Bad Habits

by Dave Barry

  Governmental Follies

  Fungus On The Economy

  I don’t know about you, but I was ever so grateful when President Reagan and several other top leaders got together recently and straightened out the world economy. I had been meaning to do something about it myself, but I never found the time on account of we’ve had a lot of rain lately, which has caused these fungal growths to sprout all over the lawn.

  I am not talking here about toadstools. I am talking about organisms reminiscent of the one that nearly ate the diner in the Ingmar Bergman film The Blob before Steve McQueen subdued it with a fire extinguisher. Of course Steve had to deal with just the one lone, isolated growth, whereas I have several dozen, and I couldn’t possibly extinguish them all if they attacked in unison. Eventually they’re going to figure this out. I mean, they may be fungal growths, but they’re not stupid.

  Anyway, with all this on my mind I’ve had very little time to spend on the world economy, which is why I was so glad to hear that the leaders of the economic bloc known to economists as the Big Rich Western Nations with Indoor Plumbing and Places That Sell Cheeseburgers met in Williamsburg to straighten things out. Williamsburg is an authentic colonial restored place in Virginia where people in authentic uncomfortable clothing demonstrate how horrible it was to live in historical colonial times. Back then, if you wanted one crummy bar of soap, you had to spend the better part of a week melting beeswax and rending pigs and all the other degrading things people did before the invention of the supermarket. This is how people still live in a lot of wretched little Third World nations with names like Koala Paroondi, whose leaders were not invited to Williamsburg because the Western leaders were afraid they’d eat all the food.

  The economic summit cost something like eight million dollars, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize it lasted almost four days. The reason it took the leaders so long to straighten out the world economy is that they had to wrestle with some very complex issues. For example, I read in Newsweek that French President Mitterand does not like white sauces, and West German Chancellor Kohl does not like seafood, and so on. These high-level food differences often resulted in Frank Exchanges of Views during the summit meals:

  FRENCH PRESIDENT MITTERAND: Please pass the tiny lobsters dish.

  BRITISH PRIME MINISTER THATCHER: Those are not “tiny lobsters.” Those are crayfish.

  MITTERAND: Fish? Do not make me laugh. I represent the greatest food snots in the world, and I know what is the fish and what is not the fish, and this is not the fish. Regard: it has the claws. Does this fish of the cray have the claws?

  THATCHER: Yes, you twit. It’s a crustacean.

  MITTERAND: Perhaps I am a twit, but at least I am not wearing the tweedy British clothings of such monumental dowdiness that a dog would be reluctant to relieve itself upon them.

  Another problem was interest rates. Interest rates are very high, and the leaders spent a lot of time during their high-level meals trying to come up with a solution. Finally—and this just goes to show you why these people are world leaders and you are a mere taxpayer—they decided that interest rates ought to come down. It’s a radical plan, but it just might work.

  From the United States’ point of view, the big issue at Williamsburg was unfair foreign competition, which means any competition that involves foreigners. At one time, the foreigners competed fairly: they made chocolates and little carved-wood figurines, and we made everything else. Then, without warning, foreigners began making reasonably priced, well-made, technologically advanced cars, television sets, shoes, mushrooms, etc., and they forced Americans to buy these things at gunpoint. President Reagan discussed this problem at Williamsburg with Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone, and they hammered out an agreement under which the Japanese will continue to send us cars, but they’ll start putting defects in them. We’re going to give them technical assistance: we’re going to send people over there to train Japanese factory workers to be hostile and alienated and put the transmission in wrong and stuff like that.

  At the end of the summit, the leaders issued a major economic-policy statement that nobody read except the editors of the New York Times, and everybody went home. The world economy began to improve almost immediately. Even as you read these words, the yen is rising vs. the franc. Or else it’s failing. You may rest assured that the yen is doing whatever it does vs. the franc when things are improving. Also the other day my son ran his tricycle over one of the growths, and the growth let him off with only a sharp reprimand. So things are really looking up.

  Give Wall Street Credit

  I think I’ll just quickly bring us all up to date on President Reagan’s plan to save the economy, so we can get back to whatever we were doing.

  The big problem is Wall Street, which is a street in New York City where people go every day to work themselves into a lather. To understand how Wall Street works, all you have to do is recall those television commercials for a major Wall Street brokerage firm, the ones that feature cattle. It is not mere chance that the firm chose cattle as its symbol. If you spend much time with cattle, you know they spend their time making cattle mess and panicking. The scene is pretty much the same on Wall Street, except the herd members carry briefcases. They are very skittery, and for good reason: They are in the world’s silliest business. Here’s how it works:

  Say a company wants some money. It prints up a batch of pieces of paper (“stocks”), goes down to Wall Street, and looks around for some herd members to sell the paper to. “Hey there,” the company says to the herd members. “How would you like to own a piece of paper? Look at these features: It has an attractive border, three different colors of ink, and many financial words such as ‘accrual’ and ‘debenture’ printed right on it.” The herd members snuffle around for a while, then one of them bolts up and buys a piece of paper. Then, suddenly, they’re trampling all over each other to buy pieces of paper.

  The company now has a large sum of money, and it departs hurriedly, chuckling, to buy factories or executive washrooms or whatever. Gradually, the herd members realize that all they have is paper, which is utterly worthless unless they can get other herd members to buy it. So they all end up simply trading paper back and forth, day after day, year after year. Deep in their souls, they realize they are participating in an enormous hoax that could collapse at any moment, so any event, no matter how trivial, causes them to panic. You can pick up the newspaper financial section any day and read stories like this:

  NEW YORK—Stock prices plunged sharply today as investors reacted to the discovery that Saturn actually has six moons, rather than five as was believed previously.

  So the stock market is always skittering up and down. When Ronald Reagan was elected, it skittered up for a while, because Ron promised he would reduce government spending. Wall Street fears the government because the government is Wall Street’s major competitor in the worthless pieces-of-paper business.

  But it turned out that what Ron really meant was he was going to reduce one kind of government spending, so he could spend more money on the MX Missile, the B-1 Bomber, the Cruise Missile, the Atomic Dirigible, the Secret Decoder Ring, and the Deadly Outer Space Death Ray. So he ended up with a budget that actually increases government spending, for the 206th year in a row.

  Once Wall Street realized what Ron had done, it worked itself into an even bigger panic than usual. Ron has been trying to calm it down, but the herd members are too busy barging around, wild-eyed, waving their pieces of paper. Ron may have to go to Wall Street personally and deliver a soothing speech. “There, there,” he would tell the herd. “There, there.”

  Ron’s other big problem is the Federal Reserve Board. Nobody knows much about the Federal Reserve Board: it is a secret society whose members periodically emerge from their mountain hideout, raise the interest rates, then scurry off into the darkness. This forces the banks to raise the prime rate, which is the rate they charge customers who do not want or need money.

 
; One result of all this interest-rate-raising is that financial institutions have cooked up all kinds of bizarre schemes to get you to give them money. You can’t pick up a newspaper or turn on the television these days without seeing advertisements for these schemes:

  “Attention savers: If you invest in our new All Savers Money Market Fund Treasury Bond Certificates of Deposit, you can earn 23.6 percent interest, which, compounded hourly and during neap tides, will yield an actualized semiannual net deductible pretax liquid return of 41.7 percent, although of course your mileage may vary. If you are found guilty of premature withdrawal, the federal government requires us to send people around to break your legs, so be sure to thumb through the prospectus.”

  I have a lot of trouble understanding these schemes, so for the time being I am investing my money in groceries and consumer objects that I can charge on my Sears credit card.

  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 wh
ere 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