The Truth, Mainly - 01/02/1995

Let me be right up front about this: I'm a card-carrying member of the American Association of Dirty Rotten Bleeding Heart Liberal Secular Humanist Counterculture McGoverniks. There aren't many of us left, and all of us will be going underground as soon as the new Congress is sworn in.

The other three—you'll forgive me for not mentioning their names— have asked that as a matter of public record I report the winners at the association's Pinko Awards Banquet held last Saturday night in the back booth of the 44th and O St. DaVinci's. Not because, God knows, we seek publicity. But because the Pinko Awards reflect a contrary way of thinking that historians may find useful in trying to piece together the Catastrophe of November, 1994.

So here, as our final public statement, are the awards and the recipients:

The Conservative We've Been Most Wrong About Award. We always begin our banquet with this one—to show our moral courage in facing up to our mistakes. The winner this year is Barry Goldwater, also winner of the 1994 Arizona Civil Liberties Union "civil libertarian of the year" award. Having discovered through his grandson's homosexuality that gays are people too, he has spoken loudly and eloquently against the military ban on out-of-the-closet gays, thereby getting himself drummed out of the Limbaugh wing of the GOP and causing reactionaries of both parties to cross their legs and look the other way.

Most Laughable Act of Re-Creating God in the Image of Man Award. A close contest. Tied for runner-up were Bill McCartney for his public expressions that God is intensely committed to the success of the Colorado Buffaloes, and the Capitol Hill Prayer Alert members who prayed "imprecatory psalms" to get God's help in defeating 25 Democrat office holders, including our own Bob Kerrey. The winner, however, is John M. Templeton, identified by the AP as a "mutual funds guru" who opens each meeting of Templeton Growth Fund Ltd. with prayer. "We don't pray that a particular stock we bought will go up, because that wouldn't work," he says. "We simply pray that the decisions we make will be wise ones." Wall Street insiders say it's a wise decision to buy a particular stock that will go up.

Don Quixote Award for Most Admirable Ex-President. Easy winner—nobody else even came in second—is Jimmy Carter. Not just because he pounds nails for Habitat for Humanity and exercises skill as diplomat-without-portfolio in North Korea, Haiti, and Bosnia, but because he has also offered his peacemaking service in a controversy so tangled in webs of deceit and greed and bad motives that it makes his earlier success look like settling a squabble between Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa. I mean, of course, the baseball strike. Give him the Nobel Prize for the others, but if he can work out the baseball problem, is there any plausible argument for not canonizing him on the spot for the miracle of bringing Really Great Good out of Really Awful Evil?

Coals-to-Newcastle Award for Most Superfluous Crusade. The winner here is Rene DeMarco for founding a male-rights advocacy group lobbying Congress "to ensure that men have an equal voice in future legislation." When he finishes that Herculean task, he'll go to Rome to ensure that Catholics have an equal voice in what goes on inside the Vatican.

Giving the Electorate Just What They Deserve Award. Lots of entries here, but the winner is the Missouri General Assembly which manfully set out last fall to outlaw homosexuality but ended up getting terribly confused—it was a bad testosterone day—and passing a law so convoluted in syntax that its effect, as finally determined by a team of expert semanticists, is to outlaw all sex except that performed "through the clothing without that person's consent." Since this is a family newspaper, the rest of the wording of the new law cannot be printed. It's such a horrible example of bad writing that our youth would be permanently corrupted.

The Attaboy Military Man of the Year Award. We always end with this one in an effort to convince others that we do too respect the military. But this year we have a winner so admirable that we would admire him even if we weren't looking around for a Military Man of the Year. He's Russian Maj. Gen. Ivan Babichev who last month refused an order to have his forces attack civilians in Chechnya. Said he didn't care if it got him court-martialed or not. Said "We are not going to use tanks against the people." We say "Attaboy, Gen. Babichev." He's our kind of military man.

Which is why we're going underground now. With values like these, we're clearly an affront to the new Congress. And how about you? If you weren't righteously indignant about each of these awards, be careful. The Gingrinch will get you if you don't watch out.

Satterfield is a college professor and writes as a means of discovery.