by special Big Hollywood guest correspondent Michael Moore.
Hi, gang. Michael Moore here. I’ve been thinking a lot about patriotism lately. I had an interesting conversation with my friend Joe about this, and I thought I’d share it.
So me and Joe are sitting around at Mavis’s diner talking. “I’m not sure how a Man of the Left should handle Obama’s Presidency,” Joe confides.
I ponder this question as I crush a large joint of mutton down my enormous feeding orifice. The
bones crack and pop like July fireworks as my massive tusks rend the meat and even work the bone into a thick paste of calcium and keratin.
Motes of blood spray out of my slavering eat-hole and onto Joe’s face. He elegantly sweeps his glasses off his face and wipes the blood away. “We have so long fought the state. But now we are the state, Mike. If we indulge in the ‘new patriotism,’ are we hypocrites? Are we just exchanging one jingoism for another more appealing to us?”
It’s a good question, no doubt. I wish I could answer it. I wish I could answer another question– How can I eat this cheesesteak, this Monte Cristo, and that four-gallon tank of pork lard simultaneously, when I have only two hands?
“We know where unchallenged, unthinking adoration of a charismatic leader usually leads. And yet I find myself drawn to do so nevertheless — my heart sings Obama, while my brain whispers caution.”
I’d like to tell him I respect his uncommon introspection, but I can’t speak, as I currently have my entire ginormous freakhead stuffed into the rib-cage of dangling cow-carcass the owners of the diner have hung by chains and tenterhooks for me. My daggerlike teeth slice through the raw meat like a squadron of yellow-brown warships upon a blood-red sea.
Apparently my face shows a bit of sadness, as Joe now reaches across the table to comfort by squeezing my shoulder. He withdraws his hand quickly as I snap at it, very nearly severing three of his fingers.
I slice through bone and tendon and tough cartilage with my wickedly angled, shark-like incisors, sending bone-bits and glistening black puddings of coagulated intestinal blood sailing across the diner with
each feral bite.
A pack of Guatemalan-Indian boys now come into the diner, speaking Spanish. Or gibberish. Who can tell the difference?
They walk over to me and ask me to lift my t-shirt.
“What’s this about?” Joe wants to know.
I lift my shirt and the boys begin scraping along the insides of my luxurious rolls of corpulent fat with old playing cards. One boy gently lifts my massive, pendulous moob and collects a big dollop of a yellowish paste that resembles spoiled soft cheese.
“Oh, I’m just doing my bit to help a downtrodden minority,” I explain to Joe as I wipe a turkey drumstick from the corner of my eye. “A tribe of Peruvian Indians have discovered that the pungent, semi-toxic munge that collects on my unwashed body is a powerful psychedelic drug of some sort. Ingesting my creamy filth-sweat brings them to death’s door, but it assists them in reaching the proper mental state for dream-quests.”
“Sort of like peyote,” Joe offers.
“My munge-cheese kicks peyote’s ass to hell and back,” I say with some degree of pride. “They call it La Mantequilla del Diablo — The Devil’s Butter.”
The boys end up filling an emptied grout-bucket with my powerful psychotropic stank-juice. They’ll be having some powerful dream-quests tonight — even with my face covered in cow-meat and at least three live lobsters, I can smell that I’m especially rancid today.
One of the boys tosses a live chicken to me as payment. I snap at it with my powerful, overdeveloped jaw muscles, bulging and rippling like those of a sabre-tooth tiger, but the chicken manages a burst of flight and hovers in terror above my flickering, prehensile tongue.
“It’s the least I can do to honor our new President’s call to service,” I modestly explain to Joe.
“But that is the quandary,” Joe says. “To serve a better power, or to oppose all power on principle alone.”
“These are curious times, Joe, full of strange new feelings and conflicted thoughts,” I say, or rather that’s what I attempt to say. My words are garbled and intermixed with guttural grunts as I snap at the elusive chicken which yet manages to escape my all-ravening maw.
“Patriotism may be the last resort of the scoundrel,” I console Joe, “But it may also be the highest calling of the virtuous.” I have now sprung to my feet in order to seize the escaped chicken. The fat ripples along my elephantine haunches as I coil to leap, lethal energy gathered to spring in a frozen moment, like the cocked hammer of a gun.
A really fat gun.
“Oscar Wilde said patriotism was the virtue of the vicious,” Joe counters.
But I have no time to riposte in kind, as I leap over the assembled humanity in the cramped diner, my claws sprung out and shiny-deadly, my lard-dimpled jowls puffed out like the hood of a cobra. I beserk about the diner like the Tasmanian Devil, my heaving, snowy-pale he-knockers swinging around the room like whirling Zeppelins of Blunt Force Trauma.
The chicken dodges a slash from one of my stunted fore-limbs, atrophied by disuse in favor of my tyrannosaurine slaughtermaw. It dives beneath the seat of a six year old boy, a ruddy-cheeked, haystack-haired, gap-toothed reminder of what this nation is all about.
The boy is inconveniently providing cover for the miscreant fowl, so I snatch him up with one sweat-drooling meat-paddle and I drop him, alive and screaming, down into my eager throat.
My roiling gastric acids will take care of the kid. I’ve got no time to chew.
The chicken runs.
“Let your brain be your navigator, but your let heart be your pilot,” I advise Joe as I bite out the throat of the boy’s mother, who has, as you might well imagine, sprung to her feet to protest my devouring of her sparkled-eyed tyke. I slurp her still-pulsating gizzards down my slavering hell-void.
The chicken scampers over the well-worn hospital-green tiles of the ancient diner. It ducks through the doorway and exits to the street as a truck-driver enters the place.
Angry at the clumsiness of the truck driver, I snap at his head with my yawning pink vortex of saliva-roped doom, severing his head and neck at the clavicle. His body spews a riotously crimson fountain of blood at the ceiling, like he were some liquid roman candle.
The hot blood splatters on the diner’s windows and steams.
“But we are men of intellect, first and foremost,” Joe calls after me, but I’m on the street now, waddling like an aging Sumo wrestler with a wedgie, my dainty-tiny girlfeet pounding into the cool asphalt like fleshy
jackhammers.
“But men of intellect, too, can open their hearts to hope,” I advise.
I hear the telltale whine of jet-engines– F-15’s, I’m sure. I’ve heard them before. I hear them everytime I go out on one of my rampaging murder-luncheons.
I’ll hear the rumbling of National Guard troop carriers soon enough as well– a platoon of “mercenaries” out to chill my right to dissent. And my right to feed on human flesh.
Even in this so-called “new age of freedom.”
Perhaps Joe is right after all.
But I have little time to consider that further as I bite the mid-body out of a riot policeman’s horse. Intestines ooze and slither out of the gaping wound like wet, grisly Slinkees.
The F-15’s scream down from the sky as they begin their attack run. My debate with Joe will have to wait.
I leap into the cool, slimy waters of the East River as the air-to-ground missiles slam into the cityscape behind me.
The filthy river greets me like an old lover. A murky, green lover that smells of cabbage, burnt engine oil, and feet. It smells like… patriotism.
The chicken has escaped.
But George Bush did not. He will bear the terrible wrath of history’s judgment. And, if I have anything to do with it, the terrible wrath of a morbidly-obese cannibalistic filmmaker.
Midland, Texas is only a few days’ swim from New York.
And anyway, I think some Austin Student Association wants to give me some award. I don’t know what for, but they promised to hold the ceremony at Sizzler.
Revised and updated; an earlier version was originally posted on Ace of Spades HQ.