CARTOONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

The nation has recently been rocked by wave after wave of cartoon related violence. Here are only a few of the examples:

A navy destroyer in the Persian Gulf had orders to fire a sidewinder missile at a terrorist training camp, the missile failed to launch as planned. So, the commander of the vessel lost his temper, climbed on top of the stubborn missile and jumped and down on top of it. This dislodged it from the launcher and it launched over the gulf, taking the commander along for the ride. When it reached its intended target, it hit a conveniently placed trampoline and bounced straight into the air and out of the earth’s atmosphere. The commander then grabbed a nearby satellite, which then fell from orbit and landed on top of the destroyer.

A senior government official was walking to work one morning when he was suddenly struck by a falling piano. It bounced several times on the top of his head, driving his body deeper and deeper into the pavement. When emergency personnel removed the piano, he had a one-foot high bump on the top of his skull and several blue birds circled his head.

Another official was walking in a downpour when a lightening bolt struck his umbrella. As the electricity coursed through his body, witnesses reported seeing his skeleton light up like a Christmas tree. Luckily, he wasn’t hurt, but his hair and his clothes were severely burnt and he was covered in a fine layer of soot.

These events have awakened the nation to the danger posed to our security by all forms of humor. The people who use these methods are merciless. They have a massive arsenal of methods that include puns, dramatic irony, satire and metaphor. There is also the threat of enemy nations developing cartoons of mass destruction.

In response to this threat, the military have used all the resources at their disposal to develop various forms of weaponized humor. One such method utilizes a joke that is so funny that it causes uncontrollable laughter. The target will laugh and laugh, not able to draw a breath until they vomit and asphyxiate. By translating the joke into Arabic, they can be sure the joke won’t affect our troops, since none of them bothered to learn the language when they were sent in. They are also developing snappy comebacks to any joke the troops may encounter out in the field.

There is one thing of which we all can be sure; this isn’t a laughing matter.

FAIR GAME

The year was 2040. Only days earlier, dozens of captured democrats had been released into the forest bordering on the President’s country villa. Now, he and his Vice-President were in for an enjoyable day of recreation. It was a welcome break from the hard task of dismantling what was left of the democratic process and manufacturing the lies they would tell to justify their actions.

The sky was clear and a soft spring breeze wafted through the woods. The President stood in the tall grass bordering the forest and shouted “civil rights”, the democratic mating call. In response, a democrat popped his head up from the safely of the grass yelling “gun control, gun control.” When he saw the guns, he quickly scurried into the woods.

The President and the Vice-President turned to each other and smiled. The hunt was on. For an hour they tracked their quarry by following it’s spoor; a leftist newsletter here, an ACLU pin there, and soon they were closing in for the kill. At the VP’s suggestion they both split up in hopes of surrounding it.

Unfortunately for the President, his VP had an agenda all his own regarding the hunt. Despite the common front they presented to the press there were deep divisions between him and his President. He wanted to take over the world, the President only wanted to poison it. He supported the death sentence for homosexuals, the President supported castration. The arguments in the oval office would sometimes last all night.

Something had to be done. The VP circled around ahead of the President and from the cover of a nearby bush, he took careful aim and squeezed the trigger.

The next day, he would announce to the world, his face streaming with crocodile tears, that the President had been shot in a freak hunting accident, and once again, the American public would believe everything it was told.

THE NOT SO GREAT DEPRESSION

The alarm was set to go off at seven in the morning, a reasonable time to wake up. That is, reasonable for someone with full use of their faculties. So, as Harry’s apartment filled with morning light, the clock radio chirped to life.

“Hello folks, it’s a gray miserable day without even a ray of hope, so drag your miserable butts out of bed for yet another day of your pointless existence. I don’t know why I even come here every day to entertain you bunch of stupid ingrates, there was supposed to be so much more to life, but it was an utter lie just like the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. Now I’m going to play more stupid pap to bore and irritate you. I quit!

Harry sighed, rolled over in bed and turned it off. A mature student at a local university, he was glad he had not succumbed to the plague of suicidal depression that was afflicting close to half the world’s population. He lived from day to day, and tried to cope with the problems the depression caused him and the rest of the mentally healthy population.

Even the car ride to class was fraught with unpredictable dangers like people trying to kill themselves with their cars. It was the epitome of the American dream; they wanted to bring their cars with them. People hurling themselves in front of trucks were causing traffic jams. Sometimes they hurled themselves from great heights.

As he pulled into the campus parking lot, he heard shots ringing out from the clock tower.
He knew he would have to take a circuitous route to the lecture hall to avoid being hit by any stray bullets. Sometimes he would come across fellow students curled in a fetal crouch on the untended lawns sobbing, or staring straight ahead with hollow sunken eyes and muttering to themselves.

Eventually he entered the ivy- covered halls, climbed some stairs and found himself a seat in the virtually empty lecture hall. Professor James paced franticly before his tiny audience, his hair was messy and unwashed, his eyes bloodshot. He appeared to have spent days without sleep. Finally he stopped, buried his long face in his hands for a moment, and started to speak.

“ Mankind is at a crossroad,” he began, “ we have reached the limit of what our puny limited intellects can possibly grasp. It would be sheer conceit to consider ourselves as anything more than stupid, smelly, selfish sacks of shit that are teeming over the face of the earth like a case of the clap.

“Instead of graciously stepping aside and going extinct like all the other maladapted freaks of nature that have gone before us, we want to travel to the stars and screw up the rest of the universe. Eventually we will run out of garbage to shovel down our filthy mouths, and forget how to use the technology we created to do things we were too lazy to do for ourselves. We’ll just sit hip- deep in all the shit we’ve created, picking our noses like a bunch of inbred, brain-dead misanthropes!”

He seemed to become more composed, more resolute, and closed his talk with, “That is the theory of devolution.” He paused for a moment to be sure what he had said had sunk in, even though he was teaching Basic Marketing, and pulled out a revolver.

He trained it on his temple. With a shout of “Class dismissed!” he pulled the trigger.

The scene was a familiar one to anybody who had seen a cheap horror movie, a mess of blood and brains that was more disgusting in real life than anything one could imagine. Those in seats near to the front ran screaming, covered with gore, into the campus to join the sullen despairing masses. The rest shuffled out wearily

On the drive home, with the day’s events playing in his mind like a skipping record from his misspent youth, he felt himself growing emotionally numb. The madness in the streets no long had any effect on him. It was like watching a late movie while falling slowly asleep. None of it mattered to him anymore. Someone, somewhere, would have to find a miracle cure and save humanity, but not him. He felt like crawling into a hole and dying. Death seemed to him like an old friend he would be meeting again soon.

He returned to his apartment in the early afternoon. He pulled the blinds tight against the accursed light and crawled into bed fully dressed. He didn’t sleep, he just lay there, too tired to move, thinking of his dead father and listening as anarchy exploded across the city. The red light of many fires flickered against his blinds and horrible despairing screams seemed to keep time.

“Maybe tomorrow.” He muttered to himself as he fell sound asleep.