By Morgan Bennett Santa Monica
I was at the gym today and I saw a half drunk bottle of “sports drink”just sitting there. I was so terrified by the potential threat it now represents that I immediately called the Office of Homeland Security. They informed the FBI who called the ATF who then called in the bomb squad. They proceeded to evacuate the entire Promenade and sent in a robot to retrieve the bottle, and then, being unable to diffuse its lemon-lime timing mechanism, they disposed of it by taking it out to their truck and blowing it up at great expense to the taxpayer. (And with total disregard for the bottle’s California redemption value.) Any possible witnesses in the gym who might have seen the person who left the suspicious drink were immediately rounded up by “officials” and taken in black helicopters to a secret military prison for interrogation. (Or was it for inTERRORgation?) Their incarceration is indefinite and their condition is unknown.
The front desk clerk who sold the drink in question was declared an “unlawful combatant” in the war against sports drinks, and a secret military tribunal decided that his refrigerator full of Vitamin Water was in actuality a stockpile of WMDs that posed a direct threat to the national security of this great nation. The “freedom hater” was then legally tortured to death by the CIA, all the while refusing to give up the identity of his supplier in the Al Qaeda-erAde corporation.
I, however, was seen as a hero in the war against terror, and I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Paranoia. Sadly, I have been stripped of this illustrious title because a background check they ran on me revealed a “crackpot conspiracy” letter I had published in this very paper. You, dear reader, can read it in SMDP’s online archives — “A momentary lapse of treason” (SMDP, Dec. 19, page 4). I hope you read that letter. It nearly cost me my life. I have since escaped the city of Santa Moscow, (or is it Soviet Monica?), and I am currently writing this letter from a cave located in the mountains somewhere on the Malibu/Oxnard border.
Fortunately, for the rest of you citizens of the post-9/11 police state, there are a multitude of shiny new Orwellian surveillance cameras located all along the Promenade for your protection. (Or haven’t you noticed?) But don’t worry, they, like the current sham of a government, are there to protect you from yourself. They are there to remind you that you aren’t safe anywhere anymore. So, just trust the advice of the liars in office and sacrifice your liberties for the freedom to live in fear. Yes, you are free, free to live in fear of Gatorade and ipods. You are free to wait in line, shoeless, for five hours in order to board a two-hour flight. You are free to fly in silence and thirst, suspicious of everyone, expecting the worst.
Lets just hope they don’t catch some terrorist on a plane trying to light a wick sticking out of his butt... Know what I mean?
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 21, 2006. Read the original PDF.