As California burns, I am near-speechless with indignation as I watch Newsom and Bass in their lamentable interview performances.  These two self-satisfied political miscreants cause my hands to clench into fists of trembling rage, as spoken words fail me (cf. Billy Budd v. Claggart).  So I’m writing them instead.

Gavin Newsom is a plain sociopath, to whom no whiff of shame can attach.  There is no blameworthiness he cannot deflect, via either vicious counterattack or pathetic excuse.  Blame Trump for politicizing.  Blame the “local folks” for their dry hydrants.  Do we not yet see that he is incapable even of awareness, much less contrition?  And is not his years-long withholding of water and infrastructure from Californians perhaps blatant sadism, masquerading as leftist “policy”?  I ardently hope — after the debacle of this conflagration and his willful failure to prepare for it — that this preening malignant narcissist’s dream of high national office is finished.

As for the execrable Karen Bass — as sorry an excuse for an American big-city mayor as we’ve had in decades, and that includes some recent real stinkers in places like New York and Chicago — I guess jetting off to Africa on the public dime, as the L.A. fire alerts were ramping up, must have seemed a good idea to her.  I.Q. tests for public office, anybody?  Her silence — while she was being pelted with hard and noble questions by that hero journalist at the airport — was an enigmatic ambiguity.  Did words simply fail her into immobilizing embarrassment and silent, burning shame?  Perhaps it was monstrous insolence and terminal misanthropy?  Or did she owe it to her wooden stupidity that she could not even equivocate an answer?

Neither of these two solipsistic unworthies has resigned yet.  Given the way barnacles cling to the political hull these days, neither is likely to.  Yet just a month ago, according to multiple online articles, the president and executives of Japan’s Shikoku Bank have vowed in writing, should they ever be found guilty of financial fraud or embezzlement, to commit seppuku.  The pact was reportedly signed with the signatories’ own blood.

This is a dramatic gesture, to be sure, and a ghastly one, alien to us in America.  Yet their unequivocal acceptance of prospective ultimate responsibility proclaims that their duties have meaning to them.

Here at home, nobody’s asking for our two California losers to go anywhere near that far.  But they clearly disdain their duties.  So how about the comparatively painless concession of resignation, lasting disgrace, and withdrawal from the public sphere for life?  Would that be asking too much?

Richard Kantro may be reached at richard03@kantro.org.

Image: Gavin Newsom.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.