Trumpy Smurf and General Kelly Smurf, his chief of staff
Right now I think this country needs a good lesson in how to avoid a fascist dictatorship. And we can’t look to 1930’s Germany to get an example. They didn’t avoid it. They got Hitler even though he did not have a Twitter account to use for making himself der Fuhrer.
So let’s tell a story about fascists and infringe on copyrights at the same time by telling you a Smurf story.
There was a time in Smurf village when their local politics became entirely too polarized into only two factions. One side was made up of the good-time Smurfs who had all the money. They called themselves the Pub-Lickins because they liked to win elections by cheating and through massive donations from the richest Smurfs among them, and also because they loved to lick up all the liquor at the local pub. The other side was called the Dumb-o-crats because they let the Pub-Lickins get away with every dirty trick they tried. When Papa Smurf finally retired from running the government as a benevolent Dumb-o-crat, the Pub-lickins cheated their way into control of the government with help from Gargamel, who would later be accused of collusion to help Trumpy Smurf win the Smurf Presidency.
It didn’t take long for Trumpy Smurf to prove to be a potential Fascist dictator. The first warning sign was the way he constantly lied about everything. He claimed Gargamel was a friend to the Smurfs. He also said he was the biggest winner in Smurf election history, and everybody would benefit bigly from his highly profitable rule.
Brainy Smurf, who started out as a Pub-lickin supporter of Trumpy, began to question the Trumpy ties to Gargamel. He opened an investigation. Trumpy then fired him. Later Brainy was mysteriously killed and eaten by Azrael, Gargamel’s cat.
Jokey Smurf, voiced by Stephen Colbert
Then Jokey Smurf began making fun of Trumpy relentlessly on his late night talk show. He made fun of him mostly by accurately repeating the news about what Trumpy’s administration did and said every single day. Azrael, Gargamel’s cat, mysteriously killed and ate Jokey too. And Trumpy successfully proved the allegations against him false by shouting “Fake News!” very loudly and very often.
At long last, Robert Mueller Smurf began investigating the election hack by Gargamel and the subsequent obstruction of justice committed by Trumpy with the aid of Azrael, Gargamel’s very hungry cat. He revealed that Gargamel had secretly intercepted the ballot boxes and removed all the votes for Smurfette. Thus Trumpy won by a margin of one vote to nothing. Clumsy Smurf had been the only one stupid enough to vote for Trumpy.
So, the election was nullified. A new, fairer election was set up. Hefty Smurf belted Azrael the cat in the head with a rock before anyone tried to vote. Then, the election was re-done with Hefty Smurf running against Smurfette. Gargamel was kept totally in the dark about everything having to do with the Smurf election. Robert Mueller Smurf put Trumpy Smurf in prison for the rest of his life. And Hefty Smurf won the election, because his backers in the Pub-Lickin Party had more money, and Hefty promised the biggest tax breaks, even though the tax relief would not help the average Smurf living paycheck to paycheck.
But at least the Smurfs managed to keep their democracy from becoming a fascist government for perpetuity. And Gargamel eventually master-minded a plot to break Trumpy Smurf out of the mushroom penitentiary, after which Azrael, Gargamel’s cat, ate Trumpy, not so mysteriously. Shortly thereafter, Azrael died of food poisoning. And the Smurfs then had no more fascist dictatorship because Hefty called his rule “compassionate conservatism” which Jokey Smurf would’ve pointed out is an oxymoron, except that Jokey Smurf was dead at that point.
Catch a Falling Star 
Reading Other Writers
Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else. It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own. You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.
And not every other writer is Robert Frost. Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s Gene Kelly. There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding. What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease? And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter? Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”? I think it is. Trolls are not smart.
I know people have to make an effort to understand me. When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head. In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it. See what I did there? It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense. That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures. If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire. I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues. But most people don’t. Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point. For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom? For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom? Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub. I know. I tried to stuff her in there for this picture. And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?
When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things. I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well. I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better. And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words. I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Thank God for that! And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot. And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value. It is always worth doing.
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