Girl Hurl

"Next item:  girls!"  Augustus Bush clicked to the next slide of his PowerPoint presentation in the International Development Machine conference room.  "Girls are very trendy right now, and we need our own Malala."

"You want a girl that got shot in the head by the Taliban?" asked Momzilla.

"Yes, exactly!" said the IDM president.  "No, I mean, not literally--but we need that sort of branding in the girlasphere.  Our social media consultant has drafted an entire campaign for us, and Liv is going to be in charge."

"Me?" asked Liv Cigemeier.

"You're the closest thing we have to a girl," said Bush.

"She's older than me!" protested Momzilla.

"She doesn't have any kids," said Bush, "so she's still girly."

"Girly?" asked Cigemeier.

"Girly!" exclaimed Bush.  "You're going to set up a Facebook page, blog about girls, and send Twits."

"You mean Tweets?" asked Momzilla.

"No, it's Twitter, so it's Twits," said Bush.  (He clicked to the next slide.)  "By June, you should have 20,000 Likes on Facebook, 200 hits/day on your blog, and 40,000 people following your Twits."

"40,000!" exclaimed Momzilla.  "Hillary Clinton doesn't even have 40,000!"

"That's not really Clinton!"  said the website manager.  "I told you:  you're following a fake Twitter account."

"What am I supposed to blog and Tweet about?" asked Cigemeier (who had never Facebooked, blogged, or Tweeted in her life--nor, in fact,  been good at getting anybody to pay attention to her ever).

Bush clicked to the next slide.  "This is our memo," he said.

"Meme," said the website manager.

"Girl Hurl," said Bush.  (The social media consultant had borrowed liberally from the United Nations "Girl Up" campaign.)

"That sounds like bulimia," said Momzilla.

"What!?" exclaimed Bush (who was from the U.S. Virgin Islands branch of the Bush clan, where bulimia had never been fashionable).  "No--it's about hurling girls to the stratosphere.  The social media consultant's contract runs until the end of the week, Liv, so feel free to contact her this afternoon for additional guidance."

A couple miles away, U.S. Attorney Atticus Hawk looked up as his boss walked into his Justice Department office and closed the door behind himself.  "They want additional guidance," he said, tossing a file in front of Hawk and sitting down in the guest chair.  "As of today, you're officially back on this."  (Hawk opened the file and saw that it was about the now infamous legal guidelines for Predator drone kill orders.)  "That damned memo is killing us," Hawk's boss said.

"And killing the targets," said Hawk sardonically.

"Hmmm?  Look, you saw what Code Pink did with the CIA Director hearing?"  (Hawk nodded.)  "That's because the memo had circular reasoning:  a one-L could have torn apart the logic in that.  The big guys want a new memo tightening things up.  I told them unreservedly that nobody could justify counter-terrorism measures better than you, so you're off probation.  Well, I mean, you were never on probation, but you know what I mean.  Get me a first draft by COB Monday--it can be rough, just get me something then.  Sound good?"

"Yes, sir," said Hawk, who had nightmares two to three times a week about a Predator drone strike hurling his old girlfriend, Basia Karbusky (currently ranked 13,893 on the FBI Most Wanted list), into the stratosphere.  "Thank you, sir."

Just down the street, Judge Sowell Ame was a little disappointed there was no equivalent of a Code Pink rabble that he could clear out of his hearing, but the dozen people in Courtroom Five at Superior Court were, in fact, silently in rapture at the peculiar proceeding.  First of all, there had been the curious sight of Marcos Vazquez's attorney admonishing her client for approaching the plaintiff's attorney, and Vazquez had still been chatting with the plaintiff's attorney while the presiding judge was entering the courtroom.  ("We saw him at the Kite Festival," Vazquez whispered as he rushed back to his own attorney.  "He had an Osage vision of a prophecy--my wife understood it--it was shamanistic.")  Then Judge Ame gaveled for order and glared at Vazquez and his attorney, who bowed his head meekly to the judge.

"John Doe, rise!" commanded the judge, turning to the (shamanistic) plaintiff's attorney.  "You filed this case as 'John Doe', even though that is not the name you were admitted to the Bar with.  You are making a mockery of our legal system."

"No, your honor--"

"I didn't say you could speak!" sputtered Judge Ame.  "Summary judgment for defendant, AND I'm dismissing this case with prejudice, so don't try to file something else!"  (Silence, except for the confused guttural utterances of Libra, the plaintiff.)  "Well, do you have something to say?!"

"I can speak now?" asked John Doe.

"Don't be impertinent!" hollered Judge Ame.  "I have never seen such nonsense in thirty years on the bench!"  (Judge Ame had only been on the bench 23 years, but he rounded up.)

"Your honor," wailed Libra, getting to her feet, "he doesn't remember the attorney he was before the life-altering brain injury!  His work now transcends the legalistic confines of a linear trajectory working for The Man!  The galactic life forces are out of balance since I have been cheated out of my home, and John is the one anointed to fulfill the Prophecy!"  (She hadn't heard anything about the Prophecy until three minutes earlier, but she now believed in it wholeheartedly.)

"Restrain your client!" bellowed Judge Ame, as he gaveled four more times (and restrained himself from hurling the gavel at the hippy chick).  "Clerk, enter into the record that Ms. Libra whatever-her-name-is is barred from bringing a civil lawsuit in the District of Columbia for ten years.  This hearing is adjourned!"  With that, he rose abruptly and stared at the audience, half-expecting them to erupt into some type of frenzy, but the small audience shuffled slowly to its feet and stared at him quietly in befuddlement.  "Adjourned!" he repeated more loudly, then he remembered to bang the gavel before turning back towards his chamber.  (His law clerk tried to head him off with a reminder that Judge Ame had two more hearings scheduled, but Judge Ame shoved his law clerk aside and went out the door with a dramatic flourish of his robe.) 

A few miles to the west, Bridezilla left her Prince and Prowling office, headed to the ladies room in the hallway, and entered the handicapped stall with a dramatic flourish of her merino wool skirt.  She selected the Tchaikovsky ballet suite on her iPod, inserted her ear buds, and approached the wooden barre she had installed over the weekend in place of the steel rails that had been there before.  She looked into the 4x7 mirror (also installed over the weekend) and began running through the five positions on both sides.  Then she did demi-plies (not full plies because the floor was too dirty to brush her skirt on), followed by attitudes, arabesques, and developpes--all part of her new approach to living the beautiful-life-she-was-meant-to-live  (But she thought randomly about J.P. Morgan's damage control campaign while she was doing it so that she could bill her trips to the ladies room.)

Out in the river, Ardua of the Potomac was hurling herself out of the water like a humpback whale, sending wave after wave of cold water flying up at Dubious McGinty as he cursed her from the railing of the 14th Street Bridge.