The quality of early childhood education is in free fall. No more do we initiate our children to the sublimities of the English language with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” which uses words that are actually used by adults. In fact, we barely use words at all.

The decline can be traced back to the modern parenting movement after WWII. The first indication of serious trouble was the introduction into the bedtime reading lexicon of the works of Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. (Seuss was actually his middle name.) He was, of course a genius, in his own berserk way. But instead of animals which bear some resemblance to the fauna of the planet Earth, his creatures appear to have been drawn from microscope slides in the Infectious Diseases wing of the pathology laboratory. This is not entirely unreasonable given his background, since he paid his way part way through a Ph.D. which he never finished by drawing cartoons for Flit insecticide adverstisements, which featured gigantic insects on the point of consuming a quavering victim. But his rolicking doggerel (which I admit the kids love — in fact, I love it myself. I can recite the entire Sleep Book by heart) is not the problem. Seussisms at least resemble English.The problem is “Pat the Bunny.”

“Pat the Bunny” came out in the 1940’s, and invited the child to perform various revolting acts, including stroking the pseudo-fur of a  tan rabbit figure artfully glued to the page. It has been followed by endless imitators which invite the child to rub the skin of dinosaurs, animals, and monsters, all of which the child is assured are their friends.

The bunny is not your friend. Ask the Australians, who need to use everything short of 105 mm howitzers to keep them at bay. And in the United States, what do we get from bunnies? Tularemia, also known as rabbit fever, a particularly nasty generally fatal rikettsial disease which you contract by, you guessed it, patting the bunny.

That is not to say that bunnies are totally useless. Their pedal appendage is frequently employed as a good luck charm, despite the fact that it did not work very well for the bunny. But more importantly, they are reasonably tasty when used as the primary ingredient in hassenpfeffer, the aromatic rabbit stew.

So we have an amusing avenue to improve children’s reading material, which will shift their focus from touching a contagious rodent to enjoying a delicious repast. We need only make a single orthographic substitution, changing “P” to “E” to produce a more practical first book for baby:

EAT THE BUNNY!

You might argue that we do not want to scare the little darlings, or bring out their essential beastliness. Why not? Remember what happenned to Grizzly Adams, the lover of bears who ended up as a bear luncheon? Of course we want to scare the little darlings spitless! Their survival depends on it.

You have a choice when you’re part of the food chain: be an eater or an eatee. Which would you like your kiddies to be?

Pre-civilization, we all lived in packs and helped each other. But as civilization advanced, we learned better, and for many years screwed each other over in a ferocious Darwinian duel which led to vastly improved living standards. Unfortunately, the last generation or two has attempted to undo this important social advance. We are now enjoined to be nice to each other. Yeah, yeah, this has always been the advice of organized religions (except for a few like the Cult of Kali, also known as Thuggees, which made a virtue of strangling complete strangers to appease Kali, the goddess of death). But nobody follows religious advice. The problem is that this injunction now emanates from the government. What is the result?

DISASTER!

Let me give you an example. King George III (also familiarly known as Dubya) decided that, because substantial middle class people owned their own homes, the government should do whatever was necessary to give nice houses to bums in order to convert them into substantial middle class people.

Do you know what happens when you put a bum in a house?

You get a bum in a house.

And pretty soon you have a deadbeat bum in a house, because if he or she had the right stuff to maintain a house and pay the mortgage, he or she wouldn’t be a bum in the first place.

So here we are with more mortgage defaults and foreclosures than even in the Great Depression, crashing banks, and an astronomical unemployment rate. How do we explain this descent into a financial maelstrom that is making the U.S. look increasingly like Argentina?

By the invidious effects of kindness!

Do-gooders invariably do bad. Do something nice for soneone, and he will invariably spit in your eye. But there is a way out, and we can have FUN while we solve the problem

We can become do-badders! Yes indeed, we can organize a new movement devoted to openly and avowedly screwing our fellow citizens. Sort of like the Mafia, only without the daylight shootouts. We will kick the downtrodden, all the while singing the mantra of those deep philosophers, The Sillouettes:

Sha Na Na Na

Sha Na Na NaNa

Sha Na Na Na

Sha Na Na Na Na

Sha Na Na Na

Sha Na Na NaNa

Sha Na Na Na

Sha Na Na Na Na

Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip

Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom

GET A JOB!

Want to join the chorus?

We have reversed the once inexorable advance from primitive scribblings to precise written communication, and are descending into an inarticulate pit. You doubt me? Fools!

Around fifty-thousand years ago, the Australian Aborigines (Yeah, yeah, yeah, native peoples. Actually, not native: they arrived from Africa by way of Asia.) carved petroglyphic images onto rocks for purposes which we do not know. However, we do know that they expected somebody to look at them and get some message or other.

Around twenty-thousand years ago, the Frenchmen (excuse moi, Frenchpeople) inhabiting Lascaux took time off from their culinary pursuit of frogs and snails to paint pictures of horses (their other favorite food) on the walls of the caves in which they resided. By this mechanism, they hoped to increase their hunting success, either by propitiating the gods of really disgusting foods, or by attracting particularly vain nags who wished to gaze upon their likenesses. Notice that the French did not express their desires in written words, such as “Here, horsey, horsey, horsey!”

About five thousand years ago, the inhabitants of the Middle East and Southeast Asia made the great leap into symbolic writing. In another thousand years, the writing evolved into an alphabet. While the Egyptians were at first thought to have missed  the boat because their writing consisted of strings of pretty pictures, it turned out that the pictures were actually phonemes, just like letters of the alphabet.

So we were off and running, and soon followed Euripides (also known as “Ifixadese”), Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson (no, not the sex toy guy – the dictionary guy), and other literary lights.

All for nought!

The first source of our destruction and descent back into orthographic barbarism? Ubiquitous electronic buttons!

Think about elevators! Little triangles pointing toward each other where the rational person would just stamp the word “Close” on the damn button. How about video players? Little vertical lines instead of “Pause.” A little red dot instead of “Record.” Of course this is all the result of our ceding technological manufacturing to the Japanese in the 1980’s. Given their command of the English language at that point as evidenced by the instruction manuals they prepared (e.g. “putting the lovely wire into the holy place, you see many hours.”) maybe  it was all for the best.

The second source? The texting capability of the smartphone!!

Spelling counts, dammit! “U” is not “you.” “r” is not “are,” “rotflol” is not “rolling on the floor laughing out loud.” “fos” is not “****”.  As the next generation of larvae grow to loathsome maturity, they are doing so with no knowledge of the role of the silent “p” in “pneumonia,” the silent “k” in “knife.” They are not learning the virtues of patience, taking the time to lovingly inscribe a missive that would gladden the heart of the most pedantic maiden lady English teacher. They have lost the ability to pen a winsome poem which says tenderly “Hey , baby, let’s jump in the sack.”

The anemic concatenations of letters laughingly called “text” are nothing of the sort. They are a puerile parade of acronyms better suited to the mad ravings of government bureaucrats. [N.B. the latest Federal education guidelines mandate the replacement of some seventy percent of the high school reading list with government memoranda. Out with “Hamlet.” In with “The Environmental Impact of Peeing on the Lawn.”]

lol. The Feds are fos. Gdby.

A village is the antithesis of a civilized society. Why did the world urbanize? Because people wanted to leave the village environment in which everybody knew everybody else’s business. But as early as the 1970’s, Marshall McLuhan predicted that, thanks to modern mass media, we would all soon live in a global village. He was more correct than he knew. He was writing pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter.

McLuhan’s vision has been realized in spades. The busybodies are in the saddle. Billions of people are on Facebook, sharing the most intimate details of their lives with tens of millions of their closest “friends,” and being subjected to their “friend’s” details in return. And it gets worse; with Twitter, you receive an update on all this trivia minute by minute, your smartphone (which is smarter than you)  insistently dinging or buzzing like an angry wasp to force you to read the latest nonsense.

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Telepathy has now left the Ouija board and entered the real world. Some non-mad scientist neurophysiologists have successfuly connected two rats together using little thinking caps, and what Rat One thinks, Rat Two knows. And the connection wasn’t physical wires, joining them like robotic Siamese twins; it was a datalink mediated by the internet.  Let us think about the implications of this technology as it matures, as technologies are wont to do.

The first application, of course, will be cheating on tests. By implanting the transmitter and receiver in the mastoid bone behind your ear, you will be able to surreptitiously transmit each question to your buddies outside the examination room, who will either look up the answer on Google or calculate it using their supercomputer. And presto, as soon as they obtain it, their new knowledge of the correct answer will appear in your head. Everyone will have a 100% average in everything, and the average SAT score will rise to 2400.

But it gets much better. The fear and uncertainty that characterizes one’s entrance into a room full of strangers, say a cocktail party, convention session, or a holiday dinner with the family, will be a thing of the past. You will know immediately if the smile on the face of the lovely young lady or handsome young man across the room denotes interest or disbelief. You will know if the person walking down the street talking to no one at the top of his or her lungs is on the cell phone or suffers from Touretz Syndrome.

The nature of government will also change. Our masters will hire professional thinkers to think about the government’s orders and think them to us. They will also develop high-powered thinking transmitters which will overwhelm your personal thinking machine, ensuring that you only hear politically correct thoughts.

And think of the impact on advertising! You may be able to mute today’s TV commercials, but you won’t be able to block the thought bolts from Target and Subway, because the gummint will allow compliant companies (aka campaign contributors) to purchase the same high-powered brain wave transmitters that the government uses to brainwash you politically. You, of course, will not be permitted that luxury, since these transmitters will be denied to all but government officials and their sycophants, sort of like semi-automatic assault rifles.

Where will it all end? You will spend essentially all your time thinking somebody else’s thoughts. But the thoughts you receive will immediately become your thoughts, and hence will be re-transmitted to everybody else, who in turn will re-transmit them again, leading to an endless loop. Within a short period of time, your brain’s capacity will be exhausted, your head will explode, and you will be relieved from the unending cacaphonous din.

Thank Heaven for small favors!

Forget the romantic drug smuggling movies, filled with sophisticated villains driving Maseratis, swaggering down the Vegas strip with a supermodel on each arm, smoking Cuban cigars, sucking a fortune in white powder up their aquiline noses, dancing the night away with other sophisticates in posh nighteries, all with the proceeds from tunneling under the border with buckets of marijuana.

Things have changed for the worse. The drug smuggling method du jour is the cannon!

No, Dear Reader, this is not science fiction, nor the hallucinatory ramblings of a deranged mind (mine). The drug cartels have perfected air-powered cannons that shoot packages of drugs over the heads of oblivious border guards to a soft landing in the good old Estados Unidos, where they are picked up by the local distributors.

Talk about technological decline. (Well, not completely – a few months ago they were using catapults. Replacing the twelfth century catapult with the nineteenth century air gun is progress of a sort.) This is the 21st Century, for God’s sake! There are significantly better methods on the horizon.

Teleportation immediately springs to mind. Current research by non-mad physicists has reached the point at which light can be teleported. The cartels have mucho dinero. They should be funding improved teleportation research! Imagine shipping pot to New York without passing through Arizona or Texas or Illinois. How about teleporting directly to the ultimate consumer? The cartels’ profits would skyrocket, since they would no longer need to pay all those middlemen, corrupt DEA agents, and venal local police. There would be no more messy ripoffs to garner unfavorble publicity and blood-soaked hundred dollar bills.

How about going a stage further ; teleport the THC directly into the bloodstreams of the customers. It would provide a clear public health benefit, since the amount of lung damage produced by inhaling smoke from your joint is substantial.

How do the cartels collect their pittance if these methods are adopted? you well may ask. Simple. Ensure that the teleportation technology is bidirectional. If someone fails to pay up, you simply teleport his or her head back to Mexico. Separating heads from bodies has already been established as one of the cartels’ most popular and effective forms of discipline. This method is a bit reminescent of the eighteenth century guillotine, but I think that there is something to be said for preserving a little continuity to hold civilization together.

And this will only be the beginning! Soon this blossoming technology will be applied to other fun activities: putting ethyl alcohol directly into the bloodstream of drivers without requiring them to drink themselves into unconsciousness in  dingy barrooms; delivering campaign contributions directly into the pockets of politicians without leaving messy records in the banking system; etc. You get the idea.

You should have paid more attention in physics class.