Dogonomics and the Monkey's Uncles

Flipping through my wife's old scrapbooks, this newspaper clipping floored me:

"Headline: Nobel Prize Awarded for Revolutionary Theory of Dogonomics.

"STOCKHOLM (AP) -- 'Dogonomics,' an innovative variation on supply-side economics, has earned a special out-of-cycle Nobel Prize, it was announced today. In an unusual twist, the Trustees of the Nobel Foundation declined to name the new Laureate. 'You wouldn't believe us if we told you,' the selection committee chair announced in a written statement, and would confirm only that the award had been made to a resident of Kenosha, Wisconsin in the United States of America."

A childish scrawl alongside the clipping reads "May 2, 1983. My little brother is famous!"

Now it can be told: my brother-in-law invented dogonomics to get a swimming pool.

A bright lad, he realized that a penny spent by the family on anything other than his own desires would decrease the chances of him getting what he wanted. So, he reasoned, all he needed to do was convince his parents that a pool was cheaper than, say... a dog.

"If we had a dog, we'd have to feed it, get shots for it, buy poopie bags, and all that stuff," he told his parents. "Plus a license, and a leash, and dog toys. And if we bought a Great Dane, that would be a LOT of money. And you know, some families have four or five big dogs. That's a WHOLE LOT of money.

"Well, we don't have a dog, much less five dogs. So, we can take the money we are saving by not having any dogs and spend it on a pool. It has already paid for itself!"

Breathtaking, sweeping, revolutionary economic theory.

The Theory of Dogonomics has been applied to agricultural price supports for decades, of course, as in the old gag about the fella who's not raising sugar: "Government's gonna pay me to not farm 100 acres this year. Next year, I plan on not farming 200 acres." Friend asks "How about cotton?" He replies, "Nah, I don't think I'm ready to diversify yet." But I digress.

The same kind of brilliant reasoning that brought the Nobel to Kenosha echoes through the generations -- but sideways, passing not from parent to child, but from uncle to nephew. It might be proof of the migration of souls through which Plato asserted that "all learning is but recollection," that innate knowledge of universal ideas comes from previous lives lived.

Well, now I can prove it. (Nobel guys, listen up.) The fact that my kids have independently derived and applied their uncle's Theory of Dogonomics proves today that Uncles Are The Source of All Kid Knowledge and Mischief, and that they pass it along mystically, magically.

How else to explain that our son has fussy eating habits identical to his uncle? They don't dine together often enough for it to be learned behavior. It's not just karmic payback, to frustrate grandparents for yet another generation. It's not simply that our child-rearing style is similar to our parents' style. (Example: Starting at age eight, each birthday includes license to use one new "naughty" word. Admittedly, we've started out pretty tame: "butt" was the first release. Still, with George Carlin gone, someone has to define the limits of vocabulary. But the need to acquire the words? That's all uncle-driven.)

It's barely possible that direct interaction made an impact. Uncles and older cousins attain hero status for the things they can do that Mom and Dad can't or won't do. Being an uncle is far superior to being a dad -- certainly from the uncle's perspective. Uncles can spoil kids rotten, then return them before the rotten becomes bothersome. What kid won't idolize the man who takes him to the Brewers game, and plies him with cotton candy, a big foam rubber "Number One" finger, and 64 oz. of Pepsi?

The Avuncular Founts of Mischief also supply essential direct instruction in the arts of belching, finger-pulling, goofy handshakes (squeeze. squeeze. "Hi." squeeze. "I'm from the" squeeze. "American Heart Association.") How can a father compete? All I've got are instructive parables from my own youth. Our bedtime "Little Boy Brian" stories had gained an avid audience briefly, with their helpful moral instruction on avoiding cracked heads (first grade), broken teeth (third grade), and lacerated hands (sixth grade); then the kids started to notice a common theme and finally requested "Please, Dad -- no more stories about you getting hurt."

But I'm sticking to my theory that the kids absorb knowledge and the dogonomics outlook directly from the uncles, in some weird non-genetic, non-environmental fashion. It has something to do with magnetism, Ley lines, the hidden subterranean Earth, and quark pairing. (Notice how this spreads bets across more Nobel categories: Physics, Literature and Archaeology. Now, to make a case that this also qualifies for a Peace Prize.)

Oh yeah -- he never did get the pool from dogonomics budget surpluses. Then again, if you've won a Nobel Prize, you can jolly well buy your own.