Letter to RJ Reynolds

The nanny state struck again in Maryland recently, this time making it illegal to smoke--get this--in bars.

It was only a matter of time. What Republicans are to our Constitution (essentially what bad cholesterol is to an artery), Democrats are to reasoned personal choice. If I were more cynical, I would say that the two sides are in fact working together to create a society of automatons, people who blithely stumble brainlessly through their days, being told what they can and cannot put in their bodies and being relentlessly videotaped lest they fuck up.

At any rate, this most recent offense by the great State of Maryland occasioned the following letter of sympathy and hope and marketing to the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company:

Dear RJ Reynolds:
RE: Forthcoming Maryland Smoking Ban

Now that the great state of Maryland has spoken, to the excited clamor of addle-brained do-gooders slapping themselves on the back—and, no doubt, a few nods, winks and nudges down to the State House—for subverting the democratic process, you must be very sad.

I fully understand your feelings.

I myself am an ex-lush who likes to hang out in a bar. My days are no doubt numbered. Before too long one of those idiots who fomented the smoking ban will get bored with the banal details of, say, raising his or her own family and decide that there should be a law barring ex-alcoholics from drinking establishments, lest they "slip," and start making late-night phone calls to ex-girlfriends (I loved you so much baby, why'd you hurt me so bad?), listening to country music and getting really into the stuff that's sold on TV at 3:30 in the freaking morning. Seriously, I was in rehab with a guy who bought shitloads of the stuff, running up ginormous Visa bills on things like some electronic putter (really) that, once he sobered up, was actually still pretty damn cool. Plus he had this amazing blender thing, the Bass-O-Matic? You wouldn’t believe how good….

But that's not what I wanted to tell you.

You have been dealt a bad hand. From the bottom of the deck. By a guy whose skill set includes mayoring—and badly—the "City that Reds Readz Reeds Redded Likes Boks." Don't get me wrong, his predecessor would've done the same to you, so you were screwed either way. But to get slapped down by a guy who looks like he just crawled off a Lucky Charms box? That just sucks.

I have an idea for turning that arrogant slap in the face into a duel I think you can win. Accept that challenge and throw down your own gauntlet.

The hell with suspense: "Smoking Area" unfiltered cigarettes.

Seriously. You don't even have to retool--just repackage the Pall Mall brand (how many of those are ya sellin', huh? Wasn't Vonnegut like the last guy on the planet who owned up to smoking PMs?). I see a package showing an ordinary guy and an ordinary girl standing outside a restaurant. They're puffing on "Smoking Area" cigarettes like there's no tomorrow. The caption reads, "When Every Drag HAS to Count!" Or maybe a couple of transvestites...hell, I dunno. The point is that you can increase sales of your unfiltered products just by using a little creativity. Plus (there's really no downside to this), you can even play the same game that Exxon-Mobil, for example, plays, and charge whatever the hell usurious amount you want for the things.

Hell, I'd buy 'em. At least until the State of Maryland decides I can't go to a bar anymore. You know, for my own gud good.

Happy Effin New Year!

I had thought of coming back to the Bloodshot Eye with something lighthearted and funny and perhaps even touching. Feh.

I spent the month of November as a "contestant" in National Novel-Writing Month, the challenge being to write 50,000 words in thirty days, a goal I actually reached. My personal goal was to emerge from November with a viable first draft, and I'm proud to say that I accomplished that, too, if you ignore the fact that as of November 30, the story was only half-done. (If it matters, I am now in the process of writing the second draft and let me just say that it's a far slower process, seeing as I have to make my way through sentences, created in a coffee-and-cigarette-fueled rush back in November, that were written with an eye cast more to word count than lucidity.)

Anyway, I missed the whole election process, thanks to NaNoWriMo, as they like to call it, and I just want to say that I'm extraordinarily grateful. Because looking at the headlines now, after the new Congress has had a month and a half to settle in, I can see that the inmates are still in charge of the nuthouse.

Let's just get the angry thing out of the way right off: Why the hell would anyone put William Jefferson on any committee? Whatever happened to worrying about the appearance of impropriety? The man had bribe money in his freezer, for God's sakes, and the Democrats put him on the Homeland Security Committee? Did I miss something? Was there a campaign slogan--"The Democrats. All the incompetence, only one-half the corruption," perhaps--that I didn't see in the papers?

It is, after all, a defense that the Republicans have used for years. Whenever someone points out that the current disastrous excuse for an administration seems to have an awful lot of ties to some pretty shady people (Grover Norquist? Ralph Reed? Why haven't these guys been shot?), their knee-jerk reaction is to point out that Bill Clinton got a hummer in the Oval Office and then lied about it. I will say categorically right now that I think Clinton was a far better president than Mr. Bush can even hope to pretend to be. I think the far right should be castrated and sterilized--for God's sakes, don't let 'em breed. Not that I think Clinton ran a clean ship. Yes, the man and his administration were corrupt--ALL administrations are corrupt--, but at least Clinton and the gang didn't murder 3000 American soldiers on a whim and a desire to show daddy how tough his ne'er-do-well idiot son can really be.

Which is how the Democrats got to where they currently are. Apparently enough people decided that enough was enough and voted against the failed status quo. But it will be more of the same--only the names will change. Special favors, special friends--K Street knows no loyalty save the almighty dollar. And proof of that is William Jefferson being allowed to serve on the Homeland Security Committee. I don't care if, through some miracle, he is "innocent": The man should have been allowed to serve on nothing more august and important than the Birthday Party Planning Committee. I'm sure there is one, because that's the important kind of work that Congress likes to see done, right up there with non-binding resolutions. What the hell kind of a waste of your time and your tax money is a non-binding resolution? It's like pissing on a forest fire and saying you helped put it out.

If we, the American people, had any sense--to say nothing of stones--, we would simply not vote for anyone whose name is on an actual ballot. We would write in our favorite porn star, or chemically-altered athlete or our most senile uncle. Anybody but the people who actually want the job. Douglas Adams once wrote that "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." This is true at lower levels of governmental incompetence, greed and evil as well, in exactly the same way that Einstein's famous "E=mc^2" applies to all chemical reactions, not just nuclear ones. The same mechanism is at work.

Okay. That's enough for now. Maybe next time we can get back to slightly more cheerful skewering, but I gotta tell you: Anger feels good, or at least venting it does. Maybe in 2008 we can all remember that.

Libertarianism Rears Its Ugly Head

I had a wonderful post in the works, about a woman called Buffy Trenton-St. Clair who had been pestering her Potomac, MD neighbors to join the “End Road Work” campaign she’d been seeing all those signs for. In the story, Mrs. Trenton-St. Clair draws up a petition for her new-found cause, and on this petition she has listed some of the reasons Road Work should be banned, not the least of which is that the roughened pavement that inevitably precedes such work causes the DVD player in her SUV to skip, which in turn causes the kids to whine, which in turn give her road rage and that’s why she held up the G-D 7-Eleven. So you can see why I stopped.

Plus, as it turns out, there was something even weirder going on: People inappropriately putting drugs in food. You think I jest. You are wrong.

In Marianna, FL, a woman attempted to bring pot to an inmate at Sunland Pathways via a pint of pistachio ice cream. In Los Luna, NM, Burger King employees apparently took to sprinkling pot on some burgers served to, honest, a couple of cops. And, in Santa Fe, NM a woman tried to smuggle heroin in to a friend in the Rio Arriba County lockup by hiding a hypodermic full of the stuff in a burrito.

Ignore for the moment that two of these stories involve inmates; that’s not the point. The point is that everyone knows, for instance, that you don’t put pot in ice cream (it ruins the texture): You put pot in brownies, for heaven’s sake; it’s also common knowledge that heroin does not go well with burritos, which go much better with Peyote. I got no real problem with the pot on the burgers, except for the obvious problems inherent in serving that combo to the police.

Which brings me, finally, to the point. Under my administration, my friend Myrna will be in charge of Federal Drug Policy—which will be, in essence, “Wherefore, as long as the United States Gummint, hereinafter referred to as Billy and the Boingers, receives a positively usurious tax, the sale of drugs, including, but not by a long shot limited to, marijuana, cocaine, mescaline, psilocybin, Peyote and heroin will be allowed—and in some locales* actively encouraged—by law.” Myrna has long experience in these matters and I trust her implicitly. She has also designed an absolutely wonderful plan for Casual Sex Fridays which, like my dug policy, will help pay down the seventy-gazillion-trillion-dollar National Debt, so I owe her. Anyway, part of our drug policy will be to educate people more realistically about the hazards of intoxicants, thus avoiding a serious faux pas (from the French meaning “Shit. Did anybody see that?”) like putting pot on a cop’s burger if he hasn’t asked for it. It’s rude. Perhaps we should train, as part of a Federal full-employment program, drug sommeliers…. Just a thought.

Plus, condiments cost money; how do these people think we got the seventy-gazillion-trillion-dollar National Debt in the first place? I’ll tell you how: It all started back in the Reagan Administration when the Department of Interior (headed by James “Wilderness-Schmilderness” Watt) decided that ketchup was a vegetable and started distributing packets of the stuff like they were Defense Department “contingency” funds, thereby allowing schools to claim they were meeting Federal Nutritional Requirements. Astoundingly, this plan backfired when the money saved by the school districts was squandered by giving a half-cent per year raise to every teacher in the country, who pooled the money and sent Miss Salisbury, my fifth-grade teacher and, as near as we could tell, Satan’s favorite daughter, to Washington, D.C. to beat Watt to death with a yardstick, but unfortunately Nancy Reagan got to him first.

In my administration, that could never happen. We will have—wait for it—FLYING CARS. If Miss Salisbury had had a flying car, she could have gotten to DC in plenty of time to beat Mr. Watt into bacon mist way before Mrs. Reagan could have broken free of her meeting with Halston--and would have no doubt enjoyed her retirement more.

You see how it’s all connected? We let people do what they damn well want to their own bodies, and pretty soon the stupidity is being beaten out the entrenched Washington establishment.

Incidentally, I plan to allow road work. You know, to keep those roads to DC open.

*We’re thinking, just by way of example, Benson, Arizona, a town so remote that not even AOL goes there.

Platform Soul. Well, Almost. (Part One point Five)

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this, lest my claim to loathe all politicians currently in the biz become suspect. Apparently Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, like Senator George Allen, is incapable of following a few simple rules. Reid apparently owned some land, which he then sold to a company in which he had an interest. In other words, the land was still his, sort of, but in an entirely different (read: more potentially profitable) way. Three years after he sold the land, it was again sold, this time more traditionally, to a developer and Harry Reid, that bastion of Democratic morality, made a good chunk o’ cash.

At issue here is the fact that Reid never disclosed the initial sale of the land to the company, even though the Senate rules specifically require that he do so. Reid’s defense is that it was only a “technical” change of ownership. (Which ranks right up there with Allen’s for the dumbest excuse ever concocted for not having the slightest idea of what the word “ethics” even means.)

I said it—or at least implied it—about Sen. George Allen, and I will say it about Harry Reid: You guys are the reason I plan to replace Congress with 535 Shih-Tzus. You are the people I have to put up with, out there on the roads, who are either too freaking stupid to use your turn signals, too arrogant, or too busy making illegal financial deals on your cell phone to bother.

It is intriguing to note the timing of the Reid story, so soon after the Allen story. If I were one of the many weak-minded Democrats I would be crying “dirty partisan pool!” which of course seems to have become something of a Republican battle cry lately. We have a bunch of whiny ill-mannered little brats, there in Congress, is all I’m saying.

This is the kind of behavior that makes a body wonder just how much the Public Interest is thought about, there in the hallowed halls of Congress, as opposed the mutual fund kind of interest. If Ms. Betty Cruikshank of East Bumtickle, MN writes to her Congressperson about a problem, is that Congressperson more likely to: (A) Look into and if possible address Ms Cruikshank’s concerns or (B) Have an aide send her campaign propaganda? (Hint: This is a rhetorical question. The real answer is (C) He will send thugs to shake her down for a donation and then claim he knew nothing about the thugs.)

So: Shih-Tzus. Plus I’m gonna have 'em neutered and spayed.

Platform Soul. Well, Almost. (Part One)

The news lately has made me realize that I need to get stumping if I’m going to have a successful run at the Presidency in 2008. The Washington Post, you see, mentioned in article that Sen. George Allen, formerly a goober, Governor of Virginia and currently seeking re-election to the $enate, is a potential 2008 presidential candidate. This was mentioned in an article that was about how he failed to disclose some stock options. Allen, you may recall, is primarily known for being a bigoted asshole. (He reminds me a lot of my Aunt Ella, who used to start almost every joke the same way: “You know I don’t hate [insert your favorite religious/ethnic/racial/sexual slur here], but….”) This is a man who’s so bigoted, in fact, that his own “recently discovered” Jewish background is apparently offensive to him. None of which has a damn thing to do with the article, but in the spirit of politics…well, there you go.

The article—which came from the notoriously heathen AP—was careful to point out that Allen claims that he didn’t think he had to disclose these options—even though the rules clearly state that he does—because they’re currently worth less than he paid for them. I’m not sure what those options are actually worth but all I have to say on the matter is that my Jeep Wrangler is worth less now than what I paid for it, but if I sold it, it would still put a couple thousand bucks in my pocket, something my friend the Evil Belac though I should have on the record and frankly—because that’s the kind of honesty I know the voters want—I’m with him on this.

So I got that going for me. Easy financial disclosure, I mean. Plus I can read the rules, and follow them, too, not that I’m casting aspersions or anything.

My point—there really was one, once—being that if a guy like Allen can already be a potential Candidate, can, god help me, Ted Kennedy be far behind? Or Foley?

So anyway, after having mentioned some of my Cabinet picks in previous posts—and also that Ed. Note guy won’t let me post the most hysterical anti-football rant ever written, on the premise that some of those I offend (Steelers fans especially) may actually know where I live—I think it’s time to let you know a little more about my platform.

The most important plank on my platform —and I have mentioned this before—is the switch from “Hail to the Chief” to “Play That Funky Music, White Boy” as my theme music. I’m completely serious. I’m almost positive that President Bush would’ve been looking at seriously better polls right now if, immediately after realizing that not even Dick “Shotgun” Cheney could spin the bottle of Listerine Saddam left behind into “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” he had adopted Genesis’s “I Can’t Dance” as his theme.

I have already outlined my plans for Congress, so let me move on and explain how I will save taxpayer money in the Executive Branch. First, State Dinners. These things cost a fortune. From now on, unless France is involved, it’s a couple kegs of beer, free Jack Daniels shots and deep-fried turkeys. Well, chips and dip, of course. All music will be provided by a new officially approved White House band, led by Mark Knopfler and called the Hunky-Dory Junk and Jazz Band, because hey, why not? Pot will be available from any waiter, plus Twinkies and Cheese Puffs. We’ll laugh, we’ll dance, we’ll carry on—oh, the treaties we’ll sign!

Why exclude France? Because I plan to get the world to like America again, and I think playing dirty tricks on France is one way to soften ‘em up. So, don’t tell France, but the first time they’re invited over? We’re gonna sauté slugs and tell ‘em that they’re escargots sans coquilles en sauce à fromage avec le paprika âgé, which means “snails without shells in cheese sauce with aged paprika,” and which the French will just eat up because they’re as easily fooled by a hoity-toity name as the rest of us schlubs. Then the rest of us countries, before heading out the back door for deep-fried turkey, will stand there behind the curtains, laughing until we pee just a little.

Also I plan to eliminate Mondays. Not that hard, as it turns out. We’ll simply extend Saturday and Sunday by twelve hours each and skip straight into Tuesday after Sunday night. Sure, a lot of people will feel like hell and probably call in sick, but it won’t look suspicious because it’ll be Tuesday.

If it goes well, I’m thinking of instituting Casual Sex Fridays. (I know there’re only about eight of you, but can I get some feedback on this? Are there certain condom lobbyists I should pay particularly close attention to, for instance? Should we draw up charts or something? Or is that what the Department of Education is for?) I will share more of my positions but I haven’t thought them up yet, so for now that’ll have to do, except to mention, for the benefit of my friend the Evil Belac, that Flying Cars are On The List, I swear.

So can I have my Jeep back now? Unless you sold it, I mean?

Uncle Oscar, Oliver North and Other Penises

Let me just say for the record that I am not in favor of fair elections to the extent that Brazilian law takes it. My opinion is that if you want to arrest someone on Election Day, then by God you should be legally allowed to do it.

I’m referring, of course, to a recent Reuters article about 23-year-old law student Adriano Saddi Lima Oliveira, who reportedly confessed to Brazilian police that he had hired hitpersons to kill his mother. Because a Brazilian law states that no one may be arrested during the five days leading up to an election and the two days following, Adriano got to run around scot-free for an extra week, by my calculations.

The law was created so that people in positions of power—sheriffs, political bosses, like that—could not have their opponents arrested and locked up willy-nilly.

The thing is, it sounds an awful lot like something the Republican Congresspersons might be pushing for soon; for many, the only people who will vote for them anymore are precisely the sort of people who are likely to be locked up during the five days preceding and the two days following an election, quite possibly on the same charges as the Congressperson.

It reminds me of when my Uncle Oscar, the one who was always up on the latest stock prices and was surprisingly prescient when it came to knowing who was going to merge with whom, would declaim “Oliver North is an American hero,” a fiction he alas maintained even after he (Oscar, I mean; I'm not sure about North) was arrested, in Kate Smith drag and singing “God Bless America,” standing at a shredder and claiming to be Fawn Hall’s older sister.

As much as it pains me that Uncle Oscar had to serve jail time, it occurs to me that a relative’s rap sheet is no longer necessarily a blot on one’s family record. Some of your finer families are getting them now, and it probably won’t be too long before you won’t even be able to get into a good political fundraiser without a certain minimum amount of time in “stir” on your resume. (“Roomed with Jeffrey Skilling, 2007-2008,” for instance. “Mr. Skilling imparted to me the great wisdom of snuffing your partners before the Feds come knocking.”)

[Ed. Note: Iggy is not trying to imply that Mr. Skilling had his late partner, Kenneth Lay, killed. He is simply saying that Mr. Skilling almost certainly thought about it, at least while Mr. Lay was “testifying” by insulting pretty much everyone in the room. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.]

If nothing else, a little jail time might instill a sense of responsibility in some of the people currently in charge of running this country, most of whom apparently feel no compunction whatsoever about passing the back, lying about passing the buck and then protesting when caught, naturally enough, passing the buck—sometimes this happens in mere hours, as it did the other day with Dennis Hastert who, incidentally, would probably make a swell cellmate for Jeffrey Skilling—, much like a small child blaming his sister for the broken vase his mother watched him push off the window sill.

And it would certainly help their memories. I can’t imagine that you want to forget the names of your fellow convicts, there in “stir,” what with tempers, I suspect, being always about to flare and shivs stored by and in every murderer, rapist, thief—former lobbyists, in other words—you meet. God knows these people need help in that department. Condoleeza Rice, for instance, who reportedly has an IQ of about a zillion-six, can’t seem to remember having ever met anybody in her office, ever, and the President was seen, a few months ago, slapping his forehead while reading the White House guest log, “Oh, that Jack Abramoff. I thought you were talking about the president of Israel.”

Ahem. Not gonna give that Ed Note guy a chance to butt in here, so let me finish by saying that I have found another enforcer for my upcoming administration, to help out Santiago Montoya. Her name is Andree Rene, and she set her boyfriend’s penis on fire by pouring boiling fondue oil on it while he slept.

I plan to have Andree use the example of the village of Ranpur, India.

Lemme ‘splain:

See, what happened was this: Somebody stole food from a school. Now anyone who would steal food from a school deserves anything bad that happens to him, inasmuch as he would also steal Tiny Tim’s crutch and sell his grandmother’s medication on the streets for money to feed a gambling habit. In other words—and this is important—, Republicans.

When the police failed to do anything about the crime, the villagers took things into their own hands, quite literally. They rounded up 150 men and ordered them to pick a copper ring out of a vat of boiling oil. Those who refused were declared guilty, and Lord alone knows what happened to them.

One of the innocent guys, an unidentified 45-year-old man, pictured,

said, “We would have been ostracized had we refused.” The guilty, it seems, care not one whit about being ostracized, much like—doncha love foreshadowing?—Tom DeLay.

I will arrest him on Election Day. Just because I can.

Play That Funky Music

I need to apologize right now for the fact that in the last two posts I have been…well, a little angry. I live near Fort Meade, which has only one reason for being open, to wit, the fine people at NSA. As a result, I come into almost daily contact, there at my favorite watering hole, with some of the geekiest pass-the-buck “patriotic” sorts (“mega-dittoes, Mr. President, bwa-ha-ha!”) you could ever hope to drive over by accident, twice.

So I had to vent, is the point. Plus I was actually working on a new novel—the muse is a heartless and eccentric and time-insensitive bitch, and when she sez we work, well….

Anyway, anyway, anyway.

I promise not to get this distracted when I’m running this country. I have a plan, in fact, for helping me keep my focus, and also to buck up the flagging popular morale.

The second thing I’m going to do after taking the oath of office—well, the third thing actually: one I can’t tell you about (thereby keeping sacred the established holy writ of bullshit executive branch secrecy), and the second is firing Congress and replacing it, in its entirety except for really cute pages, with little yappy dogs. I have mentioned this part of the plan before, but I do want to add that the Majority will be Shih-Tzus, just because….

Anyway, anyway, anyway.

Oh, yeah: I’m going to hold a “Pick the First Lady Contest.” I occurs to me that a good first lady could be instrumental in helping a President keep his priorities straight--you know, that trusted someone who can always be counted on to tell you the unvarnished truth (“How many time do I have to tell you, George? First socks, then shoes”) despite the fact that you have the power to have her shot.

I haven’t worked out the specifics of how the voting will be handled—I’m thinking of letting Katherine Harris handle that—but you can be assured that there will be absolutely no Kennedy involvement, although I’ve already heard from Ted. Plus former President Clinton will not be allowed to participate, since his taste has always seemed a little…well, let’s just say that I’m sure ol’ Bill wanted to chew his own arm off on more than one occasion.

The thing is, I’m not at all sure that my public statements that I plan to marry actress Lauren Graham are having the desired effect. Let me say right now that I—unlike some Presidents I could mention—can admit failure, and it looks like the whole idea of becoming President Mr. Lauren Graham is a bust. I console myself by thinking it's because she’s still depressed about the ongoing vendetta against the “Gilmore Girls.”

I have frankly been thinking my friend Cindy, the Metaphor busgirl, might be a good alternate choice—we have a rapport, after all, and she already knows not only that I have issues, but also what they are—but when I brought it up she said, “I think I’m busy that day. Have you met my mom?”

So we’ll have a First Lady contest. I’ll let the public speak, within limits. I refuse, for instance, to even entertain the thought of convicted major crime figure Martha Stewart for the role, even though, let’s face it, the White House would look fantastic. Also, it should go without saying that Pam Coulter is right out. She'd strangle me in my sleep with my own roast beef sandwich the first night, just for laughs.

That said, no matter who else wins, I plan to listen to the voice of the people and do the right thing by her and marry her in a really big ceremony, broadcast live on all the networks and cable channels except Fox. There will be wardrobe malfunctions, right there at the reception, and we will have several bands playing, Lollapalooza style, including the White Stripes and a reunited Dire Straits. The main musical event of the evening, though, will be when Wild Cherry makes an appearance, following an Official Announcement, possibly by actress Lindsay Lohan, that “Play That Funky Music, White Boy” will replace “Hail to the Chief.” It occurs to me that the First Lady should also have a song that’s played whenever she enters a room; I’m thinking “She’s About a Mover” by the Sir Douglas Quintet, but we can have a vote on that, too.

I also promise that the First Lady and I will never use pet names in public. We had enough of that in the Reagan years to last a lifetime. Plus, I have a couple of friends who do that, and there’s nothing more nauseating than to hear a woman call her husband “my big baboo” while sitting on a barstool; I can only begin to imagine what it sound like at a State dinner.

I have to give the Bush Administration credit on that score: Not once have we heard Laura refer to George as, for instance, “little poot-poot,” and I think we should all be grateful. He has enough problems as it is; I think that shoes-socks thing is starting to get to him.

Hedgehogs and Whackjobs: A Serious Note of Sorts

Calvin Trillin once wrote about the “(Harry) Golden Rule,” which he summarized as follows: “In modern America, anyone who writes satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses.” *

I think it’s safe to say that the (Harry) Golden Rule has by now, 20-plus years after its publication, picked up an offshoot or two, one of which might be called the Monty Python Corollary: As fatuous bullshit becomes more and more entrenched, as opposed to being merely part of wacky political satire, the more Pythonesque real-world news will inevitably become.

I have, here in front of me, if not proof of this corollary, then pretty strong empirical evidence for it: “Hedgehogs,” opens this Reuters article, “have finally humbled burger giant McDonald’s after years of campaigning, forcing the company to redesign its killer McFlurry ice-cream containers.”

The article goes on to say that hedgehogs: (A) really, really like sugar; (B) have died in “untold numbers” as a result of climbing into McFlurry containers and being then unable to extricate themselves; and (C) are apparently represented by something called the “British Hedgehog Preservation Society.”

I admit that the late 70s, pretty much (thank God) all of the 80s and a fair chunk of the 90s are, well, something of a blur to me, but I distinctly remember sitting in a seedy bar in Baltimore—run by graduate students of the Philosophy Department at the Johns Hopkins University (honest) and featuring the world’s nastiest double “cheeseburgers” and 50-cent Budweiser® longnecks—, watching Monty Python and seeing sketches featuring the Ministry of Silly Walks and, I'm fairly certain, the British Hedgehog Preservation Society....

For those who have never seen the old Python television shows, they were masterpieces of very silly satire indeed, sending up outdated social values and government foolishness in a way that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would no doubt consider seditious. Incidentally, am I the only one who thinks that Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney are secret gay lovers? I mean, c’mon: Nobody acts that butch unless, like Rob Halford, they’re keeping up appearances for an audience of he-man, groin-scratching angry posers.

Anyway: I’m beginning to think, 30 years after Python started airing in the US, that their silliness, inspired as it was even then, was actually prescient. Take, for instance, the character of “The Colonel,” as portrayed by the late, great and gay Graham Chapman.

[Ed. Note: Lest you PC types start getting all bent out of shape, there is a reason for mentioning “gay” specifically; it’s called “foreshadowing” and is a subtle literary technique used by all your finer writers, like, well, Iggy.]

The Colonel would come on at (in-) opportune moments during the show and announce that he had been offended by this jab at the government, that poke the Royal Family, or the other stab at the Army; these segments were, needless to say, rife with hilarity. Except that they’ve come true. I mean, isn’t that pretty much what Rumsfeld and Cheney do anymore? And let’s refresh: Chapman was gay. QED, eh?

It occurs to me that the United States may jump a notch or two in world opinion if those two would just come the hell out of the closet. Rumsfeld could perhaps institute, by way of celebration, “Casual Bondage Wednesdays” (‘Hump Day’; get it?) there at the DOD and God alone knows what kind of action Cheney might finally get, especially with all that extra pocket change he’ll be jingling after his cut of the Halliburton/Iraq boondoggle starts rolling in.

For one thing, it would tell our allies that maybe we’ve lightened up a little, which is never a bad thing. And lest you think—as the Rumsfelds and Cheneys who sit in well-protected offices harrumphing hypocritically about the “moral and intellectual confusion” of the very people they work for (that would be us, remember?) would like you to—that lightening up sends our enemies a message of weakness in the “war” on terror, don’t worry: It’s their job to make you afraid. That’s how they stay in business—at least ‘til they come out of the closet anyhow: By making you think that the world is a horrible and mean-spirited place with people out to get you in all sorts of ways you can’t even begin to imagine. Well, yeah, but we’re used to that anymore: This is America, the home of Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, PETA and so-called “right-to-life” groups who somehow think that their calling makes it okay to kill a doctor or two.

Python understood, even savored, the essential absurdity-in-truth that tends to flavor current events the way anchovy paste might flavor a banana split. They saw that absurdity is, especially given the goobers we keep putting in office, a government’s stock-in-trade and that it can be an ugly thing indeed. And what they mostly understood—what Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld (long may their forbidden love wave) never will—is that if the absurdity is not aired, not brought to light, then stomped on and poked at and tickled, it will become truth.

Just ask Harry Golden.

*(From the introduction to Uncivil Liberties, 1982.)