Saturday 8th April 2000
Dak the Hamster answers some phone queries

I like manning the phones - it's one of those times in the week when I can get face-to-face, so to speak, with the rodents who read our articles and answer any queries they have. We also get floods of phone calls from humans all over the civilised world (and parts of New Jersey, too) who are anxious to learn more about our purposes and the Presidential Campaign.

This week, one subject seems to have been cropping up more and more and, checking with my fellow telephonists, I soon discovered that it was the one query that had been occurring throughout the entire week - 'Why hadn't the Rodent Weekly been covering the Primaries?'

After all, here we were, a newspaper with the largest rodent readership in the world, and we weren't covering the campaigns of the nominees. There is only one simple answer to such a question and that is that we find it all rather boring - and, as a poll of our readership confirmed, 92% also found it all rather mundane, tedious and a good cure for insomnia.

While it's quite true that we could write up the campaigns of the human candidates in a sort of surreal style that would bring a smile to the faces of most subscribers, we felt compelled to ignore them completely and divert our attentions, instead, to developing the volume of information available of the Hamster Presidential Campaign Committee and of how they have been preparing for the final series of elections come the end of the year.

After all, hamsters have already decided on their own candidate and there is no need, unlike the humnas, for them to have to propose certain front-runners and whittle the crowd down to just one. Besides, even if the hamsters had done this, how much money would have been wasted in campaigning that could have, rather, been spent on different priorities and in local development plans.

We at the Rodent Weekly have long since been shocked at the vast amounts that are spent in the name of 'politics' when such vast sums could be rediverted to better causes - this is the real scandal of the Primaries. Not that a candidate has to be chosen but that it can't be done sensibly and with the minimum of fuss. We could have dealt at lengths with the scandals surrounding each and every nominee (actually, our pages wouldn't have been extensive to do so), we could have told you of the hopes and dreams of each of the politicians who would suddenly find that amnesia had erased their words from their minds the moment they gained office and we could have given you a listing of all the places that they were thinking of visiting so you could have moved house away from the area - but we had to take a quality decision and chose to disregard it.

We decided to channel our energies into a more profitable avenue instead. And what can be more profitable than a low budget Presidential Campaign that doesn't exploit the monetary contributions of the American people? If the nominees expend large chunks of respectable citizens' money now, what do you think they'll do when they have limitless power in the Whitehouse? Far better to vote for a candidate who has shown that they care for the finances of the people by not spending too much of it even before the elctions take place!

Well, there you have it...that's our reason. And we trust that you understand. While our coverage of the Hamster Presidential Party is set to expand in future editions, we will, as a mark of respect for our objectives, keep our coverage of the human candidates to a minimum. After all, you can read all the lies about them in most of our human counterparts...

Dak the Hamster writes for the Rodent Weekly.
This article appears courtesy of that paper.




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