Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Killing Two Birds with One Stone

I’ve heard a lot of analysts on both sides of the aisle recently talk about doing this or that to help the economy, and saying it would “kill two birds with one stone”. I’m not sure if their suggestions would be effective or not, but I’m pretty sure birds are not to blame for any of this. So why are they so bloodthirsty to murder birds? I can’t figure this out.

Maybe they just saw Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds last night, or maybe some bird pooped all over their expensive car, or worse, pooped on their head on the way to work. But still, I don’t see the need for such calls of violence against birds. Hey, I’ve had a bird poop on me in urban locations a couple of times, and I didn’t cultivate hateful bloodlust about it! I just found their nest, climbed up and pooped in it right back; that’s the appropriate way of dealing with those birds! And I never got pooped on again (in that city, anyway). (And you don’t have to climb up anywhere either; you can just get a slingshot and fling your poop up at them. That works too. Just try not to miss.)

And must they really go out and try to kill birds themselves? Couldn’t they just go out and get like a chicken or turkey sandwich somewhere? I mean, they’re birds too, right? And if they go out to kill birds to try to solve our nation’s problems, how do they know they’re going after the right ones? They may be killing innocent birds, when the guilty birds have already flown the coop, so to speak. And I hate to sound so ignorant or bigoted, but don’t all those birds just look the same? So how can you ever be sure you’ve killed the right one?

But let’s just say for the sake of argument that birds are the guilty parties here, and that there’s just two, specific ones who’ve done this all to us, okay? Okay. So there’s two birds, and they’ve definitely done it, and it’s for sure their fault that we’re in trouble right now, and we want to get revenge and send a message to other birds not to mess with us again like that. Is trying to kill them both at the same time with a stone really the best way of going about this revenge? It’s really hard to hit two separate birds even with a shotgun, so I imagine a stone would be even harder. So you have to figure you’d miss them both and they’d just fly away and taunt you by pooping on your head and windshield again. And they might even make fun of you on Facebook and stuff. So this whole “two birds with one stone” idea is pretty crappy, I’d say.

So look, politicians: If you want us to trust your judgment, don’t suggest stupid things like trying to kill two birds with one stone! It just makes you look mean, and incompetent. If you want to kill two birds, get a cat to do it: They’re good at it, they have experience, and they’ll do it for nothing. Then you’ll just end up looking smart and effective to us all. Except PeTA, perhaps: they’ll hate you; but you could just deny responsibility and say the cat did it. That’s what I’d do.

Oh, and I’m also wondering about something else: There’s also an expression that says: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush”. So could they just squish the bird in their hand and then say it’s the same thing as having killed the two in the bush with one stone? Or maybe they could train that bird in their hand to go kill those two birds in the bush? Maybe it’s a red-tailed hawk, or a bald eagle, or something like that that’s in their hand. That would probably work, right? And then it’s just bird-on-bird violence, and surely not even PeTA could object to that, right? I mean, so long as they had plausible deniability, and they could make it look like those two birds had also scammed or screwed or bilked the bird-of-prey somehow as well, that is.