e
Cestodes share the same basic body plan. As I am the presidential
parasite, I like to consider myself unique, but (alas) that is
not the case. What’s our plan? All of us have a scolex,
sometimes colloquially referred to as the “head" and
a brain inside that head (more about this later). We also have
a “neck," and one or more proglottids, which are sometimes
called “segments," and which are the source of the
name “tapeworm," because they look like a strip of
tape.
Our proglottids are each capable of reproduction (containing
both testes and ovaries—we’re hermorphadites!), and,
as they are very flat, they tend to wave inside our host’s
large intestine like a long pennant. I like to joke that I symbolize
the American flag, and as my host’s common refrain these
days is “Freedom is on the march,” my body is an apt
metaphor for the type of “freedom” my president is
reproducing (especially in the Middle East).
All cestodes have a nerve ring in the scolex with lateral trunks
passing through the rest of the body. Ours is a lonely life because
we have no eyes to see, no olifactory organs to smell, no mouth
to chew and taste, and no hearing. We are, in effect, worse off
than Helen Keller, also quite a liberal mind and effective author
in her own right! In other words, we are a Conservative Republican’s
worst nightmare.
George W. Bush’s nightmare became real after 9/11/01—the
day he injested me. How did it happen? Zolanda Pitcairn, age 7,
handed my host a barbeque sandwich, in which I was hiding (in
my proglottid or, as Marx would say, “proletarian”
form) inside the meat. Little Ms. Pitcairn was an intermediate
host, in and of herself, as the Emma E. Booker Elementary School
was home to many of the lower-class students of Sarasota, Florida.
Zolanda and her fellow students were happy to have the president
read to them that day, and Zolanda was simply showing her appreciation,
in the middle of the reading, by handing George her sandwich.
I, of course, was also quite grateful, as this was the beginning
of my very personal relationship with the leader of the
Free World, as he couldn’t help but take a bite of that
sandwich.
We tapeworms have no digestive tract. We literally “soak
up” the digested foods of our host through our skin. Miraculous,
isn’t it? We are also almost never detected, and there are
many millions of us inside our hosts, who die, never knowing we
were there; we were there, however, hanging on for dear life,
our suction cups or jagged teeth plunged into our host like a
Chinese Silkworm missile (that also, coincidentally, can release
“bomblets” of weapons of mass destruction upon an
ususpecting population).
From birth, we tapeworms play an insidious role. Fertilized
eggs quickly develop into adventurous embryos. They exit the host’s
system through feces, usually diving into nearby water supplies.
Animals or humans then ingest the baby worms. It’s easy
to assume that the embryos then develop into full-grown worms,
but they don’t. The undeveloped worms bore through their
host’s stomach lining and slip into the bloodstream. Veins
and arteries act as an almost limitless highway system, transporting
the worms to any major organ or muscle!
Usually, we tunnel into large muscles or the liver, but we have
been known to dig into brains, spinal cords and lungs. Once the
embryo finds a home, it encases itself in a fluid-filled sack
called a cyst. We don’t break out of our cyst until the
flesh of our host is eaten by another animal. And that’s
how you end up with a tapeworm in your gut. And that’s how
I became the presidential parasite.
Tapeworms also have another sense that more than compensates
for our lack of four: we communicate through our brain waves.
Indeed, our technology was, at first, limited to communication
between each other, as we emitted our waves, which easily passed
through our hosts’ flesh and through to the “transceiver”
brain inside the scolex attached inside another host. Using our
proglottids, which act as long antennae (some of us reach lengths
of over 30 feet!), we were able to specify where a good “virgin”
host might be located, and we were also able to discuss what our
hosts were telling us about “life” on the outside.
Then cometh the New Millennium. One of our more inventive comrades
accidentally began to communicate with a computer! That’s
right; we had suddenly, like a Wi-Fi eavesdropper, hooked into
the most informative data base of human information in the history
of the world! In point of fact, did you know that the first known
computer “bug” was officially called a “tapeworm”?
Ironic, isn’t it?
And, so it is that even though my host, George Walker Bush,
the President of the United States, has never done any information
searches on the Internet (in fact, his wife reads to him at night
before they go to bed), I, on the other hand, have become the
most learned tapeworm and computer worm in the world! This predicament
is both a paradoxical, existential dilemma and the possible key
to saving most of the world’s population. You see, not only
can I receive information from the transmissions coming over the
Top Secret computer networks that my host is quite often around,
but I can also transmit to them! Ah, now you finally
understand my innate power and the source of all my suffering!
Tapeworms, like their hosts, experience psychological disorders.
For example, I am continually seeing myself as the functioning
conscience of the president. In my estimation, George is the true
parasite, and I am the free thinker! Let me explain further,
lest you consider me delusional. George Walker Bush was born into
a family that has always kept him safe from the harsh realities
of existence. He never had to get his own clothes out in the morning,
he never had to cook for himself or even shop for himself. His
family put him through school (where he performed very poorly,
I might add, as these were the days before Harvard and
Princeton gave out all-As to all students), and this
was where he performed the “parasitic” role of cheerleader
for the Yale Bulldogs football and basketball teams. His family
also put him into the Texas Air National Guard, which was then
(unlike today’s National Guardsmen) a safe haven
from the dangers of the real combat going on over in
Southeast Asia. His family also bailed him out of one failed business
venture after another. He just couldn’t get anything
done correctly. He didn’t have the brains for it. He did,
however, have something that we parasites find most rewarding.
He had connections! Now can you see how I work with my
host? He is my vehicle—my body, if you will—and I
am his, albeit hidden, brain!
estodes
of the world unite!” These were the words by which I began
our declaration of independence from our hosts. We were in a survival
mode, as we saw what these so-called “leaders” of
the eight great industrialized nations in the world were up to.
The “G-8,” as they called themselves, was nothing
more than the propagator of what one intellectual Princeton University
philosopher had recently called, “Bullshit,” and most
of the world was suffering because of it. Since much of our formative
larval time is spent in one type of feces or another, the analogy
of the good professor was not lost upon us.
We know what the G-8 represents to the world. It is another
form of parasitism, or “an interaction between two organisms,
in which one organism (the parasite) benefits and the other (the
host) is harmed.” These men represented the parasites of
the world, which were creating the backlash of the majority of
victims in the world, including we true parasites, who
have never caused harm to our hosts. Yes, there are some few parasites
who do cause the death of their host, but the more intelligent
amongst us have decided to take action against these human parasitic
leaders.
Please visualize what the Law of Nature really says:
“Nothing will be taken without giving something back of
the same or better value.” However, since the rise of Globalization,
the transfer of wealth and power has increasingly ignored this
simple dictum of our collective existence. We now knew it was
time to “turn the tables” on them, or we would never
survive.
Their meeting was in Scotland, at some exclusive golf game resort,
and this would be the site of my “grand plan to take back
Nature.” Since we controlled the insides, and they controlled
the outsides, we had to determine a way to change the rules so
that we can control them. The demonstators against
this “globalization movement” of the G-8 had thrown
many musical “fests” the week before this main event.
They sang and danced and preached their disenchantment with the
poverty of Africa, the AIDS epidemic, and the increasing subjugation
of the poor by the rich. This was all well and good, but the G-8
leaders would not allow any of these demonstrators to come within
a mile of their physical beings. Thus, it was up to us
to penetrate their bodies!
I had finally discovered through my Internet research the way
to protect us from their drugs. We were able to develop an immunity
through the use of certain steroids, sometimes used by their professional
athletes to hit many homeruns and to run and swim much faster
than their counterparts. These athletes, who were also inhabited
by cestodes, became the human transmitters of our new vaccination
serum. Through the Internet, we knew where to go to collect our
“fixes,” so to speak. The cestodes inside the atheletes
would send many hundreds of proglottids out into the water supply,
where humans would injest this serum, and we would become immune
to their killer drugs! After years of developing our immunity,
it was finally time to make our move to take back Nature!
I was growing at a prolific rate inside George. In fact, he
was beginning to lose weight! At the same time I grew and spread
my segments to the freedom outside, I also began communicating
with the only man who could help me carry out my plan: special
advisor to the president, Karl Rove—human parasite extrodinaire!
My emails to him were over the president’s top-secret
network, and I was posing as the president! What genius! This
was going to be the first phase in the plan. I sent my communication
about two months before the meeting in Scotland. I called it the
“Gandhi Diet,” and here was my message to Karl:
“Hi Karl, I’m going to tell the other leaders at
the G-8 that I am making a personal statement about world poverty.
I am fasting, just the way Mahatma Ghandi did. That way, the folks
back home will know I’m all for the poor folks in the world.
What do you think, Karl? Is it workable?”
One thing I knew about my host, the president: if Karl Rove
thought something was a good idea, then he would agree to it.
He had done it when he lied about Iraq’s WMD; he also followed
Rove’s orders about outting that blackmailing CIA officer’s
wife in the press. And, George would certainly do it this time.
When Rove next saw George, my president was down to one hundred
and five pounds.
At first, Laura Bush had all the White House cooks fired. She
thought the food was making her husband ill. George thought he
might have cancer, so he had every physical check-up known to
mankind but to no avail. None of the Bethesda doctors could find
anything wrong with him. George was looking gaunt, according to
those around him, his cheeks were sunken in, and his legs began
to look quite “twig-like.” Meanwhile, my segments
were growing and growing, each and every day.
“Mister President, I think the idea is great!” said
Rove, wrapping his pudgy arm around my host’s jutting shoulder
blades.
“Idea? What idea is that, Karl?” asked George, obviously
unaware of my previous communication.
“The fasting before the G-8 meeting in Scotland. It’s
a stroke of genius! The liberal press will eat it up, if you’ll
pardon my expression!” Rove laughed, and poked the president
between his protruding ribcage.
As I had expected, not wanting to sound like he was “out
of the loop,” George immediately replied, “Oh yes,
the fasting! Of course, that’s why I’m getting so
skinny.”
“Yes, you’ll make a statement about world poverty
and how we need to start free enterprise all over Africa and the
Third World to bring them out of their despair! It will be a magnificent
coup, George. How did you ever think of it?” Rove said.
“Actually, I think it was my daughter, Jenna’s,
idea. She thought I should show some kind of empathy for all these
folks demonstrating for hunger inside Africa and all those other
countries,” said George, getting into the lie as if he had
thought of it first.
“Africa is a continent, George, but, never mind. Keep
up the great work! You’ll be the hit of the summit meeting!”
said Rove, turning to go. “But, remember. We really
want to sell the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Maybe
you can work that into this fasting thing, too.”
Karl then drew close and whispered into George’s ear, so
that I could barely make it out, “You know, the starving
kids in Central America need to work more to put food
on the table!”
y
host, the president’s, speech at the G-8 meeting was a great
success. At 85 pounds, dripping wet, George was a figure right
out of Dachau. And, as he spoke in his usual, oxymoronic doublespeak,
I was busy sending my proglottids out his arse (as Shakespeare
would say) and into his pants, where the segments would drop down
his legs and onto the floor of the luxuriously carpeted room,
where, later, a cleaning person would sweep them up, getting many
embryos on her hands, and then (because the hotel was over-working
its few staff members to save money!), she immediately began preparation
for the dinner hosted by the Queen of England. Guess what she
was in charge of preparing? Yes! The meat! Our tiny hatched eggs
would soon be burrowing their insidious way into the victuals
of these “masters of the human race,” and then into
their bloodstream! The Revolution had finally begun as Karl Marx
said it would—from within!
very
revolution needs an anthem, and we chose a song by a vegetarian
group I found on the Internet called “The Black-eyed Peas.”
Tell me if you can see how appropriate these lyrics are to our
cause:
Everybody, everybody, let's get into it.
Get stupid.
Get it started, get it started, get it started.
Let's get it started (ha), let's get it started in here.
Let's get it started (ha), let's get it started in here.
Let's get it started (ha), let's get it started in here.
Let's get it started (ha), let's get it started in here.
Yeah.
Lose control, of body and soul.
Don't move too fast, people, just take it slow.
Don't get ahead, just jump into it.
Ya'll here a body, two pieces to it.
Get stunted, get stupid.
You'll want me body people will walk you through it.
Step by step, like you're into new kid.
Inch by inch with the new solution.
Trench men hits, with no delusion.
The feeling's irresistible and that's how we movin'.
Isn’t art wonderful? With music, we finally had an existence
outside ourselves! We, at last, could control them, our hosts.
The Queen’s dinner was quite a success, as new Cestodes
were “getting it started” inside the honorable Paul
Martin (Canada), Jacques Chirac (France), Gerhard Shröeder
(Germany), Junichiro Koizumi (Japan), Vladimir Putin (Russia),
and Tony Blair (Great Britain). To what purpose? You’ll
soon find out!
The powerful of this world now had their own religion: computers
and the Internet. They “believed” in this technology
the same way the huddled masses believed in their primitive Nature
Gods. Ergo, it made sense to us that they would believe our new
policies if we spoke them on their own religious turf, so to speak,
and we did just that.
The leaders of our “free” world were losing weight,
pound by pound, and they, of course, were searching for some meaning
to their collective plight. It came in form of top secret emails.
I won’t recreate each email verbatim, but let’s just
say we were telling them that we were in control of their drastic
weight reduction and that President Bush was a fraud, a deceit
and a liar. We also told them, since we could control whether
they lived or died, it would be much to their benefit to do what
we told them to do. In fact, we pointed out, we could cause the
entire human race to start “thinning out” and there
would be nothing they could do to prevent it.
What did we tell them to do, you might ask? This is the key,
is it not? It is what makes every human aspire to leadership.
It is what every powerful dictator or terrorist dreams about every
night! We were in control of how things were going to get done
all over the world.
First, we told these leaders that their private corporations
would begin to “literally” start serving the poor
on the planet. Each wealthy country would send out “ambassadors
of food” to every starving country, and spend whatever expense,
do whatever it took, to make certain every empty belly in Africa,
Asia, South America and India was fed and provided with the basics
of mortal existence. Also, we pointed out, if any war lords, or
other human militant terrorist groups, decided to get in the way
of this humanitarian effort, they, too, would begin to starve,
very quickly, until they would be too weak to pull a single trigger!
The next months were like a miracle happening on this earth!
The leaders of the great, wealthy nations of the earth began assembling
their technological might with one purpose in mind: to feed the
dispossessed. Caravans of aircraft, vehicles, trains, ships and
any other mode of transportation began delivering the latest biotechnology
to the underdeveloped nations—free and without political
restraints—and the results began to show almost immediately.
Former President, Jimmy Carter, was leading the way with his group.
He believed we were “voices from God,” and that we
“should not question the will of our Creator.” The
Hindus said that the Internet was part of Indra’s Net, and
that our communications came directly from the Cosmic Trinity
of Vishnu, Krishna and Brahma. Whatever the reasons, we were on
the move!
The money began to shift away from the richest to spread out,
like a magnificent fan, to embrace the dispossessed of the world.
Every time some greedy power-monger became belligerent, we would
begin shrinking him from inside, and he became as meek as a roundworm.
We at last thought we had saved the planet, but then “the
worm turned.”
This new, peaceful lifestyle began to create more and more vegetarians.
And, with this phenomenon, our “Achilles heel” was
exposed! The humans began to see that the vegetarians were not
being controlled by us! As a result, the greedy leaders began
to practice the vegetarian lifestyle. Soon, the tide began to
change, and militant vegetarian groups began to crop-up like rotten
tomatoes. Slogans and banners soon swept the nations and a new
“movement” for freedom started. We tried to get into
their bodies, but as long as we had no intermediate, carnal host
to deliver our eggs, we could not control them!
Today, the vegetarians rule the world, and they rule with an
iron fist. The same nationalist agendas are in place, the same
nuclear weapons, and the same greed. My host, George W. Bush,
has been arrested, along with many other “flesh eaters,”
and we are serving out our time in prisons all over the world.
I no longer starve George, as he is as powerless as I am. However,
I detest his constant whining about “his daddy,” and
about how “Karl Rove was responsible for all this.”
The truth of the matter is, my fellow Cestodes, ignorance is not
bliss!
[END]
© 2006 Jim Musgrave - Contributor's
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