nswering lawsuits filed by the ACLU and American Arab groups, the Justice Department touted the U.S.A. Patriot Act as the most effective tool against non-whites the government has ever had, at least since the outlaw of Jim Crow laws. The Patriot Act, named so in a misguided attempt to gain public sympathy through outlandish propaganda terms, was passed in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and allows the government easier access to wiretaps, monitors of suspicious individuals, and anything they damn well think is important.

Groups challenging the Patriot Act claim it gives the government too much unquestioned access to the privacy of Americans without the need to substantiate charges. Defenders of the group were too busy accessing the purchase records, credit reports, and group affiliations of the challengers to bother responding.

"Helping the government fight terrorism is one thing, the tactics endorsed by the Patriot Act are entirely another," said ACLU attorney Kim Wilde. "Let's suppose I'm a terrorist, living on American soil and taking flight lessons vital to my group's jihad. I buy one paperback of The Catcher in the Rye and all of a sudden the FBI is jumping all up my ass thinking I'm going to try to kill a Beatle or something. It's entirely without reason."

Arabic groups likewise expressed dismay.

"It's outrageous, even more than outrageous," insisted Arabic Anti-Defamation League spokesperson Bindari Al-Abib. "The Asians have had All-American Girl and The Joy Luck Club. The Indians have Bend it Like Beckham now. When will Arabs at last get their own sitcom? Just hear me out now. My idea is a single dad, a radiologist, named Amir. He works in a hospital, but a really funny hospital, and has an Arabic love interest who is also a radiologist. He's also a single dad, with two wise-cracking kids."

Opponents of the sitcom say the workplace and family comedy is long dead, and a hospital is a depressing place for people to work. While defenders of the Patriot Act express the necessity for the government to be given leeway in times of difficulty.

"Let's get something straight," said Justice Department spokesperson James Gattlebritch, "the government is wise and trustworthy enough to be trusted with access to anything they want. What do you think, the U.S. government is going to waste time checking out Amazon.com records to see you bought Kangaroo Jack? As if! Get over yourself, folks. We're only looking for the people who are terrorist, and have known affiliation with terrorist groups. Or look shady. Just, you know, shady. You know the kind of people."

The ambiguity of language leads many skeptics to believe the Justice Department is engaging in illegal racial profiling. An allegation some are comfortable with.

One proponent of racial profiling is author and conservative advocate Rash Tinker. "Facts are facts. It makes no sense to pull white people out of line at the airline checkpoints and search them for terrorist weapons. It's just common sense. When have white people ever been terrorists? Outside of the IRA and a few European nationalist groups, never. We know the Arabs are responsible for the biggest terrorist act since the Oklahoma City bombing. I don't see the problem with just searching Arabs."

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Don't get me started, Shorty. You know exactly how I feel about them McEnroys across the gully. A fouler people there never was burped up onto the earth, and that's one scientific fact. When I was in shorty-pants my daddy told me about them McEnroys, givin' in me the good sense to hate them as does all God's green creatures. And dang did daddy hate them McEnroys. Like his daddy afore him and so on and so what back to the day when grand-grandpa Peter done stepped right in a big dollop of moose puddin' that grand-grandpa McEnroy did left on his porch as a early-mornin' prank of sorts. But this was one of them pranks that was destine not to get no laughs, 'cause grand-grandpa Peter was wearin' the new toot-boots he just got for Christmas a few days afore, the ones with the lyrics to "Sweet Mona May" embroidered around the back. You seen them boots Shorty, an I don't need to tell you how they was shamefully ruint. Dang if that wasn't one o' them tragedies o' bible-belt proportions.

And so it done started that my family always hate them McEnroys, and them McEnroys ain't none too fond on us, neither. As you would expect from a McEnroy, them bein' no higher than snake's ass draggin' on the asphalt. Over the years this county has seen quite a feud, with plenty o' moose puddin' left strategicaldy here an there. It's been a feud that claimed more than a few lives isself, too, like the time Bobby Mo and Steefie was blowed up tryin' to make an atom bomb out from pig dung an gasoline, for what to blow up the McEnroy trailer an above-ground hot tub.

You know as well as anyone, Shorty, that I myself have had my own share o' close calls with that McEnroy clan. Remember the time a few winters back when we found that gopher done froze up solid in the ditch, and we build that catapult out from underwear elastic to shoot that frozed critter up onto the roof o' the McEnroy trailer? To this day I still think that was the best idea you ever had, Shorty. Sometimes when I've got trouble sleepin' I like to lay awake an think o' what it woulda been like if it had worked, an that critter woulda thawed in the springtime an created a powerful stink up there on that roof, an them McEnroys woulda just thought it was they own foul behinds makin' the stink. An I don't care not what nobody says, Shorty, neither o' us had any way from knowin' that icy critter was gonna come crashing down through the McEnroy roof and break botha grandma McEnroy's legs while she was sittin' there watchin' the $25,000 Pyramid.

Nobody who's not a liar can prove it was me who did put that greased pig in the McEnroy's station wagon last summer, though I will admit to laughin' the hardest when we was watchin' them try to get that pissed-off squealer to come on out o' the car. Some have said that was the best prank pulled on the McEnroys since the time my own daddy snuck in on a moonless night an covered that whole property with mouse traps. That next morning this valley sounded like a good day in Vietnam, Shorty, and a finer day our family has never seen.

Sure, the McEnroys have had they own laughs at our expense, as is to be expected in any proper feud. Like all the times they've had the law on our tails, bringin' charges of assault with a deadly carcass and grand theft of a trailer home and stalkin' or whatnot. I have to say Shorty, them McEnroys got they own style o' feudin'. It's not like a McEnroy to grease your handrail or fill up your outhouse full of locusts. They're much more fond of callin' out the law every time one o' our pranks against them ends up causin' serious property damage or cripplin' the elderly. That's just like a McEnroy, too. Always takin' the high road.

Dang if I don't hate them McEnroys, Shorty. Where's my potato gun?

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No decade since the 1950's has so boldly established itself as a fad juggernaut as did the 1980's. In comparison, the 1990's were a sad decade for fads indeed, making one wonder where the will for conspicuous time wasting had gone. Probably the best explanation can be found in looking at each decade's drug of choice, and the resultant effect this had on American culture.

In the 1960's, Americans were dropping acid and grooving to the beautiful swirling colors of the traffic accident they'd just caused. The fads of the 60's were accordingly colorful and bizarre. The 70's were all about stinking up your jeans jacket with reefer smoke in the back of some sociopath's panel van, leading to fads as ugly and alienating as the decade itself. In the 80's, the hip and squares alike were pulling lines of expensive coke and joking about the five or six dead South Americans who had made their high possible. Ambitious and overeager, if not megalomaniacal, were the keywords in 80's faddom as well. America spent the 90's slouched over between the sofa and the bathroom door with a heroin needle dangling from its arm, and as a result not a whole lot of fadding, nor much else, got done in that decade.

The 80's, however, were another story entirely. The story of neon-colored spandex encrusted with hair gel, and the story of a nation kissing its own ass. In keeping with the 80's own hyper-incongruent vibe, the most fun fad from the decade didn't even originate in the 80's. Exploiting the poor had been around for eons, but not since pirate times had it been as cool to openly flaunt this practice or write songs about it. If the pendulum had swung any further in the opposite direction from the 60's, it might have knocked America's dick right out of the anus of the disenfranchised.

This isn't to say that all of the 80's fads were mean-spirited. Sure, Cabbage Patch Kids were pretty disgusting, but there was a certain poetic justice in watching deranged materialist parents fighting each other tooth and nail for the right to give their kids some shitty cloth doll.

On the contrary, many of the 80's best fads were quite fun. Well, not the Smurfs, those little communist bastards were pretty creepy. Nobody ever really explained if they were supposed to be aliens or some kind of apocalyptic cult or what. Personally, I've always leaned in the "cult" direction, since questions of "What's a Smurf?" and "Why do they all wear the same color pants?" were always answered with the cultish doublespeak "They're Smurfs" from the bigwigs at Hanna Barbera.

But surely, not every aspect of the 80's was overrun by creepy materialistic crap. Who could forget the Rubik's Cube? Inventor and Belgian weirdo Erno Rubik created his famous cube in 1974 as a way to drive his dog insane. Though the toy failed in its intended use (the dog just tried to eat the cube), it eventually found millions of fans among Americans who thought solving some kind of chintzy plastic puzzle proved they were smart. The truly smart soon learned that you could just "solve" the puzzle by peeling all the colored stickers off the squares and putting them back on in the right order. Less-inventive children soon developed a pastime known as "Rubik's Baseball," a one-time game where the cube was hit with a bat and exploded into a million plastic pieces that went everywhere.

So maybe the Rubik's Cube was a piece of shit, too. But no one could muster such harsh words for the most expressive of 80's fads, breakdancing. Originating as a way for especially cowardly street gangs to mediate their differences through dance battles rather than actual fighting, breakdancing first came to national attention in 1975 when two Harlem street gangs, the Soft Touches and the Big Pussies, danced the shit out of each other in a bloodless gangland melee that left dozens thoroughly exhausted. By the early 80's, breakin' had become a national obsession, with white kids everywhere flopping around on the floor like they had any idea what they were doing. Despite an utter lack of coordination or soul whatsoever, Caucasian interest in breakdancing kept the fad alive for several years, eventually cementing it as the most fun source of self-inflicted spinal injuries since the invention of the skateboard.

Concerned parents who didn't want kids hurting themselves breakdancing did their children no favors by sending them to school to play tetherball instead, perhaps one of the cruelest 80's fads since it was condoned by the school board. Like dodge ball without the principle of safety in numbers, tetherball involved chaining a rock-hard leather "ball" to a pole and mandating that children use it to pummel each other into submission. Tetherball was eventually banned in 1989 after President Bush attempted the game for a photo op at a Washington elementary school, which ended in the president being escorted away by the Secret Service after a shameful episode of crying and broken glasses.

Perhaps the true salvation of 80's fads was the rise of video games, which rarely resulted in injury or public humiliation. Though as a metaphor for the 80's themselves, early videogames could hardly be more apt: gobbling up quarters while presenting basically the same rip-off level over and over again, only more hopelessly difficult each time. Perhaps video games did more to prepare children for the real world than parents realized at the time, filling kids with nervous dread while cleaning out their allowances. Personally I wouldn't know, since I never had any money and just had to stand there pretending I was controlling the little guy in the demo.

On second thought, maybe the 80's did suck a big nut.

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