conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Humorist, Attempts, Explain with the genre: Humor & Entertainment, Humor?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Parliament of Whores'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Parliament of Whores
  After I hung up I thought a while about the difference between those days and these. Back in 1991, the United States was trying, in its fumbling fashion, to settle into its role as the world's only superpower. The economy was drifting around the edges of recession. The federal government's budget deficit was growing. Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, kept spending money anyway, happily slopping every porker that could bury its jowls in the bucket. Our president, George Bush, enjoyed an extremely high approval rating, and he kept telling Congress to cut it out, but because he'd been elected as a new kind of conservative, one who was kinder and gentler and more compassionate, he wasn't really in a position to make them stop. So he turned his attention to something much more exhilarating: having a war with Saddam Hussein.
  President Clinton knew that human beings, even those living in the middle of the most spectacular exfoliation of wealth in history, are never perfectly content. The best chance a politician in the nineties had of seeming consequential, therefore, was to scan the electorate, isolate the tiny grievances and niggling wants that bedeviled it, make the problems seem urgent by the heat of his rhetoric, and then express his intention to make everyone whole. The president's skill in this regard was almost supernatural. It explained those otherwise puzzling polls which showed that a large majority of Americans considered Bill Clinton to be at once thoroughly untrustworthy and marvelously empathetic ("cares about people like you," as the pollsters put it).
  Clinton's State of the Union speeches, the most successful of the modern presidency, were models of his method, Clintonism in concentrated form. In them each problem got its own program; and each program got its own sentence, and sometimes two. Sure, times were good, the president would begin. But couldn't they be better? Think about it for a minute. Is Grandma camped out in your spare bedroom? The president offered to triple the tax credit for "long-term care," so you could off-load the old bag into a nursing home. Were you worried, as a woman, that your salary was too low? The president offered the Pay-check Fairness Act so women could more easily sue their employers. You weren't getting a 401(k) at work? Try a federally sponsored Retirement Savings Account, in which the president would match your contribution dollar for dollar, just like a real boss should. Having trouble sending your kid to college? No need to tighten your belt—use a tax credit instead.
  It got better and better as the speeches wore on. The president worried that your house was too far from your office; all that driving might make you sleepy! So he issued 220,000 new housing vouchers to help you "live closer to the workplace." Child care, violent TV shows, prescription drugs, your car's low gas mileage—the president was on the case. No concern was so small or private or parochial that it couldn't be nationalized.
  On one occasion, however, Clinton's cynicism proved too great even for his happy populace, and he paid dearly for the slip. His proposal to nationalize health care attempted to place every citizen of the United States into the same interest group, when what we liked about Clintonism was that it placed each of us in smaller, sleeker, more exclusive interest groups—designer interest groups, you might say, with special programs tailored just for people like us. At the same time, the corruption of congressional Democrats, an inevitable consequence of their unchallenged, forty-year grip on power, became impossible even for voters to ignore. Among many other princely depredations, they had taken to voting themselves pay raises in the dead of night, when no one was looking. Taken together, the failed nationalization of health care and the sleaziness of the Democratic Congress led directly to the decade's second great calamity, the Triumph of the Republicans.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know four more paragraphs? End with the sentence '" Isn't this the secret message of the drug-free America campaign?'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Marijuana also has a built-in payback. Marijuana makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?
  Heroin turns people into amoral scuzz balls. But a heroin addict who gets his fix is well behaved, or dead (and you can't get any better behaved than that).
  Cocaine is worse than heroin, but it's expensive, and—overexcited anti-drug TV commercials to the contrary—it's subtle. Cocaine is a long run for a short slide.
  Now delete the words "crack is" and insert the words "niggers are." Isn't this the secret message of the drug-free America campaign?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As I mentioned before, I hold private-property rights to be sacred—in theory. Which is like saying I'm rich—in Bulgaria. In theory we're all lots of things: good, kind and, above all, consistent. I hold private-property rights to be sacred in theory, but in practice I had thrown in with the anti-golf-course faction.
  It was at this moment, in the middle of the Blatherboro sewer debate, that I achieved enlightenment about government. I had a dominion epiphany. I reached regime satori. The whole town meeting was suddenly illuminated by the pure, strong radiance of truth (a considerable improvement over the fluorescent tubes).
  The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it. And here, in small-town New Hampshire, in this veritable world's capital of probity, we were about to commit just such a theft. If we could collect sufficient votes in favor of special town meetings about sewers, we could make a golf course and condominium complex disappear for free. We were going to use our suffrage to steal a fellow citizen's property rights. We weren't even going to take the manly risk of holding him up at gunpoint.
  Not that there's anything wrong with our limiting growth. If we Blatherboro residents don't want a golf course and condominium complex, we can go buy that land and not build them. Of course, to buy the land, we'd have to borrow money from the bank, and to pay the bank loan, we'd have to do something profitable with the land, something like... build a golf course and condominium complex. Well, at least that would be constructive. We would be adding something—if only golf—to the sum of civilization's accomplishments. Better to build a golf course right through the middle of Redwood National Park and condominiums on top of the Lincoln Memorial than to sit in council gorging on the liberties of others, gobbling their material substance, eating freedom.
  What we were trying to do with our legislation in the Blatherboro Town Meeting was wanton, cheap and greedy—a sluttish thing. This should come as no surprise. Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores.