Let’s Eat!
A Column of Gourmet Vitriol

Ford Surgery Fails

Inside sources have reported that Betty Ford, formerly of state furniture capital Grand Rapids, Michigan, has fallen into a deep depression since her celebrated plastic surgery at a laetrile clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. Unknown to most people, her surgery was a complete failure! She had intended to resemble the late Elvis Presley, and had planned a career as an Elvis impersonator! “I’m tired of Jerry being the only breadwinner in this family,” she said shortly before entering Dr. Ramon Cabron’s Clinica Veterinaria. “I too have talents and ambitions. I want to make something of myself.”

Local Boy Makes Not So Good Dept.

Representative Charles Diggs was found guilty in October of all twenty-nine counts of defrauding the government. Diggs, visibly shaken, responded, “I will continue to represent my people as I always have. I will be acting as I have acted in all my capabilities. Under his breath he was reported to have muttered, “Does this mean I have to give it all back?” A local benefit to Defend Charles Diggs is planned at the Diggs Funeral Home and will be attended by such noted personalities as Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Albert Cleage, Nicky Barnes, and Father Divine.

From the Halls of Montezuma

Local state police trooper Norman Killough has become the first black state trooper to be killed in the line of duty. Killough was murdered “accidentally” by a Flint patrolman in a staged shakedown. Killough had been working undercover at the time; now he’s working underground. The Flint policeman reported to work the following Monday. Killough may have been buried along with other skeletons at the notorious Diggs Funeral Home.

Just Doing His Job

Recent local newspaper articles have revealed anxieties in nearby Shelby Township, some twenty-five miles north of Detroit, where residents expressed fears that the state of Michigan would grant a permanent permit to Liquid Waste Disposal, Inc., to run a liquid chemical waste incinerator. The company has already done so with a series of “temporary” permits since 1968.

Audrey Shea, one local resident, said, “Some of the neighbors will say, ‘Gee have you been feeling OK?’ Their eyes burn, they feel a little sick to their stomachs, they get the headache—it just seems to be a constant thing.” John Voelpel, the attorney for the company, disagrees: “I believe in my own mind that there “is no health or safety problem today, not even — an odor problem.” Voelpel, an aficionado of reincarnation theories, hopes by being a good lawyer to ascend to being born as a slug in his next life.

Despair of the Middle Classes Dept.

John Sainsbury, 43, Florida electrical engineer discusses the “tax revolt” (sic) and inflation: “I’m bitter, you better believe it. I can see myself stripped of everything someday. I could end up joining ultra-right groups. I haven’t yet, but the government doesn’t have to push too much harder to get me there.” Look for John any day now selling New Solidarity on your local street corner.

Somethin’ Happenin’ Here

We read the following in a recent New Times article (9/4/78) on gushy guru Baba Ram Das: “When he returned from the Far East last year, he went through U.S. Customs in Honolulu. Customs inspections are often a hassle for him...so when a uniformed officer approached him, he was prepared for the usual scrutiny.

“‘Aren’t you Ram Das?’ asked the Customs man. R.D. said he was.

“The official beamed. ‘I’ve read all of your books and I just wanted to come over and tell you I really love you. Can I have a hug?’

“ ‘When Customs officials are hugging me,’ says Ram Das, ‘something sure is happening out there.’”

Ram Das apparently hopes that by being a good guru this time around, he can be a lawyer in his next life. We recommend that he open his practice in Ann Arbor.

Historic Nerds and Political Turds

The so-called “historic” West Canfield Association has become embroiled with the Detroit Common Council over the pseudo-issue of prostitution.

The street, which squats around the corner from the office of the FE, is the breeding ground of various middle class professionals, artsy-farties, and sophisticated twits who have the arrogance to refer to themselves as “urban pioneers” for renovating the Victorian mansions there, as well as for getting the street declared an “historic district.”

They have made themselves notorious in the Cass Corridor ( a euphemism of sorts for the slums extending from downtown to the Wayne State University campus and between Woodward Avenue and the Lodge freeway) for instigating and abetting an intensification over the last few years of cop harassment of the black and poor who happen to wander into their crippled little fantasy land.

They have waged a battle against prostitution by suing to close Anderson’s Garden, which one picklesucker from the street accurately described as “the biggest whore bar in Michigan.” But they came to loggerheads with the Common Council over their attempts to keep low-income housing from being built along Third Avenue across from Anderson’s Garden and the Willit Show Bar. Unfortunately for the Canfield elitists, the low-income housing being planned for the area is a pet project of the liberal politicians on the Council and at City Hall. Street residents have been suddenly hit with a flurry of violation notices from city building inspectors; also, plans to pave the street with cobblestones have been put on the back burner indefinitely.

Councilman Nicholas Hood noted cynically, “They are playing their way and so can we.” The Council has been considering the possibility of revoking the street’s designation as an historic district, which has brought it federal aid.

“Marxist” councilman clown Ken Cockerel said, “There is an endless stream of these white people. They step up and they say, ‘I’m Donald Duck and I choose to live in Detroit,’ as if they deserve a medal for it...What do these people want to do with the prostitutes? Machine gun them? Drive down the streets and spray them with some poison?-

As for us, we couldn’t give a rat’s ass for this little Greenfield Village-in-the-Ghetto and wouldn’t mind at all if the city were to bulldoze the houses with their suburban mummies locked up inside. Nor do we care in the slightest for any projects of sleazy liberal politicians to shunt the poor off into ugly, cheaply-built apartment buildings by lining the pockets of the construction companies.

Let the politicians and the historic nerds spray each other with poison. As Ivan Karamazov said, “One reptile will devour another.”

Socialist Snoids Shriek, Shrink

That tiny, insular sectlet the Spartacist League seems to be going the way of the berserkos of the U.S. Labor Party. In a recent article subheaded “Goat Fuckers and Guilt Trippers,” in which the SL brags smugly that it has won to its ranks “dozens of members from the SWP over the last several years!” the Workers (sic) Vanguard defends its fearless leader, James Robertson, for making the comment, “The Greek population exists by selling its children or selling Swiss watches to one another,” and for calling Albania “a nation of goat-fuckers”! The SL has also announced its first election campaign, that of Marjorie Stamberg for state assembly of New York, with NCLC-esque demands such as “Build a ten-lane highway underground,” and “Let the Concorde land!”

This miserable little church claims that its “approach to environmental problems is based on the real needs of working people” (yawn). The SL prides itself on the fact that other equally irrelevant grouplets attack it and adds, “Hate Trotskyism, hate the SL.” That’s fine with us; we couldn’t agree more.

Robertson is also quoted as lamenting, “We haven’t been growing much lately.”