Order! Order! This meeting of the local chapter of the Flat Earth Society will now come to order. Our mission is to stand firm in the face of common sense and uphold true doctrine no matter how improbable and without concern for the reproaches of critics not as enlightened as us. Our world organization, based in London, has been around since the time of that upstart Italian Galileo, student of the Polish astronomer Copernicus. That in itself ought to argue for our credibility.
First on our agenda tonight is the fictitious Holocaust, said to be perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War. It did not happen. And if it did, it was not as large as people claimed. And if it was, Hitler meant well. A bishop of the St. Pius X Society lent his authority to our counter-claims, even if he was reprimanded by Rome. General Eisenhower foresaw well our objections when he ordered a liberated camp filmed and the people of the towns downwind to march through and see. It was a Potemkin village.
Next, we will treat our 50-year effort to stamp out the nefarious campaign to add fluoride to the drinking water. It will make us a nation of zombies! But at least we will be zombies with good teeth. If the government succeeds, it will be able to gull and con us into all sorts of mischief. You know what we libertarians think of any government.
Third, in order to shore up our libertarian values, according to which government is the problem, not the solution to one, anarchy should become an acceptable word. It is the opposite of government and its insufferable interference in the freedom we Americans cherish. Except of course when a natural disaster like Katrina, or a man-made one like 9/11 comes along. Then it is the duty of government to immediately rescue us and lend every conceivable federal, state, county and municipal help. But just to us. Not to people of other color skin, of course. Anything else is pure Marxism/socialism/communism. Too bad we don’t have them to kick around anymore. We got great mileage out of them.
Finally, there is the myth of global warming. Tree huggers are incessantly trying to get us to shrink our carbon footprint by reducing our consumption of fossil fuels. Why don’t they listen to our expensive TV commercials telling us to contact Washington to let us drill and mine without restraint? If we keep running them the way we did the Harry and Louise plugs back in the 90s when they had that cockamamie idea of providing health insurance for everybody, we’ll sucker them once again. We are far more loyal to Big Oil and to AIG-like insurance moguls than we are to rubes from South Succotash.
How can anyone as smart as the pope, the president and the governor believe that line that we have a finite planet which, if we continue to foul it with greenhouse gases, will force us to put sandbags on the windowsills to keep out the rising tides? That’s for our kids to worry about, not us. True, boatloads of scientists are becoming unanimous against us. But weren’t they the ones who said they could convert iron to gold or who performed lobotomies or who condone human evolution? Shows you what they know.
Just a short time ago our friend the government in Washington meddled again with that cap and trade bill. It was another insidious attempt to limit us Americans and our limitless, gas-guzzling gas-hog horizons. They did a hatchet job on local GOP Rep. Frank LoBiondo who tried to think ahead for the future, a concern to his constituents and everyone else. He had the temerity to support the bill. But he got tattooed in the media as badly as if he had never voted for a conservative position before. He was billed as a sell-out whom they threatened to oust from office the next chance they get. The bill only passed by seven votes in the House, so the attack squad is gunning for all turncoats.
We owe it to our forebears to carry on the thankless task of standing in the face of history and of obstructing shared human knowledge. If it isn’t self-evident even to a child that the earth is flat and that the sun moves around it, coming up in the east and setting in the west, nothing is. Why won’t they listen to us?