An Informed People
"I don't understand why we have to have our meetings on weekends," sighed Henrietta ("Button") Samuelson, looking around at the Heurich Society members munching on Baskin and Robbins ice cream cake in the upper floor of the Brewmaster's Castle. "Most of you are retired!" ("Because my wife thinks we're playing golf!" "I don't like to drive into the city on weekdays!" "How else can I get out of antiquing in Frederick?") "Could we please try doing a meeting at a different time--how about Wednesday nights?"
"I'm not missing 'Law and Order: Special Victims Unit'--that woman is hot!"
"Yeah! Her mother was Marlene Dietrich."
"No--it was Jane Mansfield."
"Gentlemen," cackled (crackled) Condoleezza Rice from the speaker phone, "Henrietta is Chair of the Heurich Society, and it is her prerogative to call the meetings whenever she likes! You know how important it is for her to do her little real estate thing on the weekends! It is really disgraceful that her departed father didn't leave her a better financial legacy, but, well, we all know he was an erratic genius." ("And he never took a dime from the Soviets!" "Are you implying the rest of us did?" "Don't be an ass!") "Gentlemen! The point is, the poor thing has to show houses for a living, and we should support her in that."
"Um, thanks," said Samuelson. "The next meeting will be Thursday at noon--" ("I'm not missing 'General Hospital!'" "It's not on at noon!" "Well, how I am gonna get home in time?" "Don't you have a doodad?" "You mean a DVR? You can't use those! Then the government tracks everything you're watching!") "Gentlemen!" hollered Samuelson. "Email me a list of the shows you don't want to miss, and I will get you DVDs of them--not even the cable company will know you've seen them." (Hmm, she's craftier than I thought, thought some of the octogenarians present.)
"Can we talk about the chemical weapons in Syria now?" asked the former chairman. (He was personally responsible for two-thirds of them getting to Syria.) "They could fall into very dangerous hands."
"Yes, let's," said Samuelson, narrowing her eyes. "I wonder who made the shitload of money trafficking them in there in the first place?"
"Maybe he traded them for information, not money!" retorted the former chairman, narrowing his eyes in return.
"Well, if he had been smart, he would have gone for the money, because the information was useless, wasn't it?" replied Samuelson. (The longer her father was dead, the more desire she felt to distance him and his legacy from these power-hungry pigs who wanted to control the world without breaking a sweat.) "Fortunately for us, we now have new information out of Syria...."
That new information was not from Heurich Society agent Angela de la Paz--still holding fast to her vow not to return to the Middle East...and currently on a mission in Mazza Gallerie. "I'm not sure this is really the ideal place to buy a dress for the White House Correspondents' Dinner," said Angela de la Paz, modeling another black spaghetti-strap dress for her boyfriend, Major Roddy Bruce. "I don't know what I'm doing."
"You look great in everything, babe!" said Bruce sincerely, but Angela smiled wanly and retreated to the dressing room again. (The man had trained in the Australian Outback, jumped out of airplanes, slogged through East Timor jungles, kayaked in crocodile-infested waters, climbed Ayers Rock a dozen times, faced enemy fire in Indonesia, and run three marathons--but the Neiman Marcus lights and smells had rendered him an exhausted lump of male flesh scarcely able to hold his head up as he sat in despair on the floor and leaned against the wall which countless men before him had slumped down on.) "The red one was best, wasn't it?" he pleaded with the hovering sales girl.
"Some women do not like to call attention to themselves," she replied.
"What's the point of a hundred women all wearing the same black dress?" he asked in desperation.
"They're not all the same black dress," she protested without conviction.
Bruce wasn't even sure why they were going: neither of them thought Conan O'Brien was funny, they both hated formal affairs, and the tickets were obviously another attempt from Charles Wu to seduce Angela into the glittering world of the D.C. power elite. "Hello?!" Angela was now standing in front of him in a pink puff of lace and ruffles. "You look like a princess!" She beamed, then the sales girl beamed, then Bruce felt a surge of victorious adrenaline that propelled him to his feet to do a very hick Aussie hooray that was sweetly embarrassing to everybody present.
A few manikins away, Washington's premier amnesiac, John Doe, was stealthily watching the scene from behind a DKNY (off-the-rack) creation. "Some people think I'm out of touch because I'm a shamanistic autistic savant, but those two are really in love."
"Who cares?!" wailed the ghost of Henry Samuelson (former chairman of the Heurich Society, deceased father of Button). "I've got to win her back!"
"You never had her!" said Doe to Ghost Henry.
"She was my Pygmalion! I made her everything she is today, and she repaid me by stealing my Predator drone!"
"You trained her to be a secret agent, assassin and spy, but that's not everything she is today."
"She's not supposed to be wearing pink--ever!"
"She looks like a princess," sighed Doe (who used to be a cunning tax attorney, among other things).
"She's a killer, you brain-damaged loon!"
"Hey! There's no call for that!"
"You need to go talk to her! Tell her you had a Biblical vision, and she needs to get back to the Middle East!"
"She wasn't in my Biblical vision! I told you: it was Ryan Lochte beating up two of the four horseman, and then Kim Kardashian knocked the third horseman off his horse, and she was riding the horse with her hair covering her pregnant belly--but not covering her breasts--and then--"
"It's just symbolism! You're too stupid to interpret it--that's why you need me!" With that, Ghost Henry poked John Doe sharply between the eyes, and Doe sank slowly to the floor in a hazy cloud of temporal lobe epilepsy. "Aargh, they're getting away!" Ghost Henry floated after the young lovers, abandoning Doe and his "Israel" mumbles to a crowd of people uncertain whether to call an ambulance or Homeland Security.
Back in downtown Washington, militiaman and conspiracy theorist Glenn Michael Beckmann had his own White House Correspondents' Dinner mission. He was riding his Segway back and forth between the White House and the Washington Hilton, stopping every now and then to pull his laptop out of his messenger bag and type furiously into his blog. Homeland Security agents had already kicked him out of the Hilton lobby--ostensibly for wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with a photo of Paris Hilton and the words Fashion Terrorist--but Beckmann knew it was really because half of DHS were undercover Islamist agents, and Boston was only the beginning! "What will the scene of carnage be like tonight if true patriots like me are not there to protect the innocent?" he blogged. (By "the innocent", he was mostly referring to his girl, Megyn Kelly.) He looked back suddenly, and the Secret Service agent tailing him tried to switch on his nonchalant face and pretend to hail a taxi, but Beckmann knew! "What a moral dilemma!" he blogged to his followers, most of whom hailed him as leader of the Hunter-Gatherers (although Sarah Palin was their secret President). "Should I kill this agent and risk capture by the Enemy Within, or wait until tonight when my patriotic duty might be even biggerer?"
"God, he can't even spell!" wailed Dick Cheney, reading Beckmann's blog on his suburban home computer. "Why does this jackass have a million more readers than I do?!"
"Not Beckmann's blog again, honey?! You know what it does to your blood pressure!" Cheney's wife, Lynn, turned off the computer and tweaked his twitching nose. "Get out in this beautiful sunshine! What ever happened to those fellows you used to golf with--you know, before the White House years?"
"They were jealous of how smart I was!" bellowed Cheney. (It had been more than a decade since the Heurich Society allowed him into their secret meetings.)
"Yes, dear, everybody is--it's the cross you have to bear. Why don't you go outside and pick some flowers for me, like you used to do back in Wyoming?"
Cheney smiled, submitted to a kiss, and went outside to sulk. Back in Wyoming he would buy wildflowers from a 10-year-old Mexican girl for 50 cents. Here he was, a man who had been leader of the Free World, reduced to picking flowers for his wife on a Saturday afternoon! Why couldn't they see he still had so much to give?! Not like that dingleberry Dick Rumsfeld, writing Washington Post op-eds about high school wrestling!
Out in the river, Ardua of the Potomac wallowed in the mud, primping and preening for Washington's unholy coalition of ego-stroking, vapid celebrities, jingoistic journalism, and mouthpieces for manufactured consent. So much pride and prejudice concentrated in one place at one time! It made a demonic girl giddy.
"I'm not missing 'Law and Order: Special Victims Unit'--that woman is hot!"
"Yeah! Her mother was Marlene Dietrich."
"No--it was Jane Mansfield."
"Gentlemen," cackled (crackled) Condoleezza Rice from the speaker phone, "Henrietta is Chair of the Heurich Society, and it is her prerogative to call the meetings whenever she likes! You know how important it is for her to do her little real estate thing on the weekends! It is really disgraceful that her departed father didn't leave her a better financial legacy, but, well, we all know he was an erratic genius." ("And he never took a dime from the Soviets!" "Are you implying the rest of us did?" "Don't be an ass!") "Gentlemen! The point is, the poor thing has to show houses for a living, and we should support her in that."
"Um, thanks," said Samuelson. "The next meeting will be Thursday at noon--" ("I'm not missing 'General Hospital!'" "It's not on at noon!" "Well, how I am gonna get home in time?" "Don't you have a doodad?" "You mean a DVR? You can't use those! Then the government tracks everything you're watching!") "Gentlemen!" hollered Samuelson. "Email me a list of the shows you don't want to miss, and I will get you DVDs of them--not even the cable company will know you've seen them." (Hmm, she's craftier than I thought, thought some of the octogenarians present.)
"Can we talk about the chemical weapons in Syria now?" asked the former chairman. (He was personally responsible for two-thirds of them getting to Syria.) "They could fall into very dangerous hands."
"Yes, let's," said Samuelson, narrowing her eyes. "I wonder who made the shitload of money trafficking them in there in the first place?"
"Maybe he traded them for information, not money!" retorted the former chairman, narrowing his eyes in return.
"Well, if he had been smart, he would have gone for the money, because the information was useless, wasn't it?" replied Samuelson. (The longer her father was dead, the more desire she felt to distance him and his legacy from these power-hungry pigs who wanted to control the world without breaking a sweat.) "Fortunately for us, we now have new information out of Syria...."
That new information was not from Heurich Society agent Angela de la Paz--still holding fast to her vow not to return to the Middle East...and currently on a mission in Mazza Gallerie. "I'm not sure this is really the ideal place to buy a dress for the White House Correspondents' Dinner," said Angela de la Paz, modeling another black spaghetti-strap dress for her boyfriend, Major Roddy Bruce. "I don't know what I'm doing."
"You look great in everything, babe!" said Bruce sincerely, but Angela smiled wanly and retreated to the dressing room again. (The man had trained in the Australian Outback, jumped out of airplanes, slogged through East Timor jungles, kayaked in crocodile-infested waters, climbed Ayers Rock a dozen times, faced enemy fire in Indonesia, and run three marathons--but the Neiman Marcus lights and smells had rendered him an exhausted lump of male flesh scarcely able to hold his head up as he sat in despair on the floor and leaned against the wall which countless men before him had slumped down on.) "The red one was best, wasn't it?" he pleaded with the hovering sales girl.
"Some women do not like to call attention to themselves," she replied.
"What's the point of a hundred women all wearing the same black dress?" he asked in desperation.
"They're not all the same black dress," she protested without conviction.
Bruce wasn't even sure why they were going: neither of them thought Conan O'Brien was funny, they both hated formal affairs, and the tickets were obviously another attempt from Charles Wu to seduce Angela into the glittering world of the D.C. power elite. "Hello?!" Angela was now standing in front of him in a pink puff of lace and ruffles. "You look like a princess!" She beamed, then the sales girl beamed, then Bruce felt a surge of victorious adrenaline that propelled him to his feet to do a very hick Aussie hooray that was sweetly embarrassing to everybody present.
A few manikins away, Washington's premier amnesiac, John Doe, was stealthily watching the scene from behind a DKNY (off-the-rack) creation. "Some people think I'm out of touch because I'm a shamanistic autistic savant, but those two are really in love."
"Who cares?!" wailed the ghost of Henry Samuelson (former chairman of the Heurich Society, deceased father of Button). "I've got to win her back!"
"You never had her!" said Doe to Ghost Henry.
"She was my Pygmalion! I made her everything she is today, and she repaid me by stealing my Predator drone!"
"You trained her to be a secret agent, assassin and spy, but that's not everything she is today."
"She's not supposed to be wearing pink--ever!"
"She looks like a princess," sighed Doe (who used to be a cunning tax attorney, among other things).
"She's a killer, you brain-damaged loon!"
"Hey! There's no call for that!"
"You need to go talk to her! Tell her you had a Biblical vision, and she needs to get back to the Middle East!"
"She wasn't in my Biblical vision! I told you: it was Ryan Lochte beating up two of the four horseman, and then Kim Kardashian knocked the third horseman off his horse, and she was riding the horse with her hair covering her pregnant belly--but not covering her breasts--and then--"
"It's just symbolism! You're too stupid to interpret it--that's why you need me!" With that, Ghost Henry poked John Doe sharply between the eyes, and Doe sank slowly to the floor in a hazy cloud of temporal lobe epilepsy. "Aargh, they're getting away!" Ghost Henry floated after the young lovers, abandoning Doe and his "Israel" mumbles to a crowd of people uncertain whether to call an ambulance or Homeland Security.
Back in downtown Washington, militiaman and conspiracy theorist Glenn Michael Beckmann had his own White House Correspondents' Dinner mission. He was riding his Segway back and forth between the White House and the Washington Hilton, stopping every now and then to pull his laptop out of his messenger bag and type furiously into his blog. Homeland Security agents had already kicked him out of the Hilton lobby--ostensibly for wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with a photo of Paris Hilton and the words Fashion Terrorist--but Beckmann knew it was really because half of DHS were undercover Islamist agents, and Boston was only the beginning! "What will the scene of carnage be like tonight if true patriots like me are not there to protect the innocent?" he blogged. (By "the innocent", he was mostly referring to his girl, Megyn Kelly.) He looked back suddenly, and the Secret Service agent tailing him tried to switch on his nonchalant face and pretend to hail a taxi, but Beckmann knew! "What a moral dilemma!" he blogged to his followers, most of whom hailed him as leader of the Hunter-Gatherers (although Sarah Palin was their secret President). "Should I kill this agent and risk capture by the Enemy Within, or wait until tonight when my patriotic duty might be even biggerer?"
"God, he can't even spell!" wailed Dick Cheney, reading Beckmann's blog on his suburban home computer. "Why does this jackass have a million more readers than I do?!"
"Not Beckmann's blog again, honey?! You know what it does to your blood pressure!" Cheney's wife, Lynn, turned off the computer and tweaked his twitching nose. "Get out in this beautiful sunshine! What ever happened to those fellows you used to golf with--you know, before the White House years?"
"They were jealous of how smart I was!" bellowed Cheney. (It had been more than a decade since the Heurich Society allowed him into their secret meetings.)
"Yes, dear, everybody is--it's the cross you have to bear. Why don't you go outside and pick some flowers for me, like you used to do back in Wyoming?"
Cheney smiled, submitted to a kiss, and went outside to sulk. Back in Wyoming he would buy wildflowers from a 10-year-old Mexican girl for 50 cents. Here he was, a man who had been leader of the Free World, reduced to picking flowers for his wife on a Saturday afternoon! Why couldn't they see he still had so much to give?! Not like that dingleberry Dick Rumsfeld, writing Washington Post op-eds about high school wrestling!
Out in the river, Ardua of the Potomac wallowed in the mud, primping and preening for Washington's unholy coalition of ego-stroking, vapid celebrities, jingoistic journalism, and mouthpieces for manufactured consent. So much pride and prejudice concentrated in one place at one time! It made a demonic girl giddy.
posted by washingtonwaterwoman | 4:08 PM
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