merican forces and the new Iraqi regime took another blow this week when Saddam loyalists hidden on the outskirts of Baghdad took responsibility for the disastrous Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez film, Gigli. The film, a reputedly putrid and cloying pairing of America's hottest celebrity couple under the helm of Scent of a Woman director Martin Brest, has been universally blasted as one of the worst movies in recent history. Which is saying quite a lot.

In a short statement on a video tape released to Al Jazeera, a ventriloquil figure purported to be Saddam Hussein credited the bomb, detrimental to the careers of Affleck, Lopez, Brest, and anyone else who touched it, to the movement of Saddam Hussein loyalists.

"The capitalist pig culture has been punished by Allah for its excesses in the most fitting fashion imaginable. We of the Iraqi regime loyalists claim full responsibility for this catastrophe. A strike to the heart of America in the name of Allah! The next time imperialists seek to meddle in the affairs of the Middle East, watch the critically impaired dialogue and undigestable chemistry forced upon your citizens."

Spokesmen for the U.S. government and Hollywood alike allege Saddam loyalists are trying to put the American public to fear, taking credit for a natural disaster they had nothing to do with, and assure the populace that Middle Eastern terrorist groups do not have the capability to sign big stars into bombs and weaken scripts or mis-edit major productions. Others defend the movie as "not that bad."

Despite the assurances of the government and celebrity authorities that Gigli is a misfire of a few studio producers and not the work of anti-American fanatics, the media has latched onto the claim and begun to question other recent disasters. While reasonably convinced Al-Qaeda or other anti-American groups are not responsible for northeastern power outages, leading media outlets are asking if Osama bin Laden may have been responsible for failed Julia Roberts-Brad Pitt vehicle The Mexican. Some postulate the film was much better and ruined by bin Laden or associates, who then refused to take responsibility for it when it turned out too atrocious.

Hollywood watchdog website www.stargaze.com has taken the bold step of suggesting Saddam loyalists, linked to Al-Qaeda, have carried out the most disastrous summer box office bombing of all time in the summer of 2003. From digital debacle The Hulk, all the way back to the underwhelming The Matrix Reloaded, the onslaught of movies that have failed to hold the number one slot or in any way live up to audience expectations has been too perfectly a Hollywood failure to be chalked up to poor studio executives and directors too apt to insult the intelligence of mainstream America. According to the website, Gigli is merely the capper designed to forever disillusion American movie-goers after the disappointing blitz of Charlie's Angels Full Throttle, Terminator 3, American Wedding, and Hollywood Homicide.

"Celebrity mismatches, cul-de-sac scripts, sequels we never asked for to movies that weren't that good to begin with," the website claimed, "this is nothing like the Hollywood we've come to know and love. They have either thrown in with the America haters in the Middle East or are the dupes of spies and con-men trying to unravel the fabric of our celluloid culture."

The investigators at www.stargaze.com stated they would reward any evidence providing a link between Al-Qaeda and the AOL-Time-Warner, and planned a three-part study next to examine the role of terrorists in the music industry since 1997.

he anemic field of Democratic candidates, described by political pundits as “what the A-team would be like if it was really gay,� has inspired many Democrats to push for another Al Gore candidacy in 2004. Perhaps not grasping the ramifications of four more years with Boy George at the helm, thus far the former vice-president has steadfastly refused.

“I wouldn’t run for president again for a million, trillion dollars,� Gore told reporters last December. “Nor for all the tea in China.�

�Not even for true love?� a reporter questioned.

“No,� answered Gore. “Not even for that.�

However, Gore did concede later that if this reporter was holding a gun to the head of an innocent newborn baby, he might consider it. Though he did seem a little weirded out by the question.

Recent polls in New Hampshire show that if Gore were to enter the race for the Democratic Party nomination, he would immediately become the front-runner in that state. These polls showed that the same also holds true for Hillary Rodham Clinton, George Clinton, and Kool-Aid Man, the gigantic pitcher of powdered beverage famous for busting through walls and responding in the affirmative. Various Democratic candidates have denounced the poll as mean, but true.

Speaking with the commune this week, Gore’s position on his potential candidacy remained unchanged.

“Would you, could you, if it rained?� this reporter asked the non-candidate.

“I would not, could not if it rained,� responded Gore. “Nor if my brain had gone insane. I meant what I said and I said what I meant: I will not run for president! Now leave me be!�

Other scenarios that would fail to entice Gore to run include learning the secrets behind various Carly Simon songs, a blimp full of naked cheerleaders landing in his backyard, or having a southern state renamed Goregia.

Several political commentators have suggested that Gore would prefer to go down in history as the man who was denied the presidency by an antiquated electoral system and corrupt election officials in Florida, rather than risk losing a second election to a man who has been amply exposed as one of the less-memorable bit characters on Dukes of Hazzard. Those who know Gore dismiss this idea as absurd, though they could totally see Bush giving the Duke boys the what-for.

Gore supporters suggest instead that the former vice-president simply doesn’t wish to subject the public to a Gore v. Bush rematch, or spend the next year of his life debating with a man who moves his lips when he reads.

No decade since the 1950's has so boldly established itself as a fad juggernaut as did the 1980's. In comparison, the 1990's were a sad decade for fads indeed, making one wonder where the will for conspicuous time wasting had gone. Probably the best explanation can be found in looking at each decade's drug of choice, and the resultant effect this had on American culture.

In the 1960's, Americans were dropping acid and grooving to the beautiful swirling colors of the traffic accident they'd just caused. The fads of the 60's were accordingly colorful and bizarre. The 70's were all about stinking up your jeans jacket with reefer smoke in the back of some sociopath's panel van, leading to fads as ugly and alienating as the decade itself. In the 80's, the hip and squares alike were pulling lines of expensive coke and joking about the five or six dead South Americans who had made their high possible. Ambitious and overeager, if not megalomaniacal, were the keywords in 80's faddom as well. America spent the 90's slouched over between the sofa and the bathroom door with a heroin needle dangling from its arm, and as a result not a whole lot of fadding, nor much else, got done in that decade.

The 80's, however, were another story entirely. The story of neon-colored spandex encrusted with hair gel, and the story of a nation kissing its own ass. In keeping with the 80's own hyper-incongruent vibe, the most fun fad from the decade didn't even originate in the 80's. Exploiting the poor had been around for eons, but not since pirate times had it been as cool to openly flaunt this practice or write songs about it. If the pendulum had swung any further in the opposite direction from the 60's, it might have knocked America's dick right out of the anus of the disenfranchised.

This isn't to say that all of the 80's fads were mean-spirited. Sure, Cabbage Patch Kids were pretty disgusting, but there was a certain poetic justice in watching deranged materialist parents fighting each other tooth and nail for the right to give their kids some shitty cloth doll.

On the contrary, many of the 80's best fads were quite fun. Well, not the Smurfs, those little communist bastards were pretty creepy. Nobody ever really explained if they were supposed to be aliens or some kind of apocalyptic cult or what. Personally, I've always leaned in the "cult" direction, since questions of "What's a Smurf?" and "Why do they all wear the same color pants?" were always answered with the cultish doublespeak "They're Smurfs" from the bigwigs at Hanna Barbera.

But surely, not every aspect of the 80's was overrun by creepy materialistic crap. Who could forget the Rubik's Cube? Inventor and Belgian weirdo Erno Rubik created his famous cube in 1974 as a way to drive his dog insane. Though the toy failed in its intended use (the dog just tried to eat the cube), it eventually found millions of fans among Americans who thought solving some kind of chintzy plastic puzzle proved they were smart. The truly smart soon learned that you could just "solve" the puzzle by peeling all the colored stickers off the squares and putting them back on in the right order. Less-inventive children soon developed a pastime known as "Rubik's Baseball," a one-time game where the cube was hit with a bat and exploded into a million plastic pieces that went everywhere.

So maybe the Rubik's Cube was a piece of shit, too. But no one could muster such harsh words for the most expressive of 80's fads, breakdancing. Originating as a way for especially cowardly street gangs to mediate their differences through dance battles rather than actual fighting, breakdancing first came to national attention in 1975 when two Harlem street gangs, the Soft Touches and the Big Pussies, danced the shit out of each other in a bloodless gangland melee that left dozens thoroughly exhausted. By the early 80's, breakin' had become a national obsession, with white kids everywhere flopping around on the floor like they had any idea what they were doing. Despite an utter lack of coordination or soul whatsoever, Caucasian interest in breakdancing kept the fad alive for several years, eventually cementing it as the most fun source of self-inflicted spinal injuries since the invention of the skateboard.

Concerned parents who didn't want kids hurting themselves breakdancing did their children no favors by sending them to school to play tetherball instead, perhaps one of the cruelest 80's fads since it was condoned by the school board. Like dodge ball without the principle of safety in numbers, tetherball involved chaining a rock-hard leather "ball" to a pole and mandating that children use it to pummel each other into submission. Tetherball was eventually banned in 1989 after President Bush attempted the game for a photo op at a Washington elementary school, which ended in the president being escorted away by the Secret Service after a shameful episode of crying and broken glasses.

Perhaps the true salvation of 80's fads was the rise of video games, which rarely resulted in injury or public humiliation. Though as a metaphor for the 80's themselves, early videogames could hardly be more apt: gobbling up quarters while presenting basically the same rip-off level over and over again, only more hopelessly difficult each time. Perhaps video games did more to prepare children for the real world than parents realized at the time, filling kids with nervous dread while cleaning out their allowances. Personally I wouldn't know, since I never had any money and just had to stand there pretending I was controlling the little guy in the demo.

On second thought, maybe the 80's did suck a big nut.

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