Computer. Car. Nuclear Weapons. No! No! No!

The answer my dear reader(s) is the portable book, and literacy is the vicious plague that soon followed after the introduction of this pernicious little device. Suddenly, all the elders old fartes had no value. Disrespect, reaction against authority, and hooliganism soon followed. It is a horrible thought to think about what some compressed pulp and ink can do to the neurology of the masses. Once books became popular, knowledge became almost a universal and worthless commodity, thus the value of respecting your elders hit the dust.

The plague of literacy soon spread around the world, most successfully into the developed world. Entire forests were razed to entertain (and educate) the masses. In time entire industries were created to filter, edit, publish, and print novels, nonfiction, magazines, etc. In time these publishing giants were able to squeeze out all the little independent publishers that were producing artistic and quality works of art. The number of different published authors decreased and the schlock gained some ground. Unfortunately, this did not increase the relative illiteracy of the populace, instead, it turned large numbers of people into book lovers. But in the midst of all this bad news, an invention appeared to save humanity. TV.

Television has been successful at weaning large numbers of children from the desolate act of reading. The crap offered up daily on the olde cathode ray tube is superior to any piece of liter-a-ture that has been printed because it is not printed and doesn’t require any work. It is an axiom that work is bad. Reading is work. Therefore, reading is bad! Since, there is no chance that books can ever be trained to produce sound and graphics, there is very little chance that reading can beat out TV. There is one dark cloud on the horizon: Movies. There is a scary trend developing in the Holy Land of Hollywood - no budget, low production, HI-8 home video crap - i.e., The Blair Witch Project. Think about it people, you paid good money (your parents’ hard earned cash) to see a pile of bovine excrement. That’s almost as moronic as reading a book.

Imagine a time when every kid has a video camera and an edit suite. You may argue that natural selection will be at work and only the crème will rise to the top. If you believe that then I have a whole pile of domain names to sell you on the Internet. Crap will dominate and people will get bored with the images and sounds produced, and one day some young punk will decide to write a symbol down in the sand to represent a thought and the whole horrid plague of literacy will return. This will begin the end of illiteracy. Amen.