While I've always prided myself on my stellar news coverage (sitting just above FOX News and falling right behind elementary-school PA system announcements in the media spectrum), I only wish I didn't have to report this.
Deep in the jungles of Borneo, scientists have discovered a highly advanced race of humans. These Homo Superiors, as they have been cautiously dubbed, are capable of communicating through telepathy and cerebral inflection. They have grown adept at levitation and can control virtually any type of matter-based object with just their residual sentiments and thoughts. Now that they have been revealed, the nomadic people known as the Dream Wanderers are threatening to level the capital city of Jakarta and submerge the island of Sumatra if they are not given full control of the Indonesian government.
What does this mean for the rest of us, the now secondary and suddenly stupid creatures that we are? As Zarathustra thus mumbled, "Man is something that is to be surpassed. ... Lo, I teach you the Superman!" Could America become a Bornean slave colony? Will loincloths finally come back in style?
The horrifying possibilities are endless.
All right, that's enough deceit. Put down the flaming torches and scratch those plans for Indonesian genocide. I was just wrapping up my readers in a ruse, attempting to hype up my Bornean spring-break travel packages with, dare I say ... a hoax.
Hopefully this will go over a little better than the latest deception to reach national prominence. I wouldn't want to encounter the wrath of Boston - after grossly misjudging a Cartoon Network-sponsored ad campaign as a major terrorist threat-has unleashed against the scheme's participants. Rather than viewing the LED-based sculptures of the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" character Ignignokt, complete with sleazy eyebrows and middle finger extended, with little interest, like the law enforcement agencies in eight other metropolises reacted when they found the horribly suspicious objects affixed to prominent structures, Boston officials instead brought the city to a standstill. Basically, Beantown went bonkers.
Now they've begun a face-saving witch hunt against everyone involved, starting with the follicle-obsessed, dastardly dudes who did the legwork and ending all the way at the top-Cartoon Network's parent company and the co-conspiring advertising agency just agreed to pay an out-of-court settlement of $2 million (which is a steal for the publicity, if you consider that a meager 30-second slot during last Sunday's football finale would run you $2.6 million). For shame, Boston. Just because the lousy Patriots didn't con their way into another Super Bowl doesn't mean you should take out your anger on a fledgling small business like Turner Broadcasting.
There are even greater repercussions here, though. What's at stake? Only our constitutionally protected right to mess with people for personal gain, that's all.
The hoax has been a part of our national fabric since the beginning, notably with the Thanksgiving story, and along with its less impressive false advertising it has kept our society well nourished with scrumptious lies and simmering tales of the improbable. It is enough to keep the hunger pains of truth at bay and the gurgling vomit of reality from being just a boring, yellow mess of unused stomach acid.
Are we to forget the bogus snake oil medicines of the Wild West, the sales of which surely made our modern pharmaceutical industry into the Viagra-pitching profiteer it has become? What about P.T. Barnum, the father of American theatrical trickery? Where would television exes and Hollywood learn about false showmanship and meritless hype otherwise? What kind of paranoid, fear-mongering society would we be, if not for the footprints left by Orson Welles and his "War Of The Worlds" broadcast?
Could you imagine our country without any urban myths? That means no Bigfoot, UFOs, alien autopsies or Milli Vanilli. False claims like separation of church and state and global warming? Gone too. We'll have to watch as enigmatic but concocted personalities who inspire us to greatness, like Bill O' Reilly (played by an acting school dropout with a small penis) and Oprah (she's really an animatronic object created to gain female and minority viewership and controlled by orangutans), vanish into thin air like the endless smoke they once blew. Lest we forget, we are the true dream wanderers, the ones who color our desolate social landscape with ideas and beliefs only conceivable in our slumber. Let us never wake up.
