So, this time, rather than presenting you with our traditional long, boring
papers concerning how we can, if we work at it, vastly improve the quality
of life for people with annual incomes of six figures or more, Willy has decided
to find out what YOU think on important subjects of the day.
Please keep in mind that all names other than those of our sponsored family,
the Greenburgs, have been withheld on the basis that as we were making our
getaway in the back of our white, unmarked Ambush Campaign Van they threatened
that when they found out who we were they would “boot yo’ pants from here
to France”. If you wish to obtain the addresses of any of these people for
disgusting or illegal reasons, please send your request and a forty-dollar
donation to:
The Campaign to Elect a Weasel,
2008
c/o Ratko K. Rattan
The drywall in your basement
EDUCATION
After surveying a group of five
hundred males in elementary school, I have come to the conclusion that, as
far as the public is concerned, the problem with our education system is that
our young people are facing too much pressure these days. According to the
students with which I spoke, they are forced against their will to go to school
six days a week, which leaves only three days for relaxation. Although from
this account and also the fact that our students are fat and have rings inserted
in places where rings don’t belong I personally gather that the problem with
our education system is that young people are stupid, it is not up to me to
make such a decision.
Therefore, should I be elected President, my first decision will be to reduce
the number of required school days from six days to five days, but leave instead
only two days for what I propose to call a “week-end”. I will also make it
necessary for teachers to spend an entire year, which I propose to call “TK”,
teaching our young people how to use a calendar. Thank God we’re being invaded
by so many Asians, because as it stands right now you couldn’t drown in the
average gene pool if you tried.
ENVIRONMENT
The thing about nature is that,
basically, we’ve been stomping it flat for the past four hundred years. We
can’t just blame modern-day corporations for this: we can also blame the corporations
that arose during the Industrial Revolution, because they released no end
of hazardous materials into the atmosphere. They just plain didn’t care about
the state of the earth back then, but to be fair this is probably because
back in those days everybody was dying from something or other, which generally
takes up a lot of a person’s attention span. People would come home from a
hard day at the factory and yell to their wife, “I’m home, and I’ve picked
up syphilis!” to which she would reply, “You idiot! You were supposed to pick
up oregano!” This is the sort of tragedy that would occur all the time until
the invention of the Shopping List, which was followed very quickly by the
Unremarkable Note on the Refrigerator that No One Except Whoever Put it There
Will Ever Notice and the Doctor’s Note that Ostensibly Prescribes Medication
But Which Could Very Well Be a Self-Reminder Telling Him to Order a New Boat.
However, we have our share of the blame as well. As much as you would like
to blame it on a high-ranking member of the Bush Administration, the sad truth
is that it is you and I who are destroying this planet bit by bit, just by
being here.
When I asked the small community of West Thumpernickle what they thought about
it, they didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. This is because West
Thumpernickle is located in rural Alabama, and as such does not get such modern
conveniences considered common in most of the United States as cable television,
the Internet or electricity. However, it stands to reason that if these people
can somehow survive without worrying about global warming, then you can, too.
That’s why I have made it my policy to implant a special chip in the brain
of every American to prevent innocent people having to hear about global warming.
You may say that it’s impossible to use a device to prevent you from acknowledging
anything you don’t want to acknowledge, but that’s where you would be wrong.
I was using such a device from 1999 all the way to the beginning of last year,
which is when the batteries ran out and I had to once again face the miseries
of reality, such as Deal or No Deal.
Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.
THE WAR IN IRAQ
It has long been noted that the
War in Iraq is futile and pointless, inasmuch as the object is to achieve
piece by killing as many bad guys as possible, a feat which had we not invaded
would likely happen anyway. Although my position in this election is to better
understand the wants and needs of the American family, it is similarly important
to understand the lifestyle of the average Iraqi family. The average Iraqi
family, I have concluded, has a name like Mojugorhuzzad and lives in a pile
of rubble nearby areas of major Iraqi towns that tend to get blown up a lot.
They are, for the most part, poorly educated people who live in fear and total
squalor; sort of like the average citizen of New York City, except they write
with a bunch of squiggly lines.
The Iraqi language is, of course, a major source of confusion for those of
us in the Western Hemisphere, because whereas we tend to write in clear, legible
sentences, like this:
…they tend to write via a system of interconnected loops designed to confuse infidels, like so:
And those, of course, are professionally designed fonts. Handwriting is even worse. For example, consider this:
For all we know, this could either
be a sentence in Arabic or a page from a medical book about the intestines.
And, of course, the language, verbally, is no better. After all, your tongue
can only produce so many jhhhk’s and tahh’s before swelling up like Keith
Richards after re-inflation. Through the process of natural selection, only
people descended from Arabs possess the necessary tongue work to get through
an entire sentence without drowning in their own phlegm. The world record,
held by Latino Jose Conjenro since 1979, is seventeen words. The fact that
he soon after fell into a coma and died is probably just a coincidence.
The majority of all examples of this language come to us in the form of video
messages from Osama Bin Laden, which he uploads next to his MySpace blog so
that we Definitely Know He’s Still Around. Although his messages usually do
not surface until months after key events have occurred, he has nevertheless
remained adamant that his people should do things like “fight against the
infidels” and “vote for Fantasia Burrino”. According to Wikipedia, he currently
has 118 sons, all named “Oscar”, who deliver his messages to the west via
a hot air balloon sent to the White House. They apparently also prank call
the office of George W. Bush, usually asking if his Big Bucket Combo comes
with extra-large chicken wings. Oh, those wacky enemies of democratic freedom!
When we tried to inform Mr. Greenburg of these important issues, he gradually
became dizzier and dizzier until he, rather than waiting for us to alert medical
professionals, simply burst into flames. After vacuuming him off the carpet
and stealing the remains of his watch, we tried a less severe approach on
his son, Michael. Although we had to wait a full nine minutes to air the suspicious
smoke from his closet (what he calls his “Secret Garden”), we have learned
from him that the typical American citizen supports the introduction of Pegasi-riding
yellow turtle warriors wearing top hats and miniature tuxedoes. Don’t worry,
America: Top-Secret scientists have been working on that for years.
HEALTH CARE
When one thinks of health care,
one often gets the unpleasant image of long white hallways full of people
in surgical gowns and masks carrying IVs and dead people that med students
are examining to figure out just what the hell is an aorta, anyway. Nothing
could be further from the truth! Most of the hallways are actually painted
a toxic shade of puce not manufactured since the Korean War due to high levels
of radioactive substances that upon exposure converted test patients into
Lean Cuisine. While we’re on the subject of health care, this is also the
same substance used in CAT-scan machines.
Being admitted to a hospital is sort of like attending your own funeral, except
that you are wearing substantially fewer clothes and hold your IV drip directly
behind you as you walk so as to shield your buttocks from the weak and elderly.
Friends and relatives send Get Well Soon cards featuring teddy bears and smiling
clowns that glare at you from atop the cabinet across the room. If you summon
a nurse to get them to stop, they may start to increase your medication, which
is a good way to pass the time if you have a complex illness like Peritonitis
or Hammer Embedded in Skull. Another way to pass the time is to stare at the
little television set with very weak speakers and a black-and-white screen
that makes your 24" flatscreen television look like Moby Dick. This can
keep you up-to-date with current events, which will not seem nearly so worrisome
if you happen to be on one of the more controversial painkillers.
Throughout each day, various people will come in to stick things in you and
remove your blood, after which they test your responsiveness by throwing a
donated kidney at your face and tell you that things are Definitely Looking
Better Today. If any of these people begin acting strangely, such as letting
you eat anything other than Jell-O or not making you pee in a cup, you should
check to make sure the spare kidney is not yours. If you find that it may
have been removed from you at some point, quickly decontaminate it with antibacterial
spray and reinsert it, as follows:
As is customary in cases like yours,
you will share a room with an octogenarian who has checked in to see if the
doctors can find any remaining trace of his reproductive organs. Although
he may look around the age of eighty-five, he is actually a thirty-two-year-old
who foolishly comes in every year for an annual check-up, neglecting to remember
that once they take the blood out, they don’t tend to put it back in. Depending
on the length of your stay, you yourself may be converted from a nice, juicy
watermelon into a head of cabbage in just one visit, even allowing time for
special services such as assisted bathroom breaks and death.
If you are lucky, you will be given a powerful painkiller to distract you
from the fact that every fifteen minutes or so they come in to remove a certain
percentage of your body weight, which they experiment on in their attempt
to reanimate dead celebrities like Elvis. (Although you may think this procedure
in vain, they have managed to reanimate bits of Elvis’s hips, and have even
found a way to bring back to life the late James Brown, although they sent
him back again once they realised that he isn’t the one who says “I pity the
fool”.) These are therefore incredibly powerful sedatives, and are exactly
the sort of drug you need to be on to remain medically stable when they hand
you your bill.
BILL REDUCTION TIP: Mention to the doctor that you may or may not have photographs of him and Dr. Wesler running around the morgue playing Liver Volleyball.
So, of course, the big question
is, what can we do to make the hospital a more cheerful place? After careful
deliberation, I have eventually come up with the obvious answer: Get rid of
the old and sick people. Wouldn’t having to go to a hospital be so much better
if you didn’t see lots of coughing children and seniors walking slowly down
the hallway wearing a small blue tablecloth and taking their IV for a walk?
This isn’t to say that they stop treating the sick and elderly, of course.
They will be cryogenically frozen and kept in a bunker on one of the lower
floors, in case future generations decide that the Hospitals of Tomorrow aren’t
depressing enough. By clearing out all that space, we could then reduce some
of the country’s budget deficit by selling lower floors to more important
health-related organisations, such as Curves.
However, there is another problem with the health care system. I speak of
course of the high cost of over-the-counter medication, which has over the
last few years driven a great many American consumers across the border to
Canada, where they often get lost and are eaten by wolves. Clearly, this has
to be stopped.
A large problem, of course, is that the drug you want may very well be cheap
and/or covered by your medical plan, but you would never know it because they
are all given ugly names like Harronyl. There are various television ads for
these drugs on right now, and they all share three things in common:
1. You should talk to your doctor.
2. The drug has made a lot of people constructing model railways, running
in marathons, advising the Pope, etc. very happy and helps them get maximum
enjoyment out of their life. Just take a look at some of the “ordinary people”
flying kites with their kids, swimming in a lake, or having their picture
taken in a photo booth, and you will realise that this drug has made their
every day much brighter, and that they are now the happiest people in the
entire world.
3. The drug will kill you.
However, you may notice that not a single drug ad includes
4. This drug does something specific, and somebody tells you about it.
Pharmaceutical ads are the only kind of advertising that promote a product without telling you what it does. Whereas a typical boring advertisement sounds like this:
SCENE: A
man is upstairs shaving. Meanwhile, just downstairs, a boy starts running
towards the staircase. Not noticing his mother coming down, he nearly runs
into her. Realising, he quickly stops just before he hits her.
MOTHER: Close shave!
MAN (from upstairs): Barbasol!
BOY: Better buy Barbasol, Mom!
ANNOUNCER: Barbasol: Something something shaving blah blah
blah.
BOY: By the way, who is that man upstairs? Daddy left for
work ten minutes ago!
A typical pharmaceutical ad looks like this:
SCENE:
A man is running down a field. The field is a bizarre, neon-like colour of
green, but this does not seem to faze the man at all. As he runs through the
beautiful fields of Chernobyl, he throws a Frisbee to a dog.
MAN: I used to think that my days would be incomplete. Now,
with Krisconal, I can get back to my life.
SCENE: The dog catches the Frisbee, and is immediately
eaten by a large, radioactive dandelion. The picture freezes, and as we pan
out we can see that it has been digitally placed over one of the pictures
in a photo album. The woman holding the album flips the page, and we can clearly
see photographs of her kids at the beach. Looking at these, the woman nods
for seemingly no reason.
WOMAN: I used to think that my kids would turn out to be
tiny, clammy little pig-faced brats who would consume more pizza toppings
in one year than Poland. Turns out I was right. Thank God I’ve got Krisconal.
SCENE: Her picture suddenly changes to that of a
monster movie. As we pan out, we see a Portuguese person with a stupid moustache
watching television in a dark room.
SECOND MAN: I used to believe that there was a talking bat
in my mailbox who wanted me to bring him the brains of the living. Now, with
Krisconal, I can claim to have odd side affects and therefore cannot be convicted!
Talk to your doctor.
WOMAN: Talk to your doctor.
FIRST MAN: Talk to your doctor.
NARRATOR (talking quickly): Ask your doctor if Krisconal
is right for you. Krisconal may cause dizziness, blurred vision, dry mouth,
stomach upset, bubonic plague, loss of appetite, erectile dysfunction, stomach
ulcers, loss of skin, warts, additional toes, an inexplicable like for music
by Hillary Duff, death, and Post-Deceased Undead Killing Spree Disorder. Do
not take other medication while on Krisconal, because we want your money,
and if you don’t give it to us I’m going to come over there and pop a cap
in yo’ ass. No offence. Get it before it’s outlawed by the FDA. “Krisconal:
Returning Your Life!”
As we compare the above advertisements,
we can clearly see that whereas the first commercial tells you that the product,
Barbasol, is designed for shaving, the second does not give you any clue as
to what the product is or what it does. All you can surmise is that Krisconal
is a mood-enhancing drug that causes people to act badly.
That’s why my new policy is to make drug advertising actually admit what their
product does. For example: “Krisconal: A placebo that makes your nose smell
like cinnamon!” The theory behind this is that by informing the American public
of many alternative drugs, they will be less likely to have to cross the northern
border and get hunted down by lost Inuits during a seal hunt, which is a typically
rare occurrence that only happens about once every three months. Plus, it
means that fewer people would have to talk to their doctors, so we could turn
their offices into Starbucks.
So there you have it! Four major
issues, all solved by simply giving the American public what it wants! These
are the policies and the ways of life in the World of Tomorrow, my friends,
so you had better damn well embrace them.
No! Don’t walk away! I’m sorry! I meant that you should learn to integrate
them with your life! Whew! Sorry about that: I’m off my Harronyl.