Mutiny for the Bounty

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Art Kumbalek

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, here we are, into September, what the fock. I’ve been trying to cool my heels for this month since April, and now finally I hear my favorite season coming up the stairs to knock on my door, ’bout time.

But I got to tell you, as too many right-wing cracker-jackanape jackboots for the rich people who want to steal the democracy continue to goose-step as members of the U.S. Congress and state legislatures across our amber waves of fruited plain, I’ve decided it would be more patriotic of me to forgo whipping out a bombastic blowhard essay this week and instead patronize an Americanly small business whose customer service cannot be cheaply outsourced to some godforsaken outpost outside the Lower 48, what the fock.

So I’m off to the Uptowner tavern/charm school majestically crammed onto the corner of wistfully hysteric Humboldt Boulevard and the fabled Center Street. Tag along if you like, but you cover the first round. Let’s get going.

Herbie: Talk about jobs, I hear Texas is looking for bounty hunters.

Ray: What the fock, Billy the Kid come back from the dead? Any idea what that bounty-hunter gig pays?

Herbie: Seems all you got to do is arrest any gal trying to exercise her constitutional rights and you get to pocket a cool $10,000. That’s what I heard, I shit you not.

Julius: I hope those Taliban Afghan don’t hear about this ’cause they know their way around handling the so-called uppity women. Cripes, they’ll be over here deep in the heart of a Texas in a New York minute—$10 grand to any one of those focksticks is like $1 million to you’s and me, ain’a?

Ernie: Texas sucks. They say everything’s bigger in Texas, you betcha, especially the gol’ darn idiocy and top-drawer ignorance. Never forget what Philip Henry Sheridan, the big-time Union Civil War general, said: “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.” And those jagwagon “America’s team” Dallas Cowboys fans can go ahead and kiss my sweet Green & Gold Packer ass any day of the week they choose.

Little Jimmy Iodine: I hear the new football season fires up this weekend. Go Pack! And I’ll bet you’s a buck two-eighty there’s going to be a whole bunch of 9/11 remembrances around the league stadiums come Sunday, ain’a?

Ray: Oh you betcha. One I’d like to see is at the game in D.C., and at halftime they haul out a handcuffed, naked Dick “Duck” Cheney and waterboard the m-effer right there on the 50-yard line at halftime, what the fock.

Emil: God bless America. This 9/11, there’s still got to be a bright side to it somewhere, sometime, ain’a?

Julius: Such as?

Emil: Cripes, like maybe if you were a guy and that was your wedding anniversary, it would be easier to remember it.

Herbie: I can buy that. Association. Whenever the anniversary of a disaster tragedy rolls around—your Pearl Harbor, your Hiroshima, your Hurricane Katrina—the dark day I got focking married springs to my mind right off the bat.

Ray: The association—that’s how I remember things, too. Like whenever I see the bartender come down to this end of the bar, I remember it’s time to have another focking cocktail.

Ernie: There’s the disasters you can bring on by mistakes you don’t even know you’re making and there’s disasters that happen no matter what you do. Like these asteroids flying around outer space. I read somewheres that it wouldn’t matter what side of bed you got out of in the morning, a space rock the size of about three football fields across would wipe out everything and everyone in a space the size of New focking Jersey. The Sopranos, Atlantic City, chemical dumps, Bruce Springsteen, on-the-take goombah politicians—bada bing! bada boom!—all gone in a New York second on account of Mother Nature got up on the wrong side of the bed that day.

Emil: Im-focking-possible ’cause Mother Nature’s got nothing to do with outer space stuff.

Julius: The hell. Listen Einstein, we the sapien Homo and the rest of the life on this planet all got its beginnings in outer space, so shut the fock up if you’re going to talk like a sausage out of your anus.

Ray: Speaking of “talking out of your anus...”

Little Jimmy Iodine: Hey, Artie! Over here. Put a load on your keister.

Art: Hey gents. What do you hear, what do you know.

Julius: I hear that the Republicans are champing at the bit to win the House and Senate next year so they can pass another load of big-ass tax cuts except for the mom-and-pop regular Joes struggling to maintain a pot to pee in—tax cuts only for the fat-cat uber-rich assholes who bankroll the campaigns of congressional QAnon types to destroy truth, justice and the American way.

Herbie: Remember when they had that idea of an “ownership society,” which means Congress Republicans and their donor pals own all the money and all the power, and the rest of us baboons own a one-way ticket to Palooka-focking-ville?

Art: I got to tell you’s guys, before I forget, about this documentary I saw on TV called “Superheroes,” where everyday guys and gals act like they’re Batman and go out to fight crime.

Little Jimmy Iodine: I’ve been out of touch with that stuff, but I heard Superman and Lois Lane finally got married, didn’t they? I always wondered if they ever got around to having any kids. I mean, how the heck do you breast-feed a baby with the superhuman power of suck?

Emil: I’d like to know how the hell they ever got a marriage license in the first place. The guy was from another focking planet for crying out loud. Wouldn’t you think there’d be some kind of law or an amendment against that kind of thing? For christ sakes, an Earth woman having a connubial relationship of a conjugal nature with a creature from outer focking space—a creature prone to wearing colorful leotards and a cape in public?

Herbie: That’s a difficult question. I think it may be focking fair to consider anyone from outer space to be of another species. While to carry on a relationship of an intimate nature with a member of another species may be perfectly acceptable onstage at select entertainment venues just south of the Texas border, I don’t think an inter-species life-partnering union would play in Peoria, nor with the Christian right nutbags who had helped put Trumpel-thinskin in the White House.

Ernie: No shit, ’cause I’ll bet you a buck two-eighty Superman was a Democrat.

Emil: How do you figure that?

Ernie: Because numbnuts, he was always helping and saving people no matter how much money they made or which side of the tracks they found themselves born on.

(Hey, it’s getting late and I know you got to go, but thanks for letting us bend your ear, ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.)