Man, I love them Americans. They feel so strongly about entertaining the rest of us with their comedic stylings, and we are all in their debt for keeping us laughing. The chutzpah, the testicular fortitude that they collectively show, out there on the world stage, walking the tightrope between hilarious self-parody and a collapse into a light-gobbling singularity whose gravitational gradient is so steep that even irony cannot escape. Bravo, I say!
The tension they so skillfully build in all the rest of us who hang on every faux-drunken swerve and stumble of their political machine is breathtaking. Those rapscallions. Teetering up there on the democracy highwire, introducing ramshackle, insecure electronic voting systems built on Microsoft™ Access© while they so nobly and selflessly impose American freedom and democracy on the Afghanis and Iraqis? Oh, eek, I can't watch! Putting their dear leader up there on stage to praise the 10 million voters registered in Afghanistan, when only 9 million are eligible? The showmanship is breathtaking, and The Funny is debilitating.
Trotting out a frothing villain like Zell Miller to inflame the stupid, while retaining the option of distancing yourself ('He's not a Republican!') should the spin from the assembled stenographers of the press turn ugly? Pure comedy gold! Did you see the look on that old bastard's face when he felt the carpet being pulled out from under him? Classic, backslappin' American pie hijinks!
Oh, you wacky yank bastards, how I love that you'd totter so close to the abyss to entertain us all. I wake up each morning frothing in my urgency to fire up my old PC and find out what new japery you might have unleashed.
The subtleties of the ways your leaders use words, my friends, while merely appearing to wield them like a simpleton's club, claiming that they 'don't do nuance'... simply magnificent. The way that you can collectively turn on an ironic dime, and allow a man whose family connections excused him from serving his country to shine the character assassination jocularity spotlight on a man who actually did. And the way that that fellow and his supporters let their foes just do it. Oh, it's belly-laughin' time, right there!
You Americans kill me. No really, you do. Not as dead as the 10,000 (30,000?) Iraqis, or the 3000 Afghanis, or the 1000 Americans, or the 100 'coalition of the willing' (oh, dear, that's a nugget of comedy pyrite there, too) members. (And never mind those 50,000 Komedy Korpses in the Darfur. They're not dead from the hilarity apoplexy!)
A pretend cowboy President whose horses are rented? A constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage in a nation where half of all marriages end in divorce? An inner powerbroker circle of oil company gassholes and oil prices at all-time highs? A leader who claims to receive instructions from his god (or from 'beyond the stars', whatever that means), making offhand remarks about crusades? Invading a country that posed no threat, while the Norks built more nukes and threaten to turn Seoul into a lake of fire? Talking about corporate responsibility and pumping a few billion into your vice-president's old company? Contracting out your warfare needs to the lowest (or best-connected) bidder? Running a gulag in Cuba, of all places? Torturing children in Iraq while proudly (if spuriously) proclaiming 'no child left behind' back home? Reducing the taxes of the richest, then making populist proclamations like 'there's no point taxing the rich because they just dodge their tax bill anyway'? Osama bin who?
Your A-material kills, my friends. You rock.
You gotta take your show on the road.

anne said
September 6, 2004 9:18 PM
stavrosthewonderchicken said
September 6, 2004 10:23 PM
arto said
September 7, 2004 9:04 AM
dg said
September 9, 2004 7:19 PM
Ian said
September 11, 2004 3:18 PM
mike said
September 14, 2004 7:36 AM
stavrosthewonderchicken said
September 14, 2004 8:21 AM
Jon Husband said
September 19, 2004 3:18 AM
Pukster said
October 10, 2004 10:58 PM