Propaganda
There was the day I left and headed out to the aerodrome where a great machine was awaiting me, and I entered it and considered myself one with the mass of beings therein who saluted me with one hand.
It was a long time before I could get to the rear of the thing and salute, there, the gigantic "standing officer," who was three times the height of the thing and engorged on confetti, which rained over the other occupants of the thing as he hiccoughed for minutes which seemed like years--were in fact years, that's why he "stood on us"--and the occupants hated him somewhat but certainly not a lot, and I loved him with much of my heart.
"Hello," I said. I expressed a good many things I haven't expressed to anyone else. I broke down and wept, in fact, and brought my wife and child into the picture--holding the wife by my pinky, the child by the ring in my septum--and described a lot of events that encircled not only myself and this requisite wife and this requisite child but also the life of the whole community (because of extension). I was molar-decrepit! femur-rejected! bladder-tumescent! lemur-senescent! Lemur, lemur, shoved up with flaws. Many of those broad sorrows descendant on lapdogs of the most civilized peoples arrayed themselves against me like one arrow, two arrow, three, and I stood brave as chiggers, as slapstick besotted the clues by which I, or we, might escape this beaming flap.
He, of course, didn't speak.
Then I calmed down and everything was okay and I launched into a sack of my orneriness using the full complement of elves crouched beneath the feet of the people now behind me (geometry flails and swoons)--the elves rising up and describing in one breath the massing of loaves at the gentrification of wheezes, a prime elf holiday. My orneriness did not last.
Everything scurried about!
"Banish me to the hum and the drum of solicitousness," someone said. I turned to him and with nebulous eye told of shrieking and limping and sodden frenzies this way and that way, all.
"Yes," he said, quite grateful.
The machine lifted off and described its familiar curlicue through the matchless streets of heaven, cloud after cloud quite uncontrary. The pilot was somewhere boarded up and hungry, taught not to expect much from those masses who will respect you up the yin-yang because you are a pilot, lieutenant. The rest of us shimmied around our capsules of sluggishness and perfection like so much dimness in a cabriolet.