"Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

Yup The Establishment

Obviously, we—and when I say “we,” i mean people who no longer laugh at the concept of hemorrhoids—need to come up with some kind of plan for dealing with the yuppies. In a moment I’ll explain my personal proposal, which is that we draft them, but first let me give you some background.

If you’ve been reading the trend sections of your weekly news magazines, you know that “yuppies” are a new breed of serious, clean-cut, ambitious, career-oriented young person that probably resulted from all that atomic testing. They wear dark, natural-fiber, businesslike clothing even when nobody they know has died. In college, they major in Business Administration. if, to meet certain academic requirements, they have to take a liberal-arts course, they take Business Poetry.

In short, yuppies are running around behaving as if they were real grown-ups, and they are doing it at an age when persons of my generation were still playing Beatles records backwards and actively experimenting to determine what happens when you drink a whole bottle of cough syrup.

NOTE TO IMPRESSIONABLE YOUNG READERS: Don’t bother. All that happens is you feel like you could never, ever cough again, even if Professional torturers armed with X-acto knives ordered you to, then you develop this intense, 10-to-12-hour interest in individual carpet fibers. So it’s not worth it, plus I understand the manufacturers have done something wimpy to the formulas.

What bothers me about the yuppies is, they’re destroying the normal social order, which is that people are supposed to start out as wild-eyed radicals, and then gradually, over time, develop gum disease and become conservatives.

This has always been the system. A good example is Franklin Roosevelt, who when he was alive was considered extremely liberal, but now is constantly being quoted by Ronald Reagan. Or take the Russian leaders. When they were young, they’d pull any kind of crazy stunt, kill the czar, anything, but now they mostly just lie around in state.

So I say the yuppies represent a threat to society as we know it, and I say we need to do something about them. One possibility would be to simply wait until they reproduce, on the theory that they’ll give their children the finest clothing and toys and designer educations, and their children will of course grow up to absolutely loathe everything their parents stand for and thus become defiant, ill-dressed, unwashed, unkempt, violently antiestablishment drug addicts, and society will return to normal. The problem here is that yuppies have a very low birth rate, because apparently they have to go to Aspen to mate.

So we’ll have to draft them. Not into the Armed Forces, of course; they’d all make colonel in about a week, plus they’d be useless in an actual war, whapping at the enemy with briefcases. Likewise we cannot put them in the Peace Corps, as they would cause no end of ill will abroad, crouching among the residents of some poverty-racked village in, say, Somalia, and attempting to demonstrate the water-powered Cuisinart.

No, what we need for the yuppies is a national Lighten Up Corps. First they’d go through basic training, where a harsh drill sergeant would force them to engage in pointless nonproductive activities, such as eating moon pies and watching “Days of Our Lives.” Then they’d each have to serve two years in a job that offered no opportunity whatsoever for career advancement, such as:

–bumper-car repairman; —gum-wad remover; —random street lunatic; —bus-station urinal maintenance person; —lieutenant governor; —owner of a roadside attraction such as “World’s Largest All-Snake Orchestra.”

During their time of service in the Lighten Up Corps, the Yuppies would of course be required to wear neon-yellow polyester jumpsuits with the name “Earl” embroidered over the breast pocket.