I have a dream
Grandad January 9th, 2009
I have a dream.
Barrack Obama is sitting in the White House, having just taken over the presidency.
He has a mountain of problems on his desk. He has the financial crisis to solve, the mess in the Middle East and how to eliminate Condoleezza Rice because she won’t hand over the keys to the executive washroom. He solves all these in the first morning when the next thing, an insurmountable problem arrives on his desk.
An invitation to visit his ancestor’s supposed birthplace in Ireland.
He knows well that the Irish will manage to drag up some kind of ancestral link to absolutely anybody, and he feels sorry for them.
How the hell is he going to get out of a visit to some arsehole in the bogs of Ireland?
The stress begins to tell.
He whips out a cigarette. But then he remembers that the White House in a non-smoking area.
“Fuck this,” Obama says to himself, “I am the Goddamn president now, and I can do what I like.”
So he lights up.
The White House staff are a bit annoyed at this political incorrectness, but they can’t give out to The Boss, so in a monumental piece of arse-licking, they declare the White House to be a smoking zone.
Word soon spreads throughout Washington that it is now politically incorrect to be a non smoker, and signs start appearing everywhere – “Smokers Only”.
America is now in a quandary. They have declared smoking and passive smoking to be lethal, yet they have to be politically correct. They send their scientists and researchers back to the drawing board.
Reams of research that has been stashed away in vaults around the country is dusted off and they suddenly discover all the stuff that has been buried.
There are the figures that give the health benefits of smoking. There is the research that shows no discernable deleterious effects of passive smoking. There is even a paper that shows that pipe smokers increase their life expectancy.
Throughout America, all the anti-smoking laws, rules and regulations are rescinded. In some states, it becomes compulsory to smoke from the age of five.
Of course this rash of fervour soon spreads throughout the world and we can all get back to normal again.
All we need is for the people of Moneygall in Offaly to send that invitation.
I wish they’d hurry up.
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