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In This Issue

• Idiotarod: Mushing Fun in NYC
• Desensitization: It Does a Body Good
• Shit Blowing Up is So Patriotic
• Letters to the Feditrix: Hot Pre-Teen Sex!
• Point: There's No State Like a Prostrate, Girls
• CounterPoint: Assloads of Bad Stuff
• I Could be the Spectator's Sex Columnist
• Hardcore CosmoGirls Have Some Things to Learn
• Point: Shocking Apathy for Homeless
• CounterPoint: Solution for Homeless is Lock and Load
• Burbery Scarves, Labia Elephantitis Linked
• Elimidate Plays Cupid, Stupid
• Anti-Life Comics: The Great Cookie War
• Wacky Fun Whitey
• Cowboy Bush
• Uncle PennyBags Gets His Due

I was waiting for the subway when a woman saw my Columbia Bagels T-shirt and was moved to start a conversation with me. I was hoping to talk about bagels, but she instead told me all about how her son (Tucker? Topher? Tyler? Toolson?) wants to attend Columbia after graduating from Von Shropfordshirewillowglen Boarding Academy. Then she asked me, “How did your parents do it?” Well Nancy, let me expound upon the key to my successful upbringing: a torrent of ultra-violent entertainment.

All those hours of televised shootouts, stabbings, rapes, decapitations, disembowelments, defenestrations, car crashes, and grenade explosions from which protagonists heroically dove away made me the delightful student and person I am today. In fact, I sometimes wonder why people my age don’t go on bullet-ridden rampages more often. Maybe there’ll be more Columbines once someone invents real-life slow-motion, so that we’ll look cool enough as we saunter to the front of the classroom, semi-automatics and molotov cocktails in hand, and announce, “Ass dismissed.” BLAMMO.

My first words were “First Blood,” so I advise pregnant women to watch horribly violent movies at full volume during the third trimester. Hopefully, as your child emerges dripping with the bloody contents of your womb, the kid’s first screams will be an homage to the helpless cries of the Greenwich Village chick chopped up by Jason Voorhees in “Jason Takes Manhattan.” During the toddler years, parents should teach discipline with the threat of deranged mutant zombies attacking in the middle of the night, e.g. “Brush your teeth, Wilbur, or men from beyond the grave will rip open your torso and devour your intestines.”
Later, in those important formative childhood years, athletics will help build his competitive spirit. Encourage him to play sports by emphasizing the fun of attacking people with sports equipment: a baseball to the temple, volleyball to the jaw, or tennis racket to the prosthetic leg can spark a lifelong interest in fitness. For me, the drive to make others feel bad carried over from the schoolyard to the classroom, where I studied hard to make sure I could tell people they were dumb just before flinging shuriken at them.

But remember, learning extends beyond the walls of the classroom; so when school lets out, don’t let your kid wallow in idleness. I spent summers playing an 8-bit Nintendo game called “Rush’n Attack” (which rewarded me for stabbing Russians with a knife), and watching so many action movies that I couldn’t play with GI Joes without making my own Bruckheimer-esque background music. My mind was saturated with glorified slaughter, but at least I was patriotic.

And parents, take note: those two concepts are often synonymous. Just check out the recently released first-person footage of an American helicopter’s attack on four Iraqis (www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/01/284086.html). Granted, it’s in grainy black-and-white thermal vision, so unlike the experience of stealing the military helicopter in “Vice City,” you don’t get to see the guys’ faces as the Apache’s 30mm rounds destroy their tractor, trucks, and ribcages. The clip, however, more than makes up for this shortcoming with the bonus actual-people-dying part.

If you think tykes will love that, I bet they’ll go absolutely bonkers when they see pictures of Ali Abbas, the kid who was freed from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, his 13 relatives, and both his arms when a US missile struck his Baghdad home. Ha! I’d call that a knee-slapper, except Abbas could only slap his knees with his head until he got some conciliatory “America’s Sorry!” prosthetics from the British. Don’t worry, he’ll be playing Counter-Strike in no time. For the time being, however, he can only pathetically mouth the Pac-Man joystick at the Chuck-e-Cheese arcade. I wonder what Senator Joe Lieberman, staunch video game violence opponent, would say if Ali started playing "Mortal Kombat." Joe voted to bomb the kid's arms off; would he argue that Ali shouldn’t do the same to polygons?

Ah, the value of idealized bloodshed! This, Nancy, is what has provided the mental energy that got me into college. Good gracious, it’s even rooted in my schedule. I’m taking Lit Hum, dinosaurs, and karate. In my daydreams, a stegosaur jump-kicks Greeks, and their armor clatters upon them. And all this violence just increases the sex drive, according to Alice Cooper in his classic “Lost in America”:

I can’t go to school cuz I ain’t got a gun,
I ain’t got a gun cuz I ain’t got a job,
I ain’t got a job cuz I can’t go to school,
So I’m looking for a girl with a gun and a job.

So ladies, how ‘bout it? If you've got a firearm, I’ve got a great personality to go with it.