satire

Most of the names, places, events, facts, and syllables below are complete (though plausible) fabrications. Except the “Baghdad ain’t shit” thing. That’s actually true.

He sat there grinning, forehead in his hand. How had it come to this? How could the comically-lauded hero-of-hubris — who, on the doorstep of Iraq in 2003 proclaimed “Baghdad ain’t shit” — have become the consigliere to madness? All those metals. All the media praise. All of it came to nothing now. Instead here he was, pleading for assistance from a faux-hawked punk no older than 24.

General Kelly was about to embark on his most arduous assignment yet.

Strolling the aisles of Toys R Us is markedly different from cruising into the Mesopotamian capital in a heavily armored Stryker, little flags flipping about in the wind. No. Unlike a 21st century American ground invasion, in order to achieve victory inside the sprawling toy store, one absolutely needed to have an exit strategy.

Kelly, unfortunately, didn’t have a plan for the mission at all, let alone one for interacting with the sullen millennial sales associate. Part of the confusion lay in the sheer number of options. Throughout the warehouse of childhood pleasure one could find innumerable variety of cheap, colorful, hard-marketed junk. The General, who always bore the stars and stripes in suit and pin form while carrying a copy of the Constitution in his breast pocket, could not have been prepared for the endless horizon of chotchkes manufactured in exotic sounding locations. And while the titans of play still ruled the aisles — Lego, Fisher Price, Milton Bradley — so, too, did the impeccable countries on the rise: China, India, and all the others that had spawned forth his suit, the pins that graced its lapel, and in all likelihood the paper on which his beloved Penguin Classics Edition Constitution had been printed.

But Kelly wasn’t there to pick out the wares of foreigners. He had come specifically for the product of a good ‘ol apple pie eating, AR-15 toting American company of tradition: Crayola. For half a century, the ubiquitous maker of crayons had carried at least half a dozen (and likely more) shades of orange in its classic box of 64. Kelly let the thought of some courtroom sketch artist being able to use all of them in a future mega-trial flash through his mind, but only briefly.

“Screamin’ Green. That’s a good name,” said the sales associate while reading the box.

“How much?” Kelly asked.

“Ten. We also have some thick construction paper that goes well with these,” the associated added, nodding down the aisle.

“Can it soak up burger grease?”

“Uh, what?”

“Nevermind. I’ll take the box. And some safety scissors.”

As the two walked towards the register, Kelly’s phone buzzed. He took it out and saw what he’d feared: a little blue (Crayola would have called it ”cerulean”) bird icon announcing a new message.

@realDonaldTrump Sorry haters and Losers! Rocket man knows I have one of the high-est possible IQ of any President in history. That is why he is afraid. We will have to totally destroy his failing country!

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered, clenching his teeth. The associate looked up with some concern, but Kelly caught his eye and shook his head. “Just another alert, that’s all.”

“Tell me about it,” the associate said, rolling his eyes. “It never stops.”

Throughout his long, presumably accomplished career, the General had dealt with all manner of people. There were the uptight junior officers fresh out of the academy, the vulgar enlistees getting drunk and wild in the Mad Max camps of Iraq, the lifelong Pentagon bureaucrats whose entire being seemed fused to a series of file cabinets, and even the turn of the century civilian blowhards who commanded the world into the crime of the century. Now the White House had turned into a cheapjack nursing home partially run by patients, and he had little experience with the tantrums of a fully grown human suffering from affluenza and brain atrophy.

The only strategy that worked was to provide harmless distractions. Despite leaking like a rusted tin roof, Kelly’s shop had managed to keep at least one thing secret: the President loved coloring. When his TV privileges were revoked — usually due to some event of adult consequence occurring in the outside world — POTUS liked to sit on the floor of the Oval Office and draw elaborate fantasy structures on chained pieces of paper. He was a builder, after all. Oddly enough he would create convoluted underground labyrinths rather than towers, complete with Scrooge McDuck money vaults and fast food franchises operated by young Slavic women. He used 24 pound paper for drawings. They were the most stable and durable structures he had produced in his entire life.

But today the strategy had failed. The Commander in Chief refused to cooperate, even after Kelly had brought him a glass of warm milk. He insisted that he did not have enough colors. His 31 Trump-branded crayons (now defunct) were made of scrap wax sourced from a Triad run candle factory outside of Macau. The box featured no fewer than 15 shades of red with exotic names like Ass of Hot Water and Joyful Merriment Frolic. With the cheese of a 99 cent quesarito dripping from his mouth, the President implored: “John, I’m going to need you to go get me a new box.”

The General couldn’t quite fathom the shell of a man he had become.

Others in his cohort had gone on to prestigious and meaningful positions. He could have been a Professor of international policy at Yale, or a venture capitalist blaring Aaron Copland on Seinheiser speakers from his camouflaged yurt at Burning Man, or even a cable news talking head like so many turn of the century intelligentsia.

But when the call to service for the red white and blue came in once again, he knew he had to accept. A return to dignity beckoned. The General refused to be a footnote in yet another American blunder. This time he would get it right.

“Cash or card?” the associate said.

Kelly snapped out of his daydreaming. “Uh, card please.”

The associate swiped the card and began to lower the items into a plastic bag, but the General interrupted.

“No bag, please. It’s a choking hazard.”

Buzz-buzz.
Buzz-buzz.

Originally written in the Summer of 2009, possibly during a fit of insomnia and/or hunger.

The great problem of our time can be summed up with a simple observation: that the man who makes the pizza does not make the pizza box. While our cook is hard at work, spinning dough and sprinkling cheese, a generic box rolls off the line in some factory town hundreds of miles away that happens to specialize in cardboard production. The delegation of work here is not the issue, nor is the physical distance between our cook and our depressing little cardboard town. If the pizza boxes were blank the world could go on spinning and the humans along for the ride could continue to shove slices of varying geometry between the lips of genuine smiles. This is, however, not our reality.

The pizza box is non-specific. Aside from big chains, most parlors use boxes without logos. For the sake of “authenticity,” these boxes will often feature a large picture of something Italian; perhaps a Venetian street or, if shooting for a ridiculous pun, the leaning tower of “Pizza.” Any normal Joe becomes immediately aware of the lie. It’s fairly obvious: the tomato sauce is from San Antonio, the cheese is from Alberta, the dough is canned in Wyoming, and the box comes from the depressing town that we have continued to dwell on, evidently without consideration for our precarious mental conditions.

The pizza box still has more tricks up its sleeve. In many cases generic boxes will have writing on the side that says something so obtuse that, if it weren’t for the maddening pizza cravings that led to its acquisition in the first place, normal rational creatures would ignore. But these too are outright lies. If a pizza box says “Fresh Hot Pizza,” it is a semi-fabrication and leap into the world of the unknown, where it appears that the slogan writer has little concern for the accuracy of his statement. In a way it’s almost like bad English used on products in Asia — the accuracy of the translation is not as important as the overall idea that it hopefully points towards. We are supposed to be reminded of a time when we indeed had pizza that was fresh and hot. And guess what? The food inside that box is something similar to that experience. At least, this is what the box makers and pizza cooks hope for.

If the pizza has been sitting under a heating lamp for several hours, a situation so common in the late night eateries of America that the high-wattage lightbulb industry might as well lobby for the Tomato-Pureeing Union, then the pizza box slogan is patently false. Fresh? No. Hot? Oh yeah. Pizza? Questionable. The point is that the box makers can’t possibly know whether the pizza will be hot, fresh, or even pizza at all (imagine their outrage if, after hiring a private culinary investigator/statistician, they found out almost half of their boxes are actually used to house calzones). Instead, they make a hopeful guess — a guess based on an ideal, possibly a wish for better pizza — that will commonly turn into opposite of itself when faced with the enormous disappointment of the innards of their little cardboard creation.

Is attempting to pass off something that one knows may not be true the same thing as an outright lie? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps it’s more appropriate to call this “pizza-boxing,” a semi-lie that serves as cheap mortar to fill the incredible gap between bricked factory and brick oven. These semi-lies we all take square on the chin, and if it weren’t for our insatiable pizza gorging we might instead serve up doses of indignation instead of handfuls of dollars. And this, again, is our problem: that we are promised the lofty ideal all the time and are mostly given less-than, because the real world is typically less-than; the Pizza-Boxers of the world tell everyone that everything is always better than it actually is while abdicating their part in the collective responsibility to improve conditions all over the Earth.

Faced with these issues, we all have only one alternative: dining in.

General Kelly’s Mission

On Pizza-Boxing