Al Gore vs Soot – An update

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Written By Norman Liebmann

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Image courtesy of JD Lasica under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Recent polls for the year 2000 presidential election show Al Gore running by substantial margins behind George W. Bush, Elizabeth Dole, and the Tooth Fairy (who may file as a Libertarian.) This has our wooden Vice President sweating splinters and breaking out in knotholes.

Small acts of desperation, over which apparently he has “no controlling legal authority”, have started to assert themselves, such as the bizarre claim with which he has gone public, that he “invented the Internet. Gore received some polite applause and was then asked if he also does card tricks.

The Internet is not his only claim to fame. Gore also bragged it was his invention of the on/off switch that gave Edison the idea for the electric light. The switch was unfortunately ahead of its time. No matter how deftly Al flipped it, the switch wouldn’t work on candles.

Still, Gore believes communication is his “main bag”, even to boasting that he invented Conversation, which would never have happened had he not thought up the word “Hello.” With pride, he points out, before he “originated” the word, a cocktail party had less “sparkle” than an abbey where monks with laryngitis who had taken vows of silence were trying to meditate. (Whether or not Gore invented the word “Hello” is problematical, but his personality certainly added greatly to the popularity of the word
“Goodbye.”) With Gore’s special “gifts”, it will not be long before he announces he has found that long-elusive cure for which there is no known disease. (My, my! – all this scientific “savvy” from a guy who on seeing a chair once asked, “What’s it for?”)

Gore’s capacity for self-appreciation reached ecstasy when he decided he was presidential timber, which confirmed the widely held opinion that he suffers from delusions of adequacy. At the least, Gore’s admiration of himself is a classic case of misplaced affection.

After his claim to the First Trust Deed to the Internet “blew up on the pad”, Gore more or less reconciled himself that claiming he invented the airplane “wouldn’t fly”, and knew a different approach to his election campaign had to be devised.

Looking toward 2000 with apprehension, Gore has been shopping around for “a cause.” The “chil’run” having been unblushingly exploited to exhaustion by the Clintons (and Fagin), Gore needed to come out against something that was “a threat” to the American family. He concluded, as the fireplace is the gathering place of the household, contributes much to their feeling of well-being, and serves as an ingress for Santa Claus (whom Gore is considering as a running mate) he found a convenient enemy of the America family right up the chimney. He decided the Gore Administration would declare a “war against
soot.” (Actually, the idea came to him in California where, while making a speech, a chunk of Los Angeles air got stuck in his throat.)

Gore zeroed in on “soot” as his target of opportunity. What the Carthaginians were to Caesar, the Saracens to the Crusaders, the “commies” to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Dracula to Doctor Von Helsing, plaque to dentists, and ring-around-the-collar to Proctor and Gamble, soot would be to “The Gore Administration.” (Gore briefly considered a war on dandruff, but decided nobody in the Democrat Party had shoulders broad enough to collect a specimen of it.

The Gore Administration plans to establish a National Soot Watch. Where Clinton advocated the V-chip, Gore will propose the S-chip, which will alert people to dirt in the air, not on the Jerry Springer Show where it belongs. He will propose the need for testing by computer (another Gore invention) the nation’s
air quality. (He has determined it will be Al Gore, not Bill Gates, who writes the software program – to be called Microsoot 1.1.)

Gore’s newly appointed Surgeon General will undertake to discredit this vicious substance. The S.G. will disclose, it is not known whether carbon dioxide contains soot or soot contains carbon dioxide, but he will confirm both contain each other – and in substantial amounts. Other alarming facts to be revealed: it’s
estimated during a lifetime the average American breathes in forty tons of soot – the same amount produced by a 1963 Pontiac owned by a Mexican family out on a Sunday drive. Not surprisingly, during a basketball season, four and a half pounds of soot congeals between each player’s toes – and that’s even
if he only gets to sit on the bench.

The Gore Administration will declare soot a controlled substance. The S-G would issue a report denouncing “second-hand air”, and start a campaign to alert Americans “Breathing can be hazardous to your health.” People who breathe “used air” will be required to provide a certificate of health from its previous breather.

As President, Gore will issue an executive order regulating respiration in public places, with restaurants required to make available to customers separate dining areas – Breathing and Non-Breathing.

To dramatize the sooty air threat, Gore will appear on television with a “victim family” whose vacuum cleaner almost died from emphysema, and had to be sent to Arizona for a year (at government expense.) Inevitably, he will resort to Bill Clinton’s favorite political ploy, the safety of the young, but in his customary muddle, Gore will announce, questionable air will not be given to laboratory mice until first tried out on children. Employing the Clinton technique for promoting panic among soccer moms, he will push through Congress The Gore Doctrine, stipulating children, will be required to breath under government supervision until they’re eighteen. It will not be uncommon to hear a mother admonish her young child, “Warren, stop putting that air in your nose. You don’t know where it’s been!”

Gore’s intention will be to make America soot-free – with the possible exception of the soot we import through NAFTA. During his first year in office, Gore anticipates allocating two hundred billion dollars to build air-reclamation facilities. It will set the homeless to picking though people’s garbage cans looking for
recyclable air. In consideration of their need for dignity, these dispossessed unwashed people will no longer be called “homeless”, but designated as official mobile collection points for soot. Gore will also fund a six-week educational soot avoidance program by teaching people how to close a window.

The Gore anti-soot campaign will rescue the tobacco industry from bankruptcy by converting cigarette filter tips for nasal insertion. A Federal inspection program will compel people to go to a Sears Automotive Center twice a year to have a mechanic rotate their nostrils. Bottled air will appear on supermarket shelves with express checkout lanes for ten-gasps-or-less. Customers placing orders in fast-air restaurants will be asked, “Is that to go? Or will you inhale it here?”

Of course, the drug-trade will reorganize itself to distribute the illegal grime. Unscrupulous “pushers” will rip off soot-junkies by selling not real soot but Baggies of black lint. Some “soot-heads” and “carbon-freaks” will pack up their flue paraphernalia and split to Amsterdam where the stuff is legal and “uncut.” (Some people believe Clinton was “on soot” when he raped Juanita Broaddrick. His “spiritual advisor team” has already made the statement, there is nothing in scripture that inveighs against soot, that even soot-abusers can go to Heaven, and whoever Clinton rapes when he’s “strung out” on soot is his
own business.)

But, in the words of the poet, Robbie Burns, “The best laid-plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.” Gore does not understand the mentality of “yuppies”, sometimes called the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Clinton Purposes.) Unlike his VP, Clinton knows that Democrats, like greedy children, are all appetite, particularly when denied something, and leads to phenomena like Prohibition. Inevitably, people will conclude, if Al Gore is against soot there must be something good about it, and
“doing soot” will become “in” among the liberal cognoscenti.

Quickly, forbidden soot will take on the allure of forbidden fruit. Soot will go from an abomination to a buzzword. Soot will take on glamour, cachet, je nais se quoi, pizzazz, and “whatever.” Soot will become “cool.” The “in-crowd” will give up on cocaine and begin snorting soot. Robin Leach will begin a syndicated show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Sooty, and likely, Hugh Hefner will write one of his pompous philosophical disquisitions on the virtues of soot – appropriately in a Playboy issue on nude
breathing.

As the demand for the smudgy stuff escalates, Calvin Klein will put out a line of soot in five designer colors – Basic Black, Midnight Black, Off Black, Navy Black and “Caucus.”

Advertisers will herald the arrival of new “diet-soot”, with only sixty calories, and no cholesterol, welcome news for people on soot-free diets.

The Betty Ford Clinic would be booked up with “soot-heads” in withdrawal. (The real problem is not those who do “recreational” soot, but people who move on to “the hard stuff” – cinders.)

Taiwan will flood the United States with artificial soot. Demand will grow to legalize soot for medical purposes, especially in San Francisco where evidence shows, soot-use prevents baldness in transsexuals.

Mexican restaurants will post signs in their windows that read “Se Habla Soot.”

The cost of soot will skyrocket, and, in the event of a conflagration in the home, the first thing someone will yell is, “Save the fireplace!” Wal-Mart will post record sales to consumers of shlock, by marketing artificial soot for false fireplaces. One company will put Monica Lewinsky’s picture on every package of their soot product called “Ditzy Grit.”

Soot will soon be in short supply, and Archer Daniels Midland will look for a process whereby soot can be extracted from soybeans. Food supplement labels will read, “contains the average daily recommended intake of soot.” Geologists will estimate Texas is sitting on a vast field of soot, and Exxon will drill for it.

Even in Gore’s home state of Tennessee, tobacco growers will take to the streets shouting, “Nicotine is dead! Long live soot!” The ACLU will petition the Supreme Court, claiming there is nothing in the Constitution prohibiting soot.

There is a silver lining for this ricochet of the anti-soot policy of a Gore Administration. This unprecedented demand for this unwholesome schmutz will open new floodgates for government
spending. At no small expense to the taxpayers, those expensive air-filtering facilities will have to retool and become soot-reclamation plants.

If you think this all sounds ridiculous, you’re right – but it doesn’t sound nearly as ridiculous as someone saying – “Al Gore for President.”

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