From SLiM: The Brutal Murder

I still don’t get it and I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now. I really want to keep you in suspense and read the phonebook to you to push it off, but if I do, you will simply skip ahead until I have read to you “Zyvurner,Zaphod, Lincoln, Nebraska”. Therefore, I will simply stop the suspense here, and start getting to my point.

You probably know by now that during an interview President Obama killed a fly.


This was responded to with much hostility by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

Now, I could probably understand the uproar if Obama accidentally killed a tiger, or some other endangered specie. (How a person could accidentally kill a tiger, I don’t know.) I could even understand it if he killed a dog or cat, or some other animal that a sane human could possibly have a fondness for. But a (hee, hee, hee) fly???? Please excuse me now, as I have to go to the bathroom to calm down.

No, seriously, a (guffaw) fly?? Flies are one of the biggest nuisances known to man. Flies make an annoying buzzing sound. Flies are attracted to just about everything. Flies harbor disease. And just to top it all off, flies are the thing that comes just when you think nothing can get worse. You’re hot and sweaty and SHAZAM, the flies come in.

I’m nervous to think about what will happen next. Will the PETA ban the act of hitting mosquitoes? Will they slow down the production of fly swatters until, suddenly, there are no more fly swatters left? Will they ban the use of the best quality sponges (made from, you guessed it, sponges)?

There are 2 things I have to address, though, before you nasty people out there give me a flurry of angry comments. #1: Obama is the President, so he has to make a good influence on people, but if, let’s say, I killed a fly in an interview (remember, people, I am not rich and famous [yet]), they wouldn’t have made such a big stink about it. #2: The PETA doesn’t have any power; it’s just a group of people?

I will address problem #1, and then I will address problem #2. Simple enough?

Okay, as for #1, Obama made a wonderful influence. He killed a fly, for heaven sakes. He showed that the President of the United States can actually do something to someone he doesn’t like. He showed that the President has at least a little power to do as he wishes. (He really had to do that after he bowed to the king of Saudi Arabia. Obama should know that the Most Powerful Individual in the Most Powerful Country in the World bows to no other person. But that’s for a different time, so I digress.) As for #2, you never should underestimate the power of a single person, let alone a group. They could make demonstrations, boycotts, petitions, or other scary things. In all likelihood, this whole thing will blow over before we know it. I never really liked flies, but I never really had a real problem against them. I’ve been thinking about it, and I can’t possibly think of any attributes for them. I’ll keep thinking about it, and if you have any ideas, please tell me about them in comment form. After all, I would like to find something to say good about our currently not-so-great-friend, the humble fly. Plus, I might understand the PETA (although that would probably be harder to understand than the flies themselves).