POST AQUATIC STRESS SYNDROME
                    (C)1993 Alan M. Schwartz

The Army Corps of Engineers had spent billions upon billions of 
tax dollars throughout the Midwest since the Great Depression.  
Some perfunctory fraction took root as dams and levees to assure 
a navigable nine foot depth for the local waterways.  Those 
public works met the most stringent official specifications and, 
like all proper government projects, those specs ignored the 
coquetries of physical reality.  Summer 1993 witnessed the 
heartland of America writhe in congestive cardiac arrest as the 
Missouri and Mississippi rivers and tributaries swelled 45+ feet 
above their beds.  It was an official once-in-500-year flood.  
They happened every quarter century, like clockwork.

Dams overflowed and levees burst.  Homes were flooded to their 
rafters.  Farms were marked by the occasional silo peeking above 
Lake Iowa.  Damages were toted at $5 billion, and then began to 
really multiply as the replacement cost (instead of the tax 
appraisal) of everything electrical or made of wood was fully 
evaluated.  President Slick Willy Clinton helicoptered over the 
disaster, goggling at all that water.  He ran back to Washington 
after pledging to one, all and the Media to consider his options.  
(He would have brought his wife had he really been concerned.) 

While a petty economic nuisance metastasized to eclipse the 
financial magnitude of the Savings & Loan Scandal, the real power 
in Washington stirred uneasily.  When whole states lose their 
entire economic base and the maintenance of their major cities, 
when millions of people are uprooted and suffer the loss of all 
their possessions, when the meager remaining profit-generating 
agricultural core of America drowns in twenty feet of water, then 
there is only one possible course of action at the highest levels 
- counseling.

An army of retained consultants securing a kilobuck per diem plus 
expenses impressed upon Health and Human Services administrators 
the potential seriousness of bad memories re the 1996 elections.  
They had government-funded studies to prove it, pending further 
studies.  Political hacks counted the days to their retirement, 
wiped cold sweat from their brows, and delegated responsibility.

Post Aquatic Stress Syndrome (PASS) was painted in bold headlines 
across this great nation.  The whole of America was galvanized by 
a whirlwind of smoke, mirrors and the most accomplished spin.  
Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, junk mail with franked 
postage and milk cartons screamed "PASS or Fail, America!"  Tens 
of thousands of Black History and Chicano Studies scholars were 
drafted from their vocations as car valets to be totally immersed 
in rigorous emergency three-day training seminars.  The Midwest 
needed PASS therapists!  Our twanging farmers were to have their 
traumas exorcised and their voter registrations reading Democrat, 
after they filled out the appropriate forms and their mandated 
Federal Reduction in Paperwork questionnaires, in duplicate.

Congress rose as one at the opportunity to buy the votes of 
people too desperate to care.  Senator Edward Kennedy's heart 
bled liberally and volubly into massed cameras, microphones and 
the Congressional Record at the plight of people not of his 
class, but he soon procured a drink and felt better.  Hundreds of 
billions of dollars allocated toward sending Bosnia a message, 
the Russians and the Somalis humanitarian aid, Saddam Hussein 
another covey of cruise missiles, and reproductive warriors their 
Welfare checks were sacred.  No problem.  Such is the beauty of 
deficit spending that there is never a bottom to the Federal 
charge account.  An Energy Tax, that was the ticket!

FEMA-allocated funds dwindled and disappeared as Maryland think 
tanks and their computers burned late into the night, triple 
billing.  Sheaves of micro-econometric differential equations 
sufficiently complex to be above criticism or even understanding 
disgorged hot spin bolus into high speed printers as the most 
advanced Post Aquatic Stress Syndrome theories evolved into 
thousand page technical manual updates mailed daily by Federal 
Express overnight courier to each PASS counselor.  The full power 
and majesty of social engineering would be put to this 
magnificent test, and would triumph!

While Heaven shone brightly along the corridors of the Everett 
Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, Hell's own morning 
dawned amidst the waterlogged denizens of agricultural America.  
They did not have a safety net of social programs catering to 
minorities, drug abusers, AIDS scum, felons and the officially 
sad.  They had the fruits of their own honest labors and their 
life savings, and retained little enough of both.  When the 
waters finally began to recede and a flood of Federal bureaucrats 
proceeded to descend, farmers and city dwellers alike drew deeply 
upon the genetic wisdom of their ancestors... and got out their 
shotguns.