It happened again last night. Periodically I receive a visit from a being who claims he’s from Mars, sent here to grok human behavior. His name is unpronounceable. (Let’s just say it would give you an astronomic triple-word score in Scrabble.) But he’s a nice enough guy and sincere in his questioning, so I try to be helpful.
“I need help with something,” he said.
“Shoot,” I said.
“Counting,” he said. “When you start counting something, do you start at zero?”
“No, of course not.”
“I didn’t think so. So why are we seeing so many end-of-the-decade stories? By basic math, this ‘decade’ is actually only nine years old. Don’t these people know how to count?”
“You’d think,” I said.
“Next,” he said. “Cats and dogs. You’re their masters, right?”
“Well, some people prefer the term animal companions.”
“But you own them, no?”
“In theory.”
“Well,” he said, “it seems the other way around to me. Take dogs, for example. You get up in the middle of the night to let them out, or you follow them around and pick up their, um ... digestive byproducts. So who’s the master of whom?”
“Good point.”
“And cats! They usually ignore you until they want food. Then they feel free to puke up partially digested balls of hair onto the bed covers. Again, who’s in charge here?”
“Us ...?”
"... in theory," he added helpfully.
I shrugged.
“Next question,” he said. "What's up with Pluto?"
"Pluto? The dog?"
"No, Pluto the planet. You demoted it to an 'extra-planetary object.' How do you think the Plutonoids feel?"
"Well, I wasn't personally involved in that decision."
"What do you think the Jupiterians think of Earth?"
"I shudder to think."
“We intercept your television signals" he continued, "and for the last few years we’ve seen advertisements for medicines that promise to cure all sorts of ailments.”
“Yeah, isn’t modern medicine great?”
“But then some guy comes on talking really fast about how this medicine might also cause your hair and teeth to fall out, lead you to break out in boils, bring about intense wobbling, and maybe even kill you. So what’s the point?”
“Well, at least you’ll be over the heartbreak of psoriasis.”
“Since we last met it seems some very silly people acted really foolishly with larges sums of money.”
“That would be a lot of us,” I said.
“So your leaders created this program to try to help everyone out. They called it ‘Cash for Clinkers.’ ”
“Cash for Clunkers,” I corrected. “The idea was to give cash incentives for people to get rid of their old cars and buy news ones.”
“The old ones would be the clunkers, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened to the clunkers after the people traded them in?”
“By law they had to be destroyed.”
“Destroyed!?” he asked, dismayed. “They still worked, right?”
“Sure, I suppose.”
“But didn’t you tell me before that your first car was a clunker?”
“Indeed. A ’67 VW Bug.”
“And you said used cars were an ideal way to help people save money on transportation and for young people to afford their first car.”
“Yeah.”
“So by destroying these clunkers, you’ve just taken away a source of inexpensive cars for these people.”
“I see your point.”
“And don’t the people who started this program claim to want to help poor people and the young? Or maybe it was to help only certain, politically connected people, like auto unions? You don’t think your leaders would do that, do you?”
“I can't even imagine it,” I said.
“Next question,” he said.
“Are you sure you want to go on?” I asked.
“I have a long list here.”
“Well, okay. But I haven’t been much help so far.”
“Oh, you’ve been immensely helpful,” he said. “Anyway, this Cash for Clunkers program was part of a larger effort to spend money to try to help a hurting economy. I believe they called it the stimulus.”
“Yeah, somewhere north of $800 billion.”
“Yes, that’s the one. On your Internet, it shows that hundreds of thousands of those dollars were given to schools to teach massage. Is that the best use of the taxpayers’ money?”
“You get the Internet? On Mars?”
“Yeah, Mars Online. You didn’t answer the question.”
“I can’t,” I confessed.
“It also shows that the number of jobs ‘saved or created’ divided by the money spent* works out to something like $250,000 per job. (I’ll forget for the moment that it’s impossible to calculate a ‘saved’ job since you’re asked to prove something that didn’t happen.) Why didn’t they just write a check for, say, $50,000 for five unemployed people? It would have helped more people, and their spending would have pumped even more money into the economy.”
“Not as much opportunity for graft and political payoffs if they did it your way,” I said.
“Your leaders would do such things?” he asked, incredulous.
“Go figure.”
“I’ve also been following this whole discussion over ‘health-care reform’ or whatever they’re calling it this week,” he said.
“My head hurts already.”
“The people who are really eager to enact this reform—aren’t they the same ones who say the government should not come between a woman and her doctor over the decision to kill her unborn child?”
“For the most part, yes.”
“But you already have the government trying to come between a woman and her doctor when it comes to medical care that could possibly save her life. It seems that if their plan goes into effect, you’ll have even more of this kind of thing. I’m just not seeing the consistency here.”
“Now my brain hurts.”
“Okay, I’ll try not to cause you too much more pain. But you really must help me with this terrorist thing.”
“Thanks. Now I hurt all over.”
“You recently had a man smuggle a bomb onto a plane despite all the security precautions you’ve put into place.”
“Yeah, pretty scary. He failed only because of sheer incompetence on his part and some alert plane passengers.”
“But immediately afterward your authorities implemented a lot of rules to try to prevent another attack. Like you cannot use the plane’s restroom facilities during the last hour of flight.”
“Yeah.”
“So why wouldn’t the terrorist just detonate his bomb one hour and five minutes before landing? And no blankets on your lap during the last hour? And no personal items on your lap? No books? No computers?”
“Pretty drastic, huh?”
“So what are the passengers supposed to do during that last hour?”
“Sit there and appreciate how safe they feel?”
“I suspect that’s not what they’ll be feeling. Why do they punish you when it was someone else who tried to kill everyone?”
“Because they can.”
“I’ll have to be going soon,” he said. “But this latest session confirms our research, so I wanted to give you some good news and bad news before I leave. Which do you want first?”
“Let’s try the good news. I need it.”
“Okay, we’re going to vaporize Earth in 24 hours. Such an idiotic planet has no place in our solar system, soaking up perfectly good solar energy that would be put to better use warming our planet.”
“That’s the good news!? What’s the bad news?”
“I meant to call on you yesterday.”
*****
*The author pointed out in a later comment that he got the equation the wrong way round, and it should be money spent divided by jobs saved/created.
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