by Gene Callahan

In the wake of the terrorist attacks last Tuesday, Larry Kudlow called for all Americans to purchase stocks: “Should America buy stocks when the market reopens on Monday? Absolutely. In a New York second.”

Larry Kramer echoed Kudlow’s idea in an article at CBS MarketWatch: “That’s right. On Monday invest as much and as often as you can in America. Send the Dow screaming for the moon.”

Well, this seemed like a dandy idea to me. The terrorists themselves were surely short! What better way to discourage them than to sock them with a bunch of margin calls when they had expected to be raking in the dough? And certainly, if bin Laden saw the Dow crack 11,000 – well, he’d just give up, wouldn’t he?

So Monday morning I frantically bought. The problem was, everything was sinking. I’d throw my weight behind IBM, and Apple would drop. I’d support Apple, and Sun would fall. Someone sure as hell was selling. Although, of course, that did seem like a problem with Kudlow and Kramer’s plan: If everyone was buying, whom were we going to be buying from? Well, never mind that. In any case, instead of screaming for the moon the Dow went moaning for the sea bottom. So what went wrong?

Focus, people, focus. There are just too many stocks, and it’s too danged hard to keep all of their prices rising. We need to narrow our efforts. Since the best way to defeat terrorism is apparently to make the price of something in your economy irrationally high, I suggest… pork rinds.

Pork rinds? Why pork rinds? I’ll give you three good reasons:

1. Didn’t Bush Senior love them? And wasn’t he the guy who kicked Saddam’s butt back in ’91?
2. Pork rinds are just fundamentally American. You can’t really imagine going into a French bistro and finding pork rinds, can you?
3. Don’t those towel heads hate pork? Think how crazy it will drive them to see us crunching on it all day long.

Now, the total pork rind capacity of the American economy can’t be that great. If tomorrow, every one of us goes out and buys twenty – no, one hundred – bags of pork rinds, the price will go through the roof!

“But,” you may say, “I don’t like pork rinds!”

Doesn’t matter! Buy ’em anyway. Look, you can feed ’em to the birds. If they won’t eat ’em, try the raccoons – they like pretty much everything. I bet they’d love pork rinds.

Imagine the look on bin Laden’s face when he sees all of the fat raccoons and $50 bags of pork rinds in America. He’ll be quaking in his burnoose.

Pork rinds for victory!

2001, Gene Callahan

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