Meet the Nieratkos – Osama Liked Boys

Kοινοποίηση

Hopefully I’m not too late to make my posthumous attacks on Osama Bin Laden. (I was busy shopping for piñatas for my Drunko de Mayo party, sorry.) But I just wanted to put it out there that I think OBL had a thing for little boys. Or at least their pacifiers.

Of course, like everything else I write, I have no basis for this claim whatsoever. But I do have a good story.

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Back in 2002 my nephew, Joshua, was being weaned off his pacifier. Rather than simply taking it away from the child and cutting him off, cold turkey, no explanation given, we opted instead for the age-old American classic: fear-based lies and mental scarring. When the day came to take Josh’s pacifier away he searched high and low for it. He then asked for it. And we all, in our own way, explained that a very bad man had come and taken it.

“What did he look like?” he asked.

“Bad.” I said.

“Why did he take it?” he asked.

“Because he’s a bad man,” his mother, Julia said.

“What is he going to do with it?” he asked.

“He’s going to kill it,” my brother/Josh’s father said.

Josh cried. Not for the wanting of the pacifier he once felt but for the loss of life the poor inanimate object was about to suffer.

Almost a year to the day later, on December 14th 2003, the family was gathered at my mother’s home for Sunday breakfast. Josh’s cartoons were preempted by a news brief saying we had found and captured Saddam Hussein. As the TV showed the squalid, bug infested dictator being pulled from the hole in the earth Joshua asked, “Who is that man? He’s so ugly.”

Before anyone could answer I quickly told the boy, “That’s the bad man who took your pacifier. We got him! God bless America!”

The child’s jaw hit the carpet. He looked on in horror. I watched as the image of Saddam burned hot and deep into his psyche. To this day Joshua holds a strong hatred for Hussein and I can’t help but laugh at the thought of his history teach one day showing a photo of Saddam and asking, “Can anyone tell me who this man is?” And Josh responding, “That’s the man who took my pacifier.”

I’m not one to recycle old jokes, but my son isn’t even two yet and he wasn’t there so he hadn’t heard that one. So Sunday night as he slept soundly in his crib after I heard the news of Osama’s death I ran and got two frying pans and began to bang them together to wake him up. “They got Osama! They got the man who took your pacifier!” I told him. He rolled his eyes back in his head (Maybe he had heard that one before. Maybe he was still asleep?) and he pretended not to understand me. (I don’t think he speaks English.)

Either way, Saddam and Osama are assholes that like little boys and steal their pacifiers. These are the facts, as I know them. Conspiracy theorists will dispute my charge, I know, because I have no photos or video to back up my claim but that’s fine. I understand how upset they are (still) that the X-Files has been canceled and that fat, lonely, ugly people everywhere need something to discuss with their fake online friends in their virtual fat community between matches of Call of Duty. So I encourage them to discredit my story.

I’ll even get the ball rolling:

—What color was the pacifier? And if the house was locked, how did Saddam or Osama get in to steal it without any visible signs of forced entry?

—Was there ever really a Joshua? If so, where is his birth certificate? And even if we saw it, do we have to believe it?

—Could there have been a third madman involved? Behind the grassy knoll? Perhaps Hitler? Or Genghis Khan?

CHRIS NIERATKO

For more stupid go to Chrisnieratko.com or NJSkateshop.com