If there's one story I regret writing, one that still resonates with unintended consequences, it would have to be the one I wrote about swinging weights from my dick.
Back in the Weekly'stoddling days, beguiling ads began to appear in our pages featuring a photo of an Asian man with a cord hanging from his man root, from which cord hung a weight stack the size of a wedding cake. The ad seemed to suggest that this was a good thing: that increased virility and greater confidence would result, not to mention developing a cock the size of a bottlenose dolphin. Look out, fishnets!
Goaded by readers, how could I not attend the Ki Cong course? Next thing I knew, I was in an office near the airport several nights a week, undertaking dickorous martial arts training from a Vietnamese gentleman in his 70s who was very like the wizened mentor in all the kung fu flicks, except for being nicknamed Dr. Sex.
As advertised, after a couple of months I had a cock so large that it qualified as a fourth person at the bridge table. The post office gave it its own ZIP code. Women I didn't even know knitted wool hats for it. It became a celebrity, while I felt overshadowed, like the guy in Wham! who wasn't George Michael. At least my glans didn't have his stubble.
Then my dick won an Orange County Press Club award, and the whole nation took notice. “Hey, I want one of those!” became the national cry, and drug companies rushed in with Viagra, Levitra, Cialis, Screwalice and such. The floodgate had opened: Dick, dick, dick, Dick, DICK!
Next came the 2000 election, decided by a Viagra-addled Supreme Court, and since then the fate of the whole nation has been hanging from a dick. And it just isn't funny anymore, this priapic urge to plunge the nation into one inextricable hole after another.
Pardon me, but I feel a fit of righteous rage coming on: What the fuck was George W. Bush doing last week while the nation was mired in its worst natural disaster in history? Was he holed up with the sequel to My Pet Goat? Aside from emerging for fund-raisers, war-defending speeches and grinning while pretending to strum a guitar for the TV cameras, our country might as well not have had a president in those dark hours.
And it certainly would have been better off without thispresident, whose administration, ignoring government experts' warnings, slashed funding intended to bolster New Orleans' levee system, gutted FEMA's ability nationwide to respond to natural disasters, and shifted first responders—including more than 40 percent of Louisiana's National Guard contingent—to a desert 7,000 miles away to fight a war based on bullshit.
Do you sense a pattern here? The White House ignored the bold-faced warning “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.,” and we got 9/11. They ignored our generals and State Department, and we're mired in Iraq. They ignored California's emergency request to help clear our insect- and drought-ravaged forests, and we got the worst fire in our history. They ignored FEMA's warning that New Orleans was among the three likeliest disaster sites in the U.S., and now the beautiful Crescent City has become the world's saddest gumbo.
When his PR people finally noticed there might be a downside to his smirking indolence, Bush cut his vacation short a whole two days early, so he and his administration might pretend they're on top of things. But even Fox News has been reporting the distraught pleas of the thousands marooned on overpasses in New Orleans, watching their babies and elderly die as not even a bottle of water or a word of advice was forthcoming from their government. If Fox News could get there, why not the forces of the most powerful nation in the world?
Older readers might recall this political slogan: “Don't change dicks in the middle of a screw! Vote for Nixon in '72.” Sage advice, that, but if we don't change the current dick we're stuck with, he might just screw us to death.
