guest to comprehend, and very convenient for that moment at the end of the night when the cheese made its inevitable transition from appetizer to projectile. Say what you will about the aesthetics of these displays, they always came in well under $500 apiece, even if you counted the dry-cleaning for the drapes.
So, one does wonder what was so special about these particular cheese displays. I mean, did they carve some cheese into likenesses of the Cabinet, or did somebody point out how redundant that would be? Perhaps they fashioned some Monterey Jack into a scene from Lynne Cheney's novel, surely the cheesiest fiction this administration has produced outside of its first couple of budgets. There could just be a simpler answer -- maybe they just paid Andy Card time-and-a-half to hold the platter.
At the end, it doesn't really matter. The Department of Homeland Security is, after all, our first line of defense in the war on terror. Go cheap on the cheeses and, the next thing you know, you're scrimping on metal detectors, forgetting to secure the ports, and who knows what all else. Let the government go to Kraft Singles and, well, you might as well hand Al Qaeda the keys to the White House.
So, hey, if they need a $500 Camembert Colin Powell to mislead the enemy, well, that's the price we all have to pay, I guess. As we all know, an army marches on its stomach, and the first steps are always the hors d'oeuvres. Or, just maybe, the purpose behind the displays was more spiritual than they were military.
It is entirely possible -- given the predilection of this government to use the Savior as a precinct captain -- that the displays were somehow faith-based in their designs. Episodes from the Gospels, perhaps. However, I mean, really ...
Cheeses Christ?
On a cracker?
(As in, "Cheeses H. Christ on a cracker, this department is run by spendthrift idiots!")
Probably not.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer for The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.
