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Rant #28
(published February 22, 2001)
Protocols of the Elders of Sweden
by Terence S. Hawkins

It's time someone blew the lid off an increasingly common but still secret tragedy stalking America's strip malls and high end outlet centers: retail child abandonment. Statistics recently made available through Freedom of Information litigation with the people who put the kids on milk cartons reveals that on average, one child in twenty left at megamall "child care centers" is simply never picked up. On a hot holiday weekend, the number approaches one in five.

It's easy to see how it happens. A GenX mom and dad tow little Zack and Emily to the Ikea to pick up some faux-stylish Scandinaviana to spruce up their little two bedroom over Dad's garage. They park the sticky little Baby Gappers in a big inflatable Playzone to bounce around harmlessly with about forty other zygotes, all under the watchful eye of some minimum wage fugitive from Megan's Law, secure that they can snap up particle board unencumbered by child or anxiety.

And then it hits them. That triplex in TriBeCa just isn't going to happen. Neither is the cool job animating webpages. Same with the vacations in Nepal. Nope. Their future is punching the PC for Prudential in the Dilbert Zone until the HMO decides they're just not worth fixing anymore. Teetering on the verge of this existential chasm even the hardiest self-deluder can make the causal association between a) poverty and b) reproduction.

So why come back for little Brendan or Zoe? Hey, they're doing them a favor. The Swedes are nice people. Socialized medicine. Subsidized everything. They'll take in a couple of American waifs. Glad to. They're too progressive actually to breed themselves anymore, so they're happy to get these little bundles of returned goods.

Not so. "Ikea" is an obscure Scandinavian dialect word for "Antichrist." Kids left behind at closing time are immediately graded by gender and size and bar-coded with temporary tattoos. Some are then shipped off to Pacific Rim child brothels, there to be forcibly sodomized by Japanese vacationers on packaged sex tours. Think I'm kidding? Hey, where do you think those pictures on the Internet come from, Sherlock?

These, unfortunately, are the lucky ones. The others go straight to the organ transplant farms of developing nations, their parasite-free inner parts earmarked for the body cavities of party cadre. Our State Department has, until this moment, suppressed the fact that one of the most prominent recipients of these "donations" was the late Chinese Premier Deng, whose diminutive size and incredibly advanced age required a steady flow of tiny spare parts made in the USA. These kids apparently didn't have it too bad: all the bean curd they could eat until "anesthetized" by a big rock and broken up by teams of guys who were quite recently grad students at the University of Southern Indiana. Of course, the skin trade isn't limited to China. No one wants to mention that it's kind of odd that Queen Elizabeth's mum, the universally beloved Queen Mother, is the only surviving signatory of Magna Carta.

So listen. I know you can't stand them. But if you want to get rid of them, just drop them off with Grandpa at the dog track.

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