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In This Issue

• Positively Sino-Soidal
• AIDS, SARS, Avian Flu... Bean Curd?
• A Paradoxical Paroxysm of Pancakes
• Letters to the Editor
• International Yuks
• Après Moi, Le Corbusier
• Get a Free Bobblehead, for a Limited Time Only!
• The Sweet, Sensual Twang of Success
• Shut Up, Shut Up.
• To Sachs With Love
• Santa's Grottos Steal X-Mas
• Broad Goes Abroad to Paris
• A Lesson on Father Christmas
• Hugo Chavez in 2008: He’ll Crush Us Like Grapes!
• Martha’s Civil Unrest Tips
• Politics: Opiate of the Asses
• A Plan to Unite Humanity Without Using Glue
• Mad Cow: All the Cool Kids Are Contracting It
• Things Around the World on Which to Pee
• Trapped in the Closet (Deleted Scene)
• Mario Around the World!
• THEY WATCH
• The Staff of 21.4

Kimi Traube

Cheney’s hair is people! Many people. Like YOU.

Political convictions, as most of us know, are painful. Politics is what inspires hopelessly idealistic youth to stand on benches on the steps of Low Library, shouting until their faces turn communist shades of red about how there’s a war in Iraq and did we ever stop to think that might be a bad thing, ever, and by the way fur is probably murder or at least that’s what I heard from someone once but it’s really cold so can I skin a mink or something? Politics makes bald men in the throes of midlife crises buy extravagant toupees, made from the hair of the oppressed, only to mistakenly spill champagne over said oppressed hair. Politics is what makes those people talk during your University Writing class.  You know, those people, the ones with voices annoying enough snap you out of your daydreams about going back to your dorm room and masturbating later. And when you’re speeding down the highway with a trunk full of illegal immigrants, it’s politics that pulls you over and asks for your license and registration. That’s right, kids, the very discipline of politics hates your filthy milky collegiate guts. So why is it so popular?

    As a young American, it’s assumed that you’re imprisoned by chains of apathy. However, this makes it likely that you will compensate for your aforementioned apathy with a desperate rush to pretend you’re from some other country.  When it comes to faking exoticness, most people think they only give themselves away when they mispronounce half the words in their new-found “native” language, but the process began long beforehand, with the first fake English accent. Sure, you tell your friends it’s just to “get literary chicks,” but before you know it, you are ascending the ladder of pretension, using insipid phrases like “ascending the ladder of pretension,” meta-commenting on your own use of insipid phrases such as “ascending the ladder of pretension,” and so on. You start sleeping with a thesaurus under your pillow because even though science is a tool of the oppressors, you might have heard some minor revolutionary use the word osmosis once, perhaps even in a sentence. Your English accent suffers as a result of all this knowledge and you decide to leech off the credibility of some other European country, like France, where the excuse of “getting literary chicks” still holds up.

    But wait! You’re flipping through the channels and accidentally catch the news, and people are lighting things on fire in Paris? All of a sudden your bright and shiny new accent is expected to be accompanied by those inconvenient political convictions you’ve been trying to avoid. You feel the jaws of a righteous slogan closing over your innocent, remote-control-clutching hand, and you reluctantly throw your freshly-minted Sartre tomes into the nearest abyss. It’s not so bad; you’re forgetting that you can’t really read anyway. With the pool of socially-acceptable European nations dwindling, however, you need to act fast. But faking citizenship of other countries is hard. You don’t wear enough black to credibly go for a Transylvanian inflection, and your German accent always degenerates into senseless Nazi parody within minutes. I bet you’re wishing you paid attention in geography class now instead of hiding in the coat closet snorting crushed-up vitamins so the other kids would think you were hardcore.

    As the looming specter of Uncle Sam closes in, his outstretched finger promising to return you to the mental trailer park from whence you came, you’re struck with inspiration and hurled into the air only to be thrown, shaken and bruised, onto the highway like a deer who wandered onto the path of an oncoming SUV. Stunned but somehow unscathed, you shout, “I have it! FINLAND!” Because no one really knows what a Finnish accent sounds like, other than that it is probably funny. And fortunately, you’ll probably kill yourself, because Finland has the highest suicide rate in the world, as its population is mostly lying, disaffected college students who haven’t actually been there.