Chapter Nineteen. The Sixties: A Nation Gets High And Has Amazing Insights, Many Of Which Later On Turn Out To Seem Kind Of Stupid

   The sixties was a unique era in American history. Mention the sixties to any middle-aged urban professional, and he’ll transform himself into something worse than one of those Depressionites, droning away about his memories until you think up an excuse to leave. Such is the impact that this exciting era still has on the American consciousness. Because it was a time of truth, but also of lies; of love, but also of hate; of peace, but also of war; of Otis Redding, but also of Sonny Bono. There was a “new feeling” in the land, especially among the young people, who joined the “hippie movement” to express their need to be free, to challenge the traditional values of American culture, to order some pizza right now. Yes! the “times they were a changin’” and nobody expressed the spirit of the sixties better than the brilliant young poet-songwriter-irritatingly-nasal-whiner Bob Dylan, when, with his usual insightfulness, he sang:
   How many times can a man be a man Before a man is a man?
   Moved by the power of this message, tens of thousands of young people rejected the trappings of a grasping greedy society to live simple, uncluttered lives dedicated to meditation and spirituality and listening to sitar music and ingesting random substances and becoming intensely interested in the ceiling and driving home at one mile per hour. As a result of these experiences, the “Flower Children” of the sixties developed a unique set of values, a strong sense of idealism and social awareness that still exerts a powerful influence over their decisions in such philosophical areas as what radio stations to listen to when driving their Jaguars to their brokerage firms.

The 1960 Presidential Election

   In 1960 the Democratic candidate was the rich, witty, graceful, charming, and of course, boyishly handsome Massachusetts senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who gained voter recognition by having his face on millions of souvenir plates and being married to the lovely and internationally admired Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Kennedy’s major political drawback was that the nation had never elected a Roman Catholic; on the other hand, the nation had never elected a total dweeb, either, and the Republicans had for some reason nominated “Dick” Nixon. So it was a very close race.
   The turning point was a series of nationally televised debates, in which Kennedy, who looked tanned and relaxed, seemed to have an advantage over Nixon, who looked as though he had been coached by ferrets. Kennedy held a slight lead going into the bonus round, where he chose Category Three (Graceful Handsome Boyish Wittiness) and won the Matching luggage plus Texas plus Illinois, thus guaranteeing his victory in the November election. This was widely believed to be the end of Nixon’s career.

The Kennedy Administration

   Kennedy had pledged, during the 1960 election campaign, to “get the country moving again”—to get it out of the Eisenhower doldrums, to bring back
   its vigor, to reinstill its pride, to reassert its leadership around the world, maybe even to get it into a dumbfounding, unwinnable war. And under the gracefully boyishly handsomely witty charmingness of his leadership, America began to do just that. Kennedy immediately set the tone in his inaugural address, in which he promised that the country would land a Peace Corps volunteer on the Moon, and ended with the stirring words of the famous challenge “Ask not what your country cannot do that you cannot do, nor what cannot be done by neither you nor your country, whichever greater.” The Kennedys also captivated the nation With their unique style, which soon earned the young administration the nickname “Camelot” (from the popular Broadway musical Guys and Dolls). The Kennedy style was an eclectic blend of amusing and graceful activeties that ranged from taking fifty-mile hikes to inviting cellist Pablo Casals to perform at the White House to playing touch football on the lawn. As the Kennedy mystique grew, the first family’s activities were widely imitated: Before long, millions of Americans were taking Pablo Casals on fifty-mile hikes. When he begged for a chance to rest, they laughed and threw footballs at him. Such was the vigor of the times.
   So everything would probably have been ideal if the Red Communists had not decided to be their usual party-pooper selves by causing new international tension in the form of ...

The Bay Of Pigs

   In 1960 there was considerable concern about the fact that Fidel Castro, a known beard-wearing Communist, had taken over Cuba, which is a mere ninety miles from Key West, Florida, site of America’s largest strategic stockpile of tasteless T-shirts. This alarmed the U.S. intelligence Community, whose crack team of analysts developed a Shrewd plan under which the U.S. would secretly train an army to invade Cuba; which then according to the plan, would cause the population to rise up in revolt and throw Castro out of power. This plan worked smoothly, with everything going exactly as planned, except the part about the population rising up in revolt, and so forth. It turned out that large segments of the population had already risen up in revolt just a short time earlier to put Castro into power, but unfortunately our intelligence community had misplaced the file folder containing this tidbit of information. So the invasion failed and the U.S. got some international egg on its face. But Kennedy took it with his usual boyishly witty graceful handsome charminghood, and the intelligence community, showing admirable spunk, quickly discovered an exciting new place to think up Shrewd plans about: Southeast Asia.
   Once more everything seemed to be going pretty well, until, wouldn’t you know it, along came ...

The Berlin Crisis

   This was caused when the Russians noticed that every morning approximately 173,000 East Berlin residents commuted to work in West Berlin, and every evening approximately 8 Of them commuted back. The Russians, showing the kind of subtle public-relations skills that have made them so popular everywhere they tromp, responded by building the Berlin Wall, which created a crisis that was not resolved until President Kennedy went over there in person and made the famous inspirational proclamation “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I wish to see a menu”). This calmed international tensions, but only briefly, for in October 1962 a major event was to occur, an event that would become the focus of the world’s attention for several tense days. We refer, of course, to the World Series, in which the Yankees beat the Giants four games to three. Also, there was a Cuban missile crisis, which the United States won in the final minutes by going into a “prevent” defense.
   Another shocking development that occurred at this time was that “Dick” Nixon reached such a low level of credibility with the voters that even California refused to elect him as governor. In his concession speech, Nixon told the press: “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore,” prompting the reporters, in a fit of nostalgia, to batter him unconscious with their wingtips. This was widely believed to be the end of his career.
   So by 1963, all things considered, the sixties seemed to be going pretty well. Which just goes to show that you can never tell, because except for the discovery of Aretha Franklin, the rest of the decade turned out to be ...

A Long String Of Bummers

   First of all, Kennedy was assassinated, which was traumatic enough in itself but was made even worse by the fact that we never did find out for sure what happened, which means that for the rest of our lives we’re going to be opening People magazine and reading articles about Yet another conspiracy buff claiming to have conclusive proof that Lee Harvey Oswald was actually working for Roy Orbison or the Nabisco Corporation or whatever.
   THEN we got President Lyndon Johnson, who tried his darnedest, by means of looking somber to the point of intestinal discomfort, to convey integrity, but who nevertheless made you think immediately of the large comically dishonest Warner Brothers cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn. Plus his wife—this is still difficult to believe even years later—was named “Lady Bird.” Johnson was nevertheless elected overwhelmingly in 1964, easily defeating Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, who turned out to be an OK guy but who at the time appeared to be perfectly likely to launch a nuclear first strike against, say, New York.
   THEN we got into the Vietnam War, which is still causing arguments involving: the people who supported it but didn’t fight in it, versus the people who didn’t support it but did fight in it, versus the people who didn’t support it and didn’t fight in it, versus the people who supported it and might have had to fight in it if ever the Indiana National Guard had been called up, which was of course a distinct possibility, and so on.
   THEN more people got assassinated and everybody started hating everybody and there were riots in the streets. THEN Gilligan’s Island was canceled.
   So by 1968 things were really bad. They were so bad that it seemed impossible for them to get any worse, unless something truly horrible happened, something so twisted and sinister and evil that the human mind could barely comprehend it.

The Nixon Comeback

   Yes. One day we turned on our televisions, and there he was, “Dick” Nixon, looking stronger than ever despite the holes in his suit where various stakes had been driven into his heart. He was advertised as a “new” Nixon with all kinds of amazing features, including an illuminated glove compartment and a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, but of course he couldn’t tell the voters what it was, because then it wouldn’t have been a secret plan.
   Nixon’s running mate was an individual named Spiro Agnew, whose principal qualification was that when You rearranged the letters of his name, You got “grow a penis” (Dick Cavett discovered this. Really.). Their campaign theme—we are not making this up—was “Law and Order.”
   The Democrats, meanwhile, were in trouble. The war had become extremely unpopular, so President Johnson had decided not to seek reelection, which was an act of great statesmanship in the sense that nobody except maybe Lady Bird would have voted for him anyway. The process by which the Democrats decided who their new nominee would be was about as organized as a tub of live bait, culminating in the 1968 Chicago convention which consisted of spokespersons for about 253 major ideological factions giving each other the finger through clouds of tear gas. Out of this process emerged Hubert Humphrey, a nice man with a lot of solid experience and an unfortunate tendency to sound like Porky Pig, only not as dignified. On top of this, the Democrats had to contend with the candidacy of Alabama governor George Wallace, who appealed to what the political experts called “disaffected Democrats” defined as “Democrats missing teeth.”
   And thus it was that on election day, October 8, 1968, the voters went to the polls and elected, as leader of the greatest nation that the world has ever seen, President Richard Milhous N ... President Richard M ... President R ... Please don’t make us do this.

The Nixon Presidency

   Nixon’s first official act as president was to sneak out behind the White House and bury his secret peace plan to ensure that nobody would find out what it was, which would have been a breach of national security. With that
   important task accomplished, he swung into action, working feverishly to accomplish his most important objective, to realize the cherished dream that had driven him through all these years of disappointment, to reach the long-sought goal that, thanks to his election was finally within his grasp, namely: getting reelected.

Discussion Questions

   1. Didn’t you always, even when you were sitting around with your friends pretending to be really enthralled, secretly hate sitar music? Admit it.

Chapter Twenty. The Seventies: A Relieved Nation Learns That It Does Not Actually Need A President

   The seventies dawned with “Dick” Nixon riding high. The nation had surged ahead in the space race through a series of courageous accomplishments by astronauts such as Donald “Deke” Slayton, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Scott “Scotty” Carpenter, and Nicholas “Nicky the Squid” Calamari, climaxing with the historic moment on October 8 when Neil “Satchmo” Armstrong became the first human, with the possible exception of guitarist Jimi Hendrix, to set foot on the Moon, where he expressed the emotions of an anxiously watching world with the unforgettable statement “Hi Mom!”
   On the foreign-policy front, Nixon continued to protect the national security by not telling anybody, not even his secret wife, Pat, what his secret plan to end the Vietnam War was. At the same time, he undertook a major clandestine foreign-policy initiative by sending chocolates and long-stemmed roses to legendary Communist Chinese revolutionary leader Mao (“Mo the Dong”) Zedong. Helping him with this initiative was the brilliant, avocado-shaped genius Henry Kissinger, who became the nation’s top foreign-policy strategist despite being born with the handicaps of a laughable accent and no morals or neck.
   The daring initiative came to fruition in 1972 when Nixon became the first American president to visit China, where Mao , an avid prankster, presented him with two giant pandas, named Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing. This was actually a hilarious Communist joke, because “Ling-Ling” and “Hsing-Hsing” are the words that Chinese children use to describe bodily outputs, as in “Mommy, I have to make ling-ling.” The Chinese officials just about died laughing when Nixon was making his thank-you speech and Ling-Ling went Hsing-Hsing on his shoe. (The pandas now reside in the National Zoo, where, over the past eighteen years, nearly a third of the federal budget has been spent on various elaborate schemes to get them to reproduce, which is also pretty funny inasmuch as they are both males.)
   The China initiative was a notable coup, and even though the darned pesky Vietnam War was still going on, everybody knew that “Dick” had his secret plan, which he could dig up and put into effect at any time. So things looked very good indeed for him going into the 1972 election. He got a lot of help from the Democrats, who, continuing the tradition they established in 1968 of appearing to be incapable of operating an electric blanket, let alone the country, nominated George McGovern, who had exhibited a wide-ranging appeal to a broad cross section of nearly fourteen voters. The result was that in the 1972 election Nixon carried all the states and every major planet except
   Massachusetts.
   So by 1973 “Dick” Nixon was at the pinnacle of power and appeared poised to become, against all odds, one of the most successful and respected presidents in the nation’s history. This was the signal for God to come into the game and create ...

The Watergate Scandal

   The Watergate Scandal, which gets its name from the fact that it was a scandal, began with a break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters by a group of burglars so ludicrously incompetent that they obviously had to have some connection with the federal government. Sure enough, when two plucky and persistent Washington Post reporters, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, began poking around, a confidential source named “Deep Throat”—whose identity remains a closely guarded secret to this very day because it was Pat Nixon in drag—revealed to them a fascinating tidbit of information: Some species of mollusk can actually change their gender.
   This was the “missing puzzle piece” that the two brash young journalists needed to “break the story.” Within days the scandal was such hot news that it was turned into a highly popular television series called The Senate Watergate Committee’s Parade of Scuzzballs, starring genial host “Senator Sam” Ervin (Okeefenokee), who had the entire nation listening with rapt attention in an effort to figure out what the hell he was saying. Senator Sam spoke in Deep Southern, which is similar to English, only unintelligible, so everything he said came out sounding like “We go’ heppin’ wif de bane pone.” But everybody was on his side anyway, because the committee witnesses—a group of high-level Nixon administration aides, all of them named Klaus—projected all the warmth and personal integrity of eels. (We are pleased to report, however, that while in federal prison they all found the Lord, who was serving a six-year sentence for failing to file tax returns.)
   So things looked very bad for the Nixon administration, and they got even worse with the revelation that Nixon had secretly taped all the Oval Office conversations that had taken place between him and the various Klauses. The tapes contained many shocking and highly revealing exchanges, such as this one, from October 8:
   NIXON: Because you have, you have problems with the, with the [expletive deleted], with the ...
   KLAUS: Yeah [garbled], with the, uh, with the ...
   NIXON: ... with, uh, with the [expletive deleted].
   KLAUS: ... with the ...
   NIXON: [Expletive deleted].
   KLAUS: ... with the Smoot-Hawley.
   NIXON: Shit.
   As damaging as these revelations were, matters got even worse for Nixon when one of the tapes was found to contain, at a crucial juncture, an eighteen-minute gap where nothing could be heard except a hum. This was the last straw: The American public, simply would not tolerate a president who would fritter away eighteen minutes humming during a crucial juncture. The next day, October 8, the Senate Watergate Committee voted 17-9 in favor of a resolution proposed by Senator Ervin calling on the president to “Rang onsum latmun sookles.” Clearly the dice had been cast down onto the gauntlet. Nixon appeared to have only two options left:
   OPTION ONE: He could boldly remain as president and defend himself in the now-inevitable impeachment proceedings.
   OPTION TWO: He could spare the country further trauma by resigning in a dignified manner.
   Those of you who are well-schooled students of “Dick” Nixon will not be surprised to learn that, after carefully weighing the alternatives, he decided to go with Option Three: to stand in the Rose Garden and make a semicoherent speech about his mother that may well rank as the single most embarrassing moment in American history. Thoroughly humiliated, Nixon then went off to live in a state of utter disgrace (New Jersey.). This was widely believed to be the end of his career.
   Nixon’s resignation left the nation in shock, compounded when enterprising Washington Post reporters revealed that, while nobody was paying attention, Vice President Agnew had resigned to take a job clubbing baby seals. This meant that the new president of the United States was—this all seems like a dream now—Gerald Ford. Yes! The golf person!

Highlights Of The Ford Administration

   The major highlight was when Ford gave Nixon a full presidential pardon, thereby sparing the nation the trauma of seeing “Dick” go to federal prison, where there was every reason to fear that he would—this makes us shudder just thinking about it—find the Lord. Ford also restored the nation’s respect for the office of the presidency by falling down and bonking his head a lot.
   Another major Ford highlight was when he alerted the nation that there was going to be an epidemic of “swine flu” and that everybody should get a shot. As it turned out, there was less of a risk from the disease than from the shots, but fortunately only a few high-level administration officials were dumb enough to get them.
   Of course there were many other Ford administration highlights, but unfortunately we lost the matchbook we had them written on. Your best bet, if you want more information on this topic, is to visit the official Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which features among other fascinating exhibits, all of the former chief executive’s merit badges (Really.).
   So Ford made an important contribution as a “caretaker” president, but by the time the 1976 election rolled around, America was ready to turn in an entirely new direction for leadership. America had grown deeply suspicious of establishment Politicians, and wanted a different kind of president, a president who was not a Washington “insider,” a president who rejected the ostentatious trappings of power, a president who was moral and decent and sensitive and kind and earnest and truthful and pious and had nice hair like Phil Donahue. America was ready to be led by: a weenie.

“Jimmy” Carter

   jimmy Carter came from a simple God-fearing homespun southern family that was normal in every respect except that many of its members, upon close inspection, appeared to be crazy. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy, he served as an officer aboard a nuclear submarine, where, due to an unfortunate radiation leakage, he developed enormous mutant teeth. Nevertheless he went on to become a successful peanut farmer and governor of Georgia for an entire term, thus acquiring all of the major qualifications that a modern politician needs to be president of the United States, namely: blue suits. He easily won the Democratic nomination in 1976 to face Gerald Ford, who won the GOP nomination after narrowly edging out former California governor Ronald Reagan by a score of four brain cells to three.
   During the election campaign, Carter performed many symbolic gestures to show he was a regular person only much smarter. For example, he often carried his own garment bag. This impressed the voters, although it was eventually revealed by enterprising Washington Post reporters that the bag did not, in fact, contain a single garment. Nevertheless Carter won the election and went on to have several highlights.

Highlights Of The Carter Administration

   The main one, without question, was when the president claimed that while he was out in a canoe one day, he was attacked by an enormous swimming rabbit. We swear we are not making this highlight up. Also there was an energy crisis during which Americans, showing the sense of self-sacrifice and community spirit that often emerges when the well-being of the nation is at stake, closed ranks and shot at each other in gas lines.
   The lowlight of the Carter administration was that the economy did poorly. This troubled Jimmy a great deal, so much so that he gathered together all of the nation’s top thinkers for a special conference at Camp David. They thought and thought and thought, and when they were finally done, Jimmy came out and announced that the nation’s problems were being caused by “malaise.” This puzzled the average American, who had never even heard of “malaise, except on a sandwich, and who was under the impression that the problem was that unemployment and inflation were running at about 652 billion percent. “Any minute now,” the average American thought, “he’s gonna tell us we have to get ‘malaise’ shots.”
   So there was much disillusionment among the voting public. The stage was set for yet another dramatic change in the nation’s political direction—a shift away from the soul-searching, the uncertainty, the intellectual complexity, and the multisylabic words of the Carter era; a shift toward a new kind of leader, a man with a gift for communicating the kind of clear, direct, uncomplicated message that had previously been associated only with Tide commercials. It was time for the Reagan Revolution.

Discussion Questions

   1. How do they know what gender a mollusk is?

Chapter Twenty-One. The Reagan-Bush Years: Napping Toward Glory

   The 1980s will be remembered as a time when the nation broke free of the confining chains of the left-leaning bleeding-heart gutless namby-pamby Mister Pouty Pants Liberal school of political thought that had dominated the American political landscape ever since the New Deal; a time when Americans began Standing Tall, Talking Proud, Feeling Good, Sitting Straight, Pledging Allegiance, and Eating More Fiber.
   Who was responsible for this sweeping change in the national mood? Amazingly, it was almost entirely the work of a single person, a strong, dominant individual who was able to change the course of history through steely determination, unflinching toughness, and sheer force of will: Nancy Reagan. But you also have to give a lot of credit to her husband, Ron, a distinguished war-movie hero who served, off and on, as president of the United States during this era, and whose administration made many historically crucial decisions, several of which he was aware of personally. Coinciding with this national mood change was emergence and rapid cholera-like spreading of the young urban professionals, also known as “yuppies” or, more affectionately, “suspender-wearing wingtipped weenies,” a new breed of seriously ambitious humanoids whose idea of a really wild evening was to get drunk and restructure a corporation. The role models for the eighties were men like Donald Trump, who had made several jillion dollars in the lucrative field of amassing wealth. But beyond being stupendously rich, Trump was also truly a class individual, as he revealed in his best-selling book, Trump: Truly a Class Individual, and in 1989 he captured the imagination of the nation when, in the largest private financial transaction ever, he purchased Ohio, the Coast Guard, the Italian Renaissance, and Mars (All of which he classily renamed “Trump.”).
   Another major trend of the 1980s was the sudden ubiquitousness of the personal computer, a tool that has freed millions of people to use words like “ubiquitousness” without actually knowing how to spell them. In fact, the book that you are now reading was written on a personal computer, which is why it is devoid of the “typos” that were so common in the days of old-fashioned wersp oidop gfegkog pl;gpp$R$%I%.
   But all was not peaches and light on the 1980s economic front. After a lengthy investigation, crack agents of the Securities and Exchange Commission discovered that top Wall Street figures were using “inside information” to make money, a revelation that came as a shock to those members of the public who had mince pie for brains. Investor confidence was further shaken by the stockmarket crash of October 8, 1987, caused by a herd of computers that were panicked into the worst international electronic stampede in history when a woman in Akron, Ohio, got angry and punched an automatic bank teller (Charging it later with sexual harassment.).
   Another major economic upheaval was the sudden end of the energy crisis, which meant lower gas prices and harder times for wealthy Texans as well as large oil companies, thereby causing alarmed, thoughtful Americans everywhere to laugh until their garments were soaked with drool. Things were also very bad for the American family farmer, whose fields, by the late 1980s, were parched and dusty because of the bright lights being shone on them by television news crews doing heartrending reports about the plight of the family farmer.
   Internationally, the major event of the eighties was that Prince Charles married Diana Spencer, thus assuring that they would be featured on roughly every third cover of People for the rest of our lives. But when all is said and done, which, trust us, will be very soon now, the story of the eighties will be the story of the Reagan administration and the many men and women who served in it, some of whom are already out on parole.

The 1980 Presidential Election Campaign

   In 1980 the Democrats were pretty much stuck with Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, who ran under the slogan “Four More Years?” The Republicans, meanwhile, had a spirited primary-campaign season, which came down to a duel between Reagan and George Herbert Walker Norris Wainright Armoire Vestibule Pomegranate Bush IV, who had achieved a distinguished record of government service despite having a voice that sounded like he had just inhaled an entire blimpload of helium.
   Reagan finally won the nomination by promoting “Reaganomics,” an economic program based on the theory that the government could lower taxes while increasing spending and at the same time actually reduce the federal budget deficit by sacrificing a live chicken by the light of a full moon. Bush charged that this amounted to “voo-doo economics,” which got him into hot water until he explained that what he meant to Say was “doo-doo economics.” Satisfied, Reagan made Bush his vice-presidential nominee.
   The turning point in the election campaign came during the October 8
   debate between Reagan and Carter, when Reagan’s handlers came up with a shrewd strategy: No Matter what Carter Said, Reagan would respond by shaking his head in a sorrowful but personable manner and Saying: “There you go again.” This was brilliant, because (a) it required the candidate to remember only four words, and (b) he delivered them so believably that everything Carter said seemed like a lie. If Carter had stated that the Earth was round, Reagan would have shaken his head, saying, “There you go again” and millions of voters would have said: “Yeah! What does Carter think we are? Stupid?”
   And so the Reagan-Bush juggernaut easily swept to victory in all but a handful of states (Which were immediately purchased by Donald Trump.), thus paving the way for

The Reagan Revolution

   The Reagan Revolution was run by Staunch Conservatives who wanted the government to stop wasting money on bloated, inefficient social programs and start wasting it on bloated, inefficient military programs. Foremost among these was the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” which is a far-flung network of highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art “defense contractors” orbiting a giant, five-sided structure called the “Pentagon,” which constantly emits high-intensity beams of “money.” In the event of a nuclear attack, electronic communications devices called “telephones” would be used to instantaneously alert the president and his top “defense strategists” that it is time for them to be whisked to secret radiation-proof underground “hideouts” stocked with food and water and recreational activities such as “Ping-Pong” and protected by vicious biting dogs from intrusion by sick, desperate, starving, and increasingly hairless “taxpayers.” Thanks to the miracle of computers, all this would take place in less time than it takes for a family of four to order breakfast!
   However, in the area of foreign policy, the major focus of the first Reagan term was Central America, a region of immense strategic vitality to the United States because if it were to ever fall into the hands of communist troops, they would be eaten by insects. Thus it was with extreme interest that Americans viewed the struggle between the “Sandinistas,” a group of anticommunist ex-military officers from Honduras, to overthrow the contras , a group of pro—militarist ex-communists from El Salvador, in an effort to control Nicaragua, the site of the vital Suez Canal, which ... No, wait a minute. sorry. What we mean is Americans viewed with extreme interest the struggle between the “Hondurans,” a group of ex-Panamanian Nicaraguans, to control the “Canal Zones” a group of pro-contra, ex-cathedral, nondenominational ... No, hold it. Never mind. The Point is that there were a great many strategic things going on down in this vital dirtball region, which is why the Reagan administration called upon its crack intelligence strategists to put down their bananas and get to work. It was clear that we were going to take an active role in the region, a policy that soon led to the turning point in the battle against communist infiltration in the Western Hemisphere, namely:

The War In Grenada

   This war began when Cuban Communist Construction workers began actively engaging in suspected acts of construction on the island of Grenada which not only contains an abundant natural supply of American medical students but also happens to be in a very strategic and vital location.
   Clearly some kind of action had to be taken, and on October 8, it was. Backed by massive sea and air support, nearly two thousand marines stormed onto the island, despite the very real danger that they might sink it. Nevertheless, they were able to overcome not only armed resistance but numerous loose goats, thus winning the war and paving the way for a peace settlement under which we agreed to give the Grenadans upward of $100 million, in return for which they agreed to be our friends, which they still were, we think, last time anybody checked.
   Another foreign-policy triumph for Reagan was his 1984 visit to China, where he met for more than three hours with Mao Zedong before realizing that Mao was dead. Aides described the talks as “frank.”
   This was exactly the kind of firm leadership that Americans had been yearning for, so Reagan was extremely popular when the 1984 presidential election campaign lumbered into view. And once again the Republicans got a lot of help from the Democrats, who by this point were acting as though they were conducting an experiment to see if it was possible to run a major presidential camPaign without winning a single state.
   The Democrats nominated Walter Mondale, who immediately announced in that distinctive voice of his that sounded as if emanating from a nasal passage the size of a gymnasium, that if he were elected, he would jack up taxes. This shrewd move immediately earned him the support of more than half the members of his immediate family, and he went on to lose so badly that people are still, years later, showing up at the polls at all hours of the day and night and demanding an opportunity to vote against him.
   But Mondale can claim one major achievement: He chose as his running mate Geraldine A. Ferraro, who will become a footnote (Geraldine A. Ferraro.) to history.

The Second Reagan Term

   The big excitement in the second Reagan term was the “Iran-contra” scandal, which was caused when somebody in the White House, we are still not sure who, but definitely not the president, decided to sell arms to the Iranian government, which is the same group of greaseballs who took American hostages, which is why we have laws against selling arms to them, but this case was an exception because the money was supposed to go to either the Sandinistas or maybe the contras, some strategic group down there, so it was perfectly OK to sell the arms, although we wish to stress once again that the president knew nothing about it, and even if he did he later forgot, which is no big deal because if a president clutters up his mind with every pesky little detail such as what the foreign policy is, he has no room left for important matters.
   When news of this got out, there was a big scandal, culminating in marathon hearings by the Joint House and Senate Committee to Bore Everybody to Death. The highlight of these hearings was the testimony of Oliver North, a marine lieutenant colonel who was considered the key witness because he had been single-handedly operating the executive branch of the federal government for several years while everybody else was in meetings. In a dramatic televised moment, North, his eyes moist and his voice shaking, revealed to the committee that he was a courageous patriot, after which he became so overcome by emotion that he knocked over his bottle of Revlon eye moistener.
   Eventually, the nation overcame the trauma of Iran-contra and went back to reading the sports pages. And Reagan was soon able to “bounce back” from the scandal by going to the Soviet Union, which is in Russia, and signing a historic agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev that enormously enhanced the prospects for world peace by prohibiting either side from ever publicly noticing the huge mark on Mr. Gorbachev’s head.
   Meanwhile, however, new problems were beginning to form. Chief among these was the federal budget deficit, which was mounting at an alarming rate. Both the Reagan administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress had tried a number of possible solutions—increased government spending, having the government spend more money, increasing the amount of money being spent by the government—but that darned ol’ deficit just would not go away. On top of that, there were other serious problems such as the AIDS epidemic, the Greenhouse Effect, the trade imbalance, drugs, illiteracy, Geraldo Rivera getting his own TV show, and so on. Obviously, the nation was in desperate need of bold new leadership and vision, which was too bad because the next scheduled event was ...

The 1988 Presidential Election

   This time the Republicans, determined to show the nation that they liked a joke as much as the next person, nominated George Bush, who selected as his running mate young “Dan” Quayle, a Vietnam-era veteran who had received the coveted Round Smiley Face decoration in recognition of the time he accidentally stapled his sleeve to the desk and was trapped for nearly two hours.
   Clearly this was a ticket that even the Democrats would have a difficult time losing to, but they worked at it and managed to come up with the ideal candidate in the form of “Mike” Dukakis, a man who, because of a tragic genetic defect, was limited to the same basic range of expressions as an iguana. He’d be making a speech, and he’d start to raise his voice, and it would look like there might be some actual emotion going on inside him, but then suddenly his tongue would flick out to snare a passing insect, and the whole effect would be ruined.
   But you also have to give a large pile of credit to Bush and his top political strategist, Darth Vader. Their campaign, conducted via highly informative television commercials, focused on the issues that were certain to be of vital concern to the nation in the years to come, especially:
   The pledge of allegiance. Furloughed rapist Willie Horton. The budget deficit, and whether it could be corrected by forcing furloughed rapist Willie Horton to say the pledge of allegiance over and over. For fifty years.
   When election day rolled around, tens of millions of American voters, impressed by the level of debate, went to the mall. But some of them also cast their ballots, and the Bush-Quayle ticket was swept into office with a clear-cut popular mandate to please not have another election for at least four years.
   That is where we stand today. And what lies ahead? Will we be able to solve our social and economic problems, clean up our environment? maybe even improve our technology to the Point where we can land a manned spacecraft on Trump? Unfortunately, we cannot know what will happen in the future. If this book proves anything, it’s that we don’t even know what happened in the past. But we do know this: America is a strong and great country, and her people have withstood many trials and tribulations (More tribulations, actually, because many never went to trial.). And whatever problems lie ahead, we may be sure of one thing: that if we all work together and “hang tough,” there will come a day when this nation—maybe not in the next few years; maybe not even in our lifetimes; but someday—will see the end of “Dick” Nixon’s political career. But we wouldn’t bet on it.

Discussion Questions

   1. How about we go get a beer?

Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

Dave Barry

Why Humor Is Funny
Snews
Public-Spirited Citizens Such As You
The Snake
Ye Olde Humor Columne
A Boy And His Hobby
Daze Of Wine And Roses
Randomly Amongst The Blobs
Valuable Presidential Freebies!
Valuable Scam Offer
&@##%$ + ?,.<> +&’%$!!(&#$$%%’&
Molecular Homicide
Tax Attacks
Yup The Establishment
Pain And Suffering
The Deadly Wind
The House Of The Seven Figures
Can New York Save Itself?
A Boy And His Diplodocus
Young Frankincense
Peace On Earth, But No Parking
Hey Babe Hum Babe Hum Babe Hey ...
Red White And Beer
Why Not The Best?
Making The World Safe For Salad
Trouble On The Line
Read This First
The Urban Professionals
The Plastic, Fantastic Cover
Bang The Tupperware Slowly
Bite The Wax Tadpole!
The Rules
The $8.95 Tax Plan
Mutant Fleas Terrorize Midwest
Booked To Death
Hot Books And Hot Coals
The Hair Apparent
TV Or Not TV
The Embarrassing Truth
A Million Words
Subhumanize Your Living Room
The Lure Of The Wild
Earning A Collie Degree
Some Thoughts On The Toilet
The Elements Of Elegance
Restrooms And Other Resorts
Revenge Of The Pork Person
Slope Flake
Shark Treatment
Electromaggots
The Lesson Of History
Sock It To Me
The D-Word
Catching Hell
Mrs. Beasley Froze For Our Sins
The Columnist’s Caper
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapt1er Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
A Rash Proposal
He Knows Not What He Writes
Man Bites Dog
“Adventure Dog”
Slow Down And Die
Sacking The Season
Why Sports Is A Drag
Batting Clean-Up And Striking Out
Snots At Sea
Sic, Sic, Sic
The Light Side Of Smoking
Ear Wax In The Fog
1987: Look Back In Horror
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Air Bags For Wind Bags
Iowa’s Safe But You’ll Be Sorry
Europe On Five Vowels A Day
When You Grotto Go
Ground Control To Major Tomb
Where Saxophones Come From
The Secrets Of Life Itself
Heat? No Sweat
Blowing The Big Game
The Swamp Man Cometh
Clan Of The Cave Rhinoceros
About The Author

Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

Why Humor Is Funny

   As a professional humorist, I often get letters from readers who are interested in the basic nature of humor. “What kind of a sick, perverted, disgusting person are you, “ these letters typically ask, “that you make jokes about setting fire to a goat?”
   And that, of course, is the wonderful thing about humor. What may seem depressing or even tragic to one person may seem like an absolute scream to another person, especially if he has had between four and seven beers. But most people agree on what is funny, and most people like to be around a person with a great sense of humor, provided he also has reasonable hygiene habits. This is why people so often ask me: “Dave, I’d like to be popular, too. How can I get a sense of humor like yours, only with less of a dependence on jokes that are primarily excuses to use the word ‘booger’?”
   This is not an easy question. Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to understand what exactly makes people laugh. That’s why they were called wise men. All the other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with spears, and the wise men were back in the cave saying:
   “How about: Here’s my wife, please take her right now. No. How about: Would you like to take something? My wife is available. No. How about ...”
   Mankind didn’t develop a logical system of humor until thousands of years later when Aristotle discovered, while shaving, the famous Humor Syllogism, which states, “If A is equal to B, and B is equal to C, then it would not be particularly amusing if the three of them went around poking each other in the eyes and going ‘Nyuk nyuk nyuk.’ At least I don’t think it would be.”
   By the Elizabethan era, humor had become extremely popular. The works of Shakespeare, for example, are filled with scenes that English teachers always claim are real thighslappers, although when you actually decode them, it turns out they mostly depend on the use of the Elizabethan word for “booger.” In America today, of course, our humor is much more sophisticated, ranging all the way from television shows featuring outtakes of situation comedies where the actors can’t get the words right to television shows featuring outtakes of commercials where the actors can’t get the words right. Also we have Woody Allen, whose humor has become so sophisticated that nobody gets it anymore except Mia Farrow. All those who think Mia Farrow should go back to making movies where the devil gets her pregnant and Woody Allen should go back to dressing up as a human sperm, please raise your hands. Thank you.
   If you want to develop a sense of humor of your own, you need to learn some jokes. Notice I do not say “puns.” Puns are little “plays on words” that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.
   So what you want is real jokes. The best source for these is the authoritative Encyclopedia Britannica article entitled “Humor and Wit,” which is in volume 99 (Humidity-Ivory Coast). This is where Carson gets all his material. It’s a regular treasure trove of fun. Here Is a real corker from right at the beginning:
   “A masochist is a person who likes a cold shower in the morning, so he takes a hot one.”
   Whoooeee! That is one authoritative joke! Tell that one at a dull party, and just watch as the other guests suddenly come to life and remember important dental appointments!
   But it is not enough merely to know a lot of great jokes. You also have to be able to tell them properly. Here are some tips:
   1. When you tell vicious racist jokes, you should first announce that you were a liberal back when it was legal to be one.
   2. Men have a certain body part that women do not have, and men always think jokes about it are a stone riot, but if you tell such a joke to a woman, she will look at you as though you are a Baggie filled with mouse remains. I don’t know why this is, but it never fails. So you want to avoid this particular type of joke in coeducational social settings such as Windsor Castle.
   3. If, after you tell a joke, somebody attempts to tell you one back, you should keep assuring him that you haven’t heard it, and then, when he gets to the punchline, no matter how funny it is, you should react as though he just told you the relative humidity and say: “Yeah, I heard that.”
   4. Never attend a large dinner party with my former mother-in-law, because she will shout across the table at you: “Tell the one about the man who’s seeking the truth and he finally gets all the way to Tibet and the wise man tells him that a wet bird doesn’t fly at night,” and then she’ll insist that you tell it, and then she’ll tell you you told it wrong, and you might have to kill her with a fork.

Snews

   Readers are sometimes critical of me because just about everything I write about is an irresponsible lie. But now I’m going to write a column in which everything is true. See how you like it.
   Our first true item comes from a news release from the j I Case company. For the benefit of those of you who have real jobs and are not involved in the news business, I should first explain that a news release is an article that has been typed up by a public-relations professional hired by a client who wants to get certain information published, which is then mailed out to several thousand newspapers, almost all of which throw it away without reading it. If you ever commit a really horrible crime and you want to keep it out of the papers, you should have a public-relations professional issue a news release about it.
   You ask: “Wouldn’t it be more efficient if the public-relations professionals simply threw the releases away themselves?” Frankly, that is the kind of ignorant question that makes us journalists want to forget about trying to inform the public and instead just sit around awarding journalism prizes to each other. But I’ll tell you the answer: Because this is America. Because two hundred years ago, a band of brave men got extremely cold at Valley Forge so that the press would have the freedom to throw away its own releases without prior censorship, that’s why.
   Anyway, this release from the j I Case company opens with this statement: “j I Case and Burlington, Iowa, the loader/backhoe capital of the world, today jointly celebrated the production of the 175,000th Case loader/backhoe.” The release said they had a nice ceremony attended by the mayor of Burlington, a person named Wayne W. Hogberg, so I called him up to confirm the story. He works at the post office.
   “Does Burlington really call itself the loader/backhoe capital of the world?” I asked. Newsmen are paid to ask the hard questions.
   “Oh yes,” replied Mayor Hogberg. “We definitely lay claim to that. We use it whenever we have the opportunity. As a mayor I sort of rub it in with any other mayors I have occasion to meet.”
   I bet that really steams the other mayors, don’t you? I bet they are consumed with jealousy, when mayors get together.
   Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Georgia, where he is involved in a law firm. One thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition. If somebody gets handed a name like “H. Boyce,” he hangs on to it, puts it on his legal stationery, even passes it on to his son, rather than do what a lesser person would do, such as get it changed or kill himself.
   What H. Boyce sent was a copy of a decision handed down by the Georgia Court of Appeals in the case of Apostol Athanasiou vs. White. It seems the former had hired the latter to mow her lawn. What happened next, in the words of the court, is that “White allegedly slipped on some dog feces concealed in the tall grass, and his left foot was severely cut as it slid under the lawnmower.” I am not going to tell you how this case came out, because you’ll want to find out for yourself in the event that it is released as a major motion picture, but I will say, by way of a hint, that in the court’s opinion “neither party had actual knowledge of the specific deposit of dog feces on which White apparently slipped.”
   Our next item comes from a release sent out by the Vodka Information Bureau, in New York City. The Vodka Information Bureau has learned that a whopping 42 percent of the women surveyed consider themselves “primary decision makers” in deciding what brand of vodka to buy. This raises in my mind, as I am sure it does in yours, a number of questions, primarily: What, exactly, do we mean by the verb “to whop”? So I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and there I found—remember, this is the column where we are not making things up—these helpful examples:
   “In less time than you can think whop comes a big black thing down. as big as the stone of a cheese-press.” “Mother would whop me if I came home without the basket.”
   So I called my mother, who said, and I quote, “I always make the vodka-buying decision as follows: the largest bottle for the smallest amount of money.” So I called the Vodka Information Bureau and told them what my mother said, and they said, sure, you can buy the cheapest vodka if you don’t mind getting a lot of impurities, but if you want a nice clean vodka, you want a brand such as is manufactured by the company that sponsors the Vodka Information Bureau.
   Finally, and sadly, we have received word of the death, at age 85, of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, who of course was governor general of the island nation of Mauritius from 1968 to 1982. Mauritius has an area of 720 square miles and was once the home of the dodo bird, which is now extinct. It is hard, at a time of such tragedy—I refer to the demise of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam—to find words to express our feelings, but I think that I speak for all of us when I say that a cheese-press is “an apparatus for pressing the curds in cheese-making.”

Public-Spirited Citizens Such As You

   I love jokes. The worse the better. Among the happiest moments of my life were those at summer camp when I was 11, lying in my bunk at night just after the counselor, Mr. Newton, had gone off to play cards with the other counselors, which meant that Eugene was going to tell the joke whose punchline is: “Ding dong, dammit! Ding DONG!” Maybe you know this joke. It involves marital infidelity and a closet. By the second week of camp, Eugene had developed a half-hour version, and campers were creeping over from the other cabins to hear it.
   So there we’d all be, listening in the dark with lunatic grins of anticipation on our faces, barely able to restrain ourselves, until finally Eugene would reach the punchline. “Ding dong, dammit,” he’d say, and we’d start vibrating like tuning forks, and then Eugene would say “Ding DONG,” and we’d dive down into the depths of our sleeping bags, out of control, howling and snorting, thinking nobody could hear us, although of course in the peaceful stillness of the forest night we must have sounded like water buffalo giving birth over a public-address system.
   Mr. Newton would slam his cards down and come storming over, and he’d tell us that he was really sick of this, night after night, and if he heard one more sound out of us we’d have to clean the latrine the next day. This was a serious threat, because it was the kind of highly odorous summer camp latrine where you wondered how it could possibly be so disgusting when nobody ever had the courage to use it. Evidently somewhere along the line it had reached Critical Latrine Mass and developed a life-style of its own.
   After making this threat, Mr. Newton would stalk off back to his cards, and there would be silence for maybe a minute, and then there would be this tiny whisper from Eugene’s direction, so faint that only a trained ear could discern it:
   “Ding,” said the whisper, “DONG.”
   And of course this resulted in a situation where, never mind having to clean the latrine, never mind that Mr. Newton was now standing in the middle of the cabin clutching a weighty flashlight and threatening to break everybody’s heads, the only thing any of us could think about was whether we would ever be able to draw breath again.
   And so we had a terrific summer, and all because of one idiot joke, which, although I would not tell it in public except under the influence of sodium pentothal, still does a better job of cheering me up than any major religion. I’d like to meet the person who made that joke up, but of course that’s always one of the big mysteries about jokes: Nobody knows who makes them up. They’re just there, floating around and lowering the productivity of offices and factories everywhere. And they’ve been there throughout human history. Archaeologists found this joke in an Egyptian tomb:
   HE: Did you hear about the Sumerian? SHE: No. What about the Sumerian? HE: He was extremely stupid. Ha ha! SHE: No, I had not heard about him.
   This, of course, is a primitive version of the modern ethnic joke, which still carries the same basic message, although it has become much more sophisticated over the years thanks to the introduction of such innovations as the light bulb. But who introduced them?
   Other mysteries about jokes are: How come you can remember extremely complex jokes involving a minister, a priest, and a rabbi, but you can’t remember your mother’s birthday? How do jokes travel so fast, and so far? (The Apollo 7 astronauts found traces of a joke on the moon!) Also: Does Queen Elizabeth ever hear any jokes? Who tells them to her? What about the pope?
   To answer these and other questions, I think we should set up a research project wherein we scientifically track the progress of a specified joke, similar to the way the flight patterns of birds are tracked by scientists called ornithologists, who attach metal wires and rubber bands to the birds’ beaks and make them come back every week for appointments. No! Hold it! My mistake! I’m thinking of “orthodontists.” What ornithologists do is attach bands of metal to a bird’s leg, then toss it gently off the roof of a tall building and watch it splat into the pavement below at upwards of 100 miles an hour. People try to tell the ornithologists that the metal bands they’re using are too heavy, but they just laugh. Recently they dropped a common wood warbler to which they had attached a 1983 Chevette.
   But the theory is sound, and I was thinking maybe we could come up with some kind of similar system for tracking a joke. What I propose to do is inject a brand-new joke into the population at certain known places and times. This joke will have a distinguishing characteristic, so that as it spreads around the country, public-spirited citizens such as yourself can act as spotters. As soon as you hear this joke, I want you to report it via postal card to: The Joke Tracking Center, P.O. Box 0 1 1509, Miami, FL 33 1 0 1.
   Please include a summary of the joke, where and when you heard it, who told it to you, and any other helpful background information such as whether you were drinking liquor right out of the bottle at the time.
   Obviously, I cannot reveal the joke here, but its distinguishing characteristic is that it answers the question: “Why is Walter Mondale nicknamed ‘Fritz’?” Everybody got that? I have tested this joke on a carefully selected panel of lowlifes, all sworn to secrecy, and they assure me that it is in very poor taste and should spread like wildfire.
   So let’s all Simonize our watches and keep a sharp ear out for this joke. I’m very serious about this. Trained personnel are standing by now at the joke Tracking Center. So report those sightings! Together, we have a chance here to obtain scientific findings of great significance, and possibly a large federal grant. Remember: This chain has never been broken.

The Snake

   The way I picture it, adulthood is a big, sleek jungle snake, swimming just around the bend in the River of Life. It swallows you subtly, an inch at a time, so you barely notice the signs: You start reading the labels on things before you eat them, rather than to pass the time while you eat them; you find yourself listening to talk radio because the hit songs they play on the rock stations (can this really be you, thinking this?) all begin to sound the same. Before you know it, you have monogrammed towels in your bathroom, and all your furniture is nice. And suddenly you realize it’s too late, that you’d rather sit around on your furniture and talk about the warning signs of colon cancer with other grown-ups than, for example, find out what happens when you set one of those plastic milk jugs on fire. And if your kid sets a milk jug on fire, you yell at him, “Somebody could get hurt,” and really mean it, from inside the snake.
   I mention all this to explain how I came to buy, at age 38, an electric guitar. I had one once before, from 1965 through 1969 when I was in college. It was a Fender jazzmaster, and I played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the kind of name that was popular in the sixties as a result of controlled substances being in widespread use. Back then, there were no restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make an album, so we made one, and it sounds like a group of people who have been given powerful but unfamiliar instruments as a therapy for a degenerative nerve disease.
   We mainly played songs like “Gloria,” which was great for sixties bands, because it had only three chords; it had a solo that was so simple it could be learned in minutes, even by a nonmusical person or an advanced fish; and it had great lyrics.
   My band career ended late in my senior year when John Cooper and I threw my amplifier out the dormitory window. We did not act in haste. First we checked to make sure the amplifier would fit through the frame, using the belt from my bathrobe to measure, then we picked up the amplifier and backed up to my bedroom door. Then we rushed forward shouting “The WHO! The WHO!” and we launched my amplifier perfectly, as though we had been doing it all our lives, clean through the window and down onto the sidewalk, where a small but appreciative crowd had gathered. I would like to be able to say that this was a symbolic act, an effort on my part to break cleanly away from one stage in my life and move on to another, but the truth is, Cooper and I really just wanted to find out what it would sound like. It sounded OK.
   Unlike The Who, I couldn’t afford a new amplifier, and playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table, so I sold my jazzmaster and got a cheap acoustic guitar, which I diddled around on for 16
   years. It was fine for “Kum By Yah,” but ill-suited for “My Baby Does the Hanky Panky.” So there’s been this void n my life, which I’ve tried to fill by having a career, but I see now I was kidding myself.
   So recently, Ms. magazine sent me a check for $800 for an article I wrote about sex. This seemed like such a bizarre way to get hold of $800 that I figured I should do something special with it, so I thought about it, and what came to mind is—this is the scary part of the story, coming up now—a new sofa. Our primary living-room sofa looks like a buffalo that has been dead for some time, and I thought: “Maybe we should get a nicer sofa.” Which is when I felt the snake of adulthood slithering around my leg.
   So I said to my wife: “I am going to take this money and buy an electric guitar.” And she said—I believe I married her in anticipation of this moment—”Fine.”
   I have never been so happy. My amplifier has a knob called overdrive, which, if you turn it all the way up to 10, makes it so that all you have to do is touch a string to make a noise that would destroy a greenhouse. My wife and son and dog spend more time back in the bedroom these days. Out in the living room, I put the Paul Butterfield Blues Band on the stereo, and when they do “Got My Mojo Workin’,” I play the guitar solo at the same time Mike Bloomfield does. I am not as accurate as he is in terms of hitting the desired notes, but you can hear me better because I have “overdrive.”
   I bet I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking my electric guitar is a Midlife Crisis Object that I bought in the Midlife Crisis Store filled with middle-aged guys who wear jogging shoes and claim they love Bruce Springsteen but really think he’s merely adequate. And you may be right. I don’t care if you are. To me, my guitar is a wonderful thing. It’s a Gibson, with the
   classic old electric-guitar shape. It looks like a modernistic oar, which you could use, in a pinch, to row against the current in the River of Life, or at least stay even with it for a while.

Ye Olde Humor Columne

   We need to do something about this national tendency to try to make new things look like they are old.
   First off, we should enact an “e” tax. Government agents would roam the country looking for stores whose names contained any word that ended in an unnecessary “e,” such as “shoppe” or “olde,” and the owners of these stores would be taxed at a flat rate of $50,000 per year per “e.” We should also consider an additional $50,000 “ye” tax, so that the owner of a store called “Ye Olde Shoppe” would have to fork over $150,000 a year. In extreme cases, such as “Ye Olde Barne Shoppe,” the owner would simply be taken outside and shot.
   We also need some kind of law about the number of inappropriate objects you can hang on walls in restaurants. I am especially concerned here about the restaurants that have sprung up in shopping complexes everywhere to provide young urban professionals with a place to go for margaritas and potato skins. You know the restaurants I mean: they always have names like Flanagan’s, Hanrahan’s, O’Toole’s, or O’Reilley’s, as if the owner were a genial red-faced Irish bartender, when in fact it is probably 14 absentee proctologists in need of tax shelter.
   You have probably noticed that inevitably the walls in these places are covered with objects we do not ordinarily attach to walls, such as barber poles, traffic lights, washboards, street signs, and farm implements. This decor scheme is presumably intended to create an atmosphere of relaxed old-fashioned funkiness, but in fact it creates an atmosphere of great weirdness. It is as if a young urban professional with telekinetic powers, the kind Sissy Spacek exhibited in the movie Caine, got really tanked up on margaritas one night and decided to embed an entire flea market in the wall.
   I think it’s too much. I think we need to pass a law stating that the only objects that may be hung on restaurant walls are those that God intended to be hung on restaurant walls, such as pictures, mirrors, and the heads of deceased animals. Any restaurant caught violating this law would have to get rid of its phony Irish-bartender name and adopt a name that clearly reflected its actual ownership. (“Say, let’s go get some potato skins at Fourteen Absentee Proctologists in Need of Tax Shelter.”)
   And I suppose it goes without saying that anybody caught manufacturing “collectible” plates, mugs, or figurines of any kind should be shipped directly to Devil’s Island.
   Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “Dave, I hear what you’re saying, but wouldn’t laws such as these constitute unwarranted government interference in the private sector?”
   The answer is: Yes, they would. But unwarranted government interference in the private sector is a small price to pay if it draws the government away from its efforts to revitalize decaying urban areas. The government inevitably tries to do this by installing 60 billion new red bricks and several dozen vaguely old-fashioned street lights in an effort to create a look I would call “Sort of Colonial or Something.”
   The government did this to a town right near where I used to live, West Chester, Pennsylvania. This is a nice little old town, with a lot of nice little old houses, but about 10 years ago some of the downtown merchants started getting really upset because they were losing business to the “shopping malls,” a phrase the merchants always say in the same tone of voice you might use to say “Nazi Germany.” Now, as a consumer, I would argue that the reason most of us were going to the shopping malls was that the downtown
   stores tended to have window displays that had not been changed since the Truman administration, featuring crepe paper faded to the color of old oatmeal, accented by the occasional dead insect. And the actual merchandise in these stores was not the kind you would go out of your way to purchase or even accept as gifts. We are talking, for example, about clothing so dowdy that it could not be used even to clean up after a pet.
   What I am saying is that the problem with the downtown West Chester stores, from this consumer’s point of view, was that they didn’t have much that anybody would want to buy. From the merchants’ point of view, however, the problem was that the entire downtown needed to be Revitalized, and they nagged the local government for years until finally it applied for a federal grant of God knows how many million dollars, which was used to rip up the streets for several years, so as to discourage the few remaining West Chester shoppers. When they finally got it all together again, the new revitalized West Chester consisted of mostly the same old stores, only in front of them were (surprise!) red brick sidewalks garnished with vaguely old-fashioned streetlights. The whole effect was definitely Sort Of Colonial or Something, and some shoppers even stopped by to take a look at it on their way to the mall.
   I gather this process has been repeated in a great many towns around the country, and it seems to me that it’s a tremendous waste of federal time and effort that could otherwise be spent getting rid of the extra “e.” I urge those of you who agree with me to write letters to your congresspersons, unless you use that stationery with the “old-fashioned” ragged edges, in which case I urge you to go to your local Flanagan’s and impale yourself on one of the farm implements.

A Boy And His Hobby

   Recently, I began to feel this void in my life, even after meals, and I said to myself: “Dave, all you do with your spare time is sit around and drink beer. You need a hobby.” So I got a hobby. I make beer.
   I never could get into the traditional hobbies, like religion or stamp collecting. I mean, the way you collect stamps is: Every week or so the Postal Service dreams up a new stamp to mark National Peat Bog Awareness Month, or whatever, and you rush down and clog the Post Office lines to buy a batch of these stamps, but instead of putting them to a useful purpose such as mailing toxic spiders to the Publisher’s Clearing House, you take them home and just sort of have them. Am I right? Have I left any moments of drama out of this action sequence? And then the biggest thrill, as I understand it, the real payoff, comes when you get lucky and collect a stamp on which the Postal Service has made a mistake, such as instead of “Peat Bog” it prints “Beat Pog,” which causes stamp collectors to just about wet their polyester pants, right?
   So for many years I had no hobby. When I would fill out questionnaires and they would ask what my hobbies were, I would put “narcotics,” which was of course a totally false humorous joke. And then one day my editor took me to a store where they sell beer-making equipment. Other writers, they have editors who inspire them to new heights of literary achievement, but the two major contributions my editor has made to my artistic development are (1) teaching me to juggle and (2) taking me to his beer-making store where a person named Craig gave me free samples until he could get hold of my Visa card.
   But I’m glad I got into beer-making, because the beer sold here in the United States is sweet and watery and lacking in taste and overcarbonated and just generally the lamest, wimpiest beer in the entire known world. All the other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer, and we are drinking Barry Manilow. This is why American TV beer commercials are so ludicrously masculine. It’s a classic case of overcompensation. You may have seen, for example, the Budweiser or Miller commercial where some big hairy men are standing around on the side of a river when a barge breaks loose and starts drifting out of control. Now real men, men who drink real beer, would have enough confidence in their own masculinity to say: “Don’t worry; it’s probably insured.”
   But the men in the commercial feel this compulsion to go racing off on a tugboat and capture the barge with big hairy ropes, after which they make excited masculine hand gestures at each other to indicate they have done a task requiring absolute gallons of testosterone. Then they go to a bar where they drink Miller or Budweiser and continue to reassure themselves that they are truly a collection of major stud horses, which is why you don’t see any women around. The women have grown weary of listening to the men say: “Hey! We sure rescued THAT barge, didn’t we?!” And: “You think it’s easy, to rescue a barge? Well, it’s NOT!” and, much later at night: “Hey! Let’s go let the barge loose again!” So the women have all gone off in search of men who make their own beer.
   Some of you may be reluctant to make your own beer because you’ve heard stories to the effect that it’s difficult to make, or it’s illegal, or it makes you go blind. Let me assure you that these are falsehoods, especially the part about making you go bleof nisdc dsdfsdfkQ$$%”%.
   Ha ha! just a little tasteless humor there, designed to elicit angry letters from liberals. The truth is, homemade beer is perfectly safe, unless the bottle explodes. We’ll have more on that if space permits. Also it’s completely legal to make beer at home. In fact, as I read the current federal tax laws—I use a strobe light—if you make your own beer, you can take a tax credit of up to $4,000, provided you claim you spent it on insulation!
   And it’s very easy to make your own beer: You just mix your ingredients and stride briskly away. (You may of course vary this recipe to suit your own personal taste.) Your two main ingredients are (1) a can of beer ingredients that you get from Craig or an equivalent person, and (2) yeast. Yeast is a wonderful little plant or animal that, despite the fact that it has only one cell, has figured out how to convert sugar to alcohol. This was a far greater accomplishment than anything we can attribute to giant complex multicelled organisms such as, for example, the Secretary of Transportation.
   After the little yeasts are done converting your ingredients into beer, they die horrible deaths by the millions. You shouldn’t feel bad about this. Bear in mind this is yeast we’re talking about, and there’s plenty more available, out on the enormous yeast ranches of the Southwest. For now, your job is to siphon your beer into bottles. This is the tricky part, because what can happen is the phone rings and you get involved in a lengthy conversation during which your son, who is 4-1/2, gets hold of the hose and spews premature beer, called “wort,” all over the kitchen and himself, and you become the target of an investigation by child welfare authorities because yours is the only child who comes to preschool smelling like a fraternity carpet.
   But that’s the only real drawback I have found, and the beer tastes delicious, except of course on those rare occasions when it explodes. Which leads us to another advantage: if yOu make your own beer, you no longer need to worry about running out if we have a nuclear war of sufficient severity to close the commercial breweries.

Daze Of Wine And Roses

   I have never gotten into wine. I’m a beer man. What I like about beer is you basically just drink it, then you order another one. You don’t sniff at it, or hold it up to the light and slosh it around, and above all you don’t drone on and on about it, the way people do with wine. Your beer drinker tends to be a straightforward, decent, friendly, down-to-earth person who enjoys talking about the importance of relief pitching, whereas your serious wine fancier tends to be an insufferable snot.
   I realize I am generalizing here, but, as is often the case when I generalize, I don’t care.
   Nevertheless, I decided recently to try to learn more about the wine community. Specifically, I engaged the services of a rental tuxedo and attended the Grand Finale of the First Annual French Wine Sommelier Contest in America, which was held at the famous Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. For the benefit of those of you with plastic slipcovers, I should explain that a “sommelier” is a wine steward, the dignified person who comes up to you at expensive restaurants, hands you the wine list, and says “Excellent choice, sir,” when you point to French writing that, translated, says “Sales Tax Included.”
   Several hundred wine-oriented people were on hand for the sommelier competition. First we mingled and drank champagne, then we sat down to eat dinner and watch the competition. I found it immensely entertaining,
   especially after the champagne, because for one thing many of the speakers were actual French persons who spoke with comical accents, which I suspect they practiced in their hotel rooms (“Zees epeetomizes zee role av zee sommelier sroo-out eestory ...” etc.) Also we in the audience got to drink just gallons of wine. At least I did. My policy with wine is very similar to my policy with beer, which is just pretty much drink it and look around for more. The people at my table, on the other hand, leaned more toward the slosh-and-sniff approach, where you don’t so much drink the wine as you frown and then make a thoughtful remark about it such as you might make about a job applicant (“I find it ambitious, but somewhat strident.” Or: “It’s lucid, yes, but almost Episcopalian in its predictability.”) As it happened, I was sitting next to a French person named Mary, and I asked her if people in France carry on this way about wine. “No,” she said, “they just drink it. They’re more used to it.”
   There were 12 sommeliers from around the country in the contest; they got there by winning regional competitions, and earlier in the day they had taken a written exam with questions like: “Which of the following appellations belong to the Savoie region? (a) Crepy; (b) Seyssel; (c) Arbois; (d) Etoile; (e) Ripple.” (I’m just kidding about the Ripple, of course. The Savoie region would not use Ripple as an insecticide.)
   The first event of the evening competition was a blind tasting, where the sommeliers had to identify a mystery wine. We in the audience got to try it, too. It was a wine that I would describe as yellow in color, and everybody at my table agreed it was awful. “Much too woody,” said one person. “Heavily oxidized,” said another. “Bat urine,” I offered. The others felt this was a tad harsh. I was the only one who finished my glass.
   Next we got a nonmystery wine, red in color, with a French name, and I thought it was swell, gulped it right down, but one of the wine writers at my table got upset because it was a 1979, and the program said we were supposed to get a 1978. If you can imagine. So we got some 1978, and it was swell, too. “They’re both credible,” said the wine writer, “but there’s a great difference in character.” I was the only one who laughed, although I think Mary sort of wanted to.
   The highlight of the evening was the Harmony of Wine and Food event, where the sommelier contestants were given a menu where the actual nature of the food was disguised via French words (“Crochets sur le Pont en Voiture,” etc.), and they had to select a wine for each of the five courses. This is where a sommelier has to be really good, because if he is going to talk an actual paying customer into spending as much money on wine for one meal as it would cost to purchase a half-dozen state legislators for a year, he has to say something more than, “A lotta people like this here char donnay.”
   Well, these sommeliers were good. They were into the Harmony of Wine and Food, and they expressed firm views. They would say things like: “I felt the (name of French wine) would have the richness to deal with the foie gras,” or “My feeling about Roquefort is that ...” I thought it was fabulous entertainment, and at least two people at my table asked how I came to be invited.
   Anyway, as the Harmony event dragged on, a major issue developed concerning the salad. The salad was Lamb’s Lettuce with—you are going to be shocked when I tell you this—Walnut Vinaigrette. A lot of people in the audience felt that this was a major screw-up, or “gaffe,” on the part of the contest organizers, because of course vinaigrette is just going to fight any wine you try to marry it with. “I strongly disagree with the salad dressing,” is how one wine writer at my table put it, and I could tell she meant it.
   So the contestants were all really battling the vinaigrette problem, and you could just feel a current of unrest in the room. Things finally came to a head, or “tete,” when contestant Mark Hightower came right out and said that if the rules hadn’t prevented him, he wouldn’t have chosen any wine at all with the salad. “Ideally,” he said, “I would have liked to have recommended an Evian mineral water.” Well, the room just erupted in spontaneous applause, very similar to what you hear at Democratic Party dinners when somebody mentions the Poor.
   Anyway, the winning sommelier, who gets a trip to Paris, was Joshua Wesson, who works at a restaurant named Huberts in New York. I knew he’d win, because he began his Harmony of Wine and Food presentation by saying: “Whenever I see oysters on a menu, I am reminded of a quote. ...” Nobody’s ever going to try buying a moderately priced wine from a man who is reminded of a quote by oysters.
   It turns out however, that Wesson is actually an OK guy who just happens to have a God-given ability to lay it on with a trowel and get along with the French. I talked to him briefly afterwards, and he didn’t seem to take himself too seriously at all. I realize many people think I make things up, so let me assure you ahead of time that this is the actual, complete transcript of the interview:
   ME: So. What do you think? WESSON: I feel good. My arm felt good, my curve ball was popping. I felt I could help the ball team. ME: What about the vinaigrette? WESSON: It was definitely the turning point. One can look at vinaigrette from many angles. It’s like electricity.
   I swear that’s what he said, and furthermore at the time it made a lot of sense.

Randomly Amongst The Blobs

   Without my eyeglasses, I have a great deal of trouble distinguishing between house fires and beer signs. I wear the kind of glasses that they never show in those eyeglasses advertisements where the lenses are obviously fake because they don’t distort the attractive model’s face at all. My lenses make the entire middle of my head appear smaller. When professional photographers take my picture, they always suggest that I take my glasses off, because otherwise the picture shows this head with the normal top and bottom, but in the middle there’s this little perfect miniature human head, maybe the size of an orange, staring out from behind my glasses.
   People like photographers and dentists and barbers are always asking me to take my glasses off, and I hate it because it makes me stupid and paranoid. I worry that the dentist and his aides are creeping up on me with acetylene torches, or have sneaked out of the room and left me chatting away at the dental spittoon. So I use a sonar technique originally developed by bats, wherein I fire off a constant stream of idiot conversational remarks designed to draw replies so I can keep track of which blobs in the room represent people. This makes it very hard to work on my teeth.
   Swimming at the beach is the worst. If I go into the ocean with my glasses off, which is the traditional way to go into the ocean, I cannot frolic in the surf like a normal person because (a) I usually can’t see the waves until they knock me over and drag me along the bottom and fill my mouth with sand, and (b) the current always carries me down the beach, away from my wife and towel and glasses. When I emerge from the water, all I can see is this enormous white blur (the beach?) covered with darkish blobs (people?), and I run the risk of plopping down next to a blob that I think is my wife and throwing my arm over it in an affectionate manner, only to discover that it is actually horseshoe crabs mating, or a girlfriend of an enormous violent, jealous weightlifter, or, God help me, the violent weightlifter himself.
   So what I do in these circumstances is wander randomly amongst the blobs, making quiet semidesperate noises designed not to bother any civilians, yet to draw the attention of whatever blob might be my wife. “Well, here I am!” I say, trying to appear as casual as possible. “Yes, here I am! Dave Barry! Ha ha! Help!” And so forth. I’m not sure I’m all that unobtrusive on account of my mouth is full of sand.
   Mostly these days when I go to the beach I just stay out of the water altogether. I sit on the shore and play cretin, sand-digging games with my three-year-old son, and I watch the lifeguards, who sit way up on the beach with their 20-20 vision and blow their whistles at swimmers I couldn’t see even with the aid of a radio telescope, off the coast of France somewhere.
   At least I no longer have to worry about necking on dates, the way I did in high school. That was awful. See, you have to take your glasses off when you neck, lest you cause facial injury to the other necker. So I’d be sitting on the sofa with a girl, watching a late movie on television, and I’d figure the time was right, and I’d very casually remove my glasses, rendering myself batlike, and lean toward the blob representing the girl and plant a sensuous kiss on the side of her head owing to the fact that she was still watching the movie. Now what? Do I try again, on the theory that she has been aroused by being kissed on the side of the head? Or is she angry? Is she still watching television? Is she still on the sofa?
   There was no way to tell. The world was a blur. So I’d have to very casually grope around for my glasses and put them back on for a little reconnaissance, but by the time I found them likely as not the potential co-necker had fallen asleep.
   I suppose I could wear contact lenses, but people who wear contact lenses are always weeping and blinking, and their eyes turn red, as though their mothers had just died. You want to go up to them on the street and say “There, there,” and maybe give them money. Also, you never hear of anybody who wears them successfully for more than maybe three weeks. People are always saying, “I really liked them, but my hair started to fall out,” or, “I had this girlfriend, Denise, and one of her contacts slid up under her eyelid and went into her bloodstream and got stuck in her brain and now she never finishes her sentences.”
   I guess I should be grateful that I can see at all, and I am. I just felt like wallowing in self-pity for a while, is all. I promise I won’t do it again. Those of you with worse afflictions than mine, such as migraine headaches or pregnancy, are welcome to write me long, descriptive letters. I promise to look them over, although not necessarily with my glasses on

Valuable Presidential Freebies!

   My wife recently got two offers in the mail, one from Ed McMahon and one from President Reagan. Ed’s offer is that if my wife will stick some little stickers on a card and send it back, he’ll give her $2 million. I figure there has to be a catch. Maybe there’s some kind of espionage chemical on the back of the sticker so that when you lick it your nasal passages swell up and explode and you can’t collect your two million. Because otherwise it just seems too easy, you know?
   President Reagan’s offer looks better. He’s offering my wife the opportunity to be on a special Presidential Task Force. Apparently this is a limited offer being made only to a select group consisting of all current and former Republicans, living or dead, in the world. My wife used to be a Republican before she quit voting altogether, except for when there are judicial candidates with humorous names.
   According to the colorful brochure my wife got, her primary task as a member of the Presidential Task Force is to send in $120. President Reagan is going to use this money to prevent the government from falling into the hands of the Democrats, who, according to the brochure, are all disease-ridden vermin. As tokens of the president’s gratitude, my wife will receive a number of Valuable Gifts, including (I swear I am not making this up):
   –A “Medal of Merit” in a “handsome case,” in recognition for highly meritorious service to the nation in the form of coming up with the 120 beans.
   –A lapel pin, which the brochure says will “signify your special relationship with President Reagan.”
   –An embossed Presidential Task Force Membership Card, which “reveals your toll-free, members-only, Washington hotline number; your direct line to important developments in the United States Senate; your superfast way to contact President Reagan and every Republican in the United States Senate.”
   Except for the time that our dog was throwing up what appeared to be squirrel parts in the living room, I can’t honestly think of any occasion in recent years when we needed to get hold of President Reagan and every Republican in the senate on short notice. Nevertheless, I think the embossed Task Force card hotline number could come in mighty handy.
   Let’s say my wife and I are at the department store and we’re trying to get waited on by a small clot of sales personnel who are clearly annoyed that some idiot has gone and left the doors open again, thus permitting members of the public to get into the store and actually try to purchase things, if you can imagine, right in the middle of a very important sales personnel discussion about hair design.
   Ordinarily what my wife and I do in these situations is stand around in an obvious manner for several minutes, after which we ask politely several times to be waited on, after which we escalate to rude remarks, after which we discharge small arms in the direction of the ceiling, after which we give up and go home. But if my wife were a Task Force member, the sales personnel would notice her lapel pin and say to each other in hushed tones: “That pin signifies that she has a special relationship with President Reagan! We had best make an exception in her case, and permit her to make a purchase!” For they would know that if they didn’t, my wife would be on the horn pronto, contacting President Reagan and all the senate Republicans, and heaven only knows what kind of strong corrective action they would take, except that it would probably involve the shipment of missiles to camel-oriented nations.
   So all in all I think the president has made my wife a fine offer. Not only does she get the valuable Free Gifts, but she gets to keep the government in Republican hands and thus save the Republic and ensure a brighter future for the entire Free World for generations to come. Of course we must weigh this against the fact that $120 will buy you enough beer to last nearly two weeks in mild weather.

Valuable Scam Offer

   So I got this letter, which said I had been selected by a “merchandise distribution organization” to receive some merchandise. The way the letter sounded, these people just woke up one day and said, “Hey! We have some merchandise! Let’s form an organization and distribute it!” The letter said I could receive as much as $1,000 in cash, but I was not so naive as to think I would get that. I figure I’d have a better shot at the Disney World vacation, or the 24karat gold bracelet with the rubies and diamonds, or maybe even—you never can tell—the five-function LCD watch.
   So I made an appointment to go get the merchandise, and they told me that, while I was there, they would tell me about a new Leisure Concept, and I had to bring my spouse. This is a normal legal precaution they take to avoid a situation where you sign a contract, and when you get home your spouse finds out and stabs you to death with a potato peeler, which could void the contract.
   So we went to the appointed place and sat for a while in a room filled with other couples, and every now and then a person would come in, call out a name, and lead a couple off, and the rest of us would wonder what was going to happen to them. I thought maybe it would be like a fraternity initiation, in which they’d shove us into a darkened room where sales representatives would taunt us and poke us with sharp sticks, then give us our merchandise. But it turns out they don’t let you off that easy.
   Finally, our name was called by a person named Joe. Joe is the kind of person who cannot begin a sentence without saying, “Let me be honest with you,” and cannot end one without grasping your forearm to let you know he is your best personal friend in the world. When Joe was born, the obstetrician examined him briefly and told the nurse: “Do not sign anything this baby gives you.”
   Joe told us his organization didn’t invite just any old set of spouses out there to offer this new Leisure Concept to. He said they had already spent somewhere between $400 and $700 on us—not that we should feel obligated or anything!—to check us out thoroughly to make sure we were not convicted felons, because he knew that nice people like us certainly didn’t want to be part of any Leisure Concept that allowed convicted felons to join, right? (Grasp.) So my wife asked exactly how they could check on something like that, which made Joe very nervous. I think it suddenly occurred to him that we might actually be convicted felons, because he launched into a murky speech about “extenuating circumstances,” the gist of which seemed to be that when he said they didn’t allow convicted felons, he didn’t mean us.
   Next we found out how you can get AIDS from hotel bedsheets. The way this came up is, Joe asked us where we liked to stay during vacations, and we said, hotels. So Joe went over the pluses and minuses of hotels for us, and the only plus he could think of was that hotels have maid service, but even then, being honest, he had to admit that you never know who has been sleeping on those sheets, and you have to worry when you read all these newspaper stories about AIDS. You know? (Grasp.) This was when we realized that, whatever Joe’s Leisure Concept was, it didn’t have maid service.
   So finally Joe let it slip out that his Leisure Concept was “resorts.” As he explained it, basically, we were supposed to give them $11,000 plus annual dues, and then we could spend our Leisure Time at these resorts, which Joe’s company had already built some of and plans to build lots more of. To help illustrate their resort in Virginia, for example, they had a nice picture of the dome of the U.S. Capitol, although when we asked Joe about it, he admitted that the Capitol was not, to be honest, technically on the resort property per se.
   My wife, a picky shopper, said that yes, these were certainly very attractive photographs but generally before she spends $1 1,000 on resorts she likes to see at least one in person. So Joe told us they had one right outside, which he showed us. What it was, to be honest with you, was a campground. It was one of those modern ones with swimming pools and miniature golf and video games, the kind that’s popular with people whose idea of getting close to nature is turn the air conditioning in their recreational vehicles down to medium. My reaction was that I would spend my Leisure Time there only if this were one of the demands made by people who had kidnapped my son.
   So we went back inside, and Joe lunged at us with a Special Offer, good only that day: For only $8,000, we could join his resorts! Plus annual dues! Plus we could stay at affiliated resorts! For a small fee! There are thousands of them! They litter the nation! Plus we could get discounts at condominiums! Waikiki Beach! Air fares! A castle in Germany! Rental cars! Several castles in Germany! Snorkeling! Roy Orbison’s Greatest Hits! But we had to act today! Right now! For various reasons! Did we have any questions?!!
   My major question was, essentially, did they think we had the same Scholastic Aptitude Test scores as mayonnaise. My wife’s questions were: What are you talking about? What resorts? What condominiums? How much of a discount? Joe didn’t know. He was more of a specialist in bedsheet hygiene. So he called the Sales Manager, who hauled over a batch of travel brochures, which he kept on his side of the table while he flipped through them at great speed, pausing occasionally to read parts of headlines to us as if they contained actual information.
   The whole ordeal took over three hours, and it was not easy, but we got our merchandise: a calculator of the kind that you have eight or twelve dead ones at the bottom of your sock drawer at any given time because it’s easier and cheaper to buy a new one than to try to put in new batteries, and an LCD watch that really does have five functions, if you count telling time as two functions (telling hours, and telling minutes).
   I would say, even though the watch stopped working the next day, that it was a fun family outing, and I recommend that you try it, assuming you are fortunate enough to get through the strict screening procedure and receive an invitation. Those of you who are convicted felons might want to use your illegal handguns to bypass the Leisure Concept altogether and ask for the $ 1,000 cash up front.

&@##%$ + ?,.<> +&’%$!!(&#$$%%’&

   I got to thinking about dirty words this morning when I woke up and looked at the clock, realized I had once again overslept, and said a popular dirty word that begins with “S,” which will hereinafter be referred to as “the S-word.”
   I say the S-word every morning when I look at the clock, because I’m always angry at the clock for continuing to run after I’ve turned off the alarm and gone back to sleep. What we need in this country, instead of Daylight Savings Time, which nobody really understands anyway, is a new concept called Weekday Morning Time, whereby at 7 A.M. every weekday we go into a space-launch-style “hold” for two or three hours, during which it just remains 7 A.m. This way we could all wake up via a civilized gradual process of stretching and belching and scratching, and it would still be only 7 A.M. when we were ready to actually emerge from bed.
   But so far we are stuck with this system under which the clock keeps right on moving, which is what prompts me each morning to say the S-word. The reason I raise this subject is that this particular morning I inadvertently said it directly into the ear of my son, who is almost four and who sometimes creeps into our bedroom during the night because of nightmares, probably caused by the fact that he sleeps on Return of the Jedi sheets with illustrations of space creatures such as jabba the Hut, who looks like a 6,000-pound intestinal parasite.
   I felt pretty bad, saying the S-word right into my son’s ear, but he was cool. “Daddy, you shouldn’t say the S-word,” he said. Only he didn’t say “the S-word,” you understand; he actually said the S-word. But he said it in a very mature way, indicating that he got no thrill from it, and that he was merely trying to correct my behavior. I don’t know where kids pick these things up.
   Here’s what strikes me as ironic: When I said the S-word this morning, I was in no way thinking of or trying to describe the substance that the S-word literally represents. No, I was merely trying to describe a feeling of great anguish and frustration, but I’d have felt like a fool, looking at the alarm clock and saying: “I feel great anguish and frustration this morning.” So in the interest of saving time, I said the S-word instead, and I got a condescending lecture from a person who consistently puts his underpants on backwards.
   The other irony is that for thousands of years, great writers such as William Shakespeare have used so-called dirty words to form literature. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the following words appear in Act II, Scene VI, Row A, Seats 4 and 5:
   “O Romeo, Romeo. Where the F-word art thou, Romeo?”
   Today, of course, it is considered very poor taste to use the F-word except in major motion pictures. When we do use it, we are almost always expressing hostility toward somebody who has taken our parking space. This is also ironic, when you consider what act the F-word technically describes, and I imagine you psychiatrists out there could drone on for hours about the close relationship between sex and hostility, but frankly I think you psychiatrists are up to your necks in S-word.
   What I think is that the F-word is basically just a convenient nasty-sounding word that we tend to use when we would really like to come up with a terrifically witty insult, the kind Winston Churchill always came up with when enormous women asked him stupid questions at parties. But most of us don’t think of good insults until weeks later, in the shower, so in the heat of the moment many of us tend to go with the old reliable F-word.
   I disapprove of the F-word, not because it’s dirty, but because we use it as a substitute for thoughtful insults, and it frequently leads to violence. What we ought to do, when we anger each other, say, in traffic, is exchange phone numbers, so that later on, when we’ve had time to think of witty and learned insults or look them up in the library, we could call each other up:
   You: Hello? Bob? BOB: Yes? YOU: This is Ed. Remember? The person whose parking space you took last Thursday? Outside of Sears? BOB: Oh, yes! Sure! How are you, Ed? YOU: Fine, thanks. Listen, Bob, the reason I’m calling is: “Madam, you may be drunk, but I am ugly, and...” No, wait. I mean: “You may be ugly, but I am Winston Churchill, and ... “ No, wait. (Sound of reference book thudding onto the floor.) S-word. Excuse me. Look, Bob, I’m going to have to get back to you. BOB: Fine.
   This would be much more educational than the F-word approach, plus it would eliminate a lot of unnecessary stabbings. On the other hand, to get back to my original point, we really ought to repeal any laws we have on the books against the S-word, which should henceforth be considered a perfectly acceptable and efficient way of expressing one’s feelings toward alarm clocks and cars that break down in neighborhoods where a toxic-waste dump could be classified as urban renewal.

Molecular Homicide

   We have the flu. I don’t know if this particular strain has an official name, but if it does, it must be something like Martian Death Flu. You may have had it yourself. The main symptom is that you wish you had another setting on your electric blanket, up past “HIGH,” that said: “ELECTROCUTION.”
   Another symptom is that you cease brushing your teeth because (a) your teeth hurt and (b) you lack the strength. Midway through the brushing process, you’d have to lie down in front of the sink to rest for a couple of hours, and rivulets of toothpaste foam would dribble sideways out of your mouth, eventually hardening into crusty little toothpaste stalagmites that would bond your head permanently to the bathroom floor, which is where the police would find you. You know the kind of flu I’m talking about.
   I spend a lot of time lying very still and thinking flu-related thoughts. One insight I have had is that all this time scientists have been telling us the truth: Air really is made up of tiny objects called “molecules.” I know this because I can feel them banging against my body. There are billions and billions and billions of them, but if I concentrate, I can detect each one individually, striking my body, especially my eyeballs, at speeds upwards of a hundred thousand miles per hour. If I try to escape by pulling the blanket over my face, they attack my hair, which has become almost as sensitive as my teeth.
   There has been a mound of blankets on my wife’s side of the bed for several days now, absolutely motionless except that it makes occasional efforts to spit into a tissue. I think it might be my wife, but the only way to tell for sure would be to prod it, which I wouldn’t do even if I had the strength, because if it turned out that it was my wife, and she were alive, and I prodded her, it would kill her.
   Me, I am leading a more active life-style. Three or four times a day, I attempt to crawl to the bathroom. Unfortunately this is a distance of nearly 15 feet, with a great many air molecules en route, so at about the halfway point I usually decide to stop and get myself into the fetal position and hope for nuclear war. Instead, I get Earnest. Earnest is our dog. She senses instantly that something is wrong, and guided by that timeless and unerring nurturing instinct that all female dogs have, she tries to lick my ears off.
   For my son, Robert, this is proving to be the high point of his entire life to date. He has had his pajamas on for two, maybe three days now. He has a sense of joyful independence a five-year-old child gets when he suddenly realizes that he could be operating an acetylene torch in the coat closet and neither parent would have the strength to object. He has been foraging for his own food, which means his diet consists entirely of “food” substances that are advertised only on Saturday morning cartoon shows; substances that are the color of jukebox lights and that, for legal reasons, have their names spelled wrong, as in New Creemy Chock-’n’-Cheez Lumps o’ Froot (“part of this complete breakfast”).
   Crawling around, my face inches from the carpet, I sometimes encounter traces of colorful wrappers that Robert has torn from these substances and dropped on the floor, where Earnest, always on patrol, has found them and chewed them into spit-covered wads. I am reassured by this. It means they are both eating.
   The Martian Death Flu has not been an entirely bad thing. Since I cannot work, or move, or think, I have been able to spend more Quality Time with Robert, to come up with creative learning activities that we can enjoy and share together. Today, for example, I taught him, as my father had taught me, how to make an embarrassing noise with your hands. Then we shot rubber bands at the contestants on “Divorce Court.” Then, just in case some parts of our brains were still alive, we watched professional bowling. Here’s what televised professional bowling sounds like when you have the flu:
   PLAY-BY-PLAY MAN: He left the 10-pin, Bob.
   COLOR COMMENTATOR: Yes, Bill. He failed to knock it down.
   PLAY-BY-PLAY MAN: It’s still standing up.
   COLOR COMMENTATOR: Yes. Now he must try to knock it down.
   PLAY-BY-PLAY MAN: You mean the 10-pin, Bob?
   The day just flew by. Soon it was 3:30 P.m., time to crawl back through the air molecules to the bedroom, check on my wife or whoever that is, and turn in for the night.
   Earnest was waiting about halfway down the hall.
   “Look at this,” the police will say when they find me. “His ears are missing.”
   WAY TO GO, ROSCOE!
   Well, it looks like we’ve finally gotten some tax reform. We’ve been trying to get tax reform for over 200 years, dating back to 17-something, when a small, brave band of patriots dressed up as Indians and threw tea into the Boston Harbor. Surprisingly, this failed to produce tax reform. So the brave patriots tried various other approaches, such as dressing up as tea and throwing Indians into the harbor, or dressing up as a harbor and throwing tea into Indians, but nothing worked.
   And so, today, the tax system is a mess. To cite some of the more glaring problems:
   –The big corporations pay nothing. —The rich pay nothing. —The poor pay nothing. —I pay nothing. —Nobody pays anything except you and a couple of people where you work. —The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service is named “Roscoe.”
   This unfair system has increasingly resulted in calls for reform. I personally called for reform nearly two years ago, when I proposed a simple and fair three-pronged tax system called the You Pay Only $8.95 Tax Plan, which worked as follows:
   PRONG ONE: You would pay $8.95 in taxes. PRONG TWO: Cheating would be permitted. PRONG THREE: Anybody who parked his or her car diagonally across two parking spaces would be shot without trial. (This prong is not directly related to tax reform, but everybody I discussed it with feels it should be included anyway.)
   The other major plan was proposed by President Reagan, who made tax reform the cornerstone of his second term, similar to the way he made tax reduction the cornerstone of his first term. Remember that? It was back when everybody was talking about “supply-side economics,” which is the mysterious curve that became famous when an economist named Arthur Laffer drew it at a party, on a napkin belonging to U.S. Congressman jack Kemp. I’m not making this up.
   What the Laffer curve allegedly showed, when you held it in a certain light, was that if the government reduced everybody’s taxes, it would make more money, and the federal budget deficit would go away. I admit that, looking back on it, this theory seems even stupider than throwing beverages into Boston Harbor, but, at the time, it had a very strong appeal. Congressman Kemp started showing his napkin around Washington and soon many people were excited about supply-side economics. it was similar to those stories you sometimes see in the newspaper about how some Third World village gets all riled up when a peasant woman discovers a yam shaped exactly like the Virgin Mary. President Reagan made tax reduction his first-term cornerstone, and Congress enacted it, and everybody waited for the budget deficit to go down, and it wasn’t until recently that economists realized Kemp had been holding his napkin sideways.
   So that was tax reduction. Now we’re on tax reform, which as I said earlier is the president’s second-term cornerstone. For a while, however, it appeared to be in big trouble in Congress, because of the PACS. PACs are lobbying organizations with names like the American Nasal Inhaler Industry Committee for Better Government, which make large contributions to your elected representatives so they can afford to make TV campaign commercials where they stand around in shirt sleeves pretending that they actually care about ordinary bozo citizens such as you.
   The PACs did not care for the president’s plan. They were very concerned that the term “tax reform” might be interpreted to mean “reforming the tax system in some way,” which of course would destroy the economy as we now know it. So they had all these amendments introduced, and, before long, the president’s tax-reform plan had been modified so much that its only actual legal effect, had it been enacted, would have been to declare July as Chalk Appreciation Month. And so it looked as though the president might have to come up with a new cornerstone for his second term, something like: “Ronald Reagan: He never bombed Canada.” Or: “Ronald Reagan: Most of his polyps were benign.”
   And then a wonderful thing happened. The Senate Finance Committee, a group of men who are not famous for standing up to the special interests, a group of men who have little slots in their front doors for the convenience of those PACs wishing to make large contributions at night, suddenly got their courage up. They took a hard look at themselves, and they said: “Wait a minute. What are we? Are we a bunch of prostitutes, taking large sums of money from the PACs and giving them what they want? No! Let’s take large sums of their money and not give them what they want!” It was a courageous step, a step that took the senators beyond prostitution, into the realm of fraud. All the editorial writers of course hailed it as a Positive Step. And that is how we came to have tax reform.
   How will tax reform affect you? It will change your life dramatically. Let’s say you’re a typical family of four with both parents working and occasional car problems. Under the new system, each year you’ll get a bunch of unintelligible forms from the government, and you’ll put off doing anything about them until mid-April, and you’ll be confused by the directions, and you’ll miss a lot of deductions, and you’ll worry about being audited. Other than that things will remain pretty much the same. Roscoe will still be in charge.