Outbungling The Commies

   Let’s all write our congresspersons and demand that the United States become involved in a no-win military quagmire in Central America.
   The reason? Global strategy. To understand the strategic significance of Central America, let’s take a close look at the map, especially in the critical region where the Oswego River flows into Lake Ontario. No, wait. Wrong map.
   Ah. Here we are. Look closely at Central America, and try to imagine what would happen if this vital region were to fall into Communist hands. What would happen is a lot of Communists would be stung repeatedly by vicious tropical insects the size of mature hamsters.
   We cannot afford to have this happen. We cannot afford to have a horde of Communists down there becoming so cranky and welt-covered that eventually, just for an excuse to get out of the jungle, they foment a revolution in Mexico, which means you’d have Communist guerrilla troops right next to Texas. I doubt they could take Texas by force. Texas has the largest fleet of armed pickup trucks of any major power, and any invading guerrilla army would be shot and run over repeatedly before it got half a mile, especially if it invaded on a Saturday night.
   So the Communists would have to use a psychological approach. They’d win the Texans over by such ploys as holding barbecues, wearing big hats and promising to extend the football Season. Once Texas went Communist, Oklahoma would follow quickly, followed by Nebraska, followed by whatever state is next to Nebraska, and so on until the entire nation had turned Communist except Massachusetts, which is already very left-wing and consequently would turn Republican.
   It is to prevent this kind of tragedy that we’re sending bales of your tax money to buy guns for the corrupt, murderous slime buckets who run El Salvador. And for those of you weak-willed, sob-sister, namby-pamby probable homosexuals who think this is wrong, let me point out that if we don’t prop up our slime buckets, the Communists will install their corrupt slime buckets, and you can bet your bottom tax dollar that the peasants down there are much happier being oppressed by ours. “Anything to keep Texas safe” is the traditional El Salvadoran peasant motto.
   Besides, the El Salvadoran rulers have started showing a real interest in human rights since we put them on this clever incentive plan under which we threaten to stop sending them guns if they keep using them to shoot their own citizens. This plan is working very well: Reagan administration observers have been bringing back rave reviews. “They’re not killing nearly as many innocent women and children,” the observers report, beaming with pride. “Let’s send them some more guns.”
   But guns alone are not enough, which is why Texas does not control the world. You also need troops, and the Communists are sending Cuban troops to Central America. Truth to tell, you can’t wave your arms in a world trouble spot without striking Cuban troops. They’ll go anywhere, because if they stay home they have to listen to extremely long speeches.
   I say that if the Communists are sending troops, they must have a damned good reason, and we should send troops, too. Only I don’t think we should send our armed forces, because I have serious reservations about how they’d do in an actual war. I suspect most of them enlisted because of those really slick, upbeat TV commercials suggesting that all you do in the armed forces is grin and jog and learn meaningful career skills such as tank repair. If we sent these kids to Central America, they’d go jogging into the jungle, grinning and clutching their tank-repair tools, and the only question would be whether the Communists would get them before the insects did.
   So I say we send the people who really understand the Communist threat in Central America, the very people who alerted us to it in the first place. I’m talking about the Reagan administration’s foreign policy strategists. I say we arm them to the teeth, smear them with insect repellent, fly them over the jungle and drop them at night. We could even give them parachutes.

It’s Drafty In Here

   If you can possibly manage it, you should avoid being a young person or a wheat farmer when the president starts feeling international tension. Nine times out of ten, when a president gets mad at the Russians, he does something nasty to young people or wheat farmers, and sometimes both.
   For example, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter was so angry that he ordered teenage American males to register for the draft; told the U.S. Olympic team it couldn’t go to the Olympics; and told farmers they couldn’t sell wheat to Russia. If you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought Afghanistan had been invaded by teenage American wheat farmers, led by the U.S. Olympic team. I imagine that if Jimmy had been really angry at the Russians, he would have had the Olympic team lined up and shot.
   But eventually everybody got bored with Afghanistan. The Russians remained there; the farmers went back to selling them wheat; and the Olympic athletes found occupations that are less directly connected with international tension than, say, the parallel bars. Jimmy went on to other pursuits, such as losing the election. But draft registration continued.
   When Ronald Reagan was campaigning for president, he said he was dead set against peacetime registration, on the grounds that in a free country the government shouldn’t go around forcing people to do things. It turns out he was just kidding. He recently decided to continue registration, using the same logic that Jimmy did: Although at the moment we are not technically in a war with the Russians, we could get into one any day, and if we do, we could have our Army up to snuff six weeks faster if we have the teenagers already registered. I see only one minor flaw in this reasoning, which is that if we ever do get into a war with the Russians, we will probably be melted, teenagers and all, in the first half hour or so, which would tend to disrupt the training process.
   Aside from that flaw, I think registration is a terrific idea. When the national security is at stake, I think everybody should be obligated to register, regardless of age, sex, religion, or occupation. The only exceptions should be children, women, and anybody else who is not a teenage male.
   Perhaps you’re wondering why we single out teenage males. Some people believe it’s because teenagers are the most physically fit, but that is stupid. If physical fitness were the main reason, we would register professional athletes first. The truth is that we register teenage males because:
   We always have. Many teenage males are sullen and snotty and could use a little discipline. There are fewer of them than there are of us.
   If we tried to register older people, they would write letters to their congressmen and hire sharp lawyers, and we’d never be able to get anybody into the Army.
   So when we draft people, we always start with teenage males. This means that the President, his advisers, and the members of Congress usually don’t get a chance to serve, but that is one of the burdens of public office.
   Many Army officials would like to start drafting teenagers right away, but unfortunately they don’t have any actual war going on at the moment, so they’re stuck with trying to get people to volunteer. This is very difficult, because the Army is not generally perceived as being a fun organization. Most people think that the Army is a place where you get up early in the morning to be yelled at by people with short haircuts and tiny brains.
   The Army has been trying very hard to change its image. It has produced a bunch of television commercials suggesting that it is really just a large technical school, where everybody is happy and nobody ever gets sent to wretched foreign countries to get shot at. I think these commercials are on the right track but don’t go far enough. I think they should make the Army look more as it does on “M*A*S*H,” where the characters have so much fun that most of them have remained in the Army for ten years:
   HAWKEYE: Boy, war sure is awful, isn’t it? Ha ha.
   BJ: Ha ha, it sure is. Say, I have an idea: Let’s go drink a bunch of martinis and flirt with attractive nurses and play practical jokes on various stuffed shirts, as we have every night since this series began.
   HAWKEYE: Ha ha. Good idea,
   BJ. But first let’s fix these wounded soldiers, who are a constant reminder that war is an enormous waste of human life, although fortunately the major characters never get killed.
   BJ: Ha ha.
   If the Army commercials were more like “M*A*S*H,” I think lots of teenagers would want to enlist. In fact, I think just about everybody would want to enlist, for a chance to pal around with Alan Alda. The Army would have all the people it would need, and everything would be swell—unless, of course, we got into an actual war. Then we’d have to turn things over to the teenage males.

Mx Is The Way To Go. Bye

   I realize it’s none of my business, but I have a few questions about the MX missile system. Here, as I understand it, is how the MX is supposed to work: We would put a bunch of missiles where the Russians can’t hit them with their missiles. That way, if the Russians shoot at us, we’ll be able to shoot back, and everybody will wind up dead. This is considered to be much more desirable than what would happen without the MX, namely that the Russians would still be alive and we would be dead. Obviously, the best solution would be for us to be alive and the Russians to be dead, but for this to happen we would have to shoot first, and we wouldn’t do that because the whole reason we built all these nuclear devices in the first place is to preserve world peace. So we are going for the peace-loving solution, which is to guarantee that if anybody attacks anybody, everybody winds up dead.
   So far so good. I mean, any fool can see the MX is the way to go. But what troubles me is the particular kind of MX President Reagan decided to build. Basically, the people who worry about our national defense for us came up with two options:
   OPTION ONE: Dig several thousand holes in Nevada and Utah, but put actual missiles in only a few of them, so the Russians won’t know which holes to shoot at. Cost: A trillion or so dollars. Advantages: The bulldozer industry would prosper beyond its wildest dreams. Disadvantages: It won’t work. One flaw, of course, is that the Russians, using their spy satellites, could figure out which holes we put the missiles in. We could probably come up with some crafty scheme to overcome this flaw: Maybe we’d attach leaves and fruit to the missiles, so the Russians would think we were merely planting enormous trees in Nevada and Utah; or maybe we’d put huge signs on each missile with the words “THIS IS NOT A MISSILE” printed in Russian. So hiding the missiles is not the problem. The problem is that the Russians, if they have any sense at all, would simply build more missiles and shoot at all the holes, and we’d all wind up dead with no way to make the Russians dead. So the national-defense people came up with Option Two.
   OPTION TWO: Put the MX missiles in holes we already have. Cost: A few hundred billion dollars. Advantages: None, except it costs less, which is not really an advantage because the government will spend the leftover money on some other gigantic scheme anyway. Disadvantages: It won’t work, since the Russians already know where the existing holes are. Heck, I even know where they are. They’re in Kansas. All the Russians would have to do is locate a map revealing the location of Kansas, which they could probably do, what with their extensive spy network.
   So basically, President Reagan was faced with two options, both of which involved holes and neither of which would work. He pondered this problem for a while, on his horse, and finally decided to go with Option Two. Why, he reasoned, should we pay a trillion dollars for a system that wouldn’t work, when we can get the same thing for a few hundred billion? He’s going on the time-honored axiom that if something is not worth doing, it is not worth doing right.
   Ideally, President Reagan would have delayed his decision in the hope that, given time, his defense planners could have come up with a third option, such as covering Nebraska with ice and launching the missiles from dogsleds. But he had to act fast, because of the Window of Vulnerability. The Window of Vulnerability, which was discovered only recently, is the period of time between now and whenever we finish the MX system, during which we are vulnerable to Russian attack. Reagan’s defense advisers are very big on the Window of Vulnerability: for months now, they have been running around the country proclaiming how vulnerable we are. This puzzles me. I mean, if we’re so vulnerable, why are we telling everybody? And if the Russians are so hot to attack us, why don’t they do it now? Why on earth would they wait until after we finish our MX system? And if they don’t attack us when we’re vulnerable, why do we need the MX at all? These questions deserve a lot of hard thought, which I intend to give them just as soon as I’ve had another drink.

Mx Service Warranty

   I’m a little worried about the MX missile system. Don’t get me wrong: I certainly think we need another missile system. Better safe than sorry, that’s my motto.
   What I’m worried about is that we won’t be able to get anybody to repair the MX. You can’t get anything repaired these days. Take, for example, Voyager 2, a United States space rocket that recently flew to Saturn to take pictures. It worked okay for a while, but then the camera got pointed in the wrong direction and started sending back pictures of outer space. This was bad public relations: taxpayers don’t want to pay nine zillion dollars for pictures that look like the inside of somebody’s closet with the light off. The NASA scientists claim Voyager 2 is a success anyway, but they have to claim this, because otherwise they can’t ask for more money. They would have claimed Voyager 2 was a success even if it had crashed into Phoenix, Arizona. The truth is, Voyager 2 broke and they couldn’t get it repaired.
   This is a problem not only with rockets but with other major appliances as well. If you have ever called the service department of a major department store to get an appliance repaired, you know what I am talking about:
   YOU: Hello, my washer ...
   TAPE RECORDING: Thank you for calling the Service Department. All of our service representatives are smoking cigarettes and chatting; your call will be taken just as soon as somebody feels like taking your call. Thank you.
   (For the next thirty-five minutes, you listen to a medley of songs by Barry Manilow, who has written a great many songs. Perhaps too many. Then an actual service representative comes on the line.)
   SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE: Thank you for calling the Service Department. How may we serve you?
   YOU: It’s our washer. One of the drive belts snared my wife by the arm and she can’t get loose and we can’t turn it off and we’re worried about what will happen when it gets to the spin cycle.
   SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE: When did you purchase the washer?
   YOU: A year ago, I guess. Could you hurry please? It’s almost done with the rinse cycle.
   SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE: Then I’m afraid you are not covered under the ninety-day warranty. But don’t feel bad: nobody is ever covered under the ninety-day warranty. That’s why we offer it. Did you buy a maintenance agreement?
   YOU: I don’t know, for God’s sake. (Your wife screams in the background.) Please, just get someone out here.
   SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE: We will have a serviceperson in your area in 1986. Will someone be at home?
   YOU: I imagine my wife will. What’s left of her.
   SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE: Fine. We will have someone call you during the latter half of 1986 to let you know exactly what month the serviceperson will be there. Thank you for calling the Service Department.
   A few years ago, we had a serviceperson come to our house regularly to try to repair our television set. He had this ritual: He would arrive with six hundred pounds of tools, select a screwdriver, take the back off the television, and stare at the insides as if he had been raised by a primitive Brazilian jungle tribe and had never seen a television before. Then he would put the cover back on, load his six hundred pounds of tools back onto the truck, and leave. Once, to prove he was sincerely interested in the problem, he took the television with him and kept it for several months. Finally, my wife and I took the cover off ourselves and blew on the insides of the television; it worked fine after that, and the serviceperson didn’t come around anymore, which was sort of a shame, because he was getting to be like one of the family.
   Another time, the motor on our forty-five-dollar vacuum cleaner broke, so I took the vacuum to a serviceperson, who took it apart but couldn’t fix the motor. So I sent it to the factory, which fixed the motor for twenty-five dollars but didn’t put the vacuum cleaner together again. So finally I took the parts to the Service Center, which is where people go when they are really desperate. You go in and take a number, then you sit with the other appliance owners, who are clutching their toasters and radios and hoping the counter person will call their numbers before their food and water runs out.
   Finally the counter person called my number, and I explained to him that my vacuum cleaner was not broken, that I merely wanted him to Put it together again. I had trouble getting this message across, because the counter person had obviously spent several years in an IQ-reduction program. He’d say: “Well, what’s wrong with it?” And I’d say: “Nothing’s wrong with it. I just want you to put it together.” And he’d say: “Well, what’s wrong with it?” And so on.
   Eventually, he got the picture, and he took my vacuum cleaner parts to the fellows back in the Shop, and together they came up with an estimate of eighty-seven dollars to put them together again. This means that we would have paid a total of $112 to repair a forty-five-dollar cleaner, so instead we bought a new vacuum cleaner, which is, of course, what they wanted us to do in the first place.
   Well, I’m afraid the government will have the same sort of problem. They’ll buy a snappy new MX missile system, and everything will be fine until the Russians attack us, at which point we’ll have bombs raining down on Ohio while the guys down the Pentagon are sitting in the War Room, listening to Barry Manilow on the telephone. Think about it.

Birthday Celebration

   The name “February” comes from the Latin word “Februarius,” which means “fairly boring stretch of time during which one expects the professional-ice-hockey season to come to an end but it does not.” During February we observe four special days, none of which is an excuse for serious drinking:
   Groundhog Day, February 2
   This is an old American tradition started years ago by profoundly retarded old Americans. According to the tradition, on this day Mr. Groundhog comes out of his hole and looks around for media representatives, who make a major fuss about it. It is one of those things that only media people care about. Another one is the government of Canada.
   Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12
   Abraham Lincoln grew up in the Tennessee wilderness and killed a bear when he was only three years old. No, wait: That was Davy Crockett. Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin and read by candlelight and learned to spell by writing on the back of a coal shovel. Later on he wrote the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope. He had a pathological fear of normal paper. As a youth, Lincoln was famous for splitting rails. People were afraid to leave their rails lying around because Lincoln would sneak up and split them.
   Lincoln became nationally known when he won the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, sponsored by the League of Women Voters. Here is a complete transcript:
   DOUGLAS: I think the territories should decide the slavery question for themselves, and I’m five feet seven inches tall.
   LINCOLN: I disagree, and I’m six four.
   After the debates, Lincoln became president and grew a beard because some little girl wrote him a letter and suggested it. He was crazy that way. We should all be grateful she didn’t suggest he wear rouge.
   St. Valentine’s Day, February 14
   The Encyclopedia Britannica says, “St. Valentine’s Day as a lovers’ festival and the modern tradition of sending valentine cards have no relation to the saints, but, rather, seem to be connected either with the Roman fertility festival of the Lupercalia or with the mating season of birds.”
   This means that, at this very moment, your kids may be in school cutting out little construction-paper hearts to celebrate the sexual activity of Romans or birds. No wonder people don’t go to church anymore.
   Washington’s Birthday, February 16
   Actually, George Washington was born on February 22. The government has decided that we should celebrate his birthday on the third Monday, because that way the nation gets a long weekend, and, what the hell, Washington is dead anyway. (When I say “the nation,” of course, I mean “government employees and maybe six or seven other people.”) I think that if the government can mess around with the calendar for its own convenience, the rest of us should be able to do the same thing. For example, most people find April 15 to be a terribly inconvenient day to file income tax returns, coming as it does right at the beginning of baseball season. I think this year on April 15 we should all send the government little notices explaining that we observe Income Tax Day on December 11.
   But back to Washington. As a youth, he threw a cherry tree across the Delaware. Later he got wooden teeth and was chosen to represent Virginia at the Continental Congress, a group of colonists who wanted to revolt against the King because he made them wear wigs and tights. They chose Washington to lead their army because he was strong and brave and not in the room at the time. Everybody thought he would lose, but he outfoxed the British by establishing headquarters all over the place. Here on the East Coast you can’t swing your arms without hitting one of Washington’s headquarters. Finally the British, who were Germans anyway, gave up and went home to fight the French, who were more conveniently located, and Washington became the Father of Our Country. That is why each year on a Monday somewhere around his birthday we have major-appliance sales oriented toward government employees.

Why Not A Postal Service?

   EDITOR’S NOTE: This column appears at first to be about the Postal Service but may actually be about the neutron bomb. It’s hard to tell.
   I am all for the nine-digit Zip Code and the eighteen-cent stamp. In fact, I think the Postal Service ought to go even further: Let’s have a fifteen-digit Zip Code and a $4.50 stamp. Let’s make it virtually impossible to send mail. I hate getting mail anyway. Apparently, my name is on a computerized mailing list entitled “People with Extremely Small Brains,” and as a result I get mainly two kinds of mail:
   Announcements Announcing Contests Somebody Else Will Win: “Mr. Barry, we are pleased to announce that you have been chosen as a semifinalist in the Publishers’ Publishing House Sweepstakes, and may have already won 11,000 head of cattle and a Korean servant family.”
   Investment Opportunities for Morons: “This rare opportunity to purchase a finely crafted, individually registered investment collection of Early American Colonial Jellied Candies is being made available only to residents of North and South America, and will not be repeated unless people actually take us up on it.”
   I have learned to recognize this kind of mail from the envelopes, which always have gimmicky statements designed to arouse my curiosity (“If you do not open this envelope immediately, you will never see your children again”). So I usually throw the envelopes away without opening them. But this doesn’t work: the junk mail companies have armies of workers who comb through everybody’s garbage at night, retrieve their announcements, and put them right back in the mail.
   We could solve this problem if we all bought portable blowtorches. We could stroll up to our mailboxes, open the doors, and incinerate everything inside. Or, for a more efficient approach, the Postal Service could buy larger blowtorches and incinerate everybody’s mail right at the post offices. Ideally, the Postal Service would buy enormous blowtorches and incinerate the junk mail companies directly, but this is probably illegal.
   The only problem with the incineration plan is that it would also destroy the occasional piece of actual mail. I got a piece of actual mail the other day, from the White House. It was signed by a machine that had learned how to reproduce the signature of Anne Higgins, Director of Presidential Correspondence, and it said: “On behalf of President Reagan, I would like to thank you for your message and to let you know that he appreciates the time you have taken to send in your views. They have been fully noted.”
   This letter troubles me greatly, because I never sent any views to the White House. This means the White House now possesses somebody else’s views masquerading as mine, and, what is worse, has fully noted them, whatever that means. I guess they have a machine in the White House basement that fully notes views at a high rate of speed, then tells the Anne Higgins signature machine to shoot out a thank-you letter.
   Now here’s my problem: I recently acquired a view that I would like to send to the White House, only I’m afraid that now it won’t be fully noted, because they probably have some rule about how many views will be noted per citizen per year. So I want the person who used my name to send in his view to now use his name to send in my view, and we’ll be even.
   My view concerns the neutron bomb, which, at the Pentagon’s urging, President Reagan recently decided to build, and which would eventually be deployed in Western Europe. The neutron bomb is a nuclear device that kills people without destroying buildings. Many people feel this is inhumane; they much prefer the old-fashioned humane-type nuclear devices that kill people and destroy buildings.
   Western Europe’s reaction to the neutron bomb has been mixed: most buildings are for it, and most people are against it, on the grounds that it might kill them. They’re always wallowing in sentiment, those Western Europeans.
   Anyway, here’s my view: I think we should develop the neutron bomb, but instead of using it to defend a bunch of ungrateful people with unAmerican views, we should keep it for ourselves. All we have to do is modify the design so that instead of leaving buildings alone and destroying people, it leaves buildings and people alone but destroys third-class mail. This would save the country billions of dollars in blowtorch fuel alone.

The Leak Detectors

   I think President Reagan has come up with a swell idea in his plan to give lie-detector tests to government employees suspected of leaking. “Leaking” is when a government employee tells the public what the government is doing. This is very bad, particularly in the area of foreign policy, because our foreign policy is supposed to be a secret. This principle was perfected by Richard Nixon, who used to keep the foreign policy hidden in a little jar buried in the White House lawn. Nobody ever had the vaguest notion what he was going to do next. For example, he went around for years announcing that our foreign policy was to hate the Chinese, then one day he showed up in China laughing and chatting with Chairman Mao and spilling ceremonial wine on himself. This kind of erratic behavior kept the other nations on their toes, because they could never really be sure that Dick wasn’t going to suddenly turn around and, say, order the Air Force to defoliate Wales.
   Today, our foreign policy is so secret that not even the President really knows what it is, which is why he is concerned about leaks. He doesn’t want to be embarrassed at a press conference when some smart-mouth reporter asks him a question about why we’re secretly sending arms to one of those humid little countries in Central America that the forces of international communism are always trying to spread into, and he doesn’t know the answer. So the President came up with this plan whereby if the public ever gets hold of any classified government documents, which basically means all government documents except the Zip Code directory and those cretin newsletters your congressman sends you at your expense, the government employees who could have leaked the information will have to take lie-detector tests, and if it turns out they are guilty they will be fired or shot or something.
   Needless to say, the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization of left-wing communists, claimed Reagan’s plan is unconstitutional, but this is typical. The ACLU is always yakking about the Constitution, and most of us are getting mighty tired of it. I mean, if the Constitution is so great, how come it was amended so many times? Huh?
   Personally, I think the President’s idea is excellent. My only concern is who’s going to administer the lie-detector tests. We don’t want government employees doing it, because they’d mess it up somehow. It would wind up like one of those Army Corps of Engineers projects where they’re trying to irrigate four beet farms in Texas but they end up causing most of Iowa to be washed into the Gulf of Mexico.
   So I think we should turn the lie-detecting operation over to the Private Sector, by which I mean F. Lee Bailey, the famous criminal trial lawyer who is widely considered to be extremely brilliant despite the fact that he always gives me the impression he’s coated with a thin layer of slime. Bailey has this television show called “Lie Detector,” wherein famous people such as Ronald Reagan’s barber take lie-detector tests, then, in the highly dramatic climax, Bailey oozes up and reveals the results. I think this would be an appropriate forum for investigating suspected leakers:
   BAILEY: Mr. Carbuncle, you’re Assistant Secretary of State for Really Pathetic Little Countries, is that correct?
   CARBUNCLE: Yes.
   BAILEY: Okay, here’s an innocent question to put you at ease. How are you?
   CARBUNCLE: Fine, thank you.
   BAILEY: Are you the person who told the New York Times about the secret CIA plan to drop 250,000 poison attack frogs on left-wing guerrillas in the Republic of Belize?
   CARBUNCLE: No.
   BAILEY: Mr. Carbuncle, our polygraph machine, which has been monitoring your pulse rate and blood pressure, indicates that you are telling the truth. Either that or you have just suffered a massive heart attack. Here’s an autographed picture of the President grooming his horse, and thanks a million for being our guest on “Lie Detector.” Folks, be sure to stay tuned, because next we’re going to see if we can figure out who leaked the plan to sell nuclear bazookas to rival street gangs in the South Bronx.

States For Sale, Cheap

   For more than a year now, President Reagan and the Congress have been working very hard on reducing government spending, so it should come as no surprise to anybody that they have managed to increase it. This is because the atmosphere in Washington, D.C., tends to lower people’s intelligence. You’ve probably noticed this. You elect all these sharp people, full of brilliant ideas, and you send them to Washington, and after a few months of breathing the atmosphere they start behaving like brain-damaged turnips. As soon as they leave Washington, their IQs start to rise again.
   This is why congressmen go on so many trips. Each congressman has a herd of aides who watch him constantly, and as soon as he starts to drool, or forget how to put on his pants, the aides send him off to Switzerland or someplace on a so-called fact-finding mission, which is really just a desperate attempt to get him away from Washington long enough to boost his IQ back to the level of, say, a cocker spaniel’s. The President has the same problem, which is why he almost always gets packed off to Camp David during times of international tension. His aides are afraid that if they leave him in Washington, he’ll start babbling into the hot line and set off World War III.
   The problem is that the only place where the President and the Congress can work on economic problems is Washington, because the economy is stored there, in a large Treasury Building vault. This means that the longer they work on the budget, the worse it gets. So the solution to our budget problems will have to come from someone who spends very little time in Washington, someone whose brain has not been affected by the atmosphere. Me, for example.
   I have been thinking about the budget for several minutes now, and I believe I have come up with an excellent way to reduce it and maybe raise some money to boot. Here’s my plan: We can sell excess states.
   The way I see it, we have far too many states, many of them serving no useful purpose whatsoever. I first noticed this some years ago when my wife and I drove from Pennsylvania to Colorado. It took us practically forever to get there, mainly because there were all these flat, boring states in the way. Take Kansas. Kansas just sits there, taking up an enormous amount of space that you are required to drive across if you want to get to Colorado. Fortunately, the Stuckey’s Corporation has been thoughtful enough to locate a restaurant roughly every eighty miles along Interstate 70, so we were able to stop and buy cute little gift boxes containing a dozen miniature pecan pies, which is just enough pecan pies to keep two people occupied until the next Stuckey’s so they don’t go insane with boredom and drive off the interstate at speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour, threatening both human and animal life. Not that there was all that much visible life in Kansas.
   Now don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against Kansas persons. I’m sure that, wherever they are, they’re a fun bunch. I’m just saying we can save a lot of money, and make it much easier for people to get from Pennsylvania to Colorado, if we sell Kansas and move the Kansas persons to, say, Iowa, which looks a lot like Kansas (only narrower) and seems to have plenty of extra space.
   Another thing. I see no reason why we need both a North and a South Dakota. One Dakota ought to be sufficient. My personal opinion is that we should sell South Dakota, because the capital is called “Pierre,” but I’m willing to leave the final decision up to the Congress. I’m just saying one of them should go. We should also try to sell California and New York, of course, but I doubt anybody would be stupid enough to buy them.
   Another thing. If we sold some states, we’d have fewer state legislatures. I have never really understood why we have state legislatures in the first place. If they’re not raising their salaries, they’re arguing over some lunatic law nobody ever asked for. For example, in my state, Pennsylvania, the legislature is obsessed with Official State Things. Our legislators have named an Official State Animal; an Official State Bird; an Official State Dog (it’s the Great Dane, and God alone knows why); an Official State Fish; an Official State Flower; and an Official State Tree. They have even named an Official State Insect. I’m not kidding. It’s the firefly. What does all this mean? Does it mean that if you squash a firefly in Pennsylvania, official state agents will track you down, using Great Danes, and arrest you?
   I don’t know the answers to these questions. All I know is that the state insect, as well as the state legislature, would become someone else’s problem if we sold Pennsylvania. So I’m all for it. I’d be perfectly happy to move to Iowa, along with the Kansas persons. My only concern is that my plan might be a bit tough on the folks at Stuckey’s, who make a terrific pecan pie.

There Auto Be A Law

   I think we Americans ought to go right out and buy some American cars. Nobody has bought an American car since 1977, and this has had profoundly negative effects on the nation, the main one being a lot of whiny television commercials:
   “Hi, I’m Telly Savalas, here to tell you that under Ford’s desperate new program, you don’t have to pay for maintenance and repairs. In fact, you don’t even have to pay for the car, or drive it, or anything. All you have to do is sign a piece of paper stating that if you were going to buy a car, it might conceivably be a Ford.”
   Unless we want to see more of this kind of thing, we’re going to have to buy some American cars pronto. Most of us could use new cars anyway. My wife and I have been driving the same cars for more than five years, and they’re starting to get a little rank, especially the one the dog threw up in on the way to the veterinarian’s office. The other one, which we use to cart our nineteen-month-old son around in, smells a little better, but it has ninety billion cracker crumbs permanently bonded to the backseat by hardened saliva.
   Also, we have a lot of junk in the glove compartment, mostly in the form of a series of recall letters from the manufacturer:
   July 3, 1977
   “Dear Mr. Barry:
   Under the terms of United States Department of Transportation Regulation 23947-54B, we are required to notify you that there exists the possibility of a potential radiation condition with respect to the wireless receiver installed in certain of our automobiles at the time of manufacture, and owners of said vehicles are therefore requested to contact their authorized sales representative with respect to an adjustment of the aforementioned potential possible condition described heretofore.”
   February 4, 1978
   “Dear Mr. Barry:
   A review of our records indicates that you have not responded to our earlier recall notice with respect to the potential radiation danger from the radio in your car. Your prompt attention to this matter would be appreciated.”
   October 8, 1978
   “Dear Mr. Barry:
   Please bring your car to the dealer right away and don’t turn on the radio because you will get very sick and all your hair will fall off.”
   June 17, 1979
   “Dear Mr. Barry:
   If you are still alive, do not bring your car or yourself anywhere near the dealer. Instead, leave the car in a lightly populated area and flee on foot. We’ll try to detonate it with helicopter-mounted bazookas.”
   So far, we haven’t responded to the recall campaign because we’ve been fairly busy, and besides we like the convenience of being able to locate our car in darkened parking lots by the glow. But I think we’re going to get a new car, because we want to get Telly off the air and receive a large sum of money in the form of a rebate. In fact, we may buy several cars and retire.
   If you want to buy a car, you should know that under federal law you are now required to get one with front-wheel drive. The advantage of front-wheel drive is that it’s good in the snow, so when there’s a really bad storm you’ll be able to get to work while your neighbors are stuck home drinking bourbon by the fire. The disadvantage of front-wheel drive is that it was invented by European communists, so nobody in the United States has the vaguest notion of how it works. In fact, most mechanics have a great deal of difficulty even finding it, because it’s all mixed in with the engine, which in turn is very difficult to find because it is covered with a thick layer of emissions-control objects that are designed to prevent the engine from starting, thereby drastically reducing the amount of emissions it can emit. These controls were mandated by the federal government and Ralph Nader, who drives a 1957 Pontiac with racing tires and an enormous engine.
   Speaking of engines, you should also decide whether you want a regular engine or a diesel engine (named for its inventor, Rudolf Engine). Lately, a lot of people have been choosing diesel engines. I won’t go into the reasons here, because, frankly, I don’t know what they are. I’m just assuming there must be some really terrific reasons for paying extra money for an engine that gives off a foul odor and is extremely slow.
   If you get a diesel, you’ll have to learn to keep your momentum up, the way truck drivers do. If a truck driver starts accelerating when he leaves New York, he does not hit fifty-five miles per hour until he gets to Cleveland, so he will run over anything in his path—fallen trees, passenger cars, small villages—to avoid losing his momentum.
   The only other thing to consider when you buy a car is gas mileage. To make it easy for you to compare, the government requires car manufacturers to provide two mileage estimates and inform you that:
   You should pay no attention to one of the estimates, and You shouldn’t pay much attention to the other estimate, either.
   The manufacturer is also required to tell you that neither estimate applies to California. When you get right down to it, almost nothing applies to California.

You’ll Look Radiant

   Let’s look at the positive side of nuclear war. One big plus is that the Postal Service says it has a plan to deliver the mail after the war, which is considerably more than it is doing now. I, for one, look forward to the day after the missiles hit, when the postal person comes striding up and hands me a Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes letter announcing that I may have already won my Dream Vacation Home, which I will probably need because my regular home will be glowing like a movie marquee.
   The Postal Service isn’t the only outfit that’s all set for a nuclear war. The whole federal government has elaborate plans to keep doing whatever it does. As soon as word arrives that enemy missiles are on the way, all the vital government officials will be whisked by helicopter to a secret mountain hideout guarded by heavily armed men. The guards are there, of course, to shoot nonvital citizens who attempt to get into the hideout, because they would get in the way of the officials who are trying to protect them.
   To determine which officials are vital enough to go to the hideout, the government periodically sends out a questionnaire:
   TO: All Top Government Officials FROM: The Government SUBJECT: Who Gets to Go to the Secret Nuclear Hideout
   Please circle the statement below that best describes how vital you are. Be as sincere as possible.
   1. I am extremely vital and should be whisked away, in the first helicopter if possible.
   2. I am not all that vital and should be left to die a horrible death with the ordinary citizens.
   Using the results of this questionnaire, the government has determined that all of its top officials are vital. This means, of course, that conditions in the hideout will be fairly cramped. But that is one of the prices you pay for being a public servant.
   Once the officials are in the hideout, they will immediately swing into emergency action. The President will announce his emergency plan for getting the nation back on its feet, and within minutes the leader of the opposition party will hold an emergency press conference to announce that the President’s plan is unfair to either middle-class taxpayers or the poor, depending on which party is the opposition at the time. Meanwhile, Pentagon officials will warn that the surviving Russians are probably stockpiling large rocks with the intention of coming over here on crude rafts and throwing them at us. The Pentagon will recommend that we, too, start stockpiling large rocks; this will lead to an emergency tax increase.
   So the government is well prepared to continue governing after a nuclear attack. The only potential fly in the ointment is that the public will probably be too sick or dead to pay taxes or receive mail. So to make sure that the government still has somebody to govern, it is the patriotic duty of all of us nonvital citizens to come up with our own personal nuclear-survival plans.
   I have some experience in this area, because in 1953, when I was a first-grader at the Wampus Elementary School in Armonk, N.Y., we used to practice surviving a nuclear attack. Our technique was to go into the hall and crouch against the walls for about ten minutes. This worked extremely well, and I recommend that all of you develop emergency plans to get to Wampus Elementary as soon as you get word that the missiles are coming.
   The best way to get information during a nuclear war is to listen to the Emergency Broadcast Radio Network, which is the organization that broadcasts those tests all the time:
   ANNOUNCER: This is a test. For the next thirty seconds, you will hear an irritating, high-pitched squeal. We here at the Emergency Broadcast Network are bored to death, waiting for a real nuclear war, so for the past few years we’ve been varying the pitch of the squeal just a little bit every time. Our theory is that if we find just the right pitch, it will drive certain species of birds insane with sexual desire. We know we’re getting close, because during our last test a Cleveland man carrying one of those enormous portable radios turned up real loud was pecked to death by more than three hundred lusting pigeons.
   Frankly, I have always wondered what the Emergency Broadcast Network would broadcast if we actually had a war. I imagine they’d try to keep it upbeat, so people wouldn’t get too depressed:
   ANNOUNCER: Hi there! You’re listening to the Emergency Broadcast Network, so don’t touch that dial! It’s probably melted anyway, ha ha! Weatherwise, we’re expecting afternoon highs of around 6,800 degrees, followed by a cooling trend as a cloud consisting of California and Oregon blots out the sun. In the headlines, the President and key members of Congress met in an emergency breakfast this morning, and a flock of huge mutant radioactive mosquitoes has emerged from the Everglades and is flying toward New Orleans at speeds approaching four hundred miles an hour. We’ll have the details in a moment, but first here’s consumer affairs reporter Debbi Terri Suzi Dinkle with the first part of her eighteen-part report entitled “Radiation and You.” DINKLE: Radiation. You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t hear it. Yet it’s all over the place, and it can kill you or make your hair fall out. In my next report, we’ll explore the reasons why.
   So we’ll be in good shape after the war. And there are advantages I haven’t even talked about, such as that the Miss America Pageant will probably be postponed for a couple of years at least.

Caution: Government At Work

   I’ve been seeing these television commercials lately in which Tug McGraw, the noted nutritionist and left-handed relief pitcher, points out in a very cheerful manner that many major soft drinks contain caffeine. Tug is concerned about this, because caffeine is one of the many substances that have been shown to cause laboratory experiments involving rats.
   Tug implies we’d all be better off if we drank 7-Up, which does not contain caffeine. He neglects to point out that 7-Up contains sugar, which, as you are no doubt aware, usually causes instant death. But I can’t blame Tug for forgetting to warn us about sugar: nobody can keep up with all the things you’re not supposed to eat and drink, because scientists come up with new ones all the time.
   You young readers should feel very fortunate to live in an era in which we know how dangerous everything is. When I was a child, people thought everything was safe except communism, smutty books, and tobacco, and a lot of people weren’t sure about tobacco. For example, the cigarette manufacturers thought tobacco was fine, and as a public service they ran many advertisements in which attractive persons offered thoughtful scientific arguments in favor of smoking, such as: “Luckies separate the men from the boys ... but not from the girls,” and “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.”
   But then the U.S. Surgeon General, who is the highest-ranking surgeon in the Army, decided that cigarettes are bad for people, and recommended that the manufacturers put little warnings on cigarette packs. Congressmen from tobacco-growing states offered to help with the wording, so at first the warning was a bit vague:
   NOTE—The U.S. Surgeon General thinks that cigarettes could possibly be somewhat less than ideal in terms of your health, but of course he could be wrong.
   But over the years the warning has gotten stronger, so now it says:
   WARNING—Cigarettes will kill you, you stupid jerk.
   These days the government won’t even allow cigarette manufacturers to advertise on television. All you see are those public health commercials in which smug ten-year-old girls order you not to smoke, to the point where you want to rush right out and inhale an entire pack of unfiltered Camels just for spite.
   Some of you may be wondering why the same government that goes around warning people not to smoke also subsidizes farmers who grow tobacco. The answer is that the government is afraid that if it stops paying the farmers to grow tobacco, they’ll start doing something even worse, such as growing opium or beating crippled children with baseball bats. So the government figures the wisest course is to pay them to grow tobacco, then warn people not to smoke it.
   The anti-smoking campaign was such a hit that the government decided to investigate the chemicals that make diet soft drinks taste sweet. Researchers wearing white laboratory coats filled a huge vat with Tab and dropped rats into it from a sixty-foot-high catwalk, and they noticed that most of the rats died, some before they even reached the vat. So the government banned the chemicals, but the diet-soda manufacturers immediately developed new ones, which also failed the vat test. At this point, the government realized that the manufacturers could come up with chemicals as fast as it could ban them, and that at the rate things were going the country would face a major rat shortage. So the government decided to let the manufacturers keep their chemicals, but it ordered them to put a little warning on diet-soft-drink containers that says: “Do not put this product in a big vat and drop rats into it from a catwalk.”
   Nowadays, Warning the Public is a major industry. Every schoolchild knows the hazards associated with cigarettes, caffeine, diet soft drinks, sugar, alcohol, dairy products, nondairy products, electronic games, air, league bowling, and chemicals in general. Any day now, you’ll pick up the newspaper and read:
   BOSTON—Laboratory scientists at a very major scientific university announced today that everything is terribly, terribly dangerous. Dr. Creston L Pesthole, who headed the research project, said scientists got a bunch of rats and just let them lead normal lives—eating, drinking, sleeping, watching television, making appointments, etc. “They all died within a matter of days,” reported Dr. Pesthole. “Most of them had cancer. Some of them also had irregular bowel movements.” Dr. Pesthole said the scientists weren’t sure what the study proves, but they feel the government ought to do something about it.
   Until we get that Final Warning, we’ll all have to make do as best we can. I, for one, plan to consume nothing but filtered rainwater. For amusement, I may take a chance on some smutty books.

Taxation Without Reservation

A Taxing Proposal

   Here it is again, income tax time, and I imagine many of you readers, especially the ones with smaller brains, are eagerly awaiting my annual tax advice column. Those of you who were fortunate enough to read last year’s column no doubt recall that I advised you to cheat, on the grounds that by reducing the amount of money you gave the government, you’d be supporting President Reagan in his program to reduce government spending. I’m proud to report that many of you went all out to support the President, and I’m sure he’d thank you personally if the Secret Service allowed him to visit federal prisons.
   But this year we have an entirely new plan, taxwise. This year, President Reagan needs all the money he can get, because he was going over the figures recently with his aides, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and they noticed that the government was going to be short by something like $200 billion. “Gosh,” chuckled the President. “That’s even bigger than those humongous deficits the Democrats used to run up when I went around making fun of them on the radio! Why, for all the difference I’ve made in the past two years, the nation might just as well have had Ted Kennedy as president! Or a toaster!” Then they all had a good laugh and decided to jack up taxes. The other option, of course, was to cut government spending, but they rejected that because they have already cut spending to the bone in the form of raising it by about $100
   billion a year.
   The Democrats are happy as clams about raising taxes. The Democrats believe that if God did not want them to raise taxes, He would not have created the Internal Revenue Service. So finally, after two years of bickering, the President and the Democrats are beginning to see eye-to-eye on the importance of taking money away from the public. Recently, for example, the Democrats supported the President’s plan to have a new gasoline tax under which the government will take $50 billion from motorists such as yourself! This will create jobs. See, if you were allowed to keep the money, you wouldn’t create jobs with it. You’d just throw it into the bushes or something. But the government will spend it, thereby creating jobs. In this case, the government will spend the $50 billion on a major road-repair program, including several million dollars for highway-construction signs that say:
   CONGRESSMAN ROBERT “BOB” LUNGER and the United States Department of Transportation are pleased to announce that for the next 86.8 miles there will be federal traffic cones all over the place and hundreds of friends and relatives of a contractor who contributed to the campaign of CONGRESSMAN ROBERT “BOB” LUNGER standing around with red flags directing traffic so casually that they may occasionally wave your car right into an oncoming tractor-trailer filled with propane gas, sorry for the inconvenience, but as CONGRESSMAN ROBERT “BOB” LUNGER pointed out when he flew in by federal helicopter to make a speech taking credit for this $364.7 million highway-repair project, we cannot allow our nation’s highways to deteriorate, especially the ones that provide access to land owned by CONGRESSMAN ROBERT “BOB” LUNGER. Thank you.
   But the $50 billion won’t be nearly enough to allow Congress to create jobs on the level it would like. And on top of that, President Reagan needs money to buy additional exploding devices to defend you with. So what can you, the ordinary taxpayer, do to help? Here’s what: this year, when you prepare your income tax return, I want you to lie in the government’s favor. I want you to declare more income than you actually received, and I want you to deliberately fail to report large numbers of legitimate deductions.
   Some of you will be caught, of course. Some of you may be called in to face IRS audits. You may even be forced to accept a large refund, thus depriving the government of money it could have used for your benefit. These risks are unavoidable, but they can be minimized if a few of us continue to cheat, so the IRS will be less likely to see any particular pattern. I’m willing to volunteer to be one of the few. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

Our Patriotic Booty

   I say we all help President Reagan cut government waste. I say we cheat on our income taxes this year.
   I mean, let’s face it: the reason the government wastes hundreds of billions of dollars is that we give it hundreds of billions of dollars. Even an intelligent organization would have trouble spending that much money usefully; the government can’t even come close. So it ends up spending money on things like the Office for Micronesian Status Negotiations. I am serious. According to the Congressional Directory, one of the things the government spends your money on is an office devoted to negotiating the status of Micronesia. I’m not saying its employees are goofing off. I’m sure they get up early in the morning, negotiate the status of Micronesia all day, then come home and collapse. I’m just saying that if they haven’t been able to get Micronesia straightened out after all these years, then the hell with Micronesia.
   Now I know President Reagan has promised to comb through the budget and get rid of everything we don’t need except nuclear weapons, but I seriously doubt he’ll ever even notice the Office for Micronesian Status Negotiations, let alone the International Pacific Halibut Commission. You didn’t know we had a Halibut Commission, did you? Well, we do. It’s in Seattle, Washington. When the folks at the Halibut Commission answer the phone, they say: “Good morning, Halibut Commission.” They’re just as bold as brass about it. No shame whatsoever. They know Ron will never find out about them, and even if he does, some congressman will claim the Halibut Commission is vital and therefore needs the support of all taxpayers, including the ones who live in Kentucky and don’t even like halibut. And then some other congressman will say: “Well, if you’re going to keep the Halibut Commission, I’m going to keep the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission.” Before long, the budget will be bigger than it was when Ron started to cut it.
   So let’s help Ron out: let’s keep the money out of the government’s hands altogether. Let’s each claim an extra thirty or forty dependents on our tax returns this year. We should view it as our patriotic duty, sort of like buying war bonds.
   Another patriotic thing we can do is send Ron lists of government activities we do not want to pay for anymore. The top item on my list is newsletters from congressmen. The way I see it, we taxpayers have an agreement with our congressmen: we give them fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year each and offices and staffs and traveling expenses and cheap haircuts and subsidized dining rooms and other privileges, and in return they go away for two years. If we valued them or their opinions, we never would have voted to send them away in the first place. The last thing we want them to do is clutter up our mailboxes with accounts of their activities:
   Dear 647th Congressional District Resident:
   I’m just taking a minute out from my hectic schedule down here in the nation’s capital to let you know that my schedule down here is very hectic. As a member of the House Joint Plumbing Committee’s Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Spigots and Drains, I recently went on a two-week Special Fact-Finding Mission to Rio de Janeiro. Here’s the fact I found: In the Southern Hemisphere, water goes down the drain in a clockwise direction, whereas in the Northern Hemisphere, which includes the 647th Congressional District, water goes down the drain in a counter-clockwise direction. Or else it’s the other way around. Next month, I plan to go to Argentina to determine which way water goes down the drain there, and whether any of this is related to the spread of International Communism.
   All the best,
   Congressman Bob Bugpit
   Here are some other government activities I don’t want to pay for anymore:
   National weeks and months, as in National Seedless Prune Week or National Faucet Repair Month. All programs that are administered by people whose titles contain more than three words. Take, for example, the National Science Foundation’s Division of Engineering. The Division Director, Physics, could stay, because his title contains just three words. But the Division Director, Division of Polar Programs, would be given two weeks to clear out his or her desk and find useful work. And the Executive Assistant, Planning and Evaluation, Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences, would be taken out and shot.

Taxpayer’s Blues

   I am beginning to suspect that many of your big-time Washington national news reporters have coleslaw for brains. My evidence is that for the past few months they have been telling us that the Reagan administration and the Congress are busy reducing government spending. You can’t pick up a newspaper or turn on a television newscast without reading or hearing about all these drastic budget cuts. If you were a very stupid person, you might get the impression that the administration and the Congress really are reducing government spending. This, of course, is utterly ridiculous.
   The big-time Washington national news reporters evidently have fallen into the obvious trap of believing that politicians actually intend to do what they say they intend to do. Administration officials say they intend to reduce government spending. Most senators say they intend to reduce government spending. And most members of the House of Representatives say they, too, intend to reduce government spending. Only a fool would conclude that they intend to do anything but increase government spending.
   And they will increase it. No matter what budget they end up adopting, next year the government will spend more money, and collect more taxes, than it does this year. If you don’t believe me, look it up.
   What happened is that just before he left office, Jimmy Carter (remember Jimmy Carter?) proposed to increase the federal budget enormously. Then along came Ronald Reagan, the Taxpayer’s Friend, the Foe of Big Government. Ron decided to replace Jimmy’s enormous budget increase with one that was merely huge. So for the last few months, the politicians have been arguing over whether to increase the budget enormously or just hugely. The news media refer to this process as “Cutting” the budget.
   The best way to understand this whole issue is to look at what the government does: it takes money away from some people, keeps a bunch of it, and gives the rest to other people. This means there are two kinds of people in the United States:
   People who pay more to the government than they get from it (taxpayers); People who get more from the government than they pay to it (senators, welfare recipients, cabinet members, defense contractors, government employees, etc.)
   So if you are just a plain old ordinary taxpayer, the Great Budget Debate doesn’t really concern you. One way or another, the government is going to spend more of your money; the only real issue is who is going to get it.
   For the past forty years, the government preferred to use your money for Social Programs. Most of these are aimed at Helping the Poor. Now the problem poor people have is obvious: they don’t have enough money. They can’t afford food, housing, or medical care. The simple, obvious, efficient way for the government to help them is to give them money so they can buy these things. So that is not how the government does it.
   See, if the government merely gave money to poor people, no matter how inefficiently it did it, it would need only one bureaucracy. This would force a lot of people to leave government employment and find honest work. So instead of simply giving money to poor people, the government Administers Programs for them. You’ve got your food programs. You’ve got your housing programs. You’ve got your medical care programs. And so on. This way you get lots of administrators. You also guarantee that poor people remain poor, since they’re so busy being administered they don’t have time to work. This is fine with the poverty-program administrators; the worst possible thing that could happen to them is for poor people to stop being poor. If that happened, the administrators would have nothing to administer. But fortunately, poverty has continued; in fact, it has been a major growth industry. A lot of people have made very good livings Helping the Poor.
   Then along came Ronald Reagan. Ron believes taxpayers are tired of having their money taken away and used for massive, inefficient social programs. He wants to take their money away and use it for massive, inefficient defense programs. So the poverty-program administrators are extremely unhappy, while the defense-program administration are tickled pink. But they have the same problem the social-program administrators had: They have to figure out how to spend the extra billions on defense without actually making the country any safer, because if they really do make it safer, they won’t be able to demand more money.
   This is tough, because the United States is obviously not directly threatened except by Russian missiles, and we already have enough missiles to blow up the whole world if the Russians ever attack us. So the defense program administrators have come up with a very imaginative plan: they have decided to defend virtually every country in the world other than Russia and its allies. Since most of these countries are hopelessly unstable, we could spend every dollar every taxpayer ever earns to defend them and never come close to succeeding. But the defense-program administrators will certainly be busy.
   Right now, for example, they are busily administering the defense of El Salvador, a wretched little country that has suddenly become Vital to Our National Security. According to many people familiar with El Salvador, including a former U.S. ambassador there, the El Salvadoran government spends much of its time shooting El Salvadorans. But our government is sending them arms anyway. I mean, it has to do something with the money. Anything but let taxpayers keep it.

The Media Is The Mess-Up

Perking Up The News

   One swell thing about the United States is that newspapers can print whatever stories they want. Another one is that nobody has to read them.
   In the United States, the press is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” No, wait, that’s the Ten Commandments. Anyway, whatever the Constitution says about the press, we Americans should be darned glad it says it. In the Soviet Union, the press is controlled by the official news agency, Tass, which is always giving out highly amusing versions of world events:
   MOSCOW—Tass, the official Soviet news agency, announced today that Soviet troops have entered Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Iran, Albania, Mongolia, Egypt, Norway, and Saskatchewan at the request of liberation movements fighting the western capitalist colonialist Zionist hegemony of running-dog pipe-carrying widow-stabbing baby-eating lackeys of United States imperialism. Tass said the Soviet forces will ride around in nuclear-powered tanks until the various countries are safe from the threat of further oppression.
   I imagine the Russian people regard Tass as a major chuckle. I bet they can’t wait to see the paper each day, so they can read what isn’t going on in the rest of the world. In fact, this is the big advantage their system has over ours: since the Russian government always lies, the people can safely assume that the opposite of whatever Tass says is true. Over here, things are more complicated. Our government lies a lot, too, but it can’t force the newspapers to print the lies accurately. From time to time the reporters try to get at the truth, and once in a great while they succeed. So you can be fairly sure you’re reading lies, but, unlike the Russians, you can never really count on it. The only reliable parts of American newspapers are horoscopes, weather forecasts, and economic outlooks, which are all consistently false.
   Another problem with American newspapers is that they are positively obsessed with boring issues. Take the Helsinki Accords. You don’t care about the Helsinki Accords, and neither does any other normal person. You can go into every bar and shopping center in America, and you will never once hear anyone say: “Hey, how about them Helsinki Accords?” But newspapers will drone on and on about them at the slightest provocation.
   Newspapers are also inordinately fond of writing about statements by presidential press secretaries. No presidential press secretary in the history of the United States has ever said anything newsworthy. I mean, his whole job is to make sure nobody has the vaguest idea what the President is thinking. Nevertheless, every morning dozens of Washington reporters troop into the press secretary’s office and write down everything he says:
   PRESS SECRETARY: I wish to correct the accounts that appeared in some newspapers yesterday quoting me as stating that the President’s mood is one of Restrained Optimism. I did not state that. I stated that the President’s mood is one of Guarded Optimism.
   REPORTER: Does this represent a change in the President’s mood?
   PRESS SECRETARY: It does not represent a change from yesterday. The President has been in a consistently Guardedly Optimistic mood for two days now.
   Now at this point, your average citizen would be asleep. But the Washington reporters think this stuff is dynamite. They’re wetting their pants over the President’s mood. They all go roaring out to find some presidential aide, who tells them, in strictest confidence, that despite what the press secretary would have them believe, the President’s mood is actually one of Hopeful Caution.
   The next day all the papers run page-one presidential-mood stories long enough to choke Brahma bulls. The reporters read them. The President’s aides read them. Everybody else, including the President, turns directly to the sports section.
   I think British newspapers have a much better approach. They ignore the official actions of the government, which hasn’t done anything in forty years anyway, and focus on something readers can respond to: sex. If you read the headlines in British newspapers, you get the impression that everybody in the government, with the possible exception of the Queen, is a pervert:
   EIGHT MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT ARRESTED IN BED WITH NEWTS, CALLIOPE
   This is the kind of story you can sink your teeth into, so to speak. I’d like to see American newspapers try the same sort of thing on the Reagan administration. Let’s face it: the Reagan administration is full of really boring-looking guys, guys who have investment portfolios and matching pen-and-pencil sets. If the newspapers write about what these guys say, the entire country will be asleep in a matter of weeks. People will be nodding off at work, in their cars, at the controls of commercial airliners. The country will collapse. The newspapers should see it as their duty to print stories about high-level sex. They wouldn’t even have to lie:
   WASHINGTON—AN in-depth examination of the statements of Vice President George Bush reveals he has never publicly denied having spent two weeks in a motel with a lawn tractor.
   Imagine seeing that in, say, the New York Times. It would turn the country around. People would start to care about public affairs again.

Junkyard Journalism

   I bet you don’t read the National Enquirer or any of the other publications sold at supermarket check-out counters. I bet you think these publications are written for people with the intellectual depth of shrubs, people who need detailed, written instructions to put their shoes on correctly.
   Well, you’re missing a lot. I have taken to reading check-out-counter publications, and I have picked up scads of useful information. For example, a recent Enquirer issue contains a story headlined “Whatever Happened to the Cast of ‘The Flying Nun’?” Now here is a vital story most of the so-called big-time newspapers didn’t have the guts to print. I mean, while the New York Times and the Washington Post were frittering away their space on stories about Alexander Haig, millions of people all over America were tossing and turning at night, wondering what happened to the cast of “The Flying Nun.” All over the country, you’d see little knots of people huddling together and asking each other: “Remember Marge Redmond, who played Sister Jacqueline in ‘The Flying Nun’? Whatever happened to her?”
   Well, the Enquirer has the answer. Somehow, an Enquirer reporter got Marge’s agent to reveal that Marge has appeared in commercials for Tide, Bravo, Betty Crocker, and Ajax. “But,” adds the agent, “she is perhaps best known as Sara Tucker of Sara Tucker’s Inn on the Cool Whip commercials.”
   I, for one, was stunned by this revelation. Believe it or not, I had never made the connection between Sister Jacqueline and Sara Tucker. Now, of course, it seems obvious: only an actress skilled enough to perform in “The Flying Nun” would be able to convincingly portray a woman who is so deranged that she puts huge globs of Cool Whip on her desserts at what is supposed to be a good restaurant. But without the Enquirer I would never have known.
   And without the National Examiner, which is like the Enquirer except it uses even smaller words, I would never have found out that
   40 VAMPIRES ROAM NORTH AMERICA
   This extremely scientific story reports on the research of Dr. Stephen Kaplan, a parapsychologist who founded the Vampire Research Center. I got the impression that Dr. Kaplan is the Vampire Research Center, but the story never makes this clear. It also doesn’t say where he got his degree in parapsychology, but we can safely assume it was someplace like Harvard.
   Anyway, Dr. Kaplan sent questionnaires to people who requested mail from the center, and forty responded that, yes indeed, they are vampires. In a way, this cheered me up. I mean, I always thought of vampires as evil, uncooperative persons of Central European descent who never even file income tax returns, and here we have forty of them who cheerfully fill out questionnaires for the Vampire Research Center.
   Dr. Kaplan, who (surprise!) plans to write a book about vampires, believes there are lots more vampires around. “This probably represents the tip of the vampire iceberg,” he told the Examiner, which knows a good metaphor when it hears one. If Dr. Kaplan is correct, I imagine that before long we’ll have a federal law requiring large companies to hire a certain percentage of vampires. They have been discriminated against long enough.
   Here are some more stories you missed: “Bingo Can Restore the Will to Live On,” “$50 Operation to Restore Virginity....,” “A Machine Chewed Up My Legs,” “Cancer Ruins Sex,” “Dead Man Thanks Killer” and “34 Years in a Haunted House.” The last one is about a Massachusetts man and woman whose house is occupied by a ghost that does terrifying things, such as caressing the woman’s brow with ghostly fingers when she’s reading. By way of proof, the article is accompanied by an actual photograph of the woman reading.
   Check-out-counter publications also perform valuable services for their readers. The Examiner has a psychic named Maria who uses her incredible psychic ability to answer baffling questions, such as “Dear Maria: A man I am dating keeps asking me to spank him. What should I do?” To which Maria replies: “Dump him. He’s nuts.” And some people have the nerve to claim that psychics are frauds.
   But the best part of check-out-counter publications is the advertisements. They can make you rich. I, for one, never realized how much money you can make stuffing envelopes, but according to the ads in the Enquirer and the Examiner, the sky is the limit. I mean, people are willing to pay you thousands of dollars a week to stuff envelopes. I figure there must be a catch. For one thing, they never tell you what you have to stuff the envelopes with. Maybe it’s poison spiders. That would explain the high pay.
   Another ad I saw in the Examiner just intrigues me. The headline says: JESUS IS HERE. Now I am going to quote very carefully from the ad, because otherwise you won’t believe me:
   Tired of money-mad ministers and physicians? Free, drugless urine cures all ills, increases energy and intelligence and is prescribed in the Bible ... Due to its Ammuno-genetic qualities, urine is the only antidote for nuclear radiation ... If you are not fully convinced that the course heralds the Second Coming of Christ, return it in perfect condition for a full refund ...
   The course costs seventy-five dollars; otherwise I would have sent for it already. I am very curious about it, and even more curious about the person who wrote it. I strongly suspect he’s one of the people who responded to Dr. Kaplan’s vampire survey.

Bring Back Captain Video

   If we’re ever going to return the United States to its glory days (August 14 and 15, 1955) we’re going to have to do something about television. This country has been going downhill ever since they took the Ed Sullivan show off the air, and I say we should bring it back. Some of you may argue that Ed Sullivan is dead, but I don’t see how that would affect his judgment or delivery in the slightest. Ed knew talent when he saw it. He discovered such acts as the little dogs that wore dresses and walked around on their hind legs for twenty or thirty minutes while the audience, whose average IQ could not have been higher than eighteen, roared with laughter. That was entertainment. If we had Ed Sullivan back, we wouldn’t spend Sunday evenings being depressed by “60 Minutes”:
   “Good evening, I’m Mike Wallace. Tonight on ‘60 Minutes’ we will explain why the Earth will be covered with a sheet of ice eight miles thick within the next fifteen years; we talk to a government researcher who has discovered that, because of a manufacturing defect, 93 percent of the refrigerators in the United States could explode at the slightest touch; and Andy Rooney will take an amusing look at whisk brooms.”
   Another show we could do without is “Phil Donahue”:
   “Hi, and welcome to the Phil Donahue show. My guest today is Wesley Snate, who was convicted in 1979 of charges that he bludgeoned roughly three hundred Los Angeles-area French poodles to death. Mr. Snate has written a very sensitive and moving book about his experience, entitled They Deserved It, and I have invited him on the show so I can ask him many sensitive and insightful questions so our viewing audience will gain a deeper understanding of dog bludgeoners and perhaps buy his book.”
   The trouble with Phil’s approach is that, with all his tiptoeing around, he hardly ever gets around to the really depraved stuff everybody is tuned in to hear. For sheer depravity, Phil’s show can’t hold a candle to the old “Queen for a Day” show, in which deranged housewives competed to see who had the most miserable life:
   FIRST CONTESTANT: My husband had a stroke and he lost his job and our house got repossessed so we had to live under a sheet of plywood in the supermarket parking lot but when it got cold our kids got tuberculosis except the youngest who got kidney disease so we built a fire under there to keep warm but the plywood caught fire and burned up my insulin and all our clothes so I had to wrap the kids in discarded plastic garbage bags which is giving them a rash.
   SECOND CONTESTANT: Well, I have cancer, of course, and my husband was hit by a truck which gave him amnesia and he wandered off and I haven’t seen him since which would be okay except he had just withdrawn our life savings so we could pay for an operation for little Theodora who has lost the use of her fingers because of rat bites and can’t tend little Buford’s iron lung when I’m out picking through the garbage for supper.
   THIRD CONTESTANT: Well my problem is that ... arghhhhh. (The third contestant keels over and dies.)
   Then the audience would applaud each contestant, and the one who got the most applause would win an Amana freezer. It was a terrific show.
   We’re also going to have to do something about children’s television. Today’s children watch shows like “Sesame Street,” which teaches them that the world is full of friendly interracial adults and cute puppets and letters that form recognizable patterns. This is, of course, a pack of lies. When I was a kid, in New York, my friends and I watched shows like “Captain Video,” which taught us that the world was full of evil forces trying to destroy the earth, which turns out to be absolutely correct.
   “Captain Video” consisted of five episodes a week, no one of which cost more than eleven dollars to produce. The episodes always took place in Captain Video’s spaceship. It was an extremely low budget spaceship. For ex ample, Captain Video’s radio was a regular telephone handset, except he held it as if it were a microphone and talked into the listening end.
   In a typical episode, Captain Video’s spaceship would be under attack by an evil alien warlord who had a robot named Tobor (get it?). The evil alien would order Tobor, who was played by a stagehand wearing cardboard boxes wrapped in aluminum foil, to attack. “Kill, Tobor, kill,” he would say, and the stagehand would go lumbering toward Captain Video. Just when he got close, Captain Video would come up with this brilliant idea: he would say “Go back, Tobor, go back.” Then the stagehand would start lumbering toward the evil alien. Then there would be some commercials. Then the alien would say “Kill, Tobor, kill,” again, and the stagehand would start toward Captain Video again, and Captain Video would say “Go back, Tobor, go back” again, and there would be more commercials, and before you knew it the half hour had just flown by. Kids today don’t get that kind of drama.
   They also don’t get Meaningful Social Lessons, the kind we got from shows about cowboys and Indians. These shows taught us that not all Indians were savage killers. For example, Tonto was a good Indian. As I recall, all the others were savage killers.

In Depth, But Shallowly

   If you want to take your mind off the troubles of the real world, you should watch local TV news shows. I know of no better way to escape reality except perhaps heavy drinking.
   Local TV news programs have given a whole new definition to the word news. To most people, news means information about events that affect a lot of people. On local TV news shows, news means anything that you can take a picture of, especially if a local TV News Personality can stead in front of it. This is why they are so fond of car accidents, burning buildings, and crowds: these are good for standing in front of. On the other hand, local TV news shows tend to avoid stories about things that local TV News Personalities cannot stand in front of, such as budgets and taxes and the economy. If you want to get a local TV news show to do a story on the budget, your best bet is to involve it in a car crash.
   I travel around the country a lot, and as far as I can tell, virtually all local TV news shows follow the same format. First you hear some exciting music, the kind you hear in space movies, while the screen shows local TV News Personalities standing in front of various News Events. Then you hear the announcer:
   ANNOUNCER: From the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News Studios, this is the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News, featuring Anchorman Wilson Westbrook, Co-Anchorperson Stella Snape, Minority-Group Member James Edwards, Genial Sports Personality Jim Johnson, Humorous Weatherperson Dr. Reed Stevens, and Norm Perkins on drums. And now, here’s Wilson Westbrook.
   WESTBROOK: Good evening. Tonight from the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness news studios we have actual color film of a burning building, actual color film of two cars after they ran into each other, actual color film of the front of a building in which one person shot another person, actual color film of another burning building, and special reports on roller-skating and child abuse. But for the big story tonight, we go to City Hall, where On-the-Spot reporter Reese Kernel is standing live.
   KERNEL: I am standing here live in front of City Hall being televised by the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News minicam with Mayor Bryce Hallbread.
   MAYOR: That’s “Hallwood.” KERNEL: What?
   MAYOR: My name is “Hallwood.” You said “Hallbread.” KERNEL: Look, Hallbread, do you want to be on the news or don’t you?
   MAYOR: Yes, of course, it’s just that my name is ...
   KERNEL: Listen, this is the top-rated news show in the three-county area, and if you think I have time to memorize every stupid detail, you’d better think again.
   MAYOR: I’m sorry. “Hallbread” is fine, really.
   KERNEL: Thank you, Mayor Hallbread. And now back to Wilson Westbrook in the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News Studios.
   WESTBROOK: Thank you, Reese; keep us posted if anything further develops on that important story. And now, as I promised earlier, we have actual color film of various objects that either burned or crashed, which we will project on the screen behind me while I talk about them. Here is a building on fire. Here is another building on fire. Here is a car crash. This film was shot years ago, but you can safely assume that objects just like these crashed or burned in the three-county area today. And now we go to my Co-Anchorperson, Stella Snape, for a Special Report on her exhaustive three-week investigation into the problem of child abuse in the three-county area. Well, Stella, what did you find?
   SNAPE: Wilson, I found that Child abuse is very sad. What happens is that people abuse children. It’s just awful. Here you see some actual color film of me standing in front of a house. Most of your child abuse occurs in houses. Note that I am wearing subdued colors.
   WESTBROOK (reading from a Script): Are any efforts under way here in the three-county area to combat child abuse?
   SNAPE: YeS.
   WESTBROOK: Thank you, Stella, for that informative report. On the lighter side, On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness Reporter Terri Tompkins has prepared a three-part series on roller-skating in the three-county area.
   TOMPKINS: Roller-skating has become a major craze in California and the three-county area, as you can see by this actual color film of me on roller skates outside the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News Studio. This certainly is a fun craze. Tomorrow, in Part Two of this series, we’ll see actual color film of me falling down. On Wednesday we’ll see me getting up.
   WESTBROOK: We’ll look forward to those reports. Our next story is from Minority-Group Reporter James Edwards, who, as he has for the last 324
   consecutive broadcasts, spent the day in the minority-group sector of the three-county area finding out what minorities think.
   EDWARDS: Wilson, I’m standing in front of a crowd of minority-group members, and as you can see, their mood is troubled. (The crowd smiles and waves at the camera.)
   WESTBROOK: Good report, James. Well, we certainly had a sunny day here in the three-county area, didn’t we, Humorous Weatherperson Dr. Reed Stevens?
   STEVENS: Ha ha. We sure did, though I’m certainly troubled by that very troubling report Stella did on child abuse. But we should see continued warm weather through Wednesday. Here are a bunch of charts showing the relative humidity and stuff like that. Ha ha.
   WESTBROOK: Ha ha. Well, things weren’t nearly as bright on the sports scene, were they, Genial Sports Personality Jim Johnson? JOHNSON: No, Wilson, they certainly weren’t. The Three-County Community College Cutlasses lost their fourth consecutive game today. Here you see actual color footage of me watching the game from the sidelines. The disgust is evident on my face. I intended to have actual color film of me interviewing the coach after the game, but the team bus crashed and everyone was killed.
   WESTBROOK: Thank you, Jim. And now, here is Basil Holp, the General Manager of KUSP-TV, to present an Editorial Viewpoint: HOLP: The management of KUSP-TV firmly believes that something ought to be done about earthquakes. From time to time we read in the papers that an earthquake has hit some wretched little country and knocked houses down and killed people. This should not be allowed to continue. Maybe we should have a tax or something. What the heck, we can afford it. The management of KUSP-TV is rolling in money.
   ANNOUNCER: The preceding was the opinion of the management of KUSP-TV. People with opposing points of view are probably in the vast majority.
   WESTBROOK: Well, that wraps up tonight’s version of the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News. Tune in tonight to see essentially the same stories.