THE CONSPIRACY SUCCEEDS

The American people have elected to the Presidency of the United States a crypto-Muslim, who is in reality a crypto-Satanist, which crypto-identity that may in turn mask, Russian doll-like, a nigh-infinitude of other crypto-identities. But one thing is certain: America has its first federal leader with ties to the underworld - by which we mean not the Mafia, but the powers of Hell itself. Whether this is better or worse for a nation battered by eight years of incompetence remains to be seen. Reports of Obama as a potential Antichrist are premature at this juncture, and in any event may be just another slippery counter-counterintuitive ploy.

BIGFOOT-IN-MOUTH

The latest kerfuffling about a so-called Bigfoot corpse has us closing our eyes and sighing in a way that better befits a parent who has just been informed that their misbehaving child has set yet another neighborhood dog on fire. This is a road we've traveled before, and we know that it leads only to disappointment, reprimand, and the grim certainty that we'll be traveling it again before long.

Alleged Bigfoot corpses have been touted and debunked more or less weekly since the signing of the Constitution of Independence. Without exception these have been hoaxes, frauds, and misidentifications by really stupid people who don't have the wherewithal to recognize a dead bear. But the main reason the whole Bigfoot-corpse game deserves to be chucked into the folly bin is that Bigfeet are not remotely rare at all. Unlike its unfortunate cousin the Neanderthal, destroyed by early homo sapiens over misunderstandings about interspecies dating etiquette, the Bigfoot aka the Sasquatch aka the Western Yeti aka the Northern Ape aka the Cryptohuman has managed to maintain a robust existence in the modern industrialized world by joining civilization rather than attempting to beat it. They walk among us, with swollen shoe sizes and shaven faces

Being native to the North American continent, Bigfeet do not figure in Asian or European history. (For an essay on the Yetis of the Himilayas, please refer to this future post [link not yet enabled]). Seeing how the native Indian population was being slaughtered by the smiling genocidists of Manifest Destiny, 19th-century Bigfeet thought fast, created fictional European ancestries, bought some smart suits, and hit the pavement in search of a living wage. No bloviating about "the sacred land of our people" for them! Plus, being pretty pale under the fur, it wasn't too difficult to pass for white.

Herefore is a list describing Notable Individuals Who Have Secretly Been Bigfeet:

• Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States, 1889-1893
• Jimmy Kimmel, comedic badboy and Late-Night Talk Host
• Chyna, once-popular WWF wrestling pinup
• Harrison Ford, Hollywood actor (Bigfeet like the name "Harrison")
• Andrew Carnegie, steel tycoon and namer of Halls, Delis, and Mellons
• Edward R. Murrow, hard-hitting TV chain-smoker
• Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, an urban settlement for Secret Sasquatch Women
• Two-thirds of the folk-singing trio Peter, Paul and Mary
• Ernest Hemingway, author who popularized the use of terse Bigfoot patois in high literature

There are, of course, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many other Bigfeet currently at large in the United States and beyond. It is best not to make fun of them in public, because they will hear you, and they will say mean things about you behind your back. What's more, you will provoke the ire of the weblog Cryptomundo, which is not considered wise under any circumstance.

CONFUSION OF STATE

Last week, notorious Manhattan tabloid The New York Times published a profile of the once- possible state of Absaroka, an unholy amalgam of Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota that attempted to secede from the Union in the late 1930s in protest over wheelchair-bound president Professor Franklin X. Roosevelt’s abuse of his mutant psychic powers in pre-WWII espionage. Though it represents a colorful chapter of our national history, Absaroka is far from the only state to have made a failed bid for the majors. Here are some of our personal favorites:

PAINE – In 1887, the territorial assembly of the nascent state of Washington batted around a bunch of different names. Though “Washington” won by a nose (setting into motion a fierce rivalry with the District of Columbia, which claimed to own the copyright), the second-runner up was a tribute to influential colonial-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine. It’s true that the radical nature of Paine’s politics fell out of favor post-Revolution, but even more than that, people simply didn’t want to live out the rest of their lives under the auspices of an execrable pun. (A similar state befell Montana, which was originally to be named after Lewis and Clark’s cook Emmet DeNile.)

NEW IOWA – A territory comprising much of what is now eastern Nebraska and northern Kansas was once loosely confederated under the name “New Iowa,” until its founders found the concept too depressing and moved back to Missouri.

SAN FRANCISCONIA – Before there was California, there was San Francisco, a city-state based on the democratic ideals of ancient Athens, populated by gentleman-fortyniners whose love of gold was surpassed only by a lust for classical learning and a fine appreciation for the arts. Of course, their adoption of Greek practices extended to the interpersonal – not too many lady-fortyniners, after all – and the U.S. government cracked down and annexed the area as a state in order to remove this perceived blemish on the continent. Fat lot of good it did.

TEXAS – After its short-lived secession as a sovereign nation, North Mexico was, for a brief period in the 19th Century, a member of the United States of America, under the name “Texas.” It reverted back to the Mexicans when President Zacherley Taylor was debriefed by then-governor Matthew Houston about what a pain in the ass it would eventually become.

NERDOLINA – In 1998, a bunch of computer geeks formed an online “state” and tried to lobby Congress for its recognition. It still exists somewhere, but it’s only had five visitors in the past three years (a 500% increase over the previous three).

Fret not, friends – there are many more where this came from, but since secret knowledge is the 180-proof spirits of the mind, we must hold revelations in abeyance for future tippling.

THE REPRESS OF THE RETURNED

Our correspondents may be asking questions concerning our recent whereabouts.

Answer #1: None of your freaking beeswax.

Answer #2: Refer to this past post.

Answer #3: Aliens.

Though the veritable inundation of support we have received over the past two weeks is nearly embarrassing in its profusiveness, we must assure you that we are well – in fact, we are quite possibly even more filled with fiendish desire and burning arcana than previously. Though any sharing that we do must remain carefully modulated, rest assured that it will continue in due time.

Many of you may have heard that historian David Halberstam, famous for authoring the secret protocol of the 1950s, passed away recently. We hasten to tell you with that this had nothing – NOTHING – NOTHING – to do with us. True, we exposed his youthful secrets to the world in our peninaugural post, but we can offer no evidence that these revelations set off any kind of grotesque chain of circumstances that led from the CIA through Cuba, the Eisenhower Mafia, the DAR, Hasbro Inc., the Dramatists Guild, the Village Green Preservation Society, Eschaton Resorts, the New Mickey Mouse Club, General Electric, the House Sub-Committee on Soon-To-Be Deceased Historians, the CIA again, and on to Mr. Halberstam’s unfortunate accident. His anarchic brand of speculative absurdity will be missed.

PERPETUAL WINTER FOR PERPETUAL SPRING

If there’s one thing we have in abundance here at The Apocryphist, it’s hunches. Our nose twitches at the scent of the possible; we are highly susceptible to cool draughts emanating from the as-yet-unknown. And lately we’ve been smacked upside the head by a cold draught indeed: the extended chill in the air outside, suspiciously prominent in its mid-April freakishness.

Many people go around and indiscriminately accuse the government of being responsible for every trivial ill. But not us: we only accuse for the big stuff. And nothing is bigger than the weather.

We’ve written previously about the perceptual causes of global warming, but this particular weather pattern we’re experiencing in the United States right now – unseasonably frigid, barely any sun, lacerating rains – is of a different class altogether. However, it is similar to global warming in that it has everything to do with politics.

No one, from the top to bottom of our nation’s vast beaureaucracy, denies that the war in Iraq is not going well. The question is, what is to be done about it? Congress has one idea; the executive branch has another; and this dichotomy is being played out in every corner of our 52.5 states.

The National Weather Service – the agency responsible for the nation’s weather, duh – is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is in turn subsidiary to the U.S. Department of Commerce – an agency answerable to the White House. All the pieces are now in place. President Bush – at the advice of Karl Rove – has ordered his lackeys to lengthen winter, causing citizens to spend so much time bitching about the cold that they don’t have time to concern themselves with politics. After the full manufacture this artificial crisis, he will command the National Weather Service to embark upon a late spring, for which the people will be so grateful that thoughts of war will be even further from their minds.

This is far from the first time that such a policy has been adopted. FDR initiated particularly cold winters during the Great Depression to encourage unemployed workers to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and enlist in New Deal programs. More recently, Richard Nixon issued a gorgeous summer in the midst of the Watergate controversy, but a fat lot of good it did him.

Our hunch is that our hunch about this is correct. Just when things feel at their worst – this morning, say – the skies will begin to clear and we’ll all be grateful for the sun and warmth. Too bad the weather report is forecasting more of the same for the foreseeable future.

MYTH MANAGEMENT

We’ve decided that it was a bit unfair to devote multiple posts in a single week to revealing the nonexistence of various notable figures. In order to prevent us from pulling another such nasty trick in the future, we would like to clear the air by offering a complete list of Individuals Who Most People Assume Are Real But Actually Were Completely Made Up. If you receive leads about any other such figures that we may have missed, please inform us immediately.

PEOPLE THAT DON’T EXIST
Jesus
Jean Baudrillard
Jacques Derrida
Michel Foucault
Charles Dickens
Aristophanes
Chef Boy-ar-Dee
Grover Cleveland
Lee Harvey Oswald (duh)
Sidney Poitier
Charlie McCarthy
Alexander Graham Bell
King Henry III
Enrico Caruso
Mamie Eisenhower
Ponce de Leon
Sid Vicious
Susan B. Anthony
Hercules (but not Herakles)
Spike Jonze (but not Spike Jones)
Dave Thomas (the Wendy’s guy, not the SCTV star)
John D. Rockefeller
Ho Chi Minh
Phillip K. Dick
Lillian Gish
The Pope (any)
Cavemen
Mr. Snuffleupagus
Whoever invented Tupperware
That rich aunt you’re expecting to inherit money from
Jesus’s clone
All who disbelieve the arcane wisdom of The Apocryphist
Bob Hope

Bonus List:

PEOPLE WE CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF

Jennifer Hudson

SYCOPHANTIC PUPPET FOUND GUILTY

The nation is abuzz with the news that former Dick Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been convicted on four counts of being a federal jackass. The only surprise here is that Cheney’s greasy monkey wrench wasn’t potent enough to gum up the gears of justice. How did things come to this pass?

It all started when Libby was accused of outing CIA agent Valerie Plame as a lesbian. Because the Bush administration had publicly accused the gays of hiding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, any such allegation had the effect of political botulism – and not the good kind. Plame’s career in tatters, Libby went on to accuse Meet the Press host Randy Quaid of making the whole thing up. After framing reporter Judith Regan for soliciting incriminating evidence in the form of a murder confession by beloved Naked Gun actor O.J. Simpson, Libby’s machinations began to be perceived as serving no purpose other than his own entertainment. This is when the anthropomorphic vultures began to pull out their silverware, tie napkins around their necks, and greedily lick their chops.

The question of the hour is: where was Cheney during all this? The answer is disarmingly simple: the bathroom. It’s still unclear what he was doing in there, but he failed to emerge for a full three years (a Washington record surpassed only by President William Howard Taft, who spent his entire 1909-1913 term in the bathtub). The next step in the investigation will no doubt involve trying to determine whether Cheney had a cell phone with him. If he did, the whole house of cards can be expected to fall like so many dominos.

Nicknamed for the way that, during potty training, he would wipe his behind by dragging it across the ground like a dog, “Scooter” Libby leaves behind a rich legacy of governmental malfeasance. As a State Department employee in the 1980s, he was charged with accelerating the fall of the USSR by making demeaning crank calls to top Communist Party officials. Working for the Pentagon in the early 1990s, he argued against intervention in Bosnia on the grounds that Balkan people “smell like hamsters.” More recently, as Cheney’s Chief of Staff, he chose a screaming chartreuse for the color of the Vice President’s bed linens.

Libby’s lawyers have already declared that they’re going to appeal the ruling. Meanwhile, Cheney’s press secretary recently announced that the VP “has to take a whiz,” which most likely means a further period of self-imposed exile. However, just because the cookie jar snapped closed on his hand, severing it, doesn’t mean that Libby won’t keep busy: his autobiography – I, Lewis “Scooter” Libby – will be released by HarperCollins this fall.

ARTHUR TOO: ON THE COCKS

That the mainstream obituaries for Presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. have consistently and shamelessly bollocksed up the facts should come as no surprise. This is because these facts have been largely unavailable, kept under lock and key for decades by the notoriously paranoid, secretive man himself.

In his writings and his life he presented the perfect profile of the genial liberal intellectual, citing the New Deal and John F. Kennedy as avatars of ideal government. But in reality, Schlesinger had no interest in politics whatsoever. His prolific literary and journalistic output was little more than a smokescreen obscuring his true passion: cockfighting.

Now that he is deceased, his story can finally be told – the story of a good farm boy from Indiana who loved nothing more than to watch roosters with blades attached to their feet fight each other to the bloody death. Though on the plains of Indiana such activity was considered socially acceptable, even mandatory in certain parishes, young Schlesinger’s aptitude for raising and training avian carnage machines was so pronounced that wider pastures awaited him. Unfortunately, this activity being illegal, he needed something else to fall back on; this something turned out to be American history.

Rising in the morning, Schlesinger would knock off 5,000 words of whatever historical text he was working on before breakfast, which generally consisted of eggs laid by the hens of defeated roosters. In private interviews with friends, he claimed that writing incisive reportage and analysis was as easy and boring as breathing – though approximately a million times more lucrative. Whether the subject was Andrew Jackson, the rise of multiculturalism in America, or his good friend Kennedy (with whom he shared the bond of bloodlust), his effortlessly analytical left brain did all the work, freeing his right brain for contemplation of the day’s more substantial matter.

In the shadow world of cockfighting, there was no name more respected than that of “El Historiador,” as he was known to his foes. His charges rose through the ranks of the American Bellicose Poultry Association, taking in Top Three titles every year from 1947 through 2002, when he retired from the sport to write a pseudonymous history of its parallel development with American governance. But despite his success, he was no sore winner; among other philanthropical efforts, he anonymously endowed a permanent Cock Bed at Beth Israel Veterinary Center, for the recuperation of his rivals.

The cockfighting world mourns its unsung patriarch equally as much as the three or four people who have read his books. The beak of history has finally impaled Schlesinger and called him home.

BONUS APOCRYPHA: Schlesinger and his son, filmmaker John Schlesinger, fought a pistol duel in 1977 over John’s outspoken repugnance towards his father’s life’s work. They both lost an eye.

OUR GREATEST EMANCIPATOR

Amidst yesterday's dudgeon, we completely forgot about Washington's Birthday. Happy 314th, George!

I HAVE POSITIVE FEELINGS FOR IKE

These days, President Dwight D. “Honest Ike” Eisenhower is generally considered little more than a relic from the Eisenhower era. Aside from his having coined the phrase “military-industrial complex” (which we are tired of having archly pointed out to us at parties and cabal meetings), little exists in the public sphere to distinguish our nation’s 34th Commander-in-Chief from a moderately intelligent potato, or sack of potatoes.

A trip to the President Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, in Abilene, Kansas, however, reveals some shockingly unexpected data on the man who, as you may or may not have known, coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”

Most visitors to the Library are lured by the big-ticket items: Eisenhower’s prize-winning collection of vintage goiter photographs, his autographed first-edition copy of P.D. Eastman’s paean to canine locomotion, Go, Dog, Go!, and the Ark of the Covenant.
But the true treasures of the Library are to be found much deeper within, in a secret chamber that can only be broached with stalwart academic credentials, or crudely forged facsimiles thereof.

In this hidden sanctum, next to Eisenhower’s mummified corpse (and no, we weren’t supposed to take pictures, so ssh!), is an item that threatens to topple popular views of this former snooker champion’s Presidency, and, indeed, the entire decade in which it unfolded.


Popular historian David Halberstam’s chronicle of the postwar years was released to the public in 1993. Eisenhower’s dog-eared copy, however, proves that this book was not a saga of hindsight, but, in fact, a work of speculative fiction penned in 1947. Thoroughly digested by the President-to-Be, who became fascinated – nay, obsessed – with the strange revelations found within, it became not a retrospective analysis of, but, in fact, the very template by which the following ten years were forged. The concept behind the hydrogen bomb was mere fantasy before Halberstam (a mere boy of 13 when he wrote the book) anticipated its design in his book. Enamored, Eisenhower made one of his first priorities as President the assignment of chief designers Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam to make manifest what had already been written about them. The same pattern resulted in the creation of Elvis, hula hoops, and the Korean War (which technically began before Eisenhower was sworn in, but we know enough about Washington politics not to be surprised by this).

Word of this so-called “paradox” began to leak sometime during the 1970s, when Eisenhower’s former Vice President, Richard Nixon, was looking for a way to evade the scrutiny being leveled against him as a result of the Whitewater Scandal. Halberstam, a notoriously slow writer (he’d been working on The Fifties since 1939), decided to make a few revisions, and would have kept at it for much longer if the Republican Party, enraged by the election of Communist Party candidate Hilary Clinton to the Presidencey in 1992, hadn’t just jerked the thing out of his hands and brought it to press.

We had some excellent photos of some of Eisenhower’s notes and suggestions in the margins of the original manuscript (re: television – “Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if we kept making the screens bigger? And invented subliminal advertising?”), but alas, it turns out there was a video camera installed in the mummy’s empty eye sockets, and we were kicked out, had our camera destroyed before our eyes, and were told never to darken the door of a Presidential Library for as long as we lived. This is why we now wear a fake moustache whenever we go to a Presidential Library.