THE DAILY TRAVESTY for January 18,
2000
Volume 1, Issue 12
brought to you by B.C.
For those of you who don't know your Vulgate
Bible, the Latin in yesterday's issue was from First Corinthians Chapter 13
verses 4-8. "Caritas" can be translated either as "love" or
"charity."
Love is suffering
Love is kind
it does not envy
it does not parade itself
it is not puffed up
it is not rude
it does not seek its own
it is not provoked
it thinks no evil
it does not rejoice over iniquity
but rejoices in
truth
it bears all things
it believes all things
it hopes all things
it endures all things
Love never fails
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FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND
I dreamt I was walking down the beach with the Goddess. And I looked
back and saw footprints in the sand.
Sometimes there were two pairs of footprints, and sometimes there was only
one.
And I noticed the times when there was only one pair of footprints were my
times of greatest trouble.
So I asked the Goddess, "Why, in my greatest need, did you abandon me?"
She replied, "I never left you. Those were the times when we both
hopped on one foot." And lo, I was really embarrassed for bothering Her with
such a stupid question.
--Carl Muckenhoupt,
without honorary
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YOUR DAILY DOSE OF
PATRIOTISM
A
Letter from the 20th Century to the 21st Century
Sent by Michael
Moore
Dear
Twenty-first Century,
Greetings from the 20th Century! Now, let's
get one thing straight from the beginning: We did the best we could. We
played the hand that was dealt to us, we made our bed then slept in it, and we
loved the one we're with. What else can a century do?
Now it is
your turn, to take over from where we left off. All we ask is that you not
judge us too harshly.
It is true that during the 20th Century we created,
for the first time ever, the means to blow up the entire planet. But, look
at the bright side -- we didn't blow it up! Instead, we used the splitting of
the atom -- and it's cousin, radiation -- to pop our popcorn, illuminate our
wristwatches, and cleanse our food products. Although we have left you
with a few thousand missiles, armed and ready to launch, we're confident you
will figure out some way to either put them to good use, or dispose of them in
their proper recyclable container.
I don't know any nice way to put this
-- and I know it doesn't look good on paper -- but, yes, we did slaughter more
of each other in the 20th Century than in any previous hundred-year
period. You have to admit -- that took some initiative! I mean, to beat
out the bubonic plague century was no easy feat! Even more interesting,
unlike past holocausts, much of the carnage in the 20th Century was initiated
not by heathens and barbarians, but by some of the most intelligent people on
the planet. Danka shein!
But, hey, how 'bout TV! We came up with
that! And frozen foods in a box -- we invented that, too. Don't forget
jumbo jets -- and jumbo shrimp! In the 20th Century, we figured out
how to make ANYTHING jumbo sized! The 20th Century also replaced the
humans who used to help us on the telephone with a robotic voice that sounds
just like, uh... just like anyone!
Did I mention TV? Endless hours
of entertainment, complete with built-in cues so we know when to laugh, and a
jiggly camera so we know when to feel "tension." We even got a whole network on
TV devoted to showing us fast-cutting videos set to music so that -- get this --
we actually KNOW what the performers were thinking when they wrote their
songs! This saved us a lot of time we would have otherwise wasted trying
to use our imagination!
One thing we are confident of is that you will
know our century as the Golden Age of Big Business. It's been an era when
the businessman has come into his own -- and he's ended up owning just about
everything and everyone! The early 1900s got off to a great start. If you
had enough money, you could buy up whatever you wanted, obliterate the
competition, fix prices, and smash unions. True, there were a few of what
we call "speed bumps" along the way. Certain radicals started breaking up
monopolies, got laws passed protecting workers' rights, and actually tried to
hold companies liable for their actions.
Well, there's nothing like a
great depression and a couple of world wars to sober the people up and set them
straight. A few other distractions like a "worldwide communist conspiracy"
and Prozac also helped to pacify the populace.
Did I mention
television?
By century's end, the captains of industry had supplanted
elected governments as the ultimate power. Competition was eliminated,
monopolies reigned, unions were near-extinct, and the citizens stopped
voting. They stopped voting because they figured out that the two
political parties on the ballot were really the same party (though one of
them did seem to have a nicer face!) The two parties were bought and paid for by
the rich, the top one percent of the population which owned about 90% of the
wealth.
So the other 99% of the citizenry decided they had better things to
do with their time than participate in a farce. Farce, a huge hit in the 1800s,
never played well in the 20th Century.
You will probably wonder why,
then, we kept calling our nations "democracies." This is a legitimate
question. One that I wish you would not ask. Unfortunately, we invented
videotape in our century, which means we have left behind many visual images of
our citizens running around all slaphappy saying ridiculously silly things like,
"We are free! Free! Free! Free, I say! We live in a DEMOCRACY!" Please
explain to future generations when they view these tapes that we meant well and
we had to come up with something to justify paying our taxes and sending our
sons off to die for what was never going to be theirs. People in your next
century will ask, incredulously, "What delusional drug were these people on? Not
a single one of their `representatives' represented THEM, for crying out loud!
If the richest one percent had both parties and all the politicians, how in the
hell did everyone else think they were living in a democracy?" Ask them,
please, to go gentle on us -- we know we've made an embarrassing spectacle of
ourselves -- and to resist, as best they can, laughing at us in the same way we
laughed at the last century for using bloodsucking leeches to cure their
sick.
The United States of the 20th Century seemed like an odd duck in
many ways, even though we were the self-declared Leader of the World. With
more wealth and resources than anywhere on earth, we let 40 million of our
people live in poverty -- with 10 million of them suffering from some form of
hunger. About 45 million of our people had no means to health care. No
other industrialized country treated their people in this manner. There
was a higher literacy rate in Cuba than in the USA, more children were immunized
in Jamaica and Kenya than in the USA, kids were better in math in Jordan than in
the USA ... well, after a while, you'd think someone would have asked the
Americans, "Just what in God's name makes you people #1?"
I'll tell you
what our secret was. French fries. NOBODY made 'em like we
did. You could even go into an American-owned establishment, like
McDonald's in Paris or Munich, and they STILL didn't taste like they tasted
here! Mmmm. Just writing about it makes me want to "Biggie Size It" right now!
Personally, I think it was the lard -- we just didn't have any kerpunctions
about slapping in as large a chunk as we can fit in the fryer. Sure, we
may have ended up a bit "larger" than other humans around the world, but do you
want the Earth's Only Remaining Superpower to look all weak and scrawny?
And consider how we adapted to our new size (nearly 30% bigger than we were in
1900) -- our American ingenuity led us to build huge automobiles called
"S.U.V.s," our movie theaters now have "stadium seating," and nobody shops for a
small size in the men's section at Wal-Mart. No wonder foreigners and terrorists
were so jealous of us!
The other thing that kept America ruling the world
for the latter half of the century was our arsenal of weapons -- and I mean the
ones in our bedrooms! Two hundred million adults with 240 million
registered guns! And just to show everyone how proficient we became with
these firearms, we killed 35,000 of EACH OTHER, every single year, with our OWN
guns, proving to the world that we will shoot at anything coming our way.
You have to admit, that's quite a sacrifice just to show how brave and
determined we are. Or let me put it another way -- you want to kill a
Beatle in America? No problem! Easy as saying, "I'll take that Magnum in
the window!" You want to kill a Beatle in Britain? BIG problem --
they don't let their citizens, even the deranged ones, own a handgun! Not
even for sport! So, if you want to off someone in merry ol' England, you have to
use a damn kitchen knife. No wonder they lost their friggin' empire!
So
as we enter the new century and the new millennium, let us give ourselves a pat
on the back (even though the new century and the new millennium don't actually
begin for another year -- but who gives a rat's ass! If WE say it's the
new millennium, IT IS, and if WE say the water is safe to drink, IT IS, and if
we say Bob Hope was funny, well, dammit, we're Number One, so we can say
whatever we very well please! Sure half the world still doesn't have safe
drinking water, but are you people in the 21st Century going to look at the
glass as half-empty or half-full, 'cause I'm a half-full kind of guy myself, and
my glass of water came right out of a plastic bottle from France and it looks
pretty darn clean to me!).
Yes, you, the people of the 21st
Century, can send man, or woman, to Mars, thanks to us and a number of our
missing NASA landers. You can find the cure for cancer, thanks to us
giving you so many reasons to. And you can figure out how to make these damn
cell phones keep a signal for more than 30 seconds. Of course, that will
cut into the phone companies' profits (they've made billions off the most
overheard line of the late 1900s: "Hello?... Hello?... Hello?... Can you hear
me?... Hello?... Oh, there you are! Uh... Hello?... Hello?... Dammit, I lost
him!").
Profit was the reason to get out of bed in the 20th
Century. Success was measured by how much cash we made. By the end of our
century, the biggest financial rewards went to the people who sat around all day
playing with their money, moving it around in one big guessing game. If you were
a good guesser, you made more money. Gone were the days when you made your
money from your hard work, your ingenuity, that new invention you created. You
were no longer rewarded for discovering cures or solar systems or recognized for
your generosity. A person's worth was determined by how they did with
their mutual funds as opposed to how they did with their kids. A candidate
was guaranteed a public office if he had raised the most money, as opposed to
winning that office by raising the REAL issues and gaining the public's
trust. A movie was no longer judged on its artistic merit or its ability
to entertain, challenge, or lift the human spirit-- all that mattered was who
was #1 at the box office.
I know I keep mentioning that term "Number
One." It seems to have been an obsession of ours. Maybe you can correct
that in the next 100 years. Like, how about giving some credit to the SECOND and
THIRD richest men in the world? Whoever hears about them? All we
heard about was Bill Gates, Bill Gates, Bill Gates and how his wealth "was more
than the combined assets of the poorest 100 million Americans!" Now, if we would
have just paid more attention to the 2nd and 3rd richest men, their combined
wealth with Mr. Gates was more than the combined gross domestic product of the
bottom 146 countries! How's that for some numbers? Try to top those in the
Twenty-first Century!
Hmm, maybe you will.
Here's to the next 100
Years -- may you take now what we have given you.
And forget most of
it. Except the french fries and Gandhi and Dr. King.
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As always, if you would like to contribute anything to this publication,
your work or not-your-work, in the form of a story, poem, quotation, essay,
letter, opinion, satire, monologue, statement, speech, holy transmission,
prayer, curse, or any other form under the sun, whether or not it has a
name, please feel free to do so. We only ask that it be relatively
SHORT. We also reserve the right to edit your submission, but we promise
to let you and everyone else know
if we do (and we don't intend to).