And never, ever, question the masks.

Whatever happened to Bill Watterson?

With his wistful, subversive humor and his wry but unquenchable optimism, the man was the illustrator of countless American childhoods (including mine). He gave us Calvin, a hapless but infinitely resilient everyboy whose indomitable spirit may be seen peeing on things all across our great nation. He gave us Hobbes, a friend and a mentor for the ages. In Bill’s hands, this kid and his tiger-buddy comprised all love, all wit, all wisdom.

And then, Bill disappeared.

Nobody knows the details -- or if they do, they aren't saying. Whether Mr. Watterson was raptured up to heaven, leaving a striped shirt and a pair of ovoid shoes behind, or whether he simply walked into the cornfield of untarnishable Americana and was never seen again, one thing is certain: the books he left us are all we'll ever have of him. It is our duty as gematricians, therefore, to squeeze every ounce of meaning from the too-few pages of whimsical artistry that he left behind. We know that Bill knew the Truth, the real Truth. If only we can divine the underlying secret of Bill’s message, it could save -- not only human civilization, now turning ever more turnily in the widening gyre -- but perhaps our souls themselves.

What does this have to do with California congressman Henry Waxman, you ask?

If you don't know what Calvinball is, you're a terrorist and I don't want you reading my blog. My terror rating is high enough as it is, thank you very much -- look, I need to always have an aisle seat when I fly, okay? I'm 6'6", I have long legs. Do you want me to hook my knees over you all the way from Dulles to Detroit Metro? No, you don’t want that. Nobody wants that. So if you’re still reading this, you already know that Calvinball is a game with only three fixed rules:

1. Everyone who plays Calvinball must wear a mask

2. The set of rules governing play can never be the same twice (apart from these three)

3. No one is allowed to question the masks.

This makes for a game in which skillful play -- masterful wielding of croquet mallets, a strong baritone voice for singing the ‘Very Sorry Song’, etcetera -- is less important than clever manipulation of the rules. Let’s face it, a strategically-located Pernicious Poem Place can undo the fastest bag-flagger who ever lived. In short: playing the rule book is more important than playing the game. The rule book, however, is a fickle ally. Times change quickly, and even the best laid snares have a habit of ganging agley at inconvenient moments, trapping the mice and/or men who set them in the first place.

Enter Rep. Waxman. Small of stature and suffering from an unfortunate case of eyebrow-moustache, this L.A. congressman may seem like an unlikely casus metui -- and yet he is the most feared man on Capitol Hill. And why? Because, as of January, what has gone around will officially come around. Waxman is poised to become the new chairman of the Government Reform Committee.

This is as good an opportunity as any for me to make my solemn pledge never, ever, to perform political analysis in this space. If there are two things I know about politics –- and the over-under is 2.5 -- they are: that I can claim less comprehension of the winds of politicical fortune than anybody else on K Street, and that I'd rather look like an ass talking about things I understand than about things I don’t. So I’ll let Time.com do the talking:

Come January, however, the man that the liberal Nation magazine once called the "Eliot Ness of the Democrats" can do even more, thanks to the two words that strike fear in the heart of every government official: subpoena power. As the new chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, Waxman will have free rein to investigate, as he puts it, "everything that the government is involved with." And the funny thing is, Waxman can thank the Republicans for the unique set of levers he will hold. Under a rules change they put through in the days when they used the panel to make Bill Clinton's life miserable, the leader of Government Reform is the only chairman who can issue subpoenas without a committee vote. Then Chairman Dan Burton--who famously re-enacted the suicide of Clinton deputy White House counsel Vince Foster by shooting at what he called a "head-like thing" (later widely reported to be a melon) in his backyard--issued 1,089 such unilateral subpoenas in six years. Since a Republican entered the White House, the G.O.P. Congress has been far less enthusiastic in its oversight. Waxman likes to point out that the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony to get to the bottom of whether Clinton had misused the White House Christmas-card list for political purposes, but only 12 hours on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

I won’t speculate about the possible fruits of Mr. Waxman’s investigation. Will he drive corruption before him in a crimson wave, like Kevin Costner in ‘The Untouchables’? Or will he disappoint the nation, like Kevin Costner in everything he’s made since 1993? Only time will tell. But there is one lesson that is clearly to be learned from this whole kerfuffle:

Life is a game of Calvinball. You have just enough control over it to screw yourself royally if you aren’t careful. Everywhere is a boomerang zone if you live long enough, and the petard you end up hoisted on may be your own. Every underdog has his day. It’s easy to shoot yourself in the head-like thing. And the score never stays ‘oogy’ to ‘boogy’ for long.

-A