Every four years, like clockwork, two enormous trucks back up to the public troughs. One slaps in various slime and slop, while the other one glops in some assorted goo and gorp. Then, diners are left to choose between the two evils.
Oh, sure -- there are some sweet, well-intentioned people who drop by now and again to offer a bucket or two of much fresher food that's far better looking, smelling, and tasting. But everyone knows a bucket or two won't stretch very far, not up against these industrial-strength, corporate sludge movers that deal in mountains and not mole hills to fill public troughs.
Before you know it, everybody's been taken to market, as in the old nursery rhyme. Only thing is, the "market" looks suspiciously like voting booths filled with easily-hacked, paper-trail-free, shaky and uncertain, electro-mechanical vote takers. Not only that, there's no chance to go wee-wee-wee, all the way home.
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"Thank goodness the fate in that cartoon won't befall us," said the worker ant behind the podium, tapping the projection screen with a rubber-tipped pointer for emphasis as the lights came back up in the school gym, amid amused chuckles and laughter. "Providing we all take a deep breath, remember what's truly important, and work together, that is."
The ant adjusted its wireless mic. "True, we must be alert for laughing hyenas escaped from asylums and zoos, and also be watchful for the ravenous anteaters that draw them, just as the 'eaters are in turn drawn to all of us, in this vast circle of life."
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
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