World Cup to Destroy Japan

n less than a week, 330,000 soccer fans from around the world will descend upon Japan for the biggest melee of apeshit social chaos since Cats: World Cup 2002. Japan is hoping the tournament will provide a boost for its belly-floating economy, and also hopes that soccer fans will leave enough of the country intact that it might be made livable again some time in the next 20 years.

Ever since Japan was selected along with South Korea to co-sponsor the games in 1996, Japanese and South Korean officials have been calling around, trying to figure out who nominated their countries and where they should mail the horse heads. Both China and North Korea are among the leading candidates.

The tournament will sprawl across Japan starting May 31st, destroying everything in sight and most likely leveling all 10 cities from northern Hokkaido to southern Kyushu, as well as virtually everything in neighboring South Korea.

"Oh yeah, there's no doubt about it. These crazy assholes are gonna soccer Japan and South Korea back into the stone age," noted Norio Kamijo, a senior researcher at Dentsu Institute for Human Studies.

Kamijo said the World Cup could generate some 3 trillion yen ($23.6 billion) for Japan — which should be more than enough to rebuild the Japanese cities that will need to be bulldozed into the Pacific and built up again from scratch after the tournament is over.

South Korea has offered to allow Japan to host the first several high-profile matches in the tournament, which some observers see as a sign of the warming of once-strained relations between the countries. Sources close to the events, however, suggest that South Korean officials merely hope that fans will be tired of smashing everything to shit by the time they get to South Korea.

"Hooligan experts" from Britain and Argentina have been invited to give tips and suggestions on how to spot and handle violent lawbreaking fans, inviting derisive giggles from the governments of previous World Cup host nations and forehead-smacking from British and Argentinean con-men who never thought of fobbing themselves off as "hooligan experts." British expert Sidney Bockle comments: "Jesus Christ in a sushi bar. Did you see what those animals did at the Gold Cup last year? They're gonna eat Japan alive. You don't need to hunt down an expert to guess what happens when you let loose 80,000 berserk Argentinean soccer fans in a country where all of the buildings are made out of paper. This is gonna make WWII look like Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws. They should hide the whole country under leaf clippings and hope the World Cup thinks it moved away."

In the city of Sapporo, where the much-anticipated match between Britain and Argentina is to be played at the Sapporo brewery to save on beer transportation costs, city officials have set up machine-gun turrets in strategic placements around the building. They also plan to have several dozen coked-up bulls ready to be set loose into the streets at a moment's notice, with hopes that confused Spanish fans will lead the rioting crowd in racing the bulls out of the city.

Japanese newspapers and TV feature a daily "Countdown to Armageddon," describing scenarios of possible hooligan attacks and featuring scary backlit profiles of black-listed uberhooligans thought to be hiding in Thailand. Police in Niigata city have even staged an exercise on a ferry boat to counter the hypothetical event of crazed fans tearing up the Pacific ocean and crippling the Japanese fishing industry.

The National Police Agency announced that for every major game, particularly the matches with the British national team, they plan to mobilize more than 7,000 riot police with the instructions to shoot at the first sign of a crowd. When asked if this approach might be considered overkill, NPA head Usaki Shinjo answered "No," speaking like a ventriloquist without moving a muscle in his controlled, icy stare.

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I'm going to let you all in on a secret that will save our federal government billions of Saddam-hunting dollars and will end this whole Iraq misadventure once and for all. It may take slightly longer than our current approach, but it's cheap and we won't have any more GIs shot in the ass while they're playing beach volleyball. It's simple: All we have to do is open a couple of Pizza Huts over there. They may not have that kind of hut-building technology over in Iraq yet, but we can import it. And within 30 years, all those bomb-happy assholes will have more fat pulsing through their veins than blood and they'll be dropping like lethargic, weak-hearted flies. Advantage: America.

It's a scientific fact that terrorism never originates in countries that get more than 40% of their calories from fat. Constructing a pair of tennis shoes out of plastic explosives or hucking hand grenades at an army patrol sounds like an awful lot of work when rolling over in bed is enough to raise your pulse. But you start feeding these guys rice, beans, and couscous and before you know it you've got some asshole hiding a time bomb in your birthday cake. Bad scene.

Now I'm a realist, so I realize this plan won't work quickly enough for those individuals who want Saddam Hussein's gonads in a Ball jar like, yesterday. But for those impatient folk I believe a slight modification to my Mideast peace plan may suffice.

Let's say you turn those fast food franchising dogs loose on Iraq, to quell the general populace. But while you're at it you save one location for a very special KFC. You might even put this special KFC in Saddam's hometown, couldn't hurt. But the most important thing is to make sure this restaurant is really the cream of the KFC crop, no chicken fingers petrifying under heat lamps for two weeks while the crew chief does lines of coke back in the walk-in freezer. That won't do. What we need here is a real tightly run ship that's cranking out some damned delicious chicken. And once the joint's become established and you've saturated the region with fried chicken fat, one random day you close up shop very unexpectedly. Blame it on to "technical difficulties" or a chicken rampage or what have you.

But before you board up the windows, you sell one last bucket of chicken. The last ever, and it goes to the highest bidder. Doesn't matter who it is. Wherever he's hiding, some of that chicken will find it's way back to Saddam Hussein, guaranteed. Maybe a thigh, maybe a wing. Doesn't matter. But the kicker is that you've saturated that one bucket of chicken with enough fat to kill the three tenors. Silver bullet heart attack variety, extra tasty deadly. Let's see the Iraqi public claim we faked a picture of Saddam Hussein, dead on a toilet with a drumstick hanging out of his mouth. Even those cynical bastards will be shocked into acknowledging the disgusting truth.

It's a sad state of affairs when all this administration wants for Christmas is Saddam Hussein dead on a toilet, but there you go. Merry Christmas.

Escalating the plan further couldn't help but solve the bigger Mideast asshole problem, as all those hard-ons will go soft for stuffed-crust cholesterol bombs and gorgeable Gorditas. And it wouldn't cost the Western superpowers a thing, just cut the fast food chains loose and they'd lick each other's brainpans clean for the chance to do America's dirty work for us. But for God's sake, please leave Subway out of this. The last thing I need to see on television is some big fat Arab guy talking about how he used to be even more big and fat before he started mainlining veggie subs.

If that happens I'm just going to keep my ideas to myself in the future, the common good be damned.

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The simple truth of my business—truth-telling—is that there's not enough column space and enough interest for me to write more often to tell all the unsettling truths out there. The answer for me is to prioritize what gets told, which means I use my column space for only the most dire of conspiracies and the occasional request for summarizing books for my book club reading for me. Which means some of my revelations are late in coming—like the truth about reality TV.

I have never liked so-called "reality TV," ever since the farce that was Cops first debuted, but it seemed generally harmless and not worthy of my attention, just a distraction and nothing more. But as I reach a dry spell in my material, it seems necessary now to reveal the truth about that distraction and allow people to start focusing on the horrible truths of real life, like the story behind the snakehead fish and Craig Kilborn.

To cut to the truth quick and early, reality TV is no more real than Everybody Loves Raymond, and only slightly funnier. In fact, shows like Friends hold more truth than a "reality show" like Big Brother—at least the characters on Friends are based on real friends of the creator (except for Chandler, who could never exist in our world). The Big Brother "contestants" are simply poorly-written cardboard stereotypes that live up to people's expectations so thoroughly they seem real.

Like the "real people" on Cops, every reality show character is portrayed by unknown actors with strong improvisational skills, but poorly-constructed characters. It's amazing they've gotten away with it for this long, given the exceptionally-ridiculous paper-thin characters on talk shows like Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer.

I first became convinced of the truth while watching old repeats of Cops, which air 24-hours on independent local stations almost everywhere in the country. I distinctly saw then-unemployed actors Edward Norton, Eriq LaSalle, and John Travolta—after Look Who's Talking and before Pulp Fiction brought him back. In fact, I think I saw every member of the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter somewhere in the episode, even the guy who played Mr. Woodman. It soon dawned on me that reality TV has become a port for actors yet to make it big or weathering a bad storm. Any day now I expect to see actors with troubled careers like Larry Wilcox and Alf turning up as contestants on Survivor.

This use of destitute actors has reached its height with recent shows The Osbournes and The Anna Nicole Show. It turns out Osbournes star Ozzy Osbourne was a former singer of some kind of band, as well as an actor who has appeared in films like The Jerky Boys and Little Nicky. I'm not sure about the rest of his "family," but Osbourne himself is not a real person, just another down-on-his-luck performer. Anna Nicole, whose real name is Anna Nicole Smith, is actually nothing more than a failed actress and former Playboy playmate, again, not a "real" person. I have done so much independent research on her that I knew who she was without having to look further into it.

In all likelihood, reality TV is another fad, like space travel and feeding starving people in Africa. And besides the fact it is trivial and mindless entertainment watching self-obsessed "real people" going about their day-to-day business or competing ruthlessly for unearned money, I have nothing against it. Still, I implore producers of so-called "reality TV" to quit lying to us and presenting something as true when it's not—that's a job best left to the president.

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