Live long enough and you pretty much see it all. Well maybe not All, but you do eventually recognize what you are looking at when it whops you upside the head. Old Stanley Hubbard lived back in the Hollows every one of his 93 years. He had a game leg long as I knew him, but it never slowed him down, and I mean never. I would see him pretty much every day, driving around on his tractor and using a cleverly fashioned crutch in place of his left leg.

He had constructed the crutch to fit between the tractor’s clutch pedal and the edge of the seat where he’d jam it in and force the pedal down even as he turned the key and revved the engine. What he really enjoyed was the look on a person’s face as he drove off before they had a chance to say, “Hey old timer, need a hand getting into that thing?”

Now over time, his nifty crutch wore down you see, and one day, it just no longer did the job. Stanley grumbled about it for weeks, fussing about how he would have to lengthen his crutch to match the clutch. ‘Course that would cause his ambulating to further suffer.

Meanwhile, the clutch was misbehaving too. Stanley ended up with his tractor in pieces while the hay harvest was ready and the sun was shining. He was ranting, saying things I barely understood, something about farmers going out of business with clutches and such. He did get his tractor up and running but the problem with the short crutch was still causing cussing at every turn. After all, his reputation was at stake.

I wanted to help the old guy and considered everything he’d told me about the crutch and the clutch and the whole effect thing when he jumped up and turned it on.

“Stanley,” I said, interrupting him, “let me see your crutch.”

It took some convincing, but in the end he let me examine it. Worn and rough looking, the bottom of it was clearly not its original length and the padding on the top was a shadow of its former self. It was disintegrating and wrapped in masking tape, an end of which fluttered raggedly off to one side.

Stanley didn’t like the way duct tape felt under his arms, and put up with floppy masking tape instead. Well, we found some fresh tape and extra padding to beef up the top of the crutch. The idea being that if we added to the top we’d account for the wear on the bottom. Last memory I have of the man is of him leaping onto a tractor and driving off before you could gather your wits about you enough to wonder if old men need a license to do shit like that.

Stanley had a trick he would do with an ax. He had a way of giving it a little twist just as it entered the wood, supercharging the stroke and greatly increasing its effective splitting power. Years of practice had honed his skill to an art form. He could split wood for hours.

One day he challenged me to a wood splitting contest. Now I was about 20 or so, and Stanley was about 75 or so. But I had been around long enough to know I had a snowball’s chance of winning this one. So I declined, and waited until the opportunity came round again so I could observe the outcome. Sure enough, later on that that summer I heard him challenge a young farm hand to have a go with him; ax vs. splitting maul for one day’s wages.

We were cleaning rocks from the potato patch as I recall. Stanley doled out the logs, 5 per man. Each log had to be split cleanly in half. The farm hand carefully positioned his first log onto a large block and arranged the others nearby. Stanley scattered his loosely around himself, propping the logs up against whatever was around.

Ready, set GO! Within a few seconds, Stanley had split all 5 logs neatly in half. The poor farm hand, all of 19 himself had only split 2. Everyone proceeded to back slap and all of that. The young hand was fighting back tears of his wounded pride, and for his day of hard work, now free to the crafty old man.

Being the quiet one (at the moment), I took the time to examine things a little closer. Those logs Stanley casually leaned his logs up against, looked suspiciously well placed to optimize the angle of the firewood propped up against them. And as to the split logs themselves, well Stanley’s was all ash—not a knot to be found amongst them. The others, a mix of hard beech and rock maple. These were not the kind of odds I like to see in a challenge of wits and skill, so very quickly, I picked out 10 logs. Five ash for me, and 5 green gnarly beech for Stanley.

I propped mine up against some well-placed blocks and invited old Stanley to a match for my day’s wages. At first he was glad as could be to have the opportunity to take another fool for his money, but the look on his face changed quickly when he surveyed the scene.

Ready, set GO! I decimated my 5 logs before he got through beating up the first piece of green beech! I laughed so hard I had tears streaming down my face.

“Now don’t you feel bad about cheating an old man?” one of the boys asked me.

“Not at all,” I replied jauntily.

“Tell you what, Stanley,” I said. “You give this boy back his day’s earnings, and we can call it even.”

My promise of never mentioning the contest sealed the deal. I don’t think he minds if I tell the story now that he’s gone. Old Stanley didn’t mind taking a fool for his money, but he had a sense of humor and didn’t fuss too much once his bluff was called.

This however is not the case with the Bushites, whose ongoing assault upon our civilian rights and our civilian treasury make them more akin to the Mafia than any political “party.” But I am not going to bore you with yet another rant about the most evil group of warlords and rape and pillage capitalists to be assembled in Washington since Andrew Jackson’s genocidal attack upon the natives of this land, (often before the ink on the treaty was dry).

Nope. Today I am going to talk about Fascism. Why? Because no one is talking about it. And that means you need to know.

Faithful readers have heard me draw parallels between the Neocons and Fascism in previous essays. This characterization is in fact, extremely accurate. According to Wikipedia, “Fascists opposed democratic capitalist economics along with socialism, Marxism, and liberal democracy. They viewed the state as an organic entity in a positive light rather than as an institution designed to protect collective and individual rights, or as one that should be held in check.

It tended to reject the Marxist notion of social classes (and universally dismissed the concept of class conflict), replacing it instead with two more nebulous struggles: conflict between races and the struggle of the youth versus their elders. This meant embracing nationalism and mysticism, and advancing ideas of strength and power as means of legitimacy, a might makes right that glorified war as an end it itself and determinant of truth and worthiness.

An affinity to these ideas can be found in Social Darwinism. Historically, proponents of Social Darwinism used the theory to justify social inequality as being meritocratic, and it has also been used to justify racism and imperialism.”

Fascism is also typified by "totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic. The fascist state regulates and controls (as opposed to nationalizing) the means of production. Fascism exalts the nation, state, or race as superior to the individuals, institutions, or groups composing it. Fascism uses explicit populist rhetoric; calls for a heroic mass effort to restore past greatness; and demands loyalty to a single leader, often to the point of a cult of personality.”

Neocons claim to support and defend democratic capitalist economics. In fact they subvert them in their mad run on our National Treasures and Treasury. Big business rules big time, and the barriers between big business and big government have been blurred as the two have merged over time. This is what fascism is; the merging of Corporatism/Globalization and your tax dollars.

As you can see by reading the definition of fascism, it is definitely back in style, though with a few superficial changes. For example, mysticism is replaced with Christian mysticism. Class conflict is replaced by rich aristocrats that don’t have to play by the rules, and the peasantry, which does. Social inequality is now not only justified, it is sanctified. Citizen rights are replaced by siege mentality, in order to greater facilitate the flow of resources from the peasantry to the aristocrats.

The current administration is simply the culmination of a movement Eisenhower warned us about back in 1959. Rather than pursue a “nebulous conflict between races and the struggle of the youth versus their elders,” the modern fascists pursue a philosophy of aristocratism blended with fuzzy Christian apocalyptic mysticism.

This translates as “God loves me more because I am rich.” If he loved you more, you would have a minimum net worth of 50 million dollars too. $50M being the minimum entry level to play with the big boys. If you are wondering who is running things, please note that the Skull and Bones Society, which “taps” 14 to 16 new members a year, ran three major candidates in the last presidential election. Bush, Leiberman, and Kerry all belong to the same club of the country’s richest and most powerful, and all three bow to the same masters.

Major political and economic policies are the same between all three, differing only in the minutiae of implementation. No matter who won the election, they had it covered.

Leiberman of course is a Republican disguised as a Democrat. Kerry is an aristocrat disguised as a human being. Bush II is just a monkey-man disguised as, well, there is no disguising it—is there?

Sometimes I wonder what Old Stanley would think of the bastards in Washington looting the Treasury and spying on you and perhaps even your favorite organic soap maker. Not much I suppose. Stanley had a distinct disdain for those amateurs in Montpelier. The professional bandits in Washington have the local boys beat cold. Maybe he would give them the kind of arms length professional courtesy the fox has for the wolf.

These essays were written for entertainment purposes only. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of Vermont Soap, its employees, board of directors, our Web host, Web designer, the neighbors who live up the road; or any of the thousands of people who use our stuff. Originally published in edited form by Comic News. Many thanks to Seasoned Books, without which, life in the Hollow may never have become a reality.