A Modest Proposal

When I was a kid, I always loved watching the old, black-and-white version of Beau Geste (we only had an old, black-and-white TV, so it was perfect).

As some of you may remember the story, for rather obscure reasons having to do with honor, adventure, and the need of La France to maintain its rule over vast desert wastes, our heroes all join the French Foreign Legion.  Together with their fellow European criminals and mercenaries, they set out to fight the bad fight for white supremacy in the Sahara.

Well, I didn't understand the wider, horrible, real-world implications.

All I knew was that our boys were defending a doomed fort—What was it with doomed forts back then?  Various versions of the Alamo story were incredibly popular, and there was that Zulu thing.  Must have been some growing alarm over Red China going commie and the fear that we were all going to be surrounded in Fortress America by unreasonable people of color.  But I digress!—at the end, against an enormous number of Arabs who, as those darned nonwhite people will, were trying to take said fort by riding around and around it on camels and horses and picking off assorted Legionnaires (diseased or not).

Spoiler alert:  near the end, it just got down to a couple or even one of our heroes, who had the brilliant idea to prop up his dead mates on the parapets around the fort while shouting and firing guns, so the Bedouins would think there were still plenty of Euros (now banned from America) still up and firing.

Here is the fort, though of course it looked a lot bigger than this Hollywood model:



Now, my proposal is this: we, here at IIHIIFIIC, volunteer to go to every game at Yankee Stadium.

In return, we promise to race around the otherwise empty Stadium, hold up banners, bang on a frying pan with a spoon (is that Freddie guy still around?), imitate vendor cries, chant, and generally rave as we do anyway.  We will even agree to stage fistfights, an occasionally make a drunken run out onto the field ("Oh, you hate to see that, John!").

In return, we will get in for free, be given all the whiskey we can drink from the New York Yankees Official Jim Beam Bar & Grille after each game, and have a small but tasteful plaque in our honor placed in Memorial Park when this plague has passed.

What say you all?  Ready for our beau geste?