The Corpuscle

You anti-War-in-Iraq types out there, when was the last time somebody accused you of "preferring Saddam"?

Have you noticed this? This particular hareng rouge has all but disappeared from the catalogue of accusations made against those of us who opposed the war. Now we are merely "nay-sayers", or "blind to all the progress that's been made", or, worst of all, "Democrats".

I was out buying my paper this morning, enjoying the fresh morning air and listening to the news in my earbuds, when somebody on the radio said something, I can't recall what, and it suddenly occurred to me... Jeez, I haven't heard the "I suppose you prefer Saddam" golden-oldie in quite a while. I cannot say I was suffused with nostalgia, the way I might have been if "Goin' Home" by Ten Years After, or "Everyday People" by Sly had suddenly been piped across the airwaves into my head. But still. I remarked upon it.

When I got home, I did a quick Technorati, Google, and Google News search on the phrase "prefer Saddam". Technorati had a number of hits, all a couple of months old. Google had some out-of-date classics including this golden oldie, but there wasn't one hit on Google News.

Of course the "I suppose you prefer Saddam" shtick was never anything other than a vacuous distraction, but still... it had a spectacular albeit brief run there for a while. Like Edsels, or Pet Rocks, or Duck's Ass haircuts. Certainly there are some, well, dead-enders out there who have made hobbies, more or less, out of these minor blips in our cultural history. I'm sure that every once in a while, you'll still come across some variation on "I suppose you prefer Saddam", like some decoupaged, Bake-o-lite purse in a second-hand store down some back street. But for the most part it's gone.

I wonder why? Maybe it's a bit like est, or Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or Neil Sedaka. They all seemed like such good ideas at the time, you know.

Or maybe it's just one more entry in the brief history of bullshit. Well, it isn't so much that the history of bullshit is short. No, its history is long and inglorious. It's more that every instance of bullshit has a relatively short shelf-life. Reality has this unfortunate habit of intruding on bullshit, you see, as most of us can testify.

You'd think that, after a while, as a species we'd get better at this sort of thing... sniffing out bullshit, I mean. I don't know why more people can't just trust their noses. If it smells like bullshit, then it is. C'mon already. What else do you need to know about life?

Start trusting your nose, fer Christ's sake. We'd all be a lot better off if you did.