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America Destined to Become Best Lost Civilization Ever

3/24/2014

What Meadowlands will someday look like

It has been just about forever, it seems, since this column has covered its favorite subject, the end of the world and the utter dissolution of the human race. I know some of you are thinking to yourselves "Wait a second--I thought your favorite subject wasfecal transplants," and that is high on my list as well, but unfortunately, end of the world predictions and fecal transplant news have both fallen off the charts further than Busta Rhymes and have been failing to provide column material for months now.

So I have to be content with analyzing this study from a three university researchers who used NASA computers to predict the imminent collapse of our civilization, which is not exactly the end of the world but might prove inconvenient as well. These guys say that modern civilization is fated to cash in its chips because of resource exhaustion and income inequality.

They might have a point as far as resource exhaustion. Let's face it, an average American, sitting in his adjustable recliner while reading his friends' posts on Facebook and also simultaneously viewing "Cake Boss" on an HDTV the size of a patio door is using 60,000 times more energy than a comparable aborigine squatting on a rock in the jungle watching bugs have sex, and, sadly, is probably being less thoroughly entertained. But I, and all Americans who think that anyone who complains about income inequality is a certified, flag-burning traitor, deny that the disparity in between the fortune we pay people for making our IRAs disappear as opposed to the pittance we pay people for serving us sandwiches will have anything to do with the end of the American way of life. This is saying that while we return to howling savagery, socialist European countries will survive to produce even more masterpieces and old buildings. This is saying that the country that produced the Swedish Chef will outlive the nation that birthed Rocky Balboa.

That is nonsense. Also you have to figure that no matter what happens to America, there's going to be enough nine volt batteries and LED screens left over to preserve some kind of social networking. But if worse comes to worse and America vanishes forever, for whatever reason, there's one thing we can vow to do now—become the biggest, baddest lost civilization of all time. We're already halfway there.

First off, when future archaeologists dust off our playgrounds and taverns, what are they going to find the most of? Spherical objects of every size, ranging from pool to bocce to soccer. Right away they're going to realize the most important thing about us--we had balls.

And what did these other collapsed so-called civilizations leave behind? The Romans, a few old tubs, aqueducts and one stadium in a sorry state of disrepair and the Egyptians, merely a big bunch of stacked-up rocks. Where are the selfies? Think of how much more real the ancient Egyptians would seem to us if we had just one Instagram of a slave in a body cast posting with a message like "Broke both my legs falling off Sphinx today so now I'm croc food" followed by a sad face in a hieroglyphic Emoticon, or the Romans actually uploading a video of one of their famous orgies instead of just bragging about them in a dead language.

Well, they'll never say America didn't leave enough traces of itself for future people to examine. From sea to shining sea, both lined with marinas and rental condos, to our massive, well-marked and organized landfills to our Ginsu knives and toaster ovens, America will leave enough pieces of itself behind that archaeologists thousands of years in the future will have employment studying them for thousands of years in their future.

Plus Americans specialize in durable goods. When some future tomb raiders break into Ted Nugent's sarcophagus, not only will his ancient guns still fire but the Pop Tart he left on his counter will probably still be edible. And the flamboyant archaeologist who bites into it will probably make the same face that we all make today when we bite into a Pop-Tart, the face that says Why am I doing this?

The most important thing, though, will be the images. The billions of pics, the millions of You Tube videos, the Facebook posts beyond counting, all will provide a window into us that no prior tragically lost civilization could ever come close to matching and the message they offer will no doubt send the students of us in the future into paroxysms of uncontrollable envy.

"Wow," they'll think. "These people did nothing but eat and have sex." And then they'll vow to be more like us.

It's almost worth dying off for.

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Snarking on the Ark

9/12/2013

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A full-size replica of Noah's Ark is being constructed in the American heartland, and you are being invited to pay for it. After numerous fruitless expeditions and archaeological digs in and around Mt. Ararat, rumored to be the resting place of the original Ark, faithful Christians have apparently given up on finding it and opted to build a new one.

The new Ark will be located, as the project's publicists coyly phrase it, "in the greater Cincinnati area." By this they mean Kentucky. It will be part of the Creation Museum, a place that already exists and where the visitor can see animatronic cavemen riding on giant fiberglass dinosaurs, if he or she wishes to seek out that kind of entertainment.

The dinosaurs perished in the Great Flood, according to the curator at the Creation Museum, which is why we can't ride them today, in spite of the fact that in the the original account God commanded Noah to load up two of every animal on the Ark. The part where God said "Except the dinosaurs. You can just ride horses when things dry up," was left out of the story, but that is no reason to doubt it. Obviously, the Almighty gave many instructions that were too mundane to be included in the transcript, like the part where He told Noah what exactly a cubit was, and the part where He instructed Noah to have the giraffes sticking their necks out of the top of the boat at all times, for dramatic and artistic effect. That must have been laid down from On High, because anytime you see an artist's rendition of the Ark, there are those damn giraffes.

LIVE UPDATE: I was being implored to do something useful around the house by my Significant Other while I was intent on composing this report. Not wishing to be torn away from the project, I noted that she was watching a reality show called "Say Yes to the Dress" which was going to be followed by a show called "What Not to Wear." I suggested these entertainments should be renamed "Say No to the Show" and "What Not to Watch," thereby guaranteeing she will not be interrupting me, or possibly even talking to me, for at least the rest of the day.

The Ark's web page has links to fascinating sub-topics such as "Noah—the Super Prepper," and a comments section devoted to debunking skeptics of the project. One smarmy sarcasticist noted that the Ark shouldn't be rebuilt unless a 900-year old man could be located to direct the project. The spokesman for the pro-Ark forces rebuked him soundly by noting that the Bible tells us that while Noah lived to be 900, he was still a spry 600-year-old when he built the Ark. Also this defender of the faith notes that the Bible predicts that some people are not going to believe in it, which leads him to argue that people thinking the Bible is a crock is the ultimate proof that it is infallibly correct. This is a leap of logic as breathtaking as that rainbow that appeared when Noah's forty days of rain were up. From now on, consider it applied to this column. Whenever I write something which you think is of doubtful veracity, the fact of your skepticism proves that I am telling the truth. Amen.

But the most important thing about the new Ark is that it is going to cost some serious cheese. Noah built the original just by coaxing his family into nailing it together and herding up some occupants for it, which, unfortunately for the dinosaurs, turned out to be predominantly birds and mammals. They may have had cubits then, but they didn't have shekels. This modern-day American Ark is going to set us back 24.5 million dollars. For a hundred bucks you can buy a peg for it, for a thousand a plank, and for 5 thou a beam. What, you're surprised that lumber prices have gone up over the last 4300 years? Many of my non-religious friends have pointed out that the Ark, as described in the Bible, is as transparently fictional and miraculous as Santa Claus's sleigh. You're not getting that for just a few million,

An individual lifetime pass to the Ark, when it is completed, will cost $2000. I'm thinking of buying one, just in case. And I'm giving them my credit card number today.

You know the price is going up if it starts raining.

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Tiny Countries Perpetuate Big Longevity Hoax

3/19/2012

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Monaco--entire country depicted here

Recent articles in both Yahoo and the Huffington Post have featured the ten nations with the longest life expectancies, none of which is the US, and noted that all have of some form of universal health care, equivalent to Obamacare or something even worse. This information is probably being spread by the fem-lib-gay-healthcare types who want Americans to live longer.

They ignore that fact that national health care would infringe on our rights as Americans, particularly our right to die prematurely, which is guaranteed by the Second Amendment. All right, the Second Amendment only explicitly guarantees our right to die of a gunshot wound, but it implies our right to die prematurely of drinking, smoking, bungee-jumping or eating cream cheese wontons at every meal.

If you look more closely at the facts, you'll see what obvious fraud is being perpetuated by these kinds of studies. First off, there are only three regular-size countries on the list: Japan, Italy, and Australia. In Japan, people only live a long time because they're trying to outlive the Emperor, and those guys live forever. Most of them don't even get the job until they'd be old enough for Social Security over here.

In Italy, people live a long time because they are on a Mediterranean diet, which means they drink a lot of red wine, cook everything in olive oil and lie about when they were born. In Australia, vital statistics are known to be imprecise. Australian authorities calculate a dead person's age by counting the number of empty Foster's cans in his or her house when they find the body.

The rest of the nations on the list are tiny, and I don't mean tiny like Belgium or Luxembourg. I mean tiny by being not much bigger than your average municipal sports complex. I mean Monaco and Macau, Andorra and Hong Kong. All seven of the remaining nations on the list would fit into San Diego County, where I live, and there would still be room for Rhode Island and Delaware. Unlike some of the statements I make here, this is not an exaggeration.

None of these countries is big enough to have a straight-line marathon, and in most of them you can't even go for a jog without a passport. San Marino is on the list, and most of you thought San Marino was a type of sheep.

Guernsey is on the list. Guernsey is definitely a type of cow.

How do these mini-countries keep their citizens alive for so many endless, aged years? For one thing, many of the opportunities we big nation citizens have to check out are not available in pint-sized principalities. You're not going to suffer snakebite in Singapore, or get hit by an avalanche in Hong Kong. There are no barren wastes in which to get lost in any of these itty-bitty burgs, no cliffs to fall off, no endless interstates on which to fall asleep and crash in the middle of the night. Tornadoes and hurricanes even find them too small to bother with. So they've got that advantage. But even when these city states try to keep up with the rest of the world in fatal statistics, like when Singapore executes people for chewing gum, or Hong Kong starts yet another of their crazy flu epidemics, enough of their citizens fail to buy the farm to make a dent in their soaring longevity rates. What gives?

First off, size matters. If you suffer a heart attack while running in Andorra, for example, chances are you've already run into the next country. Bingo! You're somebody else's statistic now.

Next is cheating. Monaco probably has a big billboard outside its border saying "Envie de vomir? Séjour en France!" which means "Feeling sick? Stay in France!" No doubt they also encourage their sickly citizen to emmigrate, possibly because they aren't even big enough to have their own hospitals. If you're feeling fatally ill in Guernsey, why not use it to wangle a free trip to London? That's international granny-dumping, is what that is.

Citizens in these tiny nations aren't allowed to shoot each other, either. This is not necessarily because they are gun-control wussies (although they may well be) but because any time they miss, their bullet flies into the next country and they've started a war. You can't have a gunfight when your entire nation isn't as big as the OK Corral.

So changing over to Obamacare isn't going to make any difference, unless we want to give up much more of what makes America great, which is stuff you can't get in these midget provinces—guns, highways and fried cheese sandwiches. It's too high a price to pay for a couple extra years of sitting around staring at an oxygen tank, not to mention the embarrassment of being ruled by a bishop or some prince with a hat nearly as tall as he is. And if the Monacans, San Marinos, Singapoos, Hong Kongers and the rest of them start feeling superior because they're still sitting in their wheelchairs in some foreign old-people warehouse while we've already embarked upon the adventure of being dead, let them laugh.

They'll still be watching our TV shows.