I won’t tell you to go shopping. They tried that before. You spent your little credit cards till the numbers wore off and then squeezed your house for money and spent, spent, spent. That worked real well. For a couple years.

Now we need to crank up the economy again. Our smart bank guys loaned you so much money that we all went broke spending it. We need a new crank to get things going so we can all be rich guys again.

Some people say the way to go is get a job and make something. But what kind of things do we make here in the old USA. We make music and movies. We make computer games. But you can only sell so many of those. We used to make loans and sell them to just about anyone. That one sure is gone. How about making something you can wear or turn on and watch or just pick up and carry around? We don’t know how to make that stuff anymore.

We do services, not stuff. We do wash-your-pooch, curl-your-hair, mow-your-grass, cook-your-Mac, rub-your-back, paint-your-nails services. Lots of doing. Lots of services. That’s OK, I guess. But we are pretty saturated with services. How much more can you do without getting illegal.

I wish we could still make great stuff like a good fast bicycle or a fancy new kiddee toy or a kitchen seven-in-one mixer or even an old fashioned broom. So I don’t have to always buy stuff from overthere. Overthere is nice, but overhere should be OK too. They say we cost too much to make stuff so we have to use robots or overthere people who work like crazy and don’t like money much. That’s what they say.

I read in the paper today that all the new money is in health! That’s what’s going to crank up the old economy.

So let’s start cranking. Everybody, get sick, right now!

Kickstart those doctors and nurses. Get that health money flowing by sharing some germs and bad habits.

I know we try. We eat fat. We drink our livers blue. We smoke our lungs black. We are not well. But not sick enough to ratchetup the economy. We need a good disease for every red-blooded American. Like a chicken in every pot we need a bunch of microbes in every belly. A virus in every cell. We need some good old fashioned low-grade sicknesses in every home.

We have some bad diseases that you could get. But they kill you quick. We want good diseases that just make you go to the hospital a lot, see a doctor every day, need a nurse, take a bunch of pills, but most of all, let you keep on working your health business job, helping those other sick people. That’s how to make the economy work. Everybody stays sick and goes to see each other for new treatments and meds, paying through the nose with good hard cash.

So where do we get these diseases we need? All the good diseases live down near the equator. Malaria and sleeping sickness keep you hanging on forever and taking pill after pill. They never get cured. They could be a goldmine.

I was going to call on our genetic engineers to fix up those down-south diseases to suit us up-north Americans, but why? We don’t need to do anything this time to be saved. Isn’t it funny how the world works?

Global warming is sending bunches of mosquitoes our way with lots of fancy new diseases in their pointy little snoots. I’m looking forward to that. You should too.

Now, everybody, roll up your sleeves, give them little bugs some blood and, hurray, catch something good for America.

I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes and I Don't Like It.

Mostly TV ads just get on my nerves, but sometimes you find out something important.

Chevy showed me how to pull big, railroad cars up a mountain with my four-door SUV. Jack LaLane showed how old and saggy looks even when you work out too much. But now the probiotic, blue-state yogurt and clotted milk people are telling me secrets about who I really am—it’s like finding religion, or seeing your best friend’s mama naked when you are nine, or finding out, when you visit your Aunt Ethel in the country, that smelly, grass-eater cows squirt milk from downstairs. The world just looks different and you give up milk forever.

I used to think I was me. Now the yogurt people tell me I was all wrong-- I am more than me. In fact, more of me is not me, than is me. For every cell that says Chuck Kerns in its DNA, 1000 microbes, without papers or proper clearance, climbed the fence and live in my heartland. Well slightly lower, but you get the idea.

At first I was not sure whether to welcome them or build a fence. Now I know.

Those yogurt guys are smuggling in microbes, even charging you extra to carry them home in your car trunk. You are an accomplice and give billions sanctuary down there in your personal basement.

OK, I hear these microbe guys do work hard--dirty work--and don’t get much pay, just leftovers. It’s dangerous--if they don’t hang on tight, they get flushed. But they are taking away jobs from full Chuck Kerns DNA cells. If I could get a couple neurons or liver cells to go down and work a double shift I would, but the liver cells like to stay near their own types. And neurons think they know everything.

My problem is there are just so many microbes. A few would be fine. But they breed like rabbits in a sex club. Microbes say they don’t want to take over, but who knows. I am just one big, fat, happy colon to those guys. If things keep going this way, one day I may not be Chuck Kerns anymore. I will be a big, tall bunch of microbes named Bifidobacterium or something even longer and hyphenated too.

Now I am formally calling on those Minutemen who sit on the borders to go patrol our dairy shelves too. We need a fence in the milk case running from non-fat coffee-mate to smelly blue cheese. Microbes can’t climb high so a short wall is just fine. But those microbes slip thru damn-near invisible holes so it’s got to be tough, like us, when we can’t digest anything stronger than soggy biscuits and Wonder bread after cleaning out our system of those symbiotic alien-cell types.

We are fighting for purity in our colons today and cleaner pipes tomorrow. Remember that when you go down to Safeway and fill up your cart. Those yogurt guys will back off soon and start putting good old artificial, all-American, bacteria-free gooplets back on the shelves soon, if you act right now.

Fight On.