Christmas at the Sanitarium, Part 2 (co-starring the delicious talents of Smedley Butler)

“Every man must carry his own hide to the tanner.” – Unknown   

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In the mysterious world of hypnosis, there’s something known as a trigger word. 

Supposedly, it works like this: If I am a hypnotist – and I’m no hypnotist, truth be told – but if I were, and if I had you under hypnosis, and if I wanted you to, say, launch into a rousing rendition of Aretha Franklin’s classic tribute to female independence, “Respect,” sometime in the next week, I could suggest one of these so-called trigger words.

For example, I could say to you, while you were in this hypnotic state, “Okay you, the next time you hear the words ‘Paris Hilton,’ you will launch into a rousing rendition of Aretha Franklin’s classic tribute to female independence, ‘Respect’.”

In this scenario I am relating to you now, “Paris Hilton” would be the trigger word. And if next Thursday, your best friend called you up and said, “Damn! Did you see what that idiot Paris Hilton said today?”  then, yep, you guessed it… “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” my friend.

The thing is, in the land where I live, we have developed our own nationwide trigger word. It is almost as though the government has conducted a farflung psycho-social experiment – and one that costs trillions of dollars, to boot – and hypnotized all of the residents of the land. 

Now, ever since this experiment kicked in, every single time someone mutters the trigger word, which is “Iraq,” we all go apeshit and begin behaving just like chimpanzees injected with a stunningly potent steroid/testosterone cocktail.

If I were ever to be cornered by a large contingent of police officers and/or citizenry after comitting a robbery or other nonviolent crime, I am fairly certain I could merely yell, “Iraq!” and then wait for the ensuing fight to break out as cover for my getaway.

“Iraq” is not the name of the land where I live.  Iraq is something that the rulers of the land where I live decided to invade.  Iraq is an eater of children and dollars.

Anyway, now I hope you can understand a little better why it is I am so disappointed that, smack dab in the middle of my chemically delicious Christmas party this past Tuesday, what should appear, but my late boyfriend’s little brother to announce he’s enlisted late in the year. And all of a sudden, there arises such a clatter, my strange friends gather ‘round me to see what is the matter.

And me, I finally ask him, “What does your family say about this, Eddie?”  It’s the only thing, on such a spur of such a moment, that I can really think to ask.

Eddie, he looks around at all of the distorted faces looking back at him, and he looks at some subjective hallucinations which have somehow become manifest to us all.  Even the fractal elves of hyperspace, which only Harry should be seeing, cease their dancing and perk up their pointy ears in all of the corners of the room to hear here what it is that Eddie has to say.

“Well,” Eddie, he starts slow and then he picks up steam, “my one grandfather [20 years in the Navy, 20 years civil service at an Air Force base] says I am a blazing idiot.  The other [Air Force Lieutenant Colonel] grandfather says it is a good way to build discipline, but then asks why I would do this to my dad.  Dad says he just kind of assumes all his loved ones are destined to die useless deaths.”

Eddie’s brother died from leukemia in 2001. Eddie’s mother died while SCUBA diving in Beliz in 2007.

And the King of Montrose, he appears to be turning blue next to me. I connect this hue change to his recent inhalation of something rancid out of a makeshift smoking apparatus in my back yard, and not to Eddie’s announcement.  But I’m not always good with cause and effect.

Incidentally, the King of Montrose isn’t really the king of the land where I live.  The King of Montrose is a dwarf who carries a branch staff and possesses a magic guard dog and cruises the streets of my neighborhood when it’s dark.

The King of Montrose is standing at attention, right in my room, and he’s facing Eddie, stiff as a board. No one is quite sure just why this is, but again, it is presumed to have something to do with all the smoking. 

“And what,” I question Eddie further, “do YOU think about it, Eddie?”

Eddie, who has just enlisted in the Army, he looks around the room again.  He says, “Well, I think the military is the only chance a working class kid like me ever has to be respected by the rich and powerful in this country.”

Eddie looks down, satisfied with his answer, like he’s just successfully spelled the word “appoggiatura” in a spelling bee.

“Bullshit,” my boyfriend, Greg replies without looking up from my computer. 

Where I come from, “bullshit” is a word that everyone knows. Not like “appoggiatura,” which hardly anybody knows at all.  “Bullshit” refers to the waste product of a male cow, although it is rarely used in that context at Christmas parties, unless the partygoers are so unlucky as to be engaged in bovine bingo.

“Bovine bingo” is… Oh never mind. I’ll save that topic for another day.

 

Greg keeps talking. “That’s bullshit you’re talking, man. They have to act like they honor the poor kids dying to support their system.  It has to be the holiest of holy sacraments.  It must be the ultimate taboo to question the beauty of volunteering to sacrifice yourself in order that the dudes in charge can keep counting their mountains of gold.”

Greg says something like this, anyway. You get the idea.

And Greg types something into the computer and finds a quote by Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in the history of the country I live in.  And Greg tells us that this highly decorated Major General Smedley Butler said this:

“I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. … I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. …I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.”

Everyone in my room falls quiet.  Their drugs are all wearing off, thanks mostly to the late damn Major General Smedley Butler. 

Just to maintain the proper surrealistic tone, the King of Montrose remains standing at attention, edge of his right hand touching his proportionally much-too-wide dwarfen forehead.

As for your fearless party hostess, I take this as my cue to reach up behind some books on my bookshelf and pull out two enormous cigars.  A cigar is a tightly rolled bundle of tobacco leaves which is lit aflame and smoked. 

It looks like this:

 

These particular cigars – the ones I pull out from behind the books, not those in the picture – are contraband in the land where I am from.  They are contraband because the leaders of the land where I am from do not like the leaders of the land where these particular tobacco leaves are grown.

So these leaves have been contraband for forty-nine years.

Can you imagine such a thing?

I wrap my arm around the shoulders of Eddie, my late boyfriend’s little brother.  “You have made your own decision, and that decision is going to change your life one way or the other.  Let’s go out on the roof for a smoke in celebration.”

I’m paraphrasing, of course.

And then, the moment Eddie and I are safely on the ledge of the roof outside my bedroom window, one of my guests yells “Iraq!” and the room erupts into civil war.

Some trigger words work each and every time they are spoken.