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Julia Gorin
The America Show
Episode 4
Jesus and Mordy
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Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
by Burt Prelutsky
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America Alone
by Mark Steyn
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The CRO Store
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My wife wanted to see Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show, so there we were the other night in the mezzanine of the Geffen Playhouse, while on stage Princess Leia, of “Star Wars” fame, bellyached about the hardships of growing up as the privileged daughter of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.

After a while, my mind, as it is wont to do when I’m forced to sit in one spot for too long, began to wander.  And once my mind gets it into its mind to stretch its chubby little legs, there’s no telling where it will wind up.

For instance, what idiot came up with the notion that sending a kid to his bedroom was the appropriate punishment if he behaved like a brat?  The average kid’s bedroom is a modern day Garden of Eden, but with lots more toys and gadgets, and one less snake.  While I can’t swear to it, I have a hunch that the idea was first hatched by that eminent child psychologist, Dr. Brer Rabbit.

Somewhere between Ms. Fisher’s complaining about step-fathers numbers two and three, I decided that any college football player who scores a touchdown and then strikes that corny Heisman Trophy pose in the end zone should automatically be out of the running for the award.

Carrie was just beginning to make jokes about the awful hairdo she was saddled with in “Star Wars” when I found myself thinking that it’s probably the perks, and not the job itself, that makes being a U.S. senator the slightest bit bearable.  I mean, I’ve worked in enough offices to know that all it takes is one creep in the work place to put a pall on even the best of jobs.  Well, imagine, if you will, what it must be like to spend day after day, year after year, with such long-winded gas bags as Schumer, Kerry, Boxer, Clinton, Biden and Byrd!

Just as Carrie started dumping on one of her ex-husbands, Paul Simon, I found myself thinking that if only Albert Einstein hadn’t beaten me to it, I would have inevitably come up with Prelutsky’s theory of relativity.  Quite frankly, I don’t know how it was that the professor got so much mileage out of his discovery.  Maybe Einstein just had a better P.R. person than we realized.  I mean, time is obviously relative.  Any kid knows that days stretch on interminably in the week leading up to Christmas.  For this they hand out Nobel Prizes?!

Or take doctors, for example.  I bet time just zips along for those guys.  However, if you’re cooling your heels in the waiting room or, worse yet, sitting in an examining room in a paper gown, cooling your tush, time crawls along like an arthritic snail.  Time has actually been known to come to a complete standstill during certain Will Ferrell movies, and even to move backwards when you’re waiting for some knucklehead to finally pull out of a parking space at the local mall.

Which brings me to the show, itself.  First off, one can’t help feeling that you’re caught up in a peculiar time warp when a person spends the better part of two hours either talking about a 50-year-old Hollywood scandal involving her folks and Elizabeth Taylor, or a 30-year-old science fiction movie.  But, for me, the thing I disliked the most about the evening were her gratuitous cracks about George W. Bush.  Now you should understand that, even though I’m a Conservative or perhaps because I am, I no longer take cracks about the president to heart.  Ever since he decided to be more concerned with safeguarding Iraqi mosques and trying to win the hearts and minds of the heartless and mindless Islamic fascists, he lost my support.  I wanted to see Falloujah wiped off the map, but he obviously feared how that would play on CNN and Al Jazerra.  It certainly didn’t help our relationship when his approach to illegal aliens was to roll out the red carpet or when he out-spent Clinton on federal entitlement programs or when he failed to use his bully pulpit to promote a right-wing agenda.  By the time his Justice Department let Sandy Berger off with a slap on the wrist, instead of twenty years hard labor in Leavenworth, you knew better than to invite us to the same dinner party.

However, all that being said, if an allegedly funny person, someone such as Carrie Fisher, is going to get laughs at his expense, one expects her to do it with wit and some style.  Instead, she merely flashed his photo on the screen a couple of times, as if it were a Pavlovian exercise for the predominantly left-wing audience, and made some puerile remarks about the man.  It was as if she were merely displaying her credentials, reassuring us all that she’s one of us.

Well, maybe if I were also a liberal, it wouldn’t have annoyed me quite so much.  Still, I’d like to think that even if I were an ACLU card-carrying fruitcake who thought the sun rose on Ted Kennedy in the east and set on Barbara Streisand in the west, it might give me pause to realize that a middle-aged woman who makes her living ridiculing her still-living parents, who has herself been divorced twice, has a daughter by a homosexual husband, been a drug addict, an alcohol abuser, and been institutionalized as a certifiable loon, shares my politics! CRO

Copyright 2007 Burt Prelutsky

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