I strive for timeless humor. Airline food, guys who leave the toilet seat up, the Lindbergh Baby, anything Dave Coulier ever said while hosting America’s Funniest Home Videos; timeless. Topical humor is just that. It usually doesn’t age well. Next time you leave your fly down, or your shirt is unbuttoned announce that you had a “wardrobe malfunction” ala Janet Jackson. No one will know what the hell you are talking about. So, it is with great hesitation that I broach the subject of Mariah Carey’s twins who were recently buried at sea[1]. In all actuality, nothing funny happened to me over the last week and I figure I may as well jump on the Osama bandwagon while it’s rolling.
When I heard that Osama bin Laden was killed I didn’t hear the flapping of a golden eagle’s wings, I didn’t see fireworks exploding behind the flag, or have visions of George Washington riding a flaming jet-ski across the Delaware. The first thing that came to my mind was the pink computer paper signs plastered around the tiny backwater town where I grew up that read: WHERE’S OSAMA?
I remember the first time I saw them. I was driving to work when I noticed something pink zip by outside. I slowed down as I noticed little pink rectangles on the telephone poles that lined the road. In what looked like 72pt Impact font it leaped out at me. WHERE’S OSAMA? I was able to ponder this question for nearly all of my fifteen minute commute to work as the signs were featured on every telephone pole along the road.
Aside from being the main pathway to and from dead-end go-nowhere jobs, this road also featured the town’s gardening and nursery store, a veritable hot-bed for terrorist tracking, and a gun and ammo shop that actually probably fancied itself as a hot-bed for terrorist tracking. Between these two hubs of culture there was a blinking yellow light. This light was a big player in local town politics; it had a lot of clout.
It is important to note that these signs came up years after 9/11. I liked to imagine the creator of the signs sitting in front of his television and being driven to the point of activism by the lack of results from operation Iraqi Freedom, or Breaking Dawn, or Resident Evil, or whatever was going on at the time. He crushed a Miller Light can in his hand, shouted “No more!” and took action. He got up, stormed over to his computer, played a furious game of Mine Sweeper, and then printed WHERE’S OSAMA signs until he ran out of ink. In his fury he did not notice that his daughter had put in pink computer paper for the birthday party invitations she had printed the day before. It didn’t matter. It was time for the world to start looking, starting with a small town in New Hampshire that would probably vote for a Perot/Ruxbin ticket in 2012.
What I want to know is, who was this guy’s audience? The kids I went to high school with who would get high on Dust-Off? The shiftless Wal-Mart employs who sold the high school kids Dust-Off knowing all too well that they didn’t have any keyboards to clean? Did he expect them to see these signs and then drive their parents’ cars to Afghanistan? Did he think that the President’s motorcade would be putting down the road, when the President would see the sign and exclaim “Hold the phone boys! We’ve got to find the Osama fella!”
I might be reading it all wrong too. He may have just been an incredibly curious guy. I don’t even know for sure it was a guy. It could be considered slightly sexist that I am assuming it was a man who made these signs, but ladies do not take offense. I think men, and men alone, are capable of the concentrated idiocy it takes to put even an iota of time into something as ineffectual as those signs.
Either way, whoever the mastermind was behind those signs, he or she can now breathe easy. And we can all go back to obsessing about the Royal Wedding.
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