SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins These Things Do Happen I have long maintained that the trouble with the Big Scriptwriter in the Sky is that He is just too fond of irony. Take the Middle East (please)....
...all Bissinger did was report on football...
...Saddam...
...You don't...
...Instead of writing one of those snotty, condescending accounts of our strange redneckian folkways, Bissinger really liked the kids, the coaches, and the townspeople...
...But these things do happen...
...New World Order is a felicitous contribution, don't you think...
...He wrote quite a good one, called Friday Night Lights, about the Permian High Panthers in Odessa...
...Then came the word that while we are about to go to war to protect Our Way of Life, we want someone else to pay for it...
...Bissinger has been getting death threats from Odessa, had to cancel his Texas book tour, and was last heard of hiding in New York...
...run the in-service training programs at this cathouse...
...This presents some tricky questions...
...We are being led by the peerless George Bush, who reverts to his verbless mode under stress...
...Didn't quite reach, "We will fight them on the beaches...," but he's getting there...
...As though the world weren't bad enough, I have to live in Texas, where we've created a new Salman Rushdie...
...How about a madam...
...The Feds fell heir to the Mustang Ranch, Nevada's most famous house of ill repute, through a series of tax liens, and they have to keep it open in hopes of salvaging something for us taxpayers...
...As for me, give me the New World Order or give me death...
...The other day, in an interesting effort to sum it all up, Bush said, "World agreement...
...Kuwait...
...I know Texans consider football one of the world's greatest religions, but this is ridiculous...
...On a more mundane level, the U. S. Government is now running a whorehouse...
...As a lady once said to a man who had murdered both his parents, "Well, these things do happen...
...Are we obliged to advertise for a procurer...
...He wrote about football passion with genuine sympathy—for all the good it did him...
...Why do we always have to defend ourselves against the charge that we might be a bunch of pinheaded, half-civilized dorkerados by acting like a bunch of pin-headed, half-civilized dorkerados...
...Can Jesse Helms apply...
...He also managed to make it clear that he considers our obsession with football a trifle—er, um—excessive...
...One kid's algebra grade became the object of a legal battle that raged across the state, and the state champions were later arrested and convicted on burglary charges...
...Vote no...
...Great...
...We are about to go to war against Saddam Hussein of Iraq, a ruthless dictator, with the help of Hafez al Assad of Syria, a ruthlesser dictator...
...Well, these things do happen...
...It used to be that someone who fought a war on someone else's money was considered a mercenary...
...The President and the Secretary of State have been racing around taking up a collection for this endeavor and getting quite p.o.ed with any ally who fails to fork up his fair share, for all the world like those earnest souls who run the United Way fund drive at the office...
...Salman Rushdie had to commit blasphemy against one of the world's greatest religions to get into his pickle...
...A nice man named Bissinger came down here a few years ago from Philadelphia to write a book about high-school football...
...Let's try it out...
...To what civil-service grade does a hooker belong...
...For a while, we had great hopes for those nice mullahs down the road in Iran...
...Is affirmative action required, and will it include male prostitutes...
...The Panthers have just been knocked out of contention for violating the rule against summer practice, and half the folks in Odessa decided to blame Bissinger for this, although the connection is somewhat obscure...
...It came out a few weeks ago and turned out to be a wonderfully empathetic account of a particularly trying year in Texas schoolboy football...
...Me neither...
...For allies in this endeavor, we have the Saudis, who are more of a corporation than a country, and the aforementioned Assad of Syria, such a lovely man...
...We have a peculiar relationship with Assad: We once bombed another nutty dictator, Colonel Muammar Qadddafi of Libya, in retaliation for a terrorist bombing in Germany that, it turned out later in the cold light of day, was actually committed by Assad's terrorists, not by Qaddafi's...
...Who'll get to Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
Vol. 54 • November 1990 • No. 11
