Well, you’ve finally convined me, folks! No longer can I subscribe to the hedonistic liberalism that has permeated and infested my thinking for as long as I can remember. No sir, you've finally convinced me that it’s time to buckle down my brain and think and feel just as you do about everything. But I’ve thought about my new mind just a little bit, and I think that although you are very well intentioned, perhaps you haven’t gone far enough. I feel somewhat compelled, therefore, to offer the following "modest proposal." I feel you are correct that rock and roll music is naught but the vile breath of Satan himself breathing all manner of foul and putrid impurities into the minds of our youth. We all know about the vicious cycle of drug and alcohol abuse and rampant sexual misconduct that this music causes. Ban it! Ban it, I say! Let us keep pure the minds of our future leaders. This is true also of the trash "literature" that the secular humanists are trying to fill our school libraries with. Burn the books. But don’t stop there. Books and recorded material are only two of the ways that blasphemous and dangerous ideas are spread. Indeed, we must destroy every possible device and manner of spreading these ideas which are an abomination unto the Lord. Because the dark one, Satan, is so clever, we don’t know exactly which ideas and which books are good. We must destroy every book, every record, every computer tape, every blank sheet of paper, every writing instrument. But ideas can be spread by word of mouth, too. Cut out every tongue! Destroy every brain cell capable of creating, considering, or repeating an idea. Ideas are the cause of all that is sinful in our world. Isn’t that what is really wrong with the Russians? They just don’t have the same ideas we have, right? Isn’t that why Moslems will burn in hell -- they don’t know the truth that we have in our good book -- the Bible? Did I say "book?" Buuurrnnn it!

Written Circa 1985. Originally published in Dayton Daily News Image