Rex Huppke has a flair for absurdity. Plenty of journalists speak truth to power, ignorance, and mendacity. But not many of them make me laugh.
Facts matter to Huppke, as they do to all reporters, but only Huppke has written their obituary. Last April he announced in the Tribune: “To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet.” Facts had been born, Huppke said, in ancient Greece, “the brainchild of famed philosopher Aristotle,” and had lived a long and honorable life. But after ailing for years, Facts finally succumbed to “injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists. Facts held on for several days after that assault—brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason—before expiring peacefully at home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.”
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“Good thing I’m not the average person. The GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN was concocted by TED CRUZ who was born IN CANADA which is where the OBAMACARE WEBSITE COMES FROM. . . . In much the same way Obama’s presidency was hatched years before his birth and carefully planned out with the insertion of a fake birth notice in a Hawaiian newspaper, Cruz was sent here to provide cover for this communist Muslim president’s socialist anarchist health care law.”
Huppke rejoiced. “Bingo. Thank you, Finland, you’ve solved America’s trust problem. Rather than mucking about getting to know each other, all we have to do is strip down to our skivvies and touch each other in a nonsexual manner.”
Huppke listened politely as I had my say. There’s this, he allowed: in journalism as in engineering “you’re figuring out how to get from A to B,” and science taught him to deploy logic to make the trip. He remembered that his father didn’t send him to Lehigh to become the family’s next chemical engineer; the reason to go to college, he told Huppke, is to learn how to think. Huppke now thinks along lines that deeply amuse him, me, and lots of other people besides. But it’s serious thought.
