MAD DOG: Money Can't Buy Everything ... Right?

A major part of a parent's job is to fill their child's head. At birth it's an empty vessel waiting for bits of knowledge to be dropped in. As we grow older we amass more and more pieces until, in our late teens, we know everything there is to know and take every opportunity to demonstrate this fact to anyone who will listen. And many who would rather not.

A few years later we discover there's still a little room way in the back, right between where we stored the image of our third grade teacher's face -- which we're saving just in case we run across her on a dark street and still want to seek revenge for "dessert has two esses because we always want seconds" -- and the place where that charmingly useless tidbit has been taking up room for way too many years.

In middle age we find that we've actually overfilled our head and start having trouble keeping its contents organized. Names get accidentally filed with geographic facts, the multiplication tables splinter into pieces and scatter into dark recesses we forgot we had -- and would prefer to keep that way, and your social security number starts to look like the drug store's telephone number. Or maybe that's your phone number. It's hard to say.

Not long after that it all starts to dribble out like so much cerebral incontinence in need of a Depends until one morning you wake up and suddenly your head's as empty as the day you were born. Luckily it's so empty you don't even realize it's empty, though you do keep wondering where that strange echo is coming from.

That's why people should be more careful about what they stick in their kids' heads. Since there's a finite amount of space, it should be used for things that are important, or at least true. Not like the things They always told us. You know, like "You'll understand when you grow up", "Ignore it and it will go away", and "One day you'll look back at this and laugh." And to think, we believed them. At least until we tried to figure out the opposite sex, "Survivor" became a hit and spawned offspring like, well, grubs, and those photos from last year's neighborhood party turned up at www.you-should-have-burned-the-negatives.com.

They also told us "Money can't buy everything" and they were wrong about that too. True, maybe it can't buy love, happiness, or peace of mind, but it can buy political office, and once you have that the other pieces fall into place.

Take Jon Corzine, the political newcomer who picked himself up a nice little New Jersey Senate seat by spending $60 million, an all-time record. True that sounds like a lot of money, especially for a seat from a state like New Jersey, but it's not. Amazon.com lost that much in only ten days during the last quarter of 2000.

This shows both how smart Corzine is and how bad the management is at Amazon.com. If they had any brains at all they would have spent the last quarter's loss on a political campaign instead of trying to get people to buy, well, everything. The money still would have been spent, but at least nine of them would be sitting next to Corzine as we speak.

Of course if they had any ambition at all they would have pooled the money so one of them would be president. So what if they have no experience, they have money, and that worked for George Bush. He popped up out of nowhere, flashed a resume with less political experience than any presidential candidate in the last hundred years, and managed to raise more money in the first four months of his campaign than anyone before him had been able to do in two years. Now, thanks to those donations, he has a new job and house. The management at Amazon.com may end up with the same things, though at the rate they're going it won't be voluntary.

Money can also buy a winning sports team. In recent years the New York Yankees shelled out the most bucks for players and in return won four playoff titles in five years. Noticing that, the Texas Rangers went and signed shortstop Alex Rodriguez to a $252 million contract in the hope that people will finally stop thinking there's an outfielder on the team named Walker and he's played by Chuck Norris.