I remember my first Fluffernutter. Jiff Creamy Style peanut butter, carefully spread on Wonder Bread (because Wonder Bread just can't stand up to crunchy) topped with a layer of Marshmallow Fluff and another slice of squishy bread. This sweet nutritional black hole, a symphonic conglomeration of the emptiest calories in the universe, was packed into my lunchbox -- the one shaped like a barn with space for a thermos under the roof. And I knew it was going to be a good day.

My children have never, to my knowledge, eaten a Fluffernutter. But I think maybe I'll serve some up one day this summer, maybe make one for myself. Set up a little table on the sidewalk outside my house and give them away.

Yes, Fluffernutters are silly and nutritionally void. But they don't pretend to be anything else. Unlike the powers that be in the U.S. Senate, who wasted a whole precious day spouting silly, nutritionally void rhetoric about the need -- or not -- to pass a Constitutional Amendment banning flag burning. While Iraq burns, and the border simmers, and the ranks of poor children in America continue to grow (by more than a million in the past 4 years, according to the latest Kids Count report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.)

Then there's the empty rhetorical calories emerging from the Massachusetts State House, where legislators spent a week wrangling over a proposed bill to ban Fluffernutters from elementary school cafeterias. Fluff isn't friendless in the halls of power, especially in Massachusetts, where it was invented and is still manufactured by the Durkee-Mower company. So, borrowing a page from the U.S. Congress manual on "How To Do Nothing While Talking a Lot," the proposed ban on Fluff was quietly withdrawn this week.

At least the stuff that comes in a jar has no pretensions.