In Reality, 1994 Was Out of This World

Take a good long look at this past year, would you?

Wait, get back here! You’ve scarcely looked at all. Now, really take a gander at the darned thing. I’ll wait. . . .

Sorry. I know that wasn’t easy. It’s never pretty staring into such a Kentucky-fried bucket of weirdness, and if this past year had been any weirder, we would have seen Jerry Lewis appearing on Broadway. That Jerry will be on Broadway in a couple of months--in “Damn Yankees,” no less--does not suggest that things are going to be getting any easier for us, reality-wise.

That’s what’s at stake, I think: reality . There were just too many signs this past year that we’ve reached the end of our last bolt of the fabric of reality, because all we have left to cling to are the frayed and tattered edges.

If the events of the year had been in a movie, could you possibly have sat in a theater and believed them? Wouldn’t it strain credulity to see a film in which, say, the suspect in a vicious double murder takes a vehicular cakewalk down major freeways in a white Ford Bronco as hundreds line the roadside and overpasses and cheer as though he was Rocky Balboa? (You have to admire the pluck of a Florida car dealer who, in the days following the O.J. processional, put a Bronco on display with an “As Seen on TV” sign.)

After that, and endless media coverage of the respective snipping and whacking in the Bobbitt and Harding escapades, our sense of disbelief had been so abused that folks scarcely even blinked when Elvis heir Lisa Marie Presley and professional squirrel Michael Jackson turned up married.

Hooray for them. I hope they see it through their rough first year and go on to have several discernibly human children. They deserve privacy, but it’s a sign of just how odd our world has become that they might just get it.

In almost any other year, their wedding would have attracted the sort of public interest usually reserved for the end of the universe. Was Bubbles best man? Is Bubbles jealous? Is Bubbles going to marry Julian Lennon? If, as rumored, Bubbles is dead, has he been sighted at the Dairy Queen with Elvis? Does Michael ever screw up and call Lisa Liz ? Will Lisa Marie get reconstructive surgery to make her look like Berry Gordy? Will they name their firstborn Little Elvis?

Folks typically would be clamoring to know this and so much more. Usually Michael gets headlines if he gets chocolate milk up his nose, but after the barrage of other events, people clearly couldn’t take much more.

But much more keeps on coming anyway, and it just keeps getting weirder. Does it strike anyone else as strange that in November, the nation--in what’s described as a revolutionary rejection of old-guard politics as usual--voted in the Republicans ? That’s like naming General Motors the wildcat business newcomer of the year.

If I have my tally right, Republicans have only controlled the executive branch for 19 of the past 25 years, packed the Supreme Court and cowed Congress while setting impeccable standards in corporate coziness, covert wars and government secrecy, and suddenly they’re the fresh innocent outsiders starring in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with a Rottweiler”? I don’t get it.

And now we, solid, mall-majority Orange County, have been making international headlines with our little bankruptcy unpleasantness. You expect New York City to go bankrupt, or possibly Lagos, Nigeria, but Orange County? We invented affluence. We sup on the fatted calf nightly, with a side of braised asparagus.

And now the whole world thinks we’re broke. It’s embarrassing. Don’t these people realize it’s merely our government that’s gone bust? That only means our infrastructure, schools and social services are going to hell. It doesn’t have to effect our lifestyle.

OK, school kids will probably have to put up with their teachers hanging around the cafeteria at lunchtime, pestering, “Say, Billy, were you going to finish that sandwich?” The mentally ill homeless and others struggling to survive will be among the lucky first in the nation to benefit from that character-building independence conservatives have been touting.

There will be more potholes, but half the well-heeled folks in this county drive Humvees anyway. So what’s everybody in a tizzy for? There’s such a mood of anxiety and doom around these parts that, for those of us who like a bit of mischief, it would almost be worth the expense of hiring a skywriting plane to circle above the county spelling out “Surrender Dorothy.”

My understanding of finances begins and ends at the “If Sally had five tangerines and you had three” level, so I’m still trying to figure “Where did our lost billions go?” If they went to someone else, couldn’t we just explain that we don’t count so good, and could we please have them back?

If, as I read, the billions didn’t actually go to someone else, but instead lost their value, I can’t quite grasp that. If these billions were represented by actual money at some point--like the money we all used to have and paid in taxes--did the bills just shrink and shrink until you couldn’t see them any more? Is the money so small that germs are spending it now?

I find all this very disconcerting, not so much because of the extra taxes we’ll likely get socked with, but because when Orange County is bankrupt, when Michael Jackson isn’t getting press and when Jerry Lewis is coming to Broadway, it’s difficult to believe that this world is real. And if it’s all just a fever dream, and I’m the one dreaming it, I’m one sick puppy.

What will come next--athletic shoes named for prominent American mayors? “Hello, do you stock Nike Air Riordans?” Will Poppin’ Fresh be named Speaker of the House? Will Jerry Lewis become Orange County Treasurer? How many tangerines will he have? Will Bubbles reappear and eat the Speaker of the House? Will Lisa Marie marry Gary Lewis?

In such uncertain times, sociologists say that many of us turn to the comfort foods of our youth.

And right about now I’m getting a huge hankering for a bottle of orange baby aspirin.