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President Bush Announces Massive "Mortuary Arts" Community College Initiative
President Bush announced that his administration would sponsor a major initiative designed to promote the creation or expansion of Mortuary Arts programs at community colleges throughout the United Sates.
Speaking before the American Morticians and Funeral Directors' 2004 Affordable Funeral Conference, Bush pledged his administration's support. "There's nothing more American than dying," Bush said, "unless it's making money from people dying. My administration wants to give every American a chance to profit from the deaths of others."
The initiative, dubbed "Living Off the Dead in America," will sponsor the creation of Mortuary Arts programs in over 200 community colleges. The plan will also aggressively target high school students in economically depressed areas with a "pro-living off the dead" message that will include a mascot, "Happy the Profitable Corpse."
"We're going to bring death right into our schools," explained program director Montel Brocklish. "We want them to look at that classmate who got knifed in a drug transaction gone bad and see dollar signs!"
And the plan may be working. Reggie "Rabid Squirrel" Truman was like so many of his peers - 19 years old, running drugs and running wild as an inner city gang member. But a chance encounter with Happy the Profitable Corpse turned things around.
"After I saw Happy I started thinking of him when I saw one of my homies bleeding to death. I started wondering how I could make 'im look better." Now he's enrolled in a Mortuary Arts program.
The President regularly voiced his support for community colleges throughout his 2004 campaign, offering them as a solution to unemployed Americans with outdated skills and training.
One of the Americans who took the President's advice was Lynette Dawning, a communications specialist who found herself in what the President called "an outdated field."
"People don't communicate anymore," Dawning noted, "but they do die," and it is their deaths that now provide Dawning with a lucrative living as a mortician's assistant.
"Before I returned to community college I was just another unemployed communications specialist with a Master's degree. Now I have a life, thanks to death."
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