Amplified Dog

Bat Boy Joins Up

59 bAT boY Joins Up —WeeklyWorld News in a photo leaked by the pentagon, the little mutant wears bandoleers crossed over khaki.A marine helmet shoves down his pointed ears. eight years after being found in a WestVirginia cave, bat boy’s english is garbled, but his desire’s clear: sink fangs into his country’s enemies! his great strength, his keen sense of smell and hearing, his ability to scale rock walls and navigate in darkness make him ideal to hunt people in caves. True, his use violates international law. but what’s too cruel for fiends who used a country’s openness to murder thousands, and want to germ / gas / nuke the rest?! on the other hand, these “fiends” claim self defense. given slavery and the indians, don’t their fears make sense? Thoughtful people have to ask: artists, intellectuals, the flowers of civilization. (or are we pinworms, sucking anal blood?) is patriotism obsolete? scorning it helped me worm out ofVietnam. (is war ever a smart choice for a grunt?) i’d never follow bat boy and enlist, though i may tell the CiA my plan to flood the muslim world with Korans saying Allah made women to govern men.Yesterday, my wife’s hair-dryer fried every circuit in our house. Turns out the house was wired with lamp-cord. Char-marks in the attic showed where three fires had been. While i sweated anthrax and hijacked jet planes, my family could have charbroiled in our sleep! please, god, send bat boy to the previous owners. let them wake feeling his teeth . . . but wait— is that Christian? humane? my dad despised life insurance; so do i. is it genetic? if a trait’s biochemical, is it my fault? does fault exist? Can cheapskates 60 be otherwise? Can terrorists? Can the U.s.? Are indians to blame if fire-water makes them crazed? some modern ones harpooned a gray whale, called devil-fish for attacking schooners twice their size. sure enough, the whale rammed the indians’ boat. Hooray for the gray, thought i, who burned, at 10, to be a whaler (bare polynesian boombas were involved). it seemed only fair that the harpooneer’s spare skewered his own thigh; but i stopped reading when his friends emptied assault rifles into the whale’s head. There’s fealty to the old ways! They might as well have sicced bat boy on the poor beast. Would he kill the gophers in my yard? i nursed a bougainvillea through a withering summer; now, when it’s pink-ruffled as a mexican dancer, gophers are going for its roots. my family’s first week here (as the attic charred), our cat left five dead gophers on the porch. now suddenly the cat is old. All day she loafs on my lawn chair.As punishment, i squirt her with the hose. is that mature? or kind? is it worth trying to be what i clearly am not? if bat boy wants to rip out terrorists’ throats, isn’t that good? if he kills civilians too, is that our problem? When my friend’s son asked to be a vampire for halloween, his mom bought him a pumpkin suit: non-violent, non-scary, non-fun. no one makes bat boy costumes, but i’ll bet someone makes Arab terrorists. some kid will wear one, and get shot. some innocent pumpkin will eat an anthrax-dustedTootsie roll. Think that’s far-fetched? The governor publicized “credible threats” to bomb the golden gate bridge at rush hour. muslims (i hear) 61 buy gas stations to blow them up, 7-elevens to poison the big gulps, and motels to burn travelers in their sleep. Anything’s likely with theTwinTowers down— though, by the way, i don’t believe there’s a bat boy, or god, or one right way to look at things. i wish there was. ...