Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

by Dave Barry

  DISCUSSION QUESTION: Don’t you think David Hartman is just a little too avuncular? Why?

  So I propose that we laypersons forget about historians and agree among ourselves to believe in a permanent set of historical facts once and for all. Specifically, I propose we use the facts contained in a book I found in my basement recently, called Civilization Past and Present, which was apparently one of my wife’s high-school textbooks.

  DISCUSSION QUESTION: Did she steal it? Or what?

  Civilization Past and Presentcombines the advantage of having a snappy title with the advantage of ending in 1962, just before history starts to get really depressing. It’s easy to understand, because my wife has underlined all the important words and phrases (Germany, for example). And it doesn’t beat around the bush. For example, on page 599 it makes the following statement in plain black and white: “The causes of the American Civil War are complex.”

  Since some of you laypersons out there may not have Civilization Past and Presentin your basements, here’s a brief summary to tide you over until you can get your own copies:

  HISTORY

  5,000,000,000 B.C.-1962

  After the Earth cooled, it formed an extremely fertile crescent containing primitive people such as the Hittites who believed in just the stupidest things you ever heard of. Then came Greece and Rome, followed by Asia. All of this came to a halt during the Middle Ages, which were caused by the Jutes and featured the following terms underlined by my wife: the steward, the bailiff, and the reeve. Next the Turks got way the hell over into France, after which there were towns. And the Magna Carta. Then France and England fought many wars that involved dates such as 1739 and were settled by the Treaty of Utrecht, which also was used to harness water power. By then the seeds had been sown for several World Wars and the Louisiana Purchase, but fortunately we now have a fairly peaceful atom. Now go fetch Grandpa some more bourbon.

  DEFINE THE FOLLOWING: “Avuncular.”

  Sock It To Me

  I woke up this morning experiencing several important concerns, which I would like to share with you here in the hope that they will add up to a large enough total word count so that I can go back to bed.

  CONCERN NUMBER ONE: Mr. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

  As you probably know, Mr. LaRouche is this person who has started his own political party and wishes to take over the country, which troubles many people because his views are somewhat unorthodox. (What I mean of course, is that he is as crazy as a bedbug. Where you have a brain, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., has a Whack-a-Mole game. But I am not about to state this in print, as I do not wish to have his ardent followers place poison snakes in my sock drawer.)

  Those of you who are frequent airline travelers are no doubt already familiar with Mr. LaRouche’s views, because they are displayed on posters attached to card tables at most major airports. Somehow, a year or so ago, the LaRouche people managed to get the lucrative Airport Lunatic concession away from the Moonies. What I suspect happened is that one day, on a prearranged signal, the LaRouche people sneaked up behind the Moonies and strangled them with their own little book bags, probably in full view of thousands of air travelers, who of course would not have objected. Many of them probably helped out by whapping the Moonies with their carry-on luggage. I know I would have.

  But then, two of Mr. LaRouche’s ardent followers won the Illinois Democratic primary nominations for secretary of state and lieutenant governor. This caused massive nationwide anxiety because of the unorthodoxy of their views, which, as far as we have been able to tell, involve shooting Jane Fonda with a laser beam from space. Not that I personally see anything wrong with these views! No sir! I don’t even have a sock drawer!

  But we do have to ask ourselves if we truly can afford, as a nation, to elect crazy people to a vital state office like lieutenant governor, which involves weighty responsibilities such as wearing a suit and phoning the governor every day to see if he’s dead. Because mark my words, if these people win in Illinois, they’ll go after higher and higher offices, until someday—I do not wish to alarm you, but we must be aware of the danger—we could have a situation where our top national leaders are going around babbling about laser beams from space. So I have called on you Illinois voters to come to your senses before the general election and take responsible citizen action in the form of moving to a more intelligent state. This is the perfect time to do so, thanks to declining oil prices.

  CONCERN NUMBER TWO: Declining oil prices

  Like many of you, I did not realize at first that the decline in oil prices was something to be concerned about. In fact, I viewed it as the first really positive development in this nation since jimmy Carter was attacked by the giant swimming rabbit. But then I started reading articles by leading nervous economists stating that the oil-price decline is a very bad thing, because it is causing severe hardships for the following groups:

  1. The OPEC nations.

  2. The U.S. oil industry.

  3. The big banks.

  4. Texans in general.

  When I read this, naturally my reaction as a concerned American, was hahahahahahahahaha.

  No, seriously, we need to be worried about declining oil prices, and I am going to explain why. The international economy is based on the U.S. dollar, which is trusted and respected throughout the world because it is the only major currency that does not look like it was designed by preschool children. The value of the dollar, in turn, depends on the investment savvy of big U.S. banks, which lend their dollars to the oil-rich Third World, which loses them gambling on rooster fights.

  This system worked well until the late 1970s, when the price of oil started to fall. This was caused by a decline in demand, which was caused by the fact that people couldn’t get their cars repaired, which was caused by the fact that the oil companies had bought all the independent garages and turned them into “self-service” stations selling a mutant assortment of retail goods and staffed by surly teenagers, so that God forbid you should have actual car trouble at one of these service stations because they would tow you away for blocking the access of customers wishing to purchase nasal spray and Slim Jims.

  So now the banks are stuck with a lot of oil, which they are trying to get rid of by converting it into VISA cards, which they offer to my wife. She gets six or seven VISA offers from desperate banks per business day. She got one recently from—I am not making this up—a bank in South Dakota. I didn’t even know they had banks in South Dakota, did you? What would people keep in them? Pelts?

  Well I don’t know about you, but I am uncomfortable with the idea of having a world economy dependent upon the VISA needs of my wife. She is only one person. That is the law. So I think we need to revamp the whole world economic structure, and the obvious first step is to require banks to repair cars. The supermarkets, which already cash checks, could take over the remaining functions currently performed by banks, such as lending money to the Third World and being closed. You would get your food at service stations, which would be required to get some new sandwiches. You would continue to buy gas at “convenience” stores. Illinois would be sold to wealthy Japanese investors. All these regulations would be enforced by laser beams from space.

  The D-Word

  There’s this sensitive issue that we in the news media are very reluctant to bring up.

  No. It isn’t condoms—We are totally comfortable, these days, doing lengthy stories about condoms: (“PASTELS OUT, EARTH TONES IN, FOR FALL CONDOM”). You will soon see condom commercials on television. Fortunately we can assume, based on television’s track record with this kind of thing, that these commercials will be tasteful and informative:

  FIRST MAN: What’s the matter, Ted?

  SECOND MAN: I think I have a horrible sexually transmitted disease!

  FIRST MAN: Here. Try some of my condoms.

  SECOND MAN: Thanks.

  (The Next Day:)

  FIRST MAN: Feeling better, Ted?

  SECOND MAN: You bet! Thanks to
condoms! And I got that big promotion!

  No, the issue we are reluctant to talk about is even more sensitive (ha ha!) than condoms. The issue—and I will try to be tasteful here—is that sometimes it seems like maybe the president of the United States is kind of db. If you get what I mean. What I mean is, I am not totally confident that the president would get what I mean, unless several aides explained it to him. And even then, he might forget.

  This is unsettling, although I don’t know why it should be. For the past 25 years, the presidency had been a remarkable parade of hanky-panky, comical incompetence, and outright weirdness, and the country has done OK. In fact, once you got into the spirit of it, it was kind of fun. I don’t know about you, but I loved it when jimmy Carter reported that he’d been attacked by a giant swimming rabbit. I loved it when Richard Nixon made speeches wherein he looked as though a large and disorganized committee of alien beings had taken over his body and were just learning how to operate it: (“OK. Let’s try to wave. Who’s operating the arms?” “Me!” “No, me!” “NO ...” etc.).

  So I don’t mind the president being bizarre, but that’s not the same as accepting that he might be kind of db. Yet it’s getting harder and harder to think of any other explanation, not with this Iran-Contra scandal. I realize you out there in Readerland are sick to death of this scandal, but it’s still causing multiple orgasms here in the news media, because of all these shocking revelations, the most amazing one being that the president apparently viewed foreign policy as a sort of family station wagon, which he, in the role of Ozzie Nelson, would cheerfully lend to his teen-age son, Ricky, played by Oliver North.

  RICKY: Hey Dad, can I take the foreign policy down to the Malt Shoppe and deal with Iranians?

  OZZIE: The Iranians?

  RICKY: Don’t worry, Dad. They’re moderates.

  OZZIE: Well in that case, OK. just don’t trade arms for hostages!

  The president, apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when the commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn’t remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he’s telling the truth.

  This bothers us media people, which is why we have developed this euphemistic way of describing the president’s behavior, namely, we say he has a “hands-off management style.” As in: “How many people with a hands-off management style does it take to change a light bulb?”

  Of course the president’s aides, in an effort to show that he is a Take-Charge Guy, have arranged to have him star in a number of Photo Opportunities: The President Shakes Hands with People Wearing Suits; the President Sits Down with People Wearing Suits; the President, Wearing a Suit, Signs His Own Name; etc. I think this is good, as far as it goes. My concern is that it should not go any further. My concern is that we could have a sudden eruption of “hands-on” management, for example in the nuclear-arms talks, and we’ll end up with Soviet Troops in Des Moines.

  Catching Hell

  Call me a regular American guy if you want, but baseball season is kind of special to me. For one thing, it means ice hockey season will be over in just a few short months. But it also brings back a lot of memories, because I, like so many other regular American guys, was once a Little Leaguer. I was on a team called the “Indians,” although I was puny of chest, so if you saw me in my uniform you’d have thought my team was called the “NDIAN,” because the end letters got wrinkled up in my armpits. I had a “Herb Score” model glove, named for a player who went on to get hit in the eye by a baseball.

  I remember particularly this one game: I was in deep right field, of course, and there were two out in the bottom of the last inning with the tying run on base, and Gerry Sinnott, who had a much larger chest, who already had to shave, was at bat. As I stood there waiting for the pitch, I dreamed a dream that millions of other kids had dreamed: that someday I would grow up, and I wouldn’t have to be in Little League anymore. In the interim, my feelings could best be summarized by the statement: “Oh please please PLEASE God don’t let Gerry Sinnott hit the ball to me.”

  And so of course God, who as you know has a terrific sense of humor, had Gerry Sinnott hit the ball to me. Here is what happened in the next few seconds: Outside of my body, hundreds of spectators, thousands of spectators, arrived at the ball field at that very instant via chartered buses from distant cities to see if I would catch the ball. Inside my body, my brain cells hastily met and came up with a Plan of Action, which they announced to the rest of the body parts. “Listen up, everybody!” they shouted. “We’re going to MISS THE BALL! Let’s get cracking!!”

  Instantly my entire body sprang into action, like a complex, sophisticated machine being operated by earthworms. The command flashed down from Motor Control to my legs: “GET READY TO RUN!” And soon the excited reply flashed back: “WHICH LEG FIRST?!” Before Motor Control could issue a ruling, an urgent message came in from Vision Central, reporting that the ball had already gone by, in fact was now a good 30 to 40 yards behind my body, rolling into the infield of the adjacent game. Motor Control, reacting quickly to this surprising new input, handled the pressure coolly and decisively, snapping out the command: “OK! We’re going to FALL DOWN!!” And my body lunged violently sideways, in the direction opposite the side where the ball had passed a full two seconds earlier, flopping onto the ground like some pathetic spawning salmon whose central nervous system had been destroyed by toxic waste, as Gerry Sinnott cruised toward home.

  Those boyhood memories! I have them often, although I can control them pretty well with medication.

  Actually, when I got older I continued to play organized baseball in the form of “league softball,” a game in which after work you put on a comical outfit and go to a public park to argue with strangers. For the first several years the team I was on had a nice, relaxed attitude, by which I mean we were fairly lenient if a player made a mental error. For example, if the ball was hit to the shortstop, and he threw it to first base, but the first baseman wasn’t there because he was rooting through the ice cooler looking for a non-”light” beer, we’d say to the person who brought the beer: “Hey! NEVER make the mental error of bringing ‘light’ beer to a softball game! It can cost a fielder valuable seconds!” But we wouldn’t fine him or anything.

  In later years, however, we got more and more young guys on the team who really wanted to win; guys who wore cleats and batting gloves and held practices where they were always shrieking about the importance of “hitting” somebody called the “cutoff man”; guys who hated to let women play, apparently for fear that one of them might, during a crucial late-inning rally, go into labor; guys who (this was the last straw) drank Gatorade during the game. I had to quit.

  But I’m getting back into it. I have a son of my own now, and, being an American guy, I’ve been teaching him the basics of the game. One recent bright sunny day I took him out in the yard with a Whiffle ball, and I gave him a few pointers. “Robert,” I said, “did you know that if we use a magnifying glass to focus sunlight on the Whiffle ball, we can actually cause it to melt?” So we did this, and soon we had advanced to complex experiments involving candy wrappers, Popsicle sticks, and those little stinging ants. Although I drew the line at toads. You have to teach sportsmanship, too.

  Mrs. Beasley Froze For Our Sins

  One of the issues that we professional newspaper columnists are required by union regulations to voice grave concern about is the federal budget deficit, which we refer to as the “mounting” deficit, because every extra word helps when you have to produce a certain number of gravely concerned newsprint inches. The point we try to get across in these columns is: “You readers may be out driving fast boats and having your fun, but we columnists are sitting in front of our wor
d processors, worried half to death about the nation’s financial future.” Then we move on to South Africa.

  So anyway, I have decided to fret briefly about the deficit, which according to recent reports continues to mount. A while back I proposed a very workable solution to the whole deficit problem, namely that the government should raise money by selling national assets we don’t really need: metric road signs, all the presidential libraries, the Snail Darter, the House of Representatives, North Dakota, etc. Unfortunately, the only concrete result of this proposal was that I got an angry letter from everybody in North Dakota, for a total of six letters, arguing that if we’re going to sell anything, we should sell New York City.

  This probably wouldn’t work. There would be major cultural adjustment problems. Suppose, for example, that we sold New York to Switzerland. Now Switzerland is a very tidy, conservative nation, and the first thing it would do is pass a lot of laws designed to make New York more orderly, such as no public muttering, no lunging into the subway car as though it were the last helicopter out of Saigon, no driving taxis over handicapped pedestrians while they are in the crosswalk, no sharing loud confidences regarding intestinal matters to strangers attempting to eat breakfast. These laws would be very difficult for New Yorkers to adjust to. Switzerland would have to send in soldiers to enforce them, and this would inevitably lead to tragic headlines in the New York Times: