writing samples...satire

Moon Breaker

It’s time, once again, to put a man on the moon. Now that we have grown accustomed to people who blow up themselves, watching network television has become a jaundiced affair. The nightly stew of two men robbing a bank and escaping in a hybrid motorcar no longer fires the imagination, nor do images of brain, bone and fragments of clothing mixed in with the oranges in a blown Tikrit marketplace. See, I’m even becoming familiar with the names. I can now say Fallujah without you thinking I’ve just contracted a rare virus from the Mumba-Mumba forest outside of Lusaka.

It’s time to create another colossal spending bill of interstellar proportions and what better place to throw it but at the moon? It’s accessible, not to mention visible. The beauty of this accessibility means that our progress can be tracked using a $20 telescope bought at your nearest monolithic discount store chain. And it’s close enough that Geraldo Rivera will want to make a trip there; you know, to interview someone, anyone and make his usual startling revelation. He could begin with an expose on the other side of the moon not being really dark, or something like that.

Having gone back to the moon, we shall have to do something when we get there. After all, spending untold trillions to go somewhere and not even enjoy the fly fishing is a terrible waste of time. That is akin to running in circles or driving in ovals, as you like it. The question, of course, is what to do when we go back to the moon. After a short while, moon rock sales will go bust so we must start thinking about the next big thing as soon as possible.

Short of anything like a long term plan, the type of which NASA fervently avoids, I would suggest we start by digging a hole. Marvelous things have turned up from hole digging exploits of ancestors past. First we invented wells, then gold and the last true breakthrough from digging holes has been oil. Now I’m not suggesting anything the size of an oil well. I am talking about the mother of all nappy-headed holes, the kind of which you would be able to drive an aircraft carrier through…sideways.

And the use of this hole you ask? Why, to fire the imagination of course. Think of it as the ultimate speculative venture of all time. And imagine the conversational possibilities. Whole university departments will be cobbled together to study this phenomenon. Network TV will devote the entire nightly news to a gusher of talking heads, waxing knowledgeably on The Hole. Archaeologists will lose interest in the great pyramids. The Russians will surrender as they will be certain we are digging the largest launch tube the world has ever seen. The Chinese will harken back to the old adage about digging a hole down to China and become very circumspect in their dealings with us.

Of course, such a venture will require huge amounts of labor and will put paid to our dilemma of what to do about our immigration problem. And then, holes of the magnitude of which I speak are sure to need a little blasting from time to time. I happen to know just where to find some experienced hands…in Fallujah.

Start Planning

Oil rich middle-easterners are buying English football teams like dates at a bazaar. .That's what you do when you have run out of parking space for your Ferraris and Rolls Royces. Forget the private jet collection. A mere multi millionaire like John Travolta has three parked in his back yard. Conveniently, his backyard abuts a private airfield. If you are a Sheik it's likely your backyard abuts ten billion barrels of oil.

Trust me, you tire of Tiffany diamonds just like the next man and buying blond nubiles on the slave market loses it's luster after the first ten or so, not to mention the fact that western slaves are constantly nattering on about their rights. Now that those pesky Dubaites are creating palm-shaped islands where nothing lay before, it's time to do something new. So you purchase a Premier League team and proceed to spend your way to a championship or two.

What other options are there? You used to keep a stable of Arabia's finest in a quest for the elusive triple crown. Then some hayseed with a homegrown nag comes along and wins one of the majors. Just like that! Nobody has any respect anymore. You would have bought a Formula 1 team but upstarts like the Brawn team have debased the value of the sport, not to mention the fact that those pesky Italians don't want to hand over the ownership of their national icon to an outsider like yourself.

You should have bought China back in the day when they still made stuffed toys but you had to listen to that dumb-butt accountant Ahmed when he said if things didn't pan out, 1 billion angry Chinese might have been a handful. You oughta water board the bastard!

I'm sorry to have to tell you that the English football team gig has been tried already and worked for a while until other teams discovered the newest stars and suddenly things changed. Don't you know as soon as you spend a bundle buying the best footballers on the planet, along will come some old codger with a team he built from scratch and they'll flog you out of the sport.

Time then to go long. And hard. Conveniently, now that the American economy has been cheyneyed ( a Wall Street term meaning “shot in the face”), there are a lot of bright guys walking around looking for something to pay the mortgage and keep the lease on the Audi alive. Russia has its fair share of unemployed scientists, technicians and generally inebriated types. Things are tough in North Korea, not to mention, Iran. Not even China can employ 1 billion of its own in these tough times. They gotta have two hundred thousand spare nerds and gear heads just hanging around the neighborhood Sunmoonstarbucks. I'd suggest you get serious and knock one off the planet. Start planning a mission to Mars.

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