Balga-Fresno was a bucholic third world country. Life for people in the nation had never been too bad -- the indigenous religion was not excessively moralistic, and the missionaries who had evangelized the country had likewise been largely tolerant. The colonial period had involved only an average amount of oppression, and the post-colonial governments had not been exceptionally despotic. The country's major industry was a factory which manufactured items for personal use from the hardened sap tapped from an indigenous tree.
Because of the country's geographic isolation, news of the outside world was slow to filter in. Trends would be heard of as distant echoes and become the rage when they had long since become passe in first world countries. Frequently this would result in disappointment, as in the great Rubik's Cube craze of 1991, when a demand was created that could not be satisfied, as the trendy item could no longer be found to be imported.
One day, due to a shipping error, a crate full of a leading glossy gay magazine was mistakenly unloaded from a cargo plane. A curious post office employee, a tomboyish woman named Pandora, opened the abandoned crate. The magazines looked interesting, so she took home a bundle of them and gave them to the members of her soccer team.
Her cousin Cupid, a graceful young man who was a student at the capital city's barber college, saw a copy of the magazine and demanded that Pandora bring some home for him to give to his fellow students.
The effects of this random occurrence were like the chaotic hurricane instigated by the flicker of a butterfly's wing. For the women's soccer team was especially popular, and the students of the barber college could not help but discuss the contents of the magazine with their clients.
But it was not the articles which made the biggest impression. Naturally, the young people of Balga-Fresno were fluent in English, a language as easy to learn as it is grammatically consistent. And they easily recognized the handiwork of hack journalists.
What impressed them was the the ads, featuring handsome, thin, white people -- the people of Balga-Fresno, while handsome by their own standards, were by and large neither buff nor white. Due to the remoteness of their country, they had not developed an immunity to advertising, and it devastated them like smallpox.
Their discontent with their lot in life boiled, and they marched en masse on the capitol, demanding the importation of Miller Lite Beer, the erection of an Ikea furniture store, and a shipment of light-duty pickup trucks for the women of the soccer team. Not since Stonewall has such a spontaneous eruption of gay rage against disenfranchisement graced the surface of this planet -- but who would have guessed that the franchises demanded would be of this nature.
Balga-Fresno had come out of the closet, and it wanted to buy freedom rings. And in this case, because the trend of gay commercialism has not yet passed in our or any other country, their consumer demands WILL be satisfied.
Larry-bob
larrybob@gmail.com
9/27/99