I had the harmless, innocent column below already written and ready to go when Faisal Shahzad— the man who placed a car filled with explosives in Times Square, so he could kill hundreds of innocent people—got caught.
So I decided to ask this question: Who, out there, is against waterboarding this bastard until he gives up the rest of the terrorists in his group? If you are, please write to this paper and let your feelings be known. What’s more, who is against giving him the death sentence for treason? (He is a naturalized U.S. citizen and therefore a traitor.) How fast can we put a bullet into his head?
That said, let us all return to the world of sweetness and light.
So I recently tried to talk a good friend of mine and his wife out of taking their three children, ages 2, 4 and 8, to Disney World. Those of you who have traveled to Disney World with children that age know our nation’s insane asylums are filled with people who, using my friend as a criteria, feel they should be released because they have never done anything that crazy.
I’ve been there. A thousand years ago, my wife, the beautiful Judy Licht, and I traveled 3,000 miles with our daughter Jessie, then a 3-year-old, to Disneyland to see “Mickey.” We were less than 20 feet inside the Disney property when three characters, one dressed like Pluto, along with one dyspeptic-looking and another dopey-looking dwarf, rushed up and hugged my daughter. She started to hysterically scream, thinking she was being attacked by a 9-foot-tall dog and two 4-foot dwarfs with giant heads. She didn’t stop crying for hours. The only character who calmed her down was an attractive young blond woman in a pink dress who was billed as Cinderella. It was quite a sight: There was Cinderella kneeling down so that she was eye level with about eight little kids who were gazing at her in awe.
There were the children’s mothers, misty-eyed at their kids’ sense of innocence and wonder. There were the kids’ fathers, standing on their toes to better look down the front of Cinderella’s dress. Forget men are from Mars, women are from Venus; this, I thought, is the difference between men and women. I remember feeling like a low-life standing there, with the other fathers, on our toes trying to get a look at Cinderella’s cleavage. I don’t know about the other men, but I hated myself. For crying out loud, I was lusting after Cinderella! What was next for me, Snow White?
Of course my daughter was too young to go on any ride except something called the “Pink Teacup.” I had to ride with her over and over, spinning around until I almost threw up the corn dogs, frozen bananas and icky green drink that I had eaten because it was the stuff that passed as food in Disneyland in those days.
Did I learn my lesson that trip? Of course not: A few years later, I carried my sleeping 4-year-old son on my back for hours at Epcot Center in Florida. After a while, he felt like he weighed 200 pounds. This may give me a heart attack, I thought to myself. Then I started wondering if the EMS guys, who were going to have to shock my heart back into rhythm, would arrive with paddles that had Disney characters painted on them.
I imagined the EMS workers talking over my exhausted, lifeless body. “He’s still not stirring. Hit him with the Goofy paddle and I’ll hit him with a Minnie and Mickey paddle. Stand clear!” For me, Epcot was the equivalent of the Bataan Death March of amusement parks.
But I have always had a problem with Walt Disney. Along with the fact he was a notorious anti-Semite, he killed off Bambi’s mother and put Dumbo’s mother in jail. Those two acts have made more shrinks wealthy than any other acts in the history of mankind.
I blame all of my odd behavior on the death of Bambi’s mother. Now, I know that for me, no shrink has ever pieced it together and said, “Hmmmmmmmm. When did you first start worrying that your mother was going to be shot by a hunter, Mr. Della Femina?” But the fact is every child (and that, dear reader, includes you and me) has been traumatized by what that nasty old bastard Disney passed off as entertainment. Dwarfs … witches … evil stepmothers … poisoned apples … talking rodents …
I don’t even want to speculate what “kill them then eat them” mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer was thinking when, as a small child, he sat in a darkened theater and he watched the scene where the Huntsman pretended to deliver Snow White’s “heart” to her evil stepmother. Perhaps he thought, “Oh, that looks like it would be so much more delicious than this popcorn, Raisinettes, Snickers and other junk I’m stuffing into my face.”
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