Fable

Fable

I was trying to stand for something so I talked in the streets. Strangers passed me on the sidewalks and they looked away as if I was a tramp. In these times men aren’t supposed to talk about civil liberties or human rights while walking alone on the ordinary thoroughfares even though this is the country of Jefferson and Paine and Frederic Douglas. “Aha!” I thought. “I’ll get me one of those mobile telephones—not a real one of course, but one that’s been thrown away. And I’ll hold it next to my ear and talk about habeas corpus outside this Laundromat and people will say:”Ah, there is a man speaking the truth to someone unseen, but not to me—just the way we like it in

America

.”

Let this be a lesson to you brethren. My dead cell phone began vibrating and Lo, I received messages from the mournful dead. Naturally some were frivolous, dead people are jokers like the rest of us, so Ladislaw from an undisclosed Hansiatic city wanted to know how antinomianism is faring in Cincinnati and what can you say to a dead man like that?

But my dead phone received some very serious dead calls. The best was from a long dead caller who asked to remain unidentified. He wondered why capital is not re-invested by the most successful capitalists and pointed out that Dick Cheney has moved his money to

Dubai

. “Reagan is here with us,” said this incognito ancestor of someone who could be my neighbor. “Reagan just keeps asking, “How can they screw up my trickle down idea so aggressively?” And none of the dead have an answer for Reagan. The dead don’t understand greed either. 

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