France Harboring Hussein, Bin Laden, Hamburgler

atching fire crazily like a letter from your ex-husband, the Bush Administration's groundbreaking "Trust us, we know" stance on providing proof for controversial allegations has scored fans in all walks of American life, from adulterers and witch-accusers to the nation's largest newspapers. The latest newspaper allegations streamlined by this new information-disseminating breakthrough involve the rogue nation of France and the obvious role it has played in harboring Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and, according to one source who in true Bush style refused to prove his own identity, the infamous beef larcenist The Hamburgler.

These latest accusations, which wouldn't have been printed if they weren't true (these folks have better things to do than make up stories, people), come on the heels of numerous proof-challenged jabs at France's evil underbelly in recent months. Articles appearing in diverse and fancily named American news institutions such as The Washington Times, The Washington Post, and The Post-Washington News Times have brought a host of startling allegations against France and it's 2.7 million unpatriotic non-American citizens. Long perceived to have a soft spot for Iraq, thanks to heavy French investment in the country and lucrative oil contracts, the island nation has only recently been accused of high-level deception, ranging to everything short of putting banana peels under the heels of American soldiers marching on Baghdad. Which we're going to go ahead and accuse them of right now, the weasels.

The impressive New York Times reported damningly in September that in 1998, France and Germany had supplied Iraq with the damned switches needed to detonate democracy-hating nuclear weapons. A French denial issued in a phony accent insisted that Iraq had ordered the parts allegedly for use in medical equipment, but that suspicious French officials had barred the sale and notified the Germans immediately. To which the Times replied wittily, "Oh sure, go crying to the Germans. That sounds just like France."

Sales of chemical components for long-range missiles, armored vehicles, war cheese and radar equipment between France and Iraq were reported, and slimily denied French-style, in April.

The duplicitous French proved even more slippery in November, when the Washington Post quoted a "U.S. intelligence source" as saying the French were hoarding the smallpox virus and selling airplane and helicopter parts to the Iraqis. Thanks to some tricky verbal maneuvering and a technicality, the French slithered off the hook when they demanded proof and the Post admitted that their source was, in fact, an intelligent reader of US Weekly, the nation's foremost authority on dish and celebrity gossip.

The French goose seemed surely cooked in May however, when The Washington Times reported that France had provided passports to fleeing Iraqi leaders, facilitating their escape to Europe. The French protested this story, perhaps too much if you catch our drift, and it was quickly denied by a White House too busy trying to slap Iraqi fingerprints onto some MacGyvered-together chemical weapons to mess with nailing the French to their well-deserved cross. The Times eventually bent to the French pressure and ran a small correction notice on page 4 of the next day's edition, explaining that a small typo had occurred and the original story should have ran with a "not" after every "did" that referred to France.

These latest allegations may prove harder to dodge, however, since the court of public opinion grows weary of these tedious demands for "proof," and France's strategy of deception may eventually backfire comically in their faces. Before long the public will demand that France prove it isn't hiding bin Laden, Hussein and the Hamburgler in the back room of some brothel somewhere, and this could prove difficult given the consensus that the Hamburgler is just some kind of cartoon character used to sell ground beef to infants. Word on the street, however, has it that France is busy cloning the three into one giant-sized tyrant who will oppress all of the world's people and make off with their meat, just like they did in WWII.

Officials to Celebrities: Please Get Out of New Orleans

Wisconsin Man Takes in Jazz Band

Finely Aged Winemaker Ernest Gallo Corked

Failure of Sirius Radio Blamed on "You Can't be Sirius!" Ad Campaign

Anyone who receives a decent volume of correspondence from the American public will be convinced of one of two things. One is that the American public is retarded. The other is that the English language is retarded. A small subset may conclude that both are true, which is a mean but highly defensible position.

Unless you live on the campus of a major American university, or are rich enough to never have to shop at Wal-Mart, it is a dangerous proposition to believe the bulk of humanity inherently stupid, because the only way off that cruise ship to hell is a Winchester round in the mouth. It is a far better thing to point your stupid-blaming finger elsewhere, and in the case of mainstream America's inability to compose a coherent sentence or spell "comeuppance," the ripest target for pointing is indeed our very stupid language.

As anyone learning English for the first time can attest, it is clearly a language designed by a wretched and miserable people. Spelling holds no bearing on pronunciation, each letter makes several different sounds without rhyme or reason, and there are no accent markings whatsoever. The letters "X" and "C" are completely redundant. Words that are spelled entirely differently (won, one) are pronounced the same, yet have different meanings. Other words are spelled virtually the same but pronounced in wildly different ways (tough, though, thought). And we wonder why people moving to our country can never seem to master the language or make a decent Burrito Supreme.

Why is this, when people the world over who have vastly inferior weapons-making technology to ours still have languages that work fine? How did we manage to screw the pooch so completely in this most basic of tasks? The answer is the English language's roots as a bastard tongue that was never intended to be taken seriously in the first place.

English originated in 600 AD when some guys who were stoned were fucking around, making up words, and it soon spread as a way for little girls to alienate their parents while they were having sleepover parties. In short, it was the Pig Latin of its day. Over the years, more people in the lower classes began to use the language, since it was seen as a cool and antiestablishment way to communicate, more "street" than the stuffy proper languages of Europe. For hundreds of years there was no proper spelling of any word in English, writers spelled everything any damned way they pleased, but eventually the fad grew too big and the squares found out about it.

One giant square, Richard "Big Dork" Mulcaster of London, took it upon himself to devise a standardized spelling of English words. The socially maladjusted Mulcaster sought to prove his intellectual superiority by arranging the spelling of words not phonetically, but rather by extrapolating their historical origins. This was precisely the kind of thing that got him his ass kicked daily back in school, and for good reason.

Mulcaster, a back-of-the-closet homosexual, was terrified of homophones (words pronounced the same), and this greatly influenced his spelling scheme. Thanks to Mulcaster, virtually any combination of letters in English can be pronounced any way the writer likes, to avoid the possibility of spelling two different words the same way and being exposed as gay.

Between 1066 and 1400, England was ruled by the Normans, an insane clan of men who all had the same first name. They demanded that everyone speak Norman French, the same half-assed dialect American tourists speak when visiting Europe. By the time Henry IV reclaimed England for the English in 1399, the only people who remembered the English language at all were hilariously senile, and their vague remembrances became the foundation for modern English. But even then the language was not done being molested: In the 1400's the printing press was invented, and printing presses were run only by foreign immigrants who didn't know constant exposure to lead-based inks gives you cancer. Since printers were paid by the line, they frequently padded out words with extra letters to make their layouts more visually pleasing and profitable. In time, these skylarkings became standard English spellings of words since nobody cared and it was raining all the time anyhow.

This hideous amalgam of modern spelling had become standardized by 1700, with the first dictionary appearing in 1755. Between 1750 and 1850 both Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster attempted to make some sense of the English language, but in the end only succeeded in adding more words, including the noun "noat" for a midget-sized ark and the verb "franklin'" for being blown off a toilet in the middle of the night by a bolt of lightning.

Shorthand inventor Sir Isaac Pitman, drawn to spelling reform by the nonsensical spelling of his first name, developed the Phonotype alphabet in 1842, which succeeded in inspiring all manner of freaks to come out of the woodwork and develop their own alphabets. When the writer George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, one condition of his will was that a new English alphabet be developed in his name, which led to the creation of the Shaw-script, a hilarious new alphabet that looks exactly like a Word document accidentally converted into Wingdings.

Subsequent attempts at "fixing" the English alphabet have been dismal failures, since even simple spelling reform makes words look goofy, and anyone who's spent twenty years learning to spell English sort-of correctly isn't about to chuck all that just to make things easier on little kids and immigrants. And so, th status kwo of th Inglish layngwaj lumbrs forwrd unchaynjd, az it haz sins 1755.

º Last Column: Cursing the Fates
º more columns

"When I was a young boy, no older than 24, my uncle asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. He said "Sampson, I want you to touch me right here between my testicles until I tell you to stop."

My answer that day, as it always had been, was that I planned on being a Viking.

Most laughed when I gave this answer, the same way they laughed when I said I'd be the first man to ride a cheetah at the Indy 500. In retrospect, it looks like they got the last laugh on that second part, thanks to restrictive poaching laws that came into effect in the 1940's. But I never cared. "Let them laugh," I'd say to myself. "Maybe they'll laugh so long that I'm the only one who ducks for cover when we get bombed to death by the Chinese." This would make them laugh even harder, and from then on I resolved to think personal thoughts to myself, rather than speaking them aloud.

Most thought that I would eventually give up my dream of being a Viking, as I grew older and wiser in the ways of the world. Many would have bet money on it, had the Hartwig clan not been genetically incapable of winning a money wager. But they were, as was evidenced the year dad bet the family car and the rights to my brother Goose on "Fat Charlie" Walker taking home the gold in the 50-yard dash at the 1952 summer Olympics.

But I proved them all wrong in the autumn of 1961 when I showed up at Minnesota's training camp wearing a ceramic helmet I'd made myself and gave them the best ten minutes of my life, in an effort to make the team. I may have been driven into the ground like a tent peg, but it was still a dream come true and sweet redemption in the eyes of all the Hartwigs who had looked at Sampson L. Hartwig cockeyed for years.

Later I learned that everyone thought when I said 'Viking' that I meant the guys in the big boats with the horned hats and such, and I understood why they were laughing."

º Last Column: Different
º more columns