ECONOMICS: Harvest Shmoon

The capitalist system last week faced a new menace. It was the shmoo (plural: shmoon, or colloquially, shmoos).

Menace to Hoomanity. The shmoo is a small animal which looks like an animated ham. From its round rump a plumpish neck narrows toward a tiny head; from above a sparse mustache, a pair of trusting eyes peer myopically but ingratiatingly at the world. In the words of the greatest living authority on shmoos: “They lays aigs at th’ slightest excuse! They also gives milk. And as fo’ meat—broiled, they makes th’ finest steaks; fried, they come out th’ yummiest chicken.” The shmoo is so sensitive and so eager to please that when a human merely looks at it with a faint suggestion of hunger, the animal falls flat on its back and dies of happiness, all ready for the frying pan.

The shmoo was discovered by Al Capp’s Li’l Abner. When, last month, he began to hear strange music which sounded like “shmoooooooooooo!”, his eager pursuit of the lilting sound was barred by an amazon of fierce and busty aspect. (“Ah sees to it,” said she, “that th’ shmoon don’t come over th’ mount’in.”) Nevertheless, Li’l Abner penetrated into the forbidden Valley of the Shmoon, where a sage clad only in his own beard, called Old Man Mose, frantically explained the shmoo situation to the intruder. “Shmoos, mah boy, is the greatest menace to hoo-manity th’ world has ever known!”

“Thass becuz they is so bad, huh?” asked Li’l Abner.

“No, stupid,” answered Mose, hurling one of life’s profoundest paradoxes at Li’l Abner. “It’s because they’re so good!”

The Shmoo-Plus Theory. Old Man Mose was afraid that a sudden oversupply of consumer goods would produce serious economic dislocations. Typical was the plight of Softhearted John, the shark-mouthed grocer, whose goods no one would buy as long as they could have shmoos instead. “Ah’ll be ruined ef ev’ry-body has everything they need!” he moaned. “Ah cain’t make any money!”

With this desperate plea for the return to a scarcity economy, the matter rested this week. Karl Marx (who in a lifetime of research never came across a single shmoo) provides an inkling of what might yet happen. “Society . . . finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism . . . There is too much . . . means of subsistence . . . The productive forces at the disposal of society [i.e., the shmoos] no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property . . .”

Was capitalism, then, doomed to go down before the shmoo? Not at all. Old Man Mose totally misunderstood the nature of the capitalist system and of the economic animal. A striking illustrative example came from a point due east of Shmoo Valley—San Francisco—where a man named Ott Straub recently opened a new eating place. It was a drive-in, with its own radio station which broadcast any desired tune to the customers eating below; it had a dining room, a cocktail lounge, an open-air patio, and 85 carhops.

The latter, carefully selected from among 500 applicants, had gone through a special course in “personality training,” make-up and coiffure; color movies instructed them how to hang a tray on a car door without scratching the paint. They wore fuchsia and grey uniforms to match the restaurant’s neon lights, dressed before full-length theatrical mirrors in private dressing rooms, and were protected from improper advances by a special force of private detectives. The food (somewhat more expensive but no less appetizing than shmoo schnitzel) was a negligible part of the whole enterprise.

The lesson to Li’l Abner (and Marx) was obvious: give people all the plain shmoo products they can eat, and they will soon hanker for 28 flavors of shmoon; they will also want swallows’ nests in white wine and kangaroo cutlets. Give them all they want of that, and they will demand waitresses in fuchsia costumes—with no detectives around.

Human demand is unlimited. A vigorous capitalism has nothing to fear from plenty; not even from plenty of shmoon.