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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

In Louisiana where I’m from, people like to celebrate the New Year by building bonfires by the river and shooting guns into the air, likely killing someone when the bullets fall back down. I usually celebrate with friends out in the suburbs, though, where people detonate massive stockpiles of illegal fireworks dangerously close to their gas-filled SUVs and also, I suppose, dangerously close to us, the onlookers. But hey, where’s the New Year’s fun without the chance that a firecracker could blow off your thumb or a stray celebratory bullet could sacrifice you to the spirit of the New Year?

My friends usually supply several bags of wimpy fireworks for us to light quietly in the cul-de-sac after midnight. These are the kind that just sit on the ground and spark or perhaps hop a bit. But among this year’s fireworks, they had bought one more incredible than any firework I have ever seen before. This firework consisted of two towers, side by side in a box, each with a wick on the end, and on the side of the box was a color photograph of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center before they fell on September 11th, 2001. God bless America.

According to the instructions, you were supposed to leave the fireworks in the box, so you could look at the picture of the Twin Towers throughout the display. We put the box out in the street and lit the wicks. The Twin Towers began to spew red, white, and blue sparks into the air, also emitting smoke and, of course, scorching the box. A note on the box explained the idea behind the item. I paraphrase from memory:
“When you light this firework, you are not reliving the tragedy, but remembering the many heroic rescue team lives that were lost while trying to save other lives.”

My friend told me that she had bought them ironically, but that she had seen many people picking them up in the store and saying things like, “Oh look, we should get this. We’ve gotta support our country!”
My fellow Americans, let me ask you something. Is you stupid?
I thought this firework was pretty funny, but only because it was so morbid and offensive. The box said that in lighting the firework, we were not reliving the tragedy. But in fact, the smoke that rose above the picture of the twin towers was reminiscent of the massive plume of smoke that I could see from my window in Carman for several days in 2001. And that’s not reliving? In fact, the firework represents the towers exploding and being consumed with fire, which is really a lot like what happened on September 11th, except that we lit the towers with lighters, and the terrorists lit them with airplanes. (We actually had some airplane fireworks as well, which my brother suggested we try to shoot into the Twin Towers and knock them over, but we doubted our aiming ability.)

In conclusion, patriotic people are stupid. They think they’re doing something patriotic, when in fact they’re making a rather offensive, though amusingly misguided, parody of the same national tragedy that they’re all up in arms about. This is the worst display of patriotism I’ve seen since that war we had, or that other war we had, or that calendar with the sexy dead firemen. What if there were a fireworks model of Pearl Harbor in which the ships exploded into colorful and dazzling showers of sparks? Would people think that was patriotic? Yeah. Yeah, they probably would.