Six Days of the Minivan

It happened gently, the way a carnival rolls into town at 3 a.m. — calliope music, corporate logos, a sweetness in the air — and by morning the whole country smelled like asphalt and cotton candy and nobody could remember whether that was new.

The Secretary of Transportation climbed into a Toyota with his family, the cameras purred, and somewhere in a row house on Capitol Hill a nonprofit hummed to itself like a machine that runs on gratitude.

Understand the man before you understand the machine.

Duffy’s résumé, stripped of the varnish, is one long invoice to somebody else.

Two years at his father’s law practice.

A district attorney’s job he was handed by appointment, then held unopposed.

Nine years in Congress on the public dime, ended by resignation.

Then the two jobs that only exist for men fresh out of Congress — lobbyist, cable host — both of which amount to renting your government years back to the government at a markup.

Then a cabinet seat, plus NASA on the side, the way you’d hand a man a second parking spot.

The one verifiable achievement earned entirely on his own steam is climbing a tree faster than anyone else in Hayward, Wisconsin, in 1994.

That skill transferred beautifully.

The row house matters. There’s always an address the auditors miss — some brownstone where six names on a Delaware filing hold the whole scheme together, and when you knock, three of the directors turn out not to exist in any traceable way.

The executive director is a four-time Top Lobbyist who owns the building.

One board member lobbies for a company that just took a $1.5 billion air-traffic contract from the Secretary’s own department.

Another flacks for the Secretary’s son-in-law, who is running for the Secretary’s old House seat.

This is not a nonprofit; it’s a terrarium.

And here is the part with the beautiful, airtight logic.

The department’s ethics lawyers approved the Secretary starring in a show paid for by companies the Secretary regulates.

The proof that nothing improper occurred is a signed agreement in which the sponsors promise they expect nothing — a document whose entire function is to be pointed at when someone asks why it exists.

The sponsors give because they want nothing, and they want nothing because they give, and the giving proves the wanting-nothing, and anyone who questions the arrangement is questioning a cleared arrangement, and you can’t question a cleared arrangement, because it’s cleared.

The clearance clears itself.

Somewhere a major in charge of approving approvals is weeping with professional envy.

The human details, for the record.

The Secretary vaccinated a calf on camera and shouted “I’m vaxxing cows!” with the joy of a man discovering work for the first time.

He praised CRH asphalt, unprompted, like a prayer.

He warned his daughter, on a program underwritten by Boeing, that Harvard corrupts young minds — a sermon on corruption, brought to you by his regulatees, price undisclosed.

The whole production now sits on YouTube, six episodes, nearly three hours, free to anyone with a screen and a strong stomach. 7,700 people have watched. A grumpy cat once drew twenty-three million, and the cat never billed the taxpayer.

I will not be the seven thousand seven hundred and first.

Life is short, and the competition is stiff: there’s a screening of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” across town — three hours of certified lunatics tearing across the desert after buried loot, which is at least honest about its premise and was made by professionals.

So that’s where I’ll be, down front with the popcorn, hoping to catch Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin on their way in.

My chances of meeting those two gentlemen are, I admit, not good.

They are still better than my chances of finding an honest man in that minivan.