The jerks in Parent Relations keep sending around the new draft brochure design like they want our input, when you know they want nothing more than for those of us in the democracy department to admit defeat, proclaim we've never seen better, and make them a whole bunch of god-damned cupcakes.
The one they're stuck on this week stars 233624, a kid mocha in complexion with a desert nomad vibe about him and his arm in a sling, his head wrapped in a bloody bandage, who carries this tiny American flag that looks like it's been through preteen Iwo Jima everywhere he goes.
In the cover photo, triumph: 233624 has just completed his first waterboarding exercise. He gives a strong wave of the flag, his eyes squinting and dripping but it could also be said gleaming in the burning light of the mock interrogation room. In the second he's preparing to cast some sort of vote, and has folded the flag with due ceremony next to what appears to be a classmate's blown-off foot.
In the third, 233624 and Bono are drinking venti Starbucks mocha lattes in front of the Vatican. In the fourth and last photograph, subtitled "Our Flag Was Still There," our star is pondering a bombed-out house that is clearly his family's, sobbing uncontrollably but still radiating Yes We Can, evidenced by the careful planting of the flag at the door of the smoking structure.
True, the kid's got spunk, but with 5 graduates per month from an average class size of 200 we either need better survival rates or hordes of smiling children in every photo, preferably both, or we're never going to survive this recession.
I explain as much in an email that reads to me as a scathing indictment (the logic of which should steer the reader and all cc'd to a simultaneous realization of numerous tragic character flaws, with expedient suicide as the only honorable response) but is probably overly polite. We need to be less functional and more aspirational , I write, etc. etc., Warm Regards.
It is suggested in reply: Thank you for your thoughts, Charles, we appreciate your feedback. (Fuck you, Charles, we hate your feedback and we hate you). And then: Do you think the same child might be judiciously Photoshopped, his injuries obscured through tricks of the light or via careful placement of school mascots, voting booths, or other decorations, and that through a kind of cut-and-paste cloning, several close friends or cousins can be manufactured without enlisting additional models? (Charles, we hate Photoshop, we're training little 233624 to kill you in your sleep).
Each month, we select a cohort of impoverished youth from the world's most oil-rich or otherwise strategic countries. Students, referred to in correspondence with our foundation supporters as democratically-challenged individuals, sleep in the open air and are fed dirt and diet Coke twice each day. (They seem to enjoy mixing the dirt and soda together, rather than consuming either on its own, sometimes adding a sprinkle of airborne dust or depleted uranium, the day's exercises permitting).
Students learn basic math, basic English, and the heroic history of white people, and are by turns broken into teams and hunted like animals, exposed to chemical or biological weapons, or subjected to sleep deprivation techniques and read the unabridged OED in sequence. Grading is on a curve, with the bottom 50 percent of the class rendered each week.
It's cute, they still stick gum under the desks, even when the lesson plan calls for gas masks.
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