Dave Eggers - How We Are Hungry

Why the billboards? Have you even see one? In books? Well, I guess I just never really liked the look of them — they just seemed so ugly and such an intrusion on the collective involuntary consciousness, a blight on the land. Vermont had outlawed them and boy, what a difference that made. So your mother and I revived Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign against them, and of course 98 percent of the public was with us, so the whole thing happened pretty quickly. We had most of the billboards down within a year. Right after that, your brother Sid was conceived, and it was about time I had my tubes tied.

Give me some of that cobbler, hon. We’re gonna have the peach cobbler after the main event. I just wanna get the Cool Whip on it, then stick it in the freezer for a minute. That’s Frank’s trick. Frank’s come up with a lot of good ideas for improving frozen and refrigerated desserts. No, that’s not his job, honey. Frank doesn’t have a job, per se.

I guess a lot of what we did — what made so much of this possible — was eliminate the bipolar nature of so much of what passed for debate in those days. So often the media would take even the most logical idea, like private funding for all sports stadiums or having all colleges require forty hours of community service to graduate, and make it seem like there were two equally powerful sides to the argument, which was so rarely the case. A logical fallacy, is what that is. So we just got them to keep things in perspective a bit, not make everyone so crazy, polarizing every last debate. I mean, there was a time when you couldn’t get a lightbulb replaced because the press would find a way to quote the sole lunatic in the world who didn’t want that lightbulb replaced. So we sat them all down, all the members of the media, and we said, “Listen, we all want to have progress, we all want a world for the grandkids and all. We know we’re gonna need better gas mileage on the cars, and that all the toddlers are gonna need Head Start, and we’re gonna need weekly parades through every town and city to keep morale up, and we’ll have to get rid of Three Strikes and mandatory minimums and the execution of retarded prisoners — and that it all has to happen sooner or later, so don’t go blowing opposition to any of it out of proportion. Don’t go getting everyone inflamed .” Honestly, when lynchings were originally outlawed, you can bet the newspapers made it seem like there was some real validity to the pro-lynching side of things. You can be sure that the third paragraph of any article would have said “Not everyone is happy about the anti-lynching legislation. We spoke to a local resident who is not at all happy about it…” Anyway, we sat everyone down, served some carrots and onion dip and in a couple hours your mother and I straightened all that out.

About then we had a real productive period. In about six months, we established a global minimum wage, we made it so smoke detectors could be turned off without having to rip them from the ceiling, and we got Soros to buy the Amazon, to preserve it. That was fun — he took us on his jet, beautiful thing, appointed in the smoothest cherry and teak, and they had the soda where you add the colored syrup yourself. You ever have that kind? So good, but you can’t overdo it — too much syrup and you feel bloated for a week. Well, then we came home, rested up for a few days, and then we found a cure for Parkinson’s. We did so, honey. Yes that was us. Don’t you ever look through the nice scrapbook we made? You should. It’s in the garage with your Uncle Frank. Are you sure he’s asleep? No, don’t wake him up. Hell, I guess you have to wake him up anyway, because he won’t want to miss the comida grande .

After Parkinson’s, we fixed AIDS pretty well. We didn’t cure it, but we made the inhibiting drugs available worldwide, for free, as a condition of the drug companies being allowed to operate in the U.S. Their profit margins were insane at the time, so they relented, made amends, and it worked out fine. That was about when we made all buildings curvier, and all cars boxier.

After AIDS and the curves, we did some work on elections. First we made them no more than two months long, publicly funded, and forced the networks to give two hours a night to the campaigns. Around when you were born, the candidates were spending about $200 million each on TV ads, because the news wasn’t covering the elections for more than 90 seconds a day. It was nuts! So we fixed that, and then we perfected online and phone voting. Man, participation went through the roof. Everyone thought there was just all this apathy, when the main problem was finding your damned polling place! And all the red tape — register now, vote then, come to this elementary school — but skip work to do it — on and on. Voting on a Tuesday? Good lord. But the online voting, the voting over the phone — man that was great, suddenly participation exploded, from about, what, 40 percent, to 88. We did that over Columbus Day weekend, I think. I remember I’d just had my hair cut very short. Yeah, like in the picture in the hallway. We called that style the Timberlake.

And that’s about when your mom got all kinky again. She went out, bought this one device, it was kind of like a swing, where there was this harness and—

Fine. You don’t need to know that. But the harness figures in, because that’s when your mother had the idea — some of her best ideas happened when she was lying down — to make it illegal to have more than one president from the same immediate family. That was just a personal gripe she had. We’d had the Adamses and Bushes and we were about to have the Clintons and your mother just got pissed. What the fuck? she said. Are we gonna have a monarchy here or what? Are we that stupid, that we have to go to the same well every time? This isn’t an Aaron Spelling casting call, this is the damned presidency! I said What about the Kennedys? And she said Screw ’em! Or maybe she didn’t say that, but that was the spirit of it. She’s a fiery one, your mom, a fiery furnace of—

Ahem. So yeah, she pushed that through, a constitutional amendment.

That led to another busy period. One week, we made all the cars electric and put waterslides in every elementary school. We increased average life expectancy to 164, made it illegal to manufacture or wear Cosby sweaters, and made penises better looking — more streamlined, better coloring, less hair. People, you know, were real appreciative about that. And the last thing we did, which I know I’ve told you about, was the program where everyone can redo one year of their childhood. For $580, you could go back to the year of your choice, and do that one again. You’re not allowed to change anything, do anything differently, but you get to be there again, live the whole year, with what you know now. Oh man, that was a good idea. Everyone loved it, and it made up for all the people who were pissed when we painted Kansas purple, every last inch of it. I did the period between ten-and-a-half and eleven-and-a-half. Fifth grade. Wow, that was sweet.

Speaking of ten-year-olds, here comes your brother. And Uncle Frank! We didn’t have to wake you up! Hola hermano, tios! Esta la noche de los nachos! Si, si . And here’s your mother, descending the stairs. With her hair up. This I was particularly proud of, when I convinced your mother to wear her hair up more often. When she first did it, a week before our wedding, I was breathless, I was lifted, I felt as if I’d met her twin, and oh how I was confused. Was I cheating on my beloved with this version of her, with that long neck exposed, the hair falling in helixes, kissing her clavicles? She assured me that I was not, and that’s how we got married, with her hair up— that’s how we did the walk with the music and the fanfare, everything yellow and white, side by side, long even strides, she and me, your mother and I.