Bad Habits Page 4

  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 run
s 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 wo
n’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.