NATIONAL ASPARAGUS MONTH (C)1993 Alan M. Schwartz The first June of Slick Willy Clinton's presidency bore publicity screaming that 2/3 of all Americans polled condemned him as an Arkansan debacle. His Chicago lawyer wife Hillary Ramrod Clinton had set forth that January to reform US health care - pledging to everybody everything for free, except for a piddling mandatory middle class payroll evisceration - by June or maybe eventually. The economy officially recovered (crashed). America's planetary military posture suffered scoliosis in the starving hell of African Muslim Somalia and the blood-sprinkled cities of Balkan Muslim Bosnia. Muslim Iraq wiggled its scabby posterior in Clinton's general direction. Imagine Slick Willy's surprise when one 95% relative humidity Washington morning a Brobdingnagian bumper crop of asparagus toppled his presidency. America ended its defense contracts and environmentally outlawed research, integrated device fabrication, and ecologically unsound manufacturing (which was all of it). The ensuing tempest of intractable joblessness among degreed and skilled workers launched whole counties into mortgage foreclosure, collapsing real estate brokerage and snuffing the banks. The one enterprise left capable of turning a profit was agriculture. The one crop traditionally snubbed by the Department of Agriculture in its never ending quest to exhaustively encumber everything it touched was asparagus. Thousands of consulting MBAs and their computers saw the writing on the wall. On 29 June 1993 the fruit of their expert studies, four billion pounds of fresh asparagus, hit the market. The bulk of the harvest was yet to come. California hosted 3.8 firearms/resident (even including millions of dorsally moist people who only existed when official numbers needed massaging) and politics which esteemed the home-grown John Birch Society as Centrist. Rural Southerner Clinton recognized a coon hunt by the distant sound of flapping bedsheets. Drastic action was indicated when George Bush sent him a pound of broccoli. After the smoke and mirrors had cleared, every White House publicist had accepted private sector offers of employment. Temp agencies were solicited in the best traditions of the New World Order. Dancers, painters, writers and performance artists were inundated with NEA asparagus support. National Asparagus Month blazed in print, screamed from radios and TVs, marched down Main Street across the whole of America, and greedily hung ten upon a monstrous wave of Federal porkbarreling. The Surgeon General admitted as how eating asparagus remedied dyslexia and hyperactivity; prevented cancer, cured AIDS, enhanced female breast volume and male tumescence; and elicited thinner thighs in thirty days. "Donahue" and "Oprah" hosted mobs of Cordon Bleu asparagus chefs. A quarter billion citizens relentlessly indoctrinated to believe impossible deceits like those of a 55 mph speed limit being sane legislation, that Freon-free air conditioners worked, and that Social Security would pay for their retirement were set up once again. That Monday chilled asparagus appeared upon breakfast tables. Asparagus vinaigrette overflowed lunch salads. Poached, baked, breaded, sliced, diced, blended... asparagus clogged every dinner plate. American minds were reamed, steamed and dry cleaned into obeisance. On Friday every sewage treatment plant in North America choked and died. Asparagus is rich with curious biochemistry. Human metabolism in its frantic scramble to get xenobiotics the hell out of the body hurls through asparagus eaters' kidneys ponderous quantities of S-methylthioacrylate and S-methyl 3-(methylthio)thiopropionate. The intense, penetrating and incessant stench of urine so contaminated serves notice of chemistry perilously foreign to the nitrogenous bases prompting the delicate fragrance of privies. Sewage treatment plants were having none of it. Exquisite engineering executed on multi-million gallon/day scales was suddenly firing fifteen inch shells at hallucinations. Anaerobic fermentation and oxidative biodegradation schemes delicately tuned to whole cities' sewers' outputs died. Toilets from Maine to California spit back their input. The US witnessed the amazing phenomenon of tens of thousands of soldiers shoveling out megatons of that which the purveyors of Green politics said no longer existed. The Clinton Administration foundered upon the disastrous exigency of importing whole oil tankers-full of French activated sludge - the only stuff on the planet up to the task of restarting asparagus-befouled American sewage plants - at a negotiated price of $140 the barrel. The foregoing is fictional. The Clinton Administration should be so lucky.