by Matt Robesch
The Free Press
illustration by Dick Lande
Reporters were gathered because there was a senator - who was running for president - addressing the public. However, the public couldn't get to the senator because the reporters had him surrounded. The public was forced to stand farther away where they were unable to ask the questions that were on their minds. Of course the reporters claim they do what they do in order to inform the public.
The press - having made all that fuss of barreling out of utility vans, lugging around expensive cameras, setting up portable lighting, hair-spraying their reporters, then forcing themselves through a mob of each other in order to get to the candidate - asked the usual sanitized, soap bubble, moron questions like...
"Senator what is your stance on double-dipping a potato chip?"
Of course no question is beneath a presidential candidate in the TV era.
"I'm against it. One chip, one dip, eat the whole chip. That's what I always say, in fact just the other day I said that to my wife and two young children. I said, 'Kids, there will be no more double dipping in this household.'"
"So where do you stand on opening an ice cream carton from the side versus the top?" asked another reporter.
"Or how about folding down all the carton's flaps and slicing the ice cream?" another piped in.
Shocked, the senator asked for clarification: "You mean they slice into the ice cream like it was meatloaf?"
"Yes, senator."
"My word, that's no way to eat ice cream! And - if I am elected-I will oppose eating ice cream in that manner, every time."
As with every campaign stop, there was a spoilsport reporter in the crowd.
Spoilsport reporters are bitter, underpaid, mostly alcoholic, independent journalists from barely-scraping-by local newspapers. There is such a paper in every town and reporters from these papers almost always have to be cajoled into showing up at political events at all.
When all the other reporters are quietly writing down the answers to their moronic questions, the spoilsport pops up and asks a question like...
"Senator, aren't those who eat ice cream sliced like meatloaf citizens just like everybody else? Don't these people have the right to eat their ice cream the way they choose?"
It is standard in these situations for the regular journalists to uniformly glare at the spoilsport reporter and guffaw.
"He just doesn't get it, does he?" They think to themselves. "No wonder he's not a real journalist like the rest of us." Some try to excuse him or change the topic.
"Mr. Senator, moving on to the subject of shower caps, would you..."
"No wait, Tom, his question deserves an answer," says the candidate. This gives the candidate an air of unflappability. "I'm not talking about the people who eat the ice cream served that way. They're merely victims in this scenario. We must try to get to the root of the problem by stopping those who actually slice the ice cream this way and then serve it to others. I hearby promise that in the first 100 days of my administration I will present Congress with a bill to add 100,000 police officers to the streets of America in order to fight this menace."
The couch potato sitting at home watching all this unfold live (on the uninterrupted, non-commercial public affairs channel) is smarter than every reporter in that crowd.
"Why are we fighting ice cream slicing when there are people sleeping in gutters?" She asks.
One hundred days after the senator became president, thousands of newly trained police officers were seen sitting at the counters of donut stores from coast to coast. The following year's statistics showed a 15 percent increase in ice cream slicing nationwide.
That same year, shortly before the nation's mid-term elections, Republicans filibustered and eventually killed a bill put forth by the Democrats that would require all Americans to wipe the sleepy crust from their eyes.
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Contents this page were published in the May/June, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright (c) 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.