Baby Face

Baby Face Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize and the whole world is in an uproar. Grizzled former Polish president Lech Walesa, who is no baby face, denounced the award as premature, complaining, “He hasn’t done anything yet”. Walesa is a hardbitten reactionary who would be happier in the middle ages with Cossacks and ghettos. Contemporary Polish society is hardcore and backward-looking. Polish authorities recently denied an abortion to a woman whose doctor warned that she would go blind if she had the baby. Sure enough, she went blind. The Polish government was forced to pay her an indemnity, which amounted to chump change, when the European Court of Justice ruled in her favor.

In this country, the reactionary Republicans are frothing at the mouth like rabid dogs and chewing the carpet, like Hitler, at Obama’s prize. They are livid with rage. They had a good week last week when Chicago lost the Olympics, happy to ascribe the defeat to Obama, but now they are back to square one over the Nobel Prize. Rush Limbaugh called it a plot by cosmopolite Europeans and effete American liberals to sap this country of its exclusive right to run the world, just as General Jack D. Ripper accused the Russkies of draining our vital fluids in “Dr. Strangelove”. The Wall Street Journal accused Obama of collaborating with the crooks and thieves in the United Nations, conveniently forgetting all the domestic crooks and thieves who looted the American economy and left us in the lurch, which WSJ is in a position to know if anybody does.

Yeah, American exclusivity! Whatever advantage we had in the twentieth century we squandered at our leisure with an insane foreign policy and an insane economic policy. Now Obama is left with a society in shambles that he is trying to hold together with tape and chewing gum even as the Republican attack dogs rip out the seat of his pants with sharp teeth.

What do I care? If I had been on the committee, I probably would have awarded the prize to Yankees manager Joe Girardi for building a monolithic, unbeatable team that is steamrolling its way to uncontested world dominance. Having the Yanks is the greatest aspect of living in New York. All bow in thrall to our smoking hickory!

Never mind that. Whatever you want to call it, the Nobel Peace Prize is a huge public relations windfall for Obama and the Democratic Party, who have a limited window of opportunity to achieve health insurance, banking reform and cap-and-trade before next year’s election, when the reactionary elements of society will probably win enough seats to put the brakes to any additional forward motion. That’s the world we live in – a car that keeps clutching.

A few years ago I complained about all the babies people were having. In my neighborhood you couldn’t walk a block without getting trampled by baby carriages. Families were not having just one kid, they were having multiple litters, the women calculating that one kid alone was not enough to lock the guy into a lifetime of indentured servility. Now, even if the guy tries to make a break for it (and, believe me, the women, knowing that they have the men’s scrotums locked in a vise, are not seeing any reason to make life soft for them), he’s still contractually on the hook for a lifetime of alimony and child support. You do the math…

OK, so now the little darlings have grown up to small children. Instead of dodging baby carriages, which have at least got fixed trajectories, you have to navigate your way through rampaging little piglets careening out of control all over the sidewalk, like pint-sized Multiple Interballistic Re-Entry Vehicles, while the mother yaks on her phone or, pharmacologically enhanced on prescription mood elevators, plots her next coup for social aggrandizement. It takes a nimble bit of choreography for the pedestrian to avoid colliding with these elementary particles, because the last thing you want is to have to engage in social discourse with these urchins or their mothers, due to the thinly veiled hysteria that is a fundamental aspect of modern parenting. I can think of two separate instances of adults who were incarcerated for long sentences for coming into star crossed contact with other people’s offspring, owing to communal hysteria, deluded social workers and voracious prosecutors, only to have their sentences overturned when the charges were determined to be entirely specious. Unfortunately, there are enough real cases of unhealthy adult interest in children to lend currency to the aggressive incontinence of overbearing parents. Better to just refrain from any contact with children at all costs.

I’m not Chairman Mao. They can have as many kids as they want, but at least have the decency to move to the outer boroughs or the suburbs, where the whole mess can thrive, anaesthetized, like inconscient vegetables in a carrot patch. The whole point of sacrificing creature comforts and living in confined spaces in Manhattan is to steer clear of freakin family values and screaming brats. All my life I have been blessed by not having to be exposed to the middle class, which I have always loathed like the plague, and rightly so. Unfortunately, my present girlfriend, Magpie, is rather more indulgent of the whole wretched process. She has married girlfriends and a family. Sometimes I am dragged into the whole miasma of having to endure these nasty little scenarios of family bliss. One family told her, “Your boyfriend has to behave himself around the baby”, as though I was a child molester. The kid was still in its infancy stage, where it could not even speak yet, but they were fearful that my presence would somehow spiritually corrupt it through osmosis.

Wait a minute! Whatever happened to the standard that children had to behave themselves around adults, and not the other way around? That is ultimately my complaint, the infantilism of society. I believe that they were just using the kid as a pretext to stop me from saying things that they themselves, as infantile adults, could not internalize. Just as AIDS provided an ulterior pretext for clamping the lid on the sexual revolution and plunging society back into a dark age of its habitual rut of Puritanism, now the new baby boom is providing a cultural lockdown of adult intercourse. Social relations have been reduced to the level of infant formula because, ultimately, that is where the retarded adults feel most comfortable.

When I was a kid there was a cartoon character named Baby Huey, a 350 lb. yellow duckling dressed in a diaper who constantly destroyed his whole environment due to the combined factors of his enormous girth and his infantile brain. I hate to engage in pop psychology, which is the domain of culturally deprived imbeciles like freakin Doctor Phil, but traveling around the world as a child with my peripatetic mother, I never saw a gigantic, destructive moron like Baby Huey portrayed in the comic strips of any of the countries where I lived. In England I read “Beano”, which was filled with Formula 1 adventures and kids who outsmarted their adults. In France, I read “Pilote”, which was filled with stories of intrigue in exotic overseas locales and Indian fighters in America’s Far-West, but I never encountered the kind of overweening dominance that I read in American comics, where the combination of simplistic moralism combined with irresistible force to wreak havoc on the physical world. It might be a bit of a stretch, but given the events of the last 50 years, with knucklehead American policy makers behaving with reckless abandon and destructiveness in Asia, Africa and Latin America, oblivious to the destructive nature of the chaos they inflicted, could be the natural manifestation of an idiotic, gigantic baby duck who destroys houses and cars by sitting on them out of addlebrained, puerilistic imbecility, as though a whole nation of humans had become imprinted on a creature motivated by profound idiocy. You could say that fat, stupid Rush Limbaugh, with his penchant for socially destructive behavior, bouncing around in his studio chair and screaming outrage and destructive invective against any kind of civilized innovation, totally incontinent and mindless from his longstanding addiction to Oxycontin, is the living, human manifestation of the Baby Huey Syndrome.

And this reality of Rush Limbaugh, the idiot George Bush, the Elmer Fudd Show of Dick Cheney with his Looney Toons shotgun, the Freedom Fries comedy of Bush’s defense secretary, Rumsfeld, ultimately provoked such revulsion in the Nobel selection committee that it pushed them headlong into the arms of Barack Obama. Whatever else you can say about Obama, he is deliberate, reflective and he places a great amount of emphasis on responsible behavior, qualities that are as science fiction to Republicans, who are visceral stooges. Maybe the aesthetic Norwegians who compose the Nobel committee awarded him the prize just out of relief that the world’s most potent economic power and predominant military machine is no longer being directed by a cabal of infantile twits.

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