The Fred Program of Re-Education

There are men in American politics, financial circles and media who are in dire need of re-education. These men have positions of great authority, some have been in authority for decades, but they persist in exercising their authority in ways that vary from the merely selfish to the deeply immoral. Much of their behavior is deeply anathema to the American ideal, often to the very American system that they profess to love and serve. They will continue their mischievous, destructive ways after the coming election if they are allowed, and they should be stopped.

The filth and corruption that they spew has contaminated our body politic to the degree that a genuinely decent family man like Barack Obama, a genuinely intelligent, thoughtful politician whose career displays little or no self interest, can be shamelessly denigrated with an endless stream of outright lies, and this can be done not only with impunity, but also with the cooperation of major media outlets, who dishonestly broadcast that both sides are guilty. This shit has got to stop.

The Candidates.

I am talking about men like morbidly obese “values” expert and gambling aficionado, William Bennett; cherubic faux academic and draft-dodger, the oddly named Newt Gingrich; darkly threatening draft-dodger and terror monger, Dick Cheney; draft-dodging punk/bully, Bill O’Reilly; draft-dodging and stock frauding, weirdly disoriented President of the United States, George W. Bush. These men, and many others, were too busy planning their future prosperity to answer their countries clarion call in times of war, but ever since the threat of personal hardship was lifted they have been espousing warfare at the expense of others, and energetically aggrandizing themselves, usually without actually producing anything of value, and often at the direct expense of the American people.

There are lots of younger men too, men who have never been threatened with anything in their lives except the possibility of actually working for a living. I’d recruit people from Wall Street too, and some managed health care folks too, I don’t think that the insurance industry would get away undiminished. I’ll make more of a definitive list after I get the authorization to set up the camp.

The Camp.

Yes, a camp, but I’m not a hard guy, the level of hardship will be very, very low. Unless, that is, you find actual work to be hardship. I admit, my first inclination was to put the camp in North Dakota, way out in the Chinook Wind somewhere, no trees, you know, like Mars with breathable air, but I quickly decided that North Dakota would be unnecessarily punitive. This is only re-education, after all, not some Stalinist Gulag death camp. So I think way out in the woods of Maine is a better idea, maybe have a pretty lake nearby. That would be nice.

I admit, though, that I have read Solzhenitzen (sp), and those Soviets were certainly the geniuses of the concentration camp. The Nazi’s just worked people to death, trusting to an endless supply of death-camp workers. Foolish, really, like it was so easy to make machine gun bullets in long belts that wouldn’t jam in the MG 42’s, their soldiers knew better and wished that the workers were of better quality. The Soviets figured out ways to maximize the work output of inmates who had no interest in the end product. The work of the Nazi’s is of little use to the modern day practitioner, but I have drawn more than a little inspiration from the successes of the Soviets.

The Program.

The program is work. The only political indoctrination will be, shut the fuck up and stop complaining, it’s about fucking time you did some actual work instead of just raising hell by erupting in public for a so-called living. The work, I believe, will be the building of unnecessary walls. Perfectly accurate, beautifully realized walls, made from reinforced concreter, cinder-blocks and bricks, placed in precise rows and perhaps adorned in flowers, when the weather permits. If we run out of space, the work may become the demolition of unnecessary walls, by hand, preserving one hundred percent of the materials for further use, of course.

Here’s where the Soviet experience comes in. How do you get an uncooperative, fat, lazy, brutally stupid, evil minded person, whose life has been devoted to wrecking American society, to build a wall against his will? The answer is simple: you make his nutrition and comfort dependant upon work output. No, I’m not going to starve anybody, this is America after all, not some Soviet death camp. But if a candidate refuses to work, his meals will come two a day. The first will be some decent bread and some thin vegetable soup. The second will be a cup of good, white rice and a piece of fish or something. If your not working, and you’re overweight to begin with, seven hundred or so calories a day should be lavish. Of course, the candidates will all have unlimited access to drinking water and proper sanitation.

Those who work will be fed three proper meals a day. A good breakfast, at about five thirty a.m., if the previous days quota had been met; a nice, hot lunch, if the morning’s quota had been met; and a good, hot dinner after work, about six p.m., if the days quota had been met. With extras if the days quota had been exceeded, extras like magazines, or dessert, or decks of cards, maybe board games like Monopoly, or special food, or maybe videos of Walt Disney movies. No television, that would be counterproductive. Lights out at nine o’clock.

Another tip from the endlessly inventive Soviets: put the candidates in teams. If one candidate refuses to work, the entire team is confined to quarters with the limited rations and no extras. The team lives together, in a warm, dry but very plain room built to house them all comfortably. The team can have a talk with the recalcitrant candidate, and see if they can all come to an agreement, as a team. The same thing happens in the field. If a team member slacks off and the team does not meet its goals, the entire team misses dinner and “Peter Pan” on a nice TV. They can then discuss the matter. It all works very well in practice, you can look it up.

A year or two of this should be plenty for most candidates. I believe that was the Vietnamese experience. They just sent people down to the rice farms for a while. Their candidates were merely small businessmen or academics, though, I believe that we in America have some tougher nuts to crack. So the walls.

I propose that after the election we simply wait until these people start their anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-Constitution, anti-logic, and anti-common-decency campaign of obstruction and hindrance of the elected president of the United States, recall that something similar was done in the 1990’s with disastrous consequences, and declare these people terrorists under the Patriot Act and sentence them to re-education. Habeus corpus my ass, isn’t that the way we do it now? I’ll take care of the rest.