FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved

Mr. Smutty by James Martin Things you can't do, no matter how hard you try: slap a price-tag on happiness, put yr arms around a memory, and whistle after eating crackers. You can, howev, assign a dollar value to body parts – and not just in the woke-up-in-a-Tijuana-bathtub-fulla-ice-with-a-bad-hangover-and-no-kidneys sense of things. A judge in _______ville, Canada has just awarded a gentleman $10,000 ’cuz he (the gentleman, not the judge) lost a finger whilst riding the subway. On a foggy evening not unlike tonite, the gentleman tried to shut a malfunctioning subway door and had his middle finger severed in the process. Bleeding like a drinking fountain, he approached a nearby ticket-taker for assistance, but was rudely rebuffed. The distraught man attempted to show his displeasure by "flipping the bird," not realizing that the accident had cruelly robbed him of the ability to properly execute said manoeuver. The ticket-taker teased the man w/out mercy ("Don't you shake yr fist at me, young man," etc.), and therein lies the root of the judge's decree. "Obscene gestures are the heart & soul of a society," said Your Honour, who was later seen scratching himself on the courthouse steps. "I for one will not be party to the withering of civilization." He then turned to the defense attorney: "You disgust me. Please pull my finger." All of which is just fine/dandy, but it raises serious questions about our litigious-happy society. Is there not a better way to seek justice? Is the immediate deference to the almighty dollar smothering our creativity? Over in Lower _____town, Vietnam, an ex-Khmer Rouge guerrilla murdered the local witch doctor as retribution for the death of his children – and then ate his liver. Because time is tight, we'll ignore for now the fact that the guerrilla was a recent graduate of the Army's "human rights course" (man, the education system really has gone to Hell), and concentrate our concentration elsewhere. I'm certainly not advocating murder-as-problem solving, but I think there are far more interesting courses of action than (yawn) lawsuits. (And I'm not just saying that ’cuz I'm currently embroiled in 13 separate legal battles stemming from last week's column, "Wouldn't It Be Weird If The Mayor Enjoyed Nothing Better Than A Good Ol' Fashioned Satanic Sex Orgy? With Dogs?") Consider the recent case of the guy who spent an entire weekend trapped between floors in a ___ York City elevator. With alarms blaring, he tried to call for help/open the doors/climb out the roof, all to no avail. The whole thing was caught on hidden-cam videotape (and should be airing on Fox before too long) but security guards chose to ignore the man's, errr, situation. Forty hours later, the guy was finally set free. So now the dude has launched a $25M lawsuit – how ho-hum. Wouldn't it be more interesting for all of us if he vented his anger by, oh I don't know, eating the security guards' livers? You could televise the whole process, and maybe even bring a celebrity chef on board as a ratings booster. Tell me this isn't A-1 television: the tenderizing of the liver, the chopping of the onions, the spitter-splatter of the offender's liver hitting the red-hot skillet, the studio jury rushing the stage to sample the finished goods, etc. And with today's leaps/bounds in organ-cloning technology, the whole thing could be done w/out the loss of human life; replacement livers could be grown on the backs of lab mice. Man, I'd surely think twice about ignoring a person-in-distress if I knew they'd seek revenge by eating my liver on TV. I think you would too. Next week: Break out the piñatas, we're throwing a "theme" execution!

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