PRESENTING THE 2003 PFFT! AWARDS

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third annual Pfft! Awards. You will recall the Pffts! were created in Oct. 2001, when the National Academy of Television Arts, Sciences and Loud Car Commercials couldn’t make up their minds whether to air the terminally boring Emmy Awards ceremony after the Sept. 11 attacks. Your intrepid correspondent, sensing that it is a poorer world that has no award ceremonies, stepped in with the Pfft! Awards. Only my well-known and much-admired modesty prevents me from telling you what an outstanding success the Pffts! have been.

As we announce this year’s award winners, let me remind you again that you need only put your tongue between your lips and blow each time you see Pfft!   It will enhance the experience for you and help the winners understand how proud we are of them. Now the envelopes, please.

Our first Pfft! goes to the State of Georgia for removing “Georgia on My Mind” from our license plates. We have the greatest song ever written and a bunch of bureaucrats decide to take it off our car tags. It makes me wonder if we even deserve the song. Maybe Ray Charles needs to sing “Ohio on My Mind” and teach us a lesson.

In the area of higher education, a Pfft! to Cornell University for hiring former congresswoman and full-time Ambassador to Outer Space Cynthia McKinney as a visiting professor. Among the courses Professor McKinney is scheduled to teach is the wildly popular “How to be a certified nut case and blame it on white folks.” Given the positive press McKinney’s appointment has received, word is that Cornell will shortly announce it has hired Madonna as its new football coach.

The Stonewall Bedford Forrest Pfft! is awarded to our state’s flaggers, who continue to rail about the old state flag, also known as the Cross of St. Andrew (although St. Andrew tells me he doesn’t have a dog in this fight and doesn’t want to be involved.) If the flaggers would take a moment and look at our new state flag, they would discover it is very attractive, unlike that monstrosity foisted off on us a couple of years ago, and that it closely resembles the Confederate Stars and Bars. You think this would make the flaggers happy. Of course, if flaggers were happy, they couldn’t pursue their goal of ridding the world of scalawags and their life would have no meaning.

The city of Atlanta was the unanimous choice of the judges for the Pfft! in Good Government Award. Traffic is a mess. Sewers don’t work. Neither do the city’s panhandlers. There are more potholes in town than there are people. The business community has little clout. The place is sucking up all the available water and leaving none for the rest of the state, yet the biggest issue in the city is renaming the airport — much of which isn’t even located in Atlanta. It is in Clayton County.  

A carved granite Pfft! to the great state of Vermont. The state is so tiny it would fit inside any county in Georgia, except there isn’t a county in Georgia that would have the place because Vermont is full of loony politicians and promotes same-sex marriages. I don’t blame the counties one bit.

Finally, a Star-Spangled Pfft! goes to the American Civil Liberties Union for their continued efforts to ban any public display of those subversive Ten Commandments. Now, if the ACLU will promise to quit accepting legal tender with the words “In God We Trust,” we can all agree that they aren’t a bunch of hypocrites. Their crusade reminds me of my favorite piece of graffiti. On a prison wall were written the words: “There is No God — Friedrich Nietzsche.” Just below that was written: “There is No Friedrich Nietzsche — God.” You might want to make a note of that, ACLU.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this year’s Pffts! Congratulations to the winners; to the losers, please don’t despair. Even though you may not be worth a Pfft!, there is always a chance that Cornell University may hire you. They know a lot about losers.

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