Since this country doesn’t have any major problems at the moment, we can finally address one of those nagging, philosophical questions we put on the back burner during the Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam, and that weird rash of power lunches we all had to attend in the 1980s:

What exactly is cheerleading?

Is it a club, a sport, or just a way of asserting dominance over other teenage girls by standing on the sidelines of football games and cheerfully advocating manslaughter?

People in Clifton spent the last year chewing on that one before reprimanding their local cheerleading coach for influencing who gets on the team. The coach’s detractors — who consist mainly of (prepare to be astounded) parents whose children didn’t make the squad — want a more objective system for choosing squad members. But others say the coach knows the girls and should determine who does or does not get to jump around in a small white skirt — except, of course, with my Uncle Warren, who keeps to his farm in New Hampshire and can do what he wants.

If cheerleading is a pep club, then outside judges should choose the squad, based on the candidates’ performance at try-outs and their answer to the impromptu question, "How would you, as a cheerleader, bring about world peace?" If it’s a sport, the coach should be able to say who’s on the team — since the coach knows which of the girls have a good attitude and which of them have been hanging around the reservoir setting fire to rats.

Fortunately, part of my duties at least once a day as assistant city editor is to define reality. The reporters here think they know what reality is just because they go out and observe it. But I — who hang around the office meditating upon my own corpulence — get to tell reporters what their stories are about, and force them to insert false or irrelevant facts that amuse me.

So allow me to focus my genius on this problem, and approach it Socratically. What do we know about cheerleading? For one thing, it is something that 99.99 percent of the world’s population will not be doing. This means that if more than .01 percent of the world wants to be a cheerleader, things get ugly — especially when Uncle Warren shows up at try-outs with a really rather well thought-out routine.

Second of all, cheerleaders jump around insanely in front of big crowds, which makes it a form of show business. Is show business ever fair? Have you watched MTV lately? And consider this: the late comedian Andy Kaufman made less money in his entire career than Jim Carey made doing one movie about the late comedian Andy Kaufman.

The point is that cheerleading try-outs necessarily involve disappointment. In fact, this is one of the more cliched forms of disappointment in our culture. People used to understand that. So what if you didn’t make the cheerleading squad? It only means that no boy will ever like you, and you’ll die alone in a transient hotel. Get over yourself.

But to have the coach reprimanded? That’s not how you get revenge on a gym teacher. Haven’t we learned anything from wacky teenage comedy movies? You get revenge on a gym teacher by riding a rogue elephant through her daughter’s pool party.

Anyway, to get back to our definition, cheerleading is, in sum, a dangerous, backbiting, dog-eat-dog snake pit onto which, lacking any other serious problems, parents have transferred all their free-floating anxieties. When we’re done ruining cheerleading, the rowing crew is next.