The Unger Report

Buy American Flu, Not Imports

And now Chrysler has declared bankruptcy. 

What’s worse, we can’t even manufacture our own flu virus anymore.  We’re outsourcing our pandemics to Mexico?

We used to make things, like Pontiacs.  Now we’re dependent on Mexico, a country that used to buy our cars and get sick on our flus, to drive up the stock prices of American pharmaceutical companies and makers of facemasks.

As a nation, should we be angry at Mexico or the pigs?  Or NAFTA for creating an economy where it’s cheaper to import flu than to make a terrifying world-class flu ourselves. 

With bird flu already coming from China, now swine flu from Mexico, American flumakers will have to cut labor costs to compete.  And we know that means – fewer insured workers who need help paying for flu vaccine.

We shouldn’t laugh about the flu.  But laughing about what scares us can sometimes help us through the panic generated by the media, the WHO, and the CDC’s ban on kissing.  Mouth-breathers, projectile sneezers, spitters, and kissers who insist on greeting others with a full-frontal mouth assault – you knew this day would come.  You’ve ruined it for the rest of us who like to kiss, sneeze, and spit on people we love, or hope to love one day.

Dating someone has an even newer awkward dimension – other than the usual awkward questions about STD’s.  Now we’re forced to ask the object of our affection if they’ve handled a Mexican pig lately, eaten raw bacon, or uncured pork rinds dipped in delicious salsa – all of it followed by an unromantic groping, a slap on the face, and spray down with hand sanitizer. 

I’m finding it hard to kiss my dog on the mouth not because she’s sniffed another dog’s ass, but for fear she licked the hand of a person who casually kissed another person in a dog park who kissed a pig that once lived on a farm in Mexico.  And when you can’t love your dog, who can you love?

Until the Centers for Disease Control’s own website ranks Swine Flu above salmonella and school violence, I’m going to resist the fear that is immigrating virally faster than Susan Boyle’s ear-bleeding warble of “I Dreamed a Dream,” and save my fear for things that are truly terrifying, like Air Force One screaming up the Hudson River, and the flu made right here in the U.S. of A.

Get Ready For GWOP: The Global War On Pirates

by Brian Unger

Listen Now [3 min 49 sec] add to playlist

 

This popular children's costume may soon become an anachronism. iStockphoto.com

 

 

 

Brian Unger is an acting journalist and a journalist who acts. He was an original correspondent and producer for Comedy Central's The Daily Show, a weekly contributor on NPR's Day to Day, and grew up landlocked in Ohio, the Cradle of Presidents, which fuels his cynicism. 

 

 

All Things Considered, April 14, 2009 · The new pirate poses a terrible and legitimate threat for mariners, and a huge headache for the manufacturers of the top-selling Halloween costume, for Johnny Depp, and for Disney, which is now the world's biggest profiteer and glamorizer of pirates, the new terrorists. Walt is rolling over in his cryogenic grave.

Will librarians be forced to pull copies of Treasure Island from bookshelves? Will fast-food giant Long John Silver's close its doors? Will the Jonas Brothers, a Disney staple whose raucous cover of "Yo, Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)," praising an ocean-going life of robbing and kidnapping, have to end their careers sooner than we expected? One can only hope.

Passe is the villain with a wooden leg who had a vocabulary of one word: Arrrrgh! Anachronistic is the parrot on his shoulder: Caw! Now we Americans must undergo a huge cultural shift as we embark on the modern Global War on Pirates: GWOP.

As a nation, we are all thinking the same thing: The GWOP is going to be long and expensive.

And we're wondering, while still engaged in the Global War on Terrorism, or Overseas Contingency Operation, do we burden the U.S. Navy with a Global War on Pirates, or an On the High Seas Contingency Operation to combat marauding thugs on boats?

We admired the pirate of yore, portrayed by the likes of actor Geoffrey Rush in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, for his independent spirit, allowing no one to govern him, and for living by his own pirate's code.

But the nouvelle pirate is the Glenn Beck of the sea, a maritime libertarian — a "maritiarian" if you will — who is both militant and irritant, less interested in advancing an ideology and more interested in getting rich and getting a cheap thrill.

Let's not give credit to Islamic radicalism, but at least it wants to end Western influence in the Middle East. When it comes to terrorizing the sea, one man's pirate is another man's unemployed Somali bouncer — armed about as well as a 19th century bandit who picked off wagon trains along the Santa Fe Trail, but wearing Keds.

These swashbucklers commandeered a lifeboat within sniping distance of the USS Bainbridge, a guided missile destroyer. Pirates, meet the modern age.

And if you really want to sell your story, someone's got to walk the plank, and you're going to have to add a love story and some romance. You've got to have a hook, or at the very least, a Captain Hook.

Recessed Man

Compelling data suggests the recession has put American Man in deep trouble.  Anecdotal evidence alone paints a grim portrait of a shrinking, emasculated Joe Six-pack or Joe Single Malt, diminished in status and earning, ego and pride. 

Once there was a time, before the recession, when the worst humiliation a man could suffer was losing his hair.

Now he’s losing his job.  His house.  Car.  And now we learn he can’t even afford to buy new underwear.  That means the real stain on this economy, gentlemen, is in your pants.  What further indignities must you, American Man, endure?

Ask your dog.  American Man’s best friend -- the one you kicked to the curb because you couldn’t pay for kibble.  Or the dog you didn’t give up to a shelter is – according to the anecdotal evidence and those who collect it, whoever you are – great anecdoddlers – you’ve let that dog go ungroomed because the price of haute dog bath buffer with tea tree oil is way too steep.

So with no dog, job, house, car, hair, or tighty-whities without holes, look down.  Your shoes are a mess.  Cobblers have never been busier, according to shoe data collectors, repairing your worn out soles.  And when you look into the mirror at your soulless face, it’s covered in hair because – according to beard trimming statistics – you can’t even afford to shave.

From head to toe you’ve gone from Gordon Gecko to Grizzly Adams:  your face is hairy, your undies are scary.  What more can you lose American Man but your will to reproduce…

And so you get a vasectomy.  Up 30% in some parts of the U.S. according to those whose business it is to take the measure of a man’s business.  You can’t afford a dog let alone a child.  And if it’s killing your marriage, the data suggests you’ll stay married and miserable – according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers – 37% of which report a downturn in divorcing couples. 

When love dies, lawyers can be expensive.  So if you do wind up in court, chances are you’ll be defending yourself – so says new data collected from family courts.

These are either terrible days for American Man or very busy days for journalists thinking of new ways to tear him down, and reduce him to a hapless blob of economic indicators…anecdotally-speaking.

So, American Man, if you do happen to find yourself with no job, house, car, dog, capacity to impregnate your wife in the marriage you can’t afford to escape, standing unshaven before a family court judge in tattered undies, shoes, and defending yourself…sack up, hold your head high, and have hope -- it just might be one, big coincidence.

Warning: Exposure to Sun Can Cause Recession

Today marks the beginning of Passover.

And for observant Jews, this day is even more special because, according to Talmudic tradition, the sun returns to the position it occupied at the same time during the week of its creation, something that occurs once every 28 years.  Jews express their gratitude for the continuity of the sun and to thank God for the rules of nature in worldwide Blessing of the Sun ceremonies.

The last time the sun occupied this position in the sky was in 1981, in a period of economic recession.

Before that, in 1953 – in the post Korean War recession.

And 28 years before that there was the prelude to that Great Depression thing.

Now, in 2009, in this terrible recession, the sun is trying to tell us something, again, like, "Hi, it’s me, up here – it’s been 28 years and you’ve still done nothing to harness my power and free energy -- why can’t you listen?  I’m here to help, folks.  Here’s another recession, now go to your room and think about what you’ve done.”

God of cinema Frank Capra, a Catholic, tried to say the same thing in “Our Mr. Sun” in 1956 -- ironically, a movie shown to practically every school-aged child courtesy of the now defunct Bell Telephone System.

In it we learned the sun is something awesome, powerful, even a little scary if we didn’t listen to him.

Today on Passover, this once every 28-year event is evidence that the sun, the heavens, and the economy are connected.  And when we ignore this, the economic gods send us into recession, lower our credit limits without notifying us, and perhaps take away one’s matzoh for not baking it in a solar kitchen.

So here’s a prediction – there’s going to be another solar-economic event in 2037. 

We’ve got 28 years and 3.5 more presidents to fix this economy and transform the way we consume energy before the sun says “Hey, stop investing in things that sound like me – but aren’t – like sun chips, Sun Microsystems, and the Pontiac Sunfire.  And by the way, sunny D has nothing to do with me - the sun – and contains about 2% juice.”