X-treme American Home Makeover!

“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off,
and begin again the work of remaking America.”

--President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address January 20, 2009

Before noon Tuesday, America was a fat, pasty, gouty, illiterate wretch. She stole her children’s lunch money to buy cigarettes, let her rabid dog shit all over the neighborhood, and shuffled around her ramshackle duplex wearing only a smirk and a pair of worn out dogmas, feeding herself on boxed wine and the moldy crumbs of ideology scrounged from the cracks of her soiled couch cushions. Then the doorbell rang.

“You’re not going to believe this, America, but your friends have nominated you to be on a very special edition of Oprah’s Extreme Home Makeover: Presidential Wife Swap!”

This week’s Presidential inauguration was the greatest reality television program of all time (with Fox’s Man vs. Beast a close second). A three million person live studio audience and hundreds of millions of remote viewers watched America’s newest reality family move into their new home, a lovely white colonial with plenty of yard space for the kids. That ovular office they built for the dad with the head of state-themed carpeting is totally rad. And those men with guns on the roof add a unique twist to the otherwise traditional architecture. Finally, an African-American second-generation immigrant family is finally getting the home they deserve. Thank you, Oprah!

This President swap could really shake up the America household. Why should we think otherwise—it has happened in every other episode. The fitter, more responsible, more intelligent wife instills in the dissolute morbidly obese family of cretins an ethic of self-reliance and the value of love built on care, not credit cards. She makes them exercise and puts them on a budget, and they love her for it. And with a little rational persuasion, she even gets them to drag that hideous old torture center from the basement out to the curb.

The Obamas promise to be a media family unlike any other first family in history. It’s not just because they’re extremely photogenic, affable, intelligent, poised, and lovable people, which they surely are. The Obamas have been positioned into a powerful media narrative that the American public, like a child at bedtime, loves to be told over and over again: the tale of new beginnings.

For a youth-loving nation that worries it is losing its youth and charm, the tale of new beginnings is our favorite myth—the hero of a thousand face-lifts, we might call it. Behold the bourgeois trinity: the makeover, the home renovation, and the wardrobe overhaul! All perform the miracle of faux transubstantiation— transforming the self while still retaining the original.

In that sense, the makeover is the opposite of the revolution. We change in order to fully realize what we already are, to bring our inner beauty to the surface (since everyone knows inner beauty is still ugly on the outside). The makeover allows us to keep a self that in its former form was untenable. Take my favorite program, “Wife Swap”-- the temporary swapping of spouses is the stand-in for an affair that allows us to renovate our marriage rather than terminate it. Why get divorced when you can have a marriage makeover?

This idea of a malleable but permanent self, marriage, and nation, gives us at once those two things we prize most, but rarely encounter together: novelty and security.

President Obama seems like hope incarnate because he has tapped into this dual fantasy. The vision of America he represents is unprecedented, but it is billed as a restoration project. We get to enjoy the comfort of regarding “the work of remaking America” as a time-honored tradition, as well as the excitement of creating a whole new look for ourselves. These things are old. Why did George Washington, when the British were burning the capitol, take the time to dab on that garishly-hued blush? Because, citizens, this country was founded on make-overs!

America is now back from the plastic surgeon, the hairdresser, the tanning salon, the elocutionist, and, wow, she is looking great! People are already treating her differently. And she already feels different. Gosh, when you look at the before and after photos, it’s hard to believe it’s even the same country.

Juror Number Fifteen

I was called for jury duty this week. Amidst the hours of agonizing boredom and bureaucratic dawdling, I had the pleasure of witnessing the following dialogue (with Juror Fifteen's name changed):

Juror number fifteen, could you please introduce yourself to the court?

My name is Melvin Harrison. I live in the civic center area. I am single, retired, and have no living children. This is my first time on a jury.

What kind of work did you used to do, Mr. Harrison?

I was a temporary employee for the postal service.

I see. Now, Mr. Harrison, do you recall those questions I was asking the other jurors earlier? Do you have any responses to share with the court?

Well, I’m not sure if this is relevant, but as to the question of being a victim of a crime, I have been attacked many times. Now, the first time, see, I was living in the civic center area in one of them houses that--what’s it called—one of them houses that the bank had taken back—

A foreclosure?

Yes, they had forclosed on it. But, you see, I didn’t know that it was one of those houses. I kept seeing people going in and out all day long and I just assumed they lived there. But what it was, see, was that a bunch of people had moved in—they were drug dealers—and the people going in and out all day long was buying drugs. Now one time these people broke into my room and they attacked me with a can of roach spray. They sprayed it all over my face and arms and legs.

Did you report this to the police?

No, I didn’t report it. I can’t tell you why. I can’t get into it right now. But one day these people decided they were going to give me a message to make sure I never told the police. They came up to me with a straight razor. But they had painted it black, so that I wouldn’t see it, so that I would run into it. But I was familiar with a straight razor from when I was a boy. I remember I used to watch my daddy practicing his barbering. So I knew what one looked like. Now, this was downtown, not in civic center, so I ran into a drugstore and begged the security guard to let me stay inside until those people went away and left me alone. And I was lucky, because outside there was a policeman. He pulled up in one of them white cars they have and I told him what happened and he told me that this group had been doing this thing all day, walking up Market Street trying to stick folks. So we went in his car and we found one of them with the straight razor. He was wearing a big wig and he was dressed in ladies’ clothes….

Do you have any other responses, Mr. Harrison?

Well, I had a list here, but it’s in my bag and I don’t want to get into that right now. I think I about covered it.

Mr. Harrison, concerning this first incident you mentioned, with the roach spray—this attack sounds horrible. Why didn’t you report it to the police?

Well, when you see so much crime—and living in the civic center-tenderloin area, you see this kind of thing everyday—when you see so much crime you start to think that the police don’t matter very much. Sure, they help sometimes, but there’s just so much of it, they get overwhelmed. Nothing they can do. But I also felt like there was nothing I could do, either. Just like some of these other people was saying, you feel victimized. It reduces you. I felt vulnerable, not like a man. See, I’m not a woman, but you hear so many stories of rape. But a man supposed to be strong. I’m a man, but I couldn’t fight off a woman and a man when they came into my room and attacked me. I had a woman riding across my shoulders with me on my hands and knees holding a vacuum cleaner. Now, I always thought as a man I should be able to fight, but I knew that if I had called the police, it would have been a man who showed up. And that man would be thinking that I was too weak to fight them off me.

Mr. Harrison, do you think this experience will prevent you from objectively weighing the evidence presented in this case?

You mean the box?

(laughter in the courtroom)

That’s right the evidence box. Well, I’m glad that my analogy turned out to be successful. What I am asking is if you will be able to keep your emotions from this experience outside the box and put into it only the testimony and evidence that are presented here in this courtroom?

No, it won’t go in the box. I’ve worked past that all now. I’ve moved beyond it.

So, Mr. Harrison, is there any reason to think you won’t be impartial?

Yes.

Good—wait, there is? That you won’t be impartial?

Oh. I mean I won’t be partial. See, I had it the other way.

Dessert Menu

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Dessert Menu

Creme Brulee
Sorbet Medley (persimmon, asparagus, saffron)
Triple Chocolate Decadence Cake*


* As part of our farm-to-table organic ethos, we would like to share with you how this chocolate cake was made. It was baked by the last degraded scion of Alsatian aristocrats. Hidden in the bowels of his solitude, away from the happy idiocies of his fellow philistines, he sacrificed his youth in hopes of conjuring a cake that would restore his faith in God and resurrect his moribund virility. In the kitchen of his sound proof velvet boudoir bedecked in byzantine splendor, his nerves splintered and his brain feverish from weeks of endless confectionery tribulation, he finally descended into a demonic madness from whence only the recipe, written in a delicate hand on fine shark vellum, returned to see the light of day. We faithfully follow his recipe for every cake to give you the most ultimately decadent chocolate experience that you deserve.

Our flour is finely milled in the gyrating loins of a beautiful gypsy woman with vagina dentata, who is promised a pair of silk slippers for her labors, but given a sound thrashing instead. The eggs are stolen from the Paris Zoo, plucked from the nest of the last living Phillipine Monkey-eating Eagle, whereafter they are lightly beaten by the nimble feet of Chinese orphans. We then add fresh butter that has been churned in a brass vat continually filled by the pert lactating breasts of freshly maternal adolescents who hang from on high in gilded leather harnesses.

To the flour, eggs, and butter, we add a meticulously granulated sugar from a remote plantation in Cuba, where child slaves wield white diamond machetes and wade through miles of green malarial swamp, hacking each other to bits in contest for the precious cane that will save them from their daily lashings. The dough is then kneaded by the gnarled gout-ridden hands of a tubercular nobleman in a nearby sanitorium, his signet ring repeatedly impressing into it the family seal of a shrivel-teated she-wolf nursing a six-headed python.

Then comes the chocolate. Our cocoa beans are collected from only a dozen plants that grow through the cracks in the stone ruins of the ancient pre-Inca temple at Sacsayhuaman—the only physical remains of a highly learned civilization that masturbated itself into extinction. The indigenous people consider the temple site taboo, as they believe touching the cursed ground of an extinct race will lead to immediate paralysis of the will and ossification of the sexual organs. Nor do they brook foreign trespassers, under penalty of death by bludgeoning. However, they do allow their llamas, which are worshipped as deities and costumed in tunics of glinting emerald and sapphire, to graze among the ruins, where they ingest the precious cocoa beans and pass them in perfect form through their silver-lined anuses.

Those beans that fall on common ground are collected in velvet sacks by the enterprising natives and sold on the black market in Cuzco for payment in gin. The natives, who by evolutionary shortcomings lack an enzyme for metabolizing alcohol, get frightfully drunk and, more often than not, bludgeon their clients, steal back their cocoa beans, and eat them themselves, velvet sack and all. It is only these beans, naturally wrapped in gin-soaked shreds of velvet and harvested the next morning by the bathroom attendant in the most notorious brothel in Cuzco, that we use for our chocolate.

The mixture is then poured into the occipital plate of the Roman Emperor Caligula’s skull and slowly baked over a flaming ball of opium.

Finally, a hysterical Jewess recovers from her swoon in a porcelain tub of warm chocolate ganache. When the cake is finished, she arises from her bath and erotically embraces the dark handsome pastry as a substitute love object for the repressed incestuous desire she has for her father.

We top it off with a dollop of chocolate frosting, scraped from the soiled robes of a defiled choir boy after his birthday party, rushed straight to your table, and voila! The nadir of western civilization right on your plate.