Lord of the Puddle: A Tragedy in Four Parts

(or, The Dangers of Internet Forums and Honest Answers)

Part the First—Against better judgment
“Hey boss, you have a letter.” There was a small hairy creature dancing about my office waving a battered envelope. He’s one of the gruach, the small fairy who delight in prodding me while I try to work. He is also an old friend, because I have poor tastes in friend.
I sighed and pulled off my pince nez. I’d get no work done now. “What is it, Puck? You’re not a mailman. You’ve read the letter, and now you look for trouble.”
He grinned. “It’s a message; it says come back and play.”
I snorted and extracted the document from his hand. “Puck, you should not try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.” A quick scan revealed about what I had expected. It was not an actual invitation but rather a scathing diatribe of political dogma terminating in a series of person insults impugning my intellect by association—nothing notably different from my usual mail.
He ignored me, climbing onto my desk and pushing away my papers to make himself comfortable. “I’ve already done some checking for you.”
“And?” I wadded the missive and tossed it into the wastebasket.
“And there’s a creature upstairs in the sink screaming ‘Get out of my ocean!’”
“The public washroom?”
“Yep. Boss, I think it’s a troll.”
I waved a hand at him dismissively. “I gave that up. I get angry and have to take my nitro. Leave an old man in peace, elf.”
Puck was not so easily dissuaded. “What if you left the gloves on? Played nice? Or maybe used just one hand? That’d be fair.” When I ignored him, he continued with a different tactic. “It said you were a strutting macho pig.”
“I’ve been called worse by better.”
He frowned at this and pressed on. “It says that promoting hard work is just furthering a limited thinking.”
“Wonderful. Tell it to get out of its puddle and go wait outside for the magic manna to fall and feed it.”
“I think the term sophomoric sophistry was used, you know?”
I hissed at the little beast. “What of it, Puck? I haven’t been a sophomore in decades and as for sophistry… I’ve read Sophocles and I’m not half the rhetoricist he was. That’s a compliment.”
He sat back, thinking, and put his feet on the edge of my coffee mug. “Hey boss, what’s a dominator mindset?”
Now there was a term I hadn’t heard since I made the long pilgrimage down from the ivory towers. “Feminist catch phrase. It basically means ‘male subject with unimpeachable logic’.”
“Says its IQ is over 190.”
“IQ tests skew with survey error after about 145. That just means our small creature in a smaller pond doesn’t understand how the test works. Puck, what’s really got you worked up?” I suspected I already knew most of the answer. I have never been shy about applying common sense to the problems facing the world and no honest statement goes unpunished.

Over the years, as the creatures which lived and thought at the fringes of humanity were pushed back, they had become increasingly desperate and aggressive. Lacking actual existence, these metaphysical beasties puffed themselves up with catch-phrases and sound-bytes and launched raids against the good people of my little village. A logical action, really, when you consider that they live in a world of magic and do not understand the problems which plague we mere mortals.

Puck, being a controversial personality by birth, was growing increasingly frustrated with my continued refusal to take a hatpin to the blowfish. The gruach sucked his teeth, tapped a fingernail on my desk, and chose a specific. “The male-bashing thing. I mean, nobody hears you yelling that your people were slaves so you should get special treatment. Besides, it says that you refused to respond to the actual point it was making.”
“Puck, Puck, Puck. The actual point it was making is that, for all the external accomplishments a person has, and no matter how old they get, sometimes, when things don’t go their way, they throw a temper tantrum. Just let it hold its breath until it turns blue and passes out. The poor thing is probably trying to digest a bellyful of media indignation after all. And stop teasing it; it’s probably scared to death. Anger is a coping mechanism. Besides, if I really did miss the point and it really did want an answer, it would have restated the premise, not peed on the table.”
This got his attention. Sadly, gruach enjoy scatological humor. “When did it pee on the table?”
“Bragging about IQ and various degrees granted by institutions. That’s the modern cultural equivalent of unzipping your fly, yelling ‘mine’s bigger!’ and marking territory.”
“Yea, but I think it’s a girl.”
“Woman, Puck. Girl is pejorative. Female human children are girls. Adult females are women. Adult females worthy of regard are ladies.”
“Whatever. So why don’t you pee back? I’ve seen your credentials.”
“Don’t be silly. It has papers; I have papers. The witchdoctor I met in Haiti had two human skulls on his desk. Who’s got more juju in the real world? Him, I'm afraid of. Academic sheepskins are just tribal fetishes. You cannot measure a person’s knowledge by their trinkets any more than you can measure the worth of a person by their income. False markers for shallow swimmers, all of it. It’s like saying Shakespeare was a bad playwright because he didn’t have a degree in writing screenplays.”
“Doesn’t make it right,” he sulked.
“True, but as my wife says, some days it sucks to be the grown-up. Tell you what, I’ll compromise. Go drag down the old corpse and we’ll take a look at it in the lab.”

Part the Second—A Dissection
Puck levered the rotting heap onto the autopsy table. For a tiny fairy, he is amazingly strong. Truth is, he gets on my nerves, but still, I’m rather fond of him. “So I went by the washroom on my way downstairs.”
“And?” I was at the shelf labeled ‘Socrates’, pulling down tools.
“I think it’s getting worse in there. The troll-thingee is all twisted around on itself and biting its own leg.”
“Self-contradiction?”
He nodded. “Very much.”
“Hate survives only as long as there is something to feed it. Sooner or later, it eats itself.”
“And now it’s gone after Jesus ben Josef the Christ, although it does admit that it’s never sullied its hands by actually reading the Book itself.”
“It must be really desperate for attention; typical though, to talk from a position of total ignorance and then brag about the very same ignorance. What’s to say? The Christ advocated communal living among His followers and compassion for the poor. That doesn’t conflict with capitalism; it’s a vital part of it. Notice that the Great One told people to care for the poor—not governments and not economic systems but the people themselves. If your pet troll believed what it said, it would start doing just that instead of trying to conquer the bathroom. Now, let’s take a look at this. What have we got?”
Puck peeled back the first layer of hide. “Title: ‘If our economic matrix supported human need instead of human greed. . .’”
“Hmmm; ends in an ellipsis? As though even the initial thought was incomplete? ‘Economic matrix’ instead of ‘system’ is interesting, probably a verbal preen, maybe for mating, attracting members of the opposite sex, like colorful feathering on a bird. The use of ‘if’ is also an intriguing choice, since it presumes a given not actually established. In this case, it juxtaposes need with greed—“
“Maybe it just likes to rhyme? To make itself seem smarter, like using song lyrics in place of articulated concepts?” interrupted Puck.
“Hush, elf, I’m working here. I wonder: if it perceives greed as an opposite to satisfying needs, what does it believe greed is? Why would a creature be greedy, if not to satisfy its own needs? Why would it horde, if not to safeguard against a lack of things it felt vital? I have to say, based on this coloring, I’d like to take a look into the mind of the troll which made it.”
Puck muttered a speculation most unfit for public recitation then pointed. “Look here, this may help. See? It differentiates money as a separate thing from those objects purchasable. It looks like its entire economic concept center never fully developed.”
“You’re right. The development seems to have been stunted by this growth here,” I pointed to a black mass. “That’s an amazingly large tumorous growth of frustrated artist pressing up against the cognitive center.”
My cohort nodded. “I see the liberal guilt you were referring to also; just under the over-developed worship of academia. Wow, the talent is almost vestigal.”
“Let’s get on with it. Do you see any actual questions mixed in with all this provocation and presupposition?”
“Just these two here.”
“Right then; cut them out and clean the gunk off of them, and we’ll have a look back in my office.”

Part the Third—Interrogatory Postmortem
Puck tossed the two questions on my desk—one landing in my coffee mug, and climbed up to sit beside them. “Here’s the first one: How do we get there? It grew out of: ‘Every human being born onto this planet should be issued a full share in the bounty of the planet. A child born tonight in Burundi would have the same ownership rights as a child born to a billionaire in the West.’”
I removed the question from my drink, poured the coffee into a potted plant, and tossed the mug in the trash. “Issued a full share, huh? Well that’s pretty simple. We just need to establish a global despotism. It would be an intrinsically evil act, but it would get us there. So, answer to the first part: destroy human freedom.”
“What about the ownership rights?”
I shrugged. “Already has them. Rights are inherent, not granted by governments. The child has the same right; the issue is the child gaining the same access.”
Puck smoothed his fur. “What would happen if we got there?”
“We’d all starve to death. You must never confuse having a thing with understanding the concept that provides you that thing. Remember Uganda’s economic collapse? The Newfoundland cod fiasco? And, saints have mercy, what about Uzbekistan? Giving equal access to resources into the hands of the unprepared and the irresponsible is a recipe for atrocity. What’s the second question?”
“It’s a weird one, boss. I’m afraid I may have garbled it in the removal. ‘Do we have to go through a phase of profound suffering before the "values" voters will back off?’ Frankly, I don’t even understand the question. Aren’t all votes based on values?”
I nodded. “Yes, but I believe that reference is to a specific value set which our creature finds especially offensive. That is, the Judeo-Christian paradigm.”
Puck arched a furry eyebrow. “But, umm, isn’t that the foundation of western civ and modern law?”
“So? Just because you benefit from something doesn’t mean you can’t hate it. In fact, it is a testimony to the power of the paradigm that it protects the very people who would savage it.”
“Did I mar it during removal then? It ends in the correct punctuation, but it doesn’t seem like a question.”
“It’s not. Not an honest one, anyway. Note the way that the occurrence of an event not approved by the creature is immediately linked to profound suffering. This is an old trick. You make a negative link in an interrogatory and, by doing so, create a question that presupposes its own answer. It’s a statement disguised as a question. Notice how, as part of the presupposed givens, is the assumption that these ‘values’ voters even need to back off? No consideration is possible, within the context of the discussion, that perhaps the application of these voters’ ideas will be a positive thing. Don’t feel bad Puck: you got the question out as best you could. It was just stillborn in the womb, choked on its own hubris. There was nothing you could do.”
He brightened at this and bounded to his feet. “So, shall we go up and throw rocks at the troll?”
“No. They thrive on attention. It compensates for the fact that they are hollow inside. The older ones are the worst; they’ve swallowed airy lies their entire lives. Not only are they mean, but they’re bloated and gassy, too. Leave it up there. I have some under-grads coming in for tutoring later. It will serve as a good illustration for our discussions on Calhoun and Burke.”

Part the Fourth—An Afterward of Damage Control
It was late in the day by the time Puck and I got around to sharing a pipe. I wanted to relax but, as always, he worried over details. “You know you’re going to get picked apart. And called a denominator.”
“Dominator,” I corrected him. “We should just be glad that I didn’t point out that, linguistically, men cannot be hysterical, or that women are the largest voting block and therefore are just as, if not more, responsible for failed politics than men. Consider, Puck: Freud would call it all a massive case of envy.”
The gruach cringed. “You’re going to get us killed.”
“Puck, my dear boy, sometimes you have to plant your tongue firmly in your cheek and laugh at yourself. That’s what separates us from the animals and the crazy fringe politicos. I was told there was satire and so there will be, even if I have to do it myself.” I took a deep breath, enjoying my leisure. “Besides, if you’re going to feel sorry for anyone, feel sorry for the poor janitor who has to clean up that mess in the washroom.”

If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended, that you have but slumber'd here, while these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: If you pardon, we will mend. And, as I am an honest Puck, if we have unearned luck, now to 'scape the serpent's tongue, we will make amends ere long else the Puck a liar call: So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.