All of the recent upheavals in matters sexual and gender-related have enabled the most progressive of social justice engineers (SJEs, new term, look it up) to devise new federal legislation that will be passed within days of the Democrats resuming the Majority in the United States Senate. Various anonymous spokespersons are consistent and adamant about describing this as principally a health measure.

They are understandably defensive about the sobriquet the measure has already acquired among House aides and interns, “Stop and Peek.” But it’s not unlikely that monicker will stick, although the speed of intended passage of the bill, officially called The Smith-Harris Initiative for Targeted Epilations, will render the humor moot.

ITE, as sponsors Tina Smith(D-MN) and Kamala Harris(D-CA) refer to it, represents a response to the epidemic of crab lice which has unfortunately accompanied the influx of stateless impoverished refugees from our neighbor states south of the border.

“You can’t even get to know a friendly stranger without having an unpleasant dermatological surprise a day or so later,” Senator Harris explained. “It‘s past time for our party to step up and protect the American people, to make a safe place for our safe places, so to speak. You know what I’m saying?”

To this end, the bill will federally mandate regularly scheduled epilations of both pubic and head hair throughout the population, excluding only those hundred or so minority genders who have disqualifyingly complex dysmorphic symptoms. To counterbalance the enormous energy cost of the program, the bill also expressly prohibits the shaving or chemical epilation of hair on the face, chest, back, and legs. The CDC has determined these kinds of hair are not a crab lice risk if the targeted epilation regions of the body are kept free from hair.

Regardless of motivation, ITE seems destined to wreak a profound alteration the American sexual landscape. The changes in everyone’s appearance (exceptions excepted, of course) will be striking:

You will have noticed that two pictures feature women with head hair. That’s as good a basis as any to describe the explicit exclusions and exemptions in the Smith-Harris bill. Women who earn a living predominantly from their appearance, like television hosts, movie star political activists, and certain female U.S. Senators are expressly excluded from the boll’s jurisdiction as a simple practical matter.

The otherwise universal changes in appearance may not be the most controversial aspect of the legislation. The core of the bill’s language, admittedly far too long to read before it comes to a vote, concerns the creation of a “sister” agency of the Transportation Agency (TSA), which employs highly trained personnel and advanced technology to check passengers and baggage for concealed weapons. The Pure Underwear Targeting Agency will be similarly empowered and equipped. Their personnel will be the ones charged with carrying out the bi-weekly epilation procedures required of all post-pubescent U.S. citizens, as well as the good looking ones a bit younger. The procedures performed will be brief, friendly, and strictly professional, much like passing through a TSA checkpoint at the airport.

Between sessions PUTA employees will also be stationed at common points of human passage like airports, corporate and restaurant restrooms, and sometimes at random in casinos, hotels, the subway and bus stations. This aspect of the bill is what led to the “Stop and Peek” quip, though the transaction will not be designed to humiliate.

The Senate sponsors also offered a friendly and disarming tip, especially to the women of America. “Self-examination is something we’ve all been doing since puberty,” Kamala Harris said. “Now we can help ourselves by continuing the practice a little farther south.”

And if we really want it or need it, PUTA will always be there to lend a hand.

Thank you for that, Kamala. We never doubted you.

It’s not enough that they have the most offensive piece of tallish architecture in Philadelphia, some fauvist mockery of the Flatiron Building. It’s not enough that their press release announced the sad suicide of Hunter S. Tompson with two chilling sentences: “Hunter Tompson shot himself in the head. He died.” From there they went on to prove why eulogies are better short.

Now they’ve opened a controversial exhibit about the great Pennsylvania short story writer and novelist John O’Hare. It features a one minute movie with a voiceover narration drowned out by a dinning bit of Muzak. Hard copy of the narration is handed out hopefully with the tickets, seeming to promise more. Which isn’t there.

As a true American original, John O’Hare came to the sophisticated pages of the New Yorker from a hard scrabble town or city called, um, Pottsville, PA. It was a place with people, buildings, more buildings, a statue, and dreams. And stories. All of these were typically, uniquely American, and John O’Hare got famous telling his mundanely original stories about a place called Gibbsville, a town or city a lot like Reading, PA. O’Hare told his stories in a brand new American way, which was in about a thousand words give or take. Which is what led to all those very long novels that became movies and ended his writing career.  But he got rich, which still didn’t make up for not going to Yail.

And here’s the stale donut of a film tribute to the distinguished O’Hara:

[INSERTS TO COME]
As a true American original, John Upcreek came to the sophisticated pages of the New Yorker from a hard scrabble town or city called, um, Reading, PA. It was a place with people, buildings, more buildings, a statue, and dreams. And stories. All of these were typically, uniquely American, and John Upcreek got famous telling his mundanely original stories about a place called Brewer, a town or city a lot like Pottsville, PA. Upcreek told his stories in a brand new American way, which was in words specially chosen for you by a Harvurd summa cum laude. Which is what led to all those novels about that same guy from Gibbsville that should have become movies and ended his writing career.  But thanks to not many movies, his writing career kept going and he still got rich, which is why he was so smart to go to Harvurd instead of Yail.

Rabbit Is Senile

Chapter One

Here I go again, with another brilliant display of writing. It’s amazing, even to me, that I can write this well, so transparently that it seems the scenes are just unfolding themselves out of the ether, but then again with that additional turn or twist or tweak which make it inescapably clear that we’re in the hands of Upcreek the master. I started out with this much talent all the way back when I was a summa cum laude English major at Harvard, and I’ve never stopped producing. Every piece I do for The New Yorker, every smug review and essay, every one of these damn Rabbit novels—they’re all, always, brimming with talent. It’s just so fucking beautiful the way I use words that everyone, including me, is rapt, so that even though we’re still in the first paragraph of Rabbit is Senile, all my readers have already zoomed back to where Rabbit’s life was when we left off last time, and they can taste and feel and hear the tiniest incidentals of his experience, which at the moment have to do with the fact that his diaper has just been soiled and he is grappling in the depths of his bleached and porous memory for some identification of the experience of having a bowel movement.

Only I can get away with this kind of scrupulously unblinking description, because I do it so damn well, and it doesn’t matter a farthing that nobody out there, or in here, gives a shit about Rabbit—they come to me for the performance alone, the way they would go to see Luciano Pavorotti sing arias out of context.

And if, in this case, the aria is but a cheap rehash of characters that were never that interesting in the first place, it’s still okay, because prose this beautiful accomplishes the miracle of demonstrating that life itself cannot live up to the glory of my talent with words. And if it is a joke that I am, at this very instant, describing in meticulous compleatness the content of Rabbit’s Pamper, it is not a small joke or a venal one; it is rather part of the grand joke that I and my readers share about life—if only, we all sigh and chuckle and exclaim, if only life were as fine as the writing of John Upcreek. And as we sigh and chuckle together, I can begin my next tour de force by bringing this stinking Pamper to the brink of your very nostrils and holding it there for long minutes, while arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim mem-inisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim mem-inisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta.