Iraq Being Rebuilt By Cast of Three’s Company

n a move that seems designed to stun the administration’s critics into silence, President Bush announced yesterday that in recent weeks the task of rebuilding Iraq has been turned over to the cast of the popular late-70’s ABC sitcom Three’s Company. This unprecedented move drew a total blank from the nation’s political commentators, many of whom were seen checking the calendar to see if it was April 1st. The announcement also served to quell the rising tide of allegations that Bush invaded Iraq without the slightest idea of how to build the country into a democracy or even a legitimate desire to do so, as many of the allegators (Ed. note: a larger cousin of the crocodile) were seen buying tickets for the midnight train to Canada.

“Mr. Ritter, Ms. Somers and Ms. DeWitt were carefully hand-picked by the administration for their nation-building skills and their position as some of our country’s most expendable celebrities,” explained outgoing White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. “They have the skills, and more importantly, they had the time. Mr. Knotts was not chosen for this assignment, but hid in a sack of rice on the plane and has thus far refused to be sent back.”

“We’re a nation of ass-kickers, not babysitters,” explained the president during yesterday’s press conference. “I have every confidence that Jack and Mr. Furley have this situation well under control, and are delighting the Iraqi people with hilarious sexual double-enchiladas as we speak.”

When asked if by “enchiladas,” he meant “entendres,” President Bush explained that thanks, but he wasn’t in the mood for Mexican.

“Ms. Somers has already quelled several attempted uprisings by the Shiites and Kurds, and her iron abs and hellcat personality have proved to be a more-than-adequate replacement for Saddam’s iron fist in keeping Iraq under control,” noted Fleischer. “Let’s just say Saddam wasn’t the only one who knew how to bury his problems out in the desert. In addition, thanks to Suzanne’s program of mandatory daily abdominal exercises, the people of Iraq have never looked Tripper. I mean trimmer!”

The press secretary’s clever Three’s Company-themed pun elicited guffaws among the press corps and several non-English-speaking Iraqi bystanders who hate to feel left out on a joke.

“It’s really too bad Norman Fell died back in 1998, because Mr. Roper really would have been the perfect post-Saddam leader for Iraq. I’m sure even the Iraqis would have loved him. That guy was the cat’s ass,” skylarked diehard Three’s Company fan and collectable tumbler collector Sidney Torres.

The interim government was tested last week when a local villager, whose daughter had been shot in the neck with a harpoon gun during the lawlessness that followed the fall of Baghdad, came to Ritter and DeWitt for help.

“John, this is just like the episode where you broke your tailbone teaching Chrissy the hula but you couldn’t ask Mr. Furley for a ride to the hospital because he’d think you got hurt being gay!” offered DeWitt with her trademark spunk.

“Are you saying we wrap a scarf around the harpoon and tell people it’s a new fashion craze?” questioned Ritter.

DeWitt responded with an affirmative wink and gun-cocking gesture that had the audience of Iraqi bystanders rolling with laughter, all except for the farmer and his harpooned daughter.

Ms. Somers refused to be interviewed for this story, as she had retired to a secret underground bunker with her inner circle of advisors to discuss the “rebuilding” of neighboring Iran.

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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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There is a new show on the Fox television network featuring puppets acting like real people once again. This is nothing new, it beckons back to the old days of vaudeville where wood-and-cloth dolls would make innuendos about getting laid frequently when they weren't performing. Much like Andrew "Dice" Clay during his fifteen minutes of popularity, before Ford Fairlaine.

Puppets are welcome to their shows and Church performances and whatever else they want, I just want them to stop perpetuating the myth they started long ago. It's ironic, if not embryonic, that these puppets pretend to be real during the program and then so much is made of human performers manipulating the puppets and doing its voice off-camera, when the real truth is in the program.

Yes, I say what you have all long suspected when I tell you: Puppets are real.

Once again the government and a close-knit Hollywood enclave have taken the truth and wrapped an entertainment ribbon around it, then perpetuate a lie because they feel America isn't ready for the truth. You'd be shocked and fall out of your seat, bumping your ass on your well-swept floor, if you knew how many movies in Hollywood are true stories disguised as fiction. The Truman Show? True, man. Show. Fight Club? True. Armageddon? True, except for the ridiculous dialogue. Apollo 13? Hang on to your ass, folks—it's true.

More devastating to the population as a whole may be the secret that all of the Muppet movies are real. The de facto Muppet movie, The Muppet Movie is the real story of how puppets became a large workforce in Hollywood. The frog, bear, etc. traveling to Hollywood to star in pictures, encountering several celebrities working mundane jobs along the way, it's all the true story with a few jokes dropped in, as well as a lot of talk of puppet unions and contract points left out. And the most important point: The American public must never find out puppets are human beings reincarnated in felt dolls.

The details escape me, I have misplaced the cocktail napkin I wrote them on, but suffice to say puppets are a major hidden force in Hollywood. Not only do they star in movies and television shows, they also hold powerful positions on the MPAA board and work as agents. When I visited two years ago I'm reasonably sure a puppet even parked my car when I visited Spago.

I'm not denouncing puppets, mind you; if anything, I'm encouraging them. Even if they are the dead brought back to life in the hideous form of a cloth toy creation, they deserve the same rights as anyone else. I'm not sure how they reproduce without visible sex organs, but maybe if there are puppets out there who are fans of the commune, they could e-mail me and let me know because I'm extremely curious. Just informative curious, not wanting to explore or anything.

This issue means a lot to me, if you haven't guessed by now. In fact, after looking through some old photo albums it may be possible I myself, Red Bagel, have some puppet blood running through me. It's a troublesome prospect, especially picturing some Bagel ancestor of mine engaging in sexual intercourse with a puppet. I'm not judging, I've had sex with dolls before myself, but they've never been animated in any sense and didn't seem to enjoy it as much as I did.

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