| “Welcome to Lucha Libre Night at the Taco Bell Arena in Chihuahua, Mexico. I’m Edificio Del Huevo, your color commentator, and I’ll be assisted by six-time Mexican female mud wrestling champion, Rosita La Chingada.” “¡Hola amigos!” “We’ll be reporting on the hugely anticipated grudge match tonight between Mexican champion Comandante Marco and his American rival, El Grande Bush. There’s a lot at stake in this battle for North American supremacy, wouldn’t you say, Rosie?” “¡Ooooh sííííí! Mexico has been pushing for a rematch since 1846, when the malditos gringos cabrones put a gun to our heads and made us sign over Texas and California. Now if we want to go there for a vacation we have to swim through rat-infested sewer pipes, and mutherfuckers telling us ‘Speak English! Speak English!’ I like English. I luv it! But I don’t need no gringo mutherfucker breathin’ down my neck. “Anyway, if Comandante Marco wins the match tonight, we gonna get back all our land and then we be telling you cocksuckers to speak Spanish. “I know the first thing I’m gonna do when we take over is to move into the Presidential Suite at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas and go skinny-dipping in the Grand Canal. Show the mutherfuckers what a real Mexican chocha looks like!” “Sounds good to me, Rosie, but as they say ‘Don’t count your huevos rancheros before they’re hatched.’ Remember, the norteamericanos are not going to give up all that loot without a fight. “And as we speak, El Grande Bush is entering the ring. He’s wearing his trademark pink tu-tu, dunce cap and glitter mask, and they’re playing his music, ‘Cheeseburger in Paradise.’” “Hey, Bushie, Bushie! Can we get a word from you for our studio audience?” “Waal, I’d like to address my remarks to the brave men and women fighting in Eye-Rack for the forty-second consecutive year. I honor the sacrifice you are making in the war on terror, and I want you to know that I plan to win tonight so that when you come home you’ll have a home to come home to. “The threat we are facing in this arena here tonight is whether our western states will remain The Home of The Free And The Brave, or are allowed to become an open-air taco stand like the one on Alvarado Street in downtown LA, where the crackheads and stray dogs hang out, behind the convention center.” “How inspiring! What’s your strategy for fighting Comandante Marco?" “I plan to shock and awe him with my lightning speed, twist his head in the ropes and bite his knuckles.” “Excuse me, Ed, cut out that shit. Here comes Mexico’s national hero, Comandante Marco of the Zapatista Revolutionary Army of Chiapas. He looks ready for battle with his headdress of quetzal feathers, jaguar-skin tights and crocodile nose mask. His musical accompaniment is the Mexico City rock band Molotov singing their anthem ''Viva México Cabrones.' Every time I hear that song it brings tears of pride to my eyes, especially the part where they sing ‘No Me Llames Cerdo.’ When I was a leetle girl in the shantytown overlooking the security wall separating Nuevo Laredo from Brownsville, Texas, my mother used to lull me to sleep by singing to me from Molotov’s romantic love song ‘Chinga Tu Madre’, where they sing: Nos vemos Acapulco a la fin de semana Mientras yo cuido à tu hermana Chinga tú chinga tu madre [Ed. See you in Acapulco But first I fuck your sister] “Hey, big boy! You got something to say to your fans?” “Hola, Rosie. I dedicate my life to the glory of Mexico. After I win, not only are we going to reconquer our lost territories, but we are going to sacrifice El Grande Bush on the ancient Mayan altar at Chichen Itzà by ripping out his still beating heart and feeding it to the pirhana fish that swim in the holy cenote. The whole ceremony is going to be filmed by Mel Gibson for his upcoming movie “Jews of The Jungle.” “Sounds great, sweetie. Only how do you plan to vanquish such a great warrior like El Grande Bush?” “I plan to shoot him with a curare-tipped blow dart and then, when he’s paralyzed, I’m going to stomp on his balls.” “And there’s the bell! The two fighters are circling each other warily, looking for an opening, and they are being watched by the masked referee, El Misterioso, who is also wearing a mask. Ed, what do we know about El Misterioso?” “Only that he gained fame as the fiercest lucha libre fighter in South America.” “Wow! Now El Grande Bush leaps forward and head butts Comandante Marco in the chest, but instead of falling onto the mat El Comandante does a backflip, kicking Bush in the face. Bush goes down and Comandante Marco sits on his face, locking him in a French Butt Hold, squeezing the air out of Bush like an Anaconda python between the steel vise grip of his powerful glutes.” “With his last, dying breath Bush reaches between Marco’s legs and manages to insert his two fingers in the man’s nostrils and flip him across the ring like a slingshot. Bush jumps to his feet and delivers a shattering roundkick to the head of El Comandante, who goes flying into El Misterioso who, enraged, punches him in the face. Hey, he’s not supposed to do that. He’s the ref!” “Wait a minute! Now El Misterioso grabs a folding chair and breaks it over the head of El Grande Bush.” “The audience is going berserk. The mariachi band Los Tigres Del Norte has started playing the romantic sentimental love song ‘Volver’, I suppose expressing their wish for a return of Mexico’s northern territories. Meantime, on the American side, Ted Nugent is shooting off machine gun riffs from his guitar. Oh no, that’s not his guitar, it’s a real machine gun! Now gunfire is breaking out all over the place and bullets are flying.” “Comandante Marco and El Grande Bush have recovered from the surprise attack by El Misterioso, and they’re punching the shit out of him in the corner of the ring. They rip off his mask.” “Omigod, it’s Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, and he’s got an oil gusher shooting out of his butt!” “Well, let’s get out of here before the whole place explodes. Reporting to you from Taco Bell Arena, I’m Edificio Del Huevo.” “And I’m Rosita La Chingada…” “Wishing you a big cuevo en el culo, cabrones!” |
CHUCHA LIBRE
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| Saul Bellow once wrote how he was acutely aware, growing up in Chicago, that he was not tough. Chicago is the city of heavenly bruisers, and they are not big on eye contact or the other social niceties. When a man looks you in the eye in Chicago, you know you are in a world of shit. Likewise, Winston Churchill dislocated his shoulder while debarking from a launch in Bombay harbor. Back in those days the technology for mending torn rotator cuffs did not exist and Churchill instead knew he would be permanently disabled, so he henceforth decided to let his brain do the talking instead of his fists. Now, these people were primarily writers and intellectuals, |
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| 200motels NATIONAL AFFAIRS |
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| though Churchill displayed great physical bravery as a news correspondent during the Boer War. They knew that one bright idea was worth a hundred broken noses. Unfortunately, people have not gotten smarter in the modern world, despite all the modern technology, which has brought the wisdom of the ages into our homes with the click of a computer mouse. In fact, mutherfuckers are stupider than ever. The prevailing wisdom seems to be: why do I have to know anything if I can bring it up on the Internet. Bravo! The result is a kind of reverse evolution that produces bigger and bigger idiots with each passing day. A world culture that originally began with great beauties like Helen of Troy, Andromeda and the Goddess Diana of ancient Greek mythology has narrowed to nearly the vanishing point, producing modern abominations like Lindsay Lohan and Brittany Spears, who make Paris Hilton look like a class act by comparison. And reigning over the whole sordid mess is Mr. Dumbass himself, George W. Bush, who single-handedly destroyed the economy, presided over the shambles of Hurricane Katrina and (lest we forget) inspired the current Endless Summer of Iraq, which is due to wind down in 40 or 50 years. Supporters of the Iraq War point to our previous success in South Korea as an example of how a country can be successfully occupied and pacified. To that lot I say, look at a map. Korea is a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water. Once the north was sealed off there were no avenues of infiltration except by sea, and we controlled the seas. All right! I’m not here to play armchair strategist. I had enough of that when I was 12 years old. When I became a man I cast aside childish things, which is what George W. Bush should have done. His father, who was no genius either, had a better grasp of the situation. After expelling Iraq from Kuwait, he stopped at the Iraq border and refused to proceed any further. Clinton also took a soft approach toward Iraq. He enforced an embargo and no-fly zone. Sure, Saddam Hussein was a sneaky prick and he managed to circumvent the embargo by trickery and bribery, but he was essentially painted into a very narrow corner. At this point the reactionary classes said, “Enough is enough. There is too much going on in this country that is outside of our control. The treasury is loaded with surpluses that should be in our pockets and every day that goes by without a war our people are getting soft and our defense industries (of which we are the majority shareholders, naturally) are withering on the vine. We need tax cuts and we need a war. A long war!” The only Republican candidate that they had who didn’t look like a bloated, floating corpse in the New Orleans flood was George Bush, who fit the part perfectly except that he was an absolute moron. But with the kind of money he had and the kind of money he had backing him up, what the fuck does brains have to do with it? A ventriloquist dummy would have served just as well. So the Republicans stole the 2000 election in Florida, where Bush’s brother was governor, and they stole it in the U.S. Supreme Court, where never existed a more revolting collection of desiccated stiffs and political hack attorneys. Anybody who holds that collection of dorks to be sacrosanct needs to be reminded that the U.S. Supreme Court serves at the pleasure of congress, who can change its composition any day of the week by a simple majority vote, same as appointing a federal dog catcher. The Supreme Court is the highest administrative court in the land, but that’s all it is – an administrative court, the same kind you go before to get a ruling on admissibility of evidence in a misdemeanor case or to get a decision on a contested traffic ticket. Most people don’t know this, but the justices are acutely aware of it, and that is why their rulings don’t stray too far from political or social orthodoxy. As one of America’s most astute political analysts, a man named Mr. Dooley who never existed, put it, “The Supreme Court reads the papers.” All the hullabaloo about who will be the decisive vote on the Supreme Court is just so much Three Card Monte to distract the boobs. It ought to be a game show: “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to ‘You Be The Judge,’ where the surviving contestant gets to fill the existing vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. I’m your moderator, former New York State Judge and Westchester County Prosecutor Jeanine Pirro. “As you know, the field has been narrowed to our two last contestants, one of whom will get thrown off the island (Staten Island), and the other of whom will be awarded his/her black robe and gavel. “And our contestants are: Landsdorff Putzl, appeals court judge for the nineth district, the moderate reactionary.” “Howdy, folks!” “And Bluto R. Mahogany, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, the reactionary moderate.” “Hi y’all!” “Landsdorff, we’ll start the questioning with you. What is your position on a woman’s right to choose?” “Waal, I believe that a woman has the right to as many shoes as her closet will hold.” “Now, Bluto, what is your position on medical marijuana?” “I think that those freaks should get off the weed and take oxycontin like the rest of us.” Blah blah blah. Who cares about those jokers anyway? Look at what they did to Clinton, ruling that the phony Paula Jones lawsuit could go forward while he was in office and plunging the country into an idiot show of blowjobs and cum stains on Gap dresses, with the end result that FBI Director Louis B. Freeh ended up devoting the agency’s whole energy to impeaching Clinton while the al-Queda terrorists were practicing crashing into the World Trade Center on flight simulators. Good job there, Lou! Now that the Democrats have regained control of congress and are almost certain to retake the White House next year, if the present composition of the Supreme Court dies not comfortably suit them, they can add a couple of seats and fill them with their own stooges or, better yet, eliminate a couple of judges. “Mr. Thomas, your resumé says that your last job was as a Supreme Court justice. Can you tell me why you were let go?” “I was downsized.” Everybody’s playing fast and loose with the rules. Generally speaking, when a country goes to war it needs to produce a casus belli to satisfy international world opinion that all the savagery and suffering of innocent populations, all the market disruptions and transmigrations of refugees, all the bitter enmities and savage loathings have a factual basis in reality. This Bush attempted to do, citing the yellowcake uranium, the mobile WMD laboratories, Saddam Hussein’s nasty character. The UN turned him down cold and the only allies he was able to bring into the enterprise with him were Tony Blair, for reasons that have yet to be rationally explained; Australia, a country that is still living in the past era of Anglo Saxon triumphalism, Italy under the leadership of Silvio Berlusconi, who always follows the money; and a few tin-pot countries who sent miniscule numbers of troops to the Coalition of The Willing hoping to qualify for foreign aid largess (don’t make me laugh!). Never were more vacuous assertions set forth as reasons for mounting an invasion. Even the Trojan War was at least predicated on the kidnapping of a woman, Helen, who was the consort of Menelas, the king of Greece. This historical incident was dramatized in an allegorical stage play by the illustrious French playwright Jean Giraudot, a diplomat and classically educated intellectual. The play, “La guerre de Troie n’ aura pas lieu,” which became a smash hit when it was presented at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1936, presents the lead-up to the Trojan War with parallel allusions to France as it emerged from World War I and was faced with the prospect of a sequel against a revanchist Germany under the leadership of Adolph Hitler. The play, which is written in modern language, concerns Hector, commander of the victorious Trojan forces against an unnamed enemy, who is aghast to find on the day of his return to Troy a Greek warship commanded by Ulysses moored in the harbor and demanding the return of Helen, who was kidnapped by Hector’s brother, Paris. The Greek ultimatum: return Helen immediately or we will sack Troy. Hector’s war-weariness is reinforced by the prediction of his soothsayer sister, Cassandra, that Troy will be destroyed in any war against the Greeks, and the apprehension of his pregnant wife, Andromache. But there is a large pro-war party of old men and non-combatants who enjoy having the sexy Helen in Troy, and who would rather send the fighting men off to fight a suicidal war against the much more powerful Greeks. All attempts by Hector to explain the reality of the situation to them are scornfully rebuffed. As one old man puts it, “It’s impossible to discuss the concept of honor with these war veterans. They are really abusing the fact that we can’t insult them as cowards.” Even though Paris and Helen have long since tired of each other the inertia of the situation and good sex is keeping them together. Hector finally manages to convince Helen to return on the Greek vessel, but his troubles are far from over because the Greek soldiers who have disembarked are intentionally behaving provocatively. One Greek officer, Oyox, drunkenly insults Hector and Paris and tries to goad Hector into a fight by propositioning his wife, Andromache. Still, Hector, mindful of the calamitous consequences, refuses to rise to the bait. When all else fails, Oyox punches Hector in the face, knocking him down. Still, Hector refuses to react, drawing cries of derision from his own soldiers and sailors. In a face-to-face meeting with Hector, the Greek commander, Ulysses, admits that the retrieval of Helen is just a pretext and the real reason the Greeks desire war is the wealth of Troy’s warehouses and agricultural lands, which the Greeks covet. Hector and Ulysses come to an understanding that will allow Ulysses to leave with Helen, and Ulysses will try to persuade the Greek king, Menelas, not to declare war against Troy. Unfortunately, the brutish Oyox is killed by a gang is killed by a gang of Trojans before he is able to return to the ship, setting off the ineluctable logic of war, Hector is killed by Achilles, Andromache is enslaved and the child of Andromache and Hector is thrown live on Achilles’ funeral pyre. “La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu” is a tragic and prescient stage play, which predicts the inevitable logic of war. The beauty of it is in its hero, Hector, the war hero who abandons his pride and permits himself to be insulted and smacked around in front of his own people by a drunken stooge in a vain attempt to avert a massacre. Compare that with little Bushie, Mr. Mission Accomplished; Mr. Bring'em On, who exhorted the Iraqi insurgency to give us their worst shot, which they did with armor-piercing projectiles and horrific roadside bombs producing scores of thousands of amputees and brain-damaged service personnel, not to mention thousands of cancer and nerve damage cases produced by policing a hideous, filthy toxic wasteland. Bush and Cheney, both Vietnam draft dodgers, callously invented vacuous pretexts for sending American soldiers into a meat grinder and to this day insist on piling more and more bodies into the furnace while all the time inventing new and improved justifications for the senseless waste of American manpower and treasure. The tragedy of our present situation is that our intellectual class has not evolved any artists or writers possessed of the historical depth of culture to define these monstrous realities. |
