It’s All in the Family

By Rick Steelhammer

DICK Cheney’s implication last week that West Virginia’s gene pool could use a new filter didn’t shock me nearly as much as the fact that the usually dour veep made the remark while delivering the punchline to an actual joke.

While laughter from Cheney’s stab at humor was short-lived, fallout from his West Virginia incest remark stuck around for at least three news cycles.

In a rare display of contrition by proxy, the vice president later authorized a spokeswoman to issue an apology in his behalf for saying during his appearance at the National Press Club that he had Cheneys on both sides of the family tree, “and we don’t even live in West Virginia.”

Hopefully, the furor over the remark will die down before Cheney’s spokeswoman is compelled to announce that the vice president has entered the Larry the Cable Guy Clinic for Sensitivity Training to counter his Appalachian-American stereotyping. I’d much rather see Cheney spending more of his remaining time in office making jokes than making trouble.

And the way I see it, Cheney’s West Virginia incest joke could be karma-style payback for a majority of the state’s voters supporting his election and re-election.

At least, this time, he shot himself in the foot instead of shooting a friend in the face.

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Inquiring minds probably immediately realized something was amiss with ads that appeared in Friday’s Philadelphia Inquirer for a new start-up airline, Derrie-Air, which allegedly charges passengers by their weight, rather than distance traveled.

The ad urged Derrie-Air passengers to “pack less, weigh less, and pay less,” to take advantage of fares ranging from $2.25 per pound for service from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, to $1.40 a pound for flights to Chicago.

Needless to say, the ad and a related Web site (www.flyderrie- air.com), a joint venture of the Inquirer’s publishing company and an ad agency, turned out to be fake. According to a disclaimer at the bottom of the Web site, they were designed “to test the results of advertising in our print products and to stimulate discussion on a timely environmental topic of interest to all citizens. In other words, smile, we’re pulling your leg.”

While Derrie-Air may have been bogus, its approach was loaded with real humor.

For instance, the airline was supposedly founded by Dick Derrie of Salamander, Mo., who pulled himself up by the bootstraps from a job guarding prisoners at a nearby correctional facility to creating a pinball franchise, then going on to open Missouri’s third-largest generic cola bottling plant.

His interest in developing a carbon-neutral airline came after watching Al Gore’s movie, then developing a fear that if global warming could not be checked, “his grandchildren might never know the joy of hunting alligators on his marshy wetlands from the back of a two-ton truck.”

Derrie-Air’s eco-friendly policies include using a portion of fare income to plant trees in deforested areas – a practice known as “offsetting,” which “has been adopted by a diverse array of credible entities such as famous Hollywood actors and actresses.”

At the heart of the airline is the principle of Green Luxury, “the belief that consumers in the developed world shouldn’t have to choose between doing good and feeling good.”

Finally, there are no class distinctions on Derrie-Air’s fictitious flights. Every seat will be first class, and passengers will be treated to such amenities as golden-age Rat Pack films, top- shelf vodka martinis, on-demand video blackjack, on-board masseuses, loofah scrubs and digital cable.

Too bad it’s not real.

(c) 2008 Sunday Gazette – Mail; Charleston, W.V.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.