There’s a website that I worship in this twisted, love/hate relationship. It’s the Babylon Bee. I’d add a “dot.com” to it, but management frowns at such shameless and non-hometown promotions. The Bee’s motto? “Fake News You Can Trust.” The Bee is a rare animal, a conservative satire site. Frequently, I’ll read a sampling of their prose and swear, which one shouldn’t do concerning something, even in a delightfully twisted way, involving Christianity.
You see, I suffer from the sin of envy. That darn Bee. They write stuff — RARELY AND SOMETIMES — funnier than my stuff, which we just can’t have, can we. I mumble frequently, “I wish I had thought of that.”
Example? After our Los Angeles Dodgers lost the first game of the World Series, 11-4, The Bee came out with a tongue-in-cheek lead story about how President Donald Trump would be imposing a 7-run tariff on teams outside the United States playing in Major League Baseball’s championship.
Then there’s newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Let’s see if this one gets by the copy desk — Zohran “Wham Bam Thank You” Mamdani. I know Gotham has a reputation of being rude, but this is the first time NYC face-planted themselves and elected a self-avowed terrorist-cheering commie B-word. I can’t exactly blame the Big Applers. Wham Bam was running against the big East Coast cooties word — a conservative. Worse? Curtis Sliwa, founder of the local vigilante committee there, the Guardian Angels, didn’t help what slim chance he had by campaigning in a fetching red beret made popular by Monica Lewinsky. The other serious candidate was former New York Gov. Andrew “Technically, I Didn’t Exactly Kill Your Grandmother and Hundreds of Old People Like Her in My Party’s Made-Up COVID Crisis” Cuomo.
So. Day after Mamdani’s elected, The Bee published another “Fake News You Can Trust” story that had me both in stitches and cursing the staff’s parents for birthing them. According to The Bee, Mamdani’s first act as mayor was to move the mayor’s headquarters underneath a New York children’s hospital.
Ouch. Brutal. Love it. Hate that I didn’t think of it first.
One of my guilty pleasures is to watch YouTube videos featuring person-on-the-street interviews from the loyal opposition. I caught one the other day. A young woman was asked why she supported socialism. Her answer?
“I always considered myself being a social person.”
And, of course, she was in college.
Comedian Jeff Foxworthy once opined on the warning label on the side of a Preparation H tube that cautioned: “… not to be taken orally.” Dryly, Foxworth observed, “… because you just know there was that one person …”
I think that’s the national, state and regional problem we’re suffering from today. It’s Foxworthy’s math. It’s not one person. It’s an entire passel, and then some.
When I was youngish, Ruth Newhall was editor of this paper and it struck me that she didn’t like me. I pieced this together after Ruth once said to me, “You know. I never really liked you …” She also commented, without any sort of invite on my part, “… you (long pause) — are woefully ignorant …”
Ruth was right. I was woefully ignorant. Not stupid. Ignorant. Here I am. Years later. After all the books read, classes taken, journaling, introspection, thoughtful walks in the woods — I’m still woefully ignorant. I’ll be woefully ignorant 110,000 lifetimes from now and that’s with a warm wind behind my back. Lucky thing for me? I was able to entertain (in some cases) Mrs. Newhall’s assessment of me.
You see, we can’t stop being woefully ignorant until we accept this possibility that we’re woefully ignorant. A moron, if you will. God, nor Solution, can get to you where you are not.
A favorite memory is of my dopey sister-like substance, Lisa, arguing with a Disney exec. She was conservative, he was the opposite. A dope. The Disney suit made the claim that in the last 10 years, counting 9/11, the Baptists had murdered more people than all the Islamic terrorists combined. The guy wouldn’t budge from that position. It was fact to him. Calmly, Lisa opined the mouse manager was a “¡£!!*%¢§ng moron,” no exclamation point at the end. No fact, logic, appeal to the guy’s own eyeballs could sway him.
I wish it weren’t so, but we’re going to continue to elect the circus clown car overflowing with imbecilic politicians and $10 gas we deserve. Being not just woefully ignorant, but willfully stubborn, we’ll be too dumb to realize we did this to ourselves.
Which reminds me. Darn them anyway. Babylon had more than a few stories over which I am green with envy. One was about a young boy at a spelling bee asked to spell the word, “woman.” He asked the judges if they could define it and use it in a sentence. They couldn’t. Another had a motorcyclist winning the Tour de France bicycle race because he, “… identified as a bicyclist.” Along the same ploy, The Bee ran a story with photos, about how a grown man identified as a youthful T-Ball player who dominated his league.
Of course, not so funny, The Babylon Bee has been apocalyptic. Almost 100 times in the past few years, satirical stories the site ran actually came true. One example — The Bee ran a made-up story entitled, “Gay Bar Field Trip Equality Act,” which required second-graders to attend same-sex watering holes. Two years later, a Broward County school forced second-graders to attend a gay bar on a field trip.
I guess I have to look at the bright side, which is not stationed on the back seat of my jeans. If it weren’t for dumb people, me and The Babylon Bee couldn’t have satire.
Which is what we’re going to need more of with the possibility of an American civil war around the corner …
John Boston, with more than 100 writing awards, is Earth’s most prolific humorist and satirist. “Naked Came the Novelist,” his long-awaited sequel to “Naked Came the Sasquatch,” is available now to purchase and read, but, alas, management can’t tell you where just yet. You’ll just have to hunt for it …
