IT

IT’S EVERYWHERE YUGO

So there I was, sitting at a bar with a couple of my friends. There were no sporting events on, so the televisions in the establishment were turned to CNN, which was covering the crisis in Yugoslavia. At least, I think it was the crisis in Yugoslavia. They were showing black screens that would occasionally flair up with brilliant orange explosions. It was either Yugoslavia or a kegger gone horribly wrong at Mr. Wizard’s house. But I’m pretty sure it was the prior.

So anyway, one of my friends turned to me and said, "So who are we rooting for here?" I just laughed and laughed and laughed at this question, hoping that if I laughed long enough, he would forget he had asked the question and go on to questions more important, such as who would win in a cole slaw wrestling matching between Jennifer Lopez and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Eventually, though, I had to come clean. I had no idea which side we were rooting for. All I know is that there is fighting in Kosovo, which is where I thought the Beach Boys wanted to go in that song. I think that Serbia is quarterbacked by Slobodan Milosevic, who, from what the president told me, is bad. Albania apparently has no team, and some NATO free agents came in to bomb the Serbians back to the goal line. And somewhere, someone is hiding in the mountains.

Now, before you rip off angry letters to the editor and trip my mother in the grocery store and things like that, remember one thing -- more than anything, I want all of the troops -- especially our U.S. servicemen -- to return home safely. I understand that this is a very tense time, and many people are suffering and NATO is coming in to help out (I think), but I gotta tell you -- following this war is like trying to follow a Tarantino movie. I keep hoping that, at the end, it will all come together and make sense.

I even went so far at to educate myself on the crisis. I went to CNN.com and clicked on "Strike at a Glance" which should have been entitled "Confuse You Even More." There, rather than what I had hoped for ("A Simpleton’s Guide to Airstrikes in the Balkans"), I got an in-depth political science lesson on why the Foreign Relations Secretariat of Mexico is against the actions.

Finding this to be no help, I searched deep in the recesses of my incredibly deep and recessed mind and recalled the words of Coach Ernie Pantuso: "Albania. Albania. You border on the Adriatic. Your land is mostly mountainous, and your chief export is coal." (For the 99% of you who didn’t get that, sorry. For those who did, don’t you think "Cheers" should be on in reruns?)

It was so much easier when about 90 percent of Europe was simply "The Soviet Union," with the other 10 percent being made up of, oh, I don’t know, England and Brazil or something. It was easy to channel your aggressions. You knew that any part of Europe east of London was open season. (Personally, I don’t know whose bright idea it was to break up the USSR anyway. Yoko, maybe?) But it made for simpler times. And simpler movies. If you had a kicking action hero like Bruce Willis (before he got doughy), all you had to do was put a bunch of Soviets up against him and boom -- instant bad guys. Alas, the simpler times of a bygone era. Such was 1988. Now, if you were to put a bunch of Serbians as your bad guys in a movie, you would run into two major problems:

1. It is very difficult to pin down a rock solid Serbian stereotype like it was with Soviets. You may think you have it dead-on, but some people are going to be watching the movie saying, "This is so fake! He is so Croatian!"

2. Protest fever! Apparently, you are no longer allowed to use any ethnicity as a bad guy, lest you get a mile-long line of protesters screaming at you for the crazy notion that somebody has to be a terrorist in the movie.

So I know what you’re saying -- "Uh, Mike, any point to this?" to which I reply, "You bet your Commie-hating bottom!" Here’s my proposal to solve all of our problems, from a lack of a common enemy to those awkward conversation pauses -- I say all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put that wacky Soviet Union back together again!

That’s right. We slap it back together, cram it full with Albania, Serbia, New Jersey and the like and just let them be their own little dysfunctional family. That way, they can be like that one neighbor on everyone’s street -- you know there are problems going on, but they get to work it out themselves, while you sit back and relax as you enjoy some "Cheers" reruns.