The love affair between Man-Mountain Mitso, the tall leader of the Freaks, and Demi-Tasse, the wily premier of the Jerks, has been marked by clandestine meetings behind the rose bushes at international conferences and the main obstacle to an official engagement between the lovers, a solution to the Sip problem, appears to be in the offing.
For those of you who missed the last installment of the saga, the Sip problem was created many years ago on an island that was inhabited by a majority of Freak-Sips and a minority of Jerk-Sips. At the present time, the Jerk-Sips are sitting on the northern part of the island, with the help of troops from the lerk mainland, and have declared theniM’lves an independent republic that is totally unrecognizable to anybody except the Jerks.
To keep the Jerk-Sips and the Freak-Sips from being beastly to each other, as is their wont, a force of You-Know blue berets stands between them drinking large quantities of KEO beer and orange squash.
The Freak-Sip president has been desperately trying to come to terms with the unrecognized Jerk-Sip leader, Dinky Toy, and get him to agree to some sort of arrangement by which the island can be reunited, the Jerk troops can go home and the Jerk-Sip leader gain a glimmer of recognition within some sort of federation.
But Dinky Toy is an obstinate cuss who has so far resisted all overtures. He may now succumb to pressure from Demi-Tasse who would like his romance with Man-Mountain Mitso to follow its natural course and from the You-Know Secretary-General, the re-doubtable conjuror Boutros-Boutros Galli-Galli, who can make the You-Know troops disappear from the island with a wave of his magic wand, KEO orange squash and all.
The hint of a rotating presidency for the island might also tempt Dinky Toy with the thought that he might be recognized by someone other than Demi-Tasse and actually have people as far away as Oshkosh, Nebraska, see him on their TV screens and say: “Hey, there’s ole Dinky Toy! What a great Jerk that guy is.”
Meanwhile, the Freak leader has just performed the Herculean task of getting all his fellow members in the EC (an exclusive club made up of countries that have willingly accepted VAT, CAP and Jacques Delors so that all their citizens can travel on small, burgundy-colored passports) to deny recognition to the ex-southern Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia unless it changes its name.
This has made the ex-southern Yugoslavs even more stubborn about calling themselves the independent republic of Macedonia. But the Freaks feel that as long as they’re not recognized, they don’t really exist and if the Serbs get around to them in due course, they may actually cease to exist.
The only person among the Freaks who didn’t think Man-Mountain Mitso had scored a great victory, was Andy Papandy, the ageing pop star who is hanging on by his false teeth to the leadership of the main opposition party. He was soundly berated for this attitude by the mercurial Melina, his erstwhile Minister of Culture, who frightened, him as she does everybody, with her much longer and stronger teeth.
On the home front, the Herculean Mitso has many more unpleasant labors to perform before the economy starts recovering and as if that wasn’t enough, his ministers have found another issue on which they can work at cross purposes.
This is the water shortage which will not be relieved until a new dam on the Evinos River is built by 1997. Meanwhile, Freaks will be heavily penalized on their water bills for exceeding the norms set by their bills a year ago. This means that those who heeded government warnings and economized last year will pay more for the same amount of water as that consumed by those who did not economize last year. That is, unless they forgo their daily baths or showers and revert to the nostalgic past when Saturday night was bath night and B.O. wafted ripely throughout the land.
And while the minister, who devised this grossly unfair but Freakishly logical solution to the water shortage, wallows in his swimming pool, another minister in the Tall One’s cabinet advised heat wave sufferers to take frequent showers.
As the summer advances, it seems more than likely that most Freaks will hop into their Pontiac-bought, tax exempt XJS 4-liter Jaguars, 300SE Mercedes-Benzes or BMW 5 series and cross the Adriatic for a relaxing holiday on the Italian lakes, at Monte Carlo or in the Austrian Alps, which is really the best way to save water.
