I am America (and so can you!) (6 page)

I A M A M E R I C A ( A N D S O C A N Y O U ! )

LIKE I SAID:
Ever since I was a kid I’ve been baffled by retirement, pensions, and S.S. Want proof? Look what I found in the Colbert attic archives. Couldn’t have been more than seven when I wrote it:

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POINT IS:
S.S. didn’t make sense to me as a seven-year-old, and it doesn’t
SS—why do those
initials sound

make sense to me now.

familiar?

Think of it this way: If an alien came down from the Galaxy and told you that on his planet they have a system where all the young, hardworking aliens give up a large number of their glixnards for the benefit of the non-working elder vorzoths, and that by the time they were ready to become vorzoths themselves (a process involving the ingestion of a sacred mineral which renders the forelimbs useless for work in the plthkana mines), the glixnard cisterns might be dangerously depleted, you bet your sweet bippy you’d have a lot of questions. And yet, our human American “vorzoths” (seniors) have banded together to preserve their hoard of “glixnards” (money) at the expense of the young. They call this group the “AARP,” which probably stands for something, but to me, sounds like the noise an old man makes when he’s trying to get out of a bean bag chair.

SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT THESE YEAR-HOGGERS?

Is there a solution to America’s Elderly Crisis that doesn’t involve changing our lives in any way or making us feel guilty? Yes. Think of the money in the Social Security “Trust Fund” as investment capital. Right now, we’re putting that money into millions of small-cap, zero-yield investments: The Jazzy®

Set. No offense, but unless Leo and Dolores Shipner of Forest Hills suddenly decide to get off their apple pancake asses and personally invade Iran, we’re
Shipners successfully
invaded Olive Garden.

not getting value for our money. We need to utilize seniors’ strengths to get a return on our investment.

Are you still awake?

I’m not going to win any awards for saying this, but the elderly are like rude
Prove me wrong,
Pulitzers!

party guests. They came early, they’re always in the bathroom, and now they just won’t leave. I say we do the same thing to them that I do with stragglers at my shin-digs. Put them to work cleaning the place up.

Only this time, the place is called America.

Ring a bell?

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I A M A M E R I C A ( A N D S O C A N Y O U ! )

Let’s use ’em to shut down our porous Southern Border. One thing Old People have a knack for is keeping kids off their lawn. I remember growing up, old man Schmidt would sit in that rocking chair of his like he was manning a guard tower at a Nazi prison camp. One misstep onto his immaculate “Master Lawn” was enough to trigger the old man’s shriek of
“Auf Meine Grass! Das
ist Verboten!”
I say, let’s build a 2000-mile-long front porch along our border with Mexico and line it with the angry aged. When the Mexicans try to cross,
Guardpas?
they’ll be turned into Mexi
can’ts
™ when a million Grampas bellow:

“Get off my country! I just seeded!”

Plus, they’re suckers for heat.

Hey! Anybody want a

free trip to California,

Arizona, New Mexico,

and /or Texas?

Are they up to the job? Make no bones about it, old people are tough. Many of them grew up having to scrap for every penny. They made shoes out of newspaper and twine, and subsisted on a thin stew of newspaper and twine. Sometimes they had to go without shoes and stew altogether so that there would be enough newspaper and twine to treat the baby’s Scarlet Fever. I’d say they can handle Jose.

Of course, the simplest answer to the problem of the aged is for people to stop getting old. There was a time I thought this was impossible. But that was before I developed my Age-Defying Protein Pudding!

It’s based on a high gelatin diet that has kept cow hooves supple for centuries. I’m proud to make it available for the first time in this book.
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