The set went on for a couple more songs. Despite the relative airiness of It was a beautiful spring day. Great-grandpap could not have picked a lovelier time of year for a funeral. Allie pedaled past little apartment buildings and row houses and came to a stop in front of the Yeshiva school. He exchanged greetings with the crossing guard.
"Riding your bike to school today, Allie?"
"No sir."
"Well what's with the bike?"
"My great-grandpap died."
"I AM sorry to hear that."
"Thanks. I gotta deliver these funeral invitations to his friends."
"Okay, I got the picture. You Jewish?"
"I'm Muslim, but great-grandpap was Catholic."
"Well you're lucky then. In the Jewish tradition we have to bury the deceased the next day, and you know how many old Luddites there are in this community. Good luck!" The light changed and the old gentlemen walked into the street with his arms out. A Hummer six-wheeler, or XL3, stopped but gunned its engine menacingly. Allie rode his bike across the street and down the hill. After a block the houses became grandiose and the lawns spacious and well manicured. At the intersection of Forbes and Wightman, Allie again stopped and waited for the light. The big screened billboard was showing the rear view of a naked woman who was obscuring the view of the body of an apparently naked man facing the camera. Her arm movement gave the impression that she was stimulating her partner. A female voice was emitted from the speakers on either side of the screen. "We've got the ultimate cure for a Big Mac attack." The women descended to her knees and bowed her head down into the man's crotch. As the camera angle panned to the side one could see the man holding a large hotdog in a bun. "Subway's new foot-long wieners. Eat fresh!"
The light changed and Allie crossed the Forbes Avenue. Here, Wightman became so steep that the boy had to walk his bike up the sidewalk. The azaleas were in full bloom, magnificent in their reds and pinks and purples and whites. As he walked up the hill the din of the traffic on Forbes Avenue gradually gave way to the morning songbirds -- at least until another three-axelled Hummer roared by. The diesel smoke stung Allie's eyes, and he stopped pushing his bike for a moment while he coughed. Once at the top of the hill Allie remounted his bike and cruised along the level sidewalk. The light at Northumberland Street was red. Allie looked up to see who was sponsoring red light. It was Nike. The ad featured a basketball player on a toilet wiping himself with hundred dollar bills. This was an old one, and Allie decided to ignore it and run the red light, seeing as no cars were coming.
Mid-way down the next block a woodchuck suddenly lumbered into view. Allie halted his bike and dismounted. The rodent passed through a gap in the hedges of a house that had not been occupied for years. Allie peered over the front gate and spied the animal munching on the long grass in the front lawn. Momentarily three smaller versions of the vermin joined what was evidently the mother. The family was aware of Allie watching them, but as long as he remained still and did not approach any closer they were content to go about their business merely keeping an eye on him. The woodchuck family reminded Allie of the guinea pigs his father kept for him, only much larger and with strangely mismatched tails. The tails reminded him of Rocky the Flying Squirrel from his cartoon that morning.
Bullwinkle and Rocky were the stars of a popular cartoon from the 1950s and 1960s that poked fun at the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. That was a bad example. The Permanent War on Terror was a serious business, and President Rice had to see that no one poked fun at it. Her move was not without precedent. The very episode that Allie had seen that morning, "the Great Boxtop Caper," had earlier been banned by the Hillary Clinton administration over allegations of anti-Semitism. The episode involved an effort to cause a worldwide economic collapse by the mass counterfeiting of the basis of the financial system, i.e. the cereal boxtop. The moose and squirrel teamed up with the head of the secretive World Economic Council, Fiduciary Blurt, to break-up the counterfeiting ring and save the capitalist world. While Blurt does not sound particularly Jewish, Clinton did not want to risk the cartoon playing into the hands of Jewish banking conspiracy theorists, so she banned the episode.
One Twentieth Century cartoon that survived, even thrived, was "Scooby Doo, Where are You?" The rights to this cartoon had been bought out by McDonald's-Phillip Morris. When marijuana was legalized by Clinton, Phillip Morris gained a near monopoly on domestic production. The synergy between the pot peddler giant and the junk food icon was so obvious that the merger was completed before the legislation legalizing marijuana had even gone into effect. The giggling, munching, paranoid Scooby "Dooby" Doo and his beatnik master were acquired for use as trademarks for the new brand of joints. McMunchie Happy Meals came with crayons, Scooby and Shaggy figurines, and hash brownies. Initially there had been some outcry from so-called public interest groups against deliberately targeting children from the drug, but McDonald's-Phillip Morris argued that children were a perfect target seeing as there was no problem of them driving under the influence and the brownies tended to offset the effect of sugar and caffeine on kids. In the end, parents had to agree that stoned children were easier to manage. It was a win-win situation. Allie's parents didn't let him get anywhere near a McDonald's, and his mom packed him humus and bulgur wheat lunches so that he did not have to eat the school lunches, which were catered by McDonald's.
At the next intersection, Allie decided to turn into the side streets and thus avoid the rough and narrow sidewalk of the next block of Wightman. The side streets were quiet, without cars or corner omnipods. Front yards were awash with colors from azaleas, camellias, tulips, and pansies. Cats basked in patches of sunlight, too languid to be bothered with squirrels foraging in nearby lawns. Allie spotted a chipmunk, which momentarily scampered into a hole when approached by a crow. Although hardly a bird of prey, the crow seemed to enjoy hazing the smaller and much more simple-minded mammal. Allie coasted through this upscale residential neighborhood before finally being deposited on Wilkins Avenue. Another three-axeled Hummer roared past, and in its cloud of diesel smoke a city bus accelerated slowly, having just picked up passengers. On the side of the bus was an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. The outfitter had been using naked models to sell clothing for years -- there was nothing new there. It's latest campaign was a play on the "three monkeys" motif from the temple in Nikko, Japan. Three naked young men sat on a park bench. The first was "see no evil," and he covered his eyes with his hands. The second, "hear no evil," cupped his ears. The variation was on "speak no evil." Rather than placing his hand over his mouth, this model was slumped forward in an act of autofelatio. Abercrombie & Fitch had a few years earlier found this image to be particular disturbing to participants in focus groups, and immediately registered a trademark based on it. All their subsequent advertizing campaigns managed to incorporate it.