Flossing does not come naturally to human beings. If the Good Lord had wanted us to floss our teeth, He would have given us less self-respect. But the Dental Community says we have to do it, because otherwise we’ll get gum disease.

Pretty slick, isn’t it? If we can’t even see cavities, how the hell are we going to dispute them when they tell us we have gum disease?

I was about to point all this out to my dentist when he gave me this gas, nitrous oxide I believe, and all of a sudden I felt great. I began to really appreciate the Dental Community for coming up with flossing and all the other fine things it has done for me over the years. I even began to soften toward Bucky Beaver.

I think this was part of the plan.

If you are a member of the private sector, you are going to have to start supporting the arts.

For the benefit of those of you who do not know what sector you belong to, here is a simple way to figure it out: If you get Presidents’ Day, election day, Arbor Day, Columbus Day, your birthday, Groundhog Day, and Flag Day off, you belong to the government sector. Otherwise, you belong to the private sector, and, as I said, you will have to start supporting the arts, because the government sector is cutting back.

The government sector took over the arts a few years back because the private sector had dropped the ball. The problem was that the private sector consisted largely of common people who spent most of their time working and, as a result, never became cultured. Their concept of “art” involved flamingo-shaped lawn ornaments, or pictures of dogs with actual working clocks in their stomachs. The only time that common people ever watched ballet was when it was on the Ed Sullivan show, and even then they watched it only because they knew it would last no more than three minutes and would be followed shortly by an act featuring monkeys wearing dresses.

This widespread lack of culture created a major problem for the few people who were interested in poetry, classical music, opera, ballet, sculpture, painting—in short, the real, serious, cultural, art-type activities that most people find fairly boring. The problem was that the common people would not voluntarily pay for these activities, so the only places where culture was available were:

Junior high schools, where, under state law, children are required to do cultural things, such as screech away on rented violins, and parents are required to watch them, and New York City, where there are so many people that you can get a paying crowd for virtually anything, including opera and live nude dog wrestling.

But other than that, art was pretty scarce. Then some cultured person came up with a brilliant plan: If common people wouldn’t support art voluntarily, why not force them to support it? Now when I say “force,” I’m not talking about just walking up to some common person and ordering him, at gunpoint, to attend an opera. What I’M talking about is getting the government to tax COMMON people, then use their money to put on an opera.

Actually, this is an old, tried-and-true way to support the arts, dating back to the ancient Egyptians. How do you think the Egyptians built the Sphinx? Surely, you don’t think that a bunch of common Egyptians just got together one day and said: “Hey, why don’t we build a Sphinx?” Of course not. Left to their own devices, the common Egyptians would have spent their time growing food. To get some real culture, to get the Sphinx, the Egyptians needed a government authority, someone with vision, someone with taste, someone with whips and spears.

Our government’s approach to the arts is essentially the same, but less messy. Unlike the ancient Egyptians, we common people are not forced to attend cultural activities: we are merely forced to pay for them. This works out much better. You see, under the Egyptian method, you always had a bunch of sweating or dead Egyptians around your Sphinx; under our method, cultured people can have an opera in the Kennedy Center in Washington, safe in the knowledge that few, if any, of the common people who paid for it will show up to watch. After all, a lot of the common people live thousands of miles away; they couldn’t attend even if they wanted to.

For a while there, our government was in the art business whole hog, forking over hundreds of millions of dollars for art. But now the program is in trouble. Jimmy Carter wanted to spend about $300 million on art this year, but Ronald Reagan thinks it should spend only about half that, so he’ll have more money to spend on exploding objects. Needless to say, the art officials are extremely upset. Their position is extremely logical: they argue that if the government is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on things designed to kill people, it should spend at least $300 million for art that people don’t want to see.

But it looks as though the art officials are going to lose, and that means that, unless somebody does something, art will fall back into the hands of the lawn-flamingo owners. So it’s UP tO us public-spirited, private-sector people to pick up the ball. We’ve got to develop some way to make sure people attend operas and ballets, look at paintings, read poetry, and so on. Maybe we should set up a system patterned after volunteer fire departments: whenever anybody discovered a cultural activity, he could sound an alarm, and the public-spirited citizens in the area would go and watch it. If we all work together, we might be able to keep art alive, even without the government. Maybe we could even build a sphinx.

I am extremely fond of art. Whenever I have a few spare moments, there’s nothing I enjoy more than hauling out a batch of art and looking at it. This is probably because I was exposed to so much art when I was in grade school. At least once a year, the teachers would herd us kids into a bus and take us to a museum and expose us to thousands of square yards of old paintings. We were very impressed, particularly because many of these paintings featured enormous naked women, women with thighs the size of fully inflated life rafts, lounging around and eating fruit.

The reason that this theme is so common in old paintings is that years ago Europe was terrorized by packs of enormous naked women. They would stride into a town, munching on pears, and threaten to knock down the cathedral if their portraits weren’t painted immediately. Eventually they were driven off by a particularly harsh winter, but their paintings are still popular today because they offer such a good value in terms of square yards of painting per dollar.

Which brings us to money. Money is very important to the art world, because without it we would have no way to know how good a particular piece of art is. For example, let’s say that we want to decide which painting is better: the “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci, or “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer” by Rembrandt (whose first name was Boauregard, which is why he never used it). Now let’s say that the list price on the “Mona Lisa” is $36 million, whereas the price on “Aristotle etc.” is $12 million. This would tell your experienced art critic that the “Mona Lisa” is three times as good, artwise, as “Aristotle etc.” and nearly six million times as good as those paintings they sell in shopping malls, the ones that feature children with enormous brown eyes who are supposed to look helpless and appealing but actually look like some sort of bizarre species of insect.