ASK DR. SCHUND (C)1990 Alan M. Schwartz Dr. Schund, how may the American manufacturing juggernaut be resurrected so that we may once again rule the planet? Careful studies by thousands of government-contracted consulting firms brimming full with MBA's and holders of the Master's Degree in Sociology have pinpointed the specific failures of American industry. The culpable ineptitude of manufacturing engineers and research scientists, and their unjustifiably munificent salaries, have abrogated any meaningful input they might have ever had upon the ascendant careers of senior managers, vice presidents, and chief executive officers, who are now at the brink of pulling the ripcords on their golden parachutes due to the greater crisis. No longer can these stalwart economic warriors plan their lunches and their weekends at the country club with a clear and placid mind. No longer can these courageous masculine paragons of unceasing command performance redecorate the board room with revivifying assurance. No longer can these tenacious and virile troopers rally the life essence of commerce and enterprise to secure what is theirs and litigate into their possession what is others. Inefficiency, graft, corruption, obsession with minutia, obsolete equipment, misappropriation of personnel, wastage of resources, fetish worship of facade over substance... have rendered American barbers incapable of achieving the goals of their profession, delivering the heads of the most important men of this country into hirsute impotence, volunteering gratis the spoiled remains of America to our enemies. Joint Russian and Japanese infiltration into the most hallowed halls and guarded syllabuses of the cosmetology and barber schools of this great nation, surreptitious campaign donations to and outright bribery of our elected officials, clandestine importation of tainted tonsorial pomades and defective nose hair clippers, and the interminable introduction of new and more extreme coiffure fashions while their own males rigidly adhere to the pompadour and the Buster Brown shag, have brought us to our knees. The time-efficient and materially pragmatic "quick trim" is no longer to be found. Legions of men and women trained to be incapable of achieving a haircut in less than two hours now guzzle the lifeblood of our nation's executives' busy days like a leech gorging with warm blood from the humid inner thigh of a young boy wading in a mountain lake. The progressive collapse of American production is almost complete, but not quite complete. Salvation and imperial dominance may yet be won to be ours alone. Free of the monstrous obligations incurred by accepting outside funding, Dr. Schund in an agonizing fit of insolvent petulance has recognized this malignant social paunch hanging down to trip us as we stride into the future. The intellectual vigor of his unresting mind once again punches through the armor plate of complacency to rend and tear, exposing the delicately pulsating inner heart of the truth, bringing forth inspiration and profit. Detcord is a slim polyester tube, hardly more than a hollow string in its finest versions, packed with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, PETN. Detonating at a velocity of 27,600 feet/second (5.22 miles/second; Mach 26), capable of felling trees or severing steel I-beams about which it is looped, detcord is the last hope of America to restore the implemented concept of a barbershop functioning in real time. Parametric projections intimate that with practice, a complete haircut may be accomplished is less than one tenth of a millisecond, albeit with some persistent ringing of the ears. Even the toughest grizzled barbed wire entanglement adorning the scalps, eyebrows, noses and ears of our most invincible captains of industry will instantly yield to the dissociating molecular jet spewing from detcord as it self-annihilates. Dr. Schund recommends a Number 6 blasting cap to make the magic happen. Is it mere coincidence that the imbalance of payments, 30% of the value of our trade, is exactly matched by the projected 30% increase in efficiency to be gained by installation of the detcord hairdo? Is it only happenstance that the 30% of the American population living in compromised economic circumstances exactly matches the loss of vital executive performance now suffered through the machinations of franchised and infiltrated salons? How much longer will you as a citizen of America and an investor in its financial, industrial, and political opulence tolerate this encroaching morbidity? Get up on your hind legs, raise your voices, and lay siege to your local barbers! Wrest these perverted assassins of American ascendancy from their lairs and boldly grind their faces into the validity, the essential necessity of the 100 microsecond $1.25 haircut! You can raise America off its knees to stand proudly in the international arena. You can restore the legendary economic vitality so essential to the very concept of "ugly American." You are the essential part of these preposterous pogroms, allowing business administration to continue operating in its never-never land of privilege dissociated from accountability.