Books: Citizen You!

Patriot games

By John Ziebell

Ah, Patriotism. With a fat, upper-case P. My friends, it's a stranger and far funnier concept than you may have really considered--at least the way it's portrayed in Citizen You!, a contemporary how-to manual from the minds of the Better Citizen Bureau, a coalition comprising The Onion's Mike Loew and Joe Garden and film producer Randy Ostrow.

When a text introduces itself as "The Ultimate Patriotic Handbook" and opens with remarks from Presidential Appointee George W. Bush, it's safe to guess there's some kind of agenda at work. As comedians stated with gleeful candor after the last presidential election, the humor industry likes Bush Junior because he makes their jobs so much easier. So the book is not really a partisan attack, it's just trying to be funny for all of us--at the expense of some well-connected, corporate-anointed plutocrats, it's true.

The Onion is one of our funniest publications, notorious for creating fantastic and farcical "news" stories that were sometimes a bit too convincing...who would have guessed? Americans have never been really comfortable with satire; a glance at the current movie listings suggests that, generally, we like our comedy as unsophisticated as possible. Even long-dead guys like Jonathan Swift make us nervous. So although Citizen You! lampoons the excessive zeal of our currently empowered political action figures without shamelessly promoting the other team, the list of people who will despise this book with knee-jerk vehemence is long indeed.

First, there are those who support the current junta. That "Presidential Appointee" dig at the commander-in-chief is mild, and not nearly as funny as some other aliases proffered by the BCB: Head Fearleader (Ridge), Celebrity War Criminal (Kissinger), Prophet of Justice (Ashcroft), Casanova of Defense (Rumsfeld), Little Brave Condi and, of course, Our National Treasure, Dick Cheney. And honestly, with the election-year shrillness streaming out of the Beltway, if these guys hadn't thought of it first, Karl Rove might have actually considered getting some copyright protection on the re-envisioned term Freedomª.

Then, of course, there are the assorted battalions of faithful who will recoil in horror at bits like "The New Ten Commandments"--the fifth, for example, revamped to read "Honor thy father and mother, unless they are frail, elderly parasites who are stealing money from our government through Social Security and Medicare."

There may not be a lot of surprises in this unholy civics text, but it's still a comic success in its own scathing way. Readers can pretty much guess where things are going when they come across headings like "Fight Terror--Stay Scared," "How to Run a Patriotic Office," "Who You Can't Trust" and "How to Monitor Your Neighbors." There's added fun in collateral morsels like "The Seven Wonders of the USA," which include the Mall of America, Branson, Mo., and the Missile Silos of North Dakota. Handy survival and moral superiority tips are scattered through the text in little sidebars that address topics like "Is Your Baby Ready for a Terrorist Attack?" "A Father's Prayer for His Daughter's Chastity" and "Hot Anti-Terror Gear." There's also mock advertising that ranges from the Prayer Pod 2004 (with Halo Activator) to bomb-shaped pillows from Halliburton Home Furnishings to the new depleted-uranium Hummer.

What's far more serious in nature is the book's last chapter, the brief "Read and Burn" section that discusses 79 of the disturbing questions related to the 9/11 attacks that good citizens have been ignoring since the tragedy occurred. In the final analysis, we use humor as a form of cultural commentary because it can be the best vehicle for touching upon truth: "Ever wonder how John Ashcroft slapped together a 1,200-page document that modified hundreds of pre-existing laws in 13 days? Stop wondering!" Sometimes, hopefully, the weight of that truth makes us forget why we were laughing in the first place.