Imagine you’re prime minister of this Rock of Sages. Piece of cake, right? That’s what we’re all about. We were born pretending we are what we are not and can never be. Make believe is our reality. Truth be told—at any rate, such truth as is true only in Wonderland—dwellers on this rock consider it a citizen’s first duty quickly to write off any mad hatter nutty enough to suggest it’s time to stop de carnival; time to quit pretending everyone but us is off his rocker, unholy, hypocritical, confused. Puerile imaginings be damned, we remain convinced our hemperor has always known better than to appear stark naked even in a Bruceville marketplace.
From our adult vantage, his fore and aft are nearly always concealed under a cloak of gold-plated intentions. Besides, nobody knows better than he what’s best for us. So what if from time immemorial he had told such whoppers as even a blind opposition MP could see through them? What’s lying, after all, if not the demonic art of persuading the great unwashed-unread that Alice, Humpty Dumpty, the March Hare, the White Rabbit, and the Cheshire Cat together had hunkered down one night under a huge impenetrable cloud of ganja smoke and in less than an hour knocked off the fine document that is the Constitution of Saint Lucia? This is Wonderland, remember? Fakin’ it is we kolcha!
The big problem continues to be that other thing known as the real world and what it considers reality. To the debilitating consternation of the fine residents of Wonderland, in particular its best minds, the real world (hereinafter referred to as RW) expects somehow to be repaid for whatever it doles out to beggar-leaders of the deprived, desperate and deluded. Currency doesn’t matter all that much to the lenders. They will settle for what little integrity, national pride and self-respect can be squeezed out of the best brains and free-lunch addicts at the trough—which was never much and explains why it’s the ordinary Wonderland denizen whose jugular is always on the line.
It’ll come as no big surprise that the angry bloodsucker now at our throat turns out to be none other than The Great Satan—so named by the virgin-addicted gods of the Middle East. According to the RW record, with not a word not a word not a word in our ear, our pretend leaders sold our collective soul to the devil and now the devil is demanding his due, in the name of individuals against whom our pretend guardians of life and property had allegedly committed real “gross violations of human rights.”
The accused had all been given a clean bill of health by our own respected pretend court system when our most trusted court interpreter and legal-ethics lecturer informed the good citizens of Wonderland that representatives of The Great Satan believed they had proof the people’s pretend protectors had pulled a fast one, aided and abetted by their pretend justice system.
You’d think such demonstrated RW contempt for our pretend laws would’ve caused our court jester to throw a fit. A fake one, even. But no. He said the all-powerful RW rulers were convinced they had “credible evidence” our pretend protectors of pretend life and property still had much to answer for, the heck with our pretend inquests.
What to do? Wonderland’s Mr. Wonderful had two choices: keep The Great Satan cool by any means necessary and guarantee Wonderland’s best brains another season of rooting like dogs at their now depleted trough—or play pretend hardball with The Great Satan. Alas, our pretend leader chose the latter route, sorta. He set up his own pretend court with himself as judge, jury and executioner—and accuser— thereby guaranteeing his own pretend result. And now he finds himself surrounded by real rocks and harder places.
The Great Satan has made it absolutely clear the real choices facing the pretend leader of Wonderland. And no matter how you add them up, you come up with one choice: The Great Satan’s way or the highway with the bridge to nowhere.
Still want to be prime minister of Wonderland?
Even without a US visa?
