ZXLGIEW, Freedonia. The line outside Krlzisky’s Dry Goods and Notions Store stretched down the street and around the corner of Gen. Pokls Armeglzark Avenue yesterday, but the many women–and a few men–who waited with spray cans in their hands seemed unperturbed by the long wait. “We get good deal,” said Anka Frko-Postule, holding out her aging can of White Rain hairspray for this reporter to examine. “Two containers evaporated goat’s milk, a head of cabbage, and tickets to see Socialist Fun Girls on Ice show in 2026 if I am still alive.”
“I got the large economy size, thought it would last ’til World War III.”
The “deal” the forty-something housewife speaks of is a United Nations-brokered disarmament initiative in which Freedonian citizens will give up their fleurocarbon-laced consumer products, which this land-locked nation has required that citizens maintain in readiness as a defense against nuclear weapons since the end of World War II.
“It is not only people’s right to have fleurocarbons, it is duty,” said Deputy Assistant Under-Secretary of Defense Klaisko Minitro. “You never know when some bully superpower get itchy-finger, hairspray is our first line of anti-missile defense.”
“Maybe if I sleep with Klaisko Minitro I get bigger apartment.”
Fleurocarbons were banned in the United States in 1978 after concerns that the organofluorine compounds were eating a hole in the earth’s ozone layer, but Freedonia did not follow suit. “Why should we follow suit,” Minitro asks contemptuously. “Destruction of life on earth is not a card game, where my three of clubs trumps your two of hearts. It is serious business.”
The theory on which Freedonian Civil Defense authorities imposed the nationwide mandate could never be replicated by scientists in other nations, leading Western experts to believe it was based on superstition and a secret message that The Klogzks, the state-funded band that was the nation’s answer to The British Invasion, had embedded in their breakthrough album “Don’t Touch My Milch Cow!” “If you play side 2 backwards under a blacklight you can hear it,” says Jarek Nozvi, a writer for Freedonian Music Scene Today. “It is mathematical so I can’t explain, but ozone holes apparently neutralize nuclear warheads with sticky hairspray residue.”
The Klogzks
A nation-wide education campaign was required to persuade Freedonian women to give up hairspray, which has maintained their coiffures at stratospheric heights that were the envy of other Eastern bloc countries. “I will miss the mounds of hair piled high on my girlfriend’s head,” says Nozvi. “It was sensuous to play with, and I often found loose change in her beehive she had forgotten about.”