Line-item veto saves us from indulgences - and ourselves

In your cynical moments, you suspect the government works like this: A legislator from Pipestone has a friend in the zeppelin industry, so he puts a rider on the education bill that spends $2 million on a hot-air balloon shaped like the head of Jesse Ventura.

A legislator from the other party agrees to vote for it if the Pipestone guy votes for a Tic-Tac-Toe museum in Chisholm. Two years later you're driving up I-94 and the giant head of Ventura floats overhead, and it takes a half-hour to get the kids to stop screaming. Where did that come from, you wonder. How did that happen?

But. Now and then the line-item veto gets used. The coverage peels back the lid on what we spend, and we learn some details. This week Gov. Tim Pawlenty's veto-rama got headlines for the blow dealt to the University Avenue light rail, but it also revealed two other amusing items for which we were asked to pay.

1. Four hundred thou for a brass band music library. Not to sound like an anti-oompa philistine, but we can probably wait until we're in surplus again before we indulge in such luxuries.

It's not as if a Fortune 500 CEO is choosing between two states for a new HQ, and goes for Alabama when he learns Minnesota lacks an adequate repository of Sousa tuba parts.

2. Eleven million for the Como Zoo, including some expensive gorilla cages. This was vetoed, and surely that gave you pause. No cages? So now we have free-range primates? You can't just stake them out like dogs in the backyard, after all. They need room. This won't end well. You have a relative in from out of town, you drive down Summit, you point out the elegant houses and broad landscaped lawns - and then you see two gorillas on the front lawn duking it out over a mate. You could point away and shout, "Look over there, it's Garrison Keillor pruning begonias!" as a diversion, I suppose.

But eventually your guest will ask why your town appears to be Kong-infested, and you'll have to admit it was a budget issue. Oh, we tried electronic monitoring bracelets, but they left the zoo, anyway. You didn't agree with the decision; you even had a lawn sign -- Happy to Pay for a Better, Caged-Ape Minnesota -- but democracy is a give-and-take thing, you know.

If this means we don't have apes at all, that's fine. I don't like hairy screechy primates in the first place. Oh, but they're so like us! Yes, except for the Beethoven, calculus and landing-on-the-moon stuff, there's not a whit of difference.

Monkeys are always up to something, and apes are lummoxes. Add enough Nair, and you have pro wrestling. I've been to a few zoos, and the ape exhibits are always the same: big slobs sitting around scratching themselves. They're the only animals that actually look as if they've given up hunting for the remote control.

It would be different if they were trained to do something entertaining, like drive go-karts; I think they'd like that. Or perhaps Segways. People would enjoy a gorilla exhibit if the beasts were tooling around on Segways. Especially if you gave them horns that played "La Cucaracha."

But that would mean the creatures were there for our amusement, and that's not right. Like most zoos, you get the idea that the smarter creatures would rather be elsewhere, all things considered.

I used to live by a zoo in Washington, D.C., and we were quite close to a cage of emus who spent all night mating and screaming at each other. It was like living next door to Amy Winehouse. Some animals should just be left where they live naturally, and St. Paul would be no lesser for a surfeit of apes.

Unless you can train them to file brass band sheet music and bring them out to patrons on a Segway. I think that's pretty much veto-proof, right there.

jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858. More daily at buzz.mn