Newt: An Allegory - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Newt: An Allegory
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Entirely true story, except that the embedded link is whimsical:

When I was 11 — even then, a young conservative — my family was on vacation in the mountains of North Carolina. On just the second day at our cabin in the mountaints, my brother and I caught a ribbon snake. Because it was black and gold and we were from New Orleans, we wanted to name it Saint. Our cousin Joe (my parents’ age), also on the trip, had some humorous reason, now long-forgotten, to name the snake “George.” So we compromised and called it St. George. Most people don’t realize it, but ribbon snakes after just a day or so stop being anti-social and resentful of captivity and become instead very social (or is it “sociable”?) and friendly.  But in order to engineer that change in attitude — in order to ensure St. George‘s social nature, and also to insure against the snake’s starvation — we had to keep the snake fed. 

What I would do is go to the tiny little stream up the road and look for particularly slimy rocks.  I discovered that under just about every slimy rock was a Newt.  A Newt is a slippery critter, so it would take some real work to actually catch hold of one and keep it from escaping.  But, each day, I would eventually capture a slippery Newt.

I would bring Newt back to the enclosure where we kept St. George, put Newt into the enclosure, and then run off to explore the mountain with my brother.  When I would return for lunch, I would check the enclosure and of course St. George would still be there.  But my Reaganite heart would always be glad to see that Newt, mysteriously, would be gone.  It was as if Newt magically disappeared. 

It now occurs to me that maybe, even at that young age, I had engaged in some right-wing social engineering.

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