The Screwworm Letters #1

"with apologies to C.S. Lewis"

From:
Uncle Screwworm - Administrative Assistant
Office of Grand Marshall Goebbeleninstalin.
Bulgea 1313 Fifth Circle
Attila the Hun Memorial Administrative Complex, Hell

To:
President Wormtongue
The Whitehouse
Nation Whose Name is not Spoken Among Us, Earth

September 2009

My Dear Nephew Wormtongue,

Are you surprised, then, that your attempts to generate support for your reforms through open forums have been such a dismal failure. Have you actually begun to believe your own propaganda? Never assume the Americans are so completely asleep that you cannot disturb their slumber. I agree that the window of opportunity to initiate real reforms in this abysmally chaotic land is absurdly narrow, but you must remember the words of Caesar Augustus, one of the best reform leaders we ever had, "Make haste slowly." Using this method Augustus finished the Roman Republic once and for all and built an empire that lasted half a millennium.

Of course, it is obvious that intellectuals like yourself are best suited to lead the drooling masses. Our educational reforms have, over the past century, successfully reduced the intellectual capacity of the average American by some 20%. These sheep are so much more easily led these days. Most wander through life practically asleep, their minds fuddled with worrying over who is going to get kicked off the island, which girl the Bachelor is going to pick and who Brad, Jen and Angelina are dating lately.

Nonetheless, there are still large numbers of individuals in this plaguey country who slip through the educational system with the inexplicable ability to think independently. I blame that Andrew Carnegie fellow who tried to assuage his personal guilt for some small excesses as an industrial baron by building all those libraries. A nation with all those books lying about in the open is damnably hard to entirely control. Some of its citizens actually read for fun if you can imagine it!

If you overreach, grab for power too quickly, before you've adequately anesthetized the intellectuals, you may stir some of them to action. And by intellectuals, I don't mean the degree festooned boobs we've trained to run things down there. I mean the real intellectuals - the free thinkers; the ones that read things that weren't on our reading lists; the ones that don't ask what everyone else's thinking before they think themselves. If you wake these people up they will cause you no end of grief as you have discovered at your poorly planned health care forums!

Before the next phase of the transformation, you must move forward with the seizure of control of all sources of information. It must happen quickly, before an alarm can be sounded effectively. Remember, this useful argument. "The constitution is not a suicide pact!" You must escalate the climate of fear and urgency by fanning your two major smoke screens.

Catastrophic global climate change legislation needs a couple of good catastrophes to get it pushed through. The boys in disaster promotions are working on that, but you need to remember to insure that your people not don't call it global "warming". It's far too inflexible a term and leaves you no wiggle room. Stick with global climate change, then whatever happens, up or down, you can call you subjects greedy, blame them for the problem and give up some liberties to save themselves.

You've just about blown the health care ploy by moving too quickly without the proper preparation. Your plans to enlist children to help sell the idea is only going to rouse thinking Americans even further.  For now, I suggest you spend the rest of the month shopping with the missus, sailing and building sand castles with your daughters and let the home office see if we can salvage something from this mess you've made.

And since it's too late to cancel the public school speech, at least try to say something soothing and innocuous - preferably something Rush Limbaugh won't quote you on. And for goodness sake get some new communists for the Czar program - some that have the brains not to have admitted it on camera! We're really pushing fried foods with Glenn Beck, but he just won't die. In the meantime, tell your people to try and clean up all the embarrassing video, old books and tax problems before you have 100,000 farmers and truck drivers on the White House lawn with pitchforks and torches.

We won't be able to help you then.

Your loving uncle,
Screwworm