I'm still not over the fact that I lost the David Brooks Parody Contest sponsored by the alumni magazine at the University of Chicago, our mutual alma mater. 

I thought it had everything; sharp jump-cuts between high and low culture, allusions to obscure Austrian economists, hectoring questions like a police interrogation, ba-da-bing rim shot endings to paragraphs.  I guess being the best isn't good enough for some people.

But I've cried so much that my stuffed animals are soaked, and I'm ready to come out of my bedroom.  Here is my losing entry.

David Brooks, New York Times columnist

__________________________________________ 

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF THE SUBPRIME BORROWER 

Let’s say you’re a subprime borrower.  You’re sitting in your foreclosed-upon home while class-action lawyers line up outside the door, hoping to persuade you to sue your lender because a “robo-signer” cranked out papers at the rate of four hundred no-count losers like yourself an hour.  You couldn’t afford your mortgage payments even if you won the suit, but the lawyers say not to worry, the Obama administration will go upside your bank’s head and make them write off what you can’t pay.  Life, as the t-shirts say, is good.

Buster Brown, blues singer (not the one in the shoe)

Overcome with gratitude, you decide you want to give something back.  You’d like to help solve the nation’s consumer debt crisis, even though you don’t know Ginnie Mae from Freddie Mac.  You know that Fannie Mae is a song by blues harp player Buster Brown, but that’s about all you know.

Do you tell your neighbors—honest, hard-working folks like yourself who just happen to have double names like “Veneta Sue” and “Joe Don” if they’re white, or orthographic nightmares like “D’Antae” and “Sho’niqua” if they’re black—to cut up their credit cards, stop buying lottery tickets issued by greedy state governments, and live within their means?

Of course not.  The whole point of being a borrower is to make somebody give you money.

Calvin Coolidge, stifling fart.

Americans once feared debt, but fortunately for people like you, they got over it.  In 1960, the nation’s personal debt amounted to 55 percent of national income.  By 2007, that figure had risen to 1.33—a Goals Against Average that would put you ahead of all but one National Hockey League goalie.

The whole mess, you decide, is caused by democracy and moral decay.

Calvin Murphy (left)

Do you quote from Calvin Coolidge, the last American President to reduce the national debt?  Probably not—you think Calvin Coolidge holds the NBA record for most illegitimate children—fourteen by nine women—but you’re thinking of Calvin Murphy, the former guard for the Houston Rockets.

Just be glad he didn’t have nine children by fourteen women.  Now that would have been moral decay.

The whole deficit hawk brand needs a makeover.  Coolidge said “there is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means.”  Or maybe that was Yogi Berra, I’m always getting the two mixed up.

Billy Mays

This is still a Billy Mays nation—we want to get richer and shinier.  I don’t have a problem with people taking the ShamWow!—a super-absorbent towel—to those increasingly shrinking pockets of the country that reflexively vote Democratic.  If you’re going after the vast majority of people out in heartlands who just returned the House of Representatives to the Republicans after loaning it out to Nancy Pelosi like a Blockbuster one-night rental, however, you’d better get the Huge Roll of Bounty, the Quicker Picker Upper.

If you can do that, you can save the country.  If not, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. 

Pass that quart bottle of malt liquor, would you?