ASK DR. SCHUND
                    (C)1993 Alan M. Schwartz

Dr. Schund, what is the true cause of the 1920's Dust Bowl?

That inconceivable drought devastated the American Southwest, 
driving untold multitudes of white trash Oklahoma farmers to 
California, increasing the average intelligence in both states 
and providing a bounteous genetic cistern of flaxen maidens and 
tall, wiry dudes to ultimately populate Hollywood sound stages, 
blond jokes and singles' bars.  No geological evidence exists for 
another such catastrophe since the end of the last Ice Age.   
Despite a vastly more intense, expansive and prolonged drought - 
the unprecedented seven year California and Southwest US drought 
beginning in 1986 which raised water prices 60% and lowered the 
water level of many reservoirs - the Oklahoma Dust Bowl has not 
reoccurred even as a rumor.

Before the Great Depression the phenomenon of Spring Cleaning was 
just that:  Each spring each housewife with her servants would 
open the windows, air the house, beat the rugs, scrub down the 
walls, wash the floors, and otherwise prepare her domicile for 
another year of raising of her children and suffering her 
husband's callous habitation.  Today even men are slaves of our 
residences, subordinated to the incessant cleaning of our floors, 
inundated with an irrepressible abundance of dust bunnies.  We 
sweep, we vacuum, we change the HEPA filters in our air ducts, we 
buy massive air ionizers... and every time we look under the bed 
or at the back of our closets, there they are!  Dust bunnies.

Dr. Schund transcended mere cogitation and was impelled to act.  
Hacking into the most secret of Top Secret/Classified Pentagon 
archives - Lotus Eater/Eyes Only - he has uncovered the singular 
and remarkable cause of both the devastation of so many honest, 
if dim-witted, agricultural vassals and the origin of the plague 
of unsanitary and disgusting filth which has unbidden come to 
dominate the whole of our lives across this sorry planet.  A 
quarter century before the horrors of World War II and the 
Manhattan Project there were the ghastly trench warfare and 
chemical atrocities of World War I destroying a generation of 
young men.  Unknown to any but a few dozen discreetly liquidated 
scientists and managers, there was the Schmutz Project.

Germans innovated chemical warfare.  The crudity but undeniable 
punch of chlorine was promptly superseded by mustard gas, 
arsenicals like Lewisite, and the phosphonate nerve gases 
beginning with Tabun.  The Allies decried the inhumane, 
inexpensive and eminently effective dispatch of thousands of 
their soldiers as their own scientists labored day and night to 
produce and stockpile vast quantities of even more robust weapons 
of mass destruction.  As World War I wound down an unspoken pact 
emerged among potential future belligerents prohibiting the use 
of chemical agents.  The lesson was well respected even by an 
obscure German corporal gassed in his trench, one Adolph Hitler.

The War to End All Wars lapsed into peace.  The United States 
Armed Forces immediately funded a massive secret research effort 
to create consummately lethal chemical weapons utterly 
indistinguishable from the squalor and confusion typical of a 
battlefield, as opposed to the giant blisters and square feet of 
desquamated skin ulcers typical of mustard gas.  Hidden within 
Bartlesville, OK where the camouflage of oil production and 
refining effectively hid its development, testing and pilot plant 
manufacture, kidnaped German scientists and domestic prodigies 
labored together as Project Schmutz germinated and flourished.  
Common dirt was engineered into a weapon of mass destruction.  
How inconvenient, then, that during its first field trial in 
Kansas it proved to be rather more effective and persistent, 
malignant and metastatic really, than its inventors envisioned.

The whole of Kansas blew into Oklahoma as roiling and noxiously 
aggressive clouds of Project Schmutz billowed into the 
stratosphere and the jet stream, were exposed to unfiltered 
ultraviolet light, and the pawl and ratchet of evolution was 
sprung.  The weapon mutated and explosively evolved as it circled 
the whole of our Earth.  The misery of the Great Depression 
concealed an awful secret as this country's finest military 
scientists furiously backpedaled, eventually containing and 
neutralizing the worst of Project Schmutz contamination shortly 
before their unfortunate demise.  What had escaped has grown 
kinder and gentler, adapting to its hosts and proliferating even 
within the most hermetically sealed closet or the most immaculate 
attic.  Dust bunnies do indeed grow and reproduce.  

Dr. Schund issues this sober warning to all who would put off 
housecleaning for another week.  Our missing persons have not 
been abandoned, kidnapped or departed of their own volition.  
They have been assimilated to nourish a greater and all 
encompassing evil.  Do not let it happen to you.