SERIALIZATION OF “the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle” – Chapter 46 of 61
Warble Attacks Albert With His Price Tag Bazooka, and is in Turn Attacked by Taterskin
CHAPTER 46
Warble Attacks Albert With His Price Tag Bazooka, and is in Turn Attacked by Taterskin
Fast forward a few hours. How Warble accomplished his first goal is really rather a dull tale, and not worthy of your time in reading about it. It's enough to know that it has been “seen to.”
“Now that I've set up the Dollar as the sole legal tender for all debts public and private, for all eternity,” Warble congratulates himself, “I can add a few finishing touches--some masterful flourishes and elegant grace notes, if you will--here and there.”
“I can't wait,” Mary says, sarcastically.
“That's the spirit, Mary!” Warble beams, disregarding Mary's tone of voice. “I knew you had it in you.”
“And I knew you had it in you, Warble,” Mary replies. “In fact, you're full of it.”
“Be that as it may, Mary,” Warble continues, unwilling to wander down that path, “we can now jump start consumerism, and fittingly earn ourselves a pocketful of boodle in the process.”
“Don't tell me you're going to send everyone in America a tax rebate, and ask them to invest it in government bonds,” Marianne says.
“Not a bit of it!” Warble answers. “In fact, we're going to a time before there was an America, and to the land of precision and industriousness.”
“Japan?” Comfy guesses.
“No, you ignoramus!” Warble corrects. “Germany, of course! In Japan,” he adds, “all they do is play around with flowers, write terrible poetry, and eat raw fish—they're too indolent to even cook their seafood. No, those people are a hopeless case when it comes to being productive and making high-quality consumer goods.”
To make a short story perhaps a smidgen longer than it has any justifiable right to be, Warble and company traveled to Germany in the year 1717 (Warble just picked a "neat" sounding year at random) and handed over (at a bargain price) copies of the blueprints for Fulton's Steamboat, Whitney's Cotton Gin, and Ford's Assembly Line. In two shakes of a lamb's tail (roughly equivalent to three pendulum-like swishes of a horse's tail, or four elliptical swings of a fly-harassed cow's head), the Germanic tribes reinvented themselves as an economic miracle, a manufacturing mega-monolith, and Europe's economy was soon a raging inferno, burning white hot.
Warble has one more idea to implement before he “rests” from his works regarding this episode of history re-engineering: He wants to institute a standard price for everything in the known universe, and make it mandatory (punishable by many gruesome fates far worse than death) to comply. His plan?
“Minnie Pearl was a visionary, revolutionary genius!” he informs his fellow travelers. “She really knew how things should be, and set the example herself, even when she was fighting an uphill battle, swimming upstream, bucking the trend, and being laughed at for her troubles and self-sacrificing spirit.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjX1LpSow_g
“You mean everyone should greet everyone else with a boisterous and high-pitched 'How-dee,' Warble?” Albert asks.
“Boy howdy are you dumb, boy,” Warble complains, screwing up his face as if pure lemon extract had been squirted into one or both of his eyes. “I was referring to the price tag on her stylish hat.
“You should never consider anything you own as a permanent possession,” Warble continues. “Everything is for sale at the right price, and to save precious time and the heartbreak of pointless haggling, everything should be marked with a price tag. This will grease the wheels of commerce, and inter-consumer transactions will proceed at a breakneck pace. I buy her hat, she buys your lawnmower, you buy my worn-out socks, and everybody makes money.”
“Sounds a little gaudy, gauche, cheap, and cheesy to me, Warble,” Ward opines.
“Keep your opinion to yourself, you brainless Neanderthal!” Warble hotly remarks. “If we listened to you, progress would be impeded to the point that people would be satisfied to just look out their back door and listen to Buck Owens all the time.”
Soundtrack Note: “Lookin' Out My Back Door” by Creedence Clearwater Revival should be playing at this point
“What?!” Ward responds, who had never said—or thought—anything of the sort.
“You can all see as plain as day, I take it,” Warble continues, “that it is imperative that we place a price tag on everything. All traditional 'consumer goods' as well as heretofore untraditional consumer goods, including but not limited to: Trees, mountains, waterfalls, sunsets, sunrises, rivers, lakes, cloud formations, echoes, animals, people, haiku poetry—absolutely everything—needs to be price-tagged.”
“Everything?” Mary asks, skeptically.
“Everything,” Warble answers, resolutely, crossing his arms and shaking his head in the affirmative exactly one time.
And so it goes. Warble, equipped with a portable price tag printer (which he refers to as his “price tag bazooka”) strapped across his back, pioneers the way, using the leadership style termed “Management by Example” and the punishment style known as “abuse, denigrate, embarrass, intimidate, and threaten.”
Nothing escapes Warble's scrutiny. He tags houses, cars, domestic animals such as dogs, cats, canaries, and mud turtles; wild animals such as meadow voles, moles, mice, chipmunks, polecats, and duck-billed platypi (or platypuses); fig-mulberry trees, low-bush cranberry bushes (including individual cranberries, assigning each one a different price based on size, color, and overall appearance), hills, dales, vales, valleys, alleys, ...well, you get the picture.
“My inventory is growing at a breakneck pace!” Warble excitedly reports, to every one in general but no one in particular. “I've already earned a cool billion or so.”
“Earned? How so, Warble? Those things you've tagged don't belong to you,” Jacques reasons.
“Don't they?” Warble counters. “'Finders keepers, losers weepers.' Oh, that reminds me, I'll tag that weeping willow over there, and that fish-finder in that boot there yonder—separate from the boat, because it's an add-on, and was indubitably sold separately.”
“Some people aren't going to like this, Warble,” Marianne warns.
“Yeah, and some people are sore losers,” Warble responds. “If they kick up a fuss, it'll be into the calaboose with them. Anyone interfering in the sacred art of consumer commerce will be subject to—as is logical and only right—capital punishment.”
“You would have them killed for trying to retain their own private property?” Marianne questions.
“No, you knucklehead,” Warble scolds. “That's not what capital punishment is. Capital punishment is worse than that: It's when a person is locked into a room with an old maid teacher and forced to recite the capitals of all 49 states, over and over again, until they lose their minds and turn into Congressmen.”
“That's where congressmen come from?” Albert asks incredulously.
“Stick with me, kid,” Warble says, putting his arm around Albert's shoulders, “and you'll eventually pick up all the intricacies of the inner workings of the government.”
Warble warms to his task, thinking there is finally someone in the group with potential, who truly appreciates the pearls of wisdom he has at his disposal, crammed like sardines into his storehouse of knowledge.
“Here's an interesting one for you, Albert:” Warble says. “Politicians must take the hypocritic oath, whose preamble is: 'First do no harm to the olive oil'—or the Popeye, for that matter. Bluto and Brutus are up for grabs, of course. As for Wimpy, you're on your own. Now the postamble of the hypocritic oath is: 'Kick 'em when they're down and pulverize 'em once they're unconscious.'”
“So how long have you been in politics, Mr. McGorkle?” Albert meekly asks, fearful of antagonizing our protagonist.
“Me? I'm not in politics. What makes you think I, of all people, would be in politics, Albert? I wouldn't qualify for the post--I'm not a greedy, stupid, blow-hard glory-hog.”
“You're not?” Albert innocently replies, confused and a little discombobulated—he can't imagine anyone more qualified for a political career than Warble.
Without giving the question the dignity of a reply, Warble, with a look of uncaged rage in his eyes, whips out his price tag bazooka. Albert, deducing Warble's intentions, turns tail and runs, but Warble chases down his prey in short order. Warble leaps on Albert's back, pummels him about the head and shoulders a good while, and then marks him down 31.4%.
A yellow streak flashes through the air, knocking Warble off Albert. Rolling around in the mud and the blood and the beer (Warble had just been enjoying a cold one), Warble and Taterskin engage in a wrestling match of epic proportions. Each time Taterskin lunges at his throat, Warble fends him off with one arm while marking his price down with the other.
Soundtrack Note: “A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash
As Taterskin's price drops from a high of $100 down to an unheard-of and unprecedented -$3.14, he is about to pounce on Warble, fangs bared, a growl of warning rumbling in his throat.
Albert picks himself up, dusts himself off, looks down at Warble, and then at his dog.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle” is being serialized in this space each Sunday and Thursday; it is also available in its entirety from here.
You can listen to the recording of this excerpt, by the author’s alter ego, here: