Ian

“There’s always money in the banana stand,” Pop-Pop used to say. His sage advice stuck with me during the years the banana stand grew like wildfire, fueled by consumers’ insatiable appetites for frozen, oblong treats and Pop-Pop’s money laundering. His wisdom stuck with me when the banana stand burned, fueled by hastily hidden and highly flammable legal tender. And his wisdom lives in me today, guiding my stewardship of a global empire of wildly improbable, not to mention unprofitable, banana stands in far flung locales like Panama, Moscow, Scotland and Kiev.

Yes, although these banana stands are black holes for local currency, revenue-producing marketing deals mint mountains of cash for my web of enterprises. Every time my name and face are slapped on another Tiki hut staffed by teenage contractors hired by licensees, my banana stand empire shifts into a higher gear, sluicing dollars, euros and rubles through hundreds of interconnected offshore companies. It creates a lot of wealth, believe me.

Banana stand brand licensing and merch, as well as my star turn on the CW Network’s reality show “Top Banana” have made me a billionaire. Modesty prevents me from saying how many billions, but there are a lot. Many, many billions that I have had to protect through legally-dubious, one-sided agreements with a long list of ex-wives, bastard kids, hookers and mistresses.

Normally, I would let my billions speak for themselves, but news vultures have been flooding the zone with stories about me, the banana stand empire, and my considerable wealth. Based on dubious sources like public records and government documents, it is alleged that bad things were done. I’ll counter that they weren’t, or in the worst case, mistakes were made.

So I am setting the record straight on a number of points.

First, I am a billionaire. Would I say I’m a billionaire if there weren’t millions of banana stand customers who line up each day to attest to my wealth, genius and handsomeness?

Second, allegations about my paltry contributions to the US Treasury are false. The best taxes are no taxes, any taxes make my stomach hurt, and I have a perpetual stomach ache and uncontrollable flatulence every day. So I must pay a lot of taxes!

Third, I’m personally hurt that nasty people on the Internet say I’m a bad businessman. I’m a very, very good businessman and it’s only natural that when you’re trying to keep a thousand balls in the air–each of those balls representing an obscure LLC that serves as a financial conduit for ever-larger corporations’ cash flows–one of those balls, like a banana stand-themed casino, will eventually fall to the ground and take down a local economy. That’s not my fault.

Finally, it is not true that the banana stand is a house of cards backed by unknown actors who hold a fiscal sword of Damocles over my head, and that my only way out of financial ruin is to co-opt the operations of a good sized government and start squeezing ’em for cash. No, this is not true at all, but it’s an excellent idea.

Pandemic Journal was born during the halcyon years when politicians didn’t mess with those of us who purchased ink by the barrel, and readers had to put pen to paper to tell us what was on their tiny minds. The Internet may have turned this all bass-ackwards, but believe it or not we still have readers who like to perambulate to the end of the driveway or post office to retrieve the words they’ll sit down to consume with a Scotch chaser.

Six of them, in fact. I know their names, each and every one of them, and I’ll be damned if they don’t keep re-upping their print subscriptions just to piss me off.

But times are changing and so is the manner in which each weekly copy of Pandemic Journal will be conveyed to these Luddite dead-enders.

You’ve probably heard that the US Post Office is evolving – similar to the way your neighborhood ice cream shop evolved into offering a subscription model where the only flavors are Shit and Death. We’ve gotten a memo outlining how the new order will affect subscription delivery, and for the six (or maybe five, because Ted has been knocking on death’s door for a while now) readers who like to stain their hands with ink, I’ll offer an update.

Beginning this week, each print issue of Pandemic Journal will be one page, full of four letter words, stuffed in the smallest envelope we can find. We will post these envelopes each Monday for delivery at some random date in the future. Or never.

The fine people at the USPS tell me that each issue will now follow this route, on the way to subscribers’ doors:

A man driving a red, white and blue truck will pointedly ignore your issues for a minimum of five business days. Those that don’t end up behind industrial shelving will eventually be shoved into bins, loaded on the truck and dropped off at a multipurpose processing center, where mail goes for sorting and chickens go to be parted out for McNuggets. A woman named Cheryl may take one or more of your issues home to read.

If the processing center doesn’t burn down due to the historical neglect of routine maintenance, chicken-slime coated issues will be placed in a briefcase and hand-carried to randomly selected fields, where contractors selected for being the lowest bidders will send (via hot air balloon, I think) our carefully crafted prose in the general direction of our subscribers.

Schoolchildren across the nation will eventually find these issues, emblazoned with a notice of reward for swift return, spread across balloon wreckage sites. We will receive these returned issues via FedEx.

Finally, a representative of Pandemic Journal will call each subscriber with a delivery confirmation.

We hope that our six print subscribers will appreciate this enhanced service. In order to support this improved delivery initiative, we will raise the print subscription price by a modest amount – roughly 948% per annum. You’re welcome.

Dear reader, as the publisher of Pandemic Journal, America’s leading record of social commentary, I keep an ear to the ground for rumblings of change in how my fellow citizens digest their news. I’ve watched with no small amount of interest the growing trend of news and information whose genesis is whimsical ideas, magical thinking or misinterpretation of third-grade science. My immediate instinct was to monetize this nonsense.

My god, I thought, it’s not enough to simply amplify the ravings of people whose idea of scholarly accomplishment is skimming Facebook Groups while sitting on the crapper. There’s a greater opportunity, and that is to manufacture knowledge.

That’s why I immediately fired my hotshot team of editors, tore down the walls of our office to create a bullpen, and populated it with an army of writers whose only credentials are cocksure confidence and an attraction to the mildly plausible. I have fueled these drones with black market hydroxychloroquine and am paying them by the eyeball to saturate American culture with knowledge about every subject under the sun.

There is almost no beat we don’t cover. Astrophysics and celebrity marriages are the province of writers 86-133 (in this brave new world of information, bylines no longer matter); 22-76 will tell you everything you want to know about NASCAR, cat food and venomous insects. The breadth of our coverage is almost as wide as the world itself. The only subject beyond our grasp is vaccinations, as Jenny McCarthy and Charlie Sheen have this covered and have explicitly warned us to back off. However, we share one thing in common: Editorial standards that require only that enough people believe us to pay the bills.

So get ready, America. We’re turning up the news to eleven!

There are two facts that protestors in this otherwise quiet neighborhood choose to overlook: Firstly, when our family purchased our three bedroom/2.5 bath ranch in Siesta Acres, there was nothing in the HOA covenants to prevent us from breeding a series of increasingly unhinged and dangerous Dobermans. Secondly, the warning signs (“Walk Slowly and Do Not Turn Your Back on Our Dogs”) that we stapled to front doors on our street were not in jest.

We issued reasonable warnings about the consequences of checking one’s mail, going for a walk or climbing into a car without looking around first, but here we are. Besieged by a savage mob who mistake our love for our now-deceased pet with the memorialization of its habit of stalking and taking down – eventually for good – our neighbor’s 88 year-old Nana.

Yes, there is no doubt that Frank, our beloved dog, was responsible for the demise of Martha. She was old and didn’t put up much of a fight which tells us her time was running short, and though we paid our debt to society we still maintain that Frank was just doing what came naturally and was to his core a very, very good boy.

That’s why we erected a bronze statue of Frank in our front yard. The artist depicted him in his final moments, a powerful paw against Martha’s throat and a police officer drawing his service revolver. It was, to all of us who mourn Frank, a solemn reminder of his tragic end. We hoped that its placement, facing Martha’s grandson’s front door, would be a symbol of our shared grief.

I’ll admit I probably got that wrong.

Each morning the greatgrandkids left the house, sobbing most terribly. Serious sideeye and a restraining order told the rest of the tale.

But Frank’s memory deserves to live on and we refuse to remove his monument. Not even when all our neighbors have shunned us, the HOA has issued a notice of violations, and the local constabulary has said, “You’re on your own with this one, buddy.”

But if we have to stand alone, alone we will stand. Frank is part of our heritage, and easily-triggered survivors don’t get to write history. Unless the HOA makes good on its threat to fine us, Frank’s monument isn’t going anywhere.

I have been inundated with emails and letters from readers who are incensed with our editorial staff’s decision to green-light publication of last week’s editorial “Kill ‘Em All and Let God Sort ‘Em Out.” Most of you who have taken time to write have demanded we cancel your subscriptions. Others have issued personal, detailed threats. I have read each and every one of your carelessly crafted, semi-literate missives and have a message:

I hear you.

Before I throw my editorial team under the metaphorical bus and selectively demand resignations, I’d like to rationalize their decision making process for you in the hope that firing and mansplaining makes this all go away.

It is true that one of our team’s guiding principles is clicks sell advertising. But this instance raises significant issues about newsworthiness, amplifying a range of voices in the public arena, and the duty of publications to their readers. The intern who accepted, read and published the editorial essay in question, unedited, has promised me that she weighed all of these factors before sharing the unhinged, virulent rant of her white Christo-Nationalist uncle. While I can quibble with her about the propriety of throwing gasoline onto a fiery national debate about civil rights, policing and the role of the military in quelling unrest, I do agree with her that his acid words are newsworthy, seeing that they come from a duly elected county commissioner in the rural wastelands of North Dakota.

The writer is not just a writer, but the representative of the 153 citizens who voted him into office. So when he proposes the military conduct “a mass cleansing of urban streets, so that God can then judge the holy and consign sinners to eternal hell,” he’s not just speaking for himself, but for an underrepresented group of Real Americans.

I grant that his might be a fringe position, but lifting up the voices of marginalized sod busters and cranks is essential to democracy, and I stand by our right to do so even if it means I need to spend my afternoon shopping for a new staff for our editorial department.

Standing on the wrong side of history demands unshakable faith in one’s own morally flexible principles, but that has been my M.O. from the day I plopped my hand on the Bible, crossed my fingers behind my back, and took the oath of office. Today, as I singlehandedly stand astride the highway of human progress and shout, YOU SHALL NOT PASS! I affirm this faith.

You would think that a well-earned beat down by my neighbor and a bout of COVID-19 would cause me to pause for a moment and consider the legacy I wish to leave when I shuffle off this mortal coil. But no, I’m satisfied with being memorialized as a paragon of entitlement and self-regard. Even if my reputation is the equivalent of a floating, rusty dumpster filled with flaming excrement, Americans will look at me, then glance over at my colleague Sen. McConnell, and agree that in comparison I wasn’t so bad after all. I can live with that.

Singlehandedly obstructing bipartisan legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime might seem tone deaf or even evil. I admit it: Lynching is an awful thing. But anyone who might think this legislation is the proper solution is missing the point: I am not pro-lynching. I am opposed to what my daddy would call “half-assed attempts at lynching.”

Are we, as a nation, prepared to charge, convict and sentence rage-filled individuals who never learned to tie a knot, finish a job, or take pride in their work? Bruising someone isn’t the same as lynching them, even if both acts are propelled by the same intentions. But I will not allow our justice system to be clogged by half-wits and haters who can’t be bothered to do the job right.

If my colleagues can guarantee that every miscreant who sees the inside of a jail cell because of this bill is there because he finished the job, I will lift my hold tomorrow. But if we’re talking about sloppy work that yields a few bumps and hurt feelings, then I will stand firm.

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Pandemic Journal invites elected leaders to weigh in on the issues of the day. Look for an editorial from Sen. Thom Tillis as soon as he emerges from hiding.

Learn more about this bill and Sen. Paul’s opposition.