Everyone needs a Christmas koala
It’s the most wonderful time of the year – that time when you wish you were still young enough for Christmas commercialism not to irritate you. When you wish you could go back to a more innocent time, where 24-hour Christmas standards from the ’50s and ’60s didn’t annoy you, Christmas toys like Tickle Me Elmo weren’t sources of wry Gen-X irony and Weird Al Yankovic’s “Christmas at Ground Zero” didn’t seem like a morbidly accurate prediction of things to come.
But like the halcyon schoolboy days of youth, affectionate feelings for Christmas must also come to an end. This will (probably) be the last Christmas break I will get to enjoy – the last time I have a cushy three or four weeks between the beginning of Advent and the end of Twelfth Night. From here on out, Christmas and New Years Day will just be excuses to work overtime, researching, filing papers, counting my huge piles of money and muttering “Bah Humbug” to every Fred or Bob Cratchitt that walks by.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t use one of my last columns for a silly opportunity to hypothesize gifts I would give to other people.
Gerald Turner – A Sumerian figurine. According to ancient Mesopotamian tradition, if a person could not attend the temple and worship their gods every moment of the day, they could leave a figurine behind to represent them. Considering the majority of this campus doesn’t know what Turner looks like, or has any idea what he does, good or bad, perhaps leaving a representative figurine in the Main Quad, cafeteria and Hughes-Trigg might help people understand that while President Turner isn’t there in corpereal form, he’s there in spirit … Perhaps not.
George W. Bush – Diddly squat. What do you get for a man who already has everything he could ever want – both Houses of Congress packed with Republicans, war power authority against Iraq, a signed, sealed and delivered Homeland Security Bill and the United Nations acting on his every whim? I bet that what he really wants is a public approval rating as high as it was this time last year.
John Ashcroft – A koala. Ashcroft is a genuinely scary man with a scary agenda. Just take a look at the emblem for the “Total Information Awareness” office of DARPA – The symbol of the “pyramid with an eye” radiating light on a small globe of the world (suspiciously turned toward the Middle East). No wonder everybody hates him. What he needs is a cute and cuddly mascot like a koala, that can divert people’s attention away from his plottings. (Hey, that cockatoo worked for Robert Blake, right?) The fact that a koala hides flesh-rending, razor sharp claws beneath a cute exterior makes it a perfect pet for Ashcroft.
Laura Miller – A copy of Maxis’ “Sim City 2000.” With the ability to tear up residential zones, install commercial areas and smash together industrial blocks in virtual reality, maybe the mayor will figure out better ways to improve Dallas than, as this week’s Observer notes, tearing up people’s houses, lengthening sidewalks and installing transit stations. Then again, I’ve never been able to re-create Dallas in “Sim City” without incurring the wrath of Godzilla, so I can’t honestly say how much better Dallas would look with a few more parks and a few less shopping centers.
Saddam Hussein – An umbrella with the words “so sorry we’re going to kill you” emblazoned on it. And perhaps a blindfold and a Martini.
Winona Ryder – A time machine and a Richard Nixon mask. As much as I’m against people stealing merchandise from department stores, it’s terrible to watch popular figures get totally demolished by the justice system and the press. Of course, Nixon already has a record for theivery, so an additional blemish wouldn’t hurt him any.
The boys and girls of SMU – How about a stint on “Survivor: Africa?” We could all try to “survive” in a war-torn sub-Saharan environment with no food, clothes or medical treatment. And best of all, there would be no complaining about missing “Survivor” ever again!
Well, at least until “Survivor: Central America” comes out.
