PUT GEORGE BAILEY'S SEARSUCKER SUIT ON FIRST

Okay, Bub, your money or your afterlife....George Bailey won't
you please come home, and bring Roebuck with you?

I confess to not having any life insurance, perhaps because I
never want to confront George Bailey's desperate option in "It's A
Wonderful Life," i.e. knowing my dead carcass is more redeemable
than my live one.

I want my physical self to be worth the approximate $10.00 of
chemical fodder the human form now embodies. I want an
open-ended coupon issued for this amount, entitling its pallbearers
to the ten buck's worth of goods and/or services of their choosing.

Thus, upon my surrendering the ghost, my heirs can go out for a
pizza and a video rental on me, and be done with it.

Life Insurance. Perhaps no greater misnomer has ever been
inserted into the language of commodities. If you define insurance
as my dictionary does, as: "a protective measure or device," then
we've been duped. We've been had. Bamboozled. Hoodwinked.
We didn't land on a piece of the Rock...a piece of the Rock landed
on us.

Oh, I've had life insurance policies over the years, the kind one
gets opening a bank account or securing a home mortgage, the
built-in kind. Once, I even bought an in-flight policy that would've
paid my survivors $100,000 if the plane had spiraled into Lake
Michigan enroute to Boston.

No good. At 30,000 feet, I actually found myself thinking of
ways I could be found lost and presumed dead, collect the payola
and go off to live quietly in deep America as a mysterious rural
stranger who "doesn't come to town much."

I did once almost succumb to a soft sell from the hard Rock of
Gibraltar pitchmen, but ultimately declined when they insisted on
putting a "rider" on the policy that would've denied payment, were
I to make a 10,000-foot skydive in 9,000 feet of air.

When I told them my fellow skydivers and I did indeed consider
skydiving a high risk sport because we had to drive to the airport to
do it, they were not amused. They would not remove the rider, and
I didn't lay my signature on the line.

Then we have the "lifetime guarantee." Uh-huh. If I buy a
lifetime guaranteed steak knife on Tuesday, and I die on
Wednesday...will whoever inherits my knife be able to collect if it
breaks on Thursday? Whose lifetime are they talking about? And,
how am I compensated if the steak knife company and/or its
underwriters die before I do? Who guarantees them? And, Honey,
where is my Beethoven sweatshirt? You threw it in the WHAT?

Tell me you've never asked yourself questions like those.

Okay, then tell me you're glad I've done it for you, and agree
that whoever put the words "lifetime" and "guarantee" alongside
each other should be drawn and peeled.

This is all prompted this week by a newsbit detailing how Sears
has recently informed 84,000 of its retired employees that it will be
drastically reducing their life insurance benefi...

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