Local campaigner, Dave Halfwit, today announced to a hushed
and largely indifferent world that, having weighed up the pros and cons in the
child-drugging debate, he has decided to throw parenting to the winds and adopt
the pharmaceutical model of childrearing advocated by such visionaries as Dr Timothy
Leary, Mr E. Lie-Lilly and Dr. Leon Eisenberg the famed inventor of ADHD the
celebrated work of fiction.
He announced his bold decision at a press conference to mark
the launch of his new charity Pi (Parental Irresponsibility). Pi will campaign
for the right of parents everywhere to be freed from the stigma of having to
have something to do with how their kids turn out.
The ethos of Pi is based on modern scientific discoveries
that nobody has read, which clearly show the human brain is responsible for
everything. Sadly, the psychiatrists of the Brain-U-Like Institute who published
the aforementioned discoveries also discovered that the brain has evolved over
millions of years into being not very good (unless optimistically bludgeoned
with chemicals or electricity). As
nobody gets to choose which brain they have, it’s therefore nobody’s fault when small
mishaps occur such as World War Three, presidential elections, homicidal rampages,
modern journalism or the Conservative Party.
Mr Halfwit told journalists that he has high hopes that Pi
will be able to make a significant contribution to bringing social decay into
the twenty-first century. It will do so primarily by forwarding the
revolutionary concept that society is responsible for all the actions of its
individual members. This is to replace the outmoded superstition that it is all
God’s fault and places blame where is really belongs: upon nobody in particular.
This gets society’s millions of individual members right off the hook.
The strength of any society says Pi’s manifesto, “Nothing To
Do With Me (or Anybody),” lies not in its individual members but in the ability
of a handful of its very best people - such as governments, newspaper editors,
PR gurus, arms manufacturers and other wise men of benign disposition - to do
their thinking for them, in essence to formulate policies and reforms that everybody
else would have come up with had they had proper brains.
When questioned specifically about his decision to drug his
children, Mr Halfwit declared:
“This was not an easy decision to make but after five and a
half minutes of agonised soul-searching I came to the firm conclusion that
there is little to be gained from thinking too much. I’ve decided to believe everything
I’m told by those who sell drugs and other people with no agendum whatsoever
beyond their determination to make lots of money at any price, which as you know
is the inalienable right of large corporations everywhere.”
When asked for his views on the mountain of evidence that
drugging children stunts their development and produces debilitated and
drug-addicted adults, he retorted scathingly, “The problem with evidence is that
you can use it to prove anything, especially the truth and the truth is not
always as convenient as many people like me would like it to be.”
In the end, he concluded, it is the duty of every citizen to
examine both sides of any argument and to opt for the argument that involves you
in the least hassle.
“After all,” he said, “we live in a modern and enlightened
age in which so many things are automated, giving us more time to do all those
things that earlier, less fortunate, societies could only dream about, such as
watching cultural classics like Spot the Celebrity Brain or drinking lager (preferably
both) or having nervous breakdowns. So it’s only fair and natural that the raising
of children should be automated too. The old, traditional methods of parking
children in front of the TV had only a limited workability but the pharmaceutical
industry has, in modern drugs, found an answer to that age-old problem.”
Mr Halfwit’s local MP, John Payola-Graft applauded his
constituent’s expedient decision. “It has been scientifically proved,” he said,
“that the secret of a happy government-citizen partnership is to establish the
citizen as, preferably quite literally, the sleeping partner and leave
government to do everything in the best interests of society as a whole. Of
course, multinational corporations like the Psychokiller Drug Emporium are the neediest
sectors of that society. I therefore applaud Mr Halfwit’s decision to uphold
the inalienable right of all parents not to have their freedom undermined by
the incessant self-interest of children and other groups of parasites.”
But when I put to Mr Payola-Graft that many groups such as
nutritionists, sensible people and other vociferous minorities are claiming the
way to have happy, healthy children is to not feed them junk and to talk to
them and generally look after them, he retorted: “It is just typical of people
with a vested interest in the health of others to bring common sense and facts
into the argument but we do not think there is room in the debate for such
extremism. I should also point out that, through tax breaks and imaginative accounting,
pharmaceutical companies provide hundreds of pounds a year in revenue for the
government. Without that revenue it will be very difficult to fund the next war
without the burden falling on the average voter. It is vital therefore that by
the time voters reach, er, voting age, they are in a foggy state of mind that
will enable them to believe everything we tell them.”
When I pointed out that many people are claiming that
drugging children simply makes them lose their grip on reality and become dull
and compliant, Mr Halfwit said. “Yes, admittedly, those are just some of the
benefits that influenced my decision. They are benefits that vastly outweigh a
few side effects such as the twenty thousand or so printed in tiny unreadable
lettering on the packaging, many of which can be remedied with modern drugs or
surgery in any case.”
Some studies back up this claim in so far as they have
proven scientifically that reality is not all it is cracked up to be and should
be avoided whenever possible. The reality that many children have to contend
with is particularly hostile in that in this modern age it contains many
harmful elements such as food without nutritional content and parents who want
to drug them.
And Mr Payola-Graft added: “It has been scientifically proven
that many children were hitherto inclined to grow up to be too smart for their
own good but thanks to the efforts of the psycho-pharmacy we are now able to
act in their long-terms interests by ensuring that never happens.”
I contacted the Psychokiller Drug Emporium, the manufacturers
of the antidepressant Passivit-E and the celebrated panacea for ADHD and other made-up
diseases, Apath-E, for their views on the matter. I put to their spokesmuppet the
controversial allegations that drugging children is unsafe and can lead to
brain damage, suicide and death and is in fact playing Russian Roulette with
children’s lives. In response they issued a statement that included:
“Our researchers are working flat out and leaving no search
results un-doctored in the search for improving the drugs we offer for children.
An example is our new LSD-and-Heroin-based antidepressants, our so-called D-Range
products for the under-fives, such as Hallucen-8, which are shaped to look like
Postman Pat and taste like sweets. Such
drugs have been proven safe in at least 0.001% of cases so we do not think that
parents contemplating drugging their children have more to worry about than their
child, for instance, playing with traffic or the land mines that careless people
leave lying about. Besides, what is
often forgotten with Russian Roulette is that is that when you play you have
only a one-in-six chance of coming to any harm, at least to begin with. These
are good odds by any standard as any parent who has taught his or her children
the intricacies of the game in the safety of their own home will tell you.”
Related News: Local Man Reaffirms his Commitment to Eating
Rubbish. “It’s a clear choice between short-term
gratification and long-term survival and I know which side I’m on!” says Arthur
Brain-Cell, chairman of O’Bese and Stupid, the . . . . see page 12