Common cents

What this country needs is not a good 5-cent cigar. What it needs is an anti-stupid pill.
It would help make things so much clearer for so many Americans.
For example, imagine you have spent the last week staring at your computer with the growing conviction that you are stuck in a soul-sucking, dead-end job.
You start to worry that maybe you’re just not intelligent enough to keep up with corporate America.
Your coworker Larry — it’s always Larry — is always so cheerful and peppy in the office.
Larry has the intelligence of iceberg lettuce. But somehow he’s being offered the promotion for Executive Vice Assistant to the Secretary for the Executive, and you’re not.
If only there was an anti-stupid pill, you could pop it, and knowledge would flood in like a… well, a flood or something.
Then you’d leap up from your desk with a bright, shining realization.
“This IS a soul-sucking, dead-end job!” you’d cry, and you’d throw a monitor at Larry on your way out.
This is not the only benefit of an anti-stupid pill.
Let us say you are a local politician. And a local neighborhood needs a new sewage pipe and a road replaced.
If you are a mayor of average intelligence, you would crack open the old road, put in the sewage pipe, then build the new road on top of it.
But lo! If you take the anti-stupid pill, you’d realize you can do it in the opposite order.
You can pave the road first, then break it open to put in the pipe, then pave it again.
Sure, you may have to replace the same road twice instead of once, but this lets you hire twice the people to get it done.

Employing the locals? Check. Getting the vote? Check. Paying the bill? Che–uh, no, that one goes to the taxpayers.
What’s good for mayors is good for America. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
If it doesn’t exactly scream efficiency, at least work is work, right?
To that I respond with an intelligent, eloquently articulated “Nope.”
Good work is work. Everything else is just motion.
Now, look. Anti-stupid pills do not exist. It’d be nice if they did, but no one has invented any, and no one will be able to.
I wish none of us had to deal with Executive Vice Assistants to the Secretary for the Executive, or mayors who pave our roads twice with gold bricks wrapped in our tax dollars.
But I must acknowledge that despite the pain I feel in my wallet, at least I can laugh at how silly some people are, including myself.
It’s worthwhile trying to be a little less silly and a little more shrewd.
One day, perhaps I will exceed the intelligence of iceberg lettuce.
And — because this is America — maybe I will become a mayor or even an Executive Vice Assistant to the Secretary for the Executive.
On that day, I will stretch out behind my desk, even if it’s in a hall closet, and I will meditate on one not-so-silly fact.
You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.

Copyright 2025 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.