Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (42 page)

Over the next two and a half decades the military balance will
shift dramatically in favor of the Third World. We in the United
States, the Soviet Union and China will have given up our nuclear
arms because they didn't go with our shoes and took up valuable
space that could be used to build vacation condos. In the meantime
every Third World country including Fernando Po will have acquired the bomb. Unfortunately, they won't use their bombs on
each other no matter how forcefully sensible people like ourselves
argue for them to do so. They will use the bombs on us, or, at least,
they'll try to. But every time they do they'll find five hundred or a
thousand refugee families living in the missile silos and all the
weapons-grade plutonium stolen to make glow-in-the-dark tourist
knick-knacks.

On the financial front, most underdeveloped countries will have economies based on breaking things, losing things and stealing. The resulting negative GNPs will be made up by World Bank
loans-necessary in order to maintain low unemployment and
inflation in the last of the remaining Western democracies (South
Korea, Singapore and Taiwan). International currency will be the
cow chip.

The Third World debt problem, however, will be solved at last
as developing nations offer to "work off" their various loan defaults. The entire country of Bolivia will come over to your house
and do the lawn.

This and other factors will make illegal immigration a continuing problem. But liberals will still resist passing laws giving
the United States an official language. Many Americans, they'll
point out, don't speak Spanish. Many speak Hindi and-Urdu..-

The Third World will be out of oil in 2013. But this will not
cause economic dislocations since pollution by then will be such
that all South American, Asian and African rivers will be flammable and can be burned as energy sources.

Another effect of pollution will be that all Third World wildlife
that hasn't been eaten will be dead. There will be no more elephants, rhinos or lions except in zoos (where most college-educated
people will also be confined). On the bright side, mutations caused
by the disappearance of the ozone layer and high levels of carbon
monoxide in the atmosphere will result in new forms of wildlife,
such as fifty-foot boll weevils and mealworms the size of Amtrak
trains.

Insects will be given a seat at the U.N., where they will vote
with the Communist Bloc on most issues, especially the increase of
farm subsidies in the U. S.

Third World nations will continue to gain influence in international organizations such as the Olympic Committee. As a result a
number of new sports will be added to Olympic competitionstreet begging, student rioting and hostage murder (originally a
demonstration event at the 1972 Olympics in Munich).

Another upbeat trend will be the gradual elimination of the
international narcotics traffic. As the entire world becomes lethargic, larcenous, mentally disconnected and given to fits of
violent rage, there won't be any need for drugs.

But other Third World health problems will persist, malnutrition being the worst because there will never be quite enough of it
to eliminate the other Third World maladies. Public-spirited types
will form Malnutrition-Aid organizations to raise money to take
food away from the underdeveloped world's burgeoning mass of
ignorant, crazy and ungovernable AIDS-fodder. But it will be too
little, too late.

Bizarre diseases will continue to spawn in the developing
countries. We're all hoping for one that kills only lawyers. And
Third World values and aesthetics will also come to permeate the
globe, causing a welcome respite from feminism and bringing spray
paint to the fore as the principle medium of expression in literature
and the arts.

But in the next quarter century the most dramatic change in
the Third World will be the United States becoming a part of it. We
are already well on our way. Many of our cities are indistinguishable, in large part, from Beirut. The manners, dress and grammar
of our young people have a decidedly underdeveloped cast. And
most of our intellectuals have belonged to "lesser breeds without
the law" for ages. All we have to do now is elect a few more
Democrats.