You Can't Mock the President or Say "Balls"

You Can't Mock the President or Say "Balls":
The Most Important Thing I Learned in School This Year

By BILLY WILSON

The following is an essay written by a High School sophomore in Freyburg, Maine, as the essay part of the final exam in his English class. His teacher sent it to CounterPunch as an example of the uprightness of modern youth.

The most important lesson I learned this year in school is to pay attention in class and not to doodle while the teacher is talking. The worst thing you can do is draw a picture that shows President Bush's head on a pole with blood gushing out of his bulging eyesballs. If you do something like this, it means you're probably going to blow up the Oklahoma Book Depsitory, or fly remote conrtrol planes into the White House, like the CIA did on 9/11. Even if you're only 15 like me, you can hijack a bus (like Sandra Bullock did in that cool movie, Speed), and drive it into the Bush ranch at Waco, and burn all the children to death.

I learned that drawing pictures of the President with his arms growing out of his head is no laughing matter. It's bad to make the President look stupider than he already is. You can't draw him writing memos on wide-ruled paper with a crayon, or dressed up like a cowboy and playing with toy pistols in the Awful Office. That type of humor isn't funny. You can't make him look like Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine, with blood gushing out of his ears.

It is OK to draw a picture of Saddam Hussein on all fours, with Condolisa Rice in a furry African bikini and rings around her neck, holding the evildooer on a leash, and Donald Rumsfeld whacking him on the behind and making him bark like a dog, because that's just a frat prank (like the sexy girl soldier Lindy English did at that prison in IsraelI mean Iraq). But the President is God, which is why his picture is on the dollar bill, and why you can't make him look like an elephant like those soldiers did. You know. Kneeling with his feet up in the air and one finger in his nose and the other in his anus. That's really bad.

You can't draw the president's face on a stick, even if you make it look like a lollypop or a Bubblehead doll. You are a bad person if you do that and if you do that, the Secret Police will come to your house at midnight and make you stand on a box with a shopping bag over your head and electrodes attached to your generals. Then they'll bulldoze your house into dust! (Which is way cool to see them do that on TV.)

If you make fun of the president that means you hate him and are a enemy combatant. The president has so much to worry about, like his physical fitness and if he takes his sedatives on time, he doesn't need some wise-ass kid sneaking into the Lincoln bedroom at night and fucking his wife (you shouldn't say fuck), or his really cute daughters, who drink a lot and fall down at parties and are pretty easy. The president was bad too, like his daughters, before he learned that Jesus wanted him to kill all the Arabs. The president is truly blessed, so you can't tell your freinds you made a videotape of him masturbating and sent it to Seymour Hersh. You can't do that, because one of your friends may be an informer for Homeland Security and then they'll chop your fucking head off!

What I learned this year is that the President is not someone to mock. Even if he is an idiot and a war criminal who deserves to be hanged, and even if no one in the media has the balls to say so. (You shouldn't say balls either.)

Billy Wilson

John Bolton, What a Guy!

How do you handle an arrogant, vindictive blowhard with a hair-trigger temper? Make him a diplomat, of course!

It occurs to me that the Bush administration is flirting with a level of stupidity that does not exist in nature...

Tom DeLay: Why's everybody always pickin' on me?

With apologies to The Bloodhound Gang...

Why's everybody always pickin' on me?
(Cause I have no conscience with campaign mon-ey.)

Why's everybody always pickin' on me?
(Cause I slipped a half a million to my fam-i-ly.)

Why's everybody always pickin' on me?
(Cause I stacked the Senate ethics com-mit-tee.)

Why's everybody always pickin' on me?
(Cause I took more shady trips than Tim-o-thy Lea-ry.)

Why's everybody always pickin' on me?
(Cause I'll turn the capitol into the Ho-ly See.)

Why's everybody always pickin' on me?
(Cause I threatened all those judges for de-fy-ing me.)

Why's everybody always pickin' on me?

Cause nobody likes ya, monkey boy.

People without kids...

... are the only ones who seem to know exactly how to raise them. Just ask.

I was in training this week with a group of people from Another Company. During a session break there was some discussion about raising kids. The one guy in the group who didn't have any kids, predictably, had a laundry list of things that HIS kids would never do or be. The rest of us just laughed at him.

Let me set the record straight, here: You cannot program a child like a VCR. They make decisions and come to conclusions on their own. You can provide feedback appropriate to their actions, set rules about what is acceptable and unacceptable, and lead by example, but you really don't 'make' them do anything.

Fear and Loathing on the PA Turnpike - Random Thoughts

Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but yesterday evening entailed 5.5 hours of interstate driving with nothing but a vague sense of impending doom, large volumes of coffee, and screaming along to alt/punk/death metal at high volume. Destination: Harrisburg, PA.

The impending doom was a leftover from my days at PSU at State College, when we'd take the turnpike to Somerset and swing north on the way back from home to school. (I started college a few months after my mom's death and went into a crippling depression there - basically stopped attending classes entirely during the spring semester and just stayed locked in my room playing Klondike solitaire on a Mac SE. Dark, dark times, man.)

It occurs to me that listening to The Pixies at anything less than 100 decibels is kind of like having sex with a condom: it's alright when you have to do it that way, but it's not nearly as intense as doing it the way that nature intended. Frank Black's voice was simply never meant to be heard at a civilized volume.

And just for the record, I'd like to thank the asshat from ABF Motor Freight who went into the Tuscarcra tunnel just ahead of me hauling restricted hazmat. Glad you feel qualified to make that decision on my behalf, you toothless inbred fuck! Grrr.

So here I am on company business in the state capitol, which seems a lot like Uniontown or Somerset, only with a really bad traffic problem. If I had some free time in my schedule, I'd pop down and harass my state reps with the standard Commie Pinko party line: WEED GOOD, BUSH BAD. But no time for the old in-out-in-out, luv, just here to read the meter.

A final random thought about being stopped in Harrisburg traffic: When I see bumper stickers like "My scottish terrier is smarter than your honor student" right next to the "W 2004" bumper sticker, it explains so much and I just wish that the obvious carbon monoxide poisoning that's going on there would speed up a little bit.

Why is everybody always picking on me?

Poor Tom.

That seedy liberal rag, the Wall Street Journal, has just bent him over and ripped him a new asshole. Commie pinkos!!!

I mean the guy's part of the Republican Senate, so he's obviously one of God's chosen. Who are these shysters trying to get us to question why he's accepting perks from shady Russian businessmen or funnelling a cool half million from his campaign and PAC directly into his own household?

Da bastards...

My Perspective on the Pope's Passing

Someone asked me yesterday how the news of Pope John Paul II's death had affected me.

About 12-13 years ago, I had a running conversation over Compuserve with a girl in her late teens from California.

(Compuserve: pre-Web online service for you youngin's - fun and u$eful but expen$ive as hell, e$pecially living where the clo$est dial-in line was long di$tance - I once blew $300 in a month on the long di$tance alone.)

The point is this: at one point this girl I'd been chatting with told me she was Jewish, and at another she told me that she was an atheist. When I questioned her on this, she told me that being Jewish was more than a holding a set of religious beliefs -- it was an cultural identity and an intrinsic part of who she was. I didn't understand what she meant then, but I do now.

I haven't considered myself a Catholic for a long time now, but I still feel connected to, and interested in, major events in the Catholic church. Unfortunately, though, I can't help feeling that the Church is a financial empire first and a religion second.

While my gut feeling has always been that John Paul II was a good, decent man, he also did some things that ticked me off.

Choosing to continue the entrenchment of sexism in the Church based on the social norms of two thousand years ago seems to me a very poor thing. And exponentially worse, there's the sexual abuse scandal.

I mean WTF??? The Church can manage a 50-year-late formal apology for failing to do more to prevent the Holocaust, but can't simply ask forgiveness of the men and women who were raped, as children, by the clergy they trusted?

And why do you think that is? There's almost nobody left from the Holocaust to sue the Church, that's why.

So I guess my feelings are simply this: Catholic Church, Inc. lost a decent man and a good CEO. They'll elect another one, and he'll continue to protect their financial interests throughout the world.

Springtime in Erie

Well, we got dumped on last night, in what seems to be kind of an Erie tradition. One last deep, wet snowfall for the year - the heavy, slushy kind that knocks down power lines, breaks trees in half and gives some poor old coot a heart attack when he tries to shovel his front walk.

Here's the view outside our back porch door, as of 5 minutes ago: