Dear George,
Listen, as I tell you of the saga of Walter Soehnge, an American hero and true patriot of such great modesty that he is really pissed off about being an American hero and a true patriot.
Walter is a man from the old school, a traditionalist who still holds the quaint notion that a man should pay down his debt as quickly as possible. Which is why he and his wife, faced with a healthy balance on their JC Penny Platinum Credit Card, sent them a check for $6522?
When he discovered that his check hadn’t cleared the bank, he called the card company to find out why. That’s when he learned that he had just become a soldier in the fight against terrorism. It seems the Department of Homeland Security had taken a keen interest in Walter’s payment. You see, the amount he sent in was larger than his normal monthly payment, and the law decrees that if a monthly payment exceeds the normal monthly payment by a certain percentage, the bank must notify DHS, who then vetted Walter to be sure his motives were pure.
Well, Walter wasn’t shipped of to Gitmo, his check finally cleared, and Walter, in his modesty, is “madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail.”
What Walter doesn’t understand is that DHS is performing two services when it investigates inordinately large credit card payments. First, it is addressing a potential terrorist threat. I mean, what’s the first thing a terrorist is going to do if he’s planning to fly a plane into a building? The man is going to get his affairs in order and pay down his credit card balances.
Then there is the potential economic threat. Debt is an instrument of social control. The man up to his balls in debt isn’t about to rock the boat. It’s a throwback to the days of sharecropping when plantation owners cooked the books to keep their sharecroppers in perpetual debt so they could get the sheriff after them is they got uppity. Nor must we forget that if Americans started paying down their debt it would strike a devastating blow to the our banking system, which needs its usurious interest payments to stay solvent.
Yes, Walter is a true hero. Thanks to his check, America is a little safer. Good citizens are not afraid to keep the government informed of their credit card activity. The defense of freedom demands that we sacrifice it.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
9:21:52 PM 
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