previous column next column back to archives
I am starting a new political party. It will be called the Patriotic Eagles and its mascot will be the Boston College Screaming Eagle, but our bird will wear aviator sunglasses and a stars-n-stripes bandana. Having a badass mascot is important because whenever the Democrats or Republicans question the integrity of our party, we can say, “Oh yeah? Well, your mascot is a two-dimensional elephant, and your mascot is a two-dimensional ass, but ours is a Patriotic Eagle in sunglasses and a bandana that looks like an American flag. Plus, under his wings he has heat-seeking missile launchers.”
Here are the three major political mascots and their corresponding badass ratings:
Why would you start a new political party?
A I’ll answer your question with a question. If two bands you hated, Staind and Five for Fighting for example, announced that they were both firing their lead singers, Aaron Lewis and John Ondrasik respectively, and they were hiring new lead singers and going on a two-year tour together, would you care?
Of course not.
A What if you liked the new lead singers – let’s say Staind hires Justin Timberlake and Five for Fighting signs Eddie Vedder – would that make a difference?
Doubtful. Because it’s still Staind and Five for Fighting. I’d be curious to see what would happen, interested to see if the new lead singers could actually make me like those two bands, and baffled as to why they were going on tour together, but I don’t think I’d buy tickets to a concert or anything.
A Exactly.
Exactly what?
A Well, that’s how I feel about the 2008 Presidential election. It’s two bands I don’t really like with new lead singers going on tour together. So I’m starting a new band.
The Patriotic Eagle party will appeal to the following people:
- Those who are fed up with the current political disaster.
- Those who are young, and like young stuff.
- Those who don’t enjoy the music of John Mellencamp.
- Those who like cool T-shirts.
- Those who put style before substance.
- Those who put substance before style.
- Those who put partying before everything else.
- Those who don’t like bad haircuts or pant-suits
- Those who are ready to put the “ACT” back in “ACTivism”and “ACTion” and “tACTful pterodACTyl"(an ancestor of the Patriotic Eagle)
The Patriotic Eagles will stand for:
– We’ll apply it to everything.
– We will not lie. Sometimes we will say, “No comment. That’s too personal.” But other times we will say, “Yeah, some of us smoked pot. Big deal. It should probably be legal anyway.” We will never say – just in the interest of sounding hipper – that we were against a war from the get-go when we were really for the war from the get-go.
– We will not ignore young people just because they don’t vote. We will understand that young people will vote as soon as they are presented with a cool, interesting, awesome party and candidate.
– The Patriotic Eagles will have a groundbreaking and important message, but it won’t be heard unless we package it in shiny wrapping paper. Our candidates will be funny, our viral advertisements will be like really good action movies starring The Rock, and we will sell a lot of cool merchandise, like aviator sunglasses with eagle beak and American flag headband attached.
It won’t matter if you were previously a Republican or Democrat. We’ll take all comers.
Whether you consider yourself a fiscal liberal or a fiscal conservative – that won’t be relevant either. We’ll spend way less than either the Democrats or Republicans because we won’t fight wars for no reason, we’ll stop earmarking millions of dollars to build maple syrup museums for Vermont senators, we’ll refuse to borrow billions of dollars from China, and we’ll insist on spending less money than we earn. We’ll even try to pay off that colossal black AmEx bill (eventually).
Here are some rules the Patriotic Eagles will live by:
Campaign Finance Reform is a huge deal. We won’t quit our fight to make elections publicly funded until thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners don’t exist anymore. We’re going to spend less time talking to rich people and more time talking to poor people. We’ll also spend less time golfing.
We won’t let a lobbyist buy us lunch unless we can bring a homeless person, too. And the rule at lunch is that the homeless person determines the topics of conversation, not the lobbyist.
We will mind our own business sometimes, even if someone’s doing something we don’t really approve of. Nobody thinks abortion is awesome, but a woman’s right to choose is important, so we’ll let her do what she wants with her body. Gay people are people, too, so we’ll let them get married.
We will never try to get reelected. Sure, we’ll run, but we won’t do anything in the first term that would help us win a second term. If we’re a really good guy, a “straight shooter,” and we don’t like the President, we won’t campaign for him just so we can win the party’s presidential nomination four years later.
We will only wear a suit when we absolutely have to. These occasions should be limited to funerals and debates (but showing up to the podium in a skin-tight ski suit would be encouraged because our suit would remind people that global warming could make it harder to go skiing in Vail twenty years from now.)
The environment is an obvious problem. So we’ll stop beating around the forest and actually pass laws that go into effect now, not later or never.
We will start taking the UN seriously instead of treating it like a little step-brother who has to be all-time center in a game of touch football. If the UN is bigger and more important, it can enforce the law of the universe, and we won’t get blamed for everything, which will make terrorists less likely to attack us.
We won’t fight a war unless we really have to. This is so our young people don’t have to die or get seriously injured, and also, so the world isn’t pissed off at us all the time.
Young people don’t have issues. Or they do. They just don’t realize it yet. Prescription drugs aren’t that relevant, but health care is, the economy is (a good economy means we get to shop more), social security will be (when we retire and don’t have any money and have to stay in Minnesota every winter instead of buying a house in Florida), and the war in Iraq certainly should be (those are our peers that are fighting and dying over there, after all.)
So how do we convince young people to care about these issues? We start an awesome new political party. We make politics fun again, even though they never were in the first place.
We take flight, albeit with more effort than usual because we have missile launchers attached to our wings, as the Patriotic Eagles.
To join the facebook group, go here.
previous column next column back to archives
adam@theadamwhite.com |
