WHEN YOU CAN CHOOSE – YOU BETTER CHOOSE WITH GREAT CARE !

(Or, make damn sure your choices are counted, and recognized !!!)

It was in BraveFreeLand that it all started. In BraveFreeLand – BFL, to long time inhabitants – the natives had this strange choosingtime every so often. The way it worked, 39% of them got together every 4 years and chose the Controller who would then, with a lot of pomp and fanfare, go to sleep in an uncolored house – (painted, but not in color). This Controller would then make a lot of rules for the rest of them. I know, it’s strange, but that’s the way they did it in BFL. Thirty-nine seemed to be as high as they could count, on choosing day. Had been doing it for years. Maybe drinking too much on choosing day, or whatever, but 39 was about the best they did. The conventional wisdom was that 39 was the absolute best they could muster because of the NFL in BFL. Easier to concentrate on strange shaped balls than government. Bizarre.

ANYWAY, on this particular choosingday, the 39% who did the choosing decided on a known member of the society to be the new Controller, a man of scientific curiosity. But before he could move to the uncolored house, a group of swindlers persuaded the High Priests to lay down an edict that he would not move to the uncolored house, and would not be the new Controller. The High Priests allowed another contender, who had come in second in the choosing race to move in. How is it possible, you ask? Why? Like the choosers of that day would say, “…That’s a very good question.”

So the new Controller who was not chosen if we can use that term, was known as Cord, Cord Loosh. (It was well known it should have been Cord Lush.) Cord made arrangements to move into the uncolored house. He was always accompanied by an odd cohort, always. The two of them were known as Cord Loosh, and Ditcherell Shamey, “Ditch” for short. They were Loosh and Shamey. Many said Shamey’s name was really appropriate. Not sure what they meant, but that’s what they said. The two of them broke every law in BraveFreeLand once they got into the house. They assembled their own swindlers, and decided to simply acquire all the valuable minerals and ancient artifacts in a faraway land, known as The Rock, because of its many rocky hills, with minerals beneath. And yeah, whether the inhabitants of The Rock liked it or not. See, the people who lived in The Rock didn’t follow this bizarre BFL 39% choosing routine, they just stood around and allowed the person with the most guns to take over and be their Controller. Well, you can see what this arrangement would inevitably produce in the long run. Sooner or later, one of the Controllers would go too far, and sure enough, the current Controller had done just that.

So Cord and Ditch, with the help of a lot of intellectual writers and historians and psychologists realized they could simply take control and ownership of The Rock with euphemisms, as easily as they had done with BFL. Cord, as Controller, would order the soldiers of BFL to bomb and shoot and kill and burn all the people in The Rock even after they surrendered. Including women, old people and little children. See, they had a name for that, it was collateral damage, which was an ancient sanskrit term for ‘…they’re so stupid we’re doing them a favor by killing them.’ This translation was revealed to us by an actual member of the invading BFL army!

Ditch would handle the propaganda, with his arsenal of euphemisms. In order to get this fun time started, Ditch assembled a large group of talkers who he was trainng to lie to the people of BraveFreeLand repeatedly. They took the words of an ancient speech by Herman Goering, he of an ancient tyrannical government. Goering pointed out that “…The people don’t want war, don’t like war, but if their leaders tell them enough times that it is necessary, they will accept it.” And so Ditch’s people did, and so the people of BFL did.

Thus, in secret meetings, (all his meetings were secret) Ditch assembled all his talkers. They came prepared to spend two hours practicing daily. Members of the media were welcome, and a lot of them showed up, and dutifully practiced with the rest. They all took seats facing Ditch at the podium, who looked at them with a crooked smile, and always with his head angled at 30 degrees from the perpendicular. He said the only words he needed: “If you will” and his minions would chant in unison, in 6/8 time:

“…Euphemism baby, don’t mean maybe – always be ready to say
Nash-a-nul Dee-Fense – our very best Pre-tense – from 6000 miles away? Yeah!

“…In the BFL we can go Ka-Boom, and Ka-boom and Ka-Boom and Ka-Boom
We don’t have to bother, just blow up the Father,
burn up the Mother, and any other, and all those still in the womb

“…The people can’t stop us, nor will they try, just scare ‘em with Mushroom Cloud
Ask for 200 billion - I don’t mean million - they’ll give it with heads duly bowed
Be patient, be cool, save your best for last, we’ll hear ‘em chanting in the hallways
Terrorism it was, terrorism it is, terrorism first, last and always

“…We revere the Rove playbook, it covers all matters, of how to corrupt and connive
Rove gave us the “say-hooks” to repeat and repeat, like the buzz in a giant bee-hive
Now we know how to smear, those who fought without fear, in foreign-wars-of-the-past
We just call ‘em all traitors, Democracy-haters, get rid of their ass, I mean F-A-S-T ! “

Well, you can just sort of hear all the other mantras, in your imagination. Ditch held these meetings five days a week, and very soon BFL was inundated with an army of talking heads, all saying the same things, verbatim! It was the human equivalent of a 33 1/3 stuck record.

One of his talkers was a slight woman in spike high heels. She repeated Ditch’s mantra while waving from an airplane:

“Mushroom cloud, and WMD” and (oh God, my feet are killing me) She said the last part to herself.

And Loosh? He said the same stuff, but from his giant podium as Controller. He got through some of the one syllable stuff, but he should have avoided any use of the word mechanical. This one was four syllables. Too much for Lush Loosh. He could only pronounce it “me-chac-inul” and in BFL 600 million ears hurt everytime he said it.

“I can protect you, from me-chac-inul weapons. That’s my job and I IN-tend, to do it
I’ll bankrupt the country if that’s what it takes, and if I do and it hurts, then screw it!”

He always ended with heh-heh-heh. And some times a second heh-heh-heh. No one knew what this meant, and no one else could make that sound, not even Rich Little!

So it was that this theft of the uncolored house, and the controls of government in BFL dragged on and on.

No one stood up to him – except for one old man, not in government, just an old but still very intelligent and obviously passionate person. He was old, and no one knew his real name, they just called him “oldman.” It was said he was a fan of Keefer Sutherland and he longed to solve difficult problems in just one day, so he took that name. Thus it was that Keefe the old man evolved as the only voice in BFL with the intellectual intensity, the humble honesty and the verbal virility (not to mention the altogether alliteration) to stand up to Loosh and Shamey. Keefe had a little cracked megaphone that he found under the seats after an NFL game. He couldn’t afford to see the game, cause the ticket price was six million dollars, and a beer was three hundred and six. An 81-year-old rich woman had used it to be able to shout, “Kill ‘em, Kill the liberals.” The teams playing were the Bears and the Giants. She knew that, but that’s just the way her mind worked.

But whenever he could, KeefeOldman, as he came to be known, would try to point out the incessant use of deceptive euphemisms by Loosh & Shamey and crowd, to deceive the BraveFreeLand people. But it seemed no one was listening. The lawmaking bodies were all afflicted with acute cowardice, or terminal lethargy. The Doctors weren’t sure which, but where Loosh & Shamey were concerned, continued to give in to the most exorbitant and outrageous requests. Always more money for war in The Rock, even though the majority of them publicly stated they were against more of this insanity. So it dragged on.

Then, as the people of BraveFreeLand approached their quadrennial choosingday, things appeared to take a turn for the positive. It was said appeared to, because, midway into the preparation for the choosing, there occurred a split in the unity of those who defied the current criminal “rulers” of BFL. Those who appeared to be destined to bring about a total departure from the cancerous mindset then prevailing, seemed to be quibbling about minutiae, and not concentrating on un-choosing the likes of Loosh & crowd. It was said they could nominate a tree trunk and it would be chosen, but they were quiblling. Bizarre.

There are those who think it will all work out, and Cord and Ditch will be relegated to the scrapheap of history, and incarcerated, but time will tell. See, this arrangement in use in BraveFreeland to choose rulers every so often is a great privilege, but it’s flawed. It’s been suggested that, if the people are allowed to choose the Controller, inevitably, sooner or later, they will choose an idiot. That truism has been around for a couple centuries, but I don’t believe the people were ready to accept the fact they had chosen TWO of them, one brain-damaged, the other a megalomaniac, and both liars, do you?

But … oh, that’s right, the people didn’t choose Cord and Ditch, did they? The 9 high priests did.