The Enduring Career of Godzilla

A monster becomes a monster when it transcends the categorizing constraints of binomial nomenclature. When creating a monster, it’s very important to keep this in mind if you want to avoid the kind of political controversy that can ruin a monster’s career.

Because monsters are villains and if a villain can be even remotely identified as being a symbol of any specific genus and/or species, sooner or later some group of noble humans will rise up to defend reputation of that genus and/or species or subcategory within. They will say this genus and/or species or subcategory within is being unfairly demonized because they bear a resemblance the villain. These noble humans will picket and boycott and demonize the demon for being a demonizer.

This is why Godzilla’s career endures. Godzilla is the perfect timeless monster/villain. No one can accuse it of being a maligning stereotype of any living thing because what the hell is it? It’s this lizardish thing. You can’t even tell if it’s a boy or a girl. It can’t be a boy because if it was a boy it would have a wanger about 20 feet long, swinging to and fro with enough force to demolish the Chrysler Building. What a way to go that would be, eh? You’re looking out of your office window in the Chrysler Building and there’s Godzilla’s 20-foot wanger coming straight at you like a wrecking ball.

Godzilla doesn’t have a vagina either. And that’s a shrewd move because if it did have a vagina it would be picketed and boycotted for insinuating that females are demons. So a timeless monster /villain also must have no genitalia or any sexually identifying characteristics. It must be a genderless “it” like Godzilla.

A timeless monster/villain must display no identifying racial or ethnic characteristics either. Godzilla also passes this test. It does not look Jewish or Asian or Anglo or anything other than lizardish.

So thank God for Godzilla. Because humans need monsters/villains. Monsters/villains provide a very therapeutic, tension-relieving service for humans. They give us something to blame. They make evil concrete. And because Godzilla is so uncategorizable, it can be whatever giant threat to civilization the paying customer privately fantasizes it to be. It can be a giant evil republican or a giant evil drag queen or a giant evil Hillary or a giant evil chronically unemployed welfare mooch driving around in a Mercedes. It can even be a giant cripple, although a giant cripple wouldn’t have to stomp a metropolis into kindling in order to instill terror into ordinary citizens. Fear of cripples is more of an existential fear. Cripples don’t have to do anything to scare people. We just have to be. We are symbols of vulnerability and nothing sends chills through the ordinary citizens more than that. So a giant cripple would only have to sit there looming on the horizon, an ever-present buzzkill blotting out the sun. This would be provocation enough for NATO to nuke the giant cripple.

And in the end, when Godzilla is vanquished, every paying customer of every political or sexual or ethnic persuasion can stand and cheer side by side because whatever evil they perceive Godzilla to be has also been vanquished! But deep in our hearts we know it’s not the end. We know there will surely be a remake.

Someday soon though somebody may picket and boycott Godzilla. Because Godzilla is decidedly reptilian. And there are lots of people who think reptiles get a lot of undeserved shitty press. They say snakes are so smart that they can do calculus and shit. They say iguanas are so kind and gentle they can babysit your kids. So then Godzilla will receive a radical makeover to the point where it will lose all its meaning.


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A Service Dog in Action

I have to admit that I’m skeptical when I see a wheelchair cripple with a service dog. I can certainly understand what dogs do for blind people. Dogs perform essential services that help blind people live a high quality of life, like making sure they don’t get hit by a bus.

But when I see a cripple in a wheelchair with a service dog, I often ask that cripple what services the dog performs. I ask because often I’d like to be able to assert my crippledness so I can take my two dogs places where no dogs are allowed. But what happens if the proprietor asks me to demonstrate whatever service the dogs perform for me? About the only useful thing they do is clean up after I eat by gobbling up whatever scraps I drop on the floor.

But when I ask wheelchair cripples what their dogs do, I usually get one of two answers. The first answer is something like, “My dog is an emotional support animal. He/she calms me down and makes me happy.” But isn’t that why everybody who has a dog has a dog? So I don’t know if that will wash with most proprietors. Emotional support dog is a redundant term.

Or sometimes wheelchair cripples tell me their service dogs perform heroic feats that make Lassie look like a puss. These wheelchair cripples tell me something like, “My dog knows when I’m about to have a seizure. So he/she knocks me out of my wheelchair and pins me down like a wrestler until it’s over.”

But that wouldn’t work for me either. First off, my dogs are little Chihuahua/dachshunds. It would take about ten of them to pin me down. And if I had a seizure my dogs would probably just freak out and run away. Either that or they’d think it was some fun new game and they’d giddily prance around in circles.

But recently I was with this wheelchair cripple who had a service dog. This guy wore a flannel shirt and he had a round belly and long beard. He was the jovial-lumberjack type. So just as I asked this guy what service his service dog does for him, a woman passed by and said, “Oooh look at that dog. He’s sooooo cuuuute! Can I pet him?” And as the woman pet the dog, the lumberjack cripple shot me a sly look and said, “That’s what my dog does for me.”

Whoa! There you go! His service dog attracts women for him! And hell, my dogs can perform that service easy. They do it every day. If a proprietor insists that my dogs demonstrate the service they perform, it’ll be just a matter of minutes before a woman comes by and says, “Oooh look at those dogs! They’re sooooo cuuuute! Can I pet them?”

And the proprietor would have to let me in. Because who can deny that this is an essential service that helps cripples (or anybody else) live a high quality of life?

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I Don’t Want to be Blamed for the Unsustainable Trajectory of America’s Entitlements.

Soon you might see a picture of me out there on the internet where I’m wrapped up in bandages like a mummy and I’m in traction. Don’t be alarmed. I’m just trying to cover my ass. I don’t want to be blamed for the unsustainable trajectory of America’s entitlements.

Because apparently there is this shadowy entity known as the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Energy Policy, Health Care & Entitlements. That’s a helluva mouthful, ain’t it? I guess their acronym is HCOGRSEPHCE. But one of the duties of HCOGRSEPHCE, according to its mission statement, is “oversight of the … issues pertaining to the unsustainable trajectory of America’s entitlements, including Medicare, Medicaid and federal disability programs.” So that means part of their jobs is to root out scammers who are trying to score free checks by pretending to be crippled.

Well hell, if HCOGRSEPHCE wants to find fake cripples, they ought to investigate those television commercials of ambulance-chaser lawyers. Notice how the cripples in those commercials never look the least bit crippled. But yet they brag about the fat settlements they got. You never see a real cripple in a wheelchair in those commercials or even a cripple missing a limb. I bet if HCOGRSEPHCE looked into it, they’d find that the cripples in those commercials are really just actors!

But instead, some members of the subcommittee have put forth legislation that would allow Social Security employees to examine social media profiles of those applying for or receiving cripple benefits to help determine whether they are really crippled.

Yikes!

I know where they got that idea. There were those big headlines a few months back about the New York City cops and firefighters who were arrested and charged with pretending to be emotionally crippled by the 9/11 attacks so that they could collect Social Security checks. And part of the evidence against one of them was a Facebook photo of him giving the finger while riding a jet ski.

And I thought oh hell! I never suspected that giving the finger could be used as evidence that you’re not crippled, unless you claim that what qualifies you as crippled is that you’re missing your middle finger.

I’m really screwed now! And I never suspected that being out doing something fun could also be used to cast doubt upon the authenticity of one’s crippledness.

So I can’t be too careful. Not with HCOGRSEPHCE standing guard. I’ve got to destroy all potentially incriminating pictures of me enjoying myself or flipping the bird, just in case we’re reverting back to the old fashioned calculation for determining crippledness: Crippled = homebound + miserable. The mummy in traction photo will serve as my headshot and my profile picture and the official record of my state of being. I don’t want there to be any public pictures of me doing anything Tiny Tim wouldn’t do.

Smart Ass Cripple’s Image Laundry

Often people come up to me on the street and they say, “Hey Smart Ass Cripple, do you have any regrets about being a poster child?” And my answer is oh hell yeah!

In retrospect, I realize now that I should have never consented to being paraded around as a symbol of urgent crisis without first hiring an agent. With a high-powered agent, I could have made a bundle!

I was young at the time, like still in single digits, so I had no idea that my boney little crippled ass was sitting on a goldmine. The precious commodity I possessed was my immense adorability. It was worth so much and I just gave it away, dammit! The cripple charity could never have raised anywhere near as much without the help of my adorability. So I should have had an agent to demand my cut. I’m well aware of the law of supply and demand. I know that if I withheld my adorability, some scab poster cripple may well have crossed my picket line and stolen my spotlight. But maybe not, because my crippled sister and I were a poster child team. We were a one-two punch of adorability, enough to intoxicate even the most calloused libertarian into opening his/her wallet. If my sister and I held out together, we could have had a huge payday.

Fifty years later I’m still adorable, but in much more subtle ways. It’s not the kind of adorability I can parlay into a lucrative career. But I have faith that I can still cash in on my crippledness. My spirit is buoyed every time someone famous says something insulting about gay people or women or Native Americans or whomever and it stirs media outrage. I know that sooner or later someone famous will say something that insults cripples. It’s happened before. When Rahm Emanuel was White House chief of staff, he got in trouble when it was reported that he referred to some democrats who disagreed with him as “fucking retarded.”

So Rahm did as all offending parties in this situation do. He set out in search of members of the offended party, which in this case was cripples, to buddy up with. It’s the same reason republicans show up at Martin Luther King events. I swear if I organized a Martin Luther King event I would make republicans pay a fortune to attend. Because here they are wanting to disassociate themselves from all things racist and bigoted, but they also want to continue to be republicans. That’s an awful lot to ask for, but okay. We can play along. But it will cost you a fortune.

So I’m excited to announce that Smart Ass Cripple’s Image Laundry is now open for business! The next time a famous person insults cripples, send them my way. I’ll buddy up with them for a photo op and clean their image up reeeeeeeal good. If need be, I’ll even subcontract a wide variety of other cripples to join in.

I’ll charge a bundle because that type of redemption is invaluable. It’s almost as valuable as my long-lost adorability.

Helen Keller Admiration

On the one hand there’s the kind of admiration I will refer to as superstar quarterback admiration. On the other hand there’s the kind of admiration I will refer to as Helen Keller admiration.

And make no mistake, there’s a shitload of Helen Keller admiration out there. Gallup took a poll to determine the most admired people of the 20th Century and Helen Keller came in fifth, just ahead of FDR.

But still, Helen Keller admiration just doesn’t stack up when measured against superstar quarterback admiration. Ask yourself this: Does anyone want to be that superstar quarterback they admire so much? And the answers you get to choose from are a) yes b) yes c) yes d) all of the above. Tons of children dress up like that superstar quarterback and pretend to be him. So do tons of adults. But even the people who most deeply admire Helen Keller don’t say to themselves, “Boy, I sure hope someday I’ll be deaf and blind like her.” Children don’t plug up their ears and wear blindfolds and pretend to be Helen Keller. Adults never dress up like Helen Keller, except maybe as part of some kinky sex fantasy role-playing game. But for our purposes today, that doesn’t count.

On the third hand, there’s the kind of admiration I will refer to as war hero admiration. War hero admiration falls somewhere between superstar quarterback admiration and Helen Keller admiration. People who admire war heroes would like to live the life a war hero lives, but only up to a certain point. Like for instance, there’s a city park here in Chicago that’s named after a war hero. This guy became a war hero when he sacrificed his life to save the platoon by throwing himself on a live hand grenade. Now let’s all admit that we all have something deep inside of us that would love to have a city park named in our honor. But if we have to throw ourselves on a live hand grenade in order to earn that status, we don’t want it that bad. We’ll continue living our ordinary, unheroic lives. Thanks anyway though.

When it comes to war hero admiration, we’d all love to live the hero part of their lives, if we could somehow bypass the war part. Still, that’s more than we can say for Helen Keller admiration. Is admiration even the right word for how humans today feel about Helen Keller? Can we call it admiration when our warm regard for someone is surpassed only by our gratitude that we are not them? I don’t know. I’ll leave that for the great philosophers to decide.

Kids Can Run Bases After Every Sunday Game at Wrigley

And that applies to ANY kid under 15. ANY kid at all.

Kids today are so spoiled. In my day, you had to be a “special” kid like me before the adults would even consider letting you do something as wildly frivolous as running the bases after a game at Wrigley. “Special” kids were the ones who sometimes got “special” treatment, sort of like Make-a-Wish kids.

It never occurred to me to put running the bases after a game at Wrigley on my “special” kid bucket list. It would have been considered a mighty tall order at the time. But maybe the Kiwanis or someone might have arranged it. If so it would have been me, just me, out there pushing my wheelchair around the diamond. Nobody else but me! Or maybe the players would take turns pushing my chair like a relay race. And all the plain old unspecial kids would feel jealous as hell!

But now, in this new era of permissiveness, pretty much any kid can run the bases. All they have to do is show up. And that ups the ante for “special” kids of the 21st Century. If they want to maintain their elevated “special” status, they have to get really creative with their bucket lists. They have to demand an exclusive day at Disneyland where no one is allowed in except them and their VIP entourage. And this “special” day must include a private brunch with Goofy.

It used to be, when I was a criplet, that the purpose of childhood was to prepare children for the misery of adulthood. Thus, all the big obligatory things kids had to do, like going to school and church, had to feel like punishment. In church, the adults lined kids up to eat a piece of our Lord and Savior. And we received a communion wafer that tasted like notebook paper. But why couldn’t the wafers taste like pizza or Oreos or any number of yummy treats? Surely the technology existed to make that happen. It would have given kids something about going to church to look forward to. We could compare notes after communion: “I got pizza! What did you get?” We’d turn it into a competition. You know how kids are about stuff like that. Be the first one to taste all 31 communion wafer flavors! Make a checklist! Kids would have raced each other to church every day to receive communion.

But the adults seemed to believe that if going to school or church was at all satisfying or pleasurable, it would be a grave disservice to the children in their charge. Because if children expected going to church or school to be in some small way pleasurable and satisfying, then, as adults, they might expect going to work to be in some small way pleasurable and satisfying. And that would be setting these children up for profound disappointment.

But when it came to “special” kids, the adults in charge sometimes relaxed and arranged for us to do something fun just for the pure sake of having fun. Maybe they figured we weren’t going to make it to adulthood anyway so there wasn’t any risk that frolicking with frivolity would leave us scarred.

I guess nowadays all kids are automatically granted the status of “special” without even earning it by being crippled. I fear this inevitably means that soon criplets will no longer experience the joy of making all the plain old unspecial kids feel jealous as hell.


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Cripple Quotient

There are two kinds of cripples: There are those whose degree of crippledness is quantifiable and then there are all the rest of us.

They best example of quantifiable cripples are those we used to refer to with a word that begins with the letter “r." It is no longer acceptable to use that word under any circumstances, except possibly when referring to materials that are almost, but not completely, fireproof. This group of people is now called ID, which stands for intellectually disabled. That doesn’t sound a whole lot better than “r” but that’s the best we’ve got for now.

Anyway, ID people are very quantifiable. We give them a test to determine their Intelligence Quotient. And then we give them a number which tells everyone exactly how ID each ID person is. This comes in very handy in many ways, especially in helping state governments determine which ID people should qualify to receive certain state services. For instance, the state of Florida uses IQ scores to decide which ID people who commit murder are eligible to be executed by lethal injection. If your IQ is above 70, you’re toast. Currently, in the case of Hall v. Florida, the state is fighting in the U.S. Supreme Court for its right to execute a convicted murderer with an IQ of 71.

So you see, by being so very quantifiable, ID people make it easier for the rest of us to not judge them based on blanket assumptions of who they are. It helps us understand that not all ID people are the same. And isn’t that what all cripples want? We want to be judged not by perceptions about our crippling conditions but by our individual competencies and aptitudes.

The quickest way to facilitate that level of understanding is to quantify it, to create a scale that gives our level of physical crippledness a numeric value. This would give those who are baffled by us a scorecard, if you will, with which to tell us apart. Like for instance, take me. Suppose someone sees me and they don’t know what the hell to make of me. They can see I’m in a wheelchair, so should they speak loud when they talk to me? Or should they speak to me at all? Should they only address the walking person with me, aka my nurse?

A lot of this confusion could be alleviated if there was a standardized physical incompetency test like the IQ test through which the currently unquantifiable crippledness of cripples like me could be quantified. This would determine our Cripple Quotient or CQ. Then, by knowing my CQ score, even a complete stranger would have a much better idea of what I can and can’t do and where I fall on the vast cripple spectrum. Never again will they have to ask themselves questions like, “I wonder if he can have sex?”Having sex would be part of every adult CQ exam and our performance in this area would factor heavily into the calculation of our CQ score.

Now I know you’re asking what good having a CQ score would be if no one else knows what it is. Well you see, when a cripple obtains a CQ score they would then have to wear a football jersey at all times and the number on that jersey is their CQ score.

Once we figure out how to quantify all cripples, uncrippled people won’t be nearly so intimidated by the task of figuring out what we’re all about. They won’t always have to get to know us the old fashioned way, by hanging out with us and talking to us and having sex with us. Who’s got time for that?