Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 27, 1994                   TAG: 9412290007
SECTION: EDITORIALS                    PAGE: G3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARGIE FISHER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

AMERICANISM

All we need is to be reminded of the one thing upon which Democrats, Republicans, independents, men, women, gays, straights, young, old, middle-aged, Christians, Jews, atheists, Unitarians, blacks, whites, Hispanics and hyphenated Americans can all agree:

In a word: metric.

Yes, for all our differences and sniping at each other, we proudly stand shoulder to shoulder in opposition to the metric system of measurements. It is a blight visited upon this world by the French, the Japanese, the Germans and our former friends, the Canadians. We here in the good, old U.S. of A. want no part of it, and we are resolved to fight it every inch of the way.

Just think what it would do to our traditions, our culture, our way of life, the poetry in our souls if ever we give in to this international conspiracy of scientists, engineers and those usual suspects, computer designers. (These, remember, are the same people who gave us voice mail.)

Could we ever again go to a party and gather around a piano to sing, off-key but vibrantly, ``I love you a bushel and a peck''?

``Five-foot-two, eyes of blue, but oh what those five feet can do'' would become a crushingly depressing exercise in converting feet and inches to meters and centimeters, and we would all get smashed and cry in our beer.

Beer? Ninety-nine liters of beer on the wall just doesn't sing, people!

The lyrics of one of America's greatest love songs, ``C'mon, baby, light my fire,'' would be polluted with words like ``candela.''

And need I remind anyone of Tennessee Ernie Ford? ``You dig 16 tons and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt.'' Go figure.

Imagine that our children and grandchildren, brainwashed by metric math teachers, might someday go to a library and ask to check out ``God's Little Not Quite A Hectare.''

I can't bear to think of the riots and mayhem that will take place at the VFW lodges when 23-year-old bureaucrats from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures come to lecture on political correctness before they can sing, ``It's a long way to Tipperary.''

People wouldn't know how to dress when they get up in the morning because they'd turn on their radios and not understand a word of the weather report. Our grandmothers' recipes, treasures passed down in families from generation to generation, would be rendered undecipherable.

Even our political rhetoric would suffer. Last week, for instance, so-called conservative Democrats at the Democratic Leadership Council suggested helpfully to President Clinton that he ought to consider the Republican takeover of Congress on a par with ``getting hit between the eyes with a two-by-four.''

Now, it is simple enough to translate that into metric, but it loses its eloquence to say that Clinton has been hit between the eyes with 50 x 100 millimeters of lumber.

No, we are right to continue our resistance to the metric system. Never mind that we stand alone - the only industrialized country in the world that hasn't succumbed to this plot against diversity.

Never mind that a few commie agents - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams - started pushing more than 200 years ago for us to get with the program. Or that others, notably employees of the Federal Highway Administration, are still trying to lead us down the road of kilometers, even threatening to cut off funds to states that refuse to convert road signs to metric measurements so that travelers from foreign lands can follow them.

And we won't be intimidated by those who say our global competitiveness is at risk because the products and spare parts we produce are decimally out of sync and useless in many countries. We may go along with NAFTA and GATT in the interest of world trade, but we draw a line in the sand - using a yardstick, by gum - on the devil-inspired Systeme International d'Unites.

Further, we call on the new right-minded Congress to repeal the insidious Metric Conversion Act of 1975 that encouraged a few misguided souls to voluntarily sponsor 5K races for joggers, contaminate consumerism with 2-liter containers of soft drinks and 35mm film, and even put metricized computers under the hoods of our cars.

Let others say we're xenophobic. Sticks and stones may break our bones but words like "xenophobic" will not shake our opposition. We know that the angels are on our side as we dig in our heels and say hell, no, we won't go metric. Why, it would be downright un-American!