A Satirical Look at the Modern World

Abba Zabba, Mothafucker

abbazabba Rumors that Honey Boo Boo was competing in a nearby pageant coaxed me out of a Kentucky bomb shelter (read: abandoned coal mine) that I cleverly located by cross-referencing an episode of Doomsday Preppers with Google Earth.  Sadly, such reports proved unfounded, though I did notice, once my pupils adjusted to the light, that our great nation had not only survived the Mayan prophecy of spontaneous extinction but somehow had avoided plunging over the fiscal cliff.  Well except for those misfortuned investors who’s Apple stock is hurtling towards ground zero at breakneck speed.  The tech giant this week revealed that EPS fell for the first time in a decade as gross margins tumbled from 45% to 38%.  Worse yet, the company may be forced to restate (read: lower) Q4’s $13.08 billion profit as a significant portion of the gain was due to in-app purchases made on my toddler’s iTunes account that my wife had unwittingly linked to her credit card.  These are now in dispute.  And after listening to AAPL’s conference call with Wall Street, erstwhile bullish analysts were agog at the company’s desultory guidance for future phone sales (despite whispers of an iPhone6 production run) and the unwelcome prospect of reduced subsidies by AT&T; they were left to desperately cling to CFO Peter Oppenheimer’s stillborn explanation that because the iPhone5 rollout was faster than expected, revenue growth going forward would be uncharacteristically listless.

What did hew to form was the inability of Congress to meaningfully address the burgeoning budget crisis in Washington.  Sure, agreements were reached on taxation (you’ll pay more) and the debt ceiling (we’ll owe more), but the real work, slashing outlays, was forestalled by lengthening the fuse on sequestration.   Even the automatic cuts codified by the Budget Control Act of 2011 exempt Medicare and Social Security, each responsible for consuming a fifth of federal spending.  Interest payments, once rates rise from these Bernankein depths, could easily swallow another 15%.  Republicans, despite their parsimonious rhetoric, want to radically scale back any cuts to the Pentagon, despite the fact that we spend more on “defense” than China, Russia, France, Japan, India and the U.K. combined.  And to what end?  We just wasted more time in Afghanistan and Iraq than we spent in both World Wars and essentially got our asses kicked by a bunch of seventh-century throwbacks wearing robes and sandals, armed with little more than duct tape and abandoned munitions.  Perhaps we could have done a better job of shooting jihadists if we had surreptitiously lured Al Qaeda into a movie theater (by showing Leni Riefenstahl and Mel Gibson films) or gulled the Taliban into attending an elementary school (to ostensibly prevent female students from learning) because we Americans are practically experts at killing in those milieux.

But then again, who needs terrorists when we’ve got Boeing to threaten our air safety?  And the government concurs.  To wit: just as the FAA grounded the entire fleet of 787 Dreamliners, the TSA is removing all controversial “naked body scanners” from U.S. airports because, according to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, “ a concealed weapon is no match for a GS Yuasa lithium-ion battery in terms of bringing down our commercial aircraft.”   Production glitches, electrical fires and fuel leaks have continuously plagued Boeing’s bellwether offering, necessitating a handful of emergency landings and prompting suspicion that Yuasa was awarded the custom battery contract as a quid pro quo for securing orders from ANA and Japan Airlines.

Yet the mainstream media barely mentions such threats to the commonweal.  Rather, it is obsessed with Manti Te’o’s fictional girlfriend, incessantly combing over every phone call and e-mail in order to determine who said what to whom.  Yet I can’t for the life of me understand why this is newsworthy; my cousin Andy has been engaged in Internet relations with dozens of imaginary paramours ever since he dropped out of Dartmouth.  And other than his monthly Spankwire bill, it’s not really material.

With all the pomp and lip-syncing of the inauguration behind us, we can return our focus to President Obama’s obstructionist foil on the Hill, namely Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).  The House leader, to refresh, sports an iconic perma-tan that stubbornly confounds even the most seasoned beltway pundits.  Is it merely another manifestation of Mr. Boehner’s compulsive, nay, addictive, personality (recall: chain smoking, alcoholism)?  I think not.  I believe it is a feeble and disturbing attempt by the congressman to “blackify” himself.  (It would register as far less feeble were Mr. Boehner to sport an Afro and tracksuit instead of mirroring Don Draper.)  You see, despite ample evidence to the contrary, my hunch is that the Speaker is more cunning and acute that he is given credit for.  He is trying to capitalize on the fact that African-Americans, a half-century after Gov. George Wallace (R-AL) personally barred the doorway of Foster Auditorium, now receive preferential treatment.  Rather than resorting to reverse-discrimination lawsuits likeFisher v. University of Texas or Ricci v. DeStefano, he has decided to (clumsily) infiltrate the other side.

And who could blame him?  Ray Lewis is lauded as he prepares for his Super Bowl swan song despite presiding over a double murder.  Lance Armstrong, by way of contrast, has become a pariah for simply engaging in the same behavior as every other elite cyclist.  And now the International Cycling Union (which itself faces allegations of covering up unfavorable test results) has partnered with the World Anti-Doping Agency to offer clemency to every other rider on the planet in exchange for testimony related to blood doping and steroid use.   In simple terms, I, like Mr. Boehner, have no ambition to trade lives with Sugar Bear.  But that Shawty Lo, with all them baby mommas, now that shit be poppin’.

The Great Flood

greatflood In my last Skewer, I Like Rape, I expressed dismay that some redneck preacher hadn’t yet blamed Superstorm Sandy on gays and liberals.  Well, but a scant few hours later, Internet pastor John P. McTernan averred that Sandy is God’s retribution against sodomites and their left-wing brethren who have abandoned Israel.  Citing Obama’s support of marriage equality, McTernan railed, “God is systematically destroying America [because] Obama is 100 percent behind the Muslim Brotherhood which has vowed to destroy Israel and take Jerusalem. Both candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda.” As for Romney, McTernan expounded, “Yes, he is a big time pro-homosexual supporter to the point he will keep open homosexuality in the military; he wants homosexuals in the Boy Scouts; and he wants more open homosexuals in the Republican Party.”  Reading between the lines, one can infer that McTernan believes the Catholic Church needs no assistance from the GOP when it comes to filling its cassocks with knob jockeys and poo pushers.

Upstate New York rabbi Noson Leiter chimed in as well, describing the monstrous storm as “divine justice” for lower Manhattan, which he branded “one of the national centers for homosexuality.”  “The Lord will not bring another flood to destroy the entire world,” Leiter explained, “but he can punish particular areas with that flood, and if we look at the same-gender-marriage recognition movement that’s occurring, that’s certainly a message for us to learn.”

As Hamlet’s Player Queen famously allows, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”  Indeed.  What are the odds, then, these two are packing fudge faster than Lucy and Ethel on a conveyor belt?  We can but wait for the hand of God to reveal His truth.

 

I Like Rape

ILike Last month, a Houston police officer shot and killed a mentally ill wheelchair-bound double amputee after the man brandished a pen.   While no images of the incident are available, one can merely review the first presidential debate to get a sense of the lopsided nature of the slaughter.  Bordering on a sacrificial offering, apologists offered myriad excuses for Mr. Obama’s gelded performance – his arrogance, his wedding anniversary, Denver’s altitude – though, to me he looked remarkably like that girl my roommate Todd roofied in Vegas during Spring Break.  But don’t worry about Kimberly, or whatever her name was, because according to Rep. Todd Aiken (R-MO), an unwanted pregnancy would be “really rare.”  “If it’s a legitimate rape,” Aiken expounded, “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”  Trust me, this rape was nothing if not legitimate, but still, even given the way off chance that any fertilized ova eschewed Mitt Romney’s offer of self-deportation and fugitively burrowed into Kimberly’s decidualized uterine wall, there remains a silver lining.  And I don’t mean the drug’s amnesiac effects.  According to Indiana Republican senatorial candidate Richard Murdock, having sex against your will is a blessing: “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, it is something that God intended to happen.”  So, please, don’t regard Todd as a sexual predator, rather think of him as some kind of missionary.

Admittedly, parturition isn’t the only hazard of unprotected sex.  There’s a whole gamut of STDs just waiting to trip you up.  Even professionals are at risk.  To wit: San Fernando’s entire porn industry ground to a halt after it was revealed that prolific adult film star Mr. Marcus contracted syphilis on set and subsequently altered his industry-required STD test so that he could keep performing.  And for those who think oral sex provides a safer alternative, think again.  Scientists in Japan have discovered a new and incurable strain (H041) of gonorrhea.  The genetically mutated Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which readily blooms in the back of the throat, developed immunity against cephalosporins (the last antibiotics still effective against the infection) by incorporating DNA from other microbes extant in the pharynx.

So maybe, after all is considered, Catholic priests have got it right:  Either remain celibate or bugger little boys before their scoutmasters can get to them.  Which, according to documents released last week in Portland, is no easy task.  The so called “perversion files” show twenty years of systematic enabling of 1,247 perpetrators.  In one instance, a Boy Scouts of America executive wrote that despite admission of “acts of perversion with several troop members… I would like to let this case drop,” colorfully adding, “If it don’t stink, don’t stir it.”   Which is wholly illogical: how are you supposed to discern if a tenderfoot’s bung hole is truly rank without sticking your finger up there?

Yet there are larger issues at play.  In fact, the infallibility of the Catechism itself is in grave doubt after an ancient Coptic text surfaced in which Jesus refers to “my wife.”  Dr. Karen L. King, a chair-holder at the Harvard Divinity School, opined that the papyrus fragment is consistent with texts from fourth-century Egypt.  “It’s obviously an important find,” noted Carl R. Holliday, theology professor at Emory University, before admonishing “all scholars to be really cautious about how we proceed.”   As a sidebar, Donald Trump has offered to give Jesus $5 million in return for a copy of his marriage license.

Perhaps it is most surprising that Rick Perry and the Christian right haven’t taken to the airwaves, blaming hurricane Sandy on all the gays and liberals inhabiting the Eastern seaboard.  Notably, the exact moment Sandy was forming in the Caribbean, a federal appeals court in New York ruled – as had the First Circuit in Boston – that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional.  America’s version of the Pope, Chick-Fil-A president Dan T. Cathy, you may recall, eerily forewarned of the devastation visited upon the Jersey shore and lower Manhattan when he declared back in July, “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’ “  To be honest, I thought we were in the clear when the company’s Vice President of Public Relations Don Perry was felled by a heart attack soon thereafter, but now I’m not so sure.

And like many left-wingers, I decided to boycott chicken and eat more fish as a means of protest. Until, of course, I learned that a worker at a Bumble Bee tuna processing plant had been cooked to death in an industrial oven.  An OSHA spokesman called the accident a “horrendous tragedy,” but quickly noted that cans of white albacore produced on the fateful shift were still 100% “dolphin safe.”

Casting the Big Apple as some modern day Sodom or Gomorrah does seem farfetched until you consider that NYPD officer Gilberto Valle had planned to kidnap, cook and eat 100 women, many of whom he had actively spied on.  Regarding one potential victim, he wrote, “I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus… cook her over a low heat and keep her alive as long as possible… She does look tasty, doesn’t she?”  I don’t know, Gil, but maybe if God really wanted you to eat her, she would have been born as a corned beef sandwich.

Perhaps, in the end, God set out to punish Dinesh D’Souza, the evangelical scholar who attacked the President in “2016: Obama’s America.” D’Souza was forced to resign as president of a New York Christian college in the wake of allegations of marital infidelity.  In his time off, the Bombay-born author will append his 2007 bookWhat’s So Great About Christianity with a deeply personal chapter entitledWere I Muslim, I’d be Stoned to Death.