WARNING: This column contains highly sensitive information about U.S. nuclear strategy and rutabagas.

From time to time, we newspaper columnists obtain classified government documents that we share with our readers so we can protect the Public’s Right to Know and make large sums of money. A good example is the famous columnist Jack Anderson, who is always revealing government secrets:

WASHINGTON—Classified documents recently obtained by this reporter indicate that Interior Secretary James glatt is secretly drafting legislation to legalize the shooting of American Indians for sport.

Over the years, Jack has obtained classified documents proving that every elected official in the United States is a worthless piece of scum. He gets classified documents in the mail as often as normal people get Reader’s Digest sweepstakes offers. It has gotten to the point where high government officials routinely call Jack for information:

PRESIDENT REAGAN: Hello, Jack?

JACK ANDERSON: Hi, Mr. President. What can I do for you today?

REAGAN: Jack, I can’t remember the procedure I’m supposed to use if I want to put the armed forces on Red Alert.

ANDERSON: Let’S See ... here it is. You call 800-411-9789 toll-free, and you say: “Buford ate a fat newt.”

REAGAN: “Buford ate a bat suit?”

ANDERSON: No, that one launches a nuclear attack. It’s “fat newt.”

REAGAN: “Cat shoot.” Got it. Thanks a million, Jack.

ANDERSON: Any time.

I would love to share some classified documents with you, but nobody ever sends me any. Mostly what I get in the mail is threats to sue me or kill me, along with the occasional crank letter. I did, however, recently receive some information that, as far as I know, has not been revealed in any other column. It concerns a topic that few Americans know anything about, and government officials never discuss publicly: rutabagas.

This information came in the form of a press release from the Ontario Rutabaga Producers’ Marketing Board. Ontario is located in Canada, a foreign country. So what we have is a group of foreign persons who are trying to influence Americans to buy rutabagas, and possibly even eat them.

Rutabagas, which belong to the turnip family, are fat roots (“Buford ate a fat root”) that grow underground in Canada, which is Mother Nature’s way of telling us she does not want us to eat them. Rutabagas have never been really big in America. Most Americans can go for days at a time without even thinking about them. Unless you live in a community where recreational drug use is widespread, you almost never hear anybody say: “Gee, I’d love to accept those free tickets to the final game of the World Series, but I want to get right home for dinner. We’re having rutabagas.”

The Ontario rutabaga producers are trying to influence American opinion by planting prorutabaga statements in newspaper food sections. This is fairly easy to do, because food-section editors are desperate for new recipes. There are only about eight dishes that Americans will actually eat, and all the food sections have printed every possible variation of the recipes, so nowadays they’ll print anything:

SPAM, WHEAT CHEX ADD ZEST TO SPICY GRAPEFRUIT STEW

So the food sections will be easy prey for the rutabaga producers. Fairly soon, you will begin seeing statements like these, taken from the press release: “Ontario rutabagas give you good taste and good food value in cold, wet winters ... as a fresh snack or served in exciting gourmet dishes ... covered in a thin wax coating ... use a good sharp knife to cut off the purple top ...” Your children will read these statements, and then one cold, wet winter day they will come home, refuse the plate of good, traditionally American Twinkles you have thoughtfully prepared, and demand instead that you whack the purple tops off of wax-covered Canadian roots and serve them as snacks.

And as sure as night follows day, once we start eating rutabagas, there will be nothing to prevent us from going directly to leeks. I recently obtained an extremely proleek press release from an outfit that calls itself the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, which is headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, but obviously takes its orders directly from a foreign government, because it openly uses words such as

“vichyssoise.” Here is a direct quotation, which I would refuse to print if the national interest were not at stake: “The Scottish use leeks in a traditional favorite, Cock-a-Leekie Soup, which has many delicious variations.” If you start hearing talk like this from your children, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I could go on—I could tell you about the California Dried Fig Advisory Board, which recently blanketed the nation with a document called the “Fig News”—but I don’t have the space. I will do my best to keep you abreast of this important story until Jack Anderson picks it up, or I am found stabbed to death with a good, sharp, purple-stained knife.

This is the time of year to gather up your family and all your available money and decide what you’re going to do on your summer vacation. You should get an opinion from everybody, including your children, because, after all, they are family members too, even though all they do is sit around and watch television and run up huge orthodontist bills and sneer at plain old affordable U.S. Keds sneakers, demanding instead elaborate designer athletic footwear that costs as much per pair as you paid for your first car. On second thought, the heck with what your children want to do. You can notify them of your vacation plans via memorandum.

The cheapest vacation is the kind where you just stay home, avoiding the hassle and expense of travel and getting to know each other better as

a family and gagging with boredom. Another option is to put the whole family into the car and take a trip. That’s what my family did, back in the fifties. We usually went to Florida, which has a lot of tourist attractions, always announced by large, fading roadside signs:

SEE THE WORLD’S OLDEST SHELL MUSEUM

AND SNAKE RODEO—1 MILE

We had a system for car travel. My father would drive; my mother would periodically offer to drive, knowing that my father would not let her drive unless he went blind in both eyes and lapsed into a coma; and my sister and I would sit in the backseat and read Archie comic books for the first eleven miles, then punch each other and scream for the remaining 970. My father tended to stop at a lot of tourist attractions, so he could walk around and smoke cigarettes and try to persuade himself not to lock my sister and me in the trunk and abandon the car.

I bet we stopped at every tourist attraction in Florida. A lot of them involved alligators, which are as common in Florida as retirees. You’d pay your money and go into this fenced-in area that was rife with alligators, which sounds dangerous but wasn’t, because alligators are the most jaded reptiles on earth. They’d just lie around in the muck with their eyes half open, looking like they’d been out playing cards and drinking for four consecutive nights. Sometimes, to liven things up, a tourist-attraction personnel would wrestle an alligator. This was always advertised as a death defying feat, but the alligators never seemed interested. They would just lie there, hung over, while the tourist-attraction personnel dragged them around for a few minutes. It was as exciting as watching somebody move a large carpet. I would have much preferred to watch two tourist-attraction personnel wrestle each other, and I imagine the alligators would have agreed.