Well, well, well…

Putting together the first online edition was enough to drive me to drink. It was a short drive. How do you say in English? A day trip.

In a deal of Faustinian purport we have sold our mere analog form (read as: “soul”) for this glib goose dejecta you have plaited in Xbit resolution before you.

We have traded a circulation of several hundred for a circulation of x=“site hits.” At last check we were up to 31. Not exactly an improvement but such is the price of modernization.

We have given up the most elegantly bizarre crossword puzzles in the world for a text based site.

We have exchanged quickly flipped pages for slow page load times.

We’ve swapped an easily digestible 40 pages for the 100,000 possible pages that can be squeezed out of 50Mb.

We have given up the only magazine in the world printed entirely with custom typefaces for the testicle-free Microsoft menu of Arial and its ripped-off cousins.

We have lost our place on the toilet magazine rack for all but those who can afford a lap top and cell-phone driven modem card.

In short, we have bought into the millennium.

Enough with the editorial “we,” however. I do not presume to suppose that anyone at this magazine thinks the same way I do about anything. Therefore, though we retain the capitals letters, you and I, we dispense with the congeniality of the first person plural. I am me.

Shares in majenta made their IPO (initial public offering) scant days after Amazon.com did the same. Amazon went from $12 a share to the stratosphere making many millionaires along the way. majenta opened for 25£ per share and the only buyer in bulk was the Queen of England who, in nostalgia and ’net ignorance, mistook us for a garment manufacturer of her childhood. Since the recent stock dips she lost nearly 2 million, sterling. I couldn’t have come up with better American revenge against the crown if I’d tried.

majenta is back — and this time with no risk of paper cuts — please inform the CIA. I believe they lost track of me in Bangkok over Christmas. They simply can’t get good help these days.

Now, the new magazine. We- I mean I did miss you sorely while away. Thanks for waiting. Good autumn to you.

Let’s say you owned your own business. You might very well. You might be Bill Gates and you might be a fellow small business artist chump like myself. In this case let’s say it’s a copy shop! Congratulations! You own a copy shop.

You hire a new guy. He’s the cream of the crop. There were plenty of other applicants for the job but they were either old or just not with it. You didn’t want the image of your copy shop to be brought down by a geriatric clerk. This guy’s great. Even though he’s got trouble with punctuality.

He’s doing a good job and you need a bunch of new help so you let him recommend and hire several new employees. One by one they turn out to be problems. One is a tax dodger though wealthy on her own. Another has a pending lawsuit stemming from a work dispute. Another commits suicide. Still two more are actually dragged from the shop one afternoon in handcuffs and thrown in jail where one dies. “Can’t judge people by their friends and business partners,” you tell yourself.

He brings his wife to work and she starts to rearrange things. It seems like she’s doing as much as he does there. You never hired her but you figure at least she has something to do. She doesn’t seem happy when you see her away from work. When she goes as far as to have your secretary switch HMOs for all your staff you ask her husband to get rid of her. He tones down her presence and you figure that’s good enough.

You ask him for an important file that you need that week. He says he can’t find it. He gives it to you a year later saying it was just turned up on the desk one day. Then you ask him about some personal phone calls that you suspect he’s been making on company time. He says they weren’t personal. He campaigns to raise money for the local DARE program but fails the drug test at work one week. He claims it was second hand smoke and that he didn’t even realize it was marijuana. You find out that perhaps he committed a somewhat mild criminal offense by lying to get out of jury duty. You also discover he’s keeping a file on other employees but it could be a harmless pass-time.

You send him to a copier convention in Las Vegas with an open expense account. He takes six friends who have no connection with xerography whatsoever. He has a good explanation when he comes back though and you have to admit you’ve always really liked the guy, so what’s a few thousand bucks? You can always write it off. Besides, you watch him with the customers. They love him.

Out of the blue, two of the other employees, both women, claim he made lewd remarks to them. One of them even says she was bullied by him and his friends — friends with guns — one weekend. That he showed her photocopies of his pecker. Three more women you’ve never met come in off the street and repeat this general testimony. You confront him and ask him about it. He says that nothing impropitious occurred and he doesn’t know what they’re talking about. He points out that they have no proof. He’s right. You say to yourself, “I gotta stop hiring broads,” and fire both of the trouble making bitches.

Then there’s a rash of things that are really pretty troubling. A couple of his buddies in Idaho shoot a lady with her little kid in her arms. Then you aren’t sure but you suspect that he approves the murder of a dozen children in Waco, Texas and makes sure that no one takes the fall for it. Next week you’re guessing that he moves troops into Somalia where they’re not wanted or helpful. You’ve got a strong hunch that the week after that he denies help to Rwanda where a small armed presence would have easily stopped the most accelerated and ridiculous loss of human life since Nazi Germany. It looks like he also decides to let Bosnia work out their genocide issues on their own. And although his signature is on the list of the 50 new State crimes punishable by death and aimed pretty much only at minorities you realize that maybe he had to sign it into law to get one of his other valuable pieces of legislation pushed through Congress… like… what was that terrific bill that he passed? No, he vetoed it, that’s right. He invented an illegal veto which took the Supreme Court quite awhile to pull their heads out of their asses and overturn.

Still, you don’t really have any proof of any of it, do you? You suspicious prick! Why can’t you just take the guy’s word for it? He said he didn’t do anything wrong. Why do you have to keep digging at the guy. He’s never lied to you.

Then you walk into the office one day and he’s on the phone with your local Xerox representative, one of your most important business contacts, and he’s got his dick in your secretary’s mouth, and she’s sucking like an 8 amp Hoover set for deep shag.

He says he didn’t do that either. All of the sudden, 6 years of his employment have to be looked at a bit differently, don’t they? Perhaps this was the one and only time he lied about anything. Capone had to be put away for tax evasion because that’s all he could be caught for. Take what you can get. Raise the standards of this country from where we all know they are going.

William Jefferson Clinton is not THE President — he is A President. Impeaching him will not damage the presidency in the least. What a ridiculous thing to suggest. The presidency is the biggest, shiniest pair of shoes in the greatest nation in world history. The American presidency was once the only freely elected national position of leadership in the world. It’s still the most important, by default and by precedent. Which will hurt the presidency more: keeping a serial liar and sex offender (that’s what he is, folks, Paula and other women are almost certainly telling the truth), or getting him out quickly and admitting we were mistaken to put him there twice?

Let’s make sure we understand Hillary’s role in this. Wounded wife? I don’t think so. “Right wing conspiracy,” some still cry? Conspiracy to what? Stuff the President’s pecker in every female orifice that presents itself?! There are allegations from what we now know to be reliable sources that Mr. Clinton has had affairs with hundreds of women. If you think Hillary didn’t know… It has to sting that everyone else knows too, but she’s known all along. She’s the biggest cuckold this country has ever known but she’s playing the country for the biggest sap; just like she has from the jump.

A President who perjures himself about a parking ticket should be impeached because it is proof positive that he cannot be trusted with a small issue and therefore how much more fearful should we be of trusting him with large ones.

My prediction is that he will not be impeached. The press initially and ironically expressed moral indignation and outrage. The public polls, however, are so against these editorial opinions that I see newspapers reversing this stand. I see the New York Times kissing your ass. I see a lawyer who did a good job nailing a perjurist to the wall become a badguy. I see you angry not because the President was caught lying but because you’re forced to stop pretending you didn’t know already. I see you all so desperate for heroes and a father-figure that you’re willing to make excuses for anything. I see the country proudly standing behind Clinton by Christmas because if Clinton taught this nation anything it’s how to reverse your position 180° and make it seem natural and honest.

Keep him? Why? What’s he done for us lately? The excellent state of the economy is the result of booming American technology and service industry and a business friendly Congress. The poor state of the world has little to do with American politics and less to do with Clinton’s wobbly foreign policy. This week he killed a 90 billion dollar tax cut and pushed through pouring 30 billion more dollars into the IMF money pit by way of Brazil.

What standards are we setting? We let Reagan get away with lies that would make the Devil blush. Nixon died a hero with, what was it, four Presidents attending his funeral. Kennedy has been canonized. Quayle is in a think tank. I heard Carter called a traitor on NPR last week for trying to avert the Gulf War. You wonder why children are molesting each other and bringing guns to school? You wonder why voter turnout goes down every year? You wonder why Generation X is best known for our chilling apathy? These questions are not non-sequitur or tangential. They’re all liars and criminals because you’ve proved over and over how easy it is to get away with. You cry out for role models in athletes and television shows, you rail against rap music and internet pornography, yet you’ll turn a blind eye to the very public values of the single person who represents America to the world. Pornography isn’t good enough for the ’net but it’s okay for the Oval Office?

We need to impeach a President. We need it.

If we don’t change things then the American public has exactly the leaders it deserves.

One more point to elocute the dire hypocrisy of the situation: if that intern had been a man instead of a woman, Clinton would’ve resigned or been on the Senate floor for removal inside of a week, and you know it.