An Equal-Opportunity Tyrant

Hey, remember back in school there was always this one teacher that seemed to hate kids? Remember that guy? His name was Mr. Fenstermopper or Mr. MacDoogle or something like that. No one knew if he had a first name and he always appeared to have gotten his teaching credentials from the Third Reich. In fact, rumor around school was that he was a fugitive Nazi war criminal that came over on Operation Paperclip and probably went renegade. No rockets for you, American military! Right, so remember this cat? How you’d get this teacher and think, “Why is this dude even a teacher?! He HATES kids! It’s not like they drafted him into teaching, so why is he a teacher if he hates kids?!”

Remember that this Mr. Fentstermopper hated all the kids equally. It wasn’t one group or the other, he hated them all. Even the “smart kids” got nailed by his rapier teaching method. “Excuse me, Billy? Billy? Yes, eyes forward. While getting the A+ was indeed a good thing, I must ask you where your parents got those very interesting shoes. I didn’t know the church food bank was giving away discarded clothing now.” Remember how you had a thing for Carrie Ann in class and while Mr. Fentstermopper was writing crap on the blackboard and had his back turned, you wrote a note to Carrie Ann that said something like, “Hey, Carrie Ann, what’s your game? And can anybody play?” You started to pass it to her and it was like Mr. Fentstermopper had eyes in the back of his head and a “note radar”. He whirls, snatches away the note quicker than the time it takes the government to spend a trillion dollars, and reads it to the class! “Ahhh! Young love! How quaint! It would appear Jack here fancies himself a poet! What a great haiku! And will you be reading more to her in that battered old wreck you call a pickup truck? I wasn’t aware the police impound yard was still auctioning vehicles from the big multi-car pile-up. Listen to this note, class…” Man, then she was too embarrassed to agree to going to Foster Freeze and then a moonlight ride up into the canyon. I considered it a blessing when my school exiled me to a vocational program at a derelict air force base so I’d hopefully learn a trade.

The thing was, everyone hated this teacher. And he hated everyone in the class. But when he’d single out one group or the other, the untargeted group would laugh and basically egg Mr. Fentstermopper on. “Well, all you scruffy vagabonds with hair in your eyes need to put down your pot pipes long enough to look at the assignment in front of you. If, that is, you’re not currently having hallucinations.” All the Preppies and New Wavers would laugh. You’d go behind the gym to have a cigarette and he always showed up before the first drag could be savored. “All of you! To the principal’s office! March!” What, are we on the Bataan High School Death March over here? Everyone got dinged by him. The quiet punk rock chick in his class, remember her?” “So, Miss Cameron, did your hair turn that color before or after you started sniffing glue? That hair is a distraction to the class. I’m writing up a referral. Go up to the principal’s office. Oh, and Timothy, since you think that’s funny, you can join her. Considering I saw your parents drunker than sailors at the bowling alley, I would say you have little to laugh about.” And the rest of the class would roar with laughter, even though Mr. Fentstermopper had humiliated each and every one of them before. But I was thinking about this and I figured out who the federal government is. Or, rather, who the “Man Behind The Curtain” is. It’s Mr. Fentstermopper!

Look at this deal in Oregon. All the liberal newspapers were goading the government on to go in there and play Waco. I know a lot of the lefties are into retro fads, but seriously? Let’s look into this for a minute. Had those been Black Lives Matter protesters holed up in there and the government did that, the liberal newspapers would scream bloody murder about police brutality. Rightfully so, but let’s be consistent here, people! I realize our society has not progressed beyond a high school cultural level for the most part, but do we need to act the part every time? You could almost hear the liberal reporters when the government attacked the protestors in Oregon: “Ooooooo!!! BUS-ted! Ha, ha, ha! BUS-ted!” What are we, in grade school over here?

To be fair, many conservatives were sitting saying, in regards to the Black Lives Matter protests, “They need to go in there with tanks and helicopter gunships and show them what REAL police brutality is!” Yet, they failed to see that this teacher does not play favorites. He has no favorites. He hates all of you. That’s why he took this job. It isn’t that he wants to teach, or lead, or be a mentor. It’s that he was too anti-social to work someplace where he didn’t have absolute power over everyone. He discovered that if he was a teacher, he could do whatever humiliations he wished and no one could do anything about it. Other teachers know that Mr. Fentstermopper is a horrible person, which is why no one associates with him. But he’s been at the school so long, they can’t get rid of him. So it is with the United States government. But the students in this class don’t dare stick up for one another. Instead, they get this schadenfreude shtick going on where if the government attacks right-wingers, the lefties cheer. Because they don’t like the right-wingers. They eat meat and own guns. When the government attacks left-wingers, the conservatives cheer. Because they don’t like lefties. They eat tofu and drive sensible cars. The government sits there and says to itself, “Dorks! I hate all of them! But look how easy it is to divide and conquer these kids! They just keep cheering me on as I nail them both! This is like dynamiting fish in a barrel!”

I’m not saying we all need to run out and buy a Prius, an AR-15, tofu burgers, thick-sliced bacon, and hunting boots made from organic hemp made by an intentional community over here in some attempt to find common ground. But one thing we all ought to agree on is that when the government can attack anyone it deems a “threat” because it felt a “peaceful resolution” (i.e. the people surrendering and going to jail) wasn’t happening quick enough, this will only escalate. Today it’s the Black Lives Matter protesters. Then it was the guys in Oregon. Who will it be next? The Left says, “Those guy in Oregon were armed!” So? Were they actually shooting at anyone? Instead of assuming they needed to surrender and go to jail, why not sit down and negotiate and find out what their needs were? I don’t think they all just up and decided to risk it all because no one could find the Monopoly game or a chess set. When citizens encourage the government to attack other citizens who have a political complaint that isn’t being heard (that’s why they’re protesting, hel-LO!), how long will it be until those forces then do the same to you? Because this is not Liberal Government or Conservative Government. This is THE Government that will quash anything whatsoever it feels to be a threat to it. Like, for example, a middle-aged woman wearing an anti-war t-shirt into the Congress, dragged off and arrested. Pro-war conservatives cheered. What did you just cheer but the assassination of an idea? The idea that people had the right to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

The redress of grievances. Who gets heard these days? That’s what needs to be addressed. The government writes on the blackboard, “I will not defy the government no matter what they do” and tells everyone to write that 500 times. And everyone does. So when one group or the other is getting a whiff of batons and tear gas, the other side cheers. Right, here’s your Free Speech Zone. You can use it for an hour. After that, you need to shut up and go home. You had your freedom. And how many realize that word is but the hollow shell of what it once was. Like the discarded husk of a cicada you find in the yard one day, reminding you it was summer months ago.

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