It seems like everything is fake these days: fake news, fake ice cream, fake money, fake teeth, fake knees, fake hips, and fake identities. Bald guys are wearing toupees, women are getting fake boobs and fake people pester me on the phone with robocalls from fraudulent folks. Fake “reality” TV show stars in Hollywood are even creating fake grades and fake SAT scores so their dumb kids can get into Harvard and Yale. I suppose their diplomas will be made with fake sheepskin.
It’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s real and what’s not. If you look on a container of lemon juice, for instance, it says it’s made with artificial flavor while dishwashing soap is made with real lemons. I even saw on eBay an autographed photo of George Washington on a “Buy It Now” deal, even though I’m pretty sure there weren’t even Kodak® box cameras and film back in Georgie’s day. We don’t believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy any more but UFO’s in Roswell and the Kardashians are the real deal. Business bamboozlers and bureaucratic government officials in The Swamp contrive, fabricate, forge, deceive, and defraud daily but if you try to save a little on your taxes you could go to jail.
The most fraudulent thing that gets my goat is fake meat. Initially, I thought it would be a bigger flop than a braless Playmate of the Year, so I was surprised at how well fake meat has been received. (But then I wonder if all the glowing reviews about fake meat are fake.) What made me especially upset were two quotes from the CEO’s of two of the three biggest meatpackers in the world about how bullish they are on fake meat. I guess they haven’t looked at the books lately or they’d notice that 99.9999% of their income and profit comes from real meat. They should be paid off in fake stock options so they’d know how real meat producers feel.
After I finished getting mad about the charlatans in suits serving as red meat Chief Executive Officers I started thinking of ways to fight back and I think I have the answer: Fake CEOs. If the CEOs of meat companies aren’t even going to stand behind our product maybe it’s time to replace them. I’m thinking that every day you take a different employee off the deboning line who has a fake green card and fake social security number and make him or her CEO for a day. You could even buy from Harvard or MIT any extra fake diplomas they had on hand and nail them on the office walls of the fake CEO’s. The money the company would save on the difference in salaries between someone making $25 an hour versus $20 million a year would go directly to the bottom line.Even my Fake CEO For A Day Program would only be a stopgap measure until a CEO robot could be invented. Don’t laugh, if inventors can come up with a robot to milk a cow, inventing a fake CEO should be a piece of cake. A robot Tyson CEO wouldn’t speak in such glowing terms about fake meat for fear of being replaced.
We shouldn’t just stop with the CEO, we also have to address the scientists who came up with beet juice laced fake meat in the first place. We should replace their test kitchens and test tubes with a fake research department filled with fake scientists in white lab coats who couldn’t figure out how to turn on a bunsen burner in a million years. These fraudulent scientists would be recruited from the ranks of high school dropouts so they wouldn’t know the first thing about how to create a fake chicken, hog or steer. They’d be as reliable as a Chinese-made Rolex.
All the employees of the fake meat companies should be paid in counterfeit $20 bills with Bill Clinton’s picture on them so the only people dumb enough to accept them would be employees of the fake hamburger joints and fake fast-food chicken outfits. Maybe we could even use some of our checkoff dollars to create Fake Impossible Hamburgers and Fake Beyond Beef Burgers.
Of course, they’d be made with 100% real meat.
