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.