ASK DR. SCHUND (C)1993 Alan M. Schwartz Dr. Schund, what triggered the downfall of the Russian empire? The seething ethnic, religious, territorial and political morass that was imperial Soviet Russia - a ghastly reflection of the privation of Mexico plus Balkan separatism embellished with nuclear weapons and delusions of international hegemony - is no more. Russia furnished America's model of a concerned government benevolently acting in loco parentis of its untrustworthy and unwise citizens, and taking a cut of the action for its own members. America in turn squandered its financial resources to appease the appetites and purchase the votes of its non-working poor and superannuated, and gorge its military to wastrel repletion. Russia serves as a prediction of the collapse of America when some thirteen trillion dollars of accumulated debt produces interest demands in excess of any plausible remunerative capacity. This is propaganda. The event that triggered the Soviet debacle has by mutual CIA/KGB consent been buried well beyond the ken of even the most politically connected historian. Given the ultimate security imprimatur, Classified/Top Secret/Lotus Eater, it would have disappeared from human history had Dr. Schund not possessed the prescience to stoke the perverse appetites of a 43 year old computer nerd residing in Paramis, New Jersey. Barton Poswilly possessed a brilliant mind and radiant paranoia. He evolved the amorphous encryption algorithm and the gallium arsenide monolithic quantum circuitry that sequestered ultra- Classified government documents. His ensuing termination with extreme prejudice (you cannot be too careful with secrets) was regrettably scheduled after his untimely, and falsified, death in an airliner crash. Said denouement in turn occurred after he had quietly linked a hardwired back door from his work at CIA, NSA, Pentagon and officially non-existent government agencies to a kilohertz transmission hole in the New York City Channel 13 TV radiofrequency spectrum. Each afternoon while Mr. Rogers pondered bunny rabbits and castoreum, Barton Poswilly got the most spectacular and fevered straight skinny hot off the Federal griddle. Dr. Schund stood by, holding the grease can. If you look within any bathroom medicine cabinet antedating the 1980s, you will find fashioned within its back wall at the center and down toward its bottom a most remarkable and mysterious thin slot. Before cheap plastic razors became all the rage it was necessary for each man and especially each woman to own a steel razor housing which could be loaded with fresh individual blades. So great was the hazard of slightly dulled but otherwise pernicious used blades that they could not be added to the family's trash. They were slipped into that bathroom cabinet slot, there to fall between the walls of the house to sever a roach's leg or two and over the years corrode away, or await a hysterical EPA pogrom and corrupt SuperFund fiasco. Russian women are prodigiously hirsute, an adaptation to Russian winter. Socialist theory could not produce a working ball point pen let alone the billions of precision disposable razors annually required to rend asunder the barbed wire entanglements so generously infesting their legs, armpits and upper lips. Russian women struggled with cast iron safety razors and dialectically pure knockoffs of Gillette blades dating from the 1950s. Medicine cabinets in communal bathrooms were gorged with nicked and dulled blades. Every building in Russia accumulated first pounds, then tons of rusty steel shards between its walls. Socialist concrete is heavy on sand and aggregate and light on cement and safety margins. Gorbachev catapulted to power as the first square blocks of grey concrete apartment houses began to crumble. The whole of the residential infrastructure of imperial Soviet Russia was poised to physically disintegrate unless billions of disposable Bic razors and thousands of Jenny Craig weight loss centers were immediately imported. White Russian raproachement with the West was inevitable and unavoidable. The unresolved belligerence of their southern republics, Muslim Russia, is explained in a most natural manner. The men grow beards. The women luxuriate in thick rivulets of abundant black growth sprouting from their upper lips, armpits, and nether regions and lushly carpeting their limbs. The only common use of a razor is to circumcise boys at puberty. Dr. Schund marvels at Mohammet's intuition - his followers each needing only to possess a single straight razor passed down from father to son - saving the domiciles of millions of oppressed people from assured destruction and political devastation. The Iron Curtain crumpled like so much aluminum foil. France was not spared WWII's agony by its Maginot line. Germany was not protected by its Siegfried line. Imperial Soviet Russia waged four decades of Cold War, only to be doomed by its bikini line.