First the world refused to end in a fiery cataclysm on New Year’s, and then last week, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank protests ended not with a bang but a fizzle like some biodegradable whoopee cushion. The protests even ended with hundreds of people volunteering to get arrested. Volunteering to get arrested!

Who volunteers to get arrested? Oh please mister police officer in your battle gear whom I’ve been calling a fascist pig and spitting on all day, lock me up two hours before I’m supposed to get back on the Winnebago for Oregon or some other wacko state President Polk should have just left to the British. Who cares about having a police record when I can prove a point about Taco Bell serving meat?

First, you should care about your police record you darn hippies and anarchists. Someday when you want to take out a line of credit for that new Winnebago, it’s going to come back to haunt you. It’s not like you can just write Mayor Anthony Williams and get your record expunged while you’re dodging the draft and smoking dope in England.

Secondly, Taco Bell does not serve meat. I don’t know what they use instead of meat, and frankly, I don’t want to know. All I want is to eat my Chili Cheese Burrito in peace. Let my arteries and intestines worry about whatever’s inside.

And what was with the police? Where did they all come from? Who was watching Anacostia last week? Or did nobody notice? Maybe next time the protestors should march through Southeast. Try standing up to drug dealers instead of bankers. Watch out man! He’s got a fountain pen!

I’m sorry some Third-World dictator just had to have F-16s back in the 1980s even though no one in his country could fly the things, especially in the rain or at night. It sucks he had to spend the money on summer homes on the French Rivera and loot the treasury while his people were starved and were left to pay $200 million a month in interest. But how is making a giant paper mach? head and hands going to help? I thought it was a protest, not a Rose Bowl parade.

But enough about Mardi Gras, I mean the IMF protests. The federal government finally got around to acting down in Miami. Five months, that’s pretty efficient for the Feds. Oops, better get all those receipts back out, I’ve got a feeling I’m gonna get audited this year.

I can’t help but think that this whole situation could have been avoided if it had been handed over to GW. President Trachtenberg could have just bought Cuba. With the state of its economy we could have picked up the entire island for the bargain price of New Hall. Sure, we’d let Castro think we were helping him out, but then POW! We would pull a Mount Vernon on him. Once Cuba was safely under the thumb of our own bearded dictator, Elian would have been free to go home to a new and improved Cuba. You will have gas for your car!

Sure there would have been some bumps in the road as Cuba transferred over to a points-based economy, but think of the Jamba Juice possibilities: Freedom Fruit Frapp? or Post Communist Citrus Blast. GW could start selling Cuban cigars, not at the MC Store of course, maybe just at the F Street Club for all those hard working mucky-mucks in the administration. We could get some great players for the baseball team. We do have a baseball team, don’t we?

There could be a shuttle from National Airport for the freshmen banished to, err, placed in housing in Havana. Our NROTC jarheads could hang out in Guantanamo on the weekends. We still have NROTC, don’t we?

Uh-oh, now I’ve got the baseball team and the jarheads after me. I’ll just have to hide out in the library from now until the end of the year. No, wait a second, if anyone’s looking for me, I won’t be on the eighth floor of Rice Hall, certainly don’t come looking for me swinging baseball bats or bayonets on the eighth floor of Rice Hall. Nope, won’t be there. And if you did happen to look for me on the eighth floor of Rice Hall, certainly don’t just come barreling in, shooting first and asking questions later. But really that doesn’t matter because I won’t be on the eighth floor of Rice Hall.