Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 4

November 20, Email to Mike the Moslem

Well, Mike, you have to admit that I was right how the prez would act abroad. Ever heard that song by Warren Zevon (R.I.P.), Werewolves of London? Yep, that’s Boy George, my friend. No apologies, no regrets, no doubts. Shirley Temple had more dramatic depth in “The Good Ship, Lollipop” than he does in the first state visit by a U.S. president to the British in a century. Meanwhile, back home we gawk at the panem et circenses of Michael Jackson and his boy toys.

I stand by the grim fears I expressed in our call yesterday:

World War III is still on, and will escalate, eventually going nuclear, biological and chemical. It’s just my luck to have started my military career in NBC and see it come to fruition because Republicans like me elected an idiot president. [Editor’s emphasis, in all cases]

We’re going to set a new record for wars, Texas-sized so that the pretentious prez (he’s from Connecticut) will feel actualized. I reckon a body count of between 100 million and a billion before it’s over, surpassing earlier world war body counts by as many times as they exceeded the losses of the Napoleonic Wars. It’s all an inevitability of the numbers of people and the lethality of the weapons. With world population already straining diminishing resources, the economic interruptions of World War III alone will cause a hundred million deaths.

We (I mean we Baptists, you heathen devil) are going to prove our religion is the true one by making our Apocalypse (a la the Revelation of John) come true with it’s Armageddon. From what I hear and read, y’all Moslems have a wimpy end of the world without enough blood and guts to show true faith like ours.

We will find our “provocation,” as my good friend and best man Chase Untermeyer put it while hedging his bets about whether the prez is going to start flipping switches and pushing buttons any time soon…

Yep, I’ve got to say that things are about as far along as they were by the end of the first hour of Dr. Strangelove which, along with Ship of Fools, is your only homework assignment from me in two decades, you rascal! Mike, you were always brilliant but unstructured, personally moral but too tolerant of others’ failings. You’d make a lousy Christian, that’s all I’ve got to say, even if you did win the theology prize from Mt. Carmel High School. Further, you have been far too loyal to your old magister, and now look where it has landed you, in my little classic, which is as dark a comedy as either of the two movies I’ve assigned you.

I remember when you came here from Iran, sent abroad by your family with your brothers so that you wouldn’t have to fight in a senseless war against Saddam (in the days when the U.S. backed Saddam). Do you want me to embarrass you to the literati of America, boy? Too late to stop me, now, so watch me recount your most foolish moment:

When you were a mere 15, sitting in my remedial English class because you hadn’t been speaking the language a year yet and needed a lot of help, I recognized you for a lad of genius, and I worked harder to help your writing than any other student’s, because if you could only write the way I knew you thought and acted you would be a credit to your teacher and all humanity.

And do you know which essay I remember best from all the students who wrote papers for me at that Catholic school for five years? The one by Mike the Moslem, grateful beyond description to his adopted country, the United States of America, expressing his dreams of one day becoming a citizen and even, God willing, a president. You aren’t the only foreigner who’s come here thinking you could be number one in America, Mike; and, God knows, you aren’t the only foreigner who has come here and made America number one in you. Aren’t you embarrassed? You should be, because were presumptuous to believe that we would love you back just because you loved us so much. Furthermore, forget the president idea. Only quality white people like the Germinator in Kalifornia can aspire to have the rules bent enough to become Amerikan president.

Well, go ahead and be embarrassed, because I’m embarrassed to tears on my America’s behalf. You attended the University of Houston Honors College, my alma mater, at my request, learning the ancient and modern classics just as I did, going on to law school and focusing your considerable powers of mind to learning about our Constitution; you became a citizen. And now, after all that, you tell me, who would die for you, that you are afraid of concentration camps and arbitrary arrests, that beatings and burnings and bombings of American Moslems are a certainty, and that this isn’t the same benevolent, loving country you remember from your youth.

Well, Mike, I’ll keep crying for you, but I won’t cease to chastise you for your foolishness. Why on earth did you ever trust us? That’s what you get for sleeping through my American History and World History classes! If you hadn’t had so easy a time making A’s because of the dumb white kids who were your only competition, you’d have listened to me when I talked about Manifest Destiny, The White Man’s Burden and Cowboys and Indians in the Wild West. You know what the Cowboys did to the Indians to promote their improvement, right? Well, you guys are the new Indians, and the Middle East is the new Wild West. Sorry to say it, but the prez has always wanted to be a cowboy as much as he’s wanted to ride in jet planes, and the prez gets what the prez wants.

Yesterday’s Cro-Magnon Houston Chronicle carried the top editorial LONG HAUL; U.S. presence in Iraq will be neither short nor easy. I’ll just give you the last graph that their lapdog editorial board wrote for the Bushling position:

“Until the Iraqis are able to carry the ball, the United States is going to have to keep the troops in Iraq. We are going to have to go the distance, no matter how long or costly in lives, or fail completely.”

They’ve got it wrong, as always with the Quicksand War. Their last sentence shouldn’t be written as an either-or when it’s a both-and. We’re both going to stay to bleed in Iraq and we’re going to fail completely. I told every one of those Judases who sell their brothers out for silver that we were going to be in a shit storm if we attacked Iraq. They didn’t know shit about war, but they knew which way the power elite was going, so they fell in line with the big plan. Frank Michel smiled and reassured me that we’d be home by summer; David (un)Langworthy laughed and published my predictions as an April Fools joke, saying they would be irrelevant in a few days if he didn’t hurry. Fools!

Yep, looks like this has been a big April Fools joke on everyone, doesn’t it? Anyone laughing? Me neither.

For posterity, I’ll embarrass you once more. The best moment of my teaching career came when you burst into a lecture hall of fifty students (as I was explaining the heartland theory of geopolitics) to tell me that you had avenged my first loss in chess to one of you students (the school champion) by beating him back for me. I was very proud of you then, Mike, always have been, and always be. Salaam alakum.

Captain May

PS: Below is the letter I promised you that I sent to Rush Limbaugh just before Boy George brought his Yankee ass to Crawford, Texas for an August hideout. (I went looking for him at high noon for a couple of weeks, but he never showed up when I was calling him out.) Well, you’ll see from my letter that El Rushbo turned his back on the prez – and I’ve got a feeling that the prez has Rush by the balls now with federal drug charges pending. I’d say Mr. Limbaugh is back on the Bush Team, wouldn’t you?

Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 4