SUPERSTOE

Satires ought to stay slim. This one goes on for so long with so little that it's bound to lose its readers, even in this election year. Paxton Superstoe and his fellow teachers in the high school at Great Spoons, North Dakota, each of them dropouts or fired-outs from university teaching, decided, at Superstoe's urging, to take over the country. It came to short, fat, middle-aged Superstoe at one of their regular and magnificently drunken Friday evening dialectic sessions. They would start a series of epidemics from virulent cultures, have their local yokel senator rise to demand whether the CIA or FBI can't find the enemy responsible and then run the senator for President. It works, but the mechanism runs down, as Superstoe and his buddies succeed and then start succeeding each other, rewriting the Constitution, flummoxing the voters and getting happily, glassy-eyed drunk on TV dialectic sessions. The style is short staccato sentences, with some potentially visually slick slapstick and conversation that runs 50-50--half-pointed comedy, half pointless. The current campaigns may help this to barely puff along.