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Rant #234
(published July 7, 2005)
This I Believe: Profiles in Courageous Americanism, pt 1.
Armstrong on the Moon
by the Giant Squid
Architeuthis rex mundi
President of these United States

JOE LOUIE ARMSTRONG

Born first in New Orleans, and then twice more in the flat and feculent state of O-Hi-Oh, Joe Louie Armstrong rose from a position of downtrodden and desperate minority impoverishment to fill the hearts of all Americans with joy and nationalistic pride when, after smashing the Aryan Destroyer Maximum Schmeling in a matter of masterful pugilistic grace he became the first black astro-pugilist to play trumpet upon the Moon.

Raised alternately in the humid carnival wasteland fens of the Louisiana Gulf Coast and in the frigid industrial wasteland of my hometown, my Motown, the city of the Detroit, Joe Louie Armstrong honed his coronet playing, one-and-two combination punch and crack test-piloting flightsmanship whilst dwelling in the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs, in which he had been stored following some unpleasantness involving his unapproved acceleration of a North American USAF/USN X-15 experimental rocket plane upwards of the Mach 5 (some 3,000 miles per hour) in the celebration of the New Year's Eve. Louisiana (FOOTNOTE: which was at the time still referred to by its traditional name, Franco-America; Louisiana was not rechristened in Joe Louie Armstrong's honor until his first return from the Moon in 1939), it is noted, is a State which disapproves greatly of the unwarranted accelerations of vehicles.

In this home for wayward youth, a young and feisty Joe Louie was renowned as the only boy who could play a breezy, Big Easy "When the Saints Go Marching In" whilst simultaneously savagely beating a boy two years his senior. Additionally, he owned a yo-yo toy, which were rare at the time, although he could make no tricks with said yo-yo toy. None dared mock him for this dearth of yo-yosmanship.

Despite this deficiency in manual dexterity and agility, Joe Louis Armstrong quickly climbed the ranks of the NAASA (the National Association for the Advancement of Space Programs) and, in 1938—following directly upon the heels of his single-round knocked out of Maximum Schmeling—he ascended to the Moon, where he stood upon his sailing dinghy H.M.S. Satchmo upon the choppy and ill-named waters of the Sea of Tranquility, played a long, sonorous trumpet solo, and then sang in his signature, rough-and-gravel voice:

Stars fading but I linger on dear
Still craving your kiss
Houston, Tranquility Base here.
And I'm just saying this:

Dat's one lil step for yo' man
one big-ole hop fo' mankin'.

He then smoked of the marijuanas—or "muggle" as he did term it—of which he was famously fond.

Of course, all was far from the peaches and cream: Joe Louie did return to these United States to much fanfare and admiration from both sides of the Mason and Dixon Race Line of the Tracks, only to flee again moonward to evade his duty in enlisting in This Man's Army (that is The First Expeditionary Forces Committed to Being Torn to Shreds Upon the Beachy Normandy) at the commencement of the American involvement on this World's Second Human War of Note.

Having positioned himself on one of the Moon's few dry precipices, Joe Louie reigned in ignominy, contemptuously known as the "Satchelmouthed Brown Bombardier", owing to his habit of bombarding his ex-patria mori with shouted insults, scandalous lyrics casting aspersions upon the nation's sexual and moral hygiene, and the numerous lunar penguins choking the dry-land continents of the Moon. THis moniker, obviously, was additionally intended to make reference to Joe Louie's large mouth, in which up to three billiard balls might be concealed, although not while playing trumpet or boxing (this owing to boxing regulations against such concealments.)


Joe Louie Armstrong, maddened with drink, shoots Maximum Schmeling in cold blood, on the moon.

It was at this time that Joe Louie's old archnemesis, Maximum Schmeling, re-enters the life of the disgraced Americanerro. He himself having been too much the coward to fully commit to his own nation's noble and nationalistic work to remove the inconvenience of genetic diversity and drift from their reproductive pool, Schmeling took to his belovéd H.M.S. Hindenburg and sailed to the Moon, where he befriended Joe Louie and treasonously convinced him to re-target his vitriol by just 15-degrees, and thus besiege the National Socialists of Europe with his salacious trumpeteering and flung penguiños, thus ensuring American victory at home and abroad.

Joe Louie Armstrong and Maximum Schmeling never left their lunar heaven, and grew old together, Joe Louie ultimately becoming accepted as a belovéd elder statesman and racial caricature, benignly looking over all of earth from his lunar throne, a blackfacéd, grass-skirted minstrel, prancing and grinning, sweating and mopping his brow with his hand-your-chief, and penning such tomes of advice as Lose Weight the Satchmo Way (that way being the brown and mucky road of frequent laxatives).

Of course, Joe Louis Armstrong is not to be confused with his grandfather, George Louie Armstrong Custer.

GEORGE LOUIE ARMSTRONG CUSTER

An American of mythic proportions, surrounded by a great deal of foggy mis-confusion. Most American school children think of him as the jolly and fierce half-horse half-man demi-being who drove the snakes from the Moon. This, of course, is erroneous: George Louie Armstrong Custer was all man, mortal like any other, and he did not simply return snakes to earth, but more importantly liquidated the lunar Indians, nobly giving of his own life in the process.

Born solely in Ohio, trained in Michigan, distinguished in the Battle against the Gettysburgs, George Louie Armstrong Custer was a brilliant logistician, terrible strategist, plucky warmonger and shamelessly self-promoting media showboat. Following the close of the Civilian War, George Louie Armstrong Custer was appointed to the First American Space Corps, by then President Pro Tempore John Wilkes Booth, and specifically assigned the task of leading the 7th U.S. Moon Rover Cavalry in routing out Native-American strongholds on the Moon. This proved more difficult than first believed, as the Indians had numerous well entrenched encampments along the Little Big Horn River, which at that time drained into the Sea of Tranquility, and George Louie chose to use an ill-conceived single-prongéd attack with little to no collateral support. The LunaIndians, under the command of General Crazy Sitting Bull, nonecimated the expeditionary forces, with George Louie among the first to fall.


Lieutenant General George Louie Armstrong Custer pictured here upon the Moon with his faithful servant York Satchmo (left, kneeling, dressed in the drag) and his second wife, Mary Wolstonecraft Lincoln Todd Armstrong Custer III (right, white, seated on a stocky french bulldog, Mandarin Ace, concealed beneath her voluminous skirts.) In the background, an unnamed LunIndian, who was ultimately shot by George Louie Armstrong Custer and served to his troops before battle, as was customary at the time. Like the Native Americans, George Louie insisted on using all of the kill, not simply the fashionable and flavorful tongue.

This would have spelled disaster for the Re-United State's campaign against the Lunar Indians, had it not been for the unsung hero of the First American Space Corps, George Louie's trusty enslaved Afro-Amer-Indian guide, York Satchmo. With only his folding canoe and animal guile, York Satchmo set about a campaign of attrition against the gently slaughterous Lunar Indians by systematically poisoning the Lunar environs through a protracted gorilla campaign of ecological tainting. This had the effect of driving the lunar penguins—held sacred by the Indians as the lynch-pin of their rituals and diet—near extinction, destroyed the Lunar Indians, and resulted in the ravaged, dusty visage of the Moon today, the grinning skull of a once verdant and thriving satellite.

No snakes were harmed in this campaign, as York Satchmo had carefully traversed the Moon in advance of his campaign, locating snakes and painstakingly wrapping each in silken blankets for their safe trip back earthward in tiny escape capsules—or sent to "follow the drinking gourd", as it was put in the parlance of the time.

Major General Aide de Camp George Louie Armstrong Custer was ultimately memorialized in the documentary Custer's Revenge for the Atari 2600.

Both men, Joe Louie Armstrong and George Louie Armstrong Custer, live on in the hearts of loyal Americans everywhere.

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