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Sunday, August 26, 2012

111. Idiocies


There was no doubt that it wasn’t James Madison in my living room so I had to assume it was C.W. Why he chose this particular form would become obvious soon enough. With his powdered wig slightly askew, he was sitting at my desk thumbing my pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution and mumbling to himself.
 
“What’s cookin’ Satch?” I said.

“Imbecile,” he said.

“Well aren’t we touchy?”

“This thing,” he said, waving the Constitution at me. I noticed he the pages were crumpled, dog-earned, and covered with notes and underlines. “This thing is so short. I don’t remember that.”

“I thought you wanted it that way,” I said. Why not play along?

“I can find no provision for ‘aclona++snocry.’’’

“A- what?”

He thought for a second. “It’s serious crime on our planet.”

“And it is?

“Something of a cross between ‘knowingly uttering nonsense and scaring the children.”

“Examples?”

“Publicly stating that a female of your species physiologically disables her reproductive system after being beaten and violently impregnated against her will.”

“I see.”

“Or claiming that data showing increasingly warming temperatures around the globe are false because some mythical father-figure in the sky simply wouldn’t permit it.”

“Be careful with that one.”

“Stating that supply creates demand or that if you give all your riches to a few, much of it will magically trickle down to the remainder.”

“I see.”

“Or denials of the scientific processes of natural selection even after the Trogotherans dropped Charles Darwin off here in 1859 to explain it all.”

“And your point is?”

“That there no laws against this, as hard as we worked to produce such enlightenment?” He waved the Constitution at me.

“Laws against stupidity?”

“Laws against spreading it.”

“And on Falloonia?”

“On our planet, we take it quite seriously.”

“And the punishment is?”

He thought. “It would be your equivalent of Vacation Bible School as produced at Alcatraz.”
 
I shuddered. “Maybe you better check your Eighth Amendment there.”

“Levity is not appropriate when discussing this,” he said and he flourished the Constitution again.

“So what do you propose?”

“We would have the punishment fit the crime.”

“So, the ‘supply-siders’ might be given a batch of Facebook stock and forced to sell it?”

“Precisely.”

“And the ‘trickle-downers’ might be forced to live for a while at the bottom of the pile.”
If it should happen that the proposed
broom-handle remediation should
prove unsuitable to the task of
providing enlightenment to those of
the species who would aspire to
regulate the personal behavior of other
genders, a more enlightened approach
involving electrodes might suffice to
provide mental reformation. - Publius
“You are getting the picture.”

“And the ‘legitimate rape’ fellers?”

He straightened his wig, gave me a deliciously wicked wink, and began to lift himself off the floor with the handle of a broom that he had laid nearby.

“Glad you asked, Big Dope. Stand up and I will show you.”

“Uh, thanks Publius, I think I get the picture.”

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