Posted on March 19th, 2010 by Gavin M.
Doop-doop-doop, readin’ the Internet. Hey, what’s this?
Harold Witkov, American Thinker
What I Will Do If ObamaCare Passes
Wow. See, when they talk about that Superstring theory, this is what they’re talking about. If you imagine timespace as a finite yet boundless corridor in one of those Czech-produced Tom and Jerry cartoons from the early ’60s with the hep jazz and the tape echo sound effects and so forth, then reading American Thinker is like the phenomenon that occurs when you’re chasing a mouse out one door and through another at an increasing rate of speed, back and forth across the corridor with increasing motion blur and more frenzied slamming sounds, until you stop halfway through a doorway, blinking your eyes in synchrony with a marimba cue, and regard your own butt sticking through an opposite door, waggling at you in synchrony with a ‘who, me?’ cue played on a viola.
One such butt is Harold Witkov, right-wing humorist.
I have done everything I could to help prevent ObamaCare. I have signed petitions, written letters to my representatives, and penned various articles for American Thinker. Still, I have a growing fear that ObamaCare might happen,
Because this is the funny thing: We have done everything we could to help pass health care reform! We have signed comedy names on anti-ObamaCare petitions,1 written not only letters but words, and not words solely, but rude words furnished with loud punctuation, to ours but mostly other people’s representatives, and panned articles at American Thinker. In this we have proceeded further, having upon them also punned2 — nicht war, Wutkopf?3 Still, we have an exactly opposite growing fear to Witkopf’s that health care reform might happen due to his perverse and dumb efforts, wasting the effort of our well-conceived and smart ones.
so I decided that it would be wise to have a “Plan B” for myself just in case.
Or worst of all, that health care reform will both happen, rewarding his fear, and be so compromised as to suck at reforming health care, punishing our hope. So we decided that it would be wise to have a “Plan B” for Witkopf just in case.
As I see it, coverage for an additional thirty million Americans is going to mean an eventual shortage of doctors and care. Despite what President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi tell us, ObamaCare is going to result in the rationing of health care. When that happens, I want to be ready.
He’s going to medical school!
Nope, that would be an attempt to make something better, and conservatives are driven by an urge toward gleeful worsening. Their notion of the requited life, their ‘passion’ not just in the word’s recent sense of pastimes and desired things, but rising on occasions near to the Shelleyan heights of the classically passionate, is to be forever incited to throw their hat on the ground and stomp on it, cursing in rack-frap phonetics.
Yes, this Plan B must start with the premise that an additional thirty million Americans will have access to medical care, and will end up with a scheme to sell people’s organs on eBay, or with the figure of C. Everett Koop bent under a hail of rocks like in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’ It would make sense if hospitals were dynamited, if plague corpses were trebucheted through the windows of office skyscrapers. This should end with Duane Jones shot by the rescuers and his body burning on a pyre of zombies. Because that would show them, and there you see what happens when the rat hat frack-a-sack of all the [stomp-stomp] frab-jappin’, shig-wappin’ fad apps that ever [jumpity-stompity] crab-jacked a wag-‘n’-fap shack.4
Bad-gum librul hat frackers. Fracked my hat, lookit it.
Here are my top four “Plan B” safety-valve ideas if ObamaCare passes:
Or worst of all, ours up there will be funnier.
1. I am going to buy the book by that guy I see on TV all the time, author Kevin Trudeau. His Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About will be looking pretty good by the time health care rationing starts. In fact, I think that there are a lot of good books like his out there. I am going to purchase them all. I am going to buy a new bookshelf and fill every shelf with natural cure books. If I die before I read them all, I will have my wife sell them on eBay. I am sure she will get a good price for them once ObamaCare kicks in.
If health reform passes, I am going to blindly support fraud and quackery. Har-har, I’m buying all the quack books, see? Help, ack, look how dumb you’re making me be. Hitting self on head with shovel, dancing jig in dog poo.
When someone mentions buying a whole new bookshelf as part of a way-out, full-tilt 180-degree rampage of sarcastic self-victimization, the impression I’m given is that their storage problems are the opposite of mine. I always seem to have room in my heart for a stranger’s hard luck, but seldom live fewer than three shelves to the wind — meaning that if I went to Ikea right now and got three Snåljåps in white birch laminate, or even said slicka mina nötter, oändlighet and splurged on three of their distressed bubinga Sluthögs, with the bookshelf lights on them whose utility I’ve never clearly seen, as soon as I Allen-keyed them together and shoveled their maws full, I would be already setting books on fire to keep from buying shelves.
That’s sort of an allegory. ‘Shelves’ is health care reform, and ‘setting books on fire’ is like those 30 million Americans.
2. I am going to sign up for self-hypnosis workshops and order self-hypnosis CDs. While perusing the internet, I discovered that there is a whole other world of health care beyond the conventional.
Surprisingly, this wasn’t mentioned in any of the natural cure books.
If I am going to be subjected to health care rationing, I may as well give self-hypnosis a chance.
Hello, self. I just want to warn you — I can’t be hyp[snap]WTF, how is it Tuesday already? Why am I mailing all these tea bags to[snap]zzz.
3. I am going to get out my old Q-Ray Bracelet and put it on. It never did help my herniated disc pain one darn bit, but it’s not doing me any good sitting in my underwear drawer.
Unless that magnetized underwear has been staving off chronic crotch and butt pain.
Wait, a Q-Ray Bracelet? Yeah, ho-ho, alternative medicine, guffaw. Let me go into my underwear drawer and dig out that old glow-in-the-dark plastic spider that I bought for eighty bucks because they said its bite would turn me into Spider Man.
This time, I am wearing it ’til I die. If that happens sooner than later, I bet my wife can get a good price on eBay for that, too, once ObamaCare starts.
There’s definitely a joke in that refrain, but what is it? Quackery -> die -> wife -> eBay. Quackery -> die -> wife -> eBay. Damn it, what’s the jokey part?
This actually annoys me. I’m a humorist, if I’m any kind of one at all, who takes risks. I’m adapted as it were to a high-stakes win/fail environment. Seriously, is the funny thing selling stuff on eBay?
If so, and also not unseriously, shouldn’t we now be experiencing this like a sighting of the wife-buys-startling-hat cartoon, circa like 1982?
4. I plan to find myself a top-of-the-line faith healer. I am talking bona fide, not like that charlatan who worked on Andy Kaufman.
A charlatan indeed, if Andy Kaufman were dead.
If you’re talking bona fide, this guy heals people in fast-motion to ‘Yakety Sax,’ or maybe I’m not even paying attention.
There is a safety-valve idea “#5” I am considering should ObamaCare pass, but it is kind of humiliating, and I would need the help of my wife.
If you’re talking boner ride, the two words every man needs to learn are ‘Yakety’ and ‘Sax’
I start by ordering an adult Clifford the Big Red Dog Halloween costume (I saw them for sale on Amazon). My wife brings me into the local veterinarian on all fours with a leash around my neck. She provides the vet with my stool and urine samples and explains, “This is my big red dog, Clifford. I would like him examined thoroughly. You are welcome to draw his blood and take X-rays, but he is not to receive any rabies or distemper shots. If I have to leave him, that is fine, but under no circumstances should he be neutered.”
This could only be improved by Harold waving at the veterinarian and saying, “Hi, I’m Clifford the Big Red Dog.”
That, plus it’s missing a fire hydrant joke. And someone has to say that things are “going to the dogs,” and someone has to exclaim, “It’s a dog’s life!” But hey, as soon as you say “urine samples,” we’re talking right-wing comedy Goldwater.
Exercise left to the reader: Recalcitrant Democrats are known as ‘Blue Dogs.’ Adult costumes are available of Blue, the dog on Blue’s Clues.
Speaking of canines, I recently found out that there is private health insurance coverage for pets available. Imagine that: Dogs and cats can get private coverage, but under ObamaCare, citizens will one day lose that option. On the other hand, our pets and their owners will one day have something in common which they never had before if ObamaCare passes: death panels.
Aha. Before, the dog-costume idea ended like this:
I start by ordering an adult Clifford the Big Red Dog Halloween costume (I saw them for sale on Amazon). My wife brings me into the local veterinarian on all fours with a leash around my neck. She provides the vet with my stool and urine samples and explains, “This is my big red dog, Clifford. I would like him examined thoroughly. You are welcome to draw his blood and take X-rays, but he is not to receive any rabies or distemper shots. If I have to leave him, that is fine, but under no circumstances should he be neutered.” And then, having unloaded the responsibility for a punch line onto the veterinarian, we just stand there. He stands there looking at us, and we look at him and stand there. “Hi,” I say, waving. “I’m Clifford the Big Red Dog.” We’re standing there when this happens, and as we do this, a lonely train whistle sounds in the distance. I wave my floppy red paw. My wife sobs; a wind sighs through the pines.
Now I hear ‘death panels,’ and I’m seeing an ending. “Oh my God,” says the wife holding the leash and an empty collar. “I forgot to explicitly say no euthanasia death panels!” Oh my God, it was just a prank!
“It’s a dog’s life,” confides a whitely gaseous Harold, waving his paw and stepping on a whitely gaseous escalator. His wife leaves to hit eBay, and a sign is revealed: TO DOG HEAVN DOG FUD NO BAD DOGS.
I sure hope and pray that Obamacare fails. But now that I have some “Plan B” safety-valve ideas, I am feeling much better should Obamacare come to pass. I do hope that others will make use of some of my ideas. I am sure we can get through this if we all pull together.
Pull my finger.
Notes:
1
Laura Lynn Hardy, C. Wrong Mills, Aretha A. Spinosa, Bertha Tragedy, Jeanie à la Gia Moráles, Hugh Minault, Thieu-Ho Minh, Al Zosprak, Sara Thustra, Jens Eitsvongut and Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, Gyaltsen Demo Rong, Twyla d’Aïe Dölz, Darren Teague Rice, Iggy Homo, DeWilt Tappauer, etc.
2
These words should correctly be pronounced — i.e. ‘may be momentarily amusing if pronounced,’ but these shadings of meaning were more appropriate to our grandparents’ age of analogy than to our age of digitality, with their numbers carried to a fire in buckets while ours are sprayed from technology — uh, correctly pronounced like the word pwned, in the manner of Buster Keaton standing in warm ocean water, which is to say with a silent ‘p.’
We have ‘oanned’ various articles at American Thinker, and further have ‘ounned.’ Because as Tom Lehrer told us, “A thing you’ve ‘pawned’ becomes ‘owned’ instantly, If you just add…” Ah yes, there it goes. The moment of amusement has gone. Memes, being digital, are fleeting, and this goes not zero, but one plus one or even binary 10 times for the hehe, or humor meme, and the eem and/or ime, or e- and/or i-meme, meaning not twice for each thing, but one time per category, totaling two times in, you know, because binary 2 is written as ’10,’ and ‘silent e,’ and it all gets tied up at the end up with something about Tom Lehrer being a mathematician, or so I imagine.
Uh, e-meme. With the, uh, ‘e-‘ prefix being a general descriptor (different from ‘i-‘ such that ‘e-technology’ includes Internet- or ‘i-technology’ in addition to non-i items such as Internet phones, while excluding the merely electronic, such as computer architecture) for things that are futuristic, i.e. that are from the mid-late ’90s with design cues from the early-mid ’60s. Dispelled of such fumes, or futurist memes, the future is a… Ah yes, there it goes. The moment of amusement has gone.
It was a mome, anyway. The mome is a kind of meme that’s like a fleem, only less fleeting and more momentary, if the clear distinction between these words stands up to the test of yawn, oh I guess not. Yay, porn. Nom-nom, snacks.
No, what’s this paper here with the writing on it? “End it mathematician T. Lehrer.” This appears to be hate mail from Tom Lehrer to Lobachevsky. Oh, oh, it’s a Sitting Pwnadocker. Those are things worth auctioning, and they go down in what I call the Down Docks, in the box marked eBay.
Huh? The box is missing? Says it’s been moved to the Updock? No, no, crap, wait. [dials phone]
Hey, Jerry — what Updock? Hey, Jerry — what Updock? It’s shipped out with a form called a Wang 4? Packed in some snoo? Hey, hey, [dialing phone]
Hello, Martin? Buddy, where’s my pawn box? No, pawn, as in ‘pawn shop.’ Right. No, Martin, it was a tapas bar, tapas. Yeah, very funny. No, just the one box is missing. Yeah, written right on it in Magic Marker: “Sitting Ownadocker: eBay.” [hangs up] Wasting time… [dials phone]
Hey Artie, look, if there’s paperwork here that says Owatana: Siam, then what’s a Wang 4? You get one after you fill out a full set of Ward’s 4? Hi. Artie. Do you hear me? [hangs up] Do you care? [dials] Wendy, look, hi. What are Ward’s 4? Wen, no one listens anymore. Wen, no one listens; there’s no use talking at all. [hangs up, dials]
Sheldon, hi, trouble, yeah. Me with the pawn docks. ‘Docks,’ not ‘dogs.’ ‘Pawn’ p-a-w-n! Down in the pawn docks! Down in the pawn docks! Yeah, people put me down ’cause that’s the side of town I was born in. Right, you too. [hangs up] “Have a gooin’?” [dials]
Hell’s that supposed to mean, have a gooing? Have a goo-on! Hi, uh, Rachel, hi, you just called me and the, uh, phone picked up. No, I was just going to call you, but I didn’t actually dial. And the phone just picked up on its own, so…? Oh, he’s taking an hour off your pay. Yeah, it’s like what hicks do. ‘Bye. [hangs up, dials] So they’re docking… Martin? Hi, Hickory Dick, the dock is rocking my cock, equals rooster, uh, pop goes the goo on the weasel. Hello? [hangs up]
Holy jeez, cracking up. Get ahold of myself. [turns radio on, indistinct pop music] [phone rings]
Martin? Not me, I was standing over here when that happened. What’s up since earlier? No, it was a kid who ran off. I was standing over here by the radio when he did that. Look, one question: What’s snoo? No, I don’t have any amatta — what’s amatta? No, Martin, I don’t have a cluepal — you can be my cluepal. You can get a lifejack and I’ll borrow yours. Look, I don’t know what’s… A load of Laughing Boy over here? Marty, we don’t have huge inventory on detergents right now. I’ve been sitting ’til the evening comes watching the Tide roll away, wasting time, and frankly it seems like nothing’s gonna change, that everything still remains the same. Bottom line is, I can’t do what ten people tell me to do, so I guess… What’s that? How do you greet a who? A native what?
“How do you greet a Native American,” Martin, as in one or more are currently outside your office waiting for their presence there to be recognized? Okay, so do you mean hypothetically? As in, what you’re asking is, “Hey, what’s the standard etiquette of greeting a Native American if tribal affiliation and customs are uncertain?” Or are you asking with a specific tribe in mind, and if so could you identify them?
No, okay, wait. When you ask, “How do you greet a Native American?” are you asking me this question: “Cough-cough. Hi, I’m Marty, and I’ve got sweat stains under my arms. Hock-ptui. I’m wondering what greeting is considered best-practice for an idealized Native American Indian of no definite affiliation, hypothetically speaking?” Or are you asking this question: “Om-nom, eatin’ a sandwich, Marty here. How does youse greet a Native Indian, I mean not, you know…” and here you’re doing a pantomime of having six arms and you’re tapping your index finger on the middle of your forehead. No, that’s what you’re doing. “If you’re introduced to a Native of the Indian persuasion, I mean not, you know…” and here you’re pantomiming playing a flute with a snake coming out of an assumed basket and writhing back and forth. I’m seeing it as a snake despite the universal hand movements of ‘woman.’ You know what I’m saying. Okay, Marty, sure.
Okay, Marty, sure. Okay, Marty, I give up. How do you greet a Native American? I give up, Marty — How?
What? What’s all the laughing? Is this on speakerphone?
: Þε ∞
My grafitti tag used to be TYOP, pronounced like it’s spell…whoah-whoah-wait, pronounced ‘typo,’ dammit, sheez, heh-heh, woo. Then briefly it was TYO, because notice there’s no P in it, please keep it that way. Then of course it’s a whole big thing with Tasers when all I was doing was urinating over the glass divider in the olice station, but I got off with robation because the logic was unimpeachable. I’m not currently doing graffiti because my current street name is LaCuÑa, and I mostly erase letters in other people’s tags. La Cuña means The Wedge in Spanish, and you’d think a nice bilingual pun like that would inspire some respect around here, but no, the next thing you find out literally over your bowl of cereal that Wednesday morning is that there’s some kid calling himself LaCuñita, or The Wedgie, going around putting the letters back into people’s tags. I’m just like, “What is this, a segment of The Electric Company?” And of course everybody’s all laughing and passing on to each other that I said that, as if it was the punchline I’d been striving to achieve this whole time. “Oh, don’t mind me,” I said. “I’m gonna go out and paint a 3 on a bald guy’s head, oh wait, this episode is brought to you by the number lick-my-nuts-infinity,” when actually I’d already changed my name and hence my game to LaKuhna, redirecting the metaphor toward Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and envisioning the tag -(2*10¢)-> to connote a paradigm shift.
See, life on the streets is about change, and connect that pun to the last while you’re at it. That’s what I mean: I think my next tag will be NO L, pronounced like it looks because there’s no Ë. My name might be Pvt. Ives, and you may ask, “Private Ives? ‘Zat like St. Ives malt liquor or sump’m?” And I may reply, shaking my fist, “It’s got no L, coward.” I mean, you have to stay ahead of them or else they start to catch up to you. There was already this guy last month called DJ Salinger who had two chicks on the mic he called Franny an’ Zooey, and I went up to him testing his game like, “Looks like your girl Zoë found a cure for chronic diaresis,” and he comes right back with, “Hey, you can diacritic or live an artist,” and I’m like, goddamn, I hope he had that one stored up.
My next name will be LaConic, and it’ll be all about the precise one-liner. The tag ought to be 1/3 ∏ r^2 h or a picture of a cone. Then I’ma sit here and wait for some Spanish guy to call himself LaCuba and tag himself a^3 with one of those hokey pictures of a cube you make by drawing two squares. You just have to stay in front, is all.
The number, lick-my-nuts-infinity, is equal to whatever number you just said, plus infinity. Then because someone could just be like, “Oh yeah? What I said plus a double infinity,” you add one of those compound infinities like the number of positive integers from one to infinity plus also the number of fractional expressions from 0 + 1/∞ to ∞ – 1/∞, times n, where n = this nut right here, oh wait also this other one over here, so that would be two, two nuts [thunder] ah-hah-hah-haaa [thunder, sound of fluttering bats].
And that’s times two, because then there’s the negative integers and a corresponding nuthole in timespace that appears to us as a two-dimensional shape like the old side-8 infinity symbol, that you can stick your nuts in, aright, and even with your nuts down in there, there’s still a total of zero nuts stuck in it. I’m not saying I couldn’t make this up, or that I wouldn’t make this up, but I’m saying that I didn’t have to. It’s the kind of trouble a mathematician deals with every day, getting their heads stuck in Klein bottles and whatnot, trying to all be ambassadors for high-functional autism, then when the wives try to put together a luncheon, they just head straight into the kitchen with their plates and the bowl of dip, and start yelling into each other’s faces about which is bluer, the number 7 or the key of D major.
Yeah, and then when you take your nuts out of it, the weird part is that your nutsack appears to the people in the vastly broad but depthless 2D space that divides our universe from the reverso-nutrageous universe to be a hairy figure-eight shape that grows, becomes more smoothly rounded, then splits into two unconnected, irregular circular shapes which get smaller in kind of a rough unison with each other, speeding up and slowing down together almost as if they were still somehow physically connected, with hair filaments appearing and disappearing radially around each, until they just shrink into nothing and disappear, leaving no trace that they ever existed.
That’s not even the weird part. The real weird thing is that if you’re one of the millions of people who’ve experienced some kind of religious or paranormal phenomenon, consider that what you witnessed might have been some higher-dimensional guy dipping his nuts through the flat side of our universe and into the higher-negative-dimensional one on the opposite side. What would some nine-dimensional guy’s ball sack look like in three-space?
See, the moment you start to think about it seriously, it starts to get eerie in a physics way, doesn’t it? You have to stay in front of these kinds of things, is what I’m trying to tell you.
n
The number, lick-my-nuts-infinity, is expressed symbolically as above, in the superscript text that sequences the prior footnote. But a more consistent approach to the sequential numbering of footnotes would place it always below whatever number of a footnote you would have just said, like a bibliographic nightmare from which a hollow-eyed Borges might shudder awake.
It would be something about a library whose volumes are catalogued according to strict rules of sequence, where this must be the very last footnote to appear in the last volume on the lowest shelf at the farthest distance from the infinite-volume set with nothing in it but a minus sign and infinite pages of ∞^∞^∞^, and so on. And yet, in saying lick-my-nuts-infinity, the librarian in effect resets the equation so that it is greater than itself, making it necessary to shelve another new copy of the volume behind the current one.
This wouldn’t bother Borges yet. What would get to him after a number of lick-my-nuts-infinities would be the problem: Is it necessary to shelve these physically identical, indeed indistinguishable volumes one behind the next in the chronological sequence in which they became logically necessary, and therefore appeared? That is, is it necessary to file them from from oldest to most recent because the values of the footnote numbers in them are determined and also ascending? Or can they instead be shelved in the uncertain order they’ve ended up in, because okay, you know, physically identical. Like, doop-de-doop, filin’ books, w00t, finished. Who would ever know?
Indeed, who? Borges thinks. And yet, the record of the past that creates, nay constitutes and mathematically determines this ever-advancing sliver of the present in which we ride, so often as though with our noses pressed to the wavy and unclear glass behind, or to the more darkly opaque glass ahead, so often seeing little of where we are, and all that sort of thing… Because of this, thinks Borges, is it not true that the very fact that one volume came before the next in time, that is to say, is it not true that the fact that the past is objectively real and its effects persistent, and that to the converse, it is only our perceptions of the past that are incomplete and fleeting, and must it not therefore be the case that the volumes are entirely distinct to Nature and in the mind of God — i.e. in the Great Card Catalog and in the texts it locates and orders? In short, mustn’t we give greater authority to time than to mere matter alone?
Because oh shit, thinks Borges — i.e. Man as an imperfect vessel for the divine — if God finds out I’ve been misfiling stuff in him, I am so screwed.
Or no, he then thinks. If I put things out of order into God’s mind, how will he even know?
“I heard that, Borges!” sounds a booming voice from the front lobby.
3
The surname Witkov is a Russian rendering of the German Witzkopf, literally ‘clever head,’ suggesting either that there was a smart person somewhere among Mr. Witkov’s progenitors, or that a fulcrum of irony was found in the noun, der Witz, which in a display of that subtly opaque Germanness that often accrues to German things, also means ‘a joke.’ Wutkopf, above, substitutes the noun, die Wut, and means ‘rage head.’ If for Russo-Germanic symmetry Wutzkopf is preferable, it means ‘swine head.’
4
Sounds like hick wap, huh?
