ADMITTEDLY, THE inaugural Mr. Dictator Pageant didn’t go quite as we had planned. For one thing, Fidel Castro’s surprise red carpet entrance on a hospital gurney and the even more surprising lack of wheelchair-accessible ramps proved embarrassing for everyone, particularly Hugo Chavez, who got tangled up in Castro’s urethral catheter as Communist strongmen carried the Comandante en Jefe up the velvet-covered stairs. Then, there was that whole unpleasantness between the Grand Ayatollah and a snarky fashion commentator who described the Ayatollah’s black robe and turban as “too Islamic Revolution,” which caused the Supreme Leader of Iran to threaten E! Television with jihad unless the journalist was tortured and publicly executed, preferably by hanging in the Welcome Pavilion. Protestors, of course, were a problem, waving placards and chanting slogans with painfully strained rhymes for “authoritarianism” and “genocide” behind the cordon rope, but we (having organized Mr. Up for Parole, Miss Barely Legal Teen USA, and Fox’s Who Most Resembles the Messiah?, which raised some rather irate eyebrows after the judges selected a 24-year-old gay hairdresser from Queens as the winning Christ) were hardly strangers to public outcry and had several high pressure fire hoses at the ready. Unfortunately, just as the last of the protestors were being blasted out of our cameramen’s sightlines by volunteer city firefighters, allowing unobstructed ground level filming of Kim Jong-il’s stunning paraglider fly-over of his mandatorily assembled adoring fans, an errant 800 PSI blast of municipal water caught our attractive but delicate red carpet correspondent squarely in the ribs, and we had to improvisationally replace her with a vaguely similar-looking woman from the convention center’s catering staff, a woman whose commentary, entirely in Spanish, focused mostly on the available varieties of iced tea and the dinner rolls.

Once we finally corralled the dictators and their beret-and-sash-clad minions into the Green Room we hoped the situation would improve, but, sadly, it did not. First Pervez Musharraf seized control of the condiments in a bloodless coup; then Muammar Al-Qadafi refused to formally recognize the existence of the kosher-style cream cheese bagels; then, following a dramatic breakdown in Russo-Korean relations, Kim Jong-il and Vladimir Putin nearly came to blows over the mixed nuts, which led to the creation of a demilitarized zone separating the cashews from the salted pecans. Individually wrapped slices of American cheese were denounced as symbols of Western decadence; the Mr. Coffee was crudely fashioned into a low-powered bomb; and the stalls in the men’s restroom were expropriated by Robert Mugabe for the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front, forcing many dictators to defecate into the urinals until they were declared sole property of the glorious Republic of Uzbekistan; at which point the indignant presidents-for-life resigned themselves to begrudgingly squatting over the potted plants, except for Castro, who was all set with his catheter and his bedpan.

Post-Green Room, when the dictators, in their finest military regalia, strode onstage for the Parade of Police States, we suffered yet another logistical setback when our host, the handsome and charismatic star of our network’s flagship forensic dentistry/crime drama, was detained by Chinese paramilitaries for unspecified reasons and held in a secret location beneath the orchestra pit. Not wishing to involve the police we dispatched our most expendable production interns to rescue him, but they, too, were abducted, and during decrescendos in the opening medley of Rodgers and Hammerstein favorites their tortured screams were faintly but noticeably audible. The Talent Segment was next, with Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir denying the genocide allegations of his ventriloquist’s dummy and Castro, despite intestinal hemorrhaging, performing a surprisingly emotive rendition of Gloria Estefan’s “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” to the beat of his heart monitor; but every time a dictator received only polite applause for his juggling or tap dancing or assembly of an improvised explosive device while whistling Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” the enraged autocrat would order the entire studio audience shot; and by the time Kim Jong-il completed his poorly received baton twirling routine it had become clear that our small cadre of ushers and professional seat-fillers would be woefully insufficient to replace the piles of tuxedo-clad dead.

After the swimsuit and eveningwear segments, which, in retrospect, were horribly ill-conceived, we were scheduled to ask each dictator a pointed, topical question concerning such subjects as poverty, terrorism, and the global AIDS epidemic, but with the contestants’ press secretaries reducing our list of questions to a solid, rectangular mass of industrial Sharpie black the despots merely approached the microphone, gazed defiantly at the camera, and took their seats, so that the next dictator could answer his wordless question with a cold, authoritarian stare. At this point, as the celebrity judges tallied up the dictators’ final scores, a few diligent protestors had managed to sneak inside the auditorium and litter the luxurious aisle carpet with Amnesty International pamphlets, but they were thankfully incapacitated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the ceremony was allowed to continue unmolested. Moments later, however, as our replacement host, again a member of the catering staff, prepared to announce Mr. Dictator 2008 with a plate of crab canapés still resting on his arm, more protestors appeared, waves of them, surging toward the stage past the Janjaweed and the ex-KGB and the Saudi secret police with blown-up posters depicting mass graves in Darfur, executed homosexuals in Iran, political prisoners held indefinitely in China, Burma, North Korea, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Libya; women stoned for committing adultery, women lashed for being raped, children with swollen bellies and refugees packed into hovels and beggars bathing in sewage as Supreme Commanders and Dear Leaders and Guides of the Revolution ate fresh lobster and sipped Hennessy cognac and deflowered handpicked schoolgirls in gilded seven story pleasure palaces; and we were forced to utilize our five second tape delay to erase any evidence of the dissidents’ demonstration as we went straight to commercial; replacing all those bloated bodies and famine-stricken faces with Hollywood actresses, and reality television stars, and sexy men seducing slinkily dressed women with their preference of imported German beer, or moisturizing aftershave, or target-date asset allocation mutual fund; verdant suburban lawns and white sand beaches and polished decks of cruise ships flashing on our viewers’ screens as our security personnel escorted the protestors from the premises; ensuring that when we returned from commercial there would be no evidence of suffering, of torture, of mass murder or censorship or state sponsored terror—there would be only Mr. Dictator 2008, shaking hands with the celebrity judges, waving to the surviving audience members, proudly wearing his jewel-encrusted commemorative sash as we rolled the credits and cued the orchestra and briefly acknowledged our sponsors, without whom tonight’s telecast would not have been possible.

Next, of course, was a very special episode of Millionaire Promiscuous Daughters, which, we assured our viewers, was not to be missed.

This story appeared previously on Cellstories. Photo by Flickr user tanakawho.