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?
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The Truth, Mainly
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.
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