Ill Humor by Ian Shoales page 2
"When you have a 9," Mr. Farrakhan explained, "you have a womb that is pregnant, and when you have a 1 standing by a 9, it means that there's something secret that has yet to be unfolded."
Since the March, there has been a flurry of pundit concern that the message could not be separated from the messenger, the anti-Semitic Mr. Farrakhan. But what was his message here? Lincoln and Jefferson are going to have a baby? I know that dead white males are often afforded more significance than they deserve, but if two of them are suddenly expectant moms, I'd say that's pretty significant.
Maybe calling our attention to this bizarre phenomenon was Mr. Farrakhan's stab at a conciliatory gesture towards us white devils. Speaking personally, if a handshake over the giant pregnant bodies of dead forefathers is what it takes to ease racial tension, I'm ready to give it a shot.
I don't know if this has any relation to Mr. Farrakhan's remarkable claims, but when the National Park Service put the count of Million Man Marchers at something closer to 400,000, there were rumbles of racism from certain quarters.
Undercounting is racist? That's a new one on me. I know that body counts during the Vietnam War were inflated to further a political agenda. But what would be served by undercounting the Million Man March? Could some conservative leap to his feet on C-SPAN and shout, "See? Black people can't even get a million men to listen to a mixed message! End affirmative action now!" What could be gained by that?
Speaking personally, if a handshake over the giant pregnant bodies of dead forefathers is what it takes to ease racial tension, I'm ready to give it a shot.
By a sinister coincidence, however, the crowd may indeed have been undercounted. One of the television networks commissioned the Center for Remote Censing out of Boston University, which analyzed photographs of the crowd to arrive at a count of well over 800,000.
The discrepancy could be due to outmoded analog methods of censing. The Park Service probably just told some poor sap in a Smoky-the-Bear hat to mark off crowd members on a clipboard. I'll bet he got distracted when he learned that Lincoln and Jefferson were going to have a baby, and lost count. Hey, he's only human.
Still, conspiracy or not, it makes me wonder about some other numbers. How do we know there were only seven dwarves? Do we have to take Snow White's word on that? She might have had a hidden agenda. The dwarves could well have been as numberless as Smurfs.
Twelve days of Christmas? Don't make me laugh. They've been selling ornaments since July! Just three little pigs? Come on. The wolf would have gulped them down in one bite, and still had room in his maw for Riding Hood's granny.
One world? I doubt it. Seven sins? We can do better than that! And we must have a lot more than just one hundred senators, judging by the trouble they cause.
But what do I know? Just this: Paul Simon notwithstanding, I'm pretty certain there are at least 57 ways to leave your lover, though I haven't tried them all yet. I also have a hunch which might explain why we "blast off" at zero, yet "go" on three, but it's probably a hunch for which the world is not yet prepared. It could even be another one of my half-baked theories. Whether it's half-full or half-empty, well, that's another question.
