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:
- Didn't
Bush Senior love them? And wasn't he the guy who kicked Saddam's
butt back in '91?
- Pork
rinds are just fundamentally American. You can't really imagine
going into a French bistro and finding pork rinds, can you?
- 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!