By Max Burbank
There was a moment in the recent inauguration festivities where Ricky Martin was singing some groovy pop tune, thrusting his nasties rhythmically at the collective American audience and the Dubya came on stage and just kind of leaned toward him all funky like. And I thought to myself, if I were there at that moment and I had a thermos of Anthrax in one hand and a beaker of Ebola in the other, I'd unscrew the tops and bash them against my head until it stopped hurting.

Are you old enough to recall the photo of Nancy Reagan sitting on a Santa suit clad Mr. T's lap? This was worse. Let's slow down for a moment and analyze. I'll skip over the oxymoronic nature of the words "President Bush" as that's already been covered by people who make money at this. Let's take the world ending incentive of that as a given and move on to Ricky Martin. I don't mean to say he's Gay, but he was in Menudo and according to the NAMBLA website, that was pretty much a band requirement. Now don't get me wrong. His obvious yet unspoken wiggly pelvised embrace of the 'French Predilection' is not a problem for me, in fact I think it's kind fetching in a disquieting way I already wish I hadn't written down, but I'd rather eat a glass sandwich then do a second draft so it's too late. But. Juxtapose (Ever play that drinking game where you lay around all by yourself in your underwear all day long watching the Home and Garden channel and each time they say 'Juxtapose' you have to do a shot of Creme Dementhe?) Mr. Martin's overall fey deportment with A.) a Republican Inauguration and B.) That song he sings where a woman 'bangs', which I can only hope means something completely different in Puerto Rican slang, like 'enjoys the droll companionship of slim hipped lads', combine that with our Monkey like presumptive Commander in Chief attempting to communicate lord knows what all by leaning awkwardly and you have a Zeitgeist (Ever play that drinking game where you dress up like Jayne Mansfield, leaf through the text you bought for freshman philosophy but never opened, and each time you see the word 'Zeitgeist' you smash your head on the floor real hard?) that cries out for immediate divine retribution.

I'm not saying the moment in time where the leader of the free world just kind of, you know, got all smirky and... leaned a little, holding his clenched fists in some dreadful, misguided approximation of Hispanic coolness was by itself justification for falling on your knees and begging God almighty to crush the earth between his Thumb and Forefinger like a... a... you know, a single poppy thing on those sheets of plastic poppy things that you wrap stuff in so it doesn't break when you ship it? But something sometime has to tip the scale, doesn't it? I mean, when you lump that instant of Presidential Leaning atop "Temptation Island", the steady, pneumatic, medical sculpting of Ms. Brittany Spears 'front porch', the use of the phrase 'back in the day' to reference the 1980's, the near light speed with which Theodore 'Dr. Suess Geisel rotates in his grave like a roasted chicken on a hyperdrive rotisserie since Universal, Carey, Howard, et all's fetid gang rape of "The Grinch who stole Christmas" was buried beneath an avalanche of cash, 'Oprah Magazine', Oprah, Clintonís last minute pardon of Marc Rich (Ever play that drinking game where you staple your eyelids open, lie naked in the fetal and watch CNN Headline News round the clock, and each time an outgoing Democratic President pardons an fugitive white collar corporate tax fraud who's spent the last ten years living the highlife in Switzerland rather than face justice you take your sharpest knife and gut your own head like it was a rainbow trout you caught on a camping trip?) the fact that Pop stars are getting younger so fast that by the time my daughter's a teenager she's going to be demanding a few hundred bucks so she can buy the futuristic equivalent of a CD with some boy band that's five fetuses on sticks and telling me she especially likes Antoine, 'cause he's the quiet, brooding, SEXY fetus, doesn't there finally come a point? A point where you pretty much have to get on a boat, sail into the Taiwan Strait, crank up your own private pirate radio station and in phonetically memorized Taiwanese say 'Hey, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, We, the people of Taiwan just wanted you to know that our good friends the United States of America just gave us satellite surveillance photos of you on a romantic date with what seems to be a dead ferret in a miniature prom dress, and we just don't figure a fella who'd do that kind of thing has the stones to use nuclear weapons, so we're totally a nation now and you can suck our collective independent ass!" A point where you have to put on a really convincing rubber Colin Powell suit, do a quick whistle stop tour of the Middle East whispering in every Arab leader's ear that 'Ol Dubya never did 'cotton too much to them Jews' and we might 'jes' honker down n' turn a blind eye while you-know-who did what all to who all', and finishing up with a side trip to give Ariel Sharon sixteen hundred billion dollars in heavily laundered campaign funds and oh, by the way did he know that during summit meetings Clinton, Arafat and Barak routinely referred to him as 'Ariel the Little Mermaid'? I mean, isn't it ever too much? And if there truly is no God, and I think our continued existence proves that, couldn't some Alien Super Race come and eat us? Like in that Twilight Zone? The one with the cook book? Is that too much to hope for?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just overreacting. After all, we lived through President Reagan, 'Battle of the Network Stars', the Break-up of Lonnie and Burt, the Chevy Chase Show and we're still here. Maybe there is no 'too much'. Maybe God or Destiny or Human-Hungry Space Aliens have infinite patience. I look at my two beautiful daughters and think, maybe Ms. Whitney Houston was right, maybe 'the children are our future' (my italics). But then I start thinking about how no one seems to notice that "Will and Grace" is basically "the Jeffersons" for gay people.
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