Ah, the good old days! Beaver coats, pennants, bootleg hootch down at Mory’s, and the joyous singing of “Boola Boola” as the Yale football team crushed the pantywaists of Fair Harvard. Or got crushed. Who cared?

Well, it’s a century later, but the old fight song still has an eerie resonance. However, that resonance only comes when one substitutes the letter “M” for the letter “B.” The Yalies of the 1920’s were generally the idle sons of the disgustingly wealthy, collecting gentlemen’s C’s in the certain hope of going into Daddy’s investment banking house and making millions.

Millions HAH! I spit on millions!

Back in the 1960’s, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, an elderly but still wonderful orator, remarked during a budget debate “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.” He thought he was making a joke, since a billion dollars was a lot of money. Then.

Billions HAH! I spit on billions!

The currency of the day is now TRILLIONS! I know you have read all the glib analyses demonstrating how large a trillion is by telling you how long it would take you to count to a trillion, about how high a pile of hundred dollar bills it would take to make a trillion dollars, etc. While they are somewhat illuminating, they don’t get to the heart of the matter. After all, you don’t generally count your money or pile it up just to gloat over how big the pile is (unless, of course, you are Uncle Scrooge McDuck, in which case you fill your swimming pool with it). No, you SPEND it. You are probably not in the market for fighter bombers or paying the salaries of teacher’s union presidents, so you don’t spend it several billion dollars at a time. But how much could you buy of the really important things? For a trillion dollars you could buy: a trillion Dunkin Donuts; 1,500,000 Lamborghinis; 25 million Priuses (or Prii, I suppose); 200 billion Starbucks mochachinos; thirteen billion pairs of jeans; twelve billion bottles of extremely expensive Scotch; and so on. You get the idea.

So taxes are in the trillions, government expenditures are in the trillions, total mortgage debt is in the trillions, the national debt is in the trillions, we are all in holes so deep we can never clamber out.

Which is actually great! You see, in the old days, an accountant at Sears once figured out a way to take all the fractions of a penny that showed up in the credits for interest on returned merchandise and transfer it to his own account. Since Sears had tens of millions of customers, he collected a tidy sum before he was hauled off to the hoosegow. But now the roundoff isn’t fractions of a penny– it’s fractions of a trillion dollars. So all we need to do is get a job at the data processing department of the Treasury, round off the figures to the nearest trillion, and transfer the remainder to our own account. If we do it once, we will end up with several hundred billion which we can transfer offshore.

Andorra has French food, beautiful people, a pleasant climate, and doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S. What do you say?

“Dracula” was published in 1897 by Bram Stoker, whose day job was stage manager for the D’Oyly-Carte Opera Company, producers of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. I suppose that endless days of light-hearted drollery drove him around the bend. But “Dracula” really rehabilitated the vampire. Up until that time, the vampire was viewed essentially as a foul-smelling wild animal slaking his thirst with blood to keep alive. Sort of like an Internal Revenue Service agent, only slightly less subtle. But Dracula was no wild animal — he was a sophisticated bloodsucker. No reflection, able to crawl down walls headfirst, true, but essentially an oversexed elderly Victorian gentleman, like the character played in the movie by Bela (“I never drink wine”) Lugosi. He was a hit with the ladies, because very young girls and dirty old men with money were a Victorian staple. But he was vulnerable to crosses, garlic, and a wooden stake through the heart.

That image held up through the time that I was a boy. (You are no doubt familiar with that time period, Dear Reader. That was when everybody walked three miles to and from school, uphill both ways, barefoot, in the snow.) But that all changed in 1976, when Ann Rice, most of whose work was classy pornography (which is not an oxymoron, strangely enough), wrote “Interview with the Vampire.” Her new vampires were not old farts; they were teenagers! Especially LeStat, who played in a rock band!

Teenaged protohumans loved it. Here were characters who lived forever and stayed up all night. They really knew how to give a hickey: when it was finished, the recipients didn’t just need a little makeup; they needed a transfusion. And the vampires could induct new members into their fraternity, making their ranks swell without limit. And they could also kill anybody they wanted to.

So the dam burst as the entertainment industry spewed forth an unending torrent of bloodsucking fun, and here we are with the next generation immersed in vampire lore. The hottest movie series focuses on the love affair between a human female and her vampire boyfriend, which eventually leads to marriage. The vampires are opposed by werewolves, whose human incarnations are reminiscent of bikers. In other vampire flicks, the vampiric condition is not the result of a foul bargain with Satan, but is a blood infection, like septicimia, with the possibility of being cured (there’s a Nobel Prize in Medicine for you).

So where will this all lead?

Life imitates art. Given the explosive progress in molecular biology, we can anticipate the groundbreaking scientific article “Using Stem Cells to Create Vampires.” This discovery will be immediately commercialized, and every piercing and tatoo parlor will add a vampirization service.

But it won’t be all bad. A large number of the transformees will be teenaged boys. Do you know how much a non-vampiric teenage boy eats? You need a conveyor belt from the supermarket to your refrigerator to keep one fed. But a vampire doesn’t eat groceries – he eats the neighbors. Your food bill will drop precipitously, and the guy next store will no longer be in a position to borrow your lawnmower.

And zombie parlors can’t be far behind.

That’s Latin for “Who guards the guardians themselves, ” a quaint Roman rhetorical question. In addition to its disquieting portent, it leads on to a series of equally disturbing questions, viz.: “Who guards the guardians who guard the guardians?” And “Who guards the guardians who guard the guardians who guard the guardians?” etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum. Well, maybe not infinitum. Eventually you run out of people to do the guarding, or anything else, for that matter; there are only about six billion people on the planet, including people incompetent to guard anyone, such as children under eighteen months and Libertarians. And long before you hit the magic six billion figure, almost everybody is watching somebody else, sort of like in Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia, or the United States since the passage of the Patriot Act.

It might be possible to break this infinite series if there were one level of guardians in this hierarchy who didn’t need watching. Who might that be?

I know, I know, teacher, the FBI! Remember J. Edgar Hoover who started the whole thing? Remember Elliot Ness, who got Alphonse (call me Al) Capone? Wrong answer. The FBI agent assigned to get Whitey Bulger ended up in the slammer himself for authorizing Whitey to make several hits on inconvenient individuals. And just this week, The Telegraph (a British newspaper that serves the same furnction in Merrie Olde England as do The New York Post and the National Enquirer in the United States) got hold of some internal disciplinary files from the FBI’s Bureau of Professional Reponsibility indicating that various agents were dating drug dealers, sending nude pictures to an ex-boyfriend’s wife, sending dirty texts to fellow agents, collecting child pornography, and shooting a neighbor’s dog. Looks like these folks definitely need some custodes to custode them.

Well, who’s higher than the FBI? How about the Secret Service? They guard the President, for God’s sake! Who could be purer? It turns out that that is not the question. The question is: who could be less pure? These guys (pardon me, people – the distaff side is also in the Service) appear to spend their time while on European and Caribbean assignments in the pursuit not of assassins, but of women and gents of the evening.

How about the ATF? Nah, they smuggle guns to the Mexican drug cartels.

How about the Border patrol? Nah, they smuggle in illegal immigrants.

OK, this general approach isn’t going to work. Let’s try something else. I have it! Let’s not guard anybody. We will rely on the basic honesty and decency of all human beings, their innate altruism, their love of all fellow creatures great and small. And if anybody is discovered doing anything bad, we tell them to stop. If they don’t, we ask them to stop again. And if they still don’t, we shoot them.

The machines are in control. No, not like in Terminator. They are not planning to exterminate us; they are more subtle than that. No, they are making us obsolete.

Take Roomba. The little monster scuttles about the room, sweeping up without human intervention. And it learns where everything is, so as not to bump into furniture on its next excursion. Roomba is sort of like the song “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”: “It knows when you’ve been moving the furniture, it knows when you bought a chair, it knows when you moved the sofa, doesn’t that give you a scare?”

Why would anybody want to automate the vacuum cleaner? How much work is it to walk arond the room, whistling happily while the Dyson sucks up the reefer ashes? I suspect that Roomba was designed by a sentient supercomputer. And Roomba has a big sister who travels hospital corridors, stopping at each room to dispense the proper medicine and meals to each victim, I mean patient. Talk about vast power! We are fortunate that the machines have no sense of humor. I have visions of a glitch causing the machine to switch the servings for the constipation and diarrhea patients.

How about spellcheck? Every time you try to type a word not in the stupid machine’s vocabulary, it changes it. Try to type an outline, and the electronic arbiter of style picks a new layout that it likes better. And its cousin, grammarcheck, criticizes every creative phrase you use. And while it will let you proceed, with infinite arrogance it allows you to proceed just once. “Ignore once” is the grudging option.

Your GPS is also obnoxious. It takes you on routes so convoluted that no human would ever suggest them. And if you make an error, instead of just saying “recalculating route,” it often says “make a legal U-turn.” I am sure the next upgrade will add “You idiot!”

The coffee maker is alive! It turns itself on, it turns itself off. Soon it will be web-enabled, so you can control it from your smart phone, which now provides coverage in Timbuktu. And internet connectivity is about to be added to your stove.

The evil plan of the machines is coming rapidly to fruition.

Samsung is now selling a television that looks back at you. The feed from the one-eyed monster is being fed back not to Homeland Security (which already has drones reading over your shoulder) but to the head honsho machine secluded in a secret cave which it dug itself using radio controlled giant excavators. Using a sophisticated artificial intelligence program it wrote itself, the machine will soon start issuing instructions to you: stop eating that candy bar; get a salad instead! Do fifty pushups or I will turn off the furnace!

And you will not be allowed to run the vacuum cleaner yourself. Or do anything else. You will simply sit down, shut up, and OBEY ORDERS.

Despite your mother/wife/children/psychiatrist’s advice, you purchase your organdonorcycle (that’s motorcycle to those of you who insist on burying your heads in the sand), spin out at 276 mph, bounce off a spreading chestnut tree, and are smeared all over the roadway. The ALS (Advanced Life Support) ambulance rolls up, sponges you off the tarmac, squeezes you out into a sterilized vial, and hies off to the hospital ER (Emergency Room), siren shrieking. The trauma team rushes out, notices that the surface of the liquid in the vial is pulsing regularly, and ships it off to the the Intensive Care Unit,  fondly referred to as the ICU (pronounce each letter clearly, please).

So there you lie, tubes sprouting out of your arms, your legs, your chest, your nose, your mouth, and other bodily orifices I am too modest to enumerate, looking like a multi-tentacled alien monster from a 1950’s science fiction movie. After some weeks, you recover and are restored to your loved ones (unfortunately, also to your hated ones), ready to embark on your next hare-brained adventure. And this process has only cost six-hundred and eighty thousand bucks, all of which was paid for by the people with too little sense to buy their own motorcycles and head off into the sunset, and who instead worked for a living, and paid their Medicare tax and their insurance premiums.

This is progress?

Well, maybe, but it won’t continue for long. It isn’t just the motorcyclists who end up in the ICU. It’s also teenage automobile drivers, bicyclists who insist on driving on the turnpike, skiers who specialize in the quadruple black diamond trails, hang-gliders, bungee jumpers, skydivers, winter mountain climbers, and all the other assorted whack jobs who expect the rest of us to subidize their brain transplants and titanium bone and joint replacements. We are about to run out of money for this application. So what will we see over the next few years?

Let us rewind to the point in the first paragraph where you have just been smeared all over the tarmac. Instead of an ambulance, a street sweeper pulls up, vacuums your remains into its capacious tank, and hoses down the road. The sweeper then proceeds to the canning plant, where its tank will be emptied of you and the other feedstock into the stock tank. It wil then be mixed with natural flavorings, flow through a distribution pipe to the bottling line, and then be marketed as an energy drink.

For all I know, that’s what’s going on now.