After breaking up into constituent committees (media, messaging, supply, logistics, etc.), we eventually reformed into a general assembly, adopted certain general principles, and voted to reconvene on Thursday, October 6 at Cesar Chavez Park, across from City Hall. At that point, everyone of us had been given tasks to complete and missions to accomplish. Our responsibilities were to our local group, and to each other.

No leaders of any kind were chosen. Rather it was a tenet of the movement from the earliest days to steadfastly avoid the authoritarian model. Democracy in all things was the deliberate course we chose to follow.

In the past five days, the “Occupy Sacramento” movement has grown considerably, both in size and visibility. During that time, we have attempted to create a public space (in this case Cesar Chavez Park) where our movement can attract and educate — in a positive and peaceful manner — the 99% of our fellow citizens who continue to suffer under an unfair economic regime that disproportionately rewards the greedy and utterly disregards the basic human needs of everyone else.

It was in pursuit of that goal that I (in conjunction with some three dozen other men and women) made a conscious choice to be arrested in the park, and thereby tug on that unbroken thread of civil disobedience that runs through the rich fabric of our country’s history.

Suffice it to say that in the past three days, I’ve flouted “Warhol’s Dictum” by overstaying my 15 minutes. Every time I turn around, it seems, somebody is sticking a microphone or a TV camera in my face. I’ve been interviewed twice by two different reporters from the Sacramento News and Review, and once by the progressive website Think Progress, and have appeared on all four local TV stations.

But perhaps the most amusing of juxtapositions took place when I made two separate appearances in one night on KXTV Channel 10. In one, I’m identified by reporter Dave Marquis as a History instructor and asked to comment on a story he was putting together comparing Sacramento’s recent homelessness problem with the city’’s “Hoovervilles“ of the 1930’s.

In the other, I am shown being handcuffed and loaded into a paddy wagon.

Woody Allen could not have staged it better.

But from my personal perspective, there have been three gem-like moments to press in my dog-eared Book of Memories.

1. For two consecutive days, I’ve had the privilege of watching my lovely wife’s beaming face as it graced a few frames of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown on Current TV. Thanks, Keith. Thanks, Al.

2. On Saturday, Oct. 8, about 300 of us marched from Cesar Chavez Park to the Wells Fargo Building on Sacramento’s Capitol Mall. The place was closed, of course, so the cops watched impassively as we swarmed all over the place for no apparent reason. When I got my turn at the megaphone, I identified myself as a retired history teacher. I then pointed at the wonderfully restored stagecoach in the building’s lobby, and said, “You know, there’s a huge historical irony here. A hundred-and-fifty years ago, these stagecoaches were the most attractive targets for robbery in the Sacramento Valley. Now they’’ve become the symbol of a corporation that is committing shameless robbery on the rest of us.””

After the applause died down, I was asked by a member of the crowd, “Where did you teach?” When I told them, an astonished Afro-Latina-American women in her early-twenties named Autumn Thomas shouted out, “MR. BRADLEY – YOU WERE MY AMERICAN HISTORY TEACHER IN THE 8TH GRADE!!!” Equally astonished, I embraced her and told her how proud I was to see her standing up for her beliefs. She began to cry as the crowd roared its approval. Meanwhile I, misty-eyed and overcome with emotion, quietly left center stage.

That scene was not written by Woody Allen. That one was written by Aaron Sorkin.

3. Later that night (or should I say the following morning at 1:00 am) as I was being handcuffed and taken into police custody, several of my fellow “99 percenters” shouted out “What’s your name?” “Mark W. Bradley,” I replied. “What’s your occupation?” they asked. “I’m a school teacher,” I said.

I could be wrong, but I think I saw one or two of the cops in riot gear look a little crestfallen at that point. I know for a fact that several of the men and women holding billy clubs and pepper spray canisters were called in on their day off. I’m guessing that a few of them had been planning to go skiing this weekend. They were less than enthusiastic about participating in this Kabuki.

Sorry guys. Society needs you to protect and defend their property against all of us ACLU lawyers, public school teachers, nurses, paramedics, and struggling housewives. Always remember: you are the ‘thin blue line’ that prevents people like us from burning down our own neighborhoods.

When the fourteen of us arrived at the jail and were being processed, several cops gathered to ask us what we hoped to accomplish with all this foolishness, and by the way, couldn’t we achieve the same objective without breaking the law? Did we have any idea how much money this was going to cost us? Did we realize how little difference any of this was going to make?

It was a bit like undergoing psy-ops conducted by a bunch of heavily armed junior high students with half a semester of behavioral psychology under their belts. But the most persistent question they kept asking us was “who are your leaders?”

“We have no leaders” we replied.

Their incredulity was palpable, even profound. “Do you seriously expect us to believe that you’re operating over there without leaders? Who makes the decisions?”

“We vote on everything,” was our answer.

At this point, I remembered something I had learned in the ‘60’s, but had forgotten somewhere along the way. Cops, like career military, spend their whole working lives taking orders from their superiors and dishing them out to their subordinates. They really, truly, had no idea what we were talking about.

Later that morning, as I was being processes out, I had the pleasure of being subjected to the same sort of rudimentary “head games” by two overly officious and unnaturally sour-faced young police officers – one male, one female. They were like a couple of Imperial Storm troopers dabbling in Jedi Mind Control. Finally I could take it no longer. I asked them what THEY knew about the real issues at hand, and proceeded to launch into a 20-minute lecture on the history of civil disobedience in America, from the real Boston Tea Party, through Emerson, Thoreau, the Underground Railroad, and the Suffrage Movement, to the integration of lunch counters in the racially divided South of the 1960′s.

I felt like a minor-league Jesus in a third-rate temple. The two cops I’d been talking to had, by now, grown into a group of five. They were all thoroughly gobsmacked. One blond guy looked like he was actually learning something.

The captain in charge just wanted me gone.

When the young man and woman in uniform drove me through the steel doors to release me half a block away from the jail (seriously) they told me how much they had enjoyed our conversation. I thanked them for being so accommodating, and walked off into the sunrise.

You should have been right there with me, O my brothers and sisters, throwing dangerous ideas around like roundhouse punches.

“I’m confident we can reach an agreement acceptable to all parties,” the president told reporters in the Rose Garden. He went on to say that while he was willing to bend over backwards to find common ground with the Panamanians, he was unwilling to consider a deal that did not include at least some parts of New Jersey.

Privately, the president acknowledged that the likelihood of significant resistance from firmly entrenched special interests (such as homeowners) could complicate or even potentially derail the delicate negotiations. But he hastened to remind disgruntled New Yorkers that failure to reach an agreement acceptable to all parties could result in a crippling domestic shortage of tapioca and cheap baby clothes.

“That’s not a risk our country can afford to take,” the president declared.

Seeking to quell rumors of widespread fear among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania that an invasion of “Spaniards” was imminent, Obama offered some reassurances to that community, as well as to all Pennsylvanians.

“When it comes to drawing new territorial boundaries as part of a larger treaty of friendship with Panama, I can assure the American People that I have no plans to cross the Delaware, at least not in the foreseeable future.”

In a related story, curriculum advisors at Penn State campuses across the Keystone State report a sudden and substantial spike in late enrollment for the university’s 1st year Spanish Language courses.

Later in the day, President Obama visited the United States Mint in Philadelphia, where he reportedly cut a deal with a nine-year-old boy who showed up outside the building with nineteen dump trucks full of nickels. Pulling a roll of nickels from one of his pockets and a roll of dimes from the other, the president shared details of what he described as “an historic opportunity to set our country’s fiscal house in order.”

“This young man approached us and offered to trade 900 billion of these big shiny coins straight across for 900 billion of these little ones,” said the president. “But after several rounds of grueling negotiations, we were able to reach agreement on a far more comprehensive and equitable exchange – namely, three of our dimes for every two of his nickels. And while I’m sure that certain aspects of this agreement will set off a whole new round of grumbling and grousing on the part of our progressive friends on the Left, it is, nonetheless, the right thing to do.”

The president’s plans for the rest of the week reportedly include launching a nationwide search for a left-handed monkey wrench, writing blank checks to unidentified Nigerian diamond merchants, purchasing the Brooklyn Bridge from a homeless man in Times Square, and going on a snipe hunt in Outer Slobbovia with Billy Shears and D.B. Cooper.

The fact is, Congressman Walsh knows what it means to make hard choices. Like when he chose to make it possible for several struggling campaign staffers to keep their jobs by loaning his own re-election committee $35,000, instead of wasting three times that much on unproductive handouts to a bunch of unemployed kids who would undoubtedly do well to learn to stand on their own two feet.

Yes, Joe Walsh and his Tea Party friends believe that if we could just get the federal government to adopt old-fashioned common sense and family values, we could restore this country to its former greatness. Needless to say, it is a proposition with which I whole-heartedly agree. But I would go further. I would argue that if we are truly serious about taking on the challenges of the 21st century, we need to do something much more radical; we must identify and isolate the values that have proven so successful in the market place of unfettered capitalism, and incorporate them in the way we run our own families. If the Republican Party’s free-market business model works as flawlessly as it does in government (and I think we can all agree that it does), why wouldn’t it succeed even more dramatically in the home?

It was in search of an answer to this very question that I set out, forty years ago, to pioneer the concept of the “free-enterprise family.” As a second-year business major at my local state university, I had just read both of Ayn Rand’s novels. In short, I was primed and ready to go. I could hardly wait to get started on my “Great Experiment.”

On the day of my wedding, I named myself CEO of the newly formed “Me Corporation” (MeCorp) and immediately sold 49% of the stock to my wife. Throughout the following three decades, as each of my 27 children were born, they were automatically assigned by me to positions of responsibility within the business, based solely on my assessment of their potential abilities. And rather than have any of them do as I had done — that is, forfeit eighteen or more productive years of employment by foolishly attending school — I chose vocational home schooling for them all: plumbing, appliance repair, auto mechanics, roofing, you know, hands on kinda stuff. And so that each of them could learn the various ins and outs of their chosen trades (chosen by me, I mean), I worked out “special deals” with local contractors to take the kids on as unofficial trainees (at a fraction of minimum wage). These “stipends” were forwarded directly to me, of course, in order to defray the cost of the children’s vocational home school tuition.

Since none of my children ever actually learned to read, I made it a point of starting every morning (or should I say the beginning of each shift) with a “daily reading” or as we sometimes referred to it “the News.” These “News” stories were either fabricated by me the night before, or were based on lurid nightmares culled directly from my dream journal. Liberally laced with fear, shame, greed, and repressed sexuality, they were designed primarily to motivate the various members of my family/workforce to perform their assigned tasks.

Most everyone’s favorite story was one called The Jamestown Welfare State. It was about a disorganized bunch of 17th Century European socialists who crossed the Atlantic in search of an indolent life in a leftist commune, but instead ran out of food and were forced to resort to mayhem, murder, and cannibalism. Then the free-enterprising John Smith showed up and told them all that if they didn’t work, they wouldn’t eat. They straightened right up after that, at least until Smith got seriously burned in a munitions explosion and had to leave the colony on a stretcher. As soon as his boat sailed away, everybody pretty much went back to their old mayhem, murder, and cannibalism routine. A few years later, these lazy (but dangerous) cannibals began referring to themselves as “the Democratic Party.”

(OK, maybe I simplified American history a bit so that the kids would understand it, but I never actually lied to them.)

But enough of that. The question you’re really dying to ask is: how did the cash flow operate within the business of our family? First off, there was no such thing as a minimum wage. In exchange for the completion of a given task, each child earned a certain number of points, which could, in turn, be redeemed for food, firewood, and other luxuries available at a commissary operated by my wife out of our garage. Secondly, the children were invariably encouraged to compete against each other for available jobs around the house, thus ensuring that wages tended to stay conveniently low. Thirdly, when meals were brought to the table, each child was required to submit a sealed bid for it. The highest bidder then paid my wife and me for all the food, ate whatever portion he or she desired, then auctioned off the remaining food to the next highest bidder. This process was fairly efficient, although the price of food tended to rise even as its temperature plummeted. All in all, MeCorp continued to thrive. Why? What is it about unfettered free-market capitalism that makes it so much more efficient and profitable than dictatorship?

The answer, of course, is simple: In a dictatorship, people are brutally forced at gunpoint to do things they know they don’t want to do, whereas under free-market capitalism, people are painstakingly hoodwinked, tempted, and frightened into vociferously demanding whatever is manifestly against their own interests. Let me offer an example of how this remarkable phenomenon operated under my regime as CEO of MeCorp.

There once stood in our backyard a stately old elm tree, at least 100 years old. Yes, it provided a bit of beneficial shade for the children’s compound in summer, and it was green and pretty and all that, and it supported a tire-swing on which each of my 27 children loved to play for hours on end. But it blocked my view of the pool owned by the beautiful lesbians living in the house behind me, so I decided to have it cut down.

Now if I had been a third-world dictator, I might perhaps have horse-whipped a dozen or so of my grumbling children into the backyard armed with paring knives, and stood over them menacingly as they chipped and scraped away at the tree for weeks (or even months) on end, soaking the ground the whole time with their bitter, angry tears. And eventually I would have achieved my goal, albeit with an unreasonable expenditure of my own precious time and resources.

But being instead a resourceful free-market capitalist, I hit on a more subtle and infinitely more profitable solution to the problem.

The first step in my plan was to call the children together in the exercise yard and inform them of the alarming spread of a new and virulent form of Dutch Elm Disease, one that kills healthy trees within hours of their becoming infected. I cited hundreds of recent cases of such infected trees suddenly collapsing and crushing to death the innocent children who played beneath them. The death toll in our neighborhood alone was said to be in the hundreds of thousands. In order to prevent such a tragedy from befalling us, I told them, we had to work fast.

I further informed my children that the only known cure for Dutch Elm Disease was to drive copper nails through the bark and into the wood. Accordingly, I had them empty their piggy banks of all pre-1983 pennies, melt them down into liquid copper, and pour it into nail molds. They then began furiously pounding the nails into the doomed tree in an ironically futile effort to save it.

When the tree inevitably began to die some weeks later, I told my crestfallen kids that they were to blame; they should have started earlier and worked harder. Unfortunately, I now informed them, our only recourse was to completely remove the tree before it claimed one or more of their lives.

Scouring the neighborhood yard sales that weekend, I was able to pick up a half-dozen or so rusty and decrepit chainsaws with which to arm the children before sending them high up into the branches of the dead and rapidly decaying elm tree. I must say, it was gratifying indeed to witness the healthy competition that developed between the children as they worked to cut as much firewood as quickly as possible. In fact, some of the younger kids proved surprisingly adept at rapidly cutting off small limbs — the tree’s as well as their own. All in all, the loss of life was no more than you would have expected in an operation this size — one death from injuries sustained in a fall, two partial decapitations, and one fatal abdominal wound caused by flying copper nail fragments. On the positive side of the ledger, we ended up with over nine cords of wood, which the kids were able to sell for a grand total of $3,200 — enough to pay their room and board for the entire month! And since I generously allowed the surviving children to divvy up the unclaimed shares earned by their less fortunate siblings, they were able to cover the increased health insurance premium costs I was forced to pass along to them once they had been relegated to the “high-risk” pool common to all amateur lumberjacks.

Yet in spite of our family’s uniquely American success story, there remains, to this day, one glaring “fly in the ointment”; namely, my 87-year-old mother (whose Social Security check barely covers her grocery bill at Petco). Not only has she steadfastly refused to help her toddler grandchildren stack cordwood, she continues to insist on poisoning our domestic corporate culture with her own brand of FDR socialism, replete with cockamamie ideas about food inspections, occupational safety, and child labor. Well, frankly, I’m fed up with her relentless attempts to impose burdensome governmental regulations on this family. So I’ve decided to institute what I call the Grover Norquist Solution. My wife and I put a stop to her filching drinking water from the garden hose, made the tool shed where she sleeps a little less comfortable by taking away the smudge pot she uses to heat it, and even cut her feed corn rations in half. Eventually, once she becomes too feeble to resist, we plan to drag her into the bathroom and drown her in the bathtub.

After all, what’s good enough for my country is good enough for my family, right?

As a retired home-school teacher of American History and this year’s co-sponsor of the National Rifle Association’s annual “Guns For Tots” Christmas Ammunition Drive, I began musing the other day about how much safer we Americans would be today, if only the NRA had been around in the early days of the Republic to protect our God-given right to amass and stockpile warehouses full of dangerous weapons. This in turn set me to thinking that, as both a gun-enthusiast and self-taught scholar, I might be uniquely qualified, not only to cast light on the history of firearms in our Great Republic, but to martial resistance against the passage of more restrictive gun laws in the future. With these worthy goals in mind, I’ve decided to take a shot at killing two birds with one stone. A few past instances of hematological irrigation for the Tree of Liberty should suffice.

The Whiskey Rebellion (1794)

This colorful little kerfuffle had its origins in Treasury Secretary (and Founding Father) Alexander Hamilton’s ingenious plan to tax the whiskey distilled by backwoods farmers, thereby providing a vast pool of capital from which his Wall Street investment friends could freely draw the low-interest loans necessary to create new jobs for the soon-to-be-bankrupt backwoods farmers. In other words, “American Capitalism on the March.” So far, so good. But when the government agents began to arrive in Western Pennsylvania to collect the excise, they discovered (to their amazement) that the farmers were none-too-happy about having to pay it. Apparently these “Joe the Plower” types had recently abandoned their pre-revolutionary slogan “No Taxation Without Representation” in favor of the new, post-revolutionary “Tea Party” slogan “Misrepresentation Without Taxation.”

In order to suppress this first in a long line of anti-tax movements peppering American History, (Founding Father) George Washington launched a well-publicized federal invasion of the Keystone State under the command of Revolutionary War hero “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, and accompanied by (Founding Father) Alexander Hamilton. Alas, by the time this punitive expedition reached the rebellion’s epicenter in Springfield, Massachusetts, “Joe the Plower” and his sweaty, grimy friends had mostly dispersed, leaving the movement (such as it was) to pretty much peter out on its own.

But it need not have ended this way.

If the National Rifle Association had been around in those days to prevent the government from banning the sale and possession of automatic weapons in the first place, “Joe the Plower” and his patriotic army of drunken rioters and arsonists might have been able to turn back and defeat this shameful government intrusion into the affairs of private citizens.

That’s right. By boldly seizing the initiative, this feisty little citizen-militia might even have succeeded in launching a preemptive strike against federal troops before they ever had a chance to leave their base camp in Maryland. Instead of being forced to kowtow before the hydra-headed tyranny of big government, these ordinary, somewhat decent, occasionally law-abiding, mostly peace-loving citizens might very well have blasted their way into the federal force’s bivouac with submachine guns, making bloody human confetti of “Lighthorse Harry” Lee and (Founding Father) Alexander Hamilton.

Who knows, these Patriots might even have captured “The Father of Our Country” himself as part of a massive citizens’ arrest, putting him on trial for treason, and sentencing him to be hanged, preferably from the nearest cherry tree.

Had they succeeded in doing so, they would have fulfilled the Gipper’s dream of “Getting Washington off the Backs of the People” before Old George had the chance to climb on in the first place.

And while, admittedly, even Glenn Beck might find it hard to condone the wanton killing of one, let alone two, Founding Fathers, it’s hard to overlook the fact that an early demise for Washington and Hamilton would not only have preempted the establishment of the unspeakably evil Federal Reserve System, it would also have cleared a fortuitous future space on both the one and ten-dollar bills for the face of Our Beloved Ronald Reagan.

Author’s Note: As “Lighthorse Harry” Lee would have been too dead in 1806 to impregnate his wife with the zygote/unicellular person that would eventually become Confederate military strategist Robert E. Lee, most likely the War of Northern Aggression would have ended three years earlier than it did, saving around 500,000 lives. This would, unfortunately, have resulted in the same dismal outcome (i.e. the abolition of slavery), but with one mitigating consolation: the creation of a vastly expanded pool of ignorant, unskilled, compliant white laborers eager to work in post-war cotton fields, steel mills, and textile sweatshops, thereby driving wages down to historic lows, clearing the way for the Capitalist Free Enterprise System to thrive as never before.

The Burr-Hamilton Duel (1804)

As every American High School student knows (actually, the figure is down around 3%), in 1804, Vice-president Aaron Burr fatally shot former Treasury Secretary (and Founding Father) Alexander Hamilton in a duel in Weehawkin, New Jersey. This unfortunate incident in American History might have been prevented, or at least mitigated (or, possibly, made grievously worse) by the timely intervention of the NRA. No one really knows.

What we can say for sure is that if the NRA had been around in 1804, there certainly would have been no government-sponsored anti-dueling ordinance in effect in the State of New York, and therefore no need for the disputants to cross the Hudson River and potentially endanger the safety of innocent wildlife in New Jersey.

Instead, Monsieurs Hamilton and Burr would simply have suited up in Kevlar frocks, waistcoats, and breeches, taken up their positions at opposite ends of Wall Street, and, on a prearranged signal, begun to ceremoniously lob hand-grenades at each other. If, after the supply of these explosive devices had been expended, there was still no clear winner, the duelists would have been summoned to close quarters to fight it out with flame-throwers.

So how (you might well ask) would this chain of events be preferable to what actually occurred on that summer day in 1804? Before attempting to answer this question, we must consider two essential facts:

1. Given the duel’s relocation to the Lower Manhattan venue, (Founding Father) Alexander Hamilton would have been able to call on the enthusiastic support of dozens of his colleagues inside the New York Stock Exchange, each packing at lease one semi-automatic pistol along with several reserve clips. Thus would Mr. Hamilton’s chances of victory (and perhaps even survival) have been exponentially increased.

2. On the other hand, given the overarching fact that (Founding Father) Alexander Hamilton would have perished ten years previously in a hail of gunfire back in Springfield, Massachusetts, Vice-president Burr (barring unforeseen technical glitches in one of his hand grenades) would likely have emerged from the contest unscathed, and free to quietly fulfill his term of office, leaving lifelong NRA member Dick Cheney as the only serving VP in American History ever to shoot a man in cold blood.

The Assassination of President Kennedy (1963)

If both Jacqueline Kennedy and John Connally had remembered to bring fully-automatic weapons with them into the Presidential Limousine on that fateful autumn day in Dallas, things might have turned out very differently. In fact, it’s likely Lee Harvey Oswald would only have had time to squeeze off a single shot before the First Lady was able to pivot to her right and respond with a massive and lethal burst of firepower in the direction of the Texas School Book Depository’s sixth floor. Collateral damage would have been minimal (it was lunchtime, after all), while the assassin himself would probably have sustained a sufficient number of gunshot wounds to render his mangled corpse unidentifiable (which would have greatly simplified the work of the Warren Commission). Meanwhile, Governor Connally could have provided protective fire with a controlled spray of bullets along the left side of the motorcade, mowing down, in the process any and all suspicious moving targets on the grassy knoll (further simplifying the Warren Commission’s report). Perhaps most importantly, responsible gun-owner Jack Ruby would still be with us today, a free and productive member of society, providing adult entertainment to inebriated out-of-towners on the eve of Super Bowl XLV, and preparing to celebrate his 100th birthday in the warm bosom of his friends, family, and female employees.

So those are the facts – irrefutable and undeniable – underlying the true story of how – over the lifespan of our republic – gun control laws have brought untold suffering and hopelessness to hundreds of thousands of Civil War soldiers and their families, not to mention Elizabeth Hamilton and Martha Washington. If only we, as a people, had had the courage and foresight to establish and support the National Rifle Association one hundred years before we did, those people might still be alive today.

“O.K., my little Veggies,” he asked, “what important lesson have we learned from this cautionary tale?”

Peter Parsnip was the first to germinate a reply, “That animals can talk!” he shouted with flatulent enthusiasm.

“Fair enough,” responded farmer Midland, barely concealing his highbrow contempt. “What else?”

“That pigs like to wear clothes and get drunk,” offered Spudwell Potato Head, one of the simpler complex carbohydrates on this or any corporate farm. Midland’s eyes rolled involuntarily as he grimaced ever so slightly. Frankly, he was beginning to question the wisdom of reading allegorical literature to life forms as congenitally unsophisticated as vegetables. Just at that moment, however, he was pleasantly surprised by a bright green head of lettuce.

“We learned that socialism is evil,” said Mr. Green the Head Lettuce thoughtfully.

The ebullient farmer unleashed a toothy grin that spanned from ear to ear. “Exactly!” he exclaimed.

Unfortunately, the profundity of Head Lettuce’s revelation was clearly lost on the rest of the audience, which remained in what can best be described as a persistent vegetative state. Undaunted, Farmer Midland sought to capitalize on what he at least viewed as a teachable moment.

“In fact,” he began, “the animals in this story represent the unbridled lust for power of an out-of-control government bureaucracy.”

“But Mr. Midland, sir, wasn’t it the animals who were suffering at the beginning of the book?” inquired a somewhat naive bale of new mown hay. “I mean, obviously horses and cows are evil, but I actually felt sorry for the cats and dogs on that farm. Wasn’t Mr. Jones kinda mean to them, too?”

At this point, the sycophantic Mr. Green intervened to buttress his corporate master’s argument. “Admittedly, this particular farmer may not always have acted in the interest of his livestock, but we should be careful not to extrapolate generalities from any one individual case…” As Head Lettuce searchingly scanned the crowd of crudités and locked eyes with of a bunch of carrots, he could see they were thickly glazed.

Meanwhile, Farmer Midland lost no time in resuming the rhetorical offensive. “Look, whatever you think of Mr. Jones’s actions in the story, you must admit they indicate he was under a lot of stress due to unwarranted government interference in his business. Government regulators not only unfairly penalized Jones for storing raw pork in an unrefrigerated warehouse warm enough to incubate flies, they further hampered his profit-making ability by restricting the sale of meat from diseased animals too sick to lift themselves off the ground.”

“There’s one thing I still don’t understand, though,” interjected Rudy Rutabaga. “Are you saying that when the animals in the story chased the farmer away, that was kind of like the government taking over the farm?”

“That’s right, rootboy,” chimed in Mr. Green, running out to patience. “Remember, all you need to know is this:

“1) Animals make up the government;

“2) Animals eat plants (i.e., us); therefore,

“3) The government will eat us if we let them.”

The medley of mixed vegetables wilted in horror. “Then who can we turn to to protect us from the government?”

“That’s where we farmers come in,” declared Mr. Midland proudly. “We represent the free market garden established to serve your unhybridized ancestors, the cause for which so many of them were willing to be sliced, diced, mashed, and pureed. So don’t let their sacrifice be in vain. Take my advice: gather up your fiber, lock tendrils together, go march into those livestock pens while you still can, and show those government farm animals who’s boss!”

After some initial debate, the intrepid vegetables finally agreed with Mr. Midland and Mr. Green, and resolved that they’d better act quickly if they were going to save themselves. So they formed up in ranks, raised up a mighty battle cry, and charged off into the holding pens where they were immediately trampled and eaten by the grateful livestock.

“Now all we have to do is drag these government animals into the bathtub and drown them,” said Farmer Midland with a wry smile. “Then we can enjoy a proper feast.”

Mr. Green laughed nervously. “How do I know you won’t try to eat me?” he asked.

Mr. Midland was quick with his answer. “That’s simple. You remind me too much of money, and only a fool devours the thing he loves.”

Upon hearing this, the head of lettuce breathed a miasmic sigh of relief.

“Besides,” the farmer added, almost as an afterthought, “salad sucks.”

Needless to say, if our current “Pretender in Chief” and his socialist allies in Congress succeed in forcing through a government takeover of the military in this country, there is bound to come a day in the not-too-distant future when our grandchildren ask us in a plaintive voice, “Grampa, what was it like when you were young and legal questions were settled through manly tests of mortal combat unencumbered by meddlesome government interference?” I, for one, will not have the heart to answer that question. What about you?

And what about the so-called “public military option”? According to the independent research group ITTTTI (In The Tank Think Tank Inc), this is nothing less than the first step toward driving honest contractors like Xe/Blackwater and Wackenhut right out of business. And this at a time when an overwhelming majority of Iraqis and Afghanis say they are satisfied with the occupation forces they currently have and don’t wish to add another layer of wasteful and expensive armed bureaucrats on top of it.

But it’s not just the army that President Obama wants to nationalize. He also has plans to create a government-run navy. That’s right folks, he wants to undo three centuries of Profitable Privateering on the High Seas by innovative small business entrepreneurs like venture capitalist Henry Morgan of J.P. Morgan Chase and currency trader William Kidd of the investment firm Kidd “R” Us , in favor of a centralized fleet on the British model. And just in case you think that’s a good idea, I refer you to Sean Hannity’s exclusive on-air phone interview with a caller who identified himself only as 245-year-old mutineer Fletcher Christian of Pitcairn Island. He has precious little good to say about the Royal Navy, I can tell you.

Now we can take all this lying down, of course, or we can all rise up together and be miscounted! Join us in Boston at noon on September 31, 2009 for the Million Man Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, followed by the Million Man Boston Massacre. All you have to do is download any of the prefabricated slogans from our FOX News website, customize the spelling till your heart’s content, and paint it on your T-shirt with a ketchup-dipped freedom fry while standing in front of a mirror so you’re sure to get it right. Then drive to Boston with your car windows down yelling, “The Red States are coming! The Red States are coming!”

The other 1.7 million of us will be waiting for you inside the Old North Church.

And remember, the folks back home is a’ counting on ya…

“I just hope each and every one of my loyal helpers manages to land on his or her financial feet,” offered the distraught and visibly shaken elder Claus, CEO and – until recently – managing stockholder of the firm. “I know this was as much a shock to them as it was to me.” Some three hundred elves are expected to lose their jobs as a result of the acquisition, which could send the unemployment rate in the sparsely-populated North Pole region soaring as high as 93%.

According to company executives, the future of CII’s charitable wing – The Claus Foundation – remains uncertain. When contacted by reporters following Tuesday’s announcement, X. Claus declined to specify what plans, if any, he had for the philanthropic enterprise. He was, however, willing to share a few tantalizing details in an exclusive interview granted to the Wall Street Journal‘s Pamela Pabulum:

WSJ: Mr. Claus, thank you for agreeing to talk to us.

X. Claus: My pleasure.

WSJ: First of all, I’m sure our readers would love to hear your expert assessment regarding any fatal flaws in your uncle’s business model which may have led to the kind of long term stock devaluation the company has undergone in recent centuries. What can you tell us about that?

X. Claus: Well, it’s not really a mystery, is it? I mean, you run a giveaway program that rewards every kid in the world for simply being “good”, and what do you expect? I don’t even know how to quantify “good”, do you? It’s too vague a term to be of any use in business, and it’s certainly no basis for a corporate strategy. In my opinion it’s SOCIALISM writ large, pure and simple, and it has no place in a free country like ours.

WSJ: So it’s safe to say you’re not planning to continue producing toys?

X. Claus: Look, here’s the bottom line. We’ve issued urgent instructions to all middle management at Claus Industries to redirect the company’s resources away from the non-profit manufacture of toys and into the highly lucrative and growth-oriented health insurance and pharmaceutical sector of the economy. Accordingly, we’ve changed our name to “ClausCare Inc.”

WSJ: Sounds ambitious.

X. Claus: Pamela, we’re all about the future here at ClausCare.

WSJ: So I guess the children of the world won’t be getting any free goodies in their stockings this year.

X. Claus: Regrettably, no. But I am proud to announce that as an introductory promotion this coming Holiday Season, our marketing department plans to provide enough free lumps of coal to fill every child’s stocking up to the brim. Clean Coal. From the Cheney Family Strip mines in Hell Hole, Wyoming.

WSJ: I’m sure the children will be thrilled.

X. Claus: I hope so. We’re all really tickled about it here at ClausCare, I can tell you. And since it looks like Congress is going to pass a Health Care Reform Bill that requires some 40 million new customers to buy health insurance from private industry without recourse to some blood-thirsty totalitarian government plan involving Nazi “Death Canneries” that grind up old people and turn them into dog food, you can be sure we’ll be coming around to every house on Christmas Eve to sign up all 40 million of you new customers to vastly improved health care contracts. And don’t worry; You’ll be entitled to the sort of comprehensive coverage and up-to-date medical care envisioned by Our Founding Fathers back in 1776. That means free mercury-oxide for all, and no deductibles on leeches.

WSJ: Sounds great. By the way, what does the initial “X” in your name stand for?

X. Claus: It’s a nom de guerre, really. A nickname I picked up at Harvard Business School. It’s short for “Exclusionary.” You see, the guys in my fraternity just started calling me “Exclusionary Claus”, since my major in business school was insurance underwriting, and it just sort of stuck. In fact, my grad school professors got together and presented me with a special award for “Most Creative Writer of Exclusionary Clauses.”

WSJ: Can you give us some examples of your work in that department?

X. Claus: Sure. I was the driving creative force behind several industry favorites, including “Whereas the party of the first part, having failed to disclose his or her previously unforeseen medical condition…” And then of course there’s “In the event the insured fails to meet any of the extrinsic financial obligations imposed after the fact by the insurer in a timely manner…” And my personal favorite, “Under no circumstances shall a condition or complaint resulting from, or perceived as having resulted from, a nuclear conflict not directly attributable to the actions of the insurer result in…etc., etc.” That last one got me an honorable mention at the Health Care Expo in Las Vegas last year.

WSJ: Your Uncle Santa traditionally used helpers in his work, by which of course I mean his elves. I gather they’ll be considered redundant at ClausCare?

X. Claus: Unfortunately, yes.

WSJ: Will you be retraining any of those elves to perform jobs at ClausCare?

X. Claus: Well, there’s a bit of a problem there. You see, because Uncle Santa insisted on paying his employees a living wage for the past 1700 years or so, he had the luxury of skimming off the top of the elf gene pool. But because we here at ClausCare believe strongly that Freedom means “working for free”, we put a lot of advertising dollars into convincing working-class people to undermine their own best interests without expecting any compensation in return. This philosophy requires us, for obvious reasons, to dredge the bottom of that same gene pool as it were, to get at the deep sedimentary layer often referred to as “the salt of the earth.” What we recover by this process is a different class of helper: less mercurial and more leaden of mind; less cerebral, more visceral in nature. But suffice it to say these workers serve our purpose quite well. Because of their near total absence of annoying brain wave interference, the predigested talking points we provide them to recite at public meetings are retained in their pristine state, you know, right off the printed page, as it were…

WSJ: Are these creatures even elves?

X. Claus: Well, genetically speaking, we’re not exactly sure. We refer to them as “Oaves.”

WSJ: If I’m not mistaken, the Urban Dictionary defines “oaves” as the plural of “oaf.”

X. Claus: Hmmm…Interesting. That may be true, but for us it’s a useful acronym. It stands for “obtuse, agitated, vituperative, and educationally stunted.” But for all that, these oaves are worth their considerable weight in gold, and frankly, we couldn’t operate without them!

WSJ: Yeah, I’ve seen them on TV; they can suck the intellectual oxygen right out of a room.

X. Claus: Damn straight.

WSJ: So, everybody knows Santa used a magic sleigh pulled by flying reindeer to make his appointed rounds. How do you get your “oaves” from town hall to town hall?

X. Claus: Well, Pamela, now that, thankfully, we’re out of the toy business, we decided to scrap that old wreck of a sleigh and replace it with a fleet of brand new, state-of-the-art coal-burning buses.

WSJ: Your buses are powered by coal?

X. Claus: Not powered by coal, heated by coal. They’re actually pulled by invisible unicorns.

WSJ: Forgive me, but aren’t unicorns imaginary?

X. Claus: Of course, but our oaves don’t know that! One should never underestimate the power of credulity to change the world, let alone pull buses. Actually, we’ve told the oaves they can help the invisible unicorns by pushing with their feet, and we’ve cut holes in the floorboards to facilitate this. It’s sort of …ponderous I suppose, but trust me, if the buses moved any faster, the oaves would be confused by all the blurred scenery. This way they can all stick their heads out of the window, relax, and enjoy the ride.

WSJ: One last question, Mr. Claus. Will ClausCare’s corporate headquarters remain at their current location at the North Pole?

X. Claus: Well, the North Pole is, in some respects, an admirable location. It’s extremely remote and inaccessible by phone or even internet, which makes it ideal from the standpoint of avoiding inconvenient medical claims by our customers. But I’m afraid my doctor (and by my doctor I mean, of course, the entire Health Insurance Lobby) has expressed some concerns about the climate. He points out that the average daily high temperature there is a relatively balmy minus 30 degrees F. and growing warmer (not due to any man-made climate change, I should point out). His recommendation is that in order to avoid fatal cardiac thaw, I should move to the South Pole, where it is a full 20 degrees cooler on average.

And as retired Texas congressman Dick Armey likes to say, “The only heart-warming stories we in the insurance business enjoy telling involve hungry cannibals around a campfire.”

WSJ: Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Claus.

X. Claus: Not at all.

“This Canine Sports Spectacular Presentation is brought to you this evening by AIPAC-brand ‘Kibitz and Blitz’, the official dog food of the Lakud Party and the Unites States Government. Like all AIPAC-brand products, ‘Kibitz and Blitz’ is made from 100% genuine negotiating table scraps ‘too good to waste on Palestinians.’ Every ‘bunker-busting’ bite is chockfull of bellicose goodness, guaranteed to make your saber-rattling, subservient solon sit up on his hind quarters and shamelessly beg for another heaping helping. And ‘Kibitz and Blitz’ now comes in two pooch-pleasing flavors: Rump Republican Red Meat Chunks (in the shiny crimson can featuring Mitch ‘Mad Dog’ McConnell gnawing on a half-eaten Persian kitty), and Lukewarm Liberal Lymph Node Pate (look for the grainy, black-and-white surveillance photo of Harry ‘Hangdog’ Reid furtively squatting in a doggie diaper). But no matter which flavor your Senator prefers, when you feed him ‘Kibitz and Blitz’, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing he’ll never again be tempted to tip over and rummage through your garbage can (unless, of course, his trainers at the NSA order him to sniff-out and retrieve your carelessly discarded cell phone bill). So do yourself a favor, and pick up a corporate contribution-size bag of ‘Kibitz and Blitz.’ After all, we’re not just providing food for Straussian thought here, we’re feeding ‘AIPAC’ of dogs. And now, here’s your FOX-news anchor, Frank Mutz.”

“Hello, and welcome. I’m pollster Frank Mutz and I’ll be bringing you all the leg-humping excitement here at the Bob Ney Convention Center. I’m pleased to be joined tonight by the Democratic Party’s chief leash-yanker and butt-sniffer, Rahm Emasculator…”

“Great to be here, Frank. This year’s top contenders will be vying for the coveted Triple Crown of Congressional Canines, the prestigious ‘Bark, Rollover and Play Dead’ triathlon. Many of these constitutionally-challenged curs have been in training for this event since their ‘hind tit sucking’ days back in the Doghouse of Representatives. I think it’s safe to say that quite a few of them are literally chasing their own tails, hoping to make a favorable impression on their owners here tonight. But before the actual competition gets underway, let’s get to know some of these Furry Federalist Fleabags, shall we? For that we send you down to everyone’s favorite newspuppy, Nora O’Doggerel, who’s been panting patiently around on the Soiled Carpet to present us with a special segment she calls ‘Up-close and Doggerel.’ Nora?”

“Thanks, Rahm. I’m here with two former Congressional dog trainers, Neuter Gingrich and Tom DeSpay. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us.”

“Thanks for having us, Nora.”

“Mr. DeSpay, let’s get your thoughts first. What’s going to be the key to victory in this competition?”

“Well, Nora, what makes this event so unique is that it requires an extraordinary array of rare talents. Take the barking competition, for example. Any dog can bark, but it takes years of practice for a dog to learn to bark out of both sides of his mouth and still keep from dropping his chew stick. In that regard, Senator Arlen ‘Fetch’ Specter has a distinct advantage. He’s a rare breed — a Wire-haired Water Retriever — and he’s been the Republican Party’s designated barker on the Senate Judiciary Committee for nearly 200 dog years. His bark is among the best in the business — ferocious, indignant, convincing. And that’s precisely what makes it such a great setup for his spontaneous rollover. It’s so spontaneous, you don’t even see it coming! One minute he’s growling away for hours at some Attorney General nominee or other on your TV set, so you get up to grab another bag of chicken bones and when you return, ‘presto’, his confirmation vote has been recorded and he’s down on all fours licking his bowl clean like nothing happened…”

“Tom’s definitely got a point there, Nora. Senator Specter’s bark-to-rollover time may be the quickest in the history of the sport. The problem is, he’s pulled it off so many times, I’m afraid he’s starting to lose the element of surprise. That’s why I’m gonna have to go with Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat “Trick Dog” Leahy on this one. Whereas Specter’s strength is his speed, Senator Leahy relies on a subtle combination of strident sincerity and quiet capitulation. His Herculean pronouncements (like the one threatening to hold up the Mukasey nomination), invariably lead to Lilliputian results. Like most purebred Hibernian Horehounds, his pugnacious growl belies a docile and compliant nature, which makes him the perfect watchdog to guard a booby-trapped room.”

“Gentlemen, you’ve identified two of the alpha males among the contenders. But who do you see as the alpha females in this competition? Neut?”

“Clearly the most formidable challenger is Hillary ‘Pharm Dog’ Clinton. Being a golden lab retriever (Pfizer Labs, Wyeth Labs, Amgen Labs), Hillary has a leg-up on the competition, so to speak. First of all, her bark is (strictly speaking) not a bark at all, but more akin to the blood-curdling howl of a hyena. Her bite, on the other hand, is quite harmless, especially when deployed against her erstwhile ‘enemies’ in the ranks of the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy.’ In fact, she appears to have mastered the difficult art of snargling (snarling and wagging her tail and the same time). But her rollover is truly a thing of beauty. More a slow-motion pirouette than a rollover per se, it occurs over a span of time tending toward the geologic, and is as subtly incremental as the blooming of a corpse flower.”

“Neut, pardon the expression, but I’m afraid ‘that dog won’t hunt.’ The ‘bitch’ to watch here (and I mean that with all due respect) is the Italian Lapdog Nancy ‘Nolo Contendere’ Pelosi. From 2001 to 2007 she howled, yelped, and barked incessantly about the crimes of the Bush Administration, but now that she finds herself in a position to do something about them, she’s become one mute mutt. I mean, her discipline is truly remarkable. Her one and only weakness is that she has a habit of passing directly from ‘barking’ to ‘playing dead’ without even a passing glance at a ‘rollover.’ One suspects she may be frozen in the supine position.”

“Which reminds me, gentlemen, you two have been uncharacteristically mute when it comes to making predictions about the ‘play dead’ phase of the competition.”

“Nora, I believe my colleague Neut will readily agree with me that Senator John ‘O’ Possum’ Kerry has a pit bull’s mandibular lock on that category. Not to say he is a pit-bull. In fact, I have no idea what he is, and I’m not sure he does either. While many professional breeders who’ve seen Kerry’s papers report him to be a purebred Standard Poodle, others contend he is nothing but a well-coiffed dingo. Rumors abound that Kerry is actually a ‘Heinz 57’, but I find this notion preposterous. Only sustained inbreeding could have produced a dog so utterly useless for any purpose beyond inducing sleep in himself and others. He is the very nonpareil of ‘playing dead’”

“I’ll grant you that, Tom, but since his bark is indecipherable and his rollover appears to be as continuous as an electric spit, I question whether his ability to ‘play dead’ will be sufficient to allow him to catch the competition. Besides, ‘dead dogs’ are a dime a dozen. The real question is: can he come back to life?”

“That’s an excellent question, Mr. Gingrich. What do you think, Tom?”

“I suppose what Neut is referring to here is what we in the ‘dog eat dog’ political world call ‘canine resurrection’ (and we’re not talking about ‘doggie heaven’ here). Let me give you three examples of this phenomenon. First, there’s the story of Trent ‘Cracker Barrel’ Lott, a rare White-hooded Bloodhound once named ‘Dog of the Year’ by the Kaucasian Kennel Klub. Need I say more? And then of course we have the strange case of Senator David ‘Bird Dog’ Vitter, who is, I believe, a cross between a Ponchartrainian Poontang Pointer and a Bayou Beaver Retriever. (This hybrid, if left to its own devices, prefers to make its home in out-of-the-way cat houses.) ‘Nuff said about that, I suppose…”

“Excuse me Nora, but Tom failed to mention the most remarkable story of ‘canine resurrection’ on record, that being the case of Senator Larry ‘Dancing Paws’ Craig, the Snake River Canyon Cockapoo. Now the Snake River Canyon Cockapoo isn’t considered much of a breeding dog, as it is suffers from a congenital olfactory malformation that renders it unable to detect the smell of canine estrogen. It does, however, make a useful pet in many South Asian countries, where it is more aggressive than a mongoose at hunting wild snakes in a confined space. But what makes Larry ‘Dancing Paws’ Craig truly remarkable (even for a Snake River Canyon Cockapoo) is his extraordinary homing powers. No matter how far from home he gets dumped by his owners (and he has been dumped several times) Larry always manages to find his way back safely to the Senate Cloakroom…”

“Thank you, Neut, for that heartwarming story. Well, folks, we’ll be back in a moment to bring you more exciting coverage of the ‘Bark, Rollover, and Play Dead’ competition. But first a word about AIPAC-brand ‘Porkless Pork-Barrel Treats.’ They’re kosher, and they’re guaranteed to keep your Doghouse Member comin’ back for more! Most important of all, ‘Porkless Pork-Barrel Treats’ help keep your House pet in the peak of health by promoting strong teeth and gums (or, in the case of a Democratic House pet, just his gums). That’s AIPAC-brand, for Congressional canines who answer to a higher authority…”

a.) Americans are too busy to make sense of the complex geopolitical realities of the modern world;

b.) Americans are too stupid to make sense of the complex geopolitical realities of the modern

world; or

c.) Americans are too stupid to know they are too stupid to make sense of the complex geopolitical

realities of the modern world.

Being the sort of person who would rather spread the darkness than curse a candle, I have come up with what I believe is a novel antidote to this debilitating condition. I call it the “Designated Thinker” solution.

This ambitious plan calls for each of us to adopt a really, really super-smart celebrity journalist/columnist of our choice to do the heavy mental lifting for us. (I like to pick mine from the Brahman stables at the New York Times, but hey, to each his own.) In my case, I rely on the prophetic and erudite visionary Thomas L. Friedman to pre-digest the steady stream of unpronounceable Arabic names and crazy-quilt geography coming out of the Middle East, and present it to me in an easy-to-comprehend format along the lines of Schoolhouse Rock. You know, something like:

America’s the greatest, and there isn’t any doubt,

But if the Sunnis don’t agree, we’re gonna gobble up their land…

But you get the idea. So let the ditto heads leech off the limbic system of Mr. Limbaugh; I’ll take “Tom Terrific” of the Times any day. Now when somebody questions me about events in Iraq or Iran (or any of those irrational Muslamistic countries) I always answer with, “Well, Thomas Friedman believes that (fill in the blank)”, and boy are they impressed! But you know, the most satisfying part of this symbiotic relationship is that I get to feel like a real intellectual heavy-weight (without having to engage in any of the time-consuming bother of processing all that information myself), while Tom gets to flog enough copies of his books to comfortably cradle a nest egg the size of Qatar.

Imagine my delight, then, when I happened to catch my surrogate cerebrum on the cable news networks the other night. Apparently, he had called an impromptu news conference to announce his startling discovery of a gigantic flaming gas-ball in outer space that seemed to be orbiting our disk-shaped planet. Friedman first noticed this star-like object (which he has taken the liberty of naming “the Sun”), when the intense luminosity emanating from the incendiary sphere temporarily blinded him, causing him to fall clean out of the saddle of the Tactical Nuclear Cruise Missile on which he was riding, Major Cong-style, toward Damascus. When asked by reporters to identify the likely origin of this gaseous body, Mr. Friedman would only say that all would be revealed to us in over-simplified form in his upcoming best-seller, The Sun is Fat and So is My Head.

This latest (and perhaps most profound) revelation to issue forth from the pen of my erstwhile muse comes on the heels of two other monumentally important discoveries made by Friedman earlier this year.

The first of these was his heroic (and ultimately successful) effort to pinpoint the precise location of his own derriere. As he described this defining moment in an NYT exclusive, “My head had become irretrievably lodged in a dark and malodorous place, but when I instinctively reached ahead of me with both hands, I was able to grasp my elusive posterior with surprising ease. Curiously enough, it had been right in front of my face the entire time! Who knew?…”

Friedman’s other recent journalistic coup, of course, was his scooping of the entire Western World last August with the breaking news that the invasion of Iraq was not such a good idea, after all.

Man,

I wish I’d gotten an Oxford education! All I could wrangle was Chico State…

“Grampa, what’s the world’s largest invertebrate life form?”

“That would be the Democratic Party,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”

“Because my science book says it’s the ‘giant squid.’ They can weigh up to 600 pounds.”

Upon hearing this stupefying factoid, I was forced to concede.

“Then I guess your science book is probably correct, sweetheart. Even loaded down with frozen blocks of corporate campaign cash, most Democrats don’t weigh that much!”

“I’ll bet the Democratic Party is smarter than a giant squid, though,” she offered, graciously allowing me to salvage some semblance of academic face.

“I suppose it would depend on the squid,” I posited. “That, and the number of Democrats present at the time of the comparison.”

“Well, Grampa, what if there were a lot of Democrats, and they were all meeting in Congress, making a really good plan to get us out of Iraq? Who would be smarter then?”

“Definitely the giant squid,” I quipped with confidence. “You see, honey, believe it or not, the more Democratic Congressmen there are in a room, the greater the likelihood the entire quorum will be outwitted by a single marine mollusk, not to mention a reasonably alert jellyfish. Take the Senate Majority for instance…”

But before I could get into my stride, my granddaughter again shifted gears.

“But Grampa, at least Democrats are brave, right? I mean, they have more guts than a squid, don’t they?”

“Well technically, sweetheart, we know a squid has guts, because we can see inside it. Squid are transparent, you see, and that’s one thing you could never say about Congressional Democrats. Oh sure, they all claim to have “intestinal” fortitude and the “stomach” for a fight when they’re on the campaign trail, but once they get voted into office they line up to be gutted like nihilistic sardines fighting to get into the can. And once Democratic politicians are eviscerated, they leave behind whatever vestige of moral courage they once possessed as thoughtlessly as a lobster sheds his carapace. They quake in terror at the mere mention of imaginary sea monsters lurking in the Strait of Hormuz, and spend most of their time groveling on bended-fin before a barnacle encrusted, not-very-lifelike cement statue of “King Neptune the Invincible”, something 71% of the other fish find laughable, if not utterly baffling. It’s the damndest thing…”

Still my intrepid granddaughter was undeterred in her valiant attempt to find a place for Congressional Democrats at the apex of the invertebrate food chain.

“There’s just one thing I don’t understand, Grampa. If big old slimy bottom-feeding squid monsters are so much braver, smarter and more powerful than Democrats, then how come one of them doesn’t run for the Senate?”

“One already has, sweetheart,” I replied. “Isn’t there a picture of Joe Liebermann in your science book?”

Now I’m one of those people naive enough to believe that performing an act of kindness like this for three newly-liberated orphans would be enough to earn me their undying gratitude, but such was not the case. In fact, they seemed curiously mistrustful of me after that.

I suppose their reaction was understandable under the circumstances, and I must admit that I did feel a little responsible for the death of their father (I had killed him, after all). But as I told the children myself (once they’d calmed down a bit), “Look, are we going to continue to dwell on the past and spend a lot of unproductive time discussing ‘how we got to this point’, or are we going to sit down together like men and figure out how to move forward on this thing?” Before long, the boys (who, at that point, ranged in age from eleven down to six) took one look at the smoking gun in my hand and decided to take a fresh look at the facts as they then existed on the ground.

The truth is that once the rental truck finished hauling away all the unnecessary clutter that had sprung up during the unspeakable reign of their despotic father (including a completely outdated plasma TV, a Land Rover with dangerously under-inflated tires, a broken-down pallet of rat-infested gold bullion, and a frightfully miscataloged collection of post-impressionist paintings), the poor kids finally had enough room to run around the house without tripping over hazardous piles of stuff every time they turned around. And since I didn’t see anybody else volunteering to do it, I agreed to store the whole god-awful mess at my house, at least until the boys were old enough to have adult grandchildren capable of looking after it in a responsible way.

Anyway, like I said, it’s been four years since their father’s untimely demise, and even now I don’t feel I can trust them to act responsibly unless I’m personally there to keep an eye on them. For one thing, every time I go out to get them another bag of food pellets at the pet store, they reach through the steel bars on the windows like idiots and try to pick the padlock on the outside of the front door. Even worse, all I have to do is forget to feed them for a while, and within a week or so they start fighting amongst themselves. I just wish they’d learn to take responsibility for their own behavior, so I wouldn’t have to. After all, I only got involved in all this because I thought I could help out. The last thing I wanted was an “open-ended” commitment, for God’s sake.

As it happened, a few months ago, I finally settled on a new approach. I told the boys I’d be “willing to stand down as soon as they were ready to stand up.” They asked me what I meant, so I told them, “Look guys, it’s simple; If you can prove to me your willingness to pool your available resources and share them with each other in an equitable way, I’ll turn the house back over to you, and you can enjoy the boundless fruits of democracy.”

The good new is, they’ve all agreed in principle to the conditions of my offer. Make no mistake — it’s an important first step, yet difficult challenges lie ahead that will continue to test my resolve. Recently, I presented the young men with a draft of changes they must agree to as a prerequisite to earning their full measure of personal sovereignty. These proposed rule changes I refer to collectively as the “Methane Resources Production and Sock Sharing Bill.” Here’s how it works:

Between them, the three boys own one-and-a-half pairs of socks. This means that if they simply stop their endless bickering and divvy up the socks evenly, they’ll find themselves in possession of one full sock each, which is more than sufficient to provide warmth and protection for one of their feet during the frigid winter months ahead.

And that, essentially, is all there is to it.

Yet (for reasons perhaps known best to them), the parties concerned seem unwilling or unable to agree to these simple terms. After months of contentious wrangling over various alternative methods of sharing out the three socks (each of which favors one of the boys at the expense of the other two) they have reached a virtual impasse. Given this unfortunate development, I can only hope that everyone involved will eventually discover in a comprehensive solution a satisfactory means of meeting his particular needs.

But whatever the obstacles that lie in my way, I cannot afford to abandon my efforts, as the well-being of these impressionable young people must continue to be my paramount concern, now, and for the foreseeable future. Failure is not an option…

Author’s note: In the past few days, some irresponsible persons have been posting flyers around the neighborhood accusing me of enriching myself at the expense of the young men under my protection. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that I should (at my own expense, I suppose) double the number of socks available, thus providing all three of them with an entire “pair” of socks. Needless to say, anyone familiar with the less well-publicized provisions of the agreement knows full well that such a profligate waste of cloth footwear is rendered utterly superfluous by Section 914B of the proposed agreement, which unambiguously stipulates that “each party to the said contract (insofar as he is designated a ward of the aforementioned ad hoc guardian) shall, as a show of good faith, undertake (at a time and place agreed upon by said guardian) to amputate his own right leg above the knee with a bacterially-infected oyster knife…”