A new kind of manliness

It’s a funny world with globe-shaking events like cults and fries dominating lives

BY NURY VITTACHI

The right to revv

Motorcyclists are claiming that the right to be macho is part of the human rights of every male. A fight started when US authorities recently banned a gathering at which bikers lock their brakes and rev their engines to see how big a cloud of dust and smoke they can generate. Angry bikers took out a lawsuit saying that men’s right to “express their manliness” was “protected by the First Amendment”.

What a wonderfully broad excuse for doing stupid, pointless things. I plan to use it frequently. “I’m sorry I ate your dinner/ seduced your wife/ falsified the interbank lending rate. I was merely exercising my right to express my manliness.”

I was forwarded the story above by a reader who did not wish his name to be printed as he had been ‘chicked’ (which means beaten by a female at a sport). “Everywhere, the male sex is in crisis,” he said. He’s right. “Maschismo On Wane” cried a Wall St Journal headline not long ago. In India, sales of motorbikes (male vehicles) are way down, while scooters (female vehicles) are soaring.

China invades Japan, but rescue comes when a New Saviour is born. The second is a feature-length anime cartoon in which Japan is attacked but salvation comes when a New Saviour is born. If you asked these guys to make a TV ad for soap powder, it would say:

Strange cults are back in the news

Every few weeks, one needs to step aside from the chaotic hurly burly of modern life, quieten one’s heart, and focus on deep matters of the spirit or, as we scientific types like to say, “evil wacko cults”.

assault with a deadly French fry

In a global outbreak of violence, evil criminals are assaulting innocent civilians with deadly weapons such as French fries, in some cases, unsalted. In recent times alone, there have been at least 10 cases of food-assisted robberies, according to cuttings sent to me by readers. In the US, a man “attacked and robbed a Brockton man using stolen sausage links”, according to the press in that country. In Croatia, a footballer was attacked with a banana, and in the UK a man was arrested for throwing lasagna.

Police are taking this seriously. A man who threw a packet of McDonald’s French fries at his stepdaughter was arrested for “felony assault with a dangerous weapon”, according to a June 26 police report in the US state of Massachusetts. James Hackett was “charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, to wit, a French fry”, police said.

I was reminded of the time reader Stephen Birkett told me his mango was confiscated as he boarded a domestic flight in India. Why? “For security reasons,” staff told him.

What happened to good old guns and knives?

The best theory I heard was from my mentor/bartender, who said the United Nations worldwide gun control crackdown was accelerating in the run-up to the global summit on the subject being held this month.

“Since guns are harder to get hold of, people are going for whatever is at hand, including French fries, sausages, etc,” he said. But can you really hurt someone with a French fry? He thought for a moment. “Sure. French fries kill. But you don’t need to hit people with them. Just feed them to them at regular intervals.”

As everyone knows, brave Katie Holmes rescued her innocent little girl from Tom Cruise’s weirdo cult and retreated back to the modelling community, a nice, safe world where women with severe eating disorders earn fortunes by striding down catwalks with pineapples on their heads. Wait. Mr Cruise’s weird cult sounds way more sane!

A reader whom I shall not name tells me he was tempted to join Scientology after seeing Mr Cruise walk up the outside of the Burj Dubai skyscraper in the recent Mission Impossible movie. I informed him that if he actually believes what he sees in the movies, he’ll be a very happy Scientologist.

But I also urged him to consider Asia’s equivalent to Scientology, a religion called Happy Science, which sends me press releases. Happy Science promotes itself by making astonishingly bad movies, and is about to launch two new ones this season. Final Judgement is an action movie in which

“Buy this soap powder! And by the way, let’s watch together as a New Saviour is born!” Happy Science started in 1986 when banker Ryuho Okawa (the new saviour) told the people of Japan that he was the reincarnation of the Buddha, and his wife the reincarnation of Aphrodite. Did people just laugh and tell them to lay off the sake for a while? Of course they didn’t. This is Asia. Thousands of people signed up from across the region.

The cult went through a bad patch last year when the Buddha and Aphrodite had a big fight and got divorced. But Mr Okawa seems to have got his groove back, according to his latest press releases.

The Happy Science founder is currently wowing people by revealing the addresses of celebrities after they have died. “Currently Beethoven lives in the lower area of the Bodhisattva Realm of the 7th dimension in the Spirit world,” he says. Charles Darwin is in ‘Abysmal Hell’, which is pretty bad, but not quite as bad as ‘Deepest Hell’, the present address of Frederick Nietzsche.

At first, I wondered why a philosopher should be in the bottom part of hell. But then I remembered what Nietzsche once said: “God is dead.” Mr Okawa took that as a personal insult.