U.S. Government Continues Strategy of Releasing Horrific Truth Bit by Bit

he U.S. Government is maintaining its winning streak of leaking disturbing information to the public over decades, as this week two extreme dealbreakers came to public attention and the public once again answered with a resounding "enh."

First the American public was allowed to learn a memo circulating through the White House may have been an early alert to president Bush about the Sept. 11th disasters. A grumbling American public pretended to be surprised and outraged, lining themselves up for the seemingly superfluous revelation later in the week that populated U.S. Navy ships were the subjects of germ warfare testing in the 1960s.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer responded Friday with a firm, "Yeah. So?"

The covert operation, called SHAD (or Shipboard Hazard and Defense) among the hip Pentagon insiders, involved spraying toxic chemicals onto U.S. Navy ships to test the effects of germ warfare combat on troops in battle. Chemicals used included sarin, VX, and staphylococcal enterotoxin Type B, a viral strain guaranteed to "totally fuck up any soldier's weekend," according to one foul-mouthed Washington source.

Once again, the SHAD operation took place from 1964-1968, during the peak of the Vietnam war, not during the Gulf War of the early 1990s. Those chemical tests and their long-term damages are still classified information and aren't due to be released for at least another twenty years.

The revelation continues the U.S. government policy of allowing four or more White House administrations to pass before alarming truths about military and government experiments on people are told to the public. Particularly conducive to the release of alarming information is the mood of the country towards the current administration and how slow a news week it is. Information in danger of distracting the public from real issues, like Congressional sex scandals or anti-terrorist rhetoric, is often sat upon until a later release is available.

"We apologize to the American people, the soldiers, and the families that experienced any pain or damages due to the… well, you know where this is going," said Pentagon spokesman Gnute Harmschell, letting the press release fall against the carpet. "I will now take any pertinent questions about Chandra Leavy's remains, the Pakistan-India troubles, the War on Terror—trademark that—or the Catholic priests scandal. Hell, how about Star Wars or Spider-Man? Box office records are busting left and right, people."

On a sad, related note, The X-Files ended its 9-year run on Fox Sunday. During its time on the air the show entertained millions, made stars of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, started a film franchise guaranteed to make Fox money in the future, and softened America's reaction to the shadowy operations of its own government. Nerve gas testing and ignored terrorist intelligence information are welcome substitutes as long as there's no hard proof of extra-terrestrial bodies in Hangar 18.

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You homos sure are convincing. Well, you can lay off with the grand descriptions of homo lifestyle, because I'm once again one of you!

Well, not a homeowner, if that's the specific meaning of "homo." But a home-liver, on the insider, a deep-inside homo. And it's all thanks to my new friends, the Russians.

Not all the Russians, mind you, but one Russian. You know me, good people, knowing one is like knowing all of them. Sure, I was instantly distrustful of her when I heard that thick Russkie accent, but when I saw her face, I was a daydream believer, just like the Brass Monkeys say. It was a little odd how I heard her voice before I saw her face, but that's one of the things you have to acclimate to when you live on the street and sleep under last week's Wall Street Journal, which I might note was covered in what smelled like human urine. There was a dry copy of the Village Voice nearby, but I hadn't lost that much dignity yet, good people.

Yes, Felchyana's face has the beauty and charm of a bookie. And if you don't think that's a compliment, you've never dealt with the gorgeous female bookies I have, friends. She is a beauty like that in a Renoir painting. Or Michelangelo. Which one had the chubby women completely buck naked? I suppose they all did. She's beautiful like those women, but all bones, no meat. I'm sure a few good meals will take care of that.

I discovered I had been sleeping outside her building in the alleyway for quite a few days. I was not my normal self after days of merciless living, which is to say my unsettling and disturbing visage wasn't even washed and shaven when she found me huddling up to a cold dumpster for warmth, which it refused to provide. Did she scream? Did she recoil in horror? Yes, understandably so. But she did come back, trying to hide her fear and disgust, and offered me a cup of warm soup.

Boy, that soup was the balm, as the hipsters say. Chicken noodle soup. I normally don't like noodles of chickens, preferring the established parts like wings and chestal regions. Living on the street will lower your standards significantly, as they say. This does not mean I'm taking their advice to have sex for money, especially not from three guys who can't even find one girl for an orgy, but "they" are a whole other story. You meet a new class of people when you have no house.

To make this story less ingratiatingly long, Felchyana shared her soup and opened her home to me. When she found out I had a job, she asked what the commune was. When I told her, she said it should be burnt and sent to hell. But she likes me so much and recognizes the hard-working industrial nature of Rok Finger and said she would allow me to stay in her home while I get back on my feet. I'm not sure how I like the sound of that last part, I'm really start to like traveling by skateboard. But I suppose we all make concessions when we're down and out.

Don't tell anybody, but I'm quite smitten with Felchyana as a woman, too, as well as a homo. She is pretty as the sun, but doesn't hurt my eyes in the same way. Her smile is like a flower blooming, her spit like pollen, or some kind of spitting lizard. She is sweet like the nectar of a gay metaphor. I wouldn't kick her out from under a newspaper for eating crackers, I'll say that much. Perhaps it is best to leave it at that, since she has said something about being married. Alas, it is not to be, but what isn't to be that actually is? Not much, I can tell you.

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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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