The flipside to more readers
a column by Chris Jungle

President Clinton announced his widespread plan to insure that more children can read adequately by the fourth grade. It is a noble cause which I endorse and support with all of the convictions my body can muster, but I did not come here today to praise and exalt glory upon the President and his staff for creating such an initiative. I come to you today to remind people that every positive theory will have a certain backlash. Think of it more like a notice more than a warning.

First, it is best to look at the positives of having a more proficient reading society. More readers means more knowledge overall. Even if the only words a person reads comes from Sports Illustrated, that person will understand in a more detailed fashion how bad the Chicago Cubs are this year. Women who choose to only read Cosmopolitan will be able to read and understand the written part of articles instead of just the pretty pictures, and the result will be that they will dress better and wear make up correctly. With the influx of new readers, the United States could say someday that it has the sharpest folks on the globe. Most of us say that already, but deep down, we all envy those pesky yet proper British.

Of course, the great flaw in having more readers is that they have the ability to read anything that is written. What politicians fail to understand is that there are lots of things to read out there. A perfect example is Penthouse Letters. While I personally enjoy the fairy tales of a man and his wife going to the massage parlor on a lark and ultimately discovering their swinger tendencies, some people disapprove of such stories being put in the written form.

More readers mean more people who can learn how to make homemade bombs, cook LSD, grow marijuana, create a gun out of a potato, hack their way all over the information superhighway, learn the teachings of Satan, and make a spinach casserole. While all of those things won't offend everyone, I'm sure someone would get upset over their children learning about at least one of those activities.

People are currently fuming about television and the horrors it teaches their young. Well, wait until they pick up a book. Books have everything television has, and they have a lot more colorful adjectives. Sex described in its most graphic sense, violence that makes war veterans queasy and more adult language and situations than you can shake a stick at. Moreover, there's hundreds of religions out there, and most of them have their strange, non-Christian, pony-sacrificing beliefs printed on paper. Anyone who learns how to read at a young age will surely be able to comprehend what their pamphlets are expressing.

As more parents allow their children to learn how to read, they, themselves, will learn what disturbing word combinations lie in books. Parents will find out Catcher in the Rye has foul language, Gulliver's Travels preaches the inefficient nature of higher education, and Joseph Conrad novels inspire the insane person in all of us. The next likely step will be for the PTA crowd to start censoring all of the books that many of us hold near and dear to our consciousness. They will say people shouldn't read Vonnegut's version of the bombing of Dresden, or Hemingway's casual conversation about abortion, or Douglas Adams' answer to life, the universe, and everything.

People who learn to read could go to libraries and research policies that the government has made. They could learn how much the government is spending on combating drugs and how well it's working. They could read Senate reports and find exactly what their representative are saying concerning a certain issue. Why, if everyone learns how to read, there's a good chance all of the issues the government has kept a lid on will suddenly be exposed. And then, anarchy, anarchy, anarchy!

There is a solution to this disaster waiting in the wings, and it's probably in most people's homes. If a television is used in every household, we can still ignore all of the words that are written and waiting to be read, and just listen to the ones that come from the box. The advantage we have in our attempt to resist reading is that it takes effort to do it, and I say we let sleeping dogs lie. Reading will make people learn more than they ever wanted to know, and it will only cause sorrow in the long run. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a new Pepsi commercial on that I want to see.

Chris Jungle has been informed that his pay will be docked the next time he creates a Doomsday Scenario for good government policy.

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