Civics 101

According to sources that years ago lost their tenuous link to real life--textbooks, for example, and Fox News--we North Americans live in a democracy. So I am confused about the escalating insurgencies of totalitarianism. George W. Bush, our National Embarrassment, famously (and publicly) revealed his yearning for the position of dictator, a post to which, like the Presidency, he could never ascend on his own dubious merits. Closer to home, merchants in my city have claimed titles such as Sturgeon King and Smoothie King. There is a Burger King on every corner. Elsewhere in the line of succession, we have dairy queens, dancing queens, drag queens, drama queens, the prince of tides, and the emperor of ice cream.

I confess to being closet monarchist, myself. Give the hoi polloi the right to vote, and some of them will invariably do so, and these will invariably be the ones who should not be allowed a say in how we live our lives. This is how we get Republicans in office. This is how Richard Hatch won the first "Survivor."

But with all of these emerging kingdoms (and queendoms), highly specialized or no, I am worried about war. What if the Burger King were to encroach on the territory of the Sturgeon King with a new kind of maritime Whopper? Can you imagine the outcome of that battle? And if these realms were to adopt Baby Doc Bush's "Doctrine of Preemption," then that would be all she wrote. The Burger King would only need the flimsiest fabricated evidence that the Smoothie King was hoarding Strawberries of Mass Destruction.

We would all get caught in the fallout.