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In This Issue

• Water On The Knee
• The Annihilator of Mathematics
• Demonic Speak-n-Spell
• The Fed Interviews Jon Voight
• Letters to the Feditors
• Sam Jenning, or: Eating Children For Profit
• Immigrate This!
• Where In Our Hearts Is Carmen Sandiego?
• The Life and Times of Carmen Sandiego
• Redder Rabbit?
• Good Golly Fucking Gumdrops, I Like Candy!
• The City’s New Hot, Sexy, Superhot Nightclub!
• Where's Waldo?
• Logical Journey into Eugenics
• Think Columbia Sucks? It's Your Fault, Doofus.
• A Farewell to Harms
• A Farewell To Bill
• Tracy Briskit, Fed Queen
• Make Your Own Safe Space!
• Columbia Trail: Safe Space, Bathroom in 347 miles
• Cook with Barney!
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.8
• The Staff of Volume 21

Michael Bredin

Russell Spitzer

America was once clean and unspoiled (plus or minus a few buffalo, but we got rid of them). Then the true dreams of our capitalist forefathers were attacked by a force so powerful it made even the most liberal of senators, like Mr. McCarthy, act to squash its red, red menace.  The evil I speak of is not sodomy on television, nor the inability to force children to pray in public school; these lesser evils are hardly comparable to the detestable doctrine which once plagued America. The cancer is known scientifically as Communist-lymphoma, and believe me, true Americans (if your last name has a -erez or –nsky, just stop reading), believe me: the tumor is not benign.

    Communism is rising again, my friends, and innocent Americans are being bamboozled into bringing the foul literature of the USSR into their own god-fearing, rent-paying, McDonald’s-munching households. Under the clever guise of children’s educational gaming, the insidious love child of Stalin and Mao is taking hold. The very games we trust to teach our children are filling them with filth and corrupting them. Is this truth too much to handle? Just like the flaws in gravity, it’s easy to prove that what our children is learning is dead wrong. Or should I say dead red?

    Consider the game Reader Rabbit. An exercise in reading and phonetics with an amusing anthropomorphized lagomorph? Or DIRTY COMMUNIST? Well, Mr. Rabbit, I’ll use your own teachings against you.

    “Reader Rabbit” seems innocent enough, but take away a few choice letters and it becomes “Red Rabbi.” Maybe that’s not so convincing all by itself, but try this on for size: Reader Rabbit was created in 1984, which Farmer’s Almanac states was the driest and most communist year of the last century. Coincidence? I think not.

    Maybe the writing on the wall still isn’t clear enough. How about we look at the actual content of the game?  In Reader Rabbit 2, a young child will embark on the cross-town train (Siberian Express) to the Word Mine (gulag). Let me make no weak statement on this topic: trains are communist. Case closed.

    But what of the mine? The Word Mine could be owned by one man, whose gumption, work ethic, and love of gerunds allowed him to inherit it from his father. But no; this mine is used by anyone who feels the need. Every pleb could just Marx his way in, grab whatever he wants, and Trotsky his way out. What are we teaching our children? As if word crystals grew on trees!

    In the first Reader Rabbit, the original Orwellian nightmare, the player was forced to assist a rabbit dressed in red with fueling his train, which I note again is a communist locomotive. Words that the player makes are the red train’s fuel.  I took a random set of screenshots from the game to see which words kept being burnt in the furnace of the “good” rabbit’s word train. At first, it was an innocent stream of three-lettered nonsense - “cat,” “dog,” “fed” - but then it took a horrible turn. “Flag,” “America,” “democracy,” and “freedom” went a-tumbling into the all-consuming fires of that terror train. Out came a cloud of smoke so putrid that I wept as my heart, my true American heart, was broken.  

    The pain, as it turned out, would not last. As soon as the wound had been torn in that most patriotic part of my body (aside from my coccyx), I saw something that set my tender heart aflame. My fluffy friend had used the recently charred corpse of democracy to fuel our trip to the nearby Vowel Pond. The cheery devil placed his rod into the water and fished out a few vowels. It soon became painfully apparent that he wasn’t going to spell an American word, like “tycoon” or “bistro” but a dirty communist word, “copacetic.” The word starts with a “c” and means fine, or, in some contexts, confidential. Communism is a word that also starts with “c” in which everything is supposed to be fine and practiced with confidentiality. The message was clear, and if I could have stapled that furry conjugating rodent to a flaming pyre, I would have.

    There is only one way to respond, one way to deal with a threat of this kind. This one way, the American way, is all-out warfare. The target? The Learning Company, which produced this piece of software? No, they were simply hippie pawns in someone else’s master plan. Their punishment will be swift and severe, but they are not the seed from which this poisonous vine winds.

   More broadly, we apply the cryptographic Majestic 12 cipher that I bought on the internet to “The Learning Company,” we get “ghn inumsats bvcxmoc,” which reassembled and minus a few extra letters spells “communist.” We all know who was just getting their Communist groove back in 1984 at the same time that The Leaning Company was founded: China. Suddenly, it all makes sense. The writing on the wall, or elevators, as it may be, has come to light. China is the culprit. They have fooled our children with loveable animated characters, and we must retaliate. I’m not saying all-out thermonuclear warfare, but I’m not not saying all-out thermonuclear war.