The Mysterious Disappearance of Ann Coulter.

Now that it's late autumn and the days grow ever colder and more joyless, of a morning, I like to take breakfast in the glass-paneled, tropical plant-filled conservatory of Palmerwood.

One morning, not too very many days ago, as I was enjoying the usual breakfast of all fabulously wealthy aristocratic international playboys and adventurers of leisure and fortune (onion scones, quail eggs over easy, yogurt, and Apple Jacks), my doughty and redoubtable gamekeeper, Oliver de Baliviere, burst into the room in a state of great agitation.

This isn't the first time this has happened, and it generally bodes ill.

Pausing only to light up a truly lovely Cuban Cohiba (I find that a cigar in the morning hits the spot. Really gets rid of that horrible toothpaste breath), I raced off behind the redoubtable and doughty Monsieur de Baliviere.

Now lest you think I was happy about having to do so, I wasn't. My misgivings increased with every step I took. It would have been so much easier to return to my quail eggs, my carafe of Kopi Iuwak coffee ($600/lb), and my Apple Jacks. But Lord knows, I'm nothing if not a RESPONSIBLE feudal land baron. And as my father used to say, "Sonny, if there's trouble afoot on one's rambling, luxurious, palatial country estate, there's no sense in sticking one's head in the sand."




I followed the doughty and redoubtable Monsieur de Baliviere over a low ridge of boulders at the base of a small hill somewhere up in the far northern and little-explored reaches of Palmerwood. There, at the crest of the hill, half-buried in the ground, are the smoking remains of what appears to be a small spacecraft. No wonder Mr. de Baliviere was so agitated! That's not the kind of think you run across every day, is it?

At the risk of being overly obvious, I got the very strong suspicion that this battered wreck is...[pause for dramatic effect, and please cue the eerie Theremin music]... NOT OF THIS WORLD.

Now, I'm no astrophysicist, but I know enough to know that I'd better not mess around with an awe-inspiring spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin without the proper preparations.

By "preparations," of course, I mean a quick phone call to Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lawrence Krauss, and a slug of hooch. Considering it's right after breakfast, it's a little early in the day for an 18-year single malt, so it looks like Johnny Walker Black for this.

The doughty, redoubtable Monsieur Oliviere de Baliviere and I retired from the scene of the crashed starship to consult the experts and swig a shlook of hooch. As we strolled back to the mansion, I congratulated myself on my own superb judgment. I really wanted to open that chariot from beyond the stars, but I didn't. Because I have superb restraint.

This isn't, however, a quality shared by my children, Intrepid Stella A. and Young Leo J.

Now, I'm well aware that an alien visitation episode means the series can officially be said to have jumped the shark. "Happy Days," "Miami Vice," and even "The Dukes of Hazzard" all started to suck after their alien visitation episodes. However, one could reasonably ask whether the Palmerwood story was ever on the right side of the shark to begin with, so on we boldly barrel.

Intrepid Stella A. and Young Leo J. have occasionally been known to rush in where angels fear to tread. Opening a strange spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin would perhaps be something about which even ten- and five-year-olds might have second thoughts. But not these two.

"Greetings, earth larvae," says an strange voice from the depths of the ship. "I am Xothnarg of Blrk 2645-J, and I have come to your planet to ask a question."

"What we on Blrk-2645-J don't get, terra-grubs," Xothnarg the alien says, "is this: corporate profits are at record highs, oil prices are down, Osama Bin Laden is dead, there's no inflation, interest rates are as low as they've been in three decades, unemployment is at record lows, the stock market is at record highs, the wealthy are still crazy-rich, and millions of Americans who didn't have insurance do now. So why, earth-cubs, why, why, WHY in the name of Grbldrk Almighty, did your people give the GOP a majority in both the House and the Senate? For Grbldrk's sake, WHY??!? When things are going so well, why in the flrkjk did your people hand control of the legislative branch to the same klrgholes who flrkjked everything six ways from Grblday in the first place?!?"

My children, who are ten and five, are still in the nascence of their political awareness, and have no answer to this question. But they have listened to their old man ranting and raving, and they do have an idea or two.

"Well, there's this creature our Pop despises above all others," Young Leo J. says thoughtfully. "The Coulter-Beast," nods Intrepid Stella A. "Apparently, it controls the thoughts of a significant percentage of the voting public. Maybe if you captured it and studied it, that might answer your question?"

Intrepid Stella A. and Young Leo J., take their new acquaintance, Xothmarg of Blrk-2645, to the magnificently-appointed, oak-paneled library of Palmerwood to do a little research.

In "The Big Book of Horrible Things," they hit paydirt: a description of the Coulter-Beast, complete with its diet.

"Excellent," says Intrepid Stella A. "Let's bait the trap."



After stopping off at the scullery to get a few pounds' worth of rotten meat, Intrepid Stella A., Young Leo J., and Xothnarg return to the woods to bait the trap. Young Leo J. erected a hastily-constructed Potemkin village of sycophantic Ann Coulter fans, and Intrepid Stella A. sounded the Coulter-Call.

All that remained to do was wait for the beast to appear.

Intrepid Stella A., Young Leo J., and their newfound acquaintance, Xothnarg of Planet Blrk 2645-J, await the arrival of the Coulter-Beast in the bosky northern reaches of the great Palmerwood Forest.

They don't have to wait long. Within moments, the sound of stiletto heels squelching into the earth is heard and a screeching, strident voice shatters the cool morning silence. Attracted by the stench of rotting meat and the what it perceives to be adulatory attention--both are like crack to its ilk--the Coulter-Beast lumbers into view.

Intrepid Stella A. and Young Leo J., and their new pal Xothnarg of Blrk 2645-J, watch intently as the Coulter-Beast lumbers toward the rotten meat with which they've cleverly baited their trap. Such brilliant children. I'm just sure they're gifted.

"By the holy bouncing Jzflgr of Grbldrk Himself, young Earth sproutlings!" breathes Xothnarg. "I've fought the Wild Snarling Snerks of the Burning Wastelands of Captillion-7, seen the Snagfestering Grook of Tau Alphalon-9 disembowel a whole flock of Shibboleths, and watched the Glumbering Horkthul battle the Klagging Smeerkachalot of Stampophilion-5--but I've never seen anything as horrifyingly and nauseatingly vile as the Coulter-Beast of Earth!"

My precious lil' poppets, Intrepid Stella A. and Young Leo J., are dab hands at building rope-snare traps. With a SNAP-WHOOSH, the Coulter-beast is lofted into the air and dangles there like knock-kneed yo yo. Which she is, come to think of it.

"Look at this whore-shoe," Intrepid Stella A. growls, picking up one of Ann's stripper-heels in disgust. "REAL women don't need to wear shoes like this to make them look good."

"I am, of course, a newcomer to this planet, Earth-larvae," muses Xothnarg, peering at the Coulter-beast's exposed junk, "and little-versed in the anatomy of your kind, but from what I can see, that's not a real woman."

Xothnarg of Blrk 2645-J couldn't have been happier with the Catch of the Day.

"Deepest gratitude, earth-tadpoles," he says. "We'll subject this creature to a few rousing sessions of good old-fashioned alien probes, and perhaps science will be able to answer the question of why your people vote so stupidly. And in gratitude, I'd like to give you a gift from the people of Blrk 2645-J."

Xothnarg hands them a small metal box festooned with sciency-looking blinking lights.

"It will help you in your struggle against the Klagg creature which now oppresses you. Open it when your fellow terra-spawn are born... but not a minute before, you got me?"

Now I am, as a fabulously wealthy international adventurer, Defender of the Republic, and celebrity, of course well-connected at the very highest levels of government, and a quick call to the right people sends a flock of the world's foremost experts in alien life scurrying to Palmerwood for a closer look.

But when they arrive, all they find is an empty crater where the alien spacecraft was. Everyone is mystified.

Everyone except, of course, my doughty and redoubtable gamekeeper, Oliver de Baliviere. This skilled woodsman and tracker's discovery of a mysterious whore-stiletto heel leads him to believe that there's more here than meets the eye... but will the world ever know the whole story????

L'Apres-Vie

Artur Schopenhauer wrote that death is not to be feared, as it is simply a return to the state of unbeing--a state we all occupied before conception and birth.

Or, as Mark Twain far more accessibly put it, the idea of death didn't bother him, since he'd been dead for millions of years before he was born, and it had never caused him the slightest inconvenience whatsoever.

The admirable Mr. Clemens expounded upon this idea in his personal creed, which first saw the light of day in 1973, when it was published in What is Man? And Other Philosophical Writings (Stanford: University of California Press):

There may be a hereafter and there may not be. I am wholly indifferent about it. If I am appointed to live again I feel sure it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not evidenced) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to follow death I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore shall not care a straw about it.

Whether there is or there isn't any continued consciousness or existence after we croak is something I don't know and neither do you and neither does anyone else on the planet. It is also not something I waste a lot of time thinking about. But if, on the off chance, there IS an afterlife, my own personal preference would be to spend a few billion millennia yacking with some of the greatest and most interesting talkers humanity's ever produced.

After shuffling off this vale of tears, I'd invite (left to right and then clockwise) Sigmund Freud, Joseph Heller, Joseph Pulitzer, Leon Trotsky, Noam Chomsky, Richard Hofstadter, the aforementioned Mr. Twain, and Herbert Bayard Swope to sit around my celestial salon and just gab.

To the best of my knowledge, none of them ever met each other. Pulitzer and Twain were roughly contemporaries, as were Freud, Trotsky, and Swope. Swope actually worked for Joseph Pulitzer for a while, but by the time Swope came to work for the New York World, Pulitzer's paper, Pulitzer was essentially an absentee despot who ruled his paper from his yacht via telephone, telegrams, and letters, and I know of no evidence they ever met. Hofstadter, Heller, and Chomsky all lived and worked throughout the twentieth century in pretty close proximity (Chomsky is still alive and active), but I don't know if they ever met.

But wouldn't a confab between these guys be something to witness? Almost makes one wish one could believe.