Letter to President Obama #42 | Subject: Politics

Letter to President Obama #42 | Subject: Politics

Dear President Obama,

I guess you could say that I’m a political junkie. I’m pretty interested in politics—I read all sorts of articles—everything from Wall Street Journal and the slightly-crazy Washington Times to the New York Times and the sometimes-cartoonish Huffington Post. (I’m sorry, but I can’t take the name “Huffington” seriously. I always think of Harry Potter—you know, the “Hufflepuff” house— and in turn, the word Hufflepuff makes me think of little marshmallow people waddling about.)

Sometimes the word “Huffington” makes me think of the three little pigs story. You know, the one with the wolf that huffs and puffs? This story never made sense to me. So there are pigs…and they live in…houses. Now I never knew about the suspension of disbelief as a kid, but OK, I’ll roll with it. So each pig lives in a house, and each house is constructed of a different material. The first has a house of straw (ok?), the second has a house made of sticks (I guess his neighbors weren’t beavers), and the third had a house made of bricks. As the reader becomes aware, the structural integrity of these materials becomes quite important to the story, as the wolf huffs and puffs and blows the first two houses into oblivion and eats the inhabitants. (Yeah, what a great message to pass on to four-year-olds.)

In the end, only the third pig survives, because he lived in a brick house. As a child, I had one response—utter terror. Specifically, I wanted to know—did wolves like this actually exist? I quickly realized that I lived in a house that was made largely of wood. That is to say, sticks. I soon begged my father to get the .22 from the basement and to shoot any wolf-like creatures he saw. Unfortunately, my cousins were outside and one of them had one of those rat mullets so popular in the ‘80s. He was seriously grazed by a bullet. I still feel guilty about this.

Anyway, back to politics. So when I’m reading these political stories, there are often “comment” buttons at the bottom of each story where one can chime in and say whatever they want about, well, anything. These buttons should probably be renamed. If the buttons said “share your hasty generalization” or “we’d like to hear your conspiracy theory” then these buttons might be more accurate. Occasionally I’ll take the time to offer a reasoned opinion, but thanks to the anonymous nature of the web, when I do I usually called a bunch of names. (What exactly is a pinko, anyway?)

Now political ranting happens all the time across the political spectrum (the Bush years anyone?), but for some reason people on the right have been particularly vocal lately. They’ve got some pretty inaccurate ideas about you—that you’re not an American, that you hate white people, that there will be death squads for grandparents if the health plan passes.

Don’t get me wrong, everyone has a right to an insane opinion, but it’s just that all that stuff is clearly untrue. Such slander is harmful, because it interrupts the difficult process of compromise—if we keep flinging around insane accusations, then we won’t get any real work done. (Then again, maybe that’s the point.)

Anyway, I assumed that those ideas would seem laughable to any reasonable person, as they’ve been debunked by serious folks from across the spectrum. (When the National Review—the same publication started by William F. Buckley—debunks the birth certificate notion, then one thinks this sort of thing should be settled.)

But people still believe this sort of thing, so to try to make light of the situation, I started adding my own “facts” to these comment sections. I tried to make things as outlandish as possible—to fight misinformation with hyperbole.

There’s been a lot of bad mouthing going on about Canada, so I told everyone that not only were you not an American citizen, that you’re actually from Canada, and that you secretly planned to merge the governments of both countries into a new country, Americanadia. This would mean we’d all have to have Canada’s apparently-dreadful healthcare—in Canada, surgeons use hockey skates as scalpels and the end-of-life care there is particularly chilling—you’re provided with an iceberg and told to “fall asleep” as you float into the nebulous dark.

And I told them that any of us younger survivors would have it bad too—we’d all have to go to (hockey) camps where we’d be given “swine-flu” shots (mind-control!) and then subjected to vigorous “re-education” where we’d have to swear allegiance to the new nation and its flag, which would feature a Canada Goose pecking at a defenseless bald eagle chick.

The problem was, people started to believe me.

Let me know what you think,

Brett

P.S. This is letter #42 to the President. Brett is sending them all to the White House and has gotten two form letters in response. If he gets a real response, he'll let everyone know. If you like these, please tell your friends by sharing them. Please join my Facebook group here. Above all, thanks for reading!