Today, my three o’clock consultation was a Mr. Sawatdee Sanook, a political analyst with the Royal Thai Embassy here in Washington. As he took a seat on the couch by the window, gazing forlornly out the window at the White House, he looked to me as if he had been up all night.
“How are you?” I began. “Frankly, you look like you’ve been up all night.”
“I have,” he confirmed with a heavy sigh. “That’s why I’m here with you right now.”
“So, you are encumbered,” I speculated, “with some sort of conundrum that’s so thorny, only a visit to my office can help you solve it?”
“Yes,” my guest replied with a sad nod, “that’s it precisely. You see, Mr. Collins, as I’m sure you are aware, there was a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Thailand this week, and, despite the fact that most of us tried to get some serious work done, your Secretary of State and the North Korean delegation took the ASEAN conference as nothing more than an opportunity to get into… what do you call it… a ‘urination competition,’ I believe?”
“The term you’re searching for is ‘[expletive] contest,’” I helpfully told him. “And it’s nothing I wouldn’t have expected from representatives of the North Korean dictatorship or Hillary Clinton, for that matter. After all, the North Koreans drink a glass of their own [expletive] every morning and she’s spent her entire life wishing she could [expletive] standing up.”
Suddenly, my guest’s countenance brightened considerably. With a smile spreading across his face, he swung his briefcase onto the couch beside him, popped it open, pulled out a yellow legal pad, took a pen from his suit jacket and began to take notes. “Excellent,” he cooed with obvious satisfaction. “When they said ‘go visit Tom Collins, he’s the man you want for this,’ I was skeptical, but you’ve proved them right!”
“They?” I inquired. “Who?”
“Oh,” Sanook chuckled, “just about everybody I asked. You know, I’m sure, Mr. Collins, how accommodating the Thai people are – how much pleasure we take in pleasing others?”
“Your reputation,” I confirmed, “is that of the nicest people anyone could meet. But how does that…”
“The [expletive] contest,” he politely interjected. “No sooner did Secretary Clinton and the North Koreans get started on one another, than they both sent envoys to our diplomatic missions, asking for advice and ideas.”
“Advice,” I slowly asked, not quite following Mr. Sanook’s line of thought, “and… ideas… about… what, specifically?”
“Why, clever insults, of course!” Sanook proclaimed triumphantly. “And you, Mr. Collins, gave me two excellent ones right off the bat, as you Americans say, without me even having to explain the situation!”
“Let me get this straight,” I requested. “Secretary Clinton and the North Koreans came to the ASEAN conference in Thailand, started getting snarky with each other, and then spouted off with the best trash talk they could come up with until they ran out of ideas. At which point, they started leaning on their famously helpful and friendly hosts for more.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it,” Sanook affirmed enthusiastically. “And we responded to both sides of the conflict with as many clever insults as we could. But now,” he admitted with an evident degree of chagrin, “we, too, have run out. So the Thai government has tasked our diplomats at Thai embassies all over the globe to contact the best consultants available in every world capital, compile the most excellent list of insults for the use of each side, and immediately cable the information back to Bangkok!”
“Understood,” I assured him. “So – there’s no time to waste. Let’s start with a review of where we stand at the moment, then.”
“Clinton kicked things off,” Sanook related, “if I may use an American football analogy, by taunting the North Koreans with comments likening them to ‘small children and unruly teenagers,’ saying that the North Koreans have been ‘acting out’ in an attempt to ‘get attention’ in an ‘immature bid to be rewarded for their misbehavior.’”
“Classic Hillary,” I averred. “Essentially a paraphrase of what she told her husband Bill after he got caught putting his dipstick in Monica Lewinsky’s crankcase.”
“So I have heard,” Sanook agreed. “So at that, the North Koreans responded with a very unkind characterization of Secretary Clinton. They said ‘sometimes, she looks like a primary school girl, but other times, she looks like a pensioner going shopping.’”
“Really?” I murmured in disbelief.
“Yes, really,” Sanook confirmed.
“In that case,” I deduced, “let me guess – it was the North Koreans who tapped you guys first for help.”
“Amazing,” my guest murmured back. “That’s absolutely correct. How did you know?”
“Because if that’s the best the North Koreans can come up with,” I explained, “they need all the help they can get.”
“You are probably right,” Sanook agreed, shaking his head slowly from side to side, “all they could think of next was to say something lame about how ‘the US is telling us to take off all our clothes.’ I mean, we Thais are Asians too, but even we didn’t understand what all that was about. Then they said Clinton’s ‘a funny lady’ and ‘by no means intelligent.’ Jesus,” Sanook snickered, “if I, as a humble Buddhist, may be so bold as to take your Christian Lord’s Name in vain – I’m pretty sure either a Thai school girl or a little old lady Thai pensioner could have come up with something better than that crap!”
“Okay,” I proposed. “If there’s one thing we Americans can’t stand, it’s an unfair fight. So let’s start out by giving the North Koreans some decent ammunition!”
“Great idea,” Sanook chortled with a grin. “Hillary Clinton is a total [expletive] anyway.”
“She sure is,” I returned with a grin of my own. “Let’s get on with it. Hillary Clinton’s got chipmunk cheeks.”
“Right,” Sanook grinned. “Like some kind of big rodent, that’s for sure.”
“Could say she has a face like a capybara, even.”
“Or maybe a giant, naked mole rat!” Sanook interjected joyfully. “And she’s got these huge, thick thighs, like an elephant!”
“Worse,” I elaborated. “More like a hippopotamus!”
“Hippopotamus thighs!” Sanook exulted. “The North Koreans are going to [expletive] love this!”
“And her voice,” I observed. “When she talks, screech owls and hyenas run away from the noise!”
“Oh, damn it,” Sanook effused, “that’s a good one. The North Koreans could never have come up with something like that! And isn’t she obviously some kind of feminist crypto-fascist, man-hating closet lesbian who only got married to a corrupt, philandering sociopathic politician in order to further her own twisted career goals and pursue her own perverted ambitions?”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “pretty much. But the North Koreans can’t just come out and say it that way, because, presented in such manner, it’s not particularly funny; and if you want to give the North Koreans something memorable to say about Hillary Clinton, it’s got to be funny as well as true.”
“So what would you suggest?” Sanook implored with an expectant expression.
“How about this,” I ventured, “the North Koreans should say she despises sex with men so much, her daughter Chelsea had to be conceived with a hooker, a Dixie cup and a turkey baster.”
“So,” Sanook responded with a hearty laugh, “one could say that Hillary Clinton is a master of the baster.”
“An accomplished and habitual master of the baster,” I embellished.
“Okay, okay,” Sanook whispered to himself excitedly as he wrote, “a closet lesbian master of the baster!”
“And a politician so ham-handed and untalented,” I suggested, “that only the people of New York could have elected her to be a dog catcher, much less a senator!”
“… a dog catcher, much less a senator,” Sanook giggled as he scribbled, “yeah – that’s rich.”
“How about this?” I persisted. “The only thing that stinks worse than her patootie is her politics.”
“Oh, I like that,” Sanook cackled. “It’s alliterative.”
“She’s so stupid, she thinks Hamburger Helper comes with an extra person.”
“Great!”
“She’s so flat, Bill had to write ‘Front’ and ‘Back’ on her with a magic marker.”
“Excellent!”
“She’s so old, dirt lets her go through the door first.”
“Brilliant! Even the North Koreans won’t need an explanation for that one!”
“She’s so hairy, they filmed ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ in her shower.”
“Kim Jong Il is a big-time film buff,” Sanook remarked. “I bet he’s going to flip for that one!”
“She’s so wrinkly, she has to screw her hat on.”
“Oh, oh, oh,” Sanook guffawed, “I can actually see her doing that! But wait – what about the North Koreans? We Thais can’t expect the United States support our heroin and sex tourist trades if we don’t give your side some good stuff, too – any more than we could expect the North Koreans to keep their MDMA factories going and their bales of counterfeit US hundred dollar bills flowing into Bangkok if we didn’t turn over this excellent stuff you’ve been cranking out to them, and pronto, as the charming Latin types in your hemisphere so quaintly put it.”
“No problem,” I told him with smile. “Let’s get started on the material you’re going to walk down the street to Foggy Bottom this afternoon. Kim Jong Il is so stupid, when they told him he has cancer, he studied for his blood test!”
“Out… of… sight!”
“North Koreans are so skinny from starvation, Ethiopians send them food.”
“Oh, God, that’s sick,” Sanook shouted, “but it’s so [expletive] true!”
“North Koreans are so dishonest, even Somali pirates don’t trust them.”
“Off the [expletive] hook!”
“North Koreans are so gay, they come out of their father’s [expletive].”
“You think the State Department will use that?”
“Okay – how about this: North Koreans are so gay, their favorite bird is the swallow.”
“Now that,” Sanook tittered, “I bet they would use.”
“North Koreans are so dirty, when they get in the tub, the water jumps out.”
“[Expletive] primo!”
“Kim Jong Un is so cross-eyed, he can read two books at once.”
“Not many people know that, either!”
“Right – and when his father told Kim Jong Un he would be the successor, he said ‘Who’s this Sessor guy? Does his [expletive] taste any worse than yours?’”
“So funny because it’s basically true,” Sanook commented as he feverishly jotted. “I think I have enough for now. Can you give me about a dozen more that I can send to each side by, say, eight or nine o’clock tonight?”
“No problem,” I guaranteed. “I see your card has an e-mail address. Can I send the deliverable there?”
“Absolutely,” Sanook smirked as he rose to leave. “And thanks for turning my job from pure hell into a cakewalk on easy street.”
“That,” I quipped as he hurried away, “is what I do for a living.”