Cosmic Debris
byGary Greenberg
Sense of Humorlessness
Has anyone seen
my sense of humor?
I seem to have
lost it. Can’t find it anywhere. It’s not like I suddenly got cynical or
anything. It just took off, like
our dog Lucky when someone leaves a gate open. Like Lucky, my
sense of humor doesn’t come when
called, but trots a few paces ahead, always staying just out of
reach.
“Here, boy,”
I say. I whistle. Forget it.
In recent months,
I’ve tried writing funny columns about various topics ranging from the
untimely demise of our not-so-old
cloned friend Dolly the Sheep to my childhood pal Dougie
Feith, who’s now a bigwig in the
U.S. Defense Department and one of the architects of President
Dubya’s dubious Iraq War. Seeing
how genetic manipulation and war in the nuclear age could
both lead to the destruction of
life as we know it, these things should be rife with humor.
But I can’t seem
to find it.
As I circle these
two topics bobbing and weaving, looking for a comic opening and tossing
out an exploratory jab here and
there, I find that my wit seems too dull, my sarcasm too sharp. I
tire quickly. And I keep thinking
about grabbing a leftover beer from our Fourth of July cooler
and cracking it open for breakfast.
Excuse me a second...
Ah, Beck’s. A
sip of bliss. Sorry if I sound unpatriotic, but German beer is the best.
Whereas the Germans really love
their beer, the Scottish really love their sheep. And this
half-witless double-entendre brings
us rather awkwardly to our late four-legged friend Dolly.
As you might
recall, Dolly was the first successfully cloned animal of note (not counting
the Kennedys). She was created from
a single sheep mammary cell, prompting her Scottish
“father,” Dr. Ian Wilmut, to name
her after that icon of mammiferous magnitude, Dolly Parton.
As funny as a
successful clone named after an aging boobacious babe might be, the cloning
failures actually have been funnier,
like the time they combined the genes of attorney general John
Ashcroft and a German shepherd and
got a dog that kept barking up the wrong tree.
Dolly, on the
other hoof, thrived at first, making headlines around the world. (Please
note
that a tabloid report claiming that
the cloning was actually designed to remove human DNA from
Dolly’s genetic makeup was vehemently
denied by Morris “Mo” Lester, spokesperson for the
United Sheepshaggers Federation
of Scotland.) Ironically, Dolly developed a severe chest
infection, of all things, and had
to be put down at the lambchop tender age of six. But she will
always be remembered as our first
clone. And lest anyone forget, she has been stuffed for
posterity and now stands in all
her genetically imperfect splendor in Edinburgh’s Royal Museum.
Surely there
must be some humor in that. But I just can’t find it – other than
to say that
when asked to comment about Dolly’s
death, former president Bill Clinton declared, “I did not
have sexual relations with that
young sheep, Miss Dolly.”
Speaking of presidents
with some disgraceful habits, the John Wayne tough guy posturing
by our current prez as he runs roughshod
over the world is pretty comical considering that he
himself artfully dodged the military
during Vietnam and went so far underground after the planes
hit on Sept. 11 some of us wondered
if he’d surface in China.
Of course, I’m
sure he was told by his supervisors to disappear for national security.
And
Dubya always does what Dubya’s told.
In fact, that’s how my old pal Dougie Feith helped lead
our country on a crusade to conquer
the Middle East.
Dougie and I
were best friends in the latter stages of elementary school and went to
the
same overnight camp for years. Even
as a kid, Dougie was elitist and egotistical, one reason he
fits in so well with the current
administration. I recall him often saying, “It’s not bragging if you
can back it up.”
And Dougie could
back it up. He was brighter than most of our teachers and a champion
tennis player who even intimidated
adults with his precocious arrogance. Other kids thought he
was a jerk for being so bossy, but
as the youngest child of my family, I was used to being ordered
around. And Dougie was cool. He
was smart, rich and had a control over things that I lacked.
I also felt indebted
to him because he got me out of class an hour every day for weeks to
help him type up an abridged version
of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream for our sixth grade play.
He was the only one in the class
who could type, including the teacher, and needed someone to
dictate the play to him because
one of his few failings at that point in life was he couldn’t touch
type. And that someone was lucky
me, even though reading A Midsummer’s Dream aloud for an
hour straight was a lot more work
than sitting in class daydreaming about sports and/or Linda
Goldfine.
Eventually, Dougie
and I parted ways in junior high. He went to private school,
presumably because he was too smart
for public school, then Harvard and Georgetown Law, no
doubt to prove it. Now Dougie has
become the honorable Douglas J. Feith, the Defense
Department’s undersecretary of policy
and self-appointed protector of the state of Israel.
When it comes
to Israel, Dougie is so far right he’s wrong. And he helped influence our
very easily influenced president
on our country’s current Middle Eastern crusade to democratize
(read conquer) this oil rich region
under the guise of...well, I’m not sure they even bother with a
guise since the weapons of mass
destruction didn’t pan out. Dougie, of course, would do anything
to stabilize the Middle East for
Israel’s security and must have figured a war with Iraq was a good
start.
Surely there
is something funny here. A rabid Jew telling a fanatical Christian how
to deal
with Muslim extremists? We’re talking
sitcom material. Yet I still can’t find a punch line.
Oh well. Please
excuse me.
I know
I will eventually find my sense of humor because the world really is a
funny place.
And it will remain so until we geneticize
ourselves into oblivion or let warmongers like Dougie
Feith herd us through the gates
of Armageddon.
In the meantime,
I wish us all peace, love and an end to humorlessness.
Dolly the Sheep, on display
Dougie Feith (left) and me, 1966