Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 2
August
15, essay, wake up call to New York
City
Dear Citizens of New York City,
It’s three
o’clock in the afternoon Eastern Time, Friday, August 15, and
Governor George Pataki is thanking President Bush for promising to pay you back
for the costs that have been incurred by the power outage – only at the end he
changed the true word, incurred, to
the cover word, occurred. Pretty smart man, Governor
Pataki, to change his wording like that.
You see, I’ve got a pretty good idea that he was thinking of expenses incurred because nothing just occurred by chance.
You have just participated in a federal crisis
exercise, that’s all, and the governor knows it. I’m just speculating, mind you, but we Texans
are noted for the crazy lengths to which we’ll go to make a point…
There was no terrorist attack against the Big Apple,
so be at ease. It can’t be terrorism
when it’s your own government that’s doing it, and like I said, this was just
an exercise. Relax, you all did fine.
An important point to remember: the exercise was not psychological warfare executed by
the commander in chief against the citizens of the nation’s
financial and media capital. Heck,
saying that would be like saying that you have been tyrannized, and I can
assure you that nowadays no responsible journalist would say a thing like that.
The prez just had a little
fire drill, that’s all. And anyhow, the
way he timed it was ever so nice, seeing as how you got to take Friday off and
make a three-day weekend of it. I
suppose he’ll get around to telling your media what to tell you about the
reasons and results for the exercise.
Maybe not, though; it depends on what he thinks is best for you.
I’m sure glad the prez didn’t get blacked out! Nope, his photo op with the Marine Corps went
just fine, and while you were in the dark he was enjoying dinner and drinks
with the swankest Republicans on the Pacific
Coast. He was as far away as he could be when your
offices, homes, transportation and hospitals lost power. But he didn’t need to be there to make sure
you were OK; he knew why your power was off, so he wasn’t worried.
His Thursday agenda showed good leadership, and I
want to give him full credit. It was a
manly and brave thing to visit those marines, while wearing a combat jacket in
the 90-degree heat of southern California for
half an hour, because it let the prez know a bit of
what if feels like to wear combat gear in Baghdad,
which is about as hot as Death Valley. He looked impressive as he told the young
servicemen that theirs was the generation that had to come forth for America’s
global war for righteousness. I guess
when you’ve arranged a photo-op, you’ve got to go all
out.
The prez needs good photo
ops now, since combat ops in peacetime Iraq are … er…
complicated – and they’re getting complicateder every day.
The prez believes that this is due to the
tendency of Iraqis to misunderstand the advantages of Reconstruction. Now, as a genuine Texan, I love to agree with
George W. Bush when he talks tough, but I have to admit that I’m as dumb as the
Iraqis when it comes to appreciating Republican Reconstruction, seeing as how
we of the South didn’t appreciate it much after the Civil War. Of course we were still Americans, albeit
rebellious, and they are Middle Easterners, after all, and that makes all the
difference. So I’ll make no excuses for
their bad manners towards our troops. In
fact, I believe I have an explanation:
We’ve corrupted them with Hollywood
movie culture!
For all their prudery, I think the Iraqis are closet
fans of Casablanca, that kissy,
courageous classic. I saw it in an
all-night movie theatre in Manhattan
when I was in your town once. Bogie…, Bergman…,
the airport scene – I cry every time.
But the part that’s messing with their minds is early on in the film,
where Bogie is talking to an SS officer who has come from Nazi Germany to bully
him for potentially harboring enemies of the Reich. Well, Bogie says he’s pretty cynical when it
comes to who eats who for dinner in this wicked old world, so he’s not taking
sides in the worldwide fracas. But then
the Nazi pushes him a step too far by suggesting that one day forces of the
Reich may be in the streets of New
York City. Then
Bogie quits being a neutral and says what every American has said since we ran
King George out: Don’t mess with New York City! And in case there are any neo-Nazis reading
my words, Captain May sez it, too. Well, anyway, I think the folks in Iraq may have watched the movie and gotten the
crazy idea that we can’t mess with Baghdad.
I wish they’d sit still, cool down and quit bothering
us for a while because we’re trying to work for their best interests. Can’t they see that we’re trying to figure
out a new way for them to live, instead of the way they’ve lived for centuries? Don’t they understand that we have a
difficult mission to not kill innocents in firefights, restore basic human
services, arrest dissidents, pacify mullahs, tear down dissenting banners and win Iraqi hearts and minds for America! The fact that we’re doing it all at the same
time without planning for it in advance is, I believe, a tribute to the
intelligence of the prez, who has bravely
bade any Iraqi who doesn’t agree with him to bring it on against our soldiers.
I’m not as brave as the prez,
but I would like to make a humble offer:
I’ll gladly don my captain’s bars again if he’ll reactivate my
commission and accompany me to Baghdad. He can play the part of Colonel William
Travis, the hero of the Alamo, and I (a bit of
a brawler, alas) will be Jim Bowie, blade in beltline. We’ll stay there together until we get
victory or death. I think that would be
the best thing for him to do to prove his courage. It would be even braver than sending boys and
girls to war for the reason that… What was
the reason? Well, I admit I can’t quite
keep up with what the reason is any more, but real Texans don’t need
reasons. Let’s just say we’re there
because the prez put us there, and I’d sooner
question the ethics of the Catholic clergy than question the leadership of the prez. It doesn’t
make any sense to complain about his not looking before we leapt, now that
we’ve landed in the middle of the quicksand, does it?
The above graph is a little bit of a downer. How ‘bout a joke to jazz things up: I met a feller at the Peace House, which is
down the highway from The Western Whitehouse, in Crawford, Texas this
week. He was a real cowboy, called “Doc”
by the townsfolk. We were talking a lot
of politics, and I asked him if he felt safer because the prez
had so much more police power after 911.
Doc looked at me with quizzed look, and asked “Safer from who?” I laughed until
there were tears in my eyes, let me tell you.
Does the joke still work for y’all up there in the boroughs?
Anyway, back to the emergency test you just went through, bear the prez no hard
feelings for it. He knows we have to be
ever-so-vigilant in his Global War on the Axis of Evil. It’s not over by a long shot, because he
still needs to liberate the people of Iran,
North Korea
and a hodgepodge list of their collaborators.
Thank God we have nukes if we run out of troops – that’s what real Texan Austin
Bay wrote in his Houston
Chronicle column yesterday.
If the emergency test scared you, or if, say, you
panicked a little while you waited in hot elevators and subways, think of the
greater public good. The ends justify
the means, after all, and anyway, deaths were predictably light. I say we need a little crisis now and then to
keep America
on the Bush Team, and that’s really where all freedom-loving Americans need to
be, just ask the prez. When your country is fighting a worldwide
war, you have to stay together at all costs.
And anyway, like your governor said, the feds will pick up the costs.
Thankfully, you have a born-in-Connecticut Texan to
tell you what’s really important in a climate of crisis. Shucks, the prez
loves you like a big brother.
So should we start having
blackout drills all over the country, maybe even have a nation-wide one for
Halloween night? Naw,
I guess it wouldn’t be as much fun now that it has already been done once. This trick-or-treat caper had to be a
surprise! You got the trick, (especially
the folks who died, RIP), but it should be a real treat for big energy, which
isn’t making nearly as much money as it thought it would in Iraq. Thankfully, it will now have plenty to do
here at home. This crisis exercise will
convince most Americans that the silly people obstructing America’s energy industries must
get out of the way. I’m talking about
people like environmentalist and peace activists, actors and editors with
un-American activities going on. It was
Barry Goldwater who said it, but it is the prez who’s
proving it to the world: “Extremism in
the defense of liberty is no vice.”
Left-wing paranoia about the right course of action has to be suppressed
at all costs. We’re in the middle of a
worldwide war, after all.
Captain May is a former Army Intelligence and
Public Affairs officer. He served on the
general staff of the US Army’s 75th Division.
Aside to editors
Alright, fellas, I’m about as committed as I can be right about now,
and let me tell you why I don’t mind sticking my neck out for your town.
I’ve been
there, once, and it was an education. I
appeared on Geraldo back in the 90’s (he was ugly then, too) to stand up for
females who had been sexually harassed by the Army. Not a lot of officers were willing to go onto
national television, in a decidedly low-end format, to make a case for women
victims of male superiors, but I did. I
even argued down a one-star lady general who sold out her sex to say that she
couldn’t imagine any such problem in the US military. I made her luck dumb and insensitive, let me
tell you. I know, it was a dumb career
move, in fact, it cost me my job, but it seemed like the honorable thing to
do. What do you think? Is it worth taking a chance here and there to
do something honorable for someone you’ve never met in your life, who has no advocacy,
no champion? Yes, I believe it is worth
it. What do you think? You can’t imagine how much I’m hoping that
you all agree with me. I’ve attached an
essay I wrote in the Houston Chronicle at about the same time. I figured that while I was fighting for an
ideal, I might as well go whole hog so that my conscience wouldn’t pull at me
for the rest of my life. What do you
think? I sure hope you think like I do,
that’s all I can say.
Anyhow, I
visited Central Park and it was beautiful and cool, and I saw bronzes out of
Lewis Carol, fountains and marbled statues, graveyards older than Texas. I was impressed. You were beautiful, even if you did keep me
up all night with your honking and sirens.
You are the city that never sleeps, and never lets her visitors sleep
either. I made the best of it by walking
around town, talking a bit of Russian with a Russian, then trying to speak
Spanish to a Pakistani, who looked like a Mexican to a Texican. I met Barbara Phillips, who was then writing
for the leisure and arts page of the Wall Street Journal. She was sweet, and she taught me to use the
subway. As we rode she said she had
lived in the city all her life and never learned to drive. New
York, you were strange, and you were beautiful. Can I have a parade there someday? Just a little one, mind you, I’m a humble
Southern man.
I was
teaching history in the barrio when Carlos and Chantel
busted in the classroom door, yelling that a jet had hit one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. I kept control of the class as I rolled out
the television, explaining to them that we had better check it out, but that it
was nothing to be alarmed about. As the
picture came into focus, I explained to them that an Army airplane had
accidentally crashed into the Empire
State Building
back in World War II. I kept teaching
class as the television showed the burning tower. “Capitan!” Sergio called and pointed to the screen. The second airplane was making an arc into
the second tower.
Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 2