BLOODSUCKERS AND OTHER DEMOCRATS: Bedbugs are all the rage in New York these days, in the same way that radical chic and mau-mauing the flak catchers used to be. There’s scarcely a day goes by any more without some new report of bedbugs showing up in the local media and sometimes in their beds as well. And now I hear that there’s even bedbugs in the Waldorf-Astoria, and you now that when the grande dame of Manhattan hotels bows to a passing fashion then somehow or other we’ve reached some sort of very important cultural milestone and nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever be the same way ever again. The bedbug has become so popular here that there is even a movement underway to get Albany to declare the bedbug the state insect, a job Joel Steinberg has held for many years. Strangely enough, I have not heard that the bedbug craze has reached Albany itself, but then bloodsucking is an old habit there and the arrival of a fresh batch of parasites would not unduly alarm the inhabitants.

Why bedbugs should be so popular this year is something of a mystery. Granted, fashions in insects change, just as they do for women’s hats and men’s suits (single breasted or double breasted, sir, or do you even care?). Only a few years ago, anyone who wanted to be anybody had spiders in their houses and made sure all the dinner party guests saw the creepy little things whenever the guests came for dinner. Spiders were the thing to have in your house, no doubt the result of the Spiderman movies, and the rarer and more dangerous the arachnid the more chic you would be. The traffic in black widow spiders alone almost brought that species to the brink of extinction and many arachnid counterfeiters did a booming business in painting funnel weaver spiders, an altogether harmless species, black, and then selling them as black widows to an unsuspecting public. This sort of thing would have gone on for years, had it not been for one more of the fickle public’s sudden twists and turns, a pivot that dropped spiders like a Pet Rock and made the praying mantis the headless king of fashionable insects. With the meteoric rise of the praying mantis, a phrase I’ve never really understood, given that meteors don’t rise, they fall, bathrooms all over New York resounded with the sound of the fashion conscious flushing their now terribly passé spiders down the drain. Not all the spiders died in their sudden descent into New York’s sewer system; I’ve heard stories that many spiders survived and flourished in the lower depths, with generations of spiders leaving behind webs so thick they ensnare rats the size of small dogs and even the occasional baby alligator now and again.

And before the spiders were all the rage, there was Beatle mania, which flourished for a few years in the 1960’s, and before that Crickets were big, at least until Buddy Holly died, and before him fleas were wildly popular, for reasons I am not sure I fathom at the moment. You would think that after all the misadventures the fleas caused in the fourteenth century, what with the little critters spreading the bubonic plague throughout the length and breadth of Europe and killing a quarter of the continent’s population, people would regard fleas as something horrific, something no sane person would ever choose to get involved with, like hard drugs or devil worship or the life insurance business, but you would be wrong. We are talking fashion here, boys and girls, and if fashion dictates that fleas are in this year, then fleas are in and you’d better have your fleas out where the cognoscenti, a word that does not come with a side order of marinara sauce, which is a bit of a cheat, if you ask me, can see them. Yes, fleas were everywhere in those days. There were flea markets to shop at and fleabags to put your flea market purchases in while you took in a flea circus and wished everyone a Fleas Navidad, which I always thought was a good name for a stripper. Vanessa Cardui is another good name for a stripper, combining, as it does, choreography and lepidopterology, but I digress here.

The spider rage lasted until the late 1990’s, when it faded from view at about the time the Lewinsky scandal struck. With a distracted press and a polarized political situation in the country, the spider went the way of the Nehru jacket and the liberal Republican. After that, the bug craze ended for a while. There were a few attempts to resurrect it; for a while everyone thought that the deer tick was going to be the next new thing, but the tick didn’t really go anywhere, despite all the type, and most of the best minds in advertising slowly, and very reluctantly, gave up and came to the conclusion that America’s long love affair with the bug was finally over. Bugs had finally worn out their welcome and gotten stomped on once and for all.

And then, just when bug lovers everywhere were about to despair and turn to quilting or collecting 15th century sports memorabilia, the bedbugs arrived on the scene, years late, to be sure, but still incredibly welcome, nevertheless. They are everywhere now; even the New York Public Library has bedbugs the size of the Cat in the Hat in all of its branch libraries, and the Met, the Met, and the Mets, have bedbugs piled up to a second violin’s knees. There are some holdouts—the Yankees will not abandon spiders and neither will the city’s Department of Corrections; the inmates on Riker’s Island apparently love their spiders more than life itself—but every other major institution in the city is laden with bedbugs and more than happy to let you know about it.

But the Yankees and the inmates will eventually surrender; the wave of bedbug mania seems too strong for any institution to stand in its way for very long. I’ve seen a good many bug crazes come and go, and to date I’ve never seen one with this kind of staying power. Of course, if DDT makes a comeback this craze will disappear almost immediately, but DDT is on the environmental movement’s list of seven deadly sins, which is good news if you’re a bedbug, but not if you’re a spider-loving Yankee fan. Now if the Yankees could find a bedbug with a great slider and willing to pitch middle relief, well, that would change everything, wouldn’t it? The Yankee management couldn’t let the little bug sign with the Red Sox, could they? No, they couldn’t: that would be stupid.

WAFFLING ALONG: GeneralStan is in trouble, boys and girls, there’s no two ways about that. He’s got the Speaker of the House sniffing haughtily, although that may just be her breathing regularly nowadays, what with the Botox overload and all, and a good many lefties bringing up Truman’s firing of MacArthur, which may only prove that some of these guys still have the crib notes their girl friends wrote for them in college on David McCullough’s Truman stuck in a file cabinet somewhere, and columnists like the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson suggesting that what GeneralStan really needs to do is shut the hell up and to do so quickly, the better to keep the electorate from realizing that the largest empty suit in the land is wearing no clothes. I’m sure that all of this must come as a big shock to GeneralStan, who, no doubt, was simply asking for the troops necessary to carry out what was, until a few short weeks ago, the publicly stated policy of the former junior Senator from Illinois, and did not realize that he had interrupted this administration’s hunt for the perfect waffle.

Yes, waffles. This administration craves a really good waffle, but importing them from Belgium is politically out of the question nowadays. Importing Belgian waffles would offend the more radical members of the United Waffle Workers, who want to keep those foreign waffles out of this country altogether and doesn’t care if this our Great Republic has to start a trade war with Belgium in order to keep them out. The former junior Senator from Illinois received a huge amount of support from the U.W.W. and he isn’t likely to forget that help any time soon; there’s more than one amendment in the cap and trade bill that would protect the jobs of American waffle workers come hell or high dudgeon. But, in a classic case of how the mighty have fallen, the Belgian waffle is no longer the world’s standard when it comes to waffling, despite the waffle’s long pedigree in that country. No, we are the world’s greatest wafflers and Afghanistan is where all our best wafflers want to waffle. I am not sure why this is, but I am certain it must have something to do with Afghanistan’s wonderful climate and the hot Afghan women.

It was not always thus, of course; so few things are, you know. Once upon a time in America, no one would think of waffling, waffling being a pernicious vice like masturbation or being a Red Sox fan. Waffling was a loathsome foreign habit that undermined American youth and American morals, and undercut the philosophical foundations of American government. After a known waffler shot President McKinley in 1901, an outraged Congress demanded that the Immigration Bureau turn back any immigrant at Ellis Island whom they even suspected of having waffling or anarchist sympathies, and the Bureau rigorously enforced the rule: immigration from Belgium virtually dried up as it was almost impossible to find a Belgian, whether they were Flemish or Walloon in origin, who hadn’t waffled at some point in their life. For many who did make it through Ellis Island, the charge of waffling was a career ender; having someone call you a Communist was an easier fate to deal with than having the whole neighborhood know that you were a waffler. Everyone knew about the vile crimes the Waffle SS committed during World War II and no honest true-blue American citizen wanted to associate with such a person. People pointed the accused waffler out in the street and talked about them in cautious whispers, and frightened mothers pulled their children away from the accused waffler, lest the odious wretch contaminate their precious offspring with waffling and bad breath.

All of this changed in the 1960’s, when waffling became hip and the governing classes in this country took to waffling like nobody’s business. Congress organized fact-finding junkets to Brussels every other week as the people’s tribunes searched the length and breadth of that city looking for the perfect waffle, despite their knowing that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept track of their waffling and the ages and sexes of those our lawmakers waffled with. Waffling became big business, leading to the rise of the U.W. W. out of the ashes of the old Brotherhood of Pancake Makers. The waffling spirit now animates the present administration, which draws its ideological strength from that period and is not going to allow someone wants to get on with his business interrupt the great waffle hunt. So GeneralStan must wait for his troops while the administration thinks of new ways to make the perfect waffle and the leaders of Congress debate whether that waffle should have blueberries in it, or whether the blueberry waffle drenched with butter and real maple syrup would constitute too much of a stretch for the political sensibilities of the American people and hurt these guys’ chances of keeping their seats in the next election.

RACISM REARS ITS UGLY HEAD: I am a racist. Yes, I am. I know this particularly unsavory fact about myself because Janeane Garofalo says so. Ms. Garofalo comes to us from the morally and psychically elevated plane of Hollywood, whose denizens can spot the lurking shadow of racism in a linen closet full of white sheets. So, I am a racist, as are the tens of thousands of people who either went to last week’s tea parties or supported the demonstrators’ aims. This, I think, is always a good thing to know about yourself, even if the sight of an affluent white woman playing the race card seems a bit cognitively dissonant at first; I will have to get over this. It seems that I am a racist because I object to the former senator from Illinois’ plan to spend the nation into bankruptcy. You wouldn’t think that fiscal policy could support a charge of racism; spending money you don’t have seems fairly color blind to me; but you’d be wrong there. Ms. Garofalo knows better and we must all defer to her superior wisdom. In fact, non-supporters of the distinguished gentleman from Illinois should simply stop spewing our racist hate altogether and be still while our betters decide what’s best for us. I was a bit nonplussed at this; I was under the impression that petitioning the government for a redress of grievances was in the Constitution somewhere and that dissent was the highest form of patriotism, but I guess I was wrong about that.