Then along came Ronald Reagan. Ron believes taxpayers are tired of having their money taken away and used for massive, inefficient social programs. He wants to take their money away and use it for massive, inefficient defense programs. So the poverty-program administrators are extremely unhappy, while the defense-program administration are tickled pink. But they have the same problem the social-program administrators had: They have to figure out how to spend the extra billions on defense without actually making the country any safer, because if they really do make it safer, they won’t be able to demand more money.

This is tough, because the United States is obviously not directly threatened except by Russian missiles, and we already have enough missiles to blow up the whole world if the Russians ever attack us. So the defense program administrators have come up with a very imaginative plan: they have decided to defend virtually every country in the world other than Russia and its allies. Since most of these countries are hopelessly unstable, we could spend every dollar every taxpayer ever earns to defend them and never come close to succeeding. But the defense-program administrators will certainly be busy.

Right now, for example, they are busily administering the defense of El Salvador, a wretched little country that has suddenly become Vital to Our National Security. According to many people familiar with El Salvador, including a former U.S. ambassador there, the El Salvadoran government spends much of its time shooting El Salvadorans. But our government is sending them arms anyway. I mean, it has to do something with the money. Anything but let taxpayers keep it.

One swell thing about the United States is that newspapers can print whatever stories they want. Another one is that nobody has to read them.

In the United States, the press is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” No, wait, that’s the Ten Commandments. Anyway, whatever the Constitution says about the press, we Americans should be darned glad it says it. In the Soviet Union, the press is controlled by the official news agency, Tass, which is always giving out highly amusing versions of world events:

MOSCOW—Tass, the official Soviet news agency, announced today that Soviet troops have entered Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Iran, Albania, Mongolia, Egypt, Norway, and Saskatchewan at the request of liberation movements fighting the western capitalist colonialist Zionist hegemony of running-dog pipe-carrying widow-stabbing baby-eating lackeys of United States imperialism. Tass said the Soviet forces will ride around in nuclear-powered tanks until the various countries are safe from the threat of further oppression.

I imagine the Russian people regard Tass as a major chuckle. I bet they can’t wait to see the paper each day, so they can read what isn’t going on in the rest of the world. In fact, this is the big advantage their system has over ours: since the Russian government always lies, the people can safely assume that the opposite of whatever Tass says is true. Over here, things are more complicated. Our government lies a lot, too, but it can’t force the newspapers to print the lies accurately. From time to time the reporters try to get at the truth, and once in a great while they succeed. So you can be fairly sure you’re reading lies, but, unlike the Russians, you can never really count on it. The only reliable parts of American newspapers are horoscopes, weather forecasts, and economic outlooks, which are all consistently false.

Another problem with American newspapers is that they are positively obsessed with boring issues. Take the Helsinki Accords. You don’t care about the Helsinki Accords, and neither does any other normal person. You can go into every bar and shopping center in America, and you will never once hear anyone say: “Hey, how about them Helsinki Accords?” But newspapers will drone on and on about them at the slightest provocation.

Newspapers are also inordinately fond of writing about statements by presidential press secretaries. No presidential press secretary in the history of the United States has ever said anything newsworthy. I mean, his whole job is to make sure nobody has the vaguest idea what the President is thinking. Nevertheless, every morning dozens of Washington reporters troop into the press secretary’s office and write down everything he says:

PRESS SECRETARY: I wish to correct the accounts that appeared in some newspapers yesterday quoting me as stating that the President’s mood is one of Restrained Optimism. I did not state that. I stated that the President’s mood is one of Guarded Optimism.

REPORTER: Does this represent a change in the President’s mood?

PRESS SECRETARY: It does not represent a change from yesterday. The President has been in a consistently Guardedly Optimistic mood for two days now.

Now at this point, your average citizen would be asleep. But the Washington reporters think this stuff is dynamite. They’re wetting their pants over the President’s mood. They all go roaring out to find some presidential aide, who tells them, in strictest confidence, that despite what the press secretary would have them believe, the President’s mood is actually one of Hopeful Caution.

The next day all the papers run page-one presidential-mood stories long enough to choke Brahma bulls. The reporters read them. The President’s aides read them. Everybody else, including the President, turns directly to the sports section.

I think British newspapers have a much better approach. They ignore the official actions of the government, which hasn’t done anything in forty years anyway, and focus on something readers can respond to: sex. If you read the headlines in British newspapers, you get the impression that everybody in the government, with the possible exception of the Queen, is a pervert:

EIGHT MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT ARRESTED IN BED WITH NEWTS, CALLIOPE

This is the kind of story you can sink your teeth into, so to speak. I’d like to see American newspapers try the same sort of thing on the Reagan administration. Let’s face it: the Reagan administration is full of really boring-looking guys, guys who have investment portfolios and matching pen-and-pencil sets. If the newspapers write about what these guys say, the entire country will be asleep in a matter of weeks. People will be nodding off at work, in their cars, at the controls of commercial airliners. The country will collapse. The newspapers should see it as their duty to print stories about high-level sex. They wouldn’t even have to lie:

WASHINGTON—AN in-depth examination of the statements of Vice President George Bush reveals he has never publicly denied having spent two weeks in a motel with a lawn tractor.

Imagine seeing that in, say, the New York Times. It would turn the country around. People would start to care about public affairs again.