07 May Al Martinez: In Your Face

When I grow up I want to be a political commentator like Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann and shout in everyone’s face.

I will holler at the masses from television and radio stations and from street corners. I will yell at passing buses and taxis and go down into the subway tunnels and bellow at the trains that thunder by.

And then when I go home at night I will holler at my wife and children and the dog if we have one, and the cat and the bird.

At dinner I will holler at the pork chops on my plate and after dinner the dish washer, the stereo, the TV set, the door, the windows, the sink and the toilet.

In the morning I will practice hollering in the shower, savoring the resonance of my stentorian condemnations and the naked beauty of my manhood.

I will scream at the world until my eyes bug out and my face turns red, calling whoever is president at the time a liar, an adulterer, a thief and a homosexual ballet dancer seen doing a pas de deux in the Oval Office.

I will be so famous that those who love what I say will build shrines to me and form fan clubs. The pathetic scum who don’t agree with me will spray obscene graffiti on the concrete barricades surrounding the White House and scream in hatred and frustration, which will make me even more famous.

I will appear on the covers of Time and Newsweek in full-face shots with my mouth wide open, and in a New Yorker caricature as a frog with a huge mouth and little tiny legs, croaking at the tadpoles and the passing swamp flies.

The London Times will call me The Most Hated Man in America, and Der Spiegel will compare me to both Hitler and Mussolini. My shouting will be translated into 26 major languages around the world and be sold on compact discs for families to hear as they gather for either Sunday picnics or evening prayers.

Eventually I will get too big for simple political reporting and move into sports commentating and be hailed as the new, less sedate John Madden. I will holler at the quarterbacks and goalies, the forwards and the tennis stars, the golfers and the car racers. I will call them wimps and cross-dressers and accuse them of slow dancing nude in the locker rooms.

Fans will call me the Great White Shark and come to sports encounters wearing shark-head hats with wide open mouths and teeth that gleam in the sun. I will be a man-eater and a woman-eater, too, and terrify little children who come trick or treating on Halloween.

At the height of my fame my listeners throughout the world will number in the millions, and I will enjoy the animosity and outright hatred of working stiffs and financiers alike. They will pay me huge sums to appear at their union halls and political forums to yell at them, and afterward they’ll ask for my autograph and a personal invective to take home. I will call the women ugly dikes and the men pussies and they will thank me profusely for it.

But then I will notice one day that I am sinking slightly in the polls and wonder why. I will decide to tune in to my TV competitors, especially one who doesn’t holler at all, the poor fool.

He looks like Walter Cronkite and sounds like Edward R. Murrow and never raises his voice. I will notice that he doesn’t rant and doesn’t rave and you can barely see his teeth or his tongue because a person doesn’t have to open his mouth wide to speak if he isn’t yelling.

I will have to stop hollering and listen in order to hear what the guy is saying and be amazed that he is telling the truth very calmly and with great dignity, commenting on the events of the day that are taking place in our nation and in our world.

On my next TV show I will call him a dirty liberal traitor in a voice meant to be heard in every room of the house and up through the chimney and out any open windows. I will mock him and blow sarcastic kisses and at the end of the show turn my back to the camera, lower my pants and moon him.

It will be a seminal moment in American television that catapults me on to a plane beyond any commentator in history, the first to flash his true nature on the air, but viewers will be offended and many outraged by the scene, and newspaper editorial writers will say I am what I displayed and begin calling my network CBAss.

It will be downhill from that point on until I end up selling beer and red hots in the stands at sporting events. Every once in a while I will be recognized and affix my autograph on pictures of my behind and remember the good old days when all you had to do to get noticed was to yell.

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