I’m not disturbed by war. More like entertained. It’s never a bad show. It’s the original Greatest Show on Earth. Otherwise, why would thev call it a “theater of war”? I love it. And as far as I’m concerned, the show must go on.
But I realize there are some people who really worry about this kind of thing, and so, as a good citizen, I offer two ideas for peace. It’s the least I can do.
Many people work on war plans; not too many work on peace plans. They even have a war college at Ft. McNair, Washington. They call it the National Defense University, but it’s a war college. They don’t have a peace college.
And they have war plans for every contingency, no matter how remote. If Easter Island gives us some crap tomorrow, we have a plan in a computer that tells us exactly how to thoroughly bomb the shit out of Easter Island. You name the country, we’ve got the plan. Chad, Myanmar, Upper Volta, Burkina Faso, Liechtenstein. Just give us some crap, and we’ll come A there, and bomb the shit out of you! ‘Cause we’ve got a plan. Well, so do I. Two of them. George’s plans for peace: My first plan is worldwide, year-round, nonstop folk dancing. In short, everyone in the world would be required to dance all the time. It leaves very little time for fighting, h and what combat does occur is inefficient, because the combatants are constantly in motion.
When it was suggested that this plan might be impractical, I offered an alternative wherein only half the people would be dancing at any given time. The problem with this was the distinct possibility that while half the people were dancing, the other half would be robbing their homes.
So now I’ve stripped it down to a symbolic plan: twenty-four-hour, nonstop, worldwide folk dancing, once a year. Each year, on a designated day, everyone in the world would stop what they were doing and dance for twenty-four-hours.
Any kind of dancing you want. Square dance, minuet, grind, peabody, Cakewalk, mazurka, samba, mashed potato. Doesn’t matter. Just get out there and dance. Even hospital patients, shut-ins, cripples, and people on life support; if you’re too sick to dance, you just die. While the doctors and nurses keep dancing. This would be a good way to weed out the weaker people. Dance or die! Natural selection with a beat.
One good result, of course, would be that during the actual dancing, no fighting could take place. But the plan would also tend to reduce violence during the remainder of the year, because for six months following the dance, everyone would be talking about how much fun they had had, and for the six months after that, they would all be busy planning what to wear to next year’s dance.
Another plan I have is World Peace Through Formal Introductions. The idea is that everyone in the world would be required to meet everyone else in the world, formally, at least once. You’d have to look the person in the eye, shake hands, repeat their name, and try to remember one outstanding physical characteristic. My theory is, if you knew everyone in the world personally, you’d be less inclined to fight them in a war: “Who? The Malaysians? Are you kidding? To know those people!” The biggest problem with compulsory, world-wide formal introductions would be logistics. How would it work? Would you line up everyone in the world single file and have one person at a time move down the line meeting all the others? And then when they finish they get on the end of the line, and the next person starts?
Or would you divide everyone into two long lines and have them move past each other laterally? That seems inefficient, because, for at least part of the time, each line would have a large number of people with nothing to do. And also, once you finished the first pass, everyone would ? still have to meet the people in their own line.
Either way, it would take a very long time. In fact, children would be born during the introductions, and then you’d have to meet them, too. And it’s probably important to remember that because of their longer names, some nationalities would move through the line more slowly than others. Russians, for example. Russian names tend to be long. If you ever bought an ID bracelet for a Russian person, you know what I mean. The engraving alone can run over two hundred dollars. I’m afraid the Russians would move through the line very slowly:“Vladimir Denisovitch Zhirinovski, this is Yevgeny Vasily Arbatov. Yevgeny Vasily Arbatov, meet Vladimir Denisovitch Zhirinovski.” Major delay.
On the other hand, the Chinese tend to have short names. “Chin Lu, Wu Han. Wu Han, Chin Lu.” Bing! See ya later! Movin’ right along. Which is why there are so many Chinese: less time saying hello, more time to fuck. Peace on you. But only if you really deserve it.
I suppose it would be nice if reincarnation were a reality, but I have problems with the math. At some point, originally, there must have been a time when there were only two human beings. They both died, and presumably their souls were reincarnated into two other bodies. But that still leaves us with only two souls. We now have nearly six billion people on the planet. Where are all the extra souls coming from? Is someone printing up souls? Wouldn’t that tend to lower their value?