21st Century Man on…Putting the Right People in Charge

Score another major win for human laziness and idiocy in the war against terrestrial life.

When a collective act of breathtaking incompetence results in the devastation of nature or gratuitous human suffering, the public invariably calls for heads to roll. Throw out the bums and put the right people in charge! Everyone feels this way, but of course no one can agree on exactly who the right people are. This leads to bickering and posturing and political divisions and eventually things like Fox News.

And yes. Unfortunately heads do have to roll. All the excuses and contrition in the world can’t erase the culpability of epic assholery. Afterwards, it’s simply too late to make amends. I’m sure the folks whose heads will eventually roll have already made it clear to the ones who were responsible that it would have more appropriate for them to have been at their stations, properly trained and prepared, during the ill-fated well capping than to have been dialed in remotely from a bar or in the bathroom jerking off to pictures of mom. Or whatever the fuck else they could have possibly been doing in lieu of their actual responsibilities. Sadly, it’s too late for all that now. Just lean forward and place your chin in the guillotine there, sir. Please and thank you.

Going forward, who does one put in charge to make sure an oil company with tubes coursing through the entire earth, for example, doesn’t fuck up the whole world again? Opinions vary, of course, but you come to the 21st Century Manual for the correct answer, so here it is: The people to put in charge of capping and locking down scary and dangerous shit like underwater wells and nuclear plants and mines and shit like that are the people who design and build assembly lines for children’s toys. In our century, nothing is more secure than a package of action figures sitting on a store shelf.

If you’ve ever opened one of these contraptions, you know this to be true. You need to set aside half an hour for the job and bring a tool set that includes scissors, pliers and a screwdriver. You need a fresh trash bag to fill with all the tape, cardboard and plastic you’ll extract from the toy, because the resulting trash will consume three times as much space in a landfill as it did when it was originally packed. You can expect to find the action figures themselves, their vehicle and each of their various battle gadgets affixed to the packaging by at least one zip tie, engineered from a post-modern plastic that is 4,000 times stronger than steel. And then, of course, these individual ties are likely to be reinforced by a lattice of support ties.

Blown up to life size, we see that this fortress would sufficiently render He-Man and G.I. Joe immobile and out of the reach of their weaponry for thousands of years-the physically fit, crafty and pissed off heroes themselves, that is. It would seem like the toy versions of these warriors would be easier to secure. Nevertheless, it is exactly this kind of redundancy, fail-over and overkill that our mines and wells and bridges and shit are lacking in our times. Let’s face it-it is more difficult to unwrap a toy tank these days than it is to steal an actual tank. Hell, there’s one of those completely unguarded down there in the park right now!

Let’s give our most competent engineers something more important to do, shall we?