By Daniel Meltzer, published in The Villager Feb. 1-7 issue
Medical
hot lines across the country remained silent today after physicians in
the nation’s capital sent out an emergency call for a willing donor to
step forward to contribute his or her brain as well as an entire
backbone to the Democratic Party, which has been diagnosed with extreme
multiple osteoneurological failure, or E-MONF syndrome (pronounced
‘eemonf’).
‘The patient is a virtual
jellyfish,’ Dr. Alvin Zweistein, chief of osteoneuropathology at Walter
Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Md., told reporters today ats a news
conference, ‘completely immobilized and unable to communicate
comprehensibly, to stand up for, or to, anything, and only occasionally
being heard to mumble, sotto voce, such utterances as, âOh, well) ‘ and
âWith all due respect) ‘ and âBeing in the minority after all) .’
Response to external stimuli is nil.’
The
patient does occasionally twitch on its right side and spit from that
side of its mouth, one hospital staff person told this writer, however
the significance, if any, of these apparently random, spontaneous
spasms remains unclear.
‘The party is currently on life support and its ultimate survival is by no means assured,’ Zweistein said, grimly.
It
may be the first identified case of an entire political party having
been stricken with E-MONF, for which the only known hope would be the
still-untested double transplant. Without it, the likelihood of full
recovery of a patient with severely atrophied brain and backbone would
be negligible, he estimated. In one earlier isolated individual case,
he said, nearly full function did return without surgery. However the
unnamed patient reportedly went on to exhibit extreme megalomania,
compounded with severe communicative difficulties characterized by
progressive retardation of grammatical skills and pronounced
pronunciation difficulties with his own native tongue. The patient
credited divine intervention for his recovery.
Just
who might step forward to offer both brain and backbone to the
currently mindless, spineless Democratic Party remains subject to
speculation.
‘We are in a state of
emergency, without question,’ one unnamed party supporter has said.
‘Look at us. Nobody knows what to say or even in which direction to
lean anymore.’
Observers had been
sounding alarms for years regarding the party’s noticeable twitching
and tilting to its right. It was only a matter of time, many felt,
before it literally fell over onto its face.
Someone
suggested that the reputedly upright and putatively ‘centered’ New York
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton step forward as a likely donor. However,
a recently revealed rightward lateral curvature of her own spine,
observed when she removed her suit jacket to be fitted with a
battery-powered microphone at a recent speaking engagement, presumably
now disqualifies her. Such public exposure of her previously
unacknowledged condition would explain her having nearly fallen off
various stages and speakers’ platforms on several occasions, as she
took unorthodox positions on various issues.
‘Besides,’
one party official volunteered on condition of anonymity, ‘it’s not
just a backbone, of which we are certainly in desperate need, there’s
the brain as well. One without the other, as we have all too often
discovered to our great dismay, is utterly useless.’
While
Clinton’s rightward cant may worry some party faithful, others are
firmly against accepting any donor spine that leans leftward, leading
to a state of virtual paralysis within the ranks.
Owing
to a mounting burden of weighty national maladies, including a
catastrophic and presumably permanent war, mass confusion and
consternation over costly and complicated medical insurance programs,
indefinitely displaced hurricane victims, hemorrhaging federal budgets
and electronic bug infestation, the collapse of the party’s central
nervous system has many now seriously alarmed.
A
nationwide debate has reportedly begun over whether the patient should
be allowed to die a peaceful death or be kept on artificial life
support indefinitely. ‘Time will tell,’ one observer noted, ‘but only
if it is tortured,’ which instantly precipitated another episode of
bizarre positionings and inarticulate utterances.