CitizenTed

Who can forget America's sweetheart?

Back in 2004, a young heartbreaker named Lynndie England became world famous for photos of her humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

The Abu Ghraib photos shone a light on American policy regarding “enhanced interrogation techniques”. We have always portrayed ourselves as the Good Guys, the shining light of Liberty in a dark world of oppressive governments and gulag nightmares. These photos made it quite clear that we had joined the ranks of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and wartime Japan as employers of cruelty and barbarity.

The whole world hated Lynndie England. But I didn’t.

I didn’t see a heartless monster. I saw a stupid girl doing exactly what her superiors demanded. And that Chain of Cruel Command went all the way up to Dick Cheney and George Bush.

A-ten...HUT!

Let’s look at some facts:

- Barbaric abuse of prisoners was going on at Abu Ghraib long before Lynndie England got there;
- She was neither a trained guard nor an MI expert – she was a volunteer reservist.
- She was a low-level administrator at Abu Ghraib, not a jailer. It was Graner who convinced her to “join in the fun”;
- The staff all admitted that the inhumane treatment was conducted on orders from above – the CIA and the Army.

The “just following orders” defense is a murky subject. To some degree, it’s  valid defense. Should we blame rank-and-file guards at the gulags for Stalin’s homicidal purges? On the other hand is the assertion that if Stalin’s gulag guards had disobeyed orders and made a big public stink, that maybe the pogroms would have ceased earlier.

If a gulag is a gulag, is a despot a despot?

It may be true that refusing to obey barbaric orders is an admirable stance, but the “we’re all stewards of ethical behavior” maxim is easy to espouse when it isn’t your career, your body and your family that are at risk.

So, is Lynndie England a calculating, diabolical witch or a just a stupid little twat?

My vote is the latter.

If she, Graner and the others are morally culpable, then Cheney etal. should serve life in prison. But he won’t. There’s a saying in the military: “Shit rolls downhill”. Rank-and-file soldiers have been eating the shit from generals and kings since the Sumerian wars 4500 years ago. Leaders were responsible for victories while “poor morale” was responsible for defeats.

That leaves us with little Lynndie England, unwitting wingman for an administration that tossed her onto the scrapheap without one iota of regret.

Another stooge in the vaudeville of war.

Many years ago, I visited a parody site from a guy named M. Spaff Sumsion. See it here. I thought ole’ Spaff was pretty funny. One of his songs was “Everyone Knows It’s Lynndie”, sung to the tune of The Association’s Everyone Knows It’s Windy. I thought it was freaking hilarious and I asked Spaff for permission to score it, which he granted.

His link to my music is down (fixed soon, I hope) so I decided to embed it here along with a link to his lyrics page.

And so, without further ado…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Lyrics found here.

If my audio link fails to work, please try another browser; Firefox is behaving badly.

God bless the USA!

It has recently come to my attention that I am not a typical American.

People have pointed out that my penchant for critical thought, my tendency toward caution, my atheism and my eclectic tastes in art, literature, film and music make me more of a stinking European elitist than a hardscrabble American pioneer.

Normally, I’d just accept the fact that I am probably a European trapped in an American’s body. I’d look for a surgeon who could outfit me with a mock turtleneck, a sharp brown blazer and some Italian shoes. I’d adopt a snide attitude and insist on taxing my own income at 38%.

But godammit, I want to be an American!

Lady Liberty shines her tired, aching torch.

People all over the world would give their eye teeth to come to America. Some would even stab me for my passport if they could. With all this zeal for everything American, who am I to deny my own heritage? Who am I to spit in the eye of the nation that whelped me?

I owe America a lot.  It educated me and gave me the opportunity to become truly great. Of course, I blew that opportunity, but that’s my fault – not America’s.

So, rather than make flippant hipster put-downs of this great nation, I have decided to join it.

Meet Citizen Ted: All-American!

Love it or leave it, you fucking commie!

Pride.

To begin, I am hereby an unrepentant nationalist. Here in America, we call ourselves “patriots” because it sounds more American and less scary-fascist-nutball. As a patriot, I promise to forget everything I’ve learned about geography and world history. And American history.

Once I’m free of the shackles of knowledge that weigh down the shoulders of commie intellectuals I will be able to see the  American tree, and not the forest of details that seeks to confuse me with its proofs and subtleties. EVIL DEMON FOREST I REBUKE YOU!

For me, not only is the USA #1, but I don’t even give a shit about who thinks they’re #2 and #3. Those guys are fucking losers. If they were any good they’d be knocking on my door. What do I hear? Nothing! That’s right, you pussies. Enjoy loserdom.

It's all about family.

Family.

Now that America is #1 again, it’s time to pay some attention to the next song on the All-American hit parade: family.

I’m single and don’t have any kids. In  America, this is the moral equivalent of squatting over the Constitution and letting loose a splatter of diarrhea. If you aren’t married with kids (and occasionally cheating on your wife), you may as well be teaching a cultural relativism class at Trotsky Community College.

Unfortunately, this dive into Americana is something I can’t do alone. If any of my ex-girlfriends or any desperate female strangers are reading this, please drop me a note. We need to get married and start popping out some over-indulged brats ASAP. We’ll have a nice Baptist wedding and a fabulous reception at the local Radisson hotel’s meeting room, then zip away for a honeymoon at Disneyworld. There, in  the still night of the Disneyland hotel, we’ll conceive young Dakota Dylyn. We’ll make sure he has every distraction available. We’ll also make sure he isn’t poisoned by the public school system and MSNBC.

A chip off the old block!

Of course, during the pregnancy we’ll become so entranced by our magical mysterious bay-bee (an occurrence which has never been matched in the history of mankind) that we’ll become die-hard pro-lifer’s. Your big belly will make a nifty resting spot for the “BABY KILLERS BURN IN HELL” protest sign.

Which brings us to…

Jesus rocks!

Religion.

78% of all Americans identify as Christians. The rest are all lying, hell-bound infidels or conniving, hate-filled secularists. If you think for one moment that any Real American™ could be a non-Christian, you are either tripping hard on nutmeg or you’re Satan. One of the two.

No, to be American is to be a Christian. Period. Thus, I plan to join the craziest, noisiest fundamentalist church I can find. I’ll “AMEN!” enthusiastically at the preacher as he exhorts me to deny evolution, vote Republican and devalue everyone outside the walls of the church.

We’ll all wave our arms around while a bunch of Christian rockers perform a set of agonizingly derivative rock ditties peppered artlessly with  “Lord”, “my Savior”, and “Jesus”. I may have to choke back vomit at these gigs, but it’s worth it if I hope become a full-fledged American again.

4 hours of this crap is the minimum daily dosage.

Television.

Since I don’t watch TV, I will have to get a full cable TV package with 300 channels of the crappiest programming imaginable. This may prove to be the hardest trial of them all in my bid to become a Real American™. I really hate TV. But if I’m going to re-join the national dialog, it will have to be via Fox News, Law & Order and Dancing With the Stars.

Not only will I become more conversant about the critical issues of the day at the water cooler, but I’ll be able to fritter away innumerable hours that were previously lost to reading, writing, playing guitar and enjoying the outdoors. This is an American win/win.

Just trying to get from Point A to point B.

Transportation.

Good-bye Subaru, hello GM! Sure, my Subaru is great on gas, nimble in the snow and totally reliable. But it’s Japanese, for God’s sake. It just won’t do. Real Americans™ buy Real American™ cars (built in Mexico). And that means General Motors. Ford is almost American. They have invested too much in quality and reliability and they will continue to suffer for it.

No, it’ll be GM for me. Since the Hummer is gone, I’m thinking the GMC Yukon XL.

Stupid, crappy and wasteful - behold the Yukon XL!

Oh, what fun we’ll have driving 0.4 miles to and from the grocery store to pick up toilet paper or a quart of milk! We can intimidate those faggy bicyclists and blunder into the shopping mall like a Bulgarian freighter. I’ll put Old Glory on the rear window and a Chinese “Support the Troops” ribbon magnet on the rear. This will let everyone know that I have avoided any attempt at educating myself and rely fully on AM talk radio for my political insights - just like everybody else!

At home or on the road - Americans do it with style!

Fashion.

OK, I admit this won’t be a big stretch for me. I’m not a clothes hound. However, to be fully and truly American, I have to bring it down a few more notches. This means investing in white socks and white sneakers, two things I do not possess. I’m also partial to polypro and fleece, which will have to be sacrificed to make way for cotton T-shirts and idiotic short pants.

The way I see it, this hurdle won’t be too hard. Everything I need is under one roof at WalMart, and driving there in my new Yukon XL will let everyone know that I may be shopping WalMart but I’m not slumming. Which brings us to the final makeover in the Citizen Ted conversion plan:

Money is EVERYTHING.

Money.

Not just possession of it, but downright worship of it. Right now I’m just not motivated by money. I live humbly, I have no debt and I save money sensibly and cautiously. This is 100% wrong and will have to be reversed. Real Americans™ are obsessed with projecting an image of wealth. Not sophistication – just wealth. Enormous fiberboard McMansions, laughably awful leather furniture, heaps of overpriced gadgets, over-stuffed refrigerators and (of course) the 2010 GMC Yukon XL.

Since few Americans possess any real wealth, managing debt is the name of the game. One must purchase on credit only those items that make you appear better off. It’s OK to stretch this credit to ludicrous extremes, but you should never go bankrupt (that’s what LOSERS do). Your house should absorb about 70-80% of your income. Everything else is financed on revolving credit so the remaining 20-30% is swallowed up by credit card payments.

This is called “The American Way of Life” and it is a sacred honor and duty to abide these rules.

The way I see it, with these goals in mind I should become a Real American™ by Q2 2011. Check in with me then and we’ll see how well my transformation is coming along.

Before........................................After

Not every man shines in a suit and tie.

There’s something compelling about a guy who looks great in a suit and tie. It’s not how they look, necessarily. It’s not the custom tailoring or the square jaw. It’s their comportment that makes them look good. It’s they way they move, their mannerisms, their confidence and their comfort.

I just can’t pull it off. I don’t have “it”. I own a few suits and a bunch of ties, but I always look like “a guy in a suit and tie”. I don’t emit an air of ease and confidence like I was born to wear this stuff. That is the domain of the truly great suit-and-tie guys.

The following list leans heavily towards the classic French and Italian looks of the 1960′s and away from the idiotic wide lapels and dinner napkin ties of the 1970′s. This is because the former is brilliant and captivating and the latter is laughable, ugly and stupid.

Here we go…

10. Gordon Gekko

Greed is good - and so is the tailoring of this jacket!

Michael Douglas isn’t a great suit-and-tie guy, but when he portrayed Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, he apparently took a crash course in being smooth and commanding. Despite the handicap of having to wear some truly awful designs and cuts, he exuded the granite charm of a wealthy egotist brilliantly. You could almost smell the cologne when he enters a room.

9. Christian Bale

Come closer; I have something for you...

Sometimes a man is so goddamn magnetic that he defines his clothes. Christian Bale is like that. He’s not a natural suit-and-tie guy, but give him a nicely tailored suit and a pneumatic bolt gun and watch out!  Bale defines the “too sexy for my shirt” kind of presence that almost precludes him from this list. No one wants to concede that a handsome face is necessary for a great suit-and-tie guy, but Bale is proof that winsomeness is part of the deal when it comes to owning a look.

8. David Bowie

You will never be this cool, so give up.

While best known for dressing like an androgynous freak, Bowie has pulled off the suit-and-tie for four fucking decades and done it with casual ease. This chameleon has walked across stages and hotel lobbies in skinny ties and wide ties, skinny pants and parachute pants and has never shuffled even one step. The man glides effortlessly like PG Wodehouses’s Jeeves. I would even say that his command of the suit-and-tie is even more outrageous than his skin-tight spaceman suits. Bowie is totally cool. You aren’t, so pay the man some respect.

7. Peter Sellers

Some men are born to it.

The greatest comedic actor of all time, period. But unlike most jokers, Sellers wore a suit like it was his own skin. From the British checks in the image above to the silly getups of Jaques Clouseau to the prim fastidiousness of Chance in the film Being There, the man of a thousand characters could portray them all smartly in a suit that looked like he’d been wearing it all his life. There will never be another like him.

6. Bryan Ferry

Only one man can pull off this suit.

You may argue that Bryan Ferry wears suits and ties as a gimmicky adjunct to his persona as front man for Roxy Music, but you’d be ignoring the fact that he does it brilliantly, both on stage and off. Furthermore, his ability to explode value out of a shimmery tuxedo jacket without looking like a total jackass says more about the man than any rock reviewer can hope to understand. Suaveness can be created from whole cloth and Bryan Ferry is living proof.

5. Sean Connery

There is no other Bond, so STFU.

This list would be useless without James Bond and no one portrayed Bond with such impeccable style and ease. Whether wearing a trim tuxedo or a period Savile Row suit and skinny tie, Sean Connery wore it like a real man. His every move was calm and pedestrian; he could have been wearing jeans and a pullover. That he didn’t have to change his gait or comportment in order to utterly shine in a tuxedo indicates how some men are truly born to it while others have to work at it (Roger Moore, this means YOU!).

4. George Clooney

Looking good is only half the battle.

How can George Clooney out-rank Sean Connery? Because Clooney is modern and forced to abide the comparatively abysmal state of modern men’s fashion. Both men are handsome devils, but Clooney is working with a handicap that Connery never dealt with. Clooney is refined and confident and willing to let small imperfections show in order to produce a look that is simultaneously crisp and human. Hats off, George.

3. Donald Draper

Fuck YEAH this guy's cool!

In third place is not the actor Jon Hamm but his character Don Draper in TV’s Mad Men. The product of a research team, a bunch of brilliant costume designers and Hamm’s steely eyes and tough chin, Don Draper defines the very reason the suit and tie was invented in the first place. Trading in shining armor for perfectly pressed lapels, this warrior conquers Madison Avenue with sharp wit and a leather briefcase. If you don’t find Don Draper to be a completely captivating character then you must be dead inside.

2. Marcello Mastroianni

This is how it's done, bitches!

Maybe he has unfair advantage being slim, Italian and debonair, but Marcello Mastroianni OWNS the suit and tie. He stole away the garb’s reputation for stuffiness and showed the whole world how cool is DONE. His look is so timeless that Quentin Tarantino couldn’t help himself when creating Reservoir Dogs. Long after mankind has disappeared, aliens will visit our planet, look through our archives, find Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and say “Holy SHIT that guy is fucking COOL!” . It is a sad indictment of our culture that this look ever faded from prominence. It simply cannot be topped.

1. Sidney Poitier

Believe it or not, our #1 spot goes to a black guy! Wearing a suit well is more than being sharp or being handsome. A brilliantly worn suit and tie is greater than the sum of its parts, and in the film To Sir, With Love, Sidney Poitier showed how a commanding presence is part and parcel of your look, your words and your comportment.

This (rather dated) film is well worth a second look in order to see how a confident, smart, elegant man uses the suit and tie to express greatness. Poitier took a tool and made a masterpiece. His Mark Thackery is tough, yet sensitive. Commanding, yet reassuring. Dominant, yet accessible. This is the heart and soul of the suit and tie.

Who's a sex machine to all the chicks?

Even when forced to act stilted during the school dance scene, Sidney Poitier was poised and smooth and lovable. I would trade all the square jaws in Hollywood for 1/10th of the elegance Sidney Poitier exudes when he’s in a suit. It’s the perfect meld of man and machine. It’s what we intend when we wear these clothes. And nobody does it like Poitier. Nobody.

Honorable Mention: Reservoir Dogs

The costume of cool.

I wanted to include a short salute to this film. Tarantino used the outfits as a visual shtick knowing full well the power of the black suit, white shirt and skinny black tie. After all, if one Macello Mastroianni is stunning, how about SIX of them? It was a smart move and made the film (and Tarantino’s career) explode. It reminded audiences that the classic look shames our modern fashions and that sometimes it’s best to leave things alone. I, for one, would welcome the permanent return of this look.

After all, what’s cooler than this?

Have you seen this man?

I’ve been making snide, snarky comments on public Internet forums for about 17 years. I even garnered some notoriety (nay, infamy) in the 1990′s for my posts to the Usenet group alt.tasteless. Oh, those were heady days full of sardonic barbs, razor-sharp quips and anecdotes about drinking dry the contents of a dead whore’s anal boil.

I also posted to sci.skeptic and a few other sundry newsgroups. This was back when your conversational skills meant everything and your cool avatar meant nothing. We didn’t even have avatars or icons. If you couldn’t express yourself in simple ASCII, you were road kill.

It was in this cauldron of writers, biters, raconteurs and saboteurs that I discovered the trolls.

A troll in the wild.

Even though I wrote some outlandish things, I always meant them to be genuinely sarcastic or humorous – I wanted everyone to laugh with me. I never broke into forums specifically to upset the locals and goad them into responding to a bunch of hyperbolic nastiness.

That’s what trolls do. They’ll go into a web forum for cancer survivors and extol the virtues of smoking cigarettes and eating lead paint chips and tell everyone to “stop whining”. Their goal is to see how many outraged cancer survivors they can get to rise to the bait.

Trolling is as old as the Internet – maybe older. And I hate it.

I worked pretty hard to get a reputation for being outrageous and funny. I don’t like it when some illiterate punk comes waltzing in with a kit bag of insults and no eloquence to back it up. They simply stir up the natives, have a laugh and move on. Lame.

They even had their own newsgroup where they could discuss the finer points of trolling a discussion board. Then out they would spread like a disease, infecting reasonable conversations worldwide – even reasonable discussions about drinking dead whore pus!

This is what you get from a GIS for "dead whore pus".

Well, the trolls may think they’re clever, but they’re not. On fark.com, they can sniff a  troll a mile away and even offer ratings for troll quality. A lousy troll (“Why don’t you go marry your Fartbama savior, libtard?”) will earn a 0/10 points while a good troll (“Just because I think Obama may not be a citizen doesn’t mean I’m wrong about global warming”) may earn a 8/10 points if it’s really, really subtle.

Sometimes, on very rare occasions, someone with true grit and a lexicon of steel can commit an act of trolling that resounds through the ages. This is so difficult that only true masters of this arcane art can pull it off.

Today, I would like to honor one of those über-trolls. If you have some time, I encourage you to read the saga of the Mall Ninja.

His name is gecko45, and to this day he maintains his cover as a bumbling, brash and hysterically funny fabulist. He infected a forum dedicated to guns and proceeded to introduce himself as a heavily armed martial artist who needed some assistance selecting assault rifles for his life-and-death vocation in  mall security.

His shtick was so good, so outrageous and so cloyingly sincere that the forum admins let him go for far too long, ending it only when the Mall Ninja (and his sock puppet supporters) started to interfere with the orderly conduct of the forum.

I really hate trolls. But sometimes from the mists comes a man so compelling, so wonderfully bizarre, that I must remove my hat and bow to his greatness. The Mall Ninja is that man.

Job well done, sir. You may return to your leaky bridge in the knowledge that you succeeded where thousands have failed.

I salute you.

I’m a creep,
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doin’ here?
I don’t belong here

Thus sang Thom Yorke. Is he really a weirdo? I don’t know. I’m not a Radiohead fan and even though Thom Yorke is constantly in the news I just don’t know anything about the man.

But I do know myself and I know weird. And I’m a weirdo.

It started when I was young. I grew up in a tiny duplex packed with two Catholic parents and six kids. My friends never came over. None of our friends ever did. Why? Because our house was weird and we were all weirdos. It’s OK to have a weirdo over. But you never go into a weirdo’s house. Ever.

C'mon on in! Tea?

What distinguishes a weirdo from a normal person is relentless introspection; a conveyor belt of self-appraisal that channels itself outward into the world. It MUST go out. When it turns itself inward, it morphs into garden variety insanity.

In school, it was readily apparent that I was not like 90% of the kids. Sure, I was smart. But I was also neurotic. I wanted to fit in, but the conveyor belt just wouldn’t stop. I had to channel it in a way that avoided causing offense or alerting authority. For me, it was comedy. I was a class clown par excellence.

In high school, my weirdness found an outlet: drugs. Not only did drugs put me in touch with my inner freak, they also introduced me to the weirdo sub-culture. Punks, criminals, vagabonds and degenerates. The ones that normal society sneers at derisively. They were my friends and mentors.

Jesus was a weirdo; Christians just refuse to admit it.

Weirdos don’t play sports, but they sometimes obsess on the statistics. They love film but they rarely become film directors. They find religion laughable or join bizarre cults. No in-between. They adore Science with all its complexity but can’t be bothered to pay attention to simple social mores.

Worst of all, once you’ve surrendered to weirdness, you can’t go back. It’s like trying to pray the gay away. It’s just isn’t going to happen. And even if it did, they really don’t want to take you back into the fold anyway.

Nope. Once you’re weird, your path is cleared.

Weirdos of a feather flock together.

Weirdos tend to recognize each other and congregate. More importantly, our individual manifestations of weirdness aren’t as important as the fact that we are simply weird. A weirdo musician gets along swimmingly with a weirdo novelist. But they never really talk about it openly. It’s assumed that the sports-and-TV-loving 9-5 normals of the world have rejected them and thus it’s “Welcome to the Monkey House”.

Want some searing irony? The normals that won’t come to our house are the same ones who adore our artistic pursuits. In order to maintain the pecking order, the normals embrace some weirdos and champion them as “talented”.

All artists – all great artists – are weirdos. Across the board. No exceptions.Even ones you wouldn’t expect! For instance…

Elvis was a weirdo....................Paul McCartney is not.

Elvis Presley was fucking weird. The music and style that he popularized among normals was a quantum leap from the straight-laced Doris Day crap that had a stranglehold on popular American culture. He swam in drugs, fired bullets at his TV and lived in a museum of weirdness. Paul McCartney? Without weirdo John Lennon prodding him endlessly he would have been a Liverpool guitar instructor.

Since weirdos are weird, sometimes it hard to distinguish them from people that simply operate outside of one’s norms. Some people can seem weird to you, but they aren’t really weirdos. It isn’t always obvious. Check this out:

WEIRDO:
- Ernest Hemingway
- Jackson Pollock
- Daniel Day-Lewis
- Jimi Hendrix
- Ghandi

NORMAL:
- Chuck Palahniuk
- Bob Ross
- Tom Cruise
- Lady Gaga
- The Dalai Lama

You see, weirdness isn’t “oddness”. An artist can create some weird works and be as normal as a Ritz cracker. Weirdness flows from within. Like the Force.

Weirdos that become successful often do so despite themselves. Other weirdos employ their “conveyor belt” with great tenacity, finding fame after years and years of fruitless effort. Usually, it never happens. But they expend the effort anyway. Not to make money or become famous, but because THEY HAVE TO.

Let’s take Lady Gaga.

Lady Gaga is normal.

Almost everyone would assume Lady Gaga is a weirdo. In fact, the only people who can see through to her normality are weirdos.

You see, dressing outrageously, behaving outrageously or outraging people isn’t weird. It’s often a tool that normal people use to establish a veneer of weirdness and thus enter the rarefied world of the weirdo.

Lady Gaga’s primary expressive form – her music – is so painfully mundane that no weirdos will even listen to it. Bumping and grinding to dance music and penning lyrics about nightclub sexcapades is about as weird as a cinderblock.

Fortunately there is a counterpoint to Lady Gaga. Her name is Fever Ray and she’s from Sweden (an incredibly normal country).

Fever Ray: truly, wonderfully weird.

Fever Ray does what she does because she must. She’ll never see the Gaga dollars and it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that she opens her mouth and lets the conveyor belt unleash its weirdness unedited.

The music she writes with her brother Olof is mysterious, personal and informed by tradition and innovation as well as internal turmoil.

When I watch her numerous music videos, I don’t see someone trying to be weird. I see a weirdo expressing herself. To be sincerely weird is, ironically, normal. For a weirdo.

I love Fever Ray.

So, how do I do it? How do I cope? Where’s my conveyor belt?

You’re reading it.

This time, saving Earth is FUN!

My buddy Alex and I were recently discussing the state of the world. We agreed that, goshdarnit, there’s just too much hatred and distrust on this planet.

But what’s a global population to do? When the Irish hate the Brits, the Americans hate the Mexicans, the Hutus hate the Tutsis,  the Tibetans hate the Chinese and everybody hates the Jews…it’s all just too much!

It seems we just can’t do anything about it. But that’s not true! We have a ready resource that is fully capable of solving all the ethnic hatred on Earth.

It’s called hot chicks.

Umm, yeah.

Doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from; hot chicks make all your problems disappear. Even if you’re a woman. Because everyone knows that lesbian action is HOT!

Centuries of diplomacy have failed. Centuries of war have failed. Violence has failed. Cruelty has failed. There is only way to end all the divisiveness: hot chicks!

Ethnic groups that distrust each other should share with each other their hot chicks. I can guarantee you that all those national tensions will be relieved. Literally.

And so, I propose that we begin a global effort to share our hot chicks with the men who are most likely to affect positive outcomes.

Worth a try?

Would a hot Iranian chick soften Dick Cheney’s heart? Or am I reaching too far?

I submit that after two months in a tropical location, exploring every inch of this beauty, nature would work its magic and even the coldest heart in America would start to feel differently about the Iranian people and, by extension, Mideast policy.

Allah take her!

Reverse scenario: we send Ahmedinajad all the American cheerleaders he could handle. He’ll be singing “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” within a week, I promise. Furthermore, when push came to shove, would he really nuke THAT? I think not.

Don’t believe me? In my previous post, I mentioned my interest in Yugoslavia. It’s worth noting that while republics and villages broke down along ethnic lines in Yugoslavia, people in mixed marriages didn’t participate in the war. Love had conquered their hearts; there was no need to conquer their lands.

Hot Croatian chicks could have prevented disaster!

After the Japanese surrender to US forces in WWII, the Japanese government was fearful of widespread sexual abuse of their women at the hands of the barbarian Americans. In order to prevent this catastrophe, they created brothels aimed at GI’s and staffed them with hot chick volunteers from across all the islands of Japan. It was considered a patriotic duty for a Japanese woman to offer herself to the invaders (for a small fee, of course).

It worked brilliantly. To this day, geriatric WWII veterans think back wistfully about the “pan-pan” girls.

MacArthur never touched them, but he recommended them highly.

The pan-pan girls helped realize Japan’s transition from a militaristic fascist empire to a capitalist democracy that eschews foreign war as a valid way of projecting power. Hot chicks made all the difference and to this day round-eyes line up for the latest fetishes from Nippon. America and Japan now form the greatest peaceful partnership the world has ever known.

I rest my case.

Hot chicks of America: are you willing to give up a bit of personal dignity in order to make the world a better place? If it’s any consolation, we men do it regularly. It’s called “American diplomacy” and it requires us to behave like completely worthless tools.

Thank you.