George Bush and the Hollow Promise of Sea Monkeys

The other day I was listening to a George Bush news clip on CNN and oddly enough it got me thinking about ‘Sea Monkeys.’ The connection wasn’t formed by anything he actually said. As a matter of fact he was talking about some proposed military action in Afghanistan that I mistakenly thought Wolf Blitzer was referring to as ‘Operation Mount N’ Thrust’ … I was feeding my baby at the time and he was fussy, so I hope you will excuse my mistaking Wolf’s mentioning of ‘Operation Mountain Thrust’ as some sort of metaphorical title for a plan intended to really give it to Osama.

So anyways, as I was puzzling over the homoerotic overtones of this latest proposed military campaign I finally noticed what so many of my friends have been referring to as president Bushes ‘Monkey Face.’ Up until this moment I had just dismissed this observation as a cheap shot from those campers who pitch their tents on the left most site of the political park. But there it was. He had paused to wrestle with what clearly must have been some challenging concept or nuance, and suddenly we had… instant simian.

Now this observation is absolutely not intended as a cheap shot on my part (I’ll take my cheap shots momentarily). Nobody truly has any idea how stupid we each look to everybody else the majority of the time. Let’s face it, women around the world will tell you that most guys look a lot like Goofy when we hit the moment of ‘intimate arrival.’ So as far as I’m concerned, the commander in chief is free to pull as many Bonzo faces as he wishes whenever and wherever he ever so pleases without me having license to pass any sort of simian facially related form of disparaging judgment.

No, what this observation oddly unearthed for me was the sudden memory of the back cover pages of the Marvel Comics magazines from my early youth. The front cover was usually plastered with the Incredible Hulk, Power Man and Iron Fist, or some other combination of tightly clad purveyors of much deserved vigilante justice. But the back pages, now that’s a different story. The back pages had ads for:

• Bigger muscles in 2 WEEKS! Never get sand kicked in your face again…
• Make money and earn prizes by SELLING SEEDS door to door in your neighborhood!

And of course, the popular favorite to grace the back cover…

Adopt your very own family of Sea Monkeys!

Ah, Sea Monkeys… sweet sweet Sea Monkeys. They looked so graceful with their elongated elfin like frames and so endearing with their cute little monkey faces and tiny crowns. They were portrayed on the back cover doing the most fantastic of tricks over chests of sunken treasure amidst a green forest of wafting and inviting kelp.
It wasn’t just an overt promise of hours of entertainment for $4.99 that made them so attractive – it was the implied promise of the ultimate united and happy aquatic family.

But alas, some promises are never meant to be delivered… 6 weeks later what you got in the mail was no happy united marine family, no graceful simian faced aquatic pets. No tiny crowns. What you got through your mail slot was a crumpled packet of brine shrimp eggs…

And this is pretty much how I feel about the Bush and his administration, with his early promises of:

• Being ‘a uniter’ of Americans – and yet Americans couldn’t be much more divided without another civil war on their hands.
• Having ‘clear irrefutable proof’ of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to justify invading another country and getting 10’s of thousands of people killed
• Being a man of the people – unless ‘the people’ is actually a little known piece of slang to refer to the wealthiest 1%.

It was more than just the monkey faces that had helped me draw this connection. The real connector was the harsh realization that in both the instances of Sea Monkeys and The Bush Administration I had succumbed to the seductive siren song of false advertising.

It’s the ‘Hollow Sea Monkey Promise’ - What you wanted was ACTUAL SEA MONKEYS / RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT. But what you actually got was ‘brine shrimp’ - or in the case of Bush an unjust and immoral war in Iraq that is bankrupting most of the country except for the 1% making money hand over fist from it. Apparently the top 1% of the population actually has evolved to have 3 arms – 2 to harvest their money and a third to distract people with a bunch of flag waving.

But at least the Bush administration has not been completely false in their advertising – we did get the monkey faces.