There was agitation in the land, and the air was thick with discontent. Not as thick as our winter, but still, pretty thick. The government no longer trusted the People to do the right thing, and by and large, the feeling was mutual. Anger reigned, and it never seemed to stop raining.
Under such circumstances, one would have expected there to have arisen from the restive provinces a great hue and cry, but in these sad times, the provinces were suffering a general malaise, and all they could muster was a great hue. Some critics thought it wasn’t even that great and gave it only two stars.
Whereas before, neighbor would not have hesitated to lend a helping hand to neighbor, and not infrequently, a lawnmower, now the citizenry eyed one another with suspicion and contempt. No small number found themselves at the ophthalmologist’s seeking relief from the nagging eye strain that is the natural by-product of going around looking askance at everybody on a regular basis.
At the National Assembly, there were the usual fatuous speeches and sitting on hands until the circulation was nearly cut off. The customary accusations of malfeasance leveled at the sovereign were met with the customary silence. Unsurprisingly, this satisfied no one, except the status quo, which was doing a brisk business.
The King was nowhere to be seen. It had been ages since he had last stepped out onto the balcony to wave robotically to the adoring throngs below. The general scuttlebutt was that he had holed up in the inner court surrounded by a coterie of sycophants all competing with one another to see who could grovel more facetiously. The truth was that the King had holed up in the inner court surrounded by a coterie of sycophants all competing with one another to see who could grovel more facetiously. From time to time, the court jester would stop by to see if he could eke out a smidgen of mirth from the royal highness. But his one joke: "Who died and made you King!?" soon lost its luster. Particularly after the 13th re-telling.
In the countryside, even the beasts of burden, underemployed though they had been ever since the mass circulation of the internal combustion engine, were staggering under the weight of the pervasive unhappiness. As they had throughout the ages, the animals exhibited an uncanny ability to express appropriately calibrated anxiety about the national debt. At least, that’s how some of the pundits interpreted the signs. Others thought they were just sick of eating grass for dinner every night.
“Who will get us out of this mess?” became the catchword of the day. Even though that’s really 8 words, nobody wanted to state the obvious. It had been done so many times before that not a soul would have paid good money for it, even had it been gussied up with a catchy song and some energetic dance steps.
Thus, when the shepherd came bounding into the main square exclaiming that he had just seen a wolf, the populace was dumbfounded. “You can still get a job as a shepherd these days? Who knew?” they were heard to mutter amongst themselves. So accustomed were they to arbitrage traders losing track of 5 billion dollars bounding into the main square on a regular basis that when a living, breathing shepherd stood before them quivering with fright, they could scarcely believe their eyes, although their ears still commanded a respectable degree of credibility. But no one paid any attention to the shepherd's story. For one thing, it didn't have an ironic plot twist in it.
Dejected and shy the cab fare, the shepherd began to walk slowly home. "Slink" is a little more like it. Because when your confidence has taken a beating, your gait is one of the first things to be affected. Well, maybe not yours, but it is for most normal people.
No one who was there that day and witnessed the event remembers it exactly the same way as anyone else who wasn't there but pretended that they were (like the 50 million or so who all claim to have been at Woodstock). Some say that it happened all-of-a-sudden-like; others that it was kind of gradual, like roots growing in a storm drain until the plumber can no longer safely be put off; still others that it was gradually sudden-like. Id.
But on this, they all agree. From Seemingly Nowhere (a district sporting the idiotic license plate motto: “Bumpkins do it with Panache”) emerged a babe out of whose mouth emerged the following words:
"If we don’t stick together, it’s because we’re using substandard glue.”
And then the People began to weep. Not because anybody had the slightest clue what this was supposed to mean, but mostly because they realized for the first time that the tariff wasn’t doing an adequate job of keeping out shoddy, underpriced materials of dubious provenance, thereby depressing wages, imperiling the structural integrity of highway overpasses, further denigrating the popular culture to a level beneath its already vacuous state, and spawning a nationwide grumpiness.
So loud was the cry of the People, that even the King on his lofty (but in serious need of re-upholstering) throne heard it. All at once, the King knew exactly what he needed to do.
He caused to be thrown open the doors of the castle. (What, he was going to do it himself? No! You delegate!) From far and near, the People came for a tour to see for themselves with their own eyes or any eyes they could get their hands on that the walls they thought had been separating them from their rulers and from each other, and from each other's walls, were just an illusion, as was every temporal, corporeal thing they had ever known.
All was illusion. What was real could not be seen or touched or weighed or horded, and most of all, declared on a tax form.
And in this one moment, everyone knew -- everyone, from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high and the middlin'est of the middlin'est -- that when all was said and done, and the fat lady had sung, and the chickens had come home to roost (where some of them had sung, but not very well, let's face it), that everything -- everything -- was going to be alright.
And not only that, but seniors and students with ID got in to the castle for half price.
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