An Immodest Proposal: Bring Carnival to Washington, DC

"Pack up all my care and woe, here I go, singing low, Bye Bye Blackbird."
     - 1926 lyric by Ray Henderson and Mort Dixon.

As the coming Mardi Gras struggles to levitate the spirit of New Orleans, the White House would prefer not to hear Second Lines mourning a city left behind.  But if President Bush wandered foreign carnivals, disguised as a peasant, they'd fill him with greater trepidation than the echoes of Katrina.

For years I've chronicled carnivals across different cultures - sense of duty.  With antiauthoritarian and satirical roots planted by the ancients, carnival is a superb barometer of the US image abroad.

A sojourn a couple years back included normally sleepy towns in Portugal.  In Torres Verdes, the centerpiece - not a float, the centerpiece - was called "Bushlandia".  Artfully rendered, five or so stories high, the sculpture offered up Dubya as a primitive king in furs, wielding a jeweled club and a scepter with a golden skull.  He wore a crucifix upon which was a soldier.  Dubya sits within the jaws of a giant skull beneath the crown of the Statue of Liberty, about which crawl wormy critters in turbans, (NONE of them depicting Mohammed, I swear).

Other heads of the coalition of the willing - I get confused over Old Europe and New Europe, but I know there were no Mongolians - were in his court.  Former Prime Minister Tony Blair fanned Dubya with feathers and scratched his backside.  We all liked Tony; too bad he ran with a rough crowd.  On the flip side of the sculpture, a bearded fellow with a turban (again, clearly NOT a depiction of Mohammed), jockeyed a wheelbarrow of explosives.  Beneath him a government minister struggled to feed the world's poor children.  Nuclear missiles flanked Dubya.  Penguins blew time-out whistles as toxic waste washed over nature and polar ice melted.

To the beat of Brazilian bands amid the samba gyrations of hotties, all revelers passed before Dubya.  Amazing, a small town in Portugal making this colossal comment on American leadership.

Portugal is not alone throwing carnival jabs.  I lost carnival virginity in Cologne, Germany.  Barely a month after the Monica scandal broke, I nearly kicked my camera off my balcony, lunging for it as a masterpiece of German engineering rounded the Koln Cathedral.  Grinning, Bill Clinton, big as a Mack truck, groped a peeved Stature of Liberty, followed by a padlocked White House atop which stood Uncle Sams throwing blood sausages to a crowd roaring approval.

They could take a joke even if finger waggers like Senator Lieberman and members of the pious press, hooked on the path of least resistance, couldn't.  Germans couldn't understand our mania over this fiasco as more pressing worldly concerns like Rwanda and the Middle East tumbled into fire.  Their message was to have a laugh and move on.  Recalling that national derailment, and voter reaction, Democrats have pledged "impeachment is off the table", even for the far more deserving.

But Dubya brings out carnival knives.  A few years back, despite German officials urging softer blows prior to a Dubya visitation,  a Cologne float had Bush shooting flames from a cross fashioned like a machine gun.  On another, Uncle Sam bent over, trousers down, while Angela Merkel climbed a ladder up his backside, her nose a shade darker.  Foreign leaders regarded as too cozy with Bush are fair game.  The subsequent year, Merkel fared better, portrayed as Elastic Girl.  Dubya walked barefoot through bowls of fat labeled "Kyoto", "New Orleans" and "Atomic Conflict".