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Friday January 4, 2008

What rhymes with Annapolis?

by andrew silow-carroll

Now it’s over, 2007,

And I hope you’ll join me in saying, “Thank heaven.”

Although it was no worse than 2006,

There were plenty of people up to their old tricks.

Like Iranian leaders, extreme and Islamic,

Who all seem hell-bent on going atomic,

And acting the part of the neighborhood bully,

And fooling the West and fooling us fully,

Because if you believe our very own nation,

There’s no need to fret over centrifugation.

We know that an apple is the thing that we eat

To keep doctors away and ill health in retreat.

Annapolis is, if you’ll forgive the conceit,

A place where Israelis and Arabs can meet

To keep rivals at bay while they jostle and shnorr

And say that the other just rots to the core.

Prime Minister Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas

Pretended they somehow eased their impasse,

But when Israel got much less than they gave, it

Sounded to us just like Camp David.

From President Bush to his aide Condoleezza,

They all seemed to contract a case of amneeza.

And lest we forget, it certainly was a

challenging time for the people in Gaza,

Who between raining fire on beleaguered Sderot,

Rose up against Abbas and grabbed the remote:

On Hamas TV, a cruel Mickey Mouse

Explained to the kids the way he’d clean house.

“Jews are the enemy!” the mascot would bellow

(We heard they asked SpongeBob, but he was too yellow).

The race for the White House has yet to infuse

A sense of excitement among voting Jews.

Whether Rudy or Mitt, Hill or Obama,

Forgive us for asking, but where is the drama?

Do Mormons love Jesus? Will Fred Thompson talk?

Will Huckabee make a disabled man walk?

With Iraq still a mess and the economy sinking,

Are these really the things about which we are thinking?

If the year had a color, it must have been green,

With efforts to make our environment clean,

And to cool down the earth after decades of warming.

Still, skeptics declared that the world was performing

According to science and natural law:

Think of it as, well, a 100-year thaw!

While others may buy this, sink, line and hooker,

We’ll remember how all of us shvitzed in the sukkah.

We must end the year with a shout-out to those

Whose names in bold face almost everyone knows:

Natalie Portman and Judd Apatow,

Shalom Auslander and Amy Winehouse,

Or Michael Mukasey, the nation’s AG,

And Michael Chabon, a real Yiddishe homey.

Zach Braff, Arnie Eisen and Shia LaBeouf

We’ll see you in 2008 soon eneouf!

Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, where this column previously appeared.

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