Crack Slippage

2000 Mythsteries and Other Pithy Shorts #21

Once upon a long ago, a new country came into being when criminals, sinners and remittance men lammed out from a monoreligic monarchy.

With sudden foresight these men founded a mockracy, as they called it, in which the majority ruled and every fowl had a pot. In time, they began to insure for failure of otherbodies to reach full dream potential by creating a tontine-like plot whereby earnings would be lifted from each worker and placed in one big bucket not to be mixed with other buckets' contents. When onebody began slipping through a crack, or became olden aged, it could then cry out and retrieve some of the bucketed boons.

This plan worked for some time until a shrub man pricked a hole in the biggest bucket and the goods began trickling out which meant that when you began to fall through the crack, you better find anotherbody to help.

There came a great uproar and this shrub person was put off the throne. Life went on until, in an unlikely deja vu, a thorn off that old shrub gained the throne and poked another bucket hole.

When the multitudinous oldenagers discovered the fraud they outraged and a foreign war was launched to get their minds switched and to provide a gathering front to shore up the flagging buckets. Now the savings of all the crack-faller-throughs drained into a desert across the sea.

While these folks watched the war, the bucket brigade added a sniff and scratch watermark to the final pail funds just before delivery to the recipients.

Without much thinking, the oldsters and the faller-throughs scratched and sniffed their terminal monies and were snuffed before they could grump about the empty bucket

And that's how the one for all and all for one theory was out cast and the mockracy devolved.