Banzai Chicken

8/31/02


BANZAI CHICKEN

Dick Cheney has emerged from his underground bunker and galloped to the hustings to warn the American Public of the mortal threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. There are chickenhearted appeasers among us who have dared to question our Vice President’s Paul Revere-like alarm, but I am not among them. We must go to war pronto and without discussion or thought, with or without the support of the Congress, the American People, or the rest of the nations of the world. Thanks to leaks from the White House hawks, I have access to privileged information about some of the truly bloodchilling weapons of mass destruction the Butcher of Baghdad will use against us if we don’t stop him NOW.

Weapons of Mass Destruction Scenario #1: Banzai Chicken. Saddam is raising millions and millions of roosters, each and every one of them a Moslem fanatic who believes he will be awarded a harem of 72 virgin hens as soon as he sacrifices himself in the Holy Jihadh against the Great Satan America. One morning, at an ungodly hour, we will wake to the thundering cockledoodledoo of 400 million feathered foes landing on our manicured lawns, pecking our dogs and cats to death, pooping on our roofs, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. AND IT WON’T STOP THERE. After they’ve purchased lap dances with some of the more mercantile and licentious of our redblooded American hens, they will engage in cockfights outside our picture windows, so riveting our attentions that we will turn off Fox News Network and start laying bets on the outcomes of these obscene, outrageous, un-American, but highly entertaining displays. The mortally wounded combatants, vanquished & victors alike, will then market themselves to supermarkets and fast food chicken outlets all over the nation, so driving down the price of poultry that we will have no choice but to gorge ourselves on the First White Meat. Americans, already overweight, will soon be so fat that we will be trapped in our own houses. Day after day we will ram fried fowl into our helpless mouths until we literally eat ourselves into oblivion. After America has eaten itself to death, Saddam will send over special clean up crews to execute the few bulemics who have survived le grande beouf and to bulldoze our swollen carcasses into the earth. Then he will bring his wives and brothers-in-law over to occupy the best of all the now-empty houses, including the White House, Kennebunkport, the Crawford Ranch, Kenny Boy Lay’s Aspen chalets, and the choicest lots around the Bel Aire and Riviera Country Clubs. All that will then remain for Saddam and his followers to do is master the game of golf. This final mop up operation will prove the most difficult step in their conquest of America.

WMD Chicken Scenario #2: The San Diego Chicken. Saddam has already infiltrated every baseball park in America. Inside every cute, bigheaded major league mascot costume in America lurks an Iraqi operative. These operatives have been feeding a horrifying new gas specially devised in Baghdad’s diabolical laboratories, GREED GAS, into the lockerrooms and owner’s offices alike. Greed Gas will make the already fantastically wealthy owners and players so greedy that they will strike to the death just as America gets ready to remember 9/11. The loss of the play-offs and the World Series at this vulnerable moment in American History will so demoralize the public that we will not only renounce baseball, we will also renounce Mom, Apple Pie, and The American Way. We will put Iraqi flags on our front lawns, convert to Islam, and cravenly welcome our new conqueror, Saddam Hussein, to his magnificent new dictatorship. With us as his faithful but dispirited retainers, the Butcher of Baghdad will now rule the world!!!

WMD Scenario #3: Despite the embargo, Saddam will sell billions of barrels of petroleum to America at prices so low that we will have no choice but to all buy SUV’s. These gas guzzlers will jam every road and produce so much exhaust that North America will turn into a gigantic sauna. Minnesota’s land of 10,000 lakes will turn into a steaming, tropical, Everglades and the real Everglades will sink beneath the Atlantic as the polar ice caps melt and the ocean rises. The national forests will dry up and burn like kindling and W will hand the remaining trees over to the lumber industry to chop down so that Americans never have to worry about forest fires, or forests, again. By the November 2002 elections, most of the Eastern Seaboard, including the White House and Kennebunkport, will have sunk beneath 10 feet of sea. President Bush and his retinue will be forced to retreat to the shadow capital in the Virginia mountains. Dubyuh will sicken of Virginia’s inadequate and shadowy exercise facilities and will go AWOL into the Texas Hill Country. The House of Representatives will engage in intramural fights to the death over their limited office space and poor lighting. The new shadow government, with the exception of Dick Cheney, will be completely demoralized and paralyzed by the overcrowding and darkness. The American Public, which will have retreated, still in their SUV’s with the gunracks on the roofs, to the remaining high ground, will discover that they do as well and as badly without any government at all as they did with the government in Washington. In the light of 43’s dereliction of duty, the electorate will name Dick Cheney the Acting President. The strain will be too much for Dick, and upon his demise America will be leaderless for months as nobody can remember or care who the Speaker of the House is nor can anybody bother to find him in the shadows. Into this dark vacuum will step Saddam Hussein, taking his rightful place as ruler of the known world. His new followers, the Americans, accept him as long as he is able to provide their SUV’s with cheap gas. Sadly, the SUV’s will all be so crowded together on America’s mountaintops that they will not be able to move. The Americans will continue to idle and threateningly rev their engines until they all choke to death on carbon monoxide fumes.

WMD Scenario #4: Saddam will lure the appeasing, chickenhearted American public into aping Moslem ways, beginning with the public execution by stoning of unfaithful spouses, especially wives. The liberals of the Upper West Side of Manhattan will march their cheating wives up to Yankee Stadium in order to bury them up to their necks at home plate and then bombard them with paving stones if any paving stones can be found and if they can’t be found then bricks and cinder blocks from the blasted vacant lots of the Bronx will have to do. All the roads leading from Manhattan to the Bronx are completely choked with foot traffic. Along the route, the wives start to get very huffy and remind the husbands that they, too, have been unfaithful. The husbands promise they, too, will allow themselves to be buried up to THEIR necks at home plate and bombarded with paving stones as righteous retribution for their sins. “But,” they say to their wives, “you go first.” By the time the Manhattanites have reached Yankee Stadium, no one is willing to allow him or her self to be buried and stoned for his sins. But the New Yorkers’ bloodlust is up and they cast about for a suitable target for stoning. “Are there any CEO’s in the house?” goes the announcer over the PA system. There are, but not as many as there would be if the East Side had made the march. And the CEO’s who ARE in the stadium aren’t about to identify themselves. Finally the angry, betrayed wife of a broker who was bullish on high tech losers way past the March 2001 collapse speaks up: “You want him? You can have him.” The whimpering, whining, pleading broker is made to dig his own hole in the batter’s box next to home plate. Then he is shoved in. His wife buries him up to his neck. The crowd prepares to fire their paving stones when the Archbishop of New York says: “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.” “Well,” says an angry choirboy, “that sure wouldn’t be you, would it Monsignor.” Everybody comes his senses for a moment and drops his stone. Then everyone looks at the whining pleading drooling buried broker, rethinks the matter, picks up the stone, and buries the mofo. On the West Side of Los Angeles a similar death march of cheating spouses, this one all the way to Chavez Ravine’s Dodger Stadium, takes place. Once again, the husbands and wives stop short of actually stoning each other to death, not because they love each other but because they realize that if they execute everyone of the opposite sex then there will be no one to have affairs with after the mass executions. Fortunately, someone lays hands on Gary Winnick, CEO of Global Crossing, and he is buried up to his neck at home plate. No paving stones can be found, so Winnick is pelted with oranges and grapefruit. So it goes all over America. Americans rediscover the delights of ritualized public stonings and dismemberments. “Maybe,” they say, “that Saddam fella isn’t so bad after all. Maybe the entire Moslem world has a few benighted, Medieval lessons to teach US.” “But he’s very un-American!” protests Dick Cheney. “If you appease him, he will come and strangle your children in the night.” “Maybe a few strangled children is just what this country needs to get back on the road to law and order,” says the American Public. “But we need an ENEMY,” says Dick. “And now that we’re playing footsy with the Russians and the Chinese, who can our enemy be if not Saddam?” “How about North Korea?” says the Public. “Didn’t you say North Korea was a good enemy?” “That was before 9/11,” says Dick. “They’re just a paper tiger. And a very hungry one, at that.” “What about the third member of the Axis of Evil?” says the American Public. “Who was it again?” “I’m thinking maybe it was Italy,” pipes up Dubyuh. “No, George,” says the First Lady, “Italy was one of the Axis Powers back in WWII. If you’d ever read a book, instead of constantly working out, you’d know that.” “Dick,” says Dubyuh, “who WAS that third Axis of Evil country?” But Dick won’t say, though he knows. “It was Iran,” says Condy Rice. “You just don’t know when to shut up, do you?” snarls Dick. “We’re sort of friends with Iran now, don’t you know that?” Condy is properly chastened. “What about Osama?” she says. “The less said about Osama the better!” hisses Dick.

Everyone is dumbfounded. It seems for a moment as if America will have no proper enemy. Then Dubyuh pipes up brightly. “I know,” he says. “We can wage war on ourselves! We can chop down our trees, pollute our air and water, rob our Social Security system, and fail to institute a national health plan. We can isolate ourselves from the whole rest of the world by withdrawing from international environmental, nuclear, trade, and civil rights agreements. We can give corporate and tax welfare to the rich and powerful and strip social aid from the poor, the weak, the young, the working people, families, and the old. “Who needs to attack Saddam! WE have more weapons of mass destruction than the rest of the world combined! WE are a greater threat to ourselves and the rest of the world than Saddam or Osama could ever be. Osama is a piker compared to us. Like Pogo said: We have met the enemy and he is us.” Dubyuh turns to his wife. “See, Laura, I do read after all. At least, if the reading comes with plenty of cartoons.”

--FIN--