One of those dusty old Roman guys said that all the people really want are “bread” and “circuses”. Personally speaking, I’d go for beer instead of bread, and a concert instead of a circus because I find most circuses to be cheesey and strangely depressing, but you get the idea. When I’m king I intend to fill your lives with all the fun and frivolity you can handle, (much of it reasonably priced thanks to massive sponsorship by the government). (My government will give away enough brew that I expect to be known as the “The King of Beers”).
As you know, it is my goal to unite the world under the banner of the Global Village Idiot. To do this, we need to do away with factions and divisions, or at least trivialize those factions and divisions until they’re no longer dangerous. For this, I plan on using the ultimate circus; television.
Let’s make a reality television show in which members of Congress have to battle it out Survivor style. The winner gets a million bucks, and his or her party gets ten extra votes in Congress. Let’s do a Fear Factor in which each of the contestants represents a political organization. I’d love to see representatives from PETA, Greenpeace, the NRA and all the rest of them go toe to toe. The winner gets a million bucks and one piece of legislation of their choice enacted. I’m very much in favor of upping the ante in the challenges. Stinging jellyfish and cranky sharks should be added to the swimming challenges, and contestants will have to navigate the obstacle courses while being chased by armed thugs. Currently Charlton Heston makes much political noise about getting his gun pried out of his cold dead hand, well, let’s see him take that risk on the new show “Celebrity Sniper Challenge.”
We can also do the same for religions. How about a year of game show inspired contests to settle the differences between Palestine and Israel? The winning country gets to occupy the West Bank for a year and the losing country gets lovely parting gifts. Next year we’ll do it again, stay tuned!
We have far too many people in this world willing to strap dynamite to themselves as an exercise in political or religious debate. This is unacceptable behavior in my kingdom. When I’m king, we will settle disputes with a rousing game of “Family Feud” or “The Price Is Right”. We need to chill a lot of people out and I can’t think of a better way than a steady diet of eight or ten hours of mind-numbing television. The King will be providing free big-screen tv’s to many many people very early in his administration…
I’m not trying to stifle debate, no, I’m trying to stifle explosions. In the kingdom, I’ll encourage my subjects to blog about everything. If you go stumbling around the current internet reading random blogs like I do, you’ll find that an incredible, and I do mean incredible, amount of typing goes into yelling about what a bunch of idiots one’s political opponents are. “Liberals” and “Conservatives” spend hours and hours and hours coming up with and then typing clever rants and tirades to publish on their blogs, and they actually expect people to read them. Generally, I think these posts go unread, except in a couple of scenarios:
Scenario 1: Joe Liberal publishes a brilliant post about what a bunch of lame dumbasses conservatives are. Billy Conservative, looking for fodder for his article about what lame dumbasses the liberals are, reads Joe’s post to get quotable quotes to rip apart for his own blog.
The two keep cross posting until they
a) discover better things, like NFL football or sex, and give up blogging
b) digress into personal attacks, realize no one is actually reading their posts, go back to blogging about how cool it would be to do Mr. Spock’s Vulcan Death Grip.
c) digress into personal attacks and wind up stalking and killing each other. This would be bad, but unlikely, as the politically wonkish are not a violent type. Generally speaking they would be more likely to stalk each other and get into a wild slap fest using folded copies of the Wall Street Journal.
Scenario 2: Freddy Conservative publishes brilliant posts about how smart conservatives are and how dumb liberals are. Howard Republican just started a Blog about the very same thing, and he desperately wants readers and links, so he pretends to read Freddy’s site and leaves thoughtful comments in an attempt to generate a following of his own. They link to each other and to other conservative blogs and create a happy festivus of conservative bloggers who don’t really read each other but who are united in their agreement that liberals, whatever their stripe, are all dumbasses.
See, the above scenarios provide for an acceptable and officially sanctioned political debate and no one got blown up. Cubs and Cardinals, Red Sox and Yankees, Lakers and Everyone; these will be the rivalries that should serve as models for all our rivalries. People can start “We love the King” blogs and “We Hate the King” blogs and “We like the idea of kings but hate this particular jackass” blogs. (And, based on the current trends, there will be a lot of blogs about people’s dogs, and even more blogs about their friggin’ cats). At the end of the day my loyal subjects will turn off their computers and tune in to an evening of riveting television, far too concerned about who will win this week’s installment of “Whack a Celebrity Mole” to want to blow anything up.
Yet another major world problem solved before lunch. This job will be cake.
