Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

would be mightily improved by a once over lightly of the Hiroshima treatment. There

is that dame upstairs, for instance, the one with the square bowling ball. Never

again would she take it out for practice right over your bed at three in the

morning. Isn’t that some consolation?

No more soap operas. No more six minutes of good old Mom facing things

bravely, interspersed with eight minutes of insistent, syrupy plugging for

commercial junk you don’t want and would be better off without. Never again will you

have to wait breathlessly for “same time, same station” to find out what

beautiful Mamie Jukes, that priceless moron, does about her nameless babe. She will

be gone, along with the literary prostitute who brought her into being.

No more alarm clocks. No more alarm clocks! No more of the frenzied keeping

of schedules, appointments, and deadlines that they imply. You won’t have to gulp

your coffee to run for the 8:19 commuters’ special, nor keep your eye on the clock

while you lunch. A few of the handy little plutonium pills dropped from the sky will

end the senseless process of running for the bus to go to work to make the money to

buy the food to get the strength to run for the bus. You will swap the pressure of

minutes for the slow tide of eternity.

But best of all, you will be freed of the plague of the alarm that yanks you

from the precious nirvana of sleep and sets you on your weary feet, with every nerve

screaming protest. If you are snapped suddenly out of sleep in the Atomic Stone Age,

it will be a mountain lion, a wolf, a man, or some other carnivore, not a mechanical

monstrosity.

Westbrook Pegler will no longer exhibit to you his latest hate, nor will

Lolly Parsons stuff you with her current girlish enthusiasm. (If your pet dislikes

among the columnists are not these two, fill in names to suit yourself; none of them

will bother you after the fission treatment.)

In fact, all the impact of world-wide troubles will fade away. Divorces,

murders, and troubles in China will no longer smite from headline and radio. Your

only worries will be your own worries.

No more John L. Lewis.

No more jurisdictional strikes.

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No more “Hate-Roosevelt” clubs.

No more “Let’s-Hate-Eleanor,-Too” clubs.

No more Petrillo.

No more damn fools who honk right behind your car while the lights are

changing. I’ll buy this one at a black market price right now.

No more Gerald L. K. Smith… . ai~d, conversely, no more people who think

that the persecution of their particular minority is the only evil in the entire

world worth talking about, or working to correct.

No more phony “days.” You won’t have to buy a red carnation to show that Mom

is alive nor a white one to show that she’s not. (It’s even money that you will have

lost track of her in the debacle and not know whether she is alive or dead.) No more

“Boy’s Day” in our city governments with pre-adolescent little stinkers handing out

fines and puritanical speeches to tired street walkers while the elected judge

smiles blandly for the photographers. No more “Eat More Citrus Fruit” or “Eat More

Chocolate Candy” or “Read More Comic Books” weeks thought up by the advertising

agents of industries.

While we are on the subject of phony buildups, let’s give a cheer for the

elimination of debutantes with press agents, for the blotting out of “cafe” society,

for the consignment to oblivion of the whole notion of the “coming-out” party. The

resumption of the comingout party in the United States, with its attendant,

incredibly callous, waste, at the very time that Europe starves, is a scandal to the

jay birds. A few atom bombs would be no more than healthy fumigation of this

imbecilic evil.

No more toothsome mammals built up by synthetic publicity into movie “stars”

before they have played a part in a picture. This is probably a relatively harmless

piece of idiocy in our whipped-cream culture, but the end of it, via A-bombs, may

stop Sarah Bernhardt from spinning in her grave.