Existentialist Bureaucracy
By Crispin Sartwell
In our continuing effort to streamline the federal government while making it more irritating to you personally, we are proud to announce the merger of the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services into a vast meta-agency: The Department of Being and Nothingness. Our Department has a single mandate: kill them; keep us alive.
Our agenda is simple, but it polls well. First, universal single-payer health insurance on the model of Sweden. Second, shock and awe: a total technology of annihilation. We kill because we care.
Surface-to-air missiles and a safety net. Hot lunches and assault rifles. Free immunizations and stockpiles of biological weapons. Only thus can we secure the homeland. How can we accomplish this noble dream without risking electoral defeat? Two words: deficit spending.
The brave men and women of the DBN look death in the face and both avoid and inflict it, like a fellow planting landmines around a day care center.
We here at the DBN know that it is the right of all Americans to have free access to whatever pharmaceuticals their whim may dictate, at whatever price the drug companies may dream up. If you live in Colombia, on the other hand, you'll soon be nostalgic for the day when the war on drugs was waged by paramilitary death squads.
We will be enforcing helmet and seatbelt laws through psycho-surgery. This is a simple matter of public health, as are our smart incendiaries, which set specifically targeted third-world peasants alight through global positioning technology.
You've got to be cruel to be kind. It hurts so good. 83% of our budget - that is, of your income - is devoted to song licensing and making American flags billow just right.
For your sake, this is where smoking ends. But we promise you this: the Middle East has barely begun to smoke.
Only Americans should have access to condoms. And we announce an aggressive needle exchange program: we'll take your dirty syringes and export them to Africa, where they can do some good. You can write them off as charitable donations.
The primary initiative we will be pursuing in the next fiscal year - our "theme," if you will - is to impose some sensible system on the Beyond, which has heretofore been unacceptably unregulated, as Hindus reincarnate willy-nilly, albinized Christians flit about fingering harps, and atheists just lie there. And though it may be hard to distinguish us from them in a case where no one actually has a body, we intend to sort the dead, killing them again while resurrecting us. Not a single child will be left behind.
Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives." c.sartwell@verizon.net.