BlameBush!

Controversy Surrounds Tomb of Unknown Babykillers

Some consider it a tragic reminder of the price paid for imperialist U.S. wars of aggression. Others are just right-wing, jingoist chickenhawks and their opinion doesn't matter anyway.  But thanks to the ravages of Bush's global warming, the Tomb of the Unknowns is in terrible shape and deteriorating rapidly.  Officials at Arlington National Cemetery are faced with a serious dilemma: should they restore the tomb to it's original glory, or replace it entirely?

The answer is a resounding No! No! A thousand times, NO!!!!  Forget for a moment that the Tomb of the Unknowns is a tragic reminder of the price paid for imperialist U.S. wars of aggression. The words chiseled into the monument's surface: "HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD" are a clear violation of the Separation Between Church and State - that very principle that the babykillers sealed within were sworn to defend.  In order to honor their service and their sacrifice, the monument must be dismantled and replaced with a more secular tribute - such as a 20' statue of Obama, with a kneeling pillow at His feet so that all Americans can reflect upon His greatness.

Thanksgiving; Harvest of Shame (Director's Cut)

As you can probably guess, I'll be spending today under my kitchen sink, stabbing myself in the thigh with a rusty fork as penance for over 200 years of white male hegemony. So in lieu of posting anything original, I present my award-winning post on the true meaning of this terrible day.  This is no simple rehash, either. It's the Director's Cut.  That is, I've actually gone through and corrected the spelling errors. - Keep hope alive. LC

As we know, the tradition of Thanksgiving began when the Mayflower landed on Malcolm X, near what is present day Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Fed up with the hegemonic stranglehold the Church of England had on their lives, a small band of progressive Christians sailed across the Atlantic to establish a New Eden in the New World, where gays could marry, women had a Right to Choose, and the only form of currency was Love.

Indeed, the pilgrims had finally found their Utopia, a place where they could experiment with conscience-expanding drugs and enjoy casual sex without being glowered at by judgmental old fuddy-duddies. Unfortunately, they spent so much time exercising their newfound freedoms that they didn't get any planting done, and soon found themselves no food reserves for the approaching winter.  Without a Patient's Bill of Rights, thousands died from hunger and disease, and hundreds more from the lack of affordable health care. 

The indigenous peoples took pity on the pilgrims and brought them bushels of maize, berries, and deer turds, but the natives' strictly vegetarian diet didn't agree with the bizarre, meat-eating Europeans. Faced with starvation, the colonists unanimously agreed to eat the Indians.  For the next six months, they ate the Patuxets, the Narragansetts, and the Erectorsets almost to extinction.  They justified their hideous crime by convincing themselves that the dark-skinned savages posed an imminent threat, and had arrows of mass destruction. This pleasant fiction lasted until the NicNacs and the Paddywacs banded together with the Mohawks and the Pompadours, exacting revenge on the pilgrims and inflicting severe casualties.   

An ignorant baboon with a short temper, Capt. Myles Standish exploited the pilgrims' fear of another Indian attack to impose a fascist theocracy on the colony. Backed by a junta of gun-toting puritans, Standish enacted the highly controversial US Mayflower Pact, rescinding all civil rights and granting the Church power to inspect a colonist's library records without a court order. Standish spent the next four years waging an illegal war for gravy, alienating our Nez Perce allies.  But it wasn't until Chief Iacocca ordered the Pontiacs and Cadillacs to drive the pilgrims out of Dodge that the cannibalistic orgy of death was brought to an end.

So when your naive, pasty-faced brats come home from school this week wearing their cute little construction paper hats, gently take them aside and explain the truth about this evil holiday: Thanksgiving dinner is not a reinactment of a bountiful harvest feast shared with friends, but the symbolic consumption of a murdered Indian's flesh to celebrate the cannabilistic genocide of America's indigenous peoples.

Honoring December 7

The Seventh of December. A momentous day in American history, for it marks the one month anniversary of our victory over the the Republican Nazis in Congress. But while we bask in the giddyness of triumph, the shattering defeat for the reichwingers threatens to tear away their already crumbling mask of sanity. Sure, they keep up a nice façade by saying pithy little things like “The Republicans didn’t deserve to win” and “Oh, was there an election?”, but beneath their thin veneer of stupidity there’s a pychotic episode waiting to happen. When conservatives lose, they don’t have the common decency to flee the country or seek emotional counseling like the rest of us, either. They bottle up their anger until it becomes so powerful that they snap and take out 30 people with an AK-47 purchased from Dick Clark through the Game Show loophole. I can't let that happen.

As the duly elected morale officer at Seattle Hemp Products, I’m charged with keeping the outbursts of feminine hysteria and total emotional breakdowns to a bare minimum. That wasn’t so easy back when Bush stole the election, and then re-stole it a second time. But now that Democrats are back in power, my day is mostly devoted to vainly trying to keep my hands off myself.

Still, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake Bush did when he read a story to a pet goat while a group of kindergartners flew planes into our skyscrapers. To prevent an “incident” in the wake of their devastating loss, I decided to provide free emotional counseling for our conservative employees – both of them.

Yes, I know – Hatemongering Haters of Hate have no place in our a progressive workplace of unconditional love, as chemically induced as it may be. Unfortunately they’re both members of the Transgendered Community so we can’t fire them. You’d think someone with a Lee Press-On Vagina® would be a tad more socially progressive, but I guess they’re just freaks of nature. So we keep them down in the mailroom where they can’t poison the minds of other employees with their right-wing hatemongering.

“Of course I’m disappointed,” Norris (or is it Doris?) told me when I invited him to our first counseling session. “But it’s not like I’m going to kill myself just because my candidate lost. What do you think I am, some sort of limp-wristed sissy boy?”

“No, I guess not,” I said, unconsciously rubbing the six-year old scars on my wrists. “But surely the return of Congress to its rightful owners and the impending repeal of the tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans had you running around your luxury Seattle condominium crying like a little girl until your mother took you into her arms and said “Hush Hush Larry-Boo! Mommy here now. Mommy here”?

“Nope,” Shirley replied, his enormous breasts bouncing to-and-fro as he spoke. “I guess Doris and I have bigger balls than you liberals do.”

Ah, yes! That’s what they all say, right before they crank up the Huey Lewis and chase you around the office with an axe.

Lesson learned: conservatives are too cold and inhuman to appreciate the concept of empathy. Emotional counseling is only wasted on them, for they have no recognizable emotions but greed - and disgust for anyone who is different.

They make me want to puke.

Bush Still Won't Accept Blame for Pearl Harbor

Today, the Shrub went through the robotic motions of honoring the brave men, womyn, and transgendered who died at Pearl Harbor thanks to his family's relentless quest for absolute power. No doubt, Bush naively believes that being born five years after that day of infamy excuses him from any guilt. But if the dead could speak, they'd cry out from their watery graves and demand he apologize and atone for his complicity in the attacks.

It's common knowledge that the Shrub's grandfather, Prescott Shrub Bush, bankrolled the Third Reich out of his own pockets, but the rabbit-hole of treachery and betrayal goes much deeper than anyone could possibly have imagined. As I will reveal, the Bush family not only orchestrated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but conspired with some of history's most notorious figures in order to assume control of the White House for decades to come.

It was the summer of 1941. Senator Prescott Bush covertly met with fellow Skull & Bones members Gen. Hideki Tojo, Joseph Goebbels, and Fatty Arbuckle to hatch an insidious plot so secret that only a few Democrat Underground members and that weird guy at the comic book store know about it. On the 7th of December, Japan would launch a "surprise attack" on the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, launching a war and allowing young naval aviator George Herbert Walker Bush pad his political resume with a phony act of heroism at sea. In return, Arbuckle would use his Hollywood connections to disgrace Tojo's political adversary, Ministry of Finance Kiichi Miyazawa, in an elaborate sex scandal involving an underaged prostitute and a syphillitic goat. Goebbels would provide beer and brauts.

Just as planned, the Pearl Harbor attacks came by complete surprise, and the entire U.S. Pacific Fleet was destroyed. George H.W. Bush went off to war, and was shot down over Iwo Jima. His crewmates and fellow Skull and Bonesmen perished, but he was "miraculously" pulled from the water and would shamelessly use his military service for political gain years later. Back in Tokyo, Tojo patiently awaited for Prescott Bush to fulfill his part of the bargain and destroy his political rival, Miyazawa.

On August 9, 1945, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - bombs built with uranium procured by Prescott Bush's Vanadium Corporation. Japan quickly surrendered, and Tojo was captured by the allies and summarily executed without a trail. Newly appointed Chancellor of Germany, Joseph Goebbels, took his own life outside a Berlin-area Piggly Wiggly, and Fatty Arbuckle became embroiled in a career-ending sex scandal of his own. Miyazawa, on the other hand, was promoted to the Japanese Diet, which monitors and controls the Nipponese sushi trade. For a while it seemed as if the Bush Dynasty would evade meeting their obligations in the sinister pact.

The Bushies would soon learn, however, that there was still a bill to be paid, and it would be paid with liquid assets.

Flash forward to 1992. In the midst of a failing political campaign, President George Herbert Walker Bush attends a state visit in Tokyo, Japan. Journalists would later describe the President as appearing pale and disoriented, at least more so than usual. Perhaps out of guilt over the needless deaths of his old crewmates, or from stress over troubles with his coke-addicted, alcoholic son, the president is overcome by a wave of nausea. He opens his mouth, and for a moment it appears as if he's going to speak. Instead, he shocks the world by vacating the contents of his stomach all over the Japanese Prime Minister...none other than Kiichi Miyazawa himself.

In ancient Japanese culture, being ralfed on by dinner guests was considered such a dishonor that the victims often committed ritual suicide before the puke even dried. Japan had long since abandoned the barbaric Samurai Code, but the stigma of being a vomit receptacle remained. Shamed and disgraced, Miyazawa was forced out of office with a vote of "no confidence" less than one year later, and the old pact between Prescott Bush and Admiral Tojo was finally fulfilled.

However, Miyazawa was from from finished. While Geedumbya ascended to the throne, the disgraced prime minister plotted his revenge. As a member of the powerful Trilateral Commission, he was able to secure documents that would both expose the Bush family's involvement in the Pearl Harbor attacks, and completely exonerate Fatty Arbuckle. Determined to get the damning evidence to the American press, he entrusted it with his nephew, a commercial fisherman operating off the coast of Hawaii. In February of 2001, just weeks after Bush stole the presidency, the Japanese trawler Emime Maru was destroyed by the U.S.S. Greenville. All aboard the vessel were killed - including Miyazawa's nephew, who had mere days before deposited the documents in a safety deposit box at the Manhattan branch of Fuji Bank - located in the south tower of the World Trade Center.

Paranoid conspiracy nuts will have fun with that little morsel, but we all know the real reason Bush ordered the 9/11 attacks was to steal Iraq's oil. Nonetheless, the evidence of Bush's treachery was destroyed forever, along with any hopes of seeing him brought to justice for his crimes.

As I expected, Dumbya didn't mention any of this in his pretty little speech today. Like he always does, he'll evade responsibility, pass the buck, and allow 2,000 brave servicemen to remain helplessly trapped at the bottom of the ocean just so he doesn't have to pay them their social security.

Thanksgiving; Harvest of Shame

It will be light blogging for the next few days.  All the Chomstein aunts, uncles, cousins, and second-cousins are meeting at Grandma's house in Tacoma to celebrate the Thanksgiving Harvest of Shame, so I'll be visiting the Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas.  I'll try to blog on the road, but I will have a full review of the facilities for you when I return.

To tide you over, here's a little history lesson concerning the upcoming holiday. 

As we know, the tradition of Thanksgiving began when the Mayflower landed on Malcolm X, near what is present day Cape Cod, Massachussetts. Fed up with the hegemonic stranglehold the Church of England held over their lives, a small band of progressive Christians sailed across the Atlantic to establish a New Eden in the New World, where gays could marry, women had a Right to Choose, and the only form of currency was Love.

Indeed, the pilgrims had finally found their Utopia, a place where they could experiment with conscience-expanding drugs and enjoy casual sex without being glowered at by judgmental old fuddy-duddies.  Unfortunately, they spent so much time exercising their newfound freedoms that they didn't get any planting done, and had no food reserves for the approaching winter.  Without a Patient's Bill of Rights, thousands died from hunger and disease, and hundreds more from the lack of affordable health care. 

The indigenous peoples took pity on the pilgrims and brought them bushels of maize, berries, and deer turds, but the natives' strictly vegetarian diet didn't agree with the bizarre, meat-eating Europeans. Faced with starvation, the colonists unanimously agreed to eat the Indians.  For the next six months, they ate the Patuxets, the Narragansetts, and the Erectorsets almost to extinction.  They justified the hideous crime by convincing themselves that the dark-skinned savages posed an imminent threat, and had arrows of mass destruction. This pleasant fiction lasted until the NicNacs and the Paddywacs banded together with the Mohawks and the Pompadours, exacting revenge on the pilgrims and inflicting severe casualties.   

An ignorant baboon with a short temper, Capt. Myles Standish exploited the pilgrims' fear of another Indian attack to impose a fascist theocracy on the colony.  Backed by a junta of gun-toting puritans, Standish enacted the highly controversial US Mayflower Pact, rescinding all civil rights and granting the Church power to inspect a colonist's library records without a court order.  Standish spent the next four years waging an illegal war for gravy, alienating our Nez Perce allies.  But it wasn't until Chief Iacocca ordered the Pontiacs and Cadillacs to drive the pilgrims out of Dodge that the cannibalistic orgy of death was brought to an end.

So when your naive, pasty-faced brats come home from school this week wearing their cute little construction paper pilgrim hats, gently take them aside and explain the truth about this evil holiday: Thanksgiving dinner is not a reinactment of a bountiful harvest feast shared with friends, but the symbolic consumption of a murdered Indian's flesh to celebrate the cannabilistic genocide of the indigenous peoples.

Tremblez, Tyrans! Et vous, Perfides!

Today, France celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Allied visit to Paris. The French tradition of warmly welcoming large foreign armies into its capitol dates back two thousand years, when Gallic tribes occupied most of the area. With tear-filled eyes, the Gauls reluctantly bid farewell to Paris in 53 B.C., when the Romans marched into the great city and proudly declared it "Gallia Parisi", or "Village of Back-Stabbing Weasels".

Much excitement and celebration swept through Paris as Atilla the Hun approached the city circa 451 B.C., lured by it's plethora of fine shops and sidewalk cafés. But after his brief downwind approach, he mysteriously turned his army around and ran like mad to the south, never to return.

Germanic Franks enjoyed Paris' many comforts from about the 7th to 9th century A.D. when they handed the jolly ol' Vikings the keys to the city and encouraged them to burn it to the ground. Sadly, the Vikings were immune to Paris' romantic allure, and quickly left without even bothering to perform the customary raping of France's most beautiful women. Both girls were sent home disappointed, having stood in line for days.

Civil war, Black Death, and Napoleon kept all but the most fanatically Paris-loving armies out of the city for the next thousand years or so. Even the construction of the wide, tree-lined Champs-Élysées wasn't enough to attract any conquerers. But in 1870, the Prussians responded to an aggressive "Invade Paris this Summer" ad campaign launched by the French Department of Tourism, and flooded through the city's gates to enjoy its many hedonistic pleasures.

They say that once you've been to Paris, you'll never go back to the farm. And so it was that in 1940, the German army marched into Paris once again. Welcoming their old friends with much fanfare, the ever-friendly French people were more than happy to volunteer their Jews to help out Hitler with his soap and lampshade shortage. France and Germany enjoyed a close friendship until four years later, when American troops rudely ran the Germans out of Paris and assailed its citizens with their cowboy arrogance and obnoxious theme parks. Thankfully, the French have never been ones to hold a grudge, and today they remain one of our closest, most loyal allies.

Congratulations, Paris, and although actual Americans weren't "invited" to join the celebration, we're with you in spirit. Or at least, in the form of French actors dressed up like American soldiers.

*Note: There has been much debate as to whether the 2001 arrival of a small troop of Boy Scouts along the Champs-Élysées qualifies as an "occupation" of Paris. Although the appearance of the scouts did indeed result in the accidental and quite embarassing surrender of Paris by the French government, it was later retracted when the kids relinquished control of the city in exchange for free passes to Euro Disney. For that reason, the author did not include the incident in this brief history of Paris.

Tommy Franks, American Weenie

I've been reading Tommy Franks' new book - yes, I know it's jingoist propaganda by a fascist tool of the military industrial complex, but I like to know what the other side is thinking. Besides, I got a good laugh out of the book jacket: "General Franks has been awarded three Defense Distinguished Service Medals, two Distinguished Service Medals, and four Legion of Merit Awards. His other decorations include three Purple Hearts, three Bronze Stars, and Air Medal, an an Army Commendation Medal - all with "V" for Valor."

Ha! More like "W" for "Weenie"! Sure, he got three Purple Hearts, but it took him FORTY YEARS TO GET THEM! What's the matter, Tommy Boy? Bashful? Afraid to get in there and kick the ball around a little? That's alright. TRUE men of valor like John Kerry will take up the slack. It only took Iron Guts Kerry four months to get his three Purple Hearts, plus a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star. Do the math: if Kerry had stuck around for 40 years, he'd have 3600 Purple Hearts, and 120 Bronze and Silver Stars. It would take him a solid month to toss that many medals at the Capitol Building.

Not surprisingly, Franks isn't the only chickenhawk, tin soldier posing as a "war hero". It took John McCain six years to get just TWO Purple Hearts. And his Silver Star - what was that for? Lounging around some hotel in Hanoi for the entire war? Give me a break! Elvis' black belt has more authenticity than any shiny trinket pinned to McCain's chest.

Colin Powell is another fine example of right-wing "heroism". A big shot General with years of service, you'd think he'd have a whole chestful of Purple Hearts. Yet we never hear him talk about them. He never mentions them in speeches or brings them up in casual conversation. I had to actually go out and buy his stinking book to confirm that he ever even got a Purple Heart. Then when you consider HOW he got his Purple Hearts, it's no wonder that he doesn't brag about them. He got his first one for falling into a hole. His second was for getting in a helicopter crash. Whoopdee doo. Did they give him one for slipping in the shower, too? How about a medal for spilling hot coffee on his lap?

Audie Murphy was the most decorated American soldier of WW2. He was awarded every medal for valor the military had, including a Purple Heart with two clusters. This guy would kill 14 Germans with a pen knife while sitting on the latrine. Yet it took him THREE (count 'em) YEARS to get all those medals. Three years for John Kerry would factor out to 27 Purple Hearts and 7 Congressional Medals of Honor. He'd have so many Bronze and Silver Stars, they'd have to start pinning them on John Edwards.

George S. Patton led troops against Pancho Villa, fought on the battlefield in WWI and rolled tanks across Africa and Europe in WW2 - yet in all his years of combat he only bagged one measly Purple Heart. Ollie North got a paltry two Purple Hearts in over 22 years of service, and General George Washington never got one single Purple Heart at all.

I'm not denigrating Frank's service, mind you. I think it's just wonderful that a poor, white boy would give up everything to go off and murder helpless farmers on the other side of the world. I simply wonder if maybe he was bullshitting just a tad when he put in for all those decorations. His Purple Hearts are just nifty, even though his wounds were so superficial that he kept right on fighting after he received them. Even more mysterious is how someone as shy and meek and Franks could ever be promoted to general and given command of our armed forces in the first place.

If I was a paranoid conspiracy nut, I might wonder if it had anything to do with Franks' "Texas connections". In his book, he even lets it slip that he went to high school with LAURA BUSH. If that doesn't bake your bean, try to explain how he knew she was Laura BUSH when she wasn't even married to the Shrub yet.

Oh yeah...D-Day.

With all the schmaltz and hooplah over Reagan buying the farm, poor ol' Shrub's big D-Day speech sort of got forgotten.

So here's a little history refresher for my uneducated neocon readers: Once a year, the presiding American president (or in this case, the pee-Resident Select) ceremonially expresses his gratitude to France for saving our asses in WW2, and for allowing us to poison their soil with the remains of our arrogant cowboys. This year was especially important because Bush was supposed to use the occasion to crawl to Chirac and beg his forgiveness for 60 years of American arrogance.

Instead, he gave a silly speech to a bunch of old geezers.

Now don't get me wrong - I have great respect for our grizzled war veterans, jingoist Nazis though they are. However, the D-Day invasion wasn't exactly the great military triumph that the history revisionists would have us believe. The fact is, by the time our troops landed at Normandy, the battle was pretty much over. Hitler had been anticipating an attack for weeks and had pulled all his troops and munitions back to Berlin, leaving the beaches to be defended by a few narcoleptic foot soldiers and a moldy plate of strüdel.

Despite romantic Hollywood portrayals of U.S. troops heroicly scaling the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc, the Normandy Chamber of Commerce had installed escalators and cable cars weeks before, under the strong, yet non-arrogant leadership of a young Charles DeGaulle. Army rangers who "scaled" these cliffs were warmly greeted at the top by French tourists.

Likewise, Omaha beach had been prepped for the American arrival days in advance. French forces lined the shoreline with "hedgehogs" for the convenient mooring of landing craft. Upon their uneventful arrival at Normandy, many American soldiers napped on the sand or simply stood around with their hands in their pockets waiting for orders. Some past the time by playing with toys, or by jumping into the air and scattering their bodies over a wide area.

It's no surprise Shrub mentioned none of this in his little speech to the "Geriatrics of Pointe Du Hoc" last weekend. Come on, how hard could it have been to take Normandy? Those guys must be in the their 70's and 80's.

Sometimes, the truth hurts. But it's time Americans overcome this arrogant notion that they alone saved Europe and the world. As history shows, the turning point of the war was not D-Day, but De Gaulle's valiant liberation of Paris. That's why France doesn't have any airports named after General Eisenhower.

The Last Ride of Ronnie Jingo

I was hesistant to write something about Ray-Gun so soon after his death. Sure, he was an evil madman who plunged the world into an age of darkness and horror, but I still couldn't bring myself to piss on his grave before they've even planted him in the ground. I'm a free-thinking progressive, but I guess I'm just not cut out to be the bold, American statesman that Ted Rall is.

However, since the Reagan family has shown their true partisan colors by refusing to beg Tom Daschle to speak at the funeral, I'm taking the gloves off.

I was just a kid during most of Reagan's presidency. The majority of what I remember about him I gleaned from teachers, the media, my parents, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood videos. I remember how he brought the world to the brink of nuclear armageddon by confronting the Soviets. I remember how he created the AIDS plague to kill gays and blacks. I remember how he put flowers on Hitler's grave, murdered John Lennon, and sold arms to terrorists. But most of all, I remember the screams - the blood curdling screams from my dear mother whenever Reagan's name was mentioned.

One particular incident is still quite fresh in my mind. It was the early 80's, just after Reagan had declared ketchup a vegetable, condemning millions of children to hunger and starvation.

"Is it true what Teacher says?" I asked my mother after school one day. "Is President...um...You-Know-Who taking away our school lunches so we'll all starve and die?"

"YEP," Mom answered. "In no time at all, you'll look like one of those kids in the Sally Struther's commercials . That is, if the radiation sickness doesn't kill you first."

"But there's plenty of peanut butter and jelly in the cupboard!" I protested.

"What do you think you're having for dinner?" she asked rhetorically as she slipped into her sequined bell-bottoms. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to the Hall & Oates concert with your Uncle Raoul."

"Uncle Raoul?" I reminded her. "The guy with the Reagan/Bush bumper sticker on his Eldorado?"

She lunged at me. "I TOLD YOU NOT TO UTTER THAT NAME IN MY HOUSE!" she screeched. "UNDER THE SINK WITH YOU!!!"

Years later, Reagan would become the bain of my existence once again when I was assaulted in the park by a deranged homeless man who whacked me with an empty bottle of T-Bird and screamed "FLIGHT 794 YOU'RE CLEAR FOR TAKEOFF!!!"

"That's Reaganomics for you," Ma explained to me later. "The poor man was probably a fired air-traffic controller, or one of those mental patients you-know-who let loose when he closed down all the nut houses. Go back and apologize for being so intolerant."

"But he peed on me!" I cried.

Ma laughed hysterically. "I guess 'trickle-down' isn't so wonderful when you're the one who gets trickled ON, huh? Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going skiing at Aspen with your Uncle Raoul. Under the sink with you! Scoot scoot!"

That very summer, the news hit the airwaves that Reagan had ordered an airstrike on Libya without France's consent. Libyan president Moammar Khaddafi's daughter was killed in the raid, along with 300 puppies, a box of kittens, two koala bears, and a mentally-challenged janitor in a nearby baby milk factory. Reagan showed no remorse for his unilateral attack, nor for his arrogant snubbing of France. In protest, my mother spent a week in Cancun with Uncle Raoul while I got reacquainted with the kitchen plumbing.

So you see, while the right-wing media tries deperately to portray the Reagan era as a time of unbridled national optimism and pride, it was in fact an era of misery and shame. While Reaganites speak of a "great shining city", the city was in reality a rusty tangle of leaky pipes and moldy dishrags, littered with half-used S.O.S. pads and reeking of household cleansers.

I know. I was there. I lived it.

Crappy Memorial Day

My fascist brother called me at the crack of dawn yesterday, demanding I go on some wild Kerouacian road trip with him.

"I'm going to go put flowers on Grandpa's grave," he blubbered, "and you're coming with me!"

"Oooh, I really wish I could," I replied, "but today's the day I sandpaper my testicles."

That got him blubbering, all right.

"BUT IT'S OUR DUTY AS PATRIOTIC AMERICANS TO HONOR THOSE WHO - "

I hung up on him and went back to bed. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a jingoist screed from a raving dittohead at 11 o'clock in the bleeping morning.

Five minutes later, there came an angry pounding on my door. It was my brother, of course. The sneaky bastard had called from the road, and now he stood before me, decked out from head to toe in red, white and blue.

"It's the Star-Spangled pimp!" I chirped. "You wasted alot of gas coming here, Superfly, because I'm not going. I refuse to exploit the victims of U.S. imperialism by celebrating this obscene holiday."

"Oh, you're goin'," he warned. "Or I'll tell Mom all about your dirty little secret."

"That was was four years ago! It's old news!"

"Then you won't mind if I tell her."

When we arrived the national cemetery, I was immediately struck by the orgiastic display of jingoist decadence that was thinly passed off as "decoration". Hundreds, if not thousands of U.S. flags lined the main drive. Red, white and blue ribbons adorned the trees and the fences. Even the grave markers had minature stars and stripes on them.

"It looks liked Nuremberg circa 1939," I told my brother, who ignored my remark and began searching for Grandpa's grave among the sea of white headstones.

"This is going to take a while," he said.

"Yeah," I laughed, "you'd think they'd plant these suckers alphabetically...make it easier on folks."

I looked down at one of the white stone grave markers. "CPL Marshall Newman, US ARMY, FRANCE, JUNE 6, 1944."

"Get a load of THIS loser!" I told my brother. "What the hell was he doing in France? It was Japan that attacked us. He must have gone to the same community college as Bush. No wonder the whole world hates us - our military is full of ignorant, mouth-breathing morons!"

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see a tiny little man, probably 70 or 80 years of age, wearing a a black suit jacket adorned with fancy medals, and one of those goofy hats you always see on those crazy geezers handing out tiny white canes in front of Safeway.

"I'll have two hot dogs and a bag of peanuts," I chuckled, and went back to re-educating my brother.

"When we finally DID get around to fighting Japan," I ranted, "we did it on a bunch of tiny, uncharted islands in the Pacific. HELLO! Japan's THATTAWAY, fellas!! The Professor will get the castaways home in due time - let's concentrate on fighting the folks that actually ATTACKED US, SHALL WE???"

The little guy in the Captain Kangaroo outfit tapped my shoulder again.

"Listen, Skippy," I growled. "You'll never get that eagle badge unless you start practicing your knots. Now amscray!"

I turned back to my brother, who was now pacing back and forth among the rows of markers, pretending like he wasn't listening to me.

"I don't think a single U.S. troop set foot on Japan during the entire war," I went on. "No, they were off storming the beaches of FRANCE. FRANCE! That's the moronic U.S. military for you. Japan attacks us, we attack France. Al Qaeda attacks us, we attack Saddam Hussein. And when Eisenhower suddenly realized that Japan was the enemy, he dropped two A-bombs on them! We've had 60 years of tired old war morons endlessly whining about Bataan. So the Japanese made you take a little stroll, cry me a river! Try radiation sickness on for size, kids! Hell, I walk three miles to work every day, and you don't hear ME complaining."

Again, with the tapping on the shoulder. I spun around.

"I've had just about enough of you!" I snapped at the shrivelled little gnome. "What is it? Whaddya WANT? Oh, I know! You want to tell me about what a great "hero" you are, and spew all those tired cliche's about how you put your life on the line to fight for my freedom, huh?"

"Actually," he answered, "a bunch of Vietnam veterans over there are taking bets on whether you'll scream like a woman or cry like a baby when they drag you around town behind their Harleys."

"And you came to warn me?"

"Naw," he replied. "I have fifty dollars on 'scream like a woman', and I was just hoping that when the time comes, you'd do a 'tired old war moron' a favor." At this, he turned and walked away.

I scurried over to where my brother was still desperately hunting for Grampa's Lost Grave. "I think we'd better go," I told him. "Looks like it's going to start raining."

"Might as well," little brother replied, scratching his head. "I've looked all over and I can't seem to find Grandpa's marker anywhere."

"Maybe that's because he's buried across town, at Evergreen National Cemetery," I informed him.

He glared at me. "Why didn't you TELL me?"

"You didn't ask. Besides, I thought it'd be a great way to illustrate the pointless folly of war."

The walk home wasn't all that bad, even if I practically shit my pants whenever a motorcycle roared by.

Memorial Day, shmemorial day. It's nothing more than a right-wing plot to ruin my weekends. Next year I'm not answering the friggin' door.