Who Let the Dogs In? Read Free Page B

context, one must never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor. You have to ignore a lot of stuff in order to laugh about Reagan—dead babies and such—but years of practice with the Texas Lege is just what a body needs to get in shape for the concept of Edwin Meese as attorney general. Beer also helps.
    Here are six perfectly good reasons to keep laughing during the Reagan administration:

•  Things are not getting worse: Things have always been this bad. Nothing is more consoling than the long perspective of history. It will perk you up no end to go back and read the works of progressives past. You will learn therein that things back then were also terrible, and what’s more, they were always getting worse. This is most inspiriting.
•  Things could get worse. The fact that they probably will should not be used as an excuse for tossing away this golden opportunity to rejoice in the relative delightfulness of our current situation. Is there anything to cheer us in the realization that Ed Meese is attorney general? Yes. It could have been Jesse Helms. And may yet be. Let us give thanks for Ed Meese while we yet have time.
•  There is always the off chance that adversity will improve our character. Since we are all the spiritual children of the Puritans, we secretly believe suffering is good for us. I am putting this spell in the wilderness to good use myself: That awful tendency we liberals have to bleed from the heart over victims of cruelty and injustice is so off-putting. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to not feel sorry for Texaco, Inc., victim of manifest injustice though it is. I hardly ever heard of anything so awfully unfair as Texaco having an $11 billion judgment put against them when it wasn’t even Texaco that screwed over Pennzoil in the first place. And then they have to pay a $13 billion bond to appeal the case. Gosh, it’s a good thing I have a will of iron or I’d be hard put to suppress those little twinges of sympathy.
•  We’re not responsible for any of this stuff. No matter how bad it gets, no matter how much they foul things up, it’s not our fault. We’ve got a guilt-free eight years here, team, and given the amount of guilt we have to carry around with us when we have any say in how things get done, this should be our shining hour.
•  A redundant reason to keep right on chortling through the Ronaldan Age is on account of lefties are more fun than righties by definition. Ever been to a YAF convention? By comparison, SDS was a Marx Brothers movie. What’s the point of doing good if you can’t have fun doing it? You want to wind up looking like Jeane Kirkpatrick? So smile.
•  The Reagan administration is genuinely funny, honest it is. From the time we whipped Grenada in a fair fight to the day the old boy dropped off the wreath at Bitburg, this administration has been nothing but laughs. James Watt! Killer trees! Ketchup as a vegetable! Reagan cures the deficit! This is great stuff. You can’t make up stuff this good.

    In fact, there’s another perfectly good reason to be grateful to Ronald Reagan: He’s so amazing that zillions of future writers are daily being discouraged from ever trying their hands at fiction.
     
    March 1986

 
    The Fudge Factory
     

     
    A FEW YEARS AGO, Jules Feiffer drew an Everyman who offered, in serial panels, these observations about the state of the nation:

1.  Truth hurts.
2.  Before truth, this was a happy country.
3.  But look what truth did to us in Vietnam.
4.  Look how the truth fouled us up in the 1960s and the 1970s.
5.  Truth has changed us from a nation of optimists to a nation of pessimists.
6.  So when the president makes it a crime for government workers to go public with the truth, I say, “Hoorah!”
7.  And when he bars the press from reporting our wars, I say, “About time!”
8.  America doesn’t need any more truth.
9.  It needs to feel better.

    Ronald Reagan, Feiffer observed