Oh for the Good Old Days

R.F. Kampfer

UNDER STALINISM, Cossacks were suspected of czarist sympathies. Now some of them are allying with the Stalinists in the anti-ethnic-separatist bloc.

The Tatars would tenderize and season their meat by keeping it under their saddles during the day’s ride. How the quality of life has deteriorated in modern times!

Remember how indignant we were when cigarette papers went up to thirty-five cents for a pack of 100?

Civil War buffs will be struck by the similarities between United Auto Workers president Owen Beiber and General George B. McClellan, whose verbal boldness was matched only by his timidity in action.

Those who take the greatest pride in the accomplishments of their remote ancestors are the ones who have done the least with their own lives. It’s not as if we had anything to do with picking our forebears.

Why don’t the Republicans just run Jim Baker for President and eliminate the middle man?

Paranoia for Beginners

SOME MOVIE critics are theorizing that the Alien creature may be symbolic of the AIDS virus; and maybe the Penguin represents Ross Perot. Whatever happened to Western Union?

A Greenwich Village shop used to sell Joan Crawford Mothers’ Day cards, reading “I never laid a fucking hand on those kids.”

Eat what tastes good. Forget about calories, cholesterol and additives. You could get hit by a truck any day, and old age is probably a real drag anyway.

Even the most dedicated carnivore, however, has to have a few qualms about the way geese are treated to produce fine pate.

Car Talk

THE UAW WILL go the way of all the other one-party states. The only question is whether Owen Beiber will end up like Gorbachev or Ceaucescu.

Only in Detroit do you find an establishment like “Virginia’s Auto Parts and Botique.”

Notes on Parenting

WE WORK OUT an elaborate detailed program for raising our first children. Second children are raised according to a diametrically opposite program, in hopes that they will turn out better than the first. Any further children are allowed to raise themselves, once the parents realize that nothing they do makes any difference.

September-October 1992, ATC 40