The large, noisy crowd in attendance at the publically pre- announced event, Wednesday, December, 2099 @ 11:30 A.M., taking place in the rural town of Adherence, Pa., was far too distracted and animated to take any notice of the low, dark and disapproving rainclouds, rumbling, overhead. The attendees were exclusively men and boys; women, having been unanimously deemed, by the male Town Officials and the local Church Authority, as having no proper place at public events. In Adherence, Pa., women’s time was to be satisfactorily taken up with cleaning house, preparing meals, seeing to the proper maintenance of the Town Church, “Our Lady of Dire Repression,” and taking turns, cleaning and polishing the 25 ft., reverential Copper statue of a smiling, confident Donald J. Trump.
The town’s two old abandoned buildings, one formerly a public library, and the other, a deserted local newspaper office, have been designated to serve as the banquet halls for this major municipal event; thereby, effecting an economy of cost, and, as well, furnishing a current and rare use for such long neglected and steadily deteriorating edifices.
The entire cost of this municipal event, has been generously subscribed to, as usual, by the town’s two philanthropists, the patriotically outspoken, energy supplier, “Climate Change No- No, Inc.,” and the salubrious chemical company, “Mute the Pollute LLC,” both again honored for their perennial charity.
The established dress code for attendees, liberally permits the carrying of pistols and other defensive automatic weapons, but strictly mandates unsoiled jeans. The wearing of red baseball caps, bearing the patriotic meme: “Make America Great Again” is strongly encouraged, and optional bullet cartridge belts, or those of ordinary leather, with large western buckles, are equally acceptable.
The crowd is restless, almost unruly, and is impatient for American justice to be meted out to the despised miscreant, one, Mr. A. Page Turner, a confessed, former children’s librarian. It was reported that during one of the Town’s regular surprise searches, Mr. Turner had, with full intention and deliberation, secreted a shocking quantity of illicit literature, behind a secret wooden wall panel. These were said to include the nefarious, “Little Dorritt”, and “Great Expectations”, by Charles Dickens, “Moby Dick”, and “Billy Budd”, by Herman Melville,” Vanity Fair” by Charles Thackeray, and “Middlemarch”, by a brazen female author, pretending, by use of her nom- de- plume, to be male, the shameless hussy George Eliot.
The accused, Mr. A.P. Turner, has demonstrated absolutely no remorse whatsoever, by compounding his previous crime, with an attempt at still another heinous crime. He was intercepted by surprise, and caught in the archaic and atavistic act, of expressing his “last words” before execution of the sentence, by means of a hand- written letter, instead of by electronic transmission the patriotic, American way.
The Vicar of the aforesaid Town Church, the Right Rev. I.M. Priggish, in his dual role as Town Magistrate, directed, that, considering the serious extent of venality, together with the multiplicity of the accused’s crimes, he be punished by communal stoning, as provided in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible. However, due to the recent shortage of such natural materials, urgently needed for the repair of the broken Church Wall, that the criminal be administered the decreed Biblical punishment, by means of the punitive casting at him, of each and every hard cover volume of the 7th Edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica.
Thus, decent folk can breathe easily, knowing that justice has again been restored in the town of Adherence, Pa.
-p.
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