bizarreville

The Bizarreville FBI office announced Monday with great pleasure, that serious crime such as murder, manslaughter, and mayhem dropped 10 percent in 2009.  This came as a surprise, given the tough economic conditions all year, which have historically caused sharp crime increases as the unemployed became whacky, desperate, and search for adrenaline-activating activities to occupy their idle time.

When asked to explain this unexpected outcome, FBI officials pointed to the increase in unemployment benefits, new entitlements, expanded food stamps, and assundry handouts to anyone who wants them, and other freebies which have negated much of the desperation factor.  “It’s a lesson for us all in how to reduce crime…just hand people what they want, when they want it, with minimal fuss and muss.  Stop all the greedy hording, and learn to share with your brothers and sisters.”

A Bizarreville News reporter challenged the FBI spokesman that this sounds a lot like Socialism, a socio-economic system that has typically produced more widespread desperation, expansive black markets, and high crime where/when tried…normally requiring expansion of policing agencies such as the FBI and other head-clobbering security forces.  The reporter was quickly whisked away by 4 large, fully-armed Agents, who indicated that they wanted to do more ‘exploratory questioning of his provocative, intriguing theories’.

The FBI spokesman went on to suggest that reducing the desperation factor could also apply to the country’s problem with hard drugs.  “It all comes down to the same desperation=crime formula.  In the Office, we are currently developing something we call the Nome Theory….here’s how it goes:  Let’s say we made all hard drugs legal in, say, all the northern counties of Alaska…made drugs relatively easy and cheap to obtain up there.  First, it would make the drug problems go away in northern Alaska.  But then…then, all the druggies across the country would begin to flock to northern Alaska, drawn by the ease of availability and ease of transaction…ultimately eliminating their desperation factor.  Yeah, you’d probably have some junkhead, spaced-out wonks crashing into each other in snowmobiles…might have a few frozen, tripped-out carcasses stretched out in the tundra…might have some illicit deals with the Eskimo mob.  Who cares?  The point is the Nome theory would hoover up the whole drug problem and dispose of it to an area where desperation could be ‘managed’ quite effectively at 20-below Farenheit.  The Nome Theory….pretty interesting, huh?”

The spokesman then asked if there were any more questions among the reporters, who all seemed a bit glassy-eyed at this stage.  But there were none.

Disclaimer:  all stories in Bizarreville are pure fiction, even the ones that sound like they could be real.