espite tests to its resolve, the United States has remained firm in its Iraq occupation since March of 2003. For more than two years the U.S. has maintained the law in Iraq and the sweet, sweet oil under its ground, even as terrorists and insurgents and, basically, anybody with a firearm has attempted to disrupt the peace forced on the country. Now, with the civilian dead count nearing a total of 25,000, the U.S. can be proud of fulfilling its pledge to stick with Iraq no matter how many are killed.

President Bush restated the U.S. perseverance on Saturday, following a surge in the death toll, a response by anti-U.S. insurgents to last week's announcement of Iraq's new transitional government.

"They can bomb us, they can shoot us, they can set our corpses on fire," said the president, "and we will not be shaken from Iraq until we've established a lasting democracy. And when I say 'us,' I mean the soldiers and civilians over there."

More than 300 have been killed in the two-week span following the announcement of the transitional government, which is saddled with making the transition to a comparatively stable Middle Eastern democracy from a valley of death ruled by violent fanatics.

Insiders say the administration has made it a point of pride to survive for so long in a region where we're clearly not wanted, even as we lose hundreds of our own citizens and thousands of Iraqi residents. The president, we're told, is optimistic about everything settling down once we reach 25,000 non-military dead, but assures the rest of the world and the remaining Iraqi citizens the U.S. won't be bullied out even if 250,000 or 25 million are killed during the occupation.

"In a great cowboy movie, the Lone Ranger doesn't run out of town just because Butch Cavendish comes riding in with his gang," said the president. "That would make him yella in the eyes of the townspeople. There. I think I've adequately explained my foreign policy."

His cowboy metaphor sufficiently delivered, Bush returned to his domestic efforts of stripping away civil rights, privatizing all social programs, and delivering more ground to the extreme Christian right. The rising death count itself took a backseat to the negligible news of the arrest of a top aide to Al-Zarqawi, the most recent in a long line of Middle Eastern Hitlers, who has among his more devious crimes refused to spell his name with a "u" after "q."

While some claim Al-Zarqawi, once arrested, will only be replaced with another anti-American despot in a region increasingly anti-American in its sentiment, others tell them to shut up and stop spoiling our fun. With the maximum civilian death toll standing around 24,000 right now, including Iraqi police and non-military, as well as foreign and American contractors, the administration is still persistent that 25,000 dead will be the turning point everyone's waiting for. Scotlar Hughes, a political science professor at Bolchek University, Ames, Iowa, believed the president would be proven right in his plan to outlast the opposition in Iraq.

"Consider it a game of chicken," said Prof. Hughes, conducting a phone interview with this poor son of a bitch reporter, still stationed in Fallujah. "It's a contest of wills right now between the president and the nameless mass of anti-American insurgents still residing in and around Iraq. Only, the president has nothing to lose—he's not even putting his own neck on the line, but the neck of soldiers and civilians in the area. He's already won re-election and Americans have so tuned out of politics the notion of lawmakers winning opposition against him is remote. What is he really risking? Sure, he may go down in history books as the worst president during his own lifespan, but this president doesn't read anyway. And as for the fanatics… how many of them can there be in Iraq anyway?"

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Seems like we spent our entire childhoods preparing for things that never happened. How many hours did we waste watching filmstrips on not accepting rides from strangers, or classics like "Don't Play with Rover Foamymouth" that taught us the virtues of staying the hell away from dogs with rabies? How many sleepless nights spent worrying about total global annihilation from a nuclear war with the Russians? By that I mean other kids staying up all night worrying about nuclear death, God knows Omar Bricks didn't lose any shuteye over foreign policy issues. I was way too wrapped up in my plans to order a money printing press from an ad I saw in the back of a Casper comic book. I schemed for a year to get that damn money-mill, and then it finally came in the mail and it turns out the friggin' thing prints toy money! I shit you not, ten-dollar bills with a picture of a walrus on them. I could have shit, I was so mad. I might have. Gone were my dreams of printing up enough currency to buy every toy in the store and to build a functioning car out of Legos, with which to drive to Sea World. I'd have to wait until Christmas (and 1995, alternately) like all of the other kids, like a shmoe.

I guess every little kid had to have some major disillusionment when they were young, like having their parents die or ordering Sea Monkeys. I'm sure you know the drill: ad in the back of your comic book looks awesome and makes you think you're getting a clan of human-sized merpeople in the mail, and that in no time you'll be frolicking in their underwater kingdom and cutting deals to have the Sea Monkeys blow up your school and stuff your Social Studies teacher into a steamer trunk headed for the Dutch East Indies. Then of course the package comes in the mail and it's an ant farm and a packet of dust. Since you're a kid and therefore gullible as a mail-order bride, you follow the instructions, add water, and hold your breath to see if this chintzy crap will somehow transform into the awesome experience you've been envisioning. Instead, it ends up looking like that Watersquirtz ring-toss game you've had since you were five, the one that got all leaky and mildewy after it spent a few years at the bottom of your toybox. It dawns on you then that the only way you could use these "Sea Monkeys" to get back at your Social Studies teacher would be if you put them in her coffee. So you get mad, and stay that way for the better part of seven minutes until you realize that you're missing the beginning of Diff'rent Strokes, and it's the one where Willis tries to grow a goatee.

That's what I hear anyway, I never ordered the Sea Monkeys myself. My dad had ordered them when he was a kid and his bitter diatribes convinced me that they probably weren't worth the eight bucks. For that same reason we never got to go to Sea World, since there was no way dad was going to shell out his hard-earned money to see a bunch of water fleas swim around in a tank.

Thank Moses I had my dad to impart these pearls of wisdom on my young mind, since school definitely wasn't doing it. They were far too concerned that we were going to get kidnapped from the school parking lot or bitten by a stray dog if we somehow managed not to get nuked while doing drugs. Of course none of it ever happened, and we all survived (except for Tommy Frink, who peed in the sink and later ended up becoming a Scientologist). What the suits didn't understand was that there were far too many Transformers to collect for any of us to blow our allowances on crack pipes. Of course I may be a bad one to ask since I flunked out of the DARE program at the tender age of eight. I passed out when the officers were showing us how to tie off and locate a vein, so during the graduation ceremony I had to sit off to the side with the kid who'd had Mono the whole time.

Seems like they could have been showing us filmstrips on something useful, like not answering cell phones in movie theaters or what to do if the guy next to you on the plane is wearing a diaper made of plastic explosives. I'm pretty sure I know the proper position to be in when you're obliterated by a mushroom cloud, but search me for how you're supposed to disarm a pimply reject in a Korn shirt with an Uzi. Or even etiquette things like the polite ways to turn down a request to join a cult. That would come in handy. And karate. They definitely should have taught us karate.

But, you know, life goes on and some things you just have to learn for yourself. For everything else, I've been thinking about correspondence colleges.

Yeah. I should definitely open one!

Bricks out.

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As long as there have been statements of truth, there have been lies. In fact, lies have been around a bit longer, since in early days there wasn't much of a good reason to tell the truth about anything at all, because it was near the beginning of time and nobody knew anything anyway. It took decades for normalcy to be established and for those original lies to come back and bite the liars on their early asses, creating a motivation not for honesty, but rather more clever lies that were less likely to boomerang back and fuck shit up later on.

After a few generations, someone told the truth, mostly on accident, and an entirely new category for these mysterious "not lies" had to be created. These were deemed highly unusual and somewhat unsettling, and no one was entirely sure what these statements of non-falsity might be good for. In the end, it turned out, the answer was not much.

Early caveman lies were charmingly quaint and simple, with the original lie, "It wasn't me!" still a popular favorite today. After a few hundred years the second lie, "It was him!" was invented, contributing greatly to the growing complexity of social interactions. The third lie, "No, you look great," marked the dawning of modern male-female relations, which have progressed little in the intervening 160 million years.

Lies grew more complex in Egyptian times, with the great lie of that age being the Pharaoh's "Seriously, we're building this pyramid for everybody to use!" But the modern lie didn't reach full maturity until the time of the Roman Empire, when the Romans went over 200 years without telling anyone the truth, ever. This became a running joke in Rome, since if you bought a ticket to the Coliseum, the time listed on the ticket only really told you the hour the event was guaranteed not to start on. Unlike modern Westerners, the Romans weren't angry at all about being lied to, since to a man they found it uniformly hilarious. Most conversations between Romans were merely contests to see who could tell the biggest lie, and because of this the greatest insult you could pay to a Roman was to compliment him. This cultural misunderstanding led to all but one of the wars Rome was involved in during the nation's reign, the other one being caused by a stray dog with incredible gas.

Some consider Jesus' "I'll be right back!" claim of rapturous return to be the original lie, but that's just foolish religious bias speaking. Men had been pulling each other's legs for millions of years before Jesus laid that turd.

Perhaps the funniest lie ever told in history was the pilgrim's famous "We come in peace!" canard handed to the Indians upon de-boating at Plymouth Rock. The Indians bought this stinker hook, line and sinker, thanks to an unfortunate history of total honesty in Native American communication, since most tribes even lacked the concept of what a lie was, except for the Ocaca ("Shitbird") tribe, who were dirty fucking cheats so crooked their arrows didn't even fly straight.

Fittingly, America was founded on not only the "Let's live together!" bullshit dealt to the Indians, but also the "We're just checking this place out for you guys" whopper that was flung back England's way. This cock-and-bull double-whammy set the precedent for a nation so enamored with tall tales we ended up exporting them to the entire world on flimsy little plastic discs guaranteed to last "forever."

America's favorite lie to date has probably been the fate of JFK; since 40 years have gone by without the truth ever being revealed that there never WAS a president named John F. Kennedy, even though it only took some grainy footage of some random parade unwisely detouring through Compton to convince an entire nation otherwise.

New Coke was a lie. It was actually exactly the same as Old Coke, which makes the soft drink's spectacular failure all the more hilarious. Admittedly, though, a large portion of the drink's failure can be attributed to an early can-printing mishap that led to the first million cans of the soda being shipped with the name "New Cock."

This flub did thrill the small bands of genetic dropped balls known as soda collectors, who rushed to buy up all the cases of the misprinted cola they could get their hands on. The flubbed pop was a giant flop with the general public though, since few people in the early 80's were ready to publicly declare their aching desire to wrap their lips around some New Cock. The soda did sell surprisingly well in Texas, however.

Advertising has overshadowed most of the big public lies of the last century, since not even President Clinton's "It wasn't me!" or President Bush's "Of course they got bombs, they're A-rabs" can really compete with the constant daily inundation of claims that beer will make you strong and that the same old shit is new and improved. In fact, dishonesty became so pervasive in advertising that the only completely honest ad on record, Pan-Am's ill-fated "We Really Hope You Fly With Us, Even Though the Airlines are All Basically the Same, or Else We'll be Up Shit Creek" campaign, led to the prompt bankrupting of the airline within fourteen days.

Other great lies you may have missed? Here's the rundown on what you need to know, courtesy of your Uncle Griswald: Unless you're Jimi Hendrix, nobody in the world likes to listen to you play guitar. Sorry. Underwear? Not really necessary, and the prime reason you haven't been laid in three years. Tomatoes aren't really a fruit, and Castor Oil isn't really good for you. Everybody else was pretending to like Reggae. Masturbation does cause cancer, but only if you keep it a secret. And most importantly of all, reading the commune really does improve both your chances of winning the lotto and being trampled by bison. Do with that knowledge what you will.

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