Monkey Business

(Written by Michael Wilson for the Oregonian, Sunday, July 29th, 2001)


Let's say you're an ape. You're hanging out, you've got cool boots with individual toes. Ape City swings. Your job keeps you in torches and horse food. your wife looks good in green, which is a bit of luck, since that's all the women wear.


You lips move funny when you talk, but whatever.


Then this... this THING shows up. he's like an ape, but not quite. He's practically hairless. Does he shave his body? Creepy freak.


Then he opens his mouth and speaks. And he sounds just like Charlton Heston. And he won't shut up. And that voice. And sorry, but you can't deal with that today. He calls you names. he goes off on your stinking paws." He disrespects your leather.


So you bounce his scrawny head off some walls. you clamp a collar on him and lean him around town. You and your boys put the fire hose on his non-hairy self.


Where, exactly, is the problem here? No, seriously. If Charlton Heston came up to you, right now, in your house while you're reading this at your computer and started rasping with his teeth clenched together about "this-upside-down-civilization" you'd slap his narrow backside into a cage, too. Beat it, gun boy. Tell 'em "Hi" at the Statue of Liberty.


All I'm saying is no one ever looks at this from the ape's point of view...