Thanks to the readers who wrote over the last
week to enlighten me about the many Talking Animals of the Bible. Not to mention
the talking animals in Milton, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Judaic apocrypha.
Since I have been mocking the dingbat beliefs of creationists lately I thought it only fair to expose some of my own dodgier convictions. Plus I’ve been angling for a way to get my Dick Cheney theory into print for months now. I genuinely believe in each of these crackpot theories. Permit me, like a creepy guy sitting next to you on the bus, to discourse upon each of them in turn and at length.
Crackpot Theory #1: George Bush’s story about giving up drinking is
too neatly and implausibly constructed: supposedly he quit on his 40th birthday
and found Jesus. Period. This is not how these things typically happen, and,
more importantly, just quitting without going into some sort of recovery program
is not really sobriety—the President is what they call a “dry
drunk.” More likely, I think, he solved his drinking problem in the
same trademark method he uses to solve all other problems—he lied about
it. I mean, think about it: choked on a pretzel? This is such a dumb, embarrassing
story that you’d invent another story to cover it up, unless the real
story was even more embarrassing, so potentially damaging that you’d
invent a cover story so embarrassing that no one would ever suspect it of
being a cover story. (However, a disclaimer: it was not George Bush who was
injured in drunken lightsaber horseplay. It was me.)
Crackpot Theory #2: Read Mark Crispin Miller’s book Fooled Again
for a full examination of the evidence that the election was rigged. I remember
raising this question on the road with my colleagues on the Laugh While You
Can tour back in April; did they think the Republicans had rigged the election?
They were both hesitant, hedged their answers for fear of seeming like paranoid
left-wing conspiracy cranks, but finally they sheepishly confessed that, although
there was no hard evidence, yeah, they kind of believed so. My own reasons
for thinking so are based on my understanding of the Bush administration’s
mentality; secretive, contemptuous of the people, hostile to democracy, concerned
above all else with holding, consolidating, and expanding their power. No
fucking way were they going to take even the smallest, most marginal risk
of losing this election. Everyone knew it was going to be close. You think
they would leave it up to the Americanelectorate, for whom they have never
shown the slightest trust or inclination to permit to interfere in their governance?
The company that manufactured the voting machines, Diebold, is owned by a
Republican campaign donor who publicly promised to do everything in his power
to deliver the election to Bush. There were no paper ballots, no way of monitoring
or double-checking the accuracy of the results. Exit polls all showed that
Kerry would win. You figure it out. We are living in a dystopian parallel
universe, like the one in Star Trek where everyone wears daggers and Mr. Spock
has a goatee. In the real America no one is debating whether torture is wrong,
the government responded swiftly and efficiently to Katrina, and George and
Mr. Cheney are hosting a cooking show. Thanks to humor consultant Boyd for
help on that panel, and to the invaluable Joy of Cooking for information on
soufflés.
Finally, my pet theory, Crackpot Theory #3: the invasion of Iraq is all about
Dick Cheney’s heart condition. Hear me out here. It is well documented
that people who have had heart attacks and/or open-heart surgery very often
then suffer episodes of clinical depression afterward. The reasons are obvious;
it’s a confrontation of one’s own mortality, an existential shock
that often precipitates major personality changes. A sane, decent person (fig.1,
my friend Jim, who did not require bypass surgery but did have a heart attack
last April and is a new man these days) might resolve to worry less about
trivial things like work and money and devote more time and attention to the
people they really love. Because Dick Cheney is neither sane nor decent, mentally
warped and morally stunted, he decided that his great achievement, his gift
to humanity, his lasting monument in human history, would be the invasion
of Iraq. Cheney suffered his first heart attack in 1978, when he was 37, and
underwent quadruple bypass surgery in 1988. Friends and confidantes of Dick
Cheney have repeatedly described his monomaniacal obsession with Iraq as being
“like a fever.” His old friend and colleague Brent Scowcroft said
of him, “I don’t know him anymore.” And by all accounts
it’s Cheney who pushed insistently and unrelentingly for invasion throughout
the buildup to war. I’m sure there is a delicate protocol in the Bush
White House whereby the idiot boy king is carefully allowed to believe he
is making all the decisions himself, but I’m also sure that, like a
rube being taken in by a card trick, he is presented with a narrow, pre-selected
range of options and subtly directed toward the one he’s supposed to
pick. It’s documented that he makes his final decisions—including
the decision to invade Iraq--only after meeting with Cheney alone. I’m
convinced that 2000 Americans and, by the President’s own conservative
estimate, 30,000 Iraqis—that’s ten times the number of Americans
killed on 9/11—have died for no reason other than that a sick, frightened
old man who was too cowardly to go to war himself years ago is afraid of dying
as the inept, forgettable technocrat he is and always has been. He is suffering
delusions of grandeur, dreams of being the architect of a great foreign policy,
founder of a New American Century. I say his motives are no different from
those of ancient kings who had all their wives and servants buried along with
them, or those dirtbags who go on shooting sprees at work before blowing their
own brains out. He’s just scared to go out alone.
My other crackpot theories: Alito will prove to be a Fundamentalist authoritarian
hack out to protect the civil liberties of zygotes and reinstate the Divine
Right of Kings. The N.S.A. is regularly spying not just on suspected terrorists
and their associates but on dissident groups, antiwar activists, environmentalists,
socialists, Democrats, journalists, and anyone else they don’t like
the looks of. Nobody in power actually gives a shit about the state of public
education. If Pakistan’s military junta is ever overthrown by an Islamic
coup, we will nuke them within a week. The Chinese will get back to the moon
before we do. They will be the next major world power, but I’m still
rooting for Brazil anyway, since they like to party and wear thongs and are
not xenophobic fascists. We should not forget about the Russians. Industrial
society as we know it will collapse within our lifetimes, either because of
global warming or oil depletion. People are getting noticeably stupider. Everything
is getting worse, except for stadium seating in theaters, which is unfortunately
cancelled out by the ads before previews. The Big Lebowski is all about Vietnam.
Pluto is a planet no matter what anyone says. There are sea monsters.