Leaders

It’s time for picking our new leader. We hear speeches and name-calling. Just to see who gets to the big leader-decider for the next four years.

Then Mr. New-Leader decides to spend all our money on things we don’t need, fight people we don’t know, give big guns to big thugs, and, most of all, pay rich guys for being rich. Would any of us decide these things?

We need to elect a NOT-Leader who doesn’t decide anything. He just does important stuff like the national trash collection and garden cleanup. And teaching our kids and keeping guns away from whacko’s and robbers and teenagers. Things we tell him to do. Yes, we want a Do-As-You’re-Told kind of guy. We don’t want this guy making up stuff to do just to keep busy like the guy we have now. The new guy can sleep all day--I don’t care, as long as he doesn’t do anything too terrible.

How come we need a leader anyway? I know. Deep in our deepest hearts we still want a king to tell us what to do. You’d think we would be over that by now. But we want a King, walking around with his fancy red coat and crown and a bunch of princesses. Why do we want him? It’s brainwashing! Do kids’ stories have a congress? No, but kings show up everywhere. The biggest things are king-sized. The baddest fish are King Salmon. Mr. King Kong always got the prettiest girls. Burger King gives you paper crowns if you’re good. The King of the jungle runs things, not the shift-manager lion down at the oasis. Boy, are we brainwashed.

And we do have a king right now. Maybe not for life but it feels that way while he does what he wants with my money and country. Let’s be honest and apply the duck test to our president: If he walks like a duck and talks like a duck then guess what he is. Let’s call his home the White Castle and bow to Queens Laura and Condi.

What’s the alternative to kings? I know Congress is messy. Kings chop off your head with a big, pretty swing, but senators argue until you drop dead of old age. It’s like those business meetings that go on and on until you schedule another meeting. But you don’t do bad things at those meetings. You just don’t do much. And not doing much is a pretty good idea when you have lots of bombs and blank checks waiting in your desk.

The kings-to-be ask us who will answer the red phone at 3AM., who gets to decide something terrible before breakfast. I know the truth--they don’t decide at 3AM. They already know what they want to do; they just wait for some a reason to do it. And they think those things they do are best done in the dark.

Since we are stuck with these leader guys, how can we keep them under control? Congress is supposed to cut off king-money to keep them in line. And they cannot attack until Congress declares war. But the decider-king just keeps spending and fighting. No matter what.

I have a plan. We need a king-sized global trading system to swap leaders every six months. Twice a year, the UN has a big party and all the leaders come and eat too much at a very fancy dinner. Then after a couple deserts, everyone pops open a fortune cookie with their new assignment: “You were made for Poland, start packing.” “Hah, you got Burma, good luck,” “Woo, woo, woo, you got the U.S. –don’t forget to cash in all your Euros.” Like musical chairs, but this time with enough seats for all, everyone moves and takes their staff. OK, we will get some good leaders and some bad. Just like now, but they change quicker and they don't get too attached to one place.

But best of all, if you were a big-shot leader, would you start pounding on another country if you might be its leader in two days? Leaders watch out for themselves, not us. We can trust them on that, and on stealing a little. Luckily it takes a while to figure out how to do something real bad in a new place and by then they will be off somewhere else.

OK it’s not a great plan, but we need to do something to spread out their power. That’s what Adams and Madison and the gang tried to do when they made the constitution here the USA. Spread out the power, so nobody has too much. Give a little to Congress, the judges, governors, city councils, a little to the steel and power companies, a little to the Girl Scouts and a bunch to the Red Cross; give a little power to everyone.

Let everybody be a leader.

Green Thoughts

I cut down on stuff coming into my house. I save electricity—curly lights in every room. I save water—the lawn dies happily each summer. I buy less—don’t have the money anyway these days.

And I pay attention to what goes out. I recycle—I sort stuff into big green and blue bins and instruct my wife (with moderate effect) on the intricacies of plastic reuse classifications. I compost—my banana peels and coffee grounds will soon be born-again dirt. I dutifully trek back to Safeway with my plastic bag offerings (suspecting that they just chuck them in the dumpster when no one is looking).

I am one green guy.

But I have been thinking about something we send out everyday and spend God knows how much money, time, effort and energy in transporting to a big industrial-style, centralized processing plant. You know, the family sewage.

In this time of decentralization, how come we have a big, superhighway of poop under every street? Right next to the fresh water pipes and cable TV.

I know that in the good old days everyone just dumped their poop out the window and men just took a walk in the newly invented garden behind every upscale urban house. Sewers were a big (but little considered) advance for civilization. With sewers, poop flowed downstream and the rich moved up on the hills. Then when the scientists learned how to cook it and clean it up in their processors for dumping in the rivers—Wow! Cities didn’t smell the same. Except for the horses and then later for the cars.

I left out the part about cholera and dysentery, (formerly known as the bloody flux, thanks Wikipedia) going away. With these guys flushed from polite society, stomach growling and cramps were a thing of the past. Hurray for Sewers!

But now in post-industrial America, when we have closed down shoe factories, plants for making steel and iron and even lots of our airplanes get built in France, do we need the biggest factory in town to turn out processed poop, just to remind us that the US was once the industrial giant of the world. I suspect no.

It's just no one has had the foresight to see what is hidden. Sort of like before vacuum cleaners, or food processors, or even back when the best place to sit and read was just over a big hole in the floor. This was before Mr. Crapper (now of great fame--his name made immortal thru daily use) did his great work and invented the toilet with its water valve that lets poop go out, but keeps smells from coming in.

Now is time to move beyond centralized, industrial-sized solutions. We have cell phones, not central switchboards; we have laptops, not IBM 360’s; we have ipods, not radio stations; we have skateboards, not steam trains. Life in the US is small and spread out, like the suburbs, and poop needs to keep up.

We need a new way to deal with it. No pipes coming out of the house. Just pull the handle and BAM: everything gets processed, clean water flows out to the tomatoes and a pile of clean, sweet-smelling, org-dirt comes out ready for the garden.

We have a prize to send someone up to outer space. That encourages rocket development. I say lets develop the poopster. Offer a new prize, a million bucks, to you, Mr. or Ms. hot-shot inventor, to think about poop for a few minutes and design us a poopster. that's what I call the invention now, but remember, it will be named after you when you succeed.

Mr. Crapper’s big days are over. When you win, you will be remembered once or twice a day by everyone on earth (if we have good marketing).