Dear George,
Augustine had his City of God. It is time to begin work on your opus, The Hierarchy of Freedom. This will be your master plan for the New American State (NAS). In this work you will pull off a deft sleight of hand by shrinking government to create the Power State, or in the lingo of today’s “rebels”, you will be the midwife of Extreme Government. (Orwell may have had his newspeak; but you’ve gone him one better. You have your negaspeak: speech that self-destructs even as it is uttered.)
Now just between us grown ups, you and I know that ideology is a synonym for “fairy tale,” (just as we know that realpolitik is an imperial wet dream). But the truth be told, ideology is the spinal chord upon which the body politic is hung. This country almost went down the tubes in the 60s when the young clearly saw that it was all a fairy tale. Thank God their response to this vision was to sink into drugs and self indulgence. And while they were stoned and hypnotized by their fictive egos the silent majority was able to reassert the Christian foundation of our country.
The key word here is “structure.” Just as a child is happiest in a well-structured household, so is the citizen happiest in a tightly-structured society. A person can endure any misery as long as they know what their station in life is. Freedom only creates angst and indecision.
Here is where your “negaspeak” comes into play. Because we are a democratic society, we need a nonstructural structure, a hierarchy that isn’t. We need freedom that is not free. So we call hierarchy an populist expression. We create a structure that reflects the people’s "will", which, in a democracy, is seen as a manifestation of Devine Will.
Populist expression reaches its greatest purity in the focus group. However, your focus groups, being exercises in pure democracy will employ a methodology that encourages democratic expression channeled along tightly controlled lines of expediency. Start with the conclusions you want and frame the questions to arrive at your conclusions. It’s much more efficient and saves the stress of people floundering for answers and consensus.
Now here are your conclusions. In the grand scheme of things, who is the fittest to rule? And taking as our model “The Great Chain of Being” as elucidated by Christian thinkers of yore, how is this hierarchy (that isn’t) to be structured from bottom to top? We know that freedom is the highest expression of God’s will. And we know that Jesus embodied God’s will on Earth. Now, it’s a given that we are all children of God. But as anyone who has ever lived in a large family knows, some are closer to the Father than others. This is our criteria. Let’s begin at the bottom of the chain.
Obviously, any group that does not except Jesus as their personal savior is sucking wind. The path of freedom (that really isn’t) runs through Jesus. They lose! For that matter, the Good News is so good that we are justified in using whatever pressure is necessary to encourage them to accept this simple and obvious truth. Those who refuse to accept Jesus are exercising their free will, which we will accept and defend even as we disenfranchise them.
While our Catholic brethren do worship Christ, their approach is problematic in that it places a bureaucracy between the worshiper and Jesus. Ours is to be a nonstructural structure the structure of which requires that the structure be unstructured. There can be no overt expression of hierarchy, so that rules out the Catholics.
The Protestant, on the other hand, throws himself at Jesus’ feet and wraps his arms around His ankles as tears of joy and repentance soak the hem of the Devine Garment. (Okay! We know most Protestants are too uptight for that sort of emotional outburst. But the imagery is effective. Keep it!) Thus is the top rung of our ladder filled.
But, there’s a fly in the ointment. Many of our brethren of a different tint confess the Protestant faith. The problem is that they are just too passionate about their faith. As I once told you, there is a thin line between religious passion and political passion. If we could only make them all Anglicans we might have something to work with. But as it stands now, their input will have to go to the bottom of the inbox.
No matter how carefully the New American State (NAS) is structured, you’re always going to have malcontents and naysayers. These unfortunates may require a firm application of Christian love (see Abu Ghraib) to facilitate their return to normality. Those most qualified to apply this “love” are not the hard of heart, but those who get a spiritual rush from the suffering of others. The best candidates are those with a shaky self esteem, the ones who get a charge out of reality TV.
Once this nonstructural structure is in place our great country will be able to look forward to a millennium of a peace born of conflict, security born of fear, and prosperity born of poverty. Onward and upward, George, to the greater glory of Christ. Verily, yours will be a special place in the highest circle of heaven when you pass.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
7:57:51 AM 
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