There have been floods, burning bushes, and now, right smack in the middle of modernity, God is confirming something most Americans already know about Washington, DC politics by coaxing the titan arum, also known as the “corpse flower,” to bloom in the U.S. Botanic Garden right next door to the U.S. Capitol.
In a greatly anticipated event, any minute now visitors will have their olfactory senses bombarded with the nauseating stench of rotting flesh. Only this time it will be from a botanical exhibition, not from what is wafting over from the mortuary next door.
Botanic Garden officials expect the smell to “peak” right around the time immigration reform is in the heat of discussion. The corpse flower will remain open anywhere from 24-48 hours, just long enough to add the appropriate scent to a legislation that, if it all goes Obama’s way, will finally transform America’s future into a malodorous, decomposing cadaver.
The titan arum is native to the tropical rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia. Poignantly, the last time the Botanic Garden corpse flower bloomed was in 2007, right around the time former Indonesia resident Barack Obama was furiously campaigning for the 2008 election.
According to scientists, in addition to curious visitors, liberals who are right at home with similar smells, and mealy-mouthed RINOs who couldn’t sniff out a stinker if they tripped over one, the flower’s peculiar aroma attracts beetles and other insects that are normally drawn to rotting flesh.
Ari Novy, the Public Programs manager at the garden, explains that “just in the same way that a lovely smelling plant, like a rose, is attracting a bee or another kind of insect with what we would consider a very nice smell, to pollinate it, this particular plant has the strategy of using a horrible, fetid smell to attract insects.”
