"Trade With Japan" joke
In recent months, we have heard the Japanese call the US workers lazy, greedy and illiterate. Those are fighting words to us, even if they may be true. The question is what to do about it. My basketball coach always told me to exploit the weakness of the opposition by using what (questionable) strengths I had. I think the US should do exactly that with Japan. The Japanese are world leaders in quality of goods and decades ahead of us in electronics like High Definition Television (HDTV). We will never be able to compete with them in these areas, so we must redefine the competition. I propose that the FCC mandate a new form of Television called Low Emission and Definition Television (LEAD-TV). Such TV sets would have lots of static interference, horrible resolution, be expensive, break very often, and would be hard and frustrating to watch. Exactly the type of TV sets that American industry and workers are already geared to produce! The Japanese, on the other hand, could not produce such sets without spending billions in retooling; in fact, they couldn't even produce the necessary low tech tools and would have to buy them from the US or places like Bulgaria and Albania. Thus helping the world balance of trade. But even if the Japanese retooled, in order to meet or deseed the FCC standards they would have to import tens of thousand of American workers to show their Japanese counterparts the "how to" of building shoddy products. The Japanese might even have to hire the entire upper management of Ford, GM, Yale, and Stanford, to show Japanese management how to really screw up production. This would solve our unemployment problem. (This does not solve all our problems as we still are left with lawyers. Especially since the supreme court overturned (five to four), the progressive Ohio law requiring lawyers who have cute phone numbers (like 1-800-SUE-THEM or 1-JUST-SAY-SUE or 1-800-I-AM-RICH) to be skinned alive, rolled in salt, then impaled in front of the statehouse. Something to do with something written somewhere prohibiting "no cruel or unusual punishment." Actually not the cruel part, as the court felt the punishment is fitting and totally justified, but the unusual part. If we could only get Japan to copy our legal system, our trade problems would cease.) But the biggest advantage of LEAD-TV would not be the jobs it created; it would be the effect on our children. Schools would require that students watch at least 4 hours of LEAD-TV every day. Since kids never do what they are told, and LEAD-TV is so bad, I know my kids would even risk a spanking to sneak upstairs, hide in a closet and read a good book. Yelling at them, of course, would only heighten their resolve to read. In a decade, our kids could be the most literate in the world! Now don't you think that our kids deserve the best of the worst we can give them! Help me in supporting LEAD-TV for the US, write the FCC or you're congressman now, or if your a typical American and can't right, just call 1-800-NUKE EM 2. PS: For those of you who think JUST-SAY-SUE isn't a valid area code, the ABA sued the phone company in 1991 because there weren't enough cute phone numbers and, of course, won. Now any lawyer can use anything for their area code. Billions of dollars of phone equipment had to be junked and we the consumers had to pay for that; but, hey, don't you agree that our lawyers are worth every penny...
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