THE TYGRRRR EXPRESS

For those who wonder why I would spend a lovely day in Birmingham, Alabama, typing on a keyboard, rumor has it that I occasionally type my column the night before. In Los Angeles I can predict the weather most of the time, but if it starts pouring in Birmingham, I can always edit this.

Saturday consists of meeting the Jewish people of Birmingham, and Sunday consists of meeting republican leaders in Bama. It will be a Republican Jewish Coalition function, so there will be religion and politics, two of the three things that should not be discussed.

The third one is sex, so hopefully a couple Scarlett O’Hara types will complete the trifecta of decadence.

Barring that, I am continually amazed at how people on the coasts truly believe that red staters are a bunch of hillbillies. Yes, hillbillies do exist, but at some point it is healthy to actually meet and talk to people. I have actually met blue staters that are not elitist snobs that I want to smack within seconds. Heck, some of them are quite enjoyable when they sit down and stop babbling about nonsense that only they care about. Heck, some of them even like football.

I say this because as soon as my buddy and I got to Birmingham, our initial plans of raisng hell and tearing up the town gave way to his exhaustion from driving a couple hours and my jet lag. We turned on the history channel, apparently because ESPN went to commercial. I am not ready to declare this network the Revisionist History Channel, because I have not watched it often enough to draw that conclusion. However, for those who have certain images of red staters, boy did this program live up to the ridicule.

The program was about Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton, a moonshiner in North Carolina. First of all, the guy makes Boomhauer from “King of the Hill” seem coherent. Secondly, not since Roscoe P. Coltrane chased Bo and Luke Duke has moonshine been something to capture more than five minutes of my attention.

As my buddy cringed, insisting that there was no way this fellow could be real (he did look like a comic book character that an elitist such as Garry Trudeau would create to denigrate southerners), the internet confirmed that bootlegging is alive and well. This being the 30 year anniversary of Smokey and the Bandit and all, I am sure his family is proud. Actually, a further surfing of the internet tells me his daughter has a blog about him, and the purpose of the blog is to tell the world she hates him.

Just when I thought the idiocy could not get any worse (I am always wrong about that), I saw on the news that a liberal congressman wants to have all people who attend Nascar events in North Carolina get tested for various diseases. So apparently enjoying Nascar is a way of spreading communicable diseases. I could not make this stuff up if I tried.

I guess I am just not enlightened or sophisticated enough to make real contributions to society, but at least I can beam with pride and say that I never won a Nobel Terrorism Prize. I wish Prince Albert had stayed in the can. Having said that, I have to give him credit for carbon credits, or as I call them, “screwup credits.”

Here is how screwup credits work. I get to act like a screwup and destroy the environment by flying in private jets, and to offset this, other people cut back on their energy consumption to make up for my bad behavior. Everybody wins. The people cutting back on energy get to feel pride, and I get to make speeches and fly around the world.

Imagine how this idea has been used in the past.

Israel is one big screwup credit. Jews were murdered throughout history, but then Israel was created. It works perfectly. Jews have one place they can go and be among other Jews, and to balance this out, they can still be murdered everywhere else.

Hey, maybe we can apply screwup credits to the future. If people in Oregon would just plant twice as many trees as usual, then I can burn down the local forest and build a shopping mall. If more people in some areas would have the courage to quit drinking, smoking and doing drugs, then those who refuse to quit can do twice as much with a clear conscience.

Now I just need to find more people to get up early, exercise more, and become vegetarian. That way I can sleep in tomorrow even later than normal, and start my day having two burgers instead of one.

So from what I have learned today, liberals are virtuous by talking about good deeds while conservatives spread moonshine and diseases.

It is a beautiful day outside (memo to self…be prepared to edit this line), and despite my best efforts, I just do not have the time to break down the political views of Kukla, Fran and Ollie. Most liberals thought that the puppets on that program were right wing hatemongers, and that the original title of the show was “The Ku Klux Klan and Ollie.” Then again, maybe had the cast of that show taken conservative republicans and set them on fire, the puppets could be winning Nobel Peace Prizes right now as we speak. After all, the bar is lower than a limbo stick right before I fall on my hide.

I could have offered an assessment of the autobiography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The book is fabulous, but I only finished half of it. I will read the other half on my way back to Los Angeles. One of my many great gifts is the ability to sleep very well on planes. Even the brilliant Judge Thomas could not keep me awake. After all, I took a sleeping pill before the flight. Well, not an actual sleeping pill…I read Al Bore’s acceptance speech. After all, it takes a great man to have people with an ideological agenda similar to his to offer him an award usually only reserved for failed Presidents, bloodthirsty terrorists, or both. I am not sure what protecting trees has to do with ending genocide, but perhaps I can save the life of a mattress by going on television and announcing that I will lead an awareness campaign to prevent people from cruelly ripping the “do not rip” labels off of the products. So many mattress labels get murdered every year. Like babies being ripped out of the womb, these labels are ripped from their mattress mothers.

For those of you who are passionate about Kukla, Fran, Ollie, Popcorn Sutton, Roscoe P. Coltrane, or my friend Billy who played high school football at Alabama, I trust that this column is worthy of an award. All I need to do is find somebody who contributes less to serious society than I do, and have them present me with a journalism award.

See how easy it is? Typing on a computer from Alabama, I am benefitting the world. Besides, on days when I have even less to say than today (let’s hope not), I can always save the environment by recycling…old columns that is.

eric

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 1:48 pm and is filed under POLITICS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.