A Fairy Tale
for Our Times

by Doc Cuddy, Editor

Once upon a time there was a powerful leader of a great nation. This nation had given the world great things of soaring beauty, great thinkers, great inventors, great scientists, great achievements.

As this nation became more and more powerful, its leaders acted with every greater certitude and bravado.

Eventually a leader came to power in this great nation who, for various reasons, divided the world into good and evil. Those who shared his beliefs were good. All others were evil. This leader also came to believe that God spoke through him.

Desiring to set the world aright, this powerful leader began attacking weaker countries. His victories, though less than perfect, convinced him more firmly of the rightness of his beliefs and of the importance of imposing those beliefs on other nations.

Early days he was even able to convince the prime minister of the one of the world’s former great empires to side with him.

The great nation’s factories worked night and day, churning out the tools and weapons of war for the great leader’s unvanquished armies. Most of the populace of his nation were happy, proud in victory and contented in the prosperity of a soaring stock market. The happiness of the populace increased as the great leader discovered that if he, from his position of power, said the same things often enough, most of the people believed what they heard.

This leader never ever thought of himself as evil, not even as a bad guy. His advisors called him a great statesman, as did many of the nation’s newspapers, television stations, and citizens. Misunderstood, perhaps, even hated by much of the rest of the world, but evil? No, no.

Evil were the Others, especially the un-Christian others, and the great leader eventually came to see that what was critically important was to cleanse the world of the impure. Which he then set out to do.

Unfortunately for him, he misunderestimated the power of the evil Others and eventually found it necessary to shoot himself in a bunker in Berlin, no doubt for the first time in his life realizing only in his last moments that in some fairy tales the self-proclaimed Good and Great do necessarily not live happily ever after.

END

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