Tariffs

A Technical Analysis

Our topic today is: Tariffs. What are they? How do they work? What the hell is happening? Will we all end up homeless and eating out of dumpsters? And how come we always want to spell "tariffs" with two "r"s?

These are all important questions, and I will address them shortly. But first I want to tell you about a situation I had recently involving my private parts.

Let me start by stipulating that women have it much worse, reproductive-organwise, than men. I have seen childbirth at close range, and I cannot believe women do that without CGI. I could never do that. Even if I could do it, there's no way I would. If our species depended on the likes of me to reproduce, we would have disappeared millions of years ago. Granted, this would mean that there would never have been a movie version of "Cats." But overall it would be bad for humanity.

So I salute women, and their courage, and their organs, for all they do. But by the same token — and I think we can all admit, if we're being honest, that we have no idea what that expression actually means — there are times when it's not easy to be a male.

I experienced one of these times a few days ago when, within a span of 20 minutes, three different people, two of whom I had not previously met and one of whom was a member of a completely different biological sex, asked me to lower my pants so they could handle parts of my body that I will refer to here, out of respect for their privacy, as my festicles (not their real name).

This happened at the office of my urologist. Like many older men, I see a urologist regularly, and I believe I speak for all of these men when I make the following urgent plea to the urology community: For the love of God, please find a way to get to the prostate gland other than the way you're getting to it now.

The prostate gland is a male organ that clearly was intended to be a prank but somehow got accidentally included in the final design. In the medical profession, the the prostate is often referred to as "the Kardashian Family of glands," because nobody really knows why it exists other than to be annoying.

When you visit your urologist, he or she always examines your prostate, which is a tricky procedure because of where it's located. If we envision the male reproductive system as a map of Florida, the prostate would be Tallahassee.

Source: Harvard University School of Medicine and Geography

The problem is, there is no easy way to get to Tallahassee. So the current procedure is for the urologist to approach it via the back road from Alabama.

This means that the prostate examination is quite unpleasant for everyone involved.

Q. How unpleasant is it?

A. When it's about to happen, both you and the urologist are quietly hoping for a direct meteor strike.

Nevertheless the exam is necessary, because as men get older, their prostates can cause problems. Often these problems involve peeing, which is a big concern for older men. Trust me on this. If you ever see a group of older men talking animatedly among themselves, there's an excellent chance that they're discussing one of two topics:

1. The fact that pretty much everybody these days is an idiot.

2. Peeing.

The specific issue is that, as men get older, their prostates can cause them to take a lot longer to pee. A young man can go to the bathroom during a TV commercial break and be out before the show resumes; an older man could be in there for the entire third season of "White Lotus." Older men whose families have reported them to the police as missing persons often turn out to simply have been stuck in a bathroom, trying to get a stream going.

I happen to be fortunate on the prostate front. I have been blessed with a low-key, non-dramatic, non-Kardashian prostate, what the medical profession calls a "Bob Newhart prostate." So in my recent visit to the urologist office, I was feeling pretty good once the dreaded Tallahassee excursion was complete, and the Alabama backroad had been vacated.

But then an issue arose involving my festicles, which — I speak for all mankind here — are the last things you want to have anybody examining closely. They are not lookers. They are the Jabba the Hutt of male bodily parts.

Yet suddenly mine were being studied intently — the way a jeweler in a heist movie studies a necklace to determine if it's real — by three completely separate people. As I noted earlier, one of these people was — in fact, probably still is — a woman. Another was a man who used a machine to conduct a test on my festicles called a "scrotal ultrasound," which as I understand it employs the same technology that our armed forces use to detect Russian submarines. Yes. In my scrotum.

Fortunately everything turned out to be OK. But it was an upsetting experience. Again: I don't mean to compare what I went through to the ordeal of childbirth. But I did have to repeatedly drop my pants without knowing for certain whether the person I was doing this in front of was a trained medical professional or a Doordash driver. I felt uninformed; I felt vulnerable; I felt scared.

In short, I felt the way many Americans feel right now as they struggle to understand what's happening with these tariffs, which, to refresh your memory, are the topic of this Substack. I hope you have found this analysis to be helpful. I know that I, for one, feel a lot better. About the submarines, anyway.

And now it's time for you wonderful paying subscribers to weigh in via this scientific poll: