(PU) Former Vice President Richard B. Cheney was found dead today at the Daniel Ellsberg Reeducation Center for War Criminals and the Psychopathically Challenged. Using twine he had pilfered from a macramé class, Mr. Cheney apparently hanged himself after a particularly grueling group therapy session in which participants were asked to go deep within themselves and explore their feelings about the phrase, “Give Peace a Chance.”
Mr. Cheney’s suicide is one more in a distressingly long line of self-inflicted deaths of Republican politicians, military contractors, army officers, and rightwing pundits following the recent nationwide, nonviolent Revolution. For some as yet unknown reason, many free market neoconservatives seem unwilling to go on living, now that all forms of racial and ethnic discrimination have ceased, gay marriage is legal, U.S. troops are coming home to full employment and psychological counseling, and the end of global warming appears possible within 1-2 weeks.
“Dick’s with Jesus, now,” wept James Dobson, chairman of the rightwing evangelical group, Focus on the Family. Mr. Dobson was recently sentenced to 2,500 years of community service at an HIV/AIDS clinic for his part in cutting off government funding to sex education programs that did not promote abstinence-only. “If you ask me, Dick Cheney didn’t kill himself,” Dobson continued. “He was murdered — murdered by those tree-hugging, all-you-need-is-love, daisy-sniffing goons who took over our government. Death to the fascist hippies that prey on the life of Christian conservatives!”
From his cell at the Reeducation Center, ex-President George W. Bush reflected on his years with Mr. Cheney. “Me and Dick had some good times. But after those peace-mongering terrorists stormed the White House and took away our ability to torture Arabs and dismantle the Constitution, life lost its meaning for Dick. He got depressed, seeing the children of illegal immigrants get adequate health care. He was also upset that the Che Guevara t-shirt they forced him to wear made him look paunchy. Oh, Dick, Dick!” wailed Mr. Bush, smashing a lava-lamp against the wall and throwing himself on his government-issued waterbed with the floral-printed, contoured sheets. “Why did it have to be YOU? Why couldn’t it have been 500,000 more Iraqis?”
Newly elected President and Maximum Leader, Cindy Sheehan, also expressed regret at hearing of Mr. Cheney’s demise. “That is a real bummer,” she lamented. “Hey, does anybody know if I have to dial ‘011’ to call South Korea? I’d like to get our troops out of there, too.”
It is foreign policy like this that has probably motivated right-wingers such as Rupert Murdoch, Ann Coulter, and Alberto Gonzalez to take their own lives. Mr. Murdoch, who drank nine quarts of toner from a color printer, and Mr. Gonzalez, who water-boarded himself to death, selected quiet, almost humble, ways to shuffle off their mortal coils.
Ms. Coulter, in contrast, chose to dress in the traditional garb of a devout Muslim woman and blow herself up at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, in order to demonstrate, her suicide note read, “the terrorist faggotry embedded in Enlightenment values.” These deaths, say remaining conservative pundits, might have been avoided, had the Bush Administration taken firmer control of the Internet.
“If millions of people hadn’t been allowed to click on all those goddamned Web petitions to stop the war,” remarked Rush Limbaugh, “Cindy Sheehan would be salted away in some FEMA detention camp by now. Every day, it gets worse. Just a minute ago, I heard that that death-row guy, Mumia Abu-Jamal, was appointed Attorney General. You’ll pardon me, now, while I take an overdose of OxyContin.”
President Sheehan’s Cabinet appointments have, at times, stirred controversy, as when she tapped singer Harry Belafonte for Secretary of State, and anti-globalization activist Naomi Klein for Chair of the Federal Reserve Board. Public outcry, however, was quickly assuaged by the new Secretary of Defense the Dalai Lama, and by White House Press Secretary Amy Goodman who gave out free Democracy Now! tote bags at a Washington press conference.
Politically, President Sheehan has had few rivals, except, for a brief time, Representative John Conyers (D-MI), who held a sit-in outside the Oval Office to “pay her back” for Ms. Sheehan’s own pre-Revolutionary protest outside Conyers’ office in support of Bush’s impeachment. All ended happily in laughter, tears, and warm hugs, however, when Ms. Sheehan admitted that she had been “an idiot.”
Surprisingly, the most serious criticism of the current Revolutionary administration has come from the sectarian Left. “I guess I miss the hatred,” observed Cyrus Prolehammer, founder of the Laborers Work Party, whose motto, “We Never Met a Leftwing Dictator We Didn’t Like,” has garnered the organization at least two-dozen members. “A hundred years ago,” Mr. Prolehammer sighed, “Cheney wouldn’t have had the white, upper-class privilege of suicide. We would have taken him down to the cellar and shot him, just like with the Czar. Sadly, those days are gone. I never realized the draconian repression that can come from a truly egalitarian, anti-capitalist, peace-loving Revolution — they just won’t let you do anything mean.”
Mr. Cheney’s body is presently on view in the Capitol Rotunda, where nobody is lined up to see it. His family would like to give him a decent burial. However, in light of the government’s radical emphasis on preserving the environment, newly appointed Secretary of the Interior Daniel McGowan has suggested that Mr. Cheney’s body be thrown to an endangered species of wolves.
Whatever the outcome of this thorny issue, it is sure to be decided harmoniously and fairly, with an eye to the Greater Good of All.
Susie Day lives in New York City where she writes a humor column for feminist and gay publications. She has also written on U.S. political prisoners and labor issues and thinks her girlfriend, Laura Whitehorn, is hot stuff. Can’t get enough of Susie? Read other pieces by Susie Day in MRZine: Susie Day, “Fugitive Offers Reward for Rumsfeld’s Capture” (22 July 2005); “Street Life of a Mad Activist” (28 July 2005); “Waiting for Karl Rove” (9 August 2005); “A Child’s Primer of Intelligent Design” (24 August 2005); “The Flood This Time” (19 September 2005); “Things That Rise Up in the Night: A Howl-oween Treat” (18 October 2005); “President Salutes Anonymous Red-Baiter” (14 November 2005); “Conspicuous Consumption of a Mad Activist” (11 December 2005); “2006: The Year in Horrorscopes” (9 January 2006); “Visiting Herman” (7 February 2006); “Savior Self” (6 March 2006); “Pinko Plague Panics President” (4 April 2006); “Seymour Hersh and the American Brain” (2 May 2006); “Identity, Class, and Bite Me, David Horowitz” (30 May 2006); “Bugging Hillary” (19 June 2006); “Back in the USSA” (24 July 2006); “News from the Back of the Front” (21 August 2006); “Barbie at the Barricades” (20 September 2006); “How to Stay Out of Gitmo” (18 October 2006); “Ted Haggard and the Church of the Down-Low” (13 November 2006); “Police Gun Down Another Rich White Man” (11 December 2006); “Consuming Karl” (6 February 2007); “Anna Nicole Smith Bombs Iran” (6 March 2007); “Peter Pace Porks a Peck of Pinko Perverts” (2 April 2007); “Jesus Christ Weds Pat Robertson” (30 April 2007); “U.S. Troops Out of . . . ME” (30 May 2007); “Killer Lesbians Mauled by Killer Court, Media Wolf Pack” (27 June 2006); and “Apartheid Americana” (23 July 2007).
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