The Warble, Peddle, and Leek Publishing Company proudly announces Romeo and Juliet II–a sweeping saga of lust and passion that begins where the best-selling original left off. The story begins with the discovery that the two lovers didn’t really stab themselves hard enough to die, and follows them through their lustful and passionate efforts to escape the clutches of their warring families and find a peaceful life of lust and passion! Now on sale at every drugstore and supermarket in the world.

Better than the original!—The Bullock, Missouri, Herald Gazette Chronicle Bugle.

Lustful ... passionate!—Field and Stream.

A recently published book!—The New York Times.

Well anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive women. There, that’s it: twenty-four words. But the guy who wrote the book took thousands of words to say it. I mean, he never just writes: “Bond walked into the bedroom.” Instead, he writes:

“Bond eased the bedroom door latch open gently, praying that the click of the ZuchSweiss stainless steel door latch would not disturb the other inhabitants, and cautiously eyed the room, which he noted was paneled with European birch, or Betula verrucose, probably from the Vorarlburg region of western Austria.” And it goes on like this for pages before Bond gets around to killing a henchman. I could barely wade through it.

I was tempted to start chatting with the person next to me about how we were both going to St. Louis.

And it’s not just spy novels. Most books are too long. I remember in college when I had to read The Brothers Karamazovby the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It’s about these two brothers who kill their father. Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It’s almost impossible to tell, because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talked as much as the brothers Karamazov did, I don’t see how they found time to become a major world power.

Our literature professor told us that Dostoyevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazovto raise the question of whether there is a God. So what I want to know is, why didn’t Dostoyevsky just come right out and ask? Why didn’t he write:

Dear Reader,

Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me.

Sincerely,

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Here are some other famous works of literature that could easily have been summarized in a few words:

Moby-Dick–Don’t mess around with large whales, because they symbolize nature and will kill you.

A Tale of Two Cities–French people are crazy. Every poem ever written—Poets are extremely sensitive.

Think of all the valuable time we would save if authors got right to the point this way. People would be able to read several dozen great books in a matter of minutes. College would take about two weeks. We’d have more time for more important activities, such as reading newspaper columns.

A distinguished, high-level, blue-ribbon federal panel of people wearing suits recently released a report concluding that (and here I quote directly): “The American public-education system has done just about as good a job of educating the nation’s children as might be expected from a bucket of live bait.” The report presented some shocking statistics to support this finding:

For the past eleven years, American students have scored lower on standardized tests than European students, Japanese students and certain species of elk; Seventy-eight percent of America’s school principals have, at some point in their careers, worn white belts or shoes to school; Nobody in the entire United States remembers the exact date of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent.

The bottom line is that the educational system, which costs over

$200 billion a year, is an unmitigated disaster. This is good news for everybody. It’s good news for those of us who went to high school back when the schools were supposed to be better, because we can feel superior to today’s students. When we go to shopping malls and see batches of teenagers standing around and laughing in a carefree teenaged manner, we can reassure ourselves by saying: “Those kids may be attractive and slim and healthy, and they may have their entire lives ahead of them and no gum problems whatsoever, but by God they never learned how to conjugate the verb ‘to squat’ in Latin, the way I had to when I was in school.”

The panel’s report is also good news for the kids, because it confirms their suspicion that they wouldn’t have learned anything even if they had been paying attention in class instead of trying to see who could most accurately guess how large, in square inches, the sweat stain under the teacher’s left armpit would be by the time the bell rang.

But most of all, the panel’s report is good news for the teachers, school administrators and other members of the American educational establishment, because as the people most responsible for screwing up the educational system in the first place, they will naturally expect to be given a great deal more money to fix it.

So everybody is pleased as punch to have blue-ribbon federal proof that the school system stinks on ice, and everybody is busy coming up with helpful suggestions for making the schools good again, the way they were when they were turning out real geniuses like the people who are making the suggestions. For example, President Reagan checked in from the planet Saturn with the suggestion that we need to go back to voluntary prayer in the schools. Now I think we can all agree that making our children pray voluntarily will certainly help, but we need to do more. We need to get Back to the Basics, back to the kinds of learning activities you and I engaged in.

For example, every student in the country should be required to read Ethan Frome unless he or she has a written doctor’s excuse. As you no doubt vaguely recall, Ethan Frome is a book you had to read when you studied early American novels because it turns out there were hardly any good early American novels. As I remember the plot, Ethan Frome falls in love with this woman, so they decide to crash into a tree on a sled. The sled crash is the only good part, and it lasts only about a page. But the way I look at it, if I had to read Ethan Frome, I don’t see why these little snots today should get out of it.

They should also be forced to disassemble frogs, the way we did in biology. Remember? You’d slice your frog up with a razor and root around inside, looking for the heart and the kidney and the other frog organs that were clearly drawn in several colors in the biology textbook, until eventually you realized that you must have been issued a defective frog, because all you could ever find inside was frog glop. So you just poked at the glop for a while and then drew the heart, etc., from the biology textbook. This taught you about life. When I was in school, I also had to do a worm, although I’m not suggesting that all of today’s students should have to do worms. Maybe just the really disruptive ones.

So that’s my back-to-basics program: Ethan Frome, frogs, and maybe some class discussion of the cosine. And any kid who doesn’t know the exact date of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent (December 24, 1814) will be held back for another year, or, if the Russians appear to be getting ahead of us in space again, shot.