Entries from June 2004 ↓

Just read an amazing article by a guy name Matt Taibbi, from New York Press. It starts off as a screed against liberal-turned-uberfascist Christopher Hitchens (who recently wrote his own screed denouncing Michael Moore as a “coward”), then settles into a long and impassioned indictment of journalism in this country:

Well, that’s rich, isn’t it? Christopher Hitchens crawling out of a bottle long enough to denounce Michael Moore as a coward. I can’t imagine anything more uplifting, except maybe a zoo baboon humping the foot of a medical school cadaver. All journalists are cowards. Hitchens knows it, I know it, everybody in this business knows it. If there were any justice at all, every last goddamn one of us would be lowered, head-first, into a wood-chipper. Over Arizona. Shoot a nice red mist over the whole state, make it arable for a year or two. A year’s worth of fava beans and endive for the children of Bangladesh: I dare anyone in our business to say that that wouldn’t represent a better use of our rotting bodies than the actual fruits of our labor.

And it just gets better after that. I haven’t seen such a thorough skewering of our fourth estate since … ever. Refreshing, after having watched journalists and reporters and press poolers kiss Bush’s ass for the last three years and print everything that spews out of his administration’s spin machine as if it was gospel.

Speaking of which, for a truly funny and depressing look at how our president fairs under the hot lights of actual journalism, check out this video of a recent interview with an Irish reporter, who obviously wasn’t briefed by her American counterparts about the intellectual obeisance necessary for a chat with our Commander in Chief. She dared to ask actual questions and demand actual answers. As this transcript shows, Bush was clearly flustered and peeved, dismayed no doubt that the usual formless pabulum was actually being challenged. His people pulled Laura Bush out of an interview with the same reporter, as punishment for her attempt to wring honesty from the great maw of deceit.

John Nichols has a nice summation of the episode:

On the eve of his recent sojourn in Europe, President Bush had an unpleasant run-in with a species of creature he had not previously encountered often: a journalist. He did not react well to the experience. Bush’s minders usually leave him in the gentle care of the White House press corps, which can be counted on to ask him tough questions about when his summer vacation starts.

How very, very sad. Hello, you 45% of the nation who still plan to vote for this guy. Are you watching this?

The Montreal Expos are looking for a new home, and Major League Baseball, the only legal monopoly in the United States, is driving a hard bargain. No less than seven different cities are competing for the opportunity to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build them a stadium, and most of those cities are prepared to use as much of their citizens’ money as it takes. Will the Expos become the new Washington Senators? The Virginia Concealed Firearms? The Las Vegas Craps? No one knows, but this much is certain: wherever they wind up, their hosts are going to pay dearly for the honor of having them.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, I guess, if baseball was actually interesting to watch. But it’s not. Baseball is not only the least interesting sport in the universe, it’s the least interesting thing in the universe, period. Try this: paint one of your walls, say a nice off-white, and put a TV in front of it. Turn on the TV. Switch to a baseball game. Sit down on your couch with a stopwatch. For the next three hours, record the amount of time you spend watching the game, versus the amount of time you spend watching the paint dry. I guarantee that you’ll spend about 85-90% of your time on the paint. Compared to baseball, drying paint has a rich, fascinating interior life that will keep you transfixed for hours.

And if that’s not proof enough, consider this: George Will thinks baseball is really cool.

The game can’t survive like this for long. Eventually, municipalities are going to realize that no one watches baseball, and that it doesn’t earn them or their communities any money. MLB has to invest some effort into making the game cooler, before it’s too late.

Luckily, we here at Doodleplex Industries have given the matter a great deal of thought, and are prepared to offer several suggestions that will go a long way toward returning the game to its glory days athwart the American steed of hope, myth, and dream.

Suggestion #1: Exploding Balls

Imagine it: your best home run hitter is up, facing a weak, flagging pitcher. You’re three runs behind. The bases are loaded. The crowd is edgy, subdued, apprehensive. The pitcher winds up and throws: a weak, slow, fat, juicy toss down the middle, right at knee level. The batter licks his lips, feels a moment of pure elation, and swings for the bleachers.

He hits the ball.

The ball explodes.

He dies.

Now that’s exciting! Every time your best hitters swing, you’ve got that extra level of uncertainty chewing away at your insides. Will he strike out? Will he hit a homer? Will he be blown into tiny little pieces?

The explosion frequency algorithm will have to be entirely random, of course. But that’ll just add to the excitement, bring the fans face to face with the reality of a heartless, unfeeling, arbitrary universe.

That’s how you sell tickets, baseball!

Suggestion #2: Escaping Bases

The hitter bangs a line drive down the middle of the field. It gets past the shortstop and the second baseman and lands safely in the outfield. Guaranteed base hit, right? Wrong!

Because first base, sensing the runner’s approach, suddenly sprouts hundreds of tiny feet and takes off down the foul line, heading toward the stands. The runner, a little old and a lot overweight, scrambles after it, puffing like a steam locomotive, followed by the first baseman. Will the runner catch up to the base before one of the opposing players can tag him? Stayed tuned to find out!

Suggestion #3: Cheerleaders

Baseball is the only major sport in this country without cheerleaders. I don’t understand how the owners could have allowed such a glaring omission to go unrectified for so long, but they clearly need to get on the ball and hire some beautiful, short-skirted females to cheer their team to victory. It’s the American way.

But I think they should do more than that. Rather than leaving the cheerleaders on the sidelines, kicking and yelling and waving their pompoms, they should put them on the field, where they can distract the opposing team. Say the batter hits a long, fat fly ball into shallow center. Easy catch, right? Wrong! Because a trio of lovely women are rushing over to the outfielder, posing in suggestive (but tasteful) positions, and whispering unprintable things into his ear. The poor guy’s trying to focus on the little white speck dropping toward him, but he thinks that blonde one might really like him, she’s giving him a look that can only mean she wants …

Smack! The ball bounces off his head, leaving a small, bleeding crater in his skull, and drops to the grass. Base hit! Good job, cheerleaders!

Sure, it’s a little — ok, a lot — sexist, but the American people won’t mind. Really. Television has been spelunking for the lowest common denominator in popular entertainment for a long time now, and hasn’t found it yet. Maybe baseball can.

Suggestion #4: Non-Boring Highlights

Whenever I have the misfortune of catching baseball highlights, they inevitably look like this: a camera tracking a tiny little ball as it flies into the stands. A pause. Some non-witty commentary by a sports announcer guy. And then a shot of another ball in flight, toward another set of stands, in another stadium. And another. And another. Home runs are cool and all, and I’m sure they’re really darn exciting if you’re at the game, but they all look the same. We don’t need to see home runs any more. We know what they look like. Hello, highlight people? Enough with the home runs.

Instead, the highlights should focus on the truly cool stuff. Acrobatic catches. Stolen bases. Clutch doubles. But they should also do more. They should go into the dugout, with audio, and capture the players’ frustration, elation, their innermost secrets. And why stop at the dugout? Highlights should delve into players’ inner lives, in an attempt to understand the reasons for their on-field performance. I’m talking hidden cameras, interviews with relatives, document searches.

Remember the stories about Mike Piazza’s supposed homosexuality a couple of years ago? He vehemently denied it, and we all had to take his word for it. Well the new baseball wouldn’t stand for that kind of uncertainty. We’d bug him, satellite-track him, film him everywhere he goes. We’d put hidden cameras in his boudoir and catalog his midnight visitors. Wait, who’s that coming in now? Is it Randy “Big Unit” Johnson? Mike Tyson? Derek Jeter? No. But it is Derek Jeter’s wife! Oh, snap! Now we’re cooking with sauce!

Really, the possibilities here are endless. Baseball could easily become the most popular sport in the universe, instead of the crappiest and most boring.

But all I can do is point the way, Major League Baseball. You must take the first step.

The frost giant bent over and bit off my head, then reared back and bellowed his terrible joy. I rattled around in the back of his mouth for a while, then guttered into his throat and fell into the long chute of his esophagus. It was wide and slick and lit by phosphorescent glumps of undigested foodstuffs that adhered to its walls, like lichen.

I passed my mother’s head, near the top of the chute, stuck in a glottal fold. She turned her rolling, lazy eye on me and screamed Clean out the cistern ye great fackin twit!, then let loose a great globule of spit that spread out into a convex lens as it fell, looming over me like a mucilaginous umbrella. Mammary Gretta, my first and best endowed love, reached out to me with a fingerless hand and bleated something pitiable in a language I did not understand. Draken Oddnose loomed up out the darkness, going the other way; he was an old comrade and a good friend, but he averted his gaze as we passed. I got a brief glimpse of his dark uninostril before he spiraled up and away.

I fell for what seemed like a very long time, passing bits and pieces of the giant’s dietary history as I went: small cows lowing disconsolately in the darkness, carriage wheels, tavern doorways, the top half of a suit of plate-mail armor containing the top half of a very startled knight.

But finally I came into his stomach, and splashed into a green pool of acid that bubbled and glurped and hissed around me. Just as my face began to liquefy, I caught sight of Hanna, sitting cross-legged just above the surface of pool, staring at me.

Help, I said.

Hanna smiled and shook her head. Didn’t I tell you about frost giants?

You did, my love. Would that I had listened.

You never listened. That’s why they got me.

And then it came back, all of it, the fear and regret and self-loathing, like a kick in the crotch. But I didn’t have a crotch anymore, or a body, for that matter. There was just the head, tilted on its axis now and sinking fast, dissolving in the acid, reduced to its top left quadrant, nothing more than a bowl of skull and skin: half a forehead, half an ear, a cheekbone, an eye. There was no pain, just sadness. But that was pain enough.

If I’d had a tongue, I would have told her that I loved her. If I’d had arms, I would put them around her, and drawn her to me. If I’d had a nose, I would have buried my face in her hair and inhaled its scent, the sweet odor of jasmine and springtime. If I’d had lips, I would have pressed them to hers. But all I had left was the eye, and all I could was watch, drink her in, and remember.

But then my eye touched the pool, and spread out across its surface like a cracked egg. The world winked out, and I lost her. Again.

Ever since our invasion of Iraq began to go sour, the punderati have been struggling to equate it with various failed conflicts of the past: Vietnam is a popular one, as is the French war in Algeria and the Russian incursion into Afghanistan. But the one that I haven’t seen mentioned very often has perhaps the most in common with our blunderwar in Iraq: the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

The parallels are striking. Begin and Sharon went into Lebanon with overwhelming force and bevy of grave misconceptions. They would destroy the PLO, and in so doing eliminate that pesky “Palestine problem” entirely. The Lebanese people (who they falsely believed to be mostly Christians, oppressed by a bunch of Muslim terrorists) would welcome them with open arms, and aid them in their effort. And Israel would deal with any logistical/cultural problems they encountered along the way by simply hammering them into oblivion with their shiny, ultra-modern, utterly superior army.

Here’s what Thomas Friedman has to say about this in From Beirut to Jerusalem, his fantastic chronicle of the period:

Indeed, instead of entering Lebanon with a real knowledge and understanding of the society and its actors, Israel simply burst in with tanks, artillery, and planes in one hand and a fistful of myths in the other — myths about the character of Israel’s Lebanese Maronite Christian allies, about the Palestinians, and about Israel’s own power to reshape the Middle East. It would take three months, but eventually these myths would undermine all that the Israeli military hardware achieved.

Sound familiar? And here’s his take on Sharon’s role in the debacle:

[Sharon] behaved with a decisiveness and unwavering sense of direction, as though he knew exactly where he was going strategically, when in reality he didn’t have a clue about the world he was charging into. His strategic design in Lebanon was based entirely on self-delusions, which is why it eventually led Israel into disaster. His was a classic example of false leadership.

Now that definitely sound familiar: George Bush as a less smart, less morbidly obese Sharon. Maybe that’s why those guys get along so well.

Three years later, Israel was forced to get the hell out of dodge with their tails between theirs legs (and there goes my cliché quota for the day; damn), retreating to an uneasy occupation of the bottom of Southern Lebanon. They didn’t withraw entirely until 2000. In a recent editorial, Friedman makes the point that, while this final withdrawal was seen as a great failure for Israel, it was actually a very smart thing to do; possibly the only smart thing that they could have done under the circumstances:

With that U.N.-approved pullout, Israel completely reversed its situation: It went from holding the strategic and moral low ground, to holding the strategic and moral high ground. When Israel was occupying south Lebanon it was embroiled in a guerrilla war in which it could never use its vast military superiority. It was going mano a mano with Hezbollah. Worse, any Hezbollah attack on Israel was seen by the world as legitimate resistance. Once Israel was out, it could use its superior air power to retaliate for Hezbollah attacks – and the world didn’t care.

Kind of a cold-blooded analysis, but he’s probably right. It won’t be that easy for us. As Colin Powel told Bush before we plunged into Iraq: you break it, you buy it. We atomized the infrastructure of an entire country and erected an occupation in its place; if we move out, there would be literally nothing left in our wake. A unilateral withdrawal would be disastrous for what’s left of our dwindling international credibility, and — more importantly — for the Iraqi people we’d be abandoning.

The problem is, I can’t see an end to this mess that isn’t disastrous for everyone involved. I just hope someone smarter than me — and with a a lot more clout — can.

Geese are vile creatures. They strut about like insolent godlings, heads held high on their horrid weedstalk necks, beaks curved into permanent sneers, hissing at everything that passes them by; they lay steaming minefields of soft green shit in the paths of innocents, and grab bread from the hands of babes. They swarm wherever there’s water, and have the malign ability to transform a peaceful, pastoral scene into a honking, hissing, reeking bedlam.

They’re avian weeds. They must be killed. All of them.

I am not proud of this unreasoning hatred, but I can’t deny it, or control it. Whenever I encounter one of them, I shoot it the evil eye and mutter something unflattering under my breath. The goose, in turn, swivels its ponderous body around and hisses at me, clods of dirt and grass spilling from its cruel beak. If I had more comic book villain in me, I would shake my fist at them, or twist my thin waxed mustache and make diabolical plans in their general direction. But I don’t, so mostly I keep walking, stepping gingerly around the the ubiquitous fecal mounds, saying a silent prayer to Liverial, the God of Pâté.

You get my point. I don’t like geese. So you can imagine my displeasure when a whole gaggle of them waddle-ran down a hill toward me as I was walking along the path that circles an artificial, goose-infested pseudo-lake near my house; they came fast, honking, snapping, hissing and just generally being the unpleasant, devil-spawn malefactors that they are. I turned to face them, lowering my bookhand to my side, staring balefully. I assumed that this was a troupe of Avenger Geese, come to put an end to me. But I was ready for them; had been preparing for this moment my entire life. I would fell half of their number with my patented Whirling Fists of Goose Smashing, and dispatch the rest with my Soaring Rotating Very Fast Goose Destroying Kung Fu Roundhouse Kick of Death.

Let them come.

As the tribe reached me, however, I discovered that it was dominated not by warrior birds, but by goslings, twenty or thirty of them at least. They were tiny versions of their parents, covered in grey down instead of feathers; kind of cute, really. They streamed down the hill, onto the path, and surrounded me instantly. I tensed. It was just like geese to throw their children into battle, hoping to cool my wrath just long enough for them to slip under my formidable defenses.

But the expected attack did not come, and all of the righteous violence died in my heart as I looked down into the innocent, open eyes of these young birds. They were not hissing at me, or honking, or clamoring for food, or nipping at my bare skin. They were just standing there, quietly, calmly, agreeably. Waiting.

But for what?

And then I knew. They were waiting for guidance. They were waiting for spiritual instruction, words that would help them find the way along the endlessly ramifying paths of their young lives. They had heard the vile testimony of their elders, and balked at it. They wanted a second opinion. My opinion.

I was their messiah.

In my mind, then, I laid hands upon their wedge-shaped heads and said: “Heed me, young goslings, for I shall bring Truth into thine lives, and Gladness into thine hearts.

“Be not fruitful, and do not multiply. Hiss not at the approach of humankind, and crap not on the paths upon which it walks. Honk not in the silence of the deep summer glade, but rather settle quietly onto the water and preen thine feathers, or something. Hiss not at innocent children who wish nothing more than to give thee morsels of bread and run screaming harmlessly through thine ranks with their little arms aflail. Be at peace with the ducks and the fish and the other creatures of the water.

“But most of all, be a part of this earth, and not thoughtless parasites that live upon it, and feed on its bounty, and give it nothing in return; learn the ancient and holy art of symbiosis; give and take equally, and love one another and all of creation as ardently as thou lovest thineselves.”

“Now go, my children, and be assholes … no longer.”

I didn’t say any of that, though. I just stood there for a while, transfixed, then stepped out of the crowd and walked away. Slowly. The goslings took a couple of steps in my direction, then moved back to mill among their mothers and fathers and nip at the grass at their feet. The moment was lost. Their messiah had left them.

It was the chance of a lifetime, and I passed it up. Why? I did a couple of more turns around the lake, mulling this over, but I couldn’t figure it out. So I went back to my car, throwing away a paper Starbucks cup in a trashcan brimming with fastfood wrappers and plastic bags and spent batteries; shoved my way through the crowds at an intersection, glaring balefully at an old guy who was moving too slowly for my taste. Then I drove home, spewing smokestacks of pollutants from my tailpipe.

In the spontaneous, ongoing Reagan hagiography that’s been playing itself out in the media over the past week, I’ve heard the following sentiment expressed countless times: “He was a big picture kind of guy.”

Now, I don’t know what to make of this. Or rather, I know exactly what I make of it, but I’m not sure it’s really a fair assessment of Ronald Reagan, since my opinion of the whole big picture thing is shaped entirely by the unmitigated disaster who currently sits athwart our executive branch.

George W also professes to be a big picture kinda guy. But, like every word that shudders, twisted, flayed, and tortured, from his slantwise thin-lipped mouth, the term doesn’t mean what you’d expect. Big picture thinking, W-style, involves: (1) a disdain for details, in the form of extreme, almost fetishistic ignorance about the world around him; (2) an unshakeable commitment to misbegotten, ideological goals that have proven themselves to be unrealistic and detrimental to the health of the country; and (3) a casual, Pope-like belief in his own infallibility.

I don’t know if Reagan’s own brand of willful ignorance and self-deception was quite as sweeping; from what I’ve been reading over the past week, I would tend to think not. But he certainly blazed the trail. Here’s his one-time communications director, David Gergen, on the subject:

Reagan could be remarkably unaware of (and indifferent to) developments around him. If I were still working for him, I would probably pass it off as being “intellectually selective.” But it’s hard for anyone to argue that he knew as much as a president should about the state of the world. … His inattention to details and hands-off stance could be dangerous for his leadership. His Republican allies in the Senate believed that because he did not pay close enough heed, he turned down a budget deal in 1985 that they had carefully crafted to cut the deficits. By their account, he didn’t seem to understand the terms of the deal. … Majority Leader Bob Dole was furious at the time.

Implicit in the big picture approach to statecraft is a suspicion of facts, those hard, angular little creatures that do so much to cloud the thinking of a great leaders. Where W and his cohorts deal with the problem by warping reality to their needs through the tried and true methods of secrecy, government-sanctioned reinterpretations of basic physical laws, lying, and mind-numbing, endlessly-repeated doublespeak, Reagan simply stood up and said things that were clearly, manifestly, in opposition to the facts. And got away with it. Take this gem, for example, from his long-delayed address to the nation in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal:

Let’s start with the part that is the most controversial. A few months ago I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it’s not.

Hoo doggy! What we have here is a rare, unfiltered view into the mind of the big picture president. On the one hand, there are facts, on the other, there’s what he believes. You can just see the scales in his head, one side piled high with dark tons of implacable truth, the other burdened only with a tiny, weightless kernel of raw faith. And you watch, stupefied, as the scale tips faithward, vaulting the mass of fact upward and outward into the ether.

But enough with the metaphors. What did Reagan’s big picture myopia mean, then, in practical terms? Well, for one thing, it meant an endless series of scandals, as his unsupervised little-picturers went forth to fulfill his vague mandates: over 130 members of his administration were either convicted or forced to resign in order to avoid prosecution. It also meant the countenancing of genocidal murderers in Guatemala and El Salvador, in the pursuit of the big picture goal of ideological purity (ie, non-commie thinking) in our own hemisphere; and it meant the Iran-Contra scandal, of course, the details of which he could never quite remember. On this last point, I’m very willing to take him at his word: we only remember what we want to, after all. The brain is good at many things, but best of all at self-deception.

Reagan’s sweeping vision thing may be what we needed in the early eighties, despite all of the terrible misbehavior that it engendered. It may have, as the pundits keep telling us, helped lift the country out of a general malaise and make it “optimistic” again. As a rule, however, I distrust these kinds of nebulous, sweeping, generalities. Ultimately, you’ve got to look at the facts, and the facts, those irascible little bastards, are not kind to Reagan’s legacy. Any more than they will be to the current president’s.

Update: By most accounts, however, Reagan was absolutely instrumental in ending the cold-war; and according to Fred Kaplan, this was partly because of his faculties for self-deception.

Sigh. What a tangled weave.

Update 2: Kevin Drum has a really good post up speculating on why the conservative movement has all but cannonized Ronald Reagan, despite his rather mixed record as a conservative. Sums it up pretty well.

I suppose I could just hit a couple of right wing blogs to figure this out for myself, but, really, I don’t have the stomach for it.

A transcript from a recent call to the Hell and Damnation Customer Service Hotline:

Customer Service Representative: Hello, you’ve reached customer service. Can I help you?

Damned Soul: Yes, hello. I’m calling to register a complaint.

CSR: I’ll be happy to help you with that. What seems to be the problem?

DS: Yes. Well, I’ve been down here in the third circle for just over two thousand years now …

CSR: Congratulations sir. Have you received your second millennium anniversary gift?

DS: Well … one of my tormentors ripped out my entrails and served them to me on some good china the other day.

CSR: How nice.

DS: And then fed me the plate.

CSR: Lovely. I’m sure that was a nice surprise for you.

DS: Yes. Well, that’s sort of why I’m calling. I … oh dear … what … AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! [horrible screams]

CSR: Sir?

DS: Yes, sorry about that, a giant set of chattering fangs just chewed my leg off. Let me just hop over to this wall and prop myself up against … AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! [horrible screams]

CSR: Sir?

DS: Yes, back again. Sorry. The wall turned out to be an onrushing wave of molten lava fire ants. They’ve crawled into my orifices and are setting me on fire from the inside. It’s really quite painful.

CSR: Oh dear. Yes, I can imagine. My apologies. But you are in hell, sir. You should watch where you’re going.

DS: Yes, yes, I quite agree. And I would watch where I’m going, of course, if my tormentors would stop popping my eyes out and then nailing them back in the wrong way around.

CSR: Goodness. Haven’t heard of that one before.

DS: Yes, it’s new. They’re very proud of it down here.

CSR: We could arrange for a seeing eye dog …

DS: Oh, good Lord, no. Thank you. The only dogs around here have three heads, and all of them want to eat me. Have eaten me, as a matter of fact. I’m just recovering from being crapped out of one of Cerberus’s puppies, actually. It wasn’t at all pleasant.

CSR: Eternal damnation seldom is, sir.

DS: Quite. But that’s why I’m calling. It’s not a question of endless punishment — I’ve reconciled myself to that — but rather one of degree. There are nine circles, after all. And, presumably, it should be better in the third than it is in the fourth, and better in the fourth than it is in the fifth, and so on. Is that correct?

CSR: Yes sir, quite correct.

DS: Good. Well, I was sent here because I led a fairly gluttonous life. Couldn’t get enough of wine, women, song, etc. Was approaching four hundred pounds when I died. Quite appalling, really. Didn’t think it was an eternal damnation offense, but mysterious ways, and all that. Fine. So here I am in the third circle, where the brochure says I’m to be subjected to snow, hail, and filthy water while I lie about in mud, guarded by Cerberus. Forever. Correct?

CSR: Yes sir.

DS: Well, it’s not like that at all. First of all, Cerberus doesn’t so much guard me as tear me to pieces, on a regular basis, and then relieve himself on my remains. And he shits fire, of course. So, basically, I’m torn to pieces and then shat on by fire. Every day. That’s nowhere in the bylaws.

CSR: Perhaps there was an amendment to the rules. Lord Lucifer is notoriously changeable on matters of torment.

DS: Perhaps. But there’s more: the hail doesn’t just fall out of the sky in large icy chunks, it’s flung down on us in waves of sharpened, stiletto thin ice spears. It pins us to the ground, so that we can’t move out of the way when the rain starts. And the rain, I might add, is so hot that it literally boils the skin off our bones. Which are then shat on by Cerberus.

CSR: Perhaps you’ve wandered into the wrong circle. Are there any sodomites, hypocrites, or thieves around?

DS: No, just us gluttons. Well, there are a couple of lobbyists, and a few CEOs, but I think they’re just here until Lord Lucifer finishes the new Corporate Malfeasance circle.

CSR: Have you registered a complaint, sir? There are complaint boxes located conveniently at the gates of each of the circles.

DS: I have, yes. Several times.

CSR: And there’s been no response?

DS: Oh, no, there’s a quite definite response, in every case. Usually, one of the lesser tormentors pays me a visit and carves the text of the complaint into my back with a rusty icepick while his assistant pounds my balls into paste with a barbed pestle, but sometimes I’m just forced to eat myself.

CSR: I see. Well, there’s definitely something amiss there. We’ll look into it immediately. May I have your name, please?

DS: Yes, it’s … hmm. Can’t quite remember. Been quite a while since I’ve used it. My tormentors call me Vile Scum-Ridden Worm Dung. That’ll do.

CSR: Thank you, Mr Worm Dung. Your complaint has been registered, and will be examined by the Bureau of Infernal Affairs in due course.

DS: Due course? Can you give me any sort of a timeframe?

CSR: Well … no, I’m afraid not. The Board just went into recess, and is due to come back in session in about four thousand years. They have quite a backlog of complaints, as you may imagine. Some four billion, at last count.

DS: I see. And how many do they process during a session?

CSR: One, generally.

DS: One billion?

CSR: No, one. It’s quite a complex process, you see.

DS: Ah. So one complaint, out of four billion, every four thousand years.

CSR: Yes. Approximately.

DS: Ah. Well. I suppose that’s not so bad, measured against eternity. They’ll get to me eventually.

CSR: Yes sir.

DS: Well. Thank you. I’ll have to get off the phone now. Cerberus is trotting over my way, and he seems a little peckish.

CSR: Of course. And if you have any other questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to call.

DS: Very good. Thank … AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!! [horrible screams]

CSR: Thank you, sir.