“It’s high time that you knew
of the terribly horrible thing that Zooks do.
In every Zook house and in every Zook town
every Zook eats his bread
with the butter side down!”
This is the subject of the ongoing Cold War between the Zooks and the Yooks. While the grandfather complains that the Zooks eat bread with the butter side down, the Yooks, of course, do the opposite and eat with the butter side up. It is a metaphor for any disagreement between opposing nations or groups, of course, but it is especially symbolic of the ideological dispute between capitalism and communism. The point being, of course, that the difference really is not worth waging an ongoing war lasting for decades.
For a while that worked fine.
All the Zooks stayed away
and our country was safe.
Then one terrible day
a very rude Zook by the name of VanItch
snuck up and slingshotted my Snick-Berry Switch!
The thing that “worked fine” is a wall which was built to separate the two opposing sides. A wall as in the Berlin Wall more than the Great Wall of China. The wall serves the purposes of both sides rather than just one since neither wants anything to do with the other. The Cold War can be maintained with this structure since both are keeping an eye on each other. The slingshot represents the latest development in arms which moves things to a new level. In other words: an arms race soon breaks out between the Yooks and the Zooks. This is the thematic foundation of the story. The bulk of the narrative actually details the race to create ever more powerful weapons such as the Kick-A-Poo Kid gun which in turn stimulate the development of the Eight-Nozzled, Elephant-Toted Boom-Blitz.
“Be patient. We’ll see. We will see.”
The arms race eventually reaches the point where both sides develop the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo which powerful enough to wipe out the other side. Making this situation all the more untenable is that neither side had developed a defensive mechanism to counteract the Boomeroo. Thus, they are at a point where the only possible defensive response to being attacked by the other side’s weapon is launching their Boomeroo. Of course, the result of this will be the annihilation of everyone on both sides of the wall. The situation has reached the critical point at which the generations are simply waiting and watching to see which side will launch first.
And it is here that the Yook Grandson asks the all-important question: “Who’s going to drop it?” The Grandfather’s reply quoted above brings the story to a close on its terrifying ambiguous note that reflects the actual state of the world at the time of publication when the United States and the Soviet Union both possessed enough weapons to destroy the other’s population entirely several times over, but not one single weapon capable of stopping such an attack.
