Dave Barry - Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

Those boyhood memories! I have them often, although I can control them pretty well with medication.

Actually, when I got older I continued to play organized baseball in the form of “league softball,” a game in which after work you put on a comical outfit and go to a public park to argue with strangers. For the first several years the team I was on had a nice, relaxed attitude, by which I mean we were fairly lenient if a player made a mental error. For example, if the ball was hit to the shortstop, and he threw it to first base, but the first baseman wasn’t there because he was rooting through the ice cooler looking for a non-”light” beer, we’d say to the person who brought the beer: “Hey! NEVER make the mental error of bringing ‘light’ beer to a softball game! It can cost a fielder valuable seconds!” But we wouldn’t fine him or anything.

In later years, however, we got more and more young guys on the team who really wanted to win; guys who wore cleats and batting gloves and held practices where they were always shrieking about the importance of “hitting” somebody called the “cutoff man”; guys who hated to let women play, apparently for fear that one of them might, during a crucial late-inning rally, go into labor; guys who (this was the last straw) drank Gatorade during the game. I had to quit.

But I’m getting back into it. I have a son of my own now, and, being an American guy, I’ve been teaching him the basics of the game. One recent bright sunny day I took him out in the yard with a Whiffle ball, and I gave him a few pointers. “Robert,” I said, “did you know that if we use a magnifying glass to focus sunlight on the Whiffle ball, we can actually cause it to melt?” So we did this, and soon we had advanced to complex experiments involving candy wrappers, Popsicle sticks, and those little stinging ants. Although I drew the line at toads. You have to teach sportsmanship, too.

One of the issues that we professional newspaper columnists are required by union regulations to voice grave concern about is the federal budget deficit, which we refer to as the “mounting” deficit, because every extra word helps when you have to produce a certain number of gravely concerned newsprint inches. The point we try to get across in these columns is: “You readers may be out driving fast boats and having your fun, but we columnists are sitting in front of our word processors, worried half to death about the nation’s financial future.” Then we move on to South Africa.

So anyway, I have decided to fret briefly about the deficit, which according to recent reports continues to mount. A while back I proposed a very workable solution to the whole deficit problem, namely that the government should raise money by selling national assets we don’t really need: metric road signs, all the presidential libraries, the Snail Darter, the House of Representatives, North Dakota, etc. Unfortunately, the only concrete result of this proposal was that I got an angry letter from everybody in North Dakota, for a total of six letters, arguing that if we’re going to sell anything, we should sell New York City.

This probably wouldn’t work. There would be major cultural adjustment problems. Suppose, for example, that we sold New York to Switzerland. Now Switzerland is a very tidy, conservative nation, and the first thing it would do is pass a lot of laws designed to make New York more orderly, such as no public muttering, no lunging into the subway car as though it were the last helicopter out of Saigon, no driving taxis over handicapped pedestrians while they are in the crosswalk, no sharing loud confidences regarding intestinal matters to strangers attempting to eat breakfast. These laws would be very difficult for New Yorkers to adjust to. Switzerland would have to send in soldiers to enforce them, and this would inevitably lead to tragic headlines in the New York Times:

ENTIRE SWISS ARMY FOUND STABBED TO DEATH WITH OWN LITTLE FOLDING KNIVES Pedestrians Step Right over Rotting Corpses

So I’m afraid that, appealing as the idea may be, we can’t reduce the deficit by selling New York.

What the government desperately needs is an innovative new concept for getting money from people, and we can all be grateful that such a concept appears to be oozing over the fiscal horizon at this very moment: a national lottery game. A number of congresspersons have already proposed that we start one. It would be similar to the lotteries currently operating in the really advanced states. Here’s how they work:

1. First you pass strict laws that say it is totally illegal for private citizens to operate lotteries, because they encourage the poor and the stupid to gamble away their money against ludicrously bad odds. If you find private citizens operating such lotteries, you call them “numbers racketeers” and you throw them in prison.

2. Next you set up an official state lottery with even more ludicrous odds. You give it a perky name like the “Extremely Lucky Digits Game,” and you run cheerful upbeat ads right on television strongly suggesting that the poor and the stupid could make no wiser investment than to spend their insulin money on lottery tickets. A nice touch is to say you’re using the lottery proceeds to fund a popular program that the state would have to pay for anyway, such as senior citizens or baby deer. In Pennsylvania, for example, they drag an actual senior citizen in front of the camera to perform the ritual televised Daily Number drawing. The senior citizen usually looks kind of frightened, like a hostage being displayed by the Red Brigades. The clear implication is that if the viewers don’t purchase Daily Number tickets, Pennsylvania will have to throw old Mrs. Beasley out into the snow headfirst.

The news media help out by regularly running heartwarming front-page stories about how a man who was broke and starving won $800 million in his state lottery and suddenly could afford nice teeth and many new friends.

So anyway, the plan now is to run something like this on a nationwide scale, which I think would be great, especially if it keeps the federal government from doing something really desperate to raise money, such as selling drugs or making snuff movies. The only potential problem with a national lottery, as some states have pointed out, is that it might siphon off a lot of poor and stupid from the state lotteries. But if this happens, we could have a bailout system, where the federal government would step in and purchase so many million dollars worth of lottery tickets from the troubled state. I mean, hey, why do we have governments in the first place, if not to help each other out?

I figured out why I’m not getting seriously rich. I write newspaper columns. Nobody ever makes newspaper columns into Major Motion Pictures starring Tom Cruise. The best you can hope for, with a newspaper column, is that people will like it enough to attach it to their refrigerators with magnets shaped like fruit.

So I have written a suspense novel. It has everything. Sex. Violence. Sex. Death. Russians. Dead Russians. Here’s what the newspaper critics are saying:

“A very short novel.”-the Waco, Texas, Chronic Vegetable “This is it? This is the entire novel?”-the Arkansas Dependent-Statesperson “Not enough sex.”-the Evening Gonad

No doubt you motion-picture producers out there would like to see the novel these critics are raving about, so you can send me lucrative film offers. Here it is:

Carter Crater strode into the Oval Office. He looked like Tom Cruise, or, if he is available, Al Pacino.

Behind the desk sat the president of the United States. To his left, in the corner, stood the secretary of state. Crater sensed that something was wrong.