That’s unusual advice. After all, the comic films always have titles like “Eat the Rich,” on the assumption that rich people are over-indulged, weak, and helpless before the united might of the virtuous poor.

What a crock.

First of all, how do you think the rich got rich? By being smarter and tougher than the useless poor, that’s how. Mess with the rich and you’re going to get major trouble. The Cypriots have just been forced by the Northern Euroweenies to confiscate 40% of the money deposited in their banks. Almost all of the money is owned by the Russians, primarily the Russian Mafia and the Russian apparatchiks (same thing, of course). Watch what happens. The army of the Volga is about to descend on the gnomes of Zurich and Madame Lagarde. Vladimir Putin is not about to play Mr. Nice Guy when his moolah is at risk. The Euroweenie armies are a pathetic joke – the Girl Scouts could defeat them. And we in the US are going to look up at the sky, whistle tunelessly, ignore our NATO obligations, and surreptitiously smirk while the Europeans get just what they deserve.

We are actually going to use the same technique with respect to the long-term unemployed right here in the good old US of A. Who are the long-term unemployed? Not terribly surprisingly, they are disproportionately represented among the old farts, say people between 50 and 106, to whom our economy has been paying exorbitant salaries for 30 years to prevent their rioting in the streets.

To a great extent, this is a self-correcting problem. When people get old enough, they die. This means that the period of long term unemployment for old folks has a natural cutoff. Accordingly, all we have to do is wait and the problem will correct itself. And we can help the situation along by allowing Medicare and Medicaid to collapse.

Especially Medicaid. Medicaid recipients have two wonderful properties that render them particularly appealing as screwees. First, they generally don’t vote, being either too sick or too degenerate to bother showing up at the polls. This desirable property is offset to some degree by the fact that their descendents, who are frequently better off than the codgers, have no intention of supporting the old folks themselves. Honor thy father and thy mother. Yeah, right. They’d rather make the Lexus or Beemer payments, so they vote enthusiastically  for any program that will shuffle the inconvenient oldsters more rapidly toward their destined roles as fertilizer or weiner filling.

Second, the Medicaidants don’t have any money! Knowledge is power? MONEY IS POWER! We can direct our vast monetary resources to subvert the popular media, painting Medicaid “clients” as parasites on society, irresponsible leeches who unreasoably resist their appopriate role as the silent downtrodden. How dare they!

So as our strategy unfolds, we will find ourselves in a society pleasantly lacking in poor and old detritus, our personal lives a rich harmony of fancy cars, great restaurants, crummy movies, and all the other things that make life worthwhile.

Of course, at some point we will be old and decrepit ourselves.

I try not to think about that.

You may be right that there are still a few occasions on which a hypocritical utterance is made and called for what it is. But the trend is down, down, down. These days, public and media figures don’t even bother to be hypocritical – they just act disgustingly, say outrageous things, and smile sweetly. To quote that great philosopher, Alfred E. Neuman, “What? Me worry?”

Consider Dennis Rodman, idol of NFL wannabees from inner city ghetto to inner city ghetto. He makes obscene amounts of money, not just because of his ability to toss a sphere through a fishing net hung from a peach basket analog, but because he is such a flaming jerk. Despite this, he can visit North Korea (a country with nearly as many incarcerated citizens as the current world record holder, the good old U. S. of A., and a level of poverty that makes Ethiopia look good), hobnob with a manifestly insane dictator, and not even try to make an excuse. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian circulate pornos of themselves.

And this attitude is coarsening public discourse into unrecognizability. Naughty words fill the airwaves. Scatological words [N.B. Strictly speaking, this term refers solely to expressions about bodily excrescences, but has come to cover all bad words.] fill children’s books. Sex education (formerly Hygiene) now includes pornographic movies and prophylactic demonstrations. Not a Bowdlerization in sight!

How can we return to the status quo ante? I think that an effective route would be to emulate our Puritan ancestors.

BRING BACK THE STOCKS!

We already have an excellent candidate to run the program: Michael Bloomberg. Hizzonner is already charging through the fields of sugared beverages, forcing fatties to slurp up their Big Gulps behnd the barn. He is forcing women who do not want to breast-feed the little vampires to hide their baby bottles inside their shirts in boob position. If you live in the Big Apple and aren’t a hypocrite, but have some independence of mind, you are heading for Big Trouble.

I can see it now. As we wake up for morning calisthenics in the street, a recording ot Hizzoner beating on a drum in the background, we can listen with great amusement to the wails of the miscreants, heads and hands immobilized, who have spent the preceding night shivering, breathing diesel exhaust fumes, and being covered in pigeon poop. Spend a night like that, buster, and you will pay homage to virtue for the rest of your life, no matter how much fun you have on the sly.

Of course, if the stocks don’t work, we can always bring back public hangings.

Even the Wall Street Journal smells collapse. For months they have been chanting the dirge “The MBA Is A Relic of the Past.” How dare they impugn the honor of the laborers in the vineyard of spreadsheets, who have taught us all how to outsource every useful job to Outer Uzbekistan! How dare they fail to respect the masters of Excel, Word, and PowerPoint! How dare they fail to tremble in the presence of the denizens of cigar bars!

Well, OK, maybe there are a few too many guys who, despite the name of their degree, could not manage their way out of a paper bag, but in fact spend their days writing reports that no one will ever even read, let alone act upon. But that’s a graduate degree, after all, and makes no claim to provide a basic education in the skills of a civilized person. How about the foundation provided by college?

Even this foundational institution is approaching eclipse. Not content with denigrating the MBA, the evildoers of the popular media are now chanting “Is College Worth It?”

College!

First of all, everyone knows that the main objectives of college, as has been the case for several thousand years, are to drink beer, chase (and catch) members of the opposite sex, and occasionally attend classes. The problem, of course, is that these activities can no longer be pursued using Daddy’s or Uncle Sam’s money; it has now become necessary for collegians to borrow the money to fund these activities, leaving the graduate at the end of his or her college days with a mortgage but no house.

The bubble-meisters are of course weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth over the “Student Loan Bubble.” The solution they are now suggesting is: College, phooey! Don’t go! Enter the workforce immediately!

Doing what?

First of all, there are no jobs, unless you want to move to Outer Uzbekistan (see above). Even if you do find a job, what prospects do you have if you are an ignorant slob? Like it or not, even running a modern computerized milling machine is an exercise in mathematics. The kid at the supermarket checkout counter calls his or her manager (college educated) seventy-five times a day to reboot the cash register, which has been transmogrified into an all-knowing computer terminal.

And what do you do in your spare time? Contribute to the decay of civilization by watching WWF Raw? Read Cosmopolitan or (heaven forfend) People Magazine? Drink lite beer?

Hey, that doesn’t sound too bad.

You have a dirty mind. This is NOT a discussion of excremental over-inflation. We are talking about Form Over Substance.

A 62-year old man, on doctor-recommended sick leave for stress, went to the beach to unwind. Seeing  a shark heading for a group of children, he rushed into the water, wrestled the shark into submission, and saved the children from becoming fish food (well, shark food). His reward? Obviously, he was fired from his job when his exploit was captured and posted on YouTube so that his boss found out that his de-stressing was carried out at the beach.

This raises the old bromide “No good deed goes unpunished” to a whole new level.

[The boss clearly agrees with W.C. Fields who, when asked how he liked children, responded “boiled.” We have reached a point of civilizational collapse at which personell policy trumps childrens’ lives. His boss could have just said “OK, fella, that sick leave just became your vacation. After all, we can’t set a precedent for shark wrestling as therapy. It would be too hard on the sharks.” The boss is probably right. Mako shark is delicious. We eat them, they eat us. Fair is fair.]

“Zero tolerance” has gone mad. No amount of virtuous action can offset the smallest picadillo. “Ve haff rules!”

A lot of rules. In fact, enough rules that nobody knows what they are, even the people who make them.

But this is great!

How better to keep the peasants in line? In a 1960s movie entitled “Mickey One” starring Warren Beatty, the lead character, who has been enduring the third degree, finally shouts “All right, I’m guilty!” The disembodied voice of his interrogator says “Guilty of what?” to which the interrogee answers “Of not being innocent.”

There you have it. The ultimate triumph of complexity: everybody is always guilty of something, probably a felony. The only reason you are walking around in the fresh air, rather than sharing a cell with Bubba the Cannibal, is prosecutorial discretion.

This mechanism is guaranteed to keep the social pot from boiling over, since nobody wants to stick their neck out, or their head up, for that matter. So our betters can steer the ship of state without fear of mutiny. No transfats! No guns! No soda! No baby formula! Let the endangered coyotes eat your kids!

Don’t you feel safer?

The phrase of the day is “Grand Bargain.”

Balderdash!

The first issue this raises is: why do we need a title? This evil practice hies  back to the days of the Iran hostage crisis, when a pusillanimous president cowered in the White House, allowing American diplomats to remain captive by the heirs of the Barbary Pirates for 444 days. How did the brave media respond? With loud cries for brave action? (You know, “to the shores of Tripoli” and all that stuff.) Nope.

What they did was have their graphic designers, who otherwise would have been designing logos for “John’s Other Wife,” design nightly changing cover pages stating “The Iran Hostage Crisis – Day N” for a one-hour news report whose burden was “Nothing Happened Today.” (The format was easy to update: N became N + 1).

The floodgates were opened. Now everything needs a catchy title: “The Fiscal Cliff,” “The Grand Bargain,” phooey! The populace has become so dumbed down that they can’t tell the topic without a scorecard.

But the Grand Bargain is not restricted to the pursuit of a Federal budget compromise that will inevitably leave everyone completely miserable. (Think about the results of compromises. Remember the Missouri Compromise in the 1800’s, the solution that was going to prevent  a civil war. How did that work out?)

But the Grand Bargain has descended from the sublime to the ridiculous. What other Grand Bargains are being touted? How about the fracking Grand Bargain, which will only permit fracking if the frackers are forced to inhale the natural gas released for at least three hours a day? How about the school districts in Miami and Hong Kong (really!) looking for a Grand Bargain to equitably distribute the school funding extorted from the starving populace (OK, not actually starving, but you get my drift). How about the North Korean nuclear Grand Bargain, pursuant to which they will only immolate the populations of U.S. cities with a population of 378,264 or less? How about the EU budget Grand Bargain, under which the Germans will agree to eat moussaka and drink retsina at least six times per week in order to prop up the Greek economy instead of snarfing down bratwurst and beer? How about the Middle East Grand Bargain, under which absolutely nothing will change?

“Bargain” would be bad enough; after all, “bargain” connotes an agreement in which both parties gain, in contrast to the current rash of bargains in which everybody loses, a plethora of demolition derbies. But “Grand?”

We’ve heard that before. Remember the “Grand Alliance” of WWII, which joined the U.S. with our traditional friends the UK (Revolutionary War, War of 1812) and the USSR (old Cold War, new Cold War)? How about the ocean shipping Grand Alliance, which allows the major ocean shipping lines (owned, of course, by fat sweaty Greek billionaires with super-celeb trophy wives) to collude on shipping rates and thus prevent WalMart’s price structure from declining too sharply, or the Chinese economy to overheat due to excess demand?

In all fairness, “Grand” was already a problem in the 18th and 19th centuries. There was the “Grand Tour,” a rite of passage in which the over-indulged scions of the robber barons and baronesses traveled the world for a year, contracting new and interesting venereal diseases in each European country they visited, before embarking on their careers of rapine and plunder. Ah, the good old days!

How can we deal with the Grand Bargain onslaught? I know, I know! We will make our own personal Grand Bargains!

The ideal one is the one with the Internal Revenue Service. Of course, we all know that the IRS, in its infinite generosity, does negotiate payment plans when you are in arrears, either because you ran afoul of the unbelievably arcane Revenue Ruling that (foolishly) disallows a deduction for purchases of medically required single malt scotch whisky, or because the dog ate the original copy of your return so you could not file on time, thus subjecting you to a 786% penalty, plus interest. But that’s just a Little Bargain.

A Grand Bargain would run something like this: we agree to assign all of our income to the IRS in perpetuity. In return, the IRS agrees to enroll us in every Federal subsidy program in existence: milk price supports (even if we do not possess a single cow); green energy credits (even if we live in a styrofoam shack heated by an open coal fire); bank bailout support (even if we do not own a bank and our personal checking account has a balance of twelve dollars).

I will write to the IRS as soon as I finish typing.