The United States of Air: a Satire that Mocks the War on Terror Read Online Free

relative, even your spouse. But deep down, in the blackness of their diseased souls, these poor creatures—like my wife—hunger for their drug of choice, and nothing you say or do can help them see the truth.
    Other than that, it was a good time at the ATFF. I brought my partner Harry Green with me. When I got promoted, I made sure he got promoted too. Loyalty counts for something in this world, I figure. Harry was a friend. Together we led the way in busting illegal grow-ops in the D.C. area—from huge warehouses full of hydroponic vats growing beans and corn, wheat and rye, down to the grungy college student with a sun lamp and a couple of tomato plants in his closet. It didn’t matter. We busted them all.
    It was around this time we got the first inkling of a growing menace in our society. Cross-border smuggling soared, flooding our streets with that vilest of drugs, the crack cocaine of food: polished white rice. How did they get it into the country? There were border checks, air-eating sniffer dogs at every port of entry, customs officials whose sole job was to look for and confiscate food. On top of it all, the sniffer dogs died of some unknown wasting disease. For a long time we weren’t quite sure what had happened. Then we realized: the dogs had been poisoned.
    We detected a master hand at work. Behind all the grow-ops, the smuggling, even the network of Supper Clubs we’d been hearing about, stood one man: Fatso, the Godfather of Food. As head of the French Food Mafia,
la chôse notre,
Fatso controlled 120% of the black market. My partner and I worked feverishly to build a case against him, but time and time again that greasy mafioso slipped through our fingers.
    What’s that? Supper Clubs are a network of exclusive food labs run by the mafia. Rich connoisseurs get high by candlelight on course after course of elaborately prepared illicit confection. I have to say, I don’t get it. Why do addicts pay so much money for this stuff? A calorie is a calorie, and in my book, they’re all bad. What’s more, these bizarre assemblies require formal dress—black tie for men, evening gowns for the women. Can someone please explain to me why wealthy food terrists wear tuxedos while consuming addictive caloric substances? Is powdered cleavage necessary for the consumption of these mind-warping and soul-destroying meals? Not to mention the fifteen-piece orchestra. Do heroin addicts insist on chamber music or light jazz in the dark garbage-lined alleys where they shoot up?
    You don’t have an answer for that, do you? I didn’t think so.
    How do I know all this? Because I busted a Supper Club once. Got a tipoff from a snitch. Sent a hundred food terrists to Fat Camp, including half a dozen Congressmen. Boy, that was rough. Finding out that not all our honorable gentlemen on Capitol Hill are pure air-eaters rattled my faith in our political system. Thankfully, I soon realized it was an isolated incident, and my enthusiasm for the American way of life—I mean, the Airitarian way of life—soon returned to its full measure.
    So we barged into this Supper Club, Laxafiers drawn, my TWAT team bringing up the rear. (That’s Thin Weapons And Tactics, in case you were curious.) Rumor was Fatso himself would be present. The food terrists gasped when they saw us. The women shrieked. They tried to escape, and would have outrun us, too, what with the performance-enhancing calories they consume. We’d anticipated this, however, and blockaded the exits with ATFF fatty wagons.
    I remember staring around that ballroom in shock. Lobsters stacked like firewood on every table, the floor littered with their crunchy husks. Buffet tables sagged under the weight of food. Calories on every plate but one.
    Fatso’s.
    He reclined in a corner, like some malevolent, clean-shaven
maître d’
in evening attire. Over his head hung a large tapestry of the Battle of Hunger Hill, one of the fiercest battles of the Civil War. Not a shot had been