It's 1985, and President Reagan is wondering where his ice cream is
I found the years that Ronald Reagan was in office to be quite scary, although I must say the political satire of the time was some of the best. Ronald Reagan had been in office four years when I first became eligible to vote and while I don't really remember that much about Walter Mondale, I remember thinking "I have to vote for him because if we don't get Reagan out of there we all may end up nuked to hell." I dreamed about getting nuked several times during the Reagan presidency. This had nothing to do with anything I might or might not have inhaled at the time--I swear it!
There was a joke circulating during Reagan's reign that went a little bit something like this:
2000 years ago Moses said "grab your shovel, load up your ass and mount your camel. We're going to find the promised land."
2000 years later, FDR said "lay down your shovel, light up your Camel and sit on your ass. This is the promised land."
With Reagan, he will take your shovel, sell your camel, kick you in the ass, and tell you that there is no promised land.
I also found a couple pages of quotes from Reagan. Here's the first and here's the second. A couple were actually amusing. Some made me realize that we had good reason to fear this man being in office.
I didn't know this at the time, but Reagan did one very good thing while he was in office. He made July national ice cream month and the third Sunday of July national ice cream day. I figure if I ever run for office I will create the Ice Cream Party, and the first thing I will do is to outlaw that crappy lowfat ice cream. What the hell is the sense of eating ice cream without the cream? The low fat stuff only uses higher amounts of high fructose corn syrup to enhance the flavor that is lost, which is not in any way healthy. My campaign motto will be "freedom from crappy ice cream!"
A lobster with ice cream: an appealing bit of East Coast culture, or something far, far more sinister?
This was a very interesting and educational read, but it left me fearing. Not for the fact that Bush is in office. Not for the fact that McCain could be in office come next year. But for the fact that there is such a thing as lobster ice cream. Be afraid--be very afraid!
In all due sincerity, I've actually never had lobster ice cream. It's just weird enough that I might like it, and in my radioactive nightmares of the Reagan era, the lobsters being used would have had four claws, eighteen legs, glowing eyes, and gone around muttering "dod-a-chik" and "did-a-chum" like the malevolent crustaceans in Stephen King's Dark Tower books. I have had crab ice cream and I did like it. It just goes to show, you never know what's possible in a world where crab ice cream can taste good and Ronald Reagan actually did something that didn't threaten to leave us all nuked, homeless, or both.
