A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan succeeds in that aim. No one has been able to understand it, including the makers of the PPt.
Panel of Nonentities warns that PowerPoint is the new, unsuspected enemy of the world.
April 28, 2010, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Uzbekistan
A group of uneducated, illiterate volunteers, randomly selected from the mean streets of Istanbul, issued a strong report today that struck a blow at the heart of the non-communications revolution. The Urchins of Istanbul, the official name adopted by the Istanbul illiterati for themselves, challenged Microsoft Power Point and its most prestigious practitioners to prove the popular product could clarify anything worth clarifying. The Urchins offered to duplicate anything Power Point could do with a writing tablet and a No. 2 pencil.
Microsoft insiders said the Power Point division of Microsoft was divided about whether or not to accept the challenge. "It is time for Power Point to put up or shut down," said one avid opponent of the wildly popular computer program.
Power Point presentations have insidiously wormed their way into the information systems of almost every large corporation on the planet, most of the world's standing armies, and even the Vatican. The Holy See is said to be preparing a giant PPt presentation to replace the Pope's traditional Easter message to the faithful, who ordinarily must wait for hours beneath the balcony of the Pope's chambers. "With Power Point the Pope can reach out to the entire city of Rome instantaneously, and maybe even Corsica" said Lyle Dicky, the Archbishop of Faith Driven Communications, a new division in the Vatican hierarchy created last May by the College of Bluebirds.
Archbishop Dicky, whose previous position was Head of the Vatican Council for the protection of the rights of gay priests accused of molesting 1,000's of altar boys, said he hoped to blend the two agencies to produce virtual lifelike portrayals of child sex abuse that could be deployed for use in abuse trials. These PPts can be used to demonstrate to jurors the altar boys actually enjoyed and profited from the abuse. "These groups of molestees have provided a steady source of new recruits to the priesthood, which recently has fallen on "soft" times as the current ranks of abusers have aged, become impotent, or have been committed to prison for life," according to Dicky.
Others emphasized the dangers of too heavy reliance on PPt, pointing to the recent example of a Power Point presentation that deployed a division of U.S. Marines to Salerno instead of Iraq, resulting in the deaths of 7,000 innocent civilians vacationing there. A Pentagon spokesperson, defending the invasion, said in times of war there always were going to be minor mistakes made by both sides, that were one of the expected costs of war. "Wars are designed to kill people," she said, "No dead, no war...it's as simple as that."
"We live in a complex world," said an unauthorized Vatican spokesman who was immediately beheaded by the Vatican Secret Service, an ecumenical collection of brigands, murderers, forgers, rapists, arsonists and cartographers, "and should be at the forefront of making it more complex," gurgled the dying spokesman whose throat had been slit with a stiletto sterilized by dipping it in Holy Water.
Contributing to this story from Cleburne, Texas was Bubba Wallace, a part time bull rider on the Texas rodeo circuit.
That ppt is like Bill Keane meets Dilbert. On Crack.
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