Americans Boycott France, Coherent Thought

triking a blow for bandwagoneers everywhere, Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) recently directed the House of Representatives cafeteria to change the name of “french fries” to “freedom fries” on their menu, teaching the rogue nation of France a powerful lesson once and for all. Restaurants across the country have followed suit, and Americans everywhere are boycotting French and French-sounding products in a bold move that sends a message to the rest of the world: Americans are fucking retarded.

“The French? A bunch of gay-asses,” opined truck stop chef Holman Weathers. “This is how they repay us for bailing them out in WWII, by having their own opinion? Maybe we should’ve just let the damned Germans win. See how they like that. No way the fuckin’ Germans would have wimped out on us on the whole Iraq thing.”

“Wait. Really? The Germans?” Weathers questioned with a note of disappointment in his voice when this reporter pointed out that even the Germans had gone the gay-assed route on this one.

“I’m glad they changed the name of Fren- these things, since I love fries but I always felt a little weird supporting such a bad country by buying food named after them,” confessed housewife Heidi Wartak as she sat munching a fresh batch of freedom fries in her mammoth Ford Excursion SUV, while the vehicle idled and sucked down enough gas to keep the Iraqi Republican Guard in munitions for a month. Asked if she thought supporting Middle East dictatorships through excessive fuel consumption might be a greater evil than uttering the name of a peace-loving ally, Wartak stood her ground. “I don’t buy french bread either. I mean freedom bread.”

“All I know is I’ve drank my last bottle of Evian,” boasted NASCAR enthusiast Glen Riddle. “That’s French, right? Somebody told me they actually bottle that stuff out in L.A., but I don’t know if that’s true. Come to think of it, I don’t like L.A. either, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Riddle later admitted that he’d never actually drank Evian, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to start now.

Dissenting opinions are rare, as anyone caught exhibiting coherent thought in the current national climate is in grave danger of being branded unpatriotic and voted off the island, i.e., hit with a brick.

“The French provided significant military help to the Americans in their campaign against the British in the Revolutionary War, and supplies of French gunpowder are widely believed to have secured the decisive American victory at Saratoga in 1777,” informed University of Wisconsin history professor and Denny’s patron Judd McClintock as he ducked under a flying brick. “If it weren’t for the French we’d be British right now, and for that even the biggest France-basher owes them continual blowjobs forever.”

“If those blue, white and red pinkos want to mess with the U.S., all they need to do is listen to our country music to know we won’t stand for it,” warned part-time window washer Steve Lideen from across the restaurant, in response to a waitress offering French dressing as an option for his salad.

Plans remain in the works for a series of public service announcements suggesting teens partake in “face-fucking” rather than French kissing and that anyone who is unable to boycott the upcoming Tour de France should refer to it as “That Big Gay Bicycle Ride” or else face sanctions, including having their Home Depot membership revoked.

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"There's nothing like a good tornado to put the fear of nature into you. The Hartwig family had their tornado experience back in the early '40s, in the days of us vs. the Germans and Japanese. You'd almost think God was a Nazi, throwing a big heapin' tornado on top of a hardworking American family.

We were doing evening living room things—us kids playing our favorite game, Flapper Smacking—while mom sewed bodybags for the boys overseas and Dad read the paper. Then, Dad looked out the window and raised his eyebrows, the warning to us all like an air raid drill.

The sky outside had turned a frightening Prince-colored purple. It had grown darker and darker by the second, a terrible foreboding like a fat man in a dark suit walking on a miniature Lego city, which I think is hilarious. I'm cracking up just thinking about it. But this storm coming on quick was no laughing matter. It was a peeing-your-pants matter.

'To the underground shelter!' shouted Dad, then ran ahead of us outside to the tornado cellar. We all followed, except Goose, who was getting out his kite and running out to meet the storm like Captain Ahab meeting his whale.

We all climbed inside and Dad barricaded the entrance with wood and nails. We told him it wasn't necessary, but he said tornadoes were sneaky enough to undo mere latches and closed doors. He also said tornadoes were taking all the American jobs and had murdered good Americans at the Alamo.

We survived the tornado, of course, but I spent years carrying confusing stereotypes about Hispanics and tornadoes around, thanks to Dad's lack of education."

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I don’t even know where to start, bizarrely loyal commune fans.

Much like when you attempt to make a casserole, it’s tempting to try and trace the thread back and discover where exactly you went wrong. Was it when you added the pickles? Was it when you had the idea to make a casserole in the first place? Was it when the NSA kicked your front door down and dragged Ivan Nacutchacokov screaming and flailing out into the night?

Some pundits would surely argue that inviting Crochet! magazine to set up shop in my mother’s attic was asking for trouble. Due to simultaneous downturns in the publishing and Kleenex box cozy industries as well as rising insurance premiums, Crochet had lost their lease on their Assflush, New Jersey offices, which they’d moved to a few years ago without leaving a forwarding address after Omar Bricks somehow burnt down their office in Asslatch. Some mom’s-basement-dwelling conspiracy theorists (I don’t mean that as a dig, I mean they literally live in my mom’s basement and work for the commune) argued that Bricks couldn’t have burnt down the Asslatch offices since he was in jail in Panama at the time.

But all reliable witnesses tell the same story, that Crochet! received an anonymous package in the mail that turned out to be a huge box of annoying glitter that got absolutely everywhere, and that the glitter somehow combined with the seven gallons of elephant shit Bricks had previously mailed to Crochet!, forming some kind of prank napalm. All it took was a spark from the teddy bear Omar had delivered a week later that sang Happy Birthday to You in a loud, high pitched voice over and over nonstop for a week before melting down and catching on fire, igniting the napalm and Crochet!’s huge stash of crocheted shawls, baby hats, coasters and old lady slippers they were holding onto in case of a governmental crackdown or the endtimes. Needless to say, the resulting fire was huge and weird and didn’t smell very good.

As possibly the world’s only commune/Crochet! fandom dual-citizen, I couldn’t pass on the once-in-anyone’s-lifetime-ever chance to rescue both of my favorite publications and quickly dispatched a singing telegram to invite the Crochet! staffers to share space with my mom’s horrific doll collection in the attic. No one was more surprised than I was when they accepted, especially since it violated several restraining orders Crochet! themselves had filed. But the promise of free rent and Raoul Dunkin’s lawn pit BBQ proved to be too much to resist.

Some opinionated commenters have suggested that I upset the natural balance of things by having Crochet! in the attic and the commune in the basement, reversing the long-standing tradition of Crochet! being the commune’s "asshole downstairs neighbors" as the entire commune staff continued to call them even after months of them living and working two floors above. And I was constantly reminded of how this messed up Griswald Dreck’s famous rhyme "Crochet! on bottom and commune on top, fuck you Aesop!" which everyone loved even though nobody was sure which fable he was referencing. But, frankly this arrangement just made more sense since the commune staff were constantly burying their various mistakes in the crawlspace under my basement and I knew if I put the commune in the attic, all of those mail-order brides and dead Pomeranians would just get shoved out the window and end up on my lawn.

And besides, there was always the buffer of the main floor of the house between the two staffs, an air gap full of my mom and Doug having sex that even I hated to cross. I figured that would be enough, but of course it’s obvious now this was like stuffing a wolverine and a Kardashian in a sack and expecting things to work themselves out.

Honestly, things did go pretty smoothly for the first few months, a few driveway knife fights notwithstanding. It took a little while to get the Crochet! folks up to speed on how to deal with Ivana Folger-Balzac since they weren’t used to dealing with psychopaths, but before long they were dropping into the fetal position on the ground like pros the second she pulled into the driveway on one of her frequent visits in hopes of getting someone to slip up and give up Ivan’s whereabouts. They also adjusted well to the conga line of bill collectors and process servers constantly flowing up the front steps all day, and if you ask me in their time here they published some of their strongest special issues on potholders and cat diapers ever.

But then, of course, Omar Bricks found us. Say what you will about him, but that guy’s Crochet!-dar is impeccable. He never actually finished a column while he was here, I think mostly because he was so busy making Crochet!’s life completely miserable, to the glee of the rest of the commune staff. Those few weeks are kind of a blur in my memory, I remember Omar replacing all the fruit roll-ups with fly paper, and replacing their toilet seat with a thin paper replica. At some point he’d got a whole case of tiny walkie talkies at Costco and proceeded to install them in all of my mom’s horrific dolls in the attic. You haven’t been woken up until you’ve been woken up by 57 deeply disturbing porcelain dolls singing Sex Dwarf at 4 in the morning. But the last straw was when Omar asked the Crochet! staffers to watch his dog Foghat while he went to Burning Man. I know that sounds kind of anti-climactic but trust me, that attic was uninhabitable within 48 hours and I had to call FEMA after the hardiest survivors from the Crochet! staff had cleared out.

I must apologize commune readers, but the thought of all those Crochet! staffers flocking to the bus stop with their little crocheted suitcases and beanies is a little too much for one Emil Zender to bear just this moment. Check back in next week, brave friends, and we’ll bring the rest of this tale home.

Zincerely,
Emil Zender

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