The Weekly Screed (#528) 2 Feb. '11

Punxsutawney Phil opens up — wide!
by David Benjamin

GOBBLER’S KNOB, Pa. — “Six more weeks of winter? Are you kiddin’ me? You bet your ass there’s gonna be six more weeks of winter! And six more after that, and then another six, topped off by something that looks more like nuclear winter. Forever, man!”

This, of course, was the statement issued today, Groundhog Day, by Punxsutawney Phil, in front of his Pennsylvania burrow. But this outspoken rodent was not the shy, retiring Phil of years past. The famous groundhog seems to have undergone what can only be described as a personality transplant.

“No, no,” he insisted. “I’m the same old lovable, furry Phil. It’s just that I finally got cable in my burrow. My God! I’m amazed! All the stuff I’ve been missing.”

Indeed, Punxsutawney Phil, long sequestered underground with little knowledge of the outside world, has been glued to the flat-screen Vizio that was provided to him last fall by the grateful town fathers of Punxsutawney.

“Once I got that TV, I couldn’t bring myself to hibernate,” said Phil, as he settled down in front of his burrow, crossed his legs, lit a cigarette and beckoned the media to come closer. “For instance, a black president? Who woulda thunk that, huh? And he’s gone two years now without getting shot by Haley Barbour! The mind boggles, bro! And now, suddenly, this business in Egypt? Man, it’s freakin’ me out. I mean, things look cool in Cairo now, but one spark and whaddya got? Detroit in ’67, right?

“Damn, the only thing that seems normal is the Packers in the Super Bowl!”

Someone tried to ask Phil a question but the celebrated groundhog of Jefferson County just continued to rant.

“Watching cable all the time, you know what really fries my whiskers?” said Phil. “It’s this Glenn Beck character. What hole did he crawl out of? And every stinkin’ day? — the same thing. He predicts the Apocalypse. That, dammit, is my gig! I’m the great forecaster. He’s just a talking head with a jones for used wedding rings.”

David Gregory of NBC asked if Phil had his own the end-of-the-world vision.

“Of course I do,” said Phil. “It’s coming, lickety-split! Thing is — I was pretty much an optimist ‘til I got cable. Now, I can see the handwriting on the LCD. The thing that’s gonna bring civilization as we know it to a grinding halt is blowhards. We got too many of ‘em, starting with this Beck shmuck, and going right on through big fat Rush, Hannity, Chuck Todd, David Brooks, Ed Schultz, Leno, Conan, two guys named Wolf and Wolffe for some reason, Anderson Cooper, O’Reilly, Colbert. Jon Stewart. And some maniac screaming about Oxy-Clean! Not to mention all these hormone-infested raging women, Sarah and that lunatic Michelle and the other Michelle who’s even crazier and Ann, the Nazi blonde, plus big fat Rosie and the lesbian on MSNBC. I mean, what happened while I was sleeping? You lost all control over the broads? What ever happened to barefoot and pregnant? Sheesh!”

Phil couldn’t stop. “And in Congress! Dear God! You got McConnell and McCain, and those crazy-ass know-nothings from Texas, Kentucky, Florida, South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin! Wisconsin? When did Wisconsin go off the deep end? What the hell’s going out there? And wait a minute! The Speaker of the House is named Boehner? What’s his nickname — Stiffy? Does he tell everybody he’s a stand-up guy?”

Phil stopped to snigger obscenely, allowing a reporter to ask him his prediction: “You’re saying that blowhards are going to trigger the End of Days. But how?”

“How?! Look around, doofus,” said Phil not very respectfully. “The blowhards are sucking up all the oxygen and turning it into toxic fumes. Nothing else comes out. I’ve been watching cable for six months and I haven’t heard two people agree on anything. These loudmouths know what they don’t want. They announce who they hate, every minute, every day. They proclaim their greatest fears and their deepest loathing. But I sit there in my burrow and I keep saying, ‘Do you gasbags have any plans? You’re like those poor bastards on the streets in Cairo. You have no idea what comes next!’”

“But they do have plans!” shouted the editor of The Weekly Standard. “They plan to cut taxes — again and again, over and over and over!”

Phil sat back and grinned toothfully. “Exactly,” he said. “That’s what the idiots are gonna do — the only thing they can think of. Cut taxes and cut taxes ‘til there are no taxes, and the world is slowly engulfed by a vast poisonous miasma of inaction, inequality, ignorance, poverty and despair. Which will leave everyone just standing around, like an episode of that zombie show — ‘The Walking Dead?’ Most of you — humans — the normal people, the liberals and moderates and swing voters and Tea Party dupes, all you people with jobs, kids, houses, responsibilities, all you suckers who tuned in and believed that the blowhards were spouting pure all-American gospel? You’ll be the walking dead, all raggedy and dopey with bloodstains on your best shirt and your innards exposed, falling into giant potholes, eating roadkill and killing strangers for a tank of gas. The ones with the best guns, who’ll be hiding behind electric fences in northwoods fortresses — that’ll be the blowhards and their bankers. That’ll the Goldman Sachs crowd and the tycoons from BP and GE and AIG, Intel, Google and Microsoft.

“But, thank goodness,” said Punxsutawney Phil, “I won’t be around for your pathetic, self-imposed Apocalypse. As soon as the TV dies, I’ll just burrow a little deeper and hibernate ‘til all the walking dead turn into the actual dead. I might have to sleep for a hundred years. Afterwards, I foresee a few human survivors, but they’ll be more like us burrow-dwellers, naked, illiterate and pure — digging up roots and devouring grubs.”

One reporter said that Phil’s scenario seemed a little paranoid and far-fetched.

“Far-fetched?” said Phil. “Hey, all I know is what I see on cable. I get all my information in my hole, watching TV and trusting my eyes. All I’m predicting is that the world will end not with a bang, but a brain-fart.

“But hey! You wanna hear paranoid and far-fetched? Tune in to C-Span!”