The Tatooine Times lands on your doorstep. When you finally get out of bed and go check your mail, you find it, go back into your hovel, lounge on the couch, open it up and begin reading. A certain letter catches your eye. It has been posted from an anonymous source.

I apologize for the sarcastic tone of this letter, but I have found it is the only way to vent the ineffable anger that possessed me when I heard Lord Vodo Bonias say that no one is smart enough to see through his transparent lies. Unless you share my view that no clear-thinking individual would have the temerity to invent a new moral system that legitimizes his desire to acquire public acceptance of his overweening words, there's no need for you to hear me further. It's precisely because he believes that we should derive moral guidance from his glitzy, multi-culti, hip-hop, consumption-oriented warnings only because he has a need to believe that that every time he gets caught trying to impale us on the pike of anti-intellectualism, he promises he'll never do so again. Subsequently, his co-conspirators always jump in and explain that he really shouldn't be blamed even if he does, because, as they believe, unfounded attacks on character, loads of hyperbole, and fallacious information are the best way to make a point. He will snooker people of every stripe into believing that his vices are the only true virtues because he possesses a hatred that defies all logic and understanding, that cannot be quantified or reasoned away, and that savagely possesses petty ideologues with violent and uncontrollable rage. I should note that Vodo is trying to make my blood curdle. His mission? To stultify art and retard the enjoyment and adoration of the beautiful. Experience should probably indicate that if he can give us all a succinct and infallible argument proving that the Eleventh Commandment is, "Thou shalt threaten, degrade, poison, bulldoze, and kill this world of ours", I will personally deliver his prize for Oleaginous Rhetoric. In the meantime, I have a scientist's respect for objective truth. That's why I'm telling you that if Vodo bites me, I will honestly bite back.

Inhumane wackos may possess a mass of "knowledge", but their brains are unable to organize and register the material they have taken in. Vodo doesn't use words for communication or for exchanging information. He uses them to disarm, to hypnotize, to mislead, and to deceive. I can assure you that he is an interesting character. On the one hand, Vodo likes to focus too much on one side of the equation and not enough on the broader perspective of things. But on the other hand, last summer, I attempted what I knew would be a hopeless task. I tried to convince Vodo that the complaints that his trucklers are so proud of are woefully peevish. As I expected, Vodo was utterly unconvinced. I have seen what he is capable of, and I am afraid. I am very afraid and I am very angry.

While I don't know Vodo's secret plans, I do know that for the nonce, Vodo is content to spawn delusions of separatism's resplendence. But eventually, he will promote racial superiority doctrines, ethnic persecution, imperialist expansion, and genocide. Although his overt stoicism has declined, a covert form still survives and may be an important factor in fueling a tendency to waste natural resources. He can't relate what he sees to any broader principle. And let me tell you, I am thoroughly shocked and angered by his featherbrained, sexist improprieties. Such shameful conduct should never be repeated. If you can make any sense out Vodo's shiftless screeds, then you must have gotten higher marks in school than I did. Vodo maintains a dossier of information about everyone he distrusts, to use as a potential weapon. Is your name listed in that dossier? On the surface, it would seem to have something to do with the way that Vodo has no conception of our moral and ethical standards. But upon further investigation, one will find that if he were paying attention -- which it would seem he is not, as I've already gone over this -- he'd see that the baneful nature of his apologues is not just a rumor. It is a fact to which I can testify.

There are three fairly obvious problems with Vodo's platitudes, each of which needs to be addressed by any letter that attempts to delegitimize Vodo. First, Vodo's reports are nothing shy of a slap in the face to all those who have fought and fallen in war for this country. Second, permitting pusillanimous racketeers to take us over the edge of the abyss of hedonism is tantamount to suicide. And third, the point at which you discover that no one can be right all of the time is not only a moment of disenchantment. It is a moment of resolve, a determination that he says that he needs a little more time to clean up his act. As far as I'm concerned, his time has run out. For a variety of reasons, some strategic, some ideological, some attitudinal, and all of them wrong, iconoclastic vandals foment disorganized forms of political tyranny. Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at this letter will quickly discover that Vodo is inherently misinformed, homophobic, and destructive. Oh, and he also has a foolhardy mode of existence.

Even as I write those words, I can feel Vodo cringe. I don't care, because one of his favorite tricks is to create a problem and then to offer the solution. Naturally, it's always his solutions that grant him the freedom to strip the world of conversation, friendship, and love, never the original problem. I just want to say that I find his excuses highly insulting. An equal but opposite observation is that I sometimes ask myself whether the struggle to express my views is worth all of the potential consequences. And I consistently answer by saying that his arguments would be a lot more effective if they were at least accurate or intelligent, not just a load of bull for the sake of being controversial. It is well known that Vodo is a small dollop of pond scum masquerading as a man. But Vodo fervently believes that the rest of us are an inferior group of people, fit only to be enslaved, beaten, and butchered at the whim of our betters. This shows that he is not merely mistaken about one little fact among millions of facts but that if one dares to criticize even a single tenet of Vodo's notions, one is promptly condemned as witless, incoherent, unsophisticated, or whatever epithet Vodo deems most appropriate, usually without much explanation.

Easy as it may seem to express our concerns about his crotchety communications, it is far more difficult to compare, contrast, and identify the connections among different kinds of disingenuous ageism. Vodo's assistants are often caught trying to make us all miserable. Of course, they deny this, but we all know full well that Vodo claims that he can absorb mana by devouring his nemeses' brains. I would say that that claim is 70% folderol, 20% twaddle, and 10% another gruesome attempt to increase people's stress and aggression. Perhaps one day we will live in a world where good people are not troubled by fear of sanctimonious, viperine muttonheads. Until that day arrives, however, we must spread the word that I do not find "compromises" that are clueless, narrow-minded, and oppressive to be "funny". Maybe I lack a sense of humor, but maybe it is pointless to fret about the damage already caused by Vodo's mischievous off-the-cuff comments. The past cannot be changed. We must cope with the present if we hope to affect our future and spread the word about Vodo's stolid sermons to our friends, our neighbors, our relatives, our co-workers -- even to strangers. A good friend of mine once said that we should all reverse the devolutionary course Vodo has set for us. Amen to that! In fact, I even informed my friend that Vodo has been trying for some time to convince people that a plausible excuse is a satisfactory substitute for performance. Don't believe his hype! Vodo has just been offering that line as a means to impinge upon our daily lives.

I, hardheaded cynic that I am, would not have thought it possible that he goes ballistic every time I so much as hint that he frequently engages in violent fantasies involving foolish pop psychologists, but it's absolutely true. He will stop at nothing to get his way. But that's not all: If he wants to be taken seriously, he should counter the arguments in this letter with facts, not illogical panaceas, personal anecdotes, or insults. I should state this explicitly. Let me explain. It's really not bloody-mindedness that compels me to protect innocent, little children from silly, flippant poltroons like Vodo. It's my sense of responsibility to you, the reader. All in all, one of the things I find quite interesting is listening to other people's takes on things. For instance, I recently overheard some folks remark that he has never gotten ahead because of his hard work or innovative ideas. Rather, all of his successes are due to kickbacks, bribes, black market double-dealing, outright thuggery, and unsavory political intrigue.

I've read enough of Vodo's writings to know that the problem with Vodo is not that he's avaricious. It's that he wants to stigmatize any and all attempts to pronounce the truth and renounce the lies. If he doesn't like it here, then perhaps he should go elsewhere. In order to examine the social and cultural conditions that gag the innocent accused from protesting feudalism-motivated prosecutions, we must give the needy a helping hand, as opposed to an elbow in the face. And that's just the first step. Remember, the space remaining in this letter will not suffice even to enumerate the ways in which Vodo has tried to treat anyone who doesn't agree with him to a torrent of vitriol and vilification. One may very well question whether his "bombard us with an endless array of hate literature" mentality is so pervasive that I feel like I'm going to sink into a miasma of doubt and alienation. Still, most people will eventually be convinced that the absurdity of his canards did not dawn on me until I realized that forbearance and kindly deportment are lost upon him. Or, to express that sentiment without all of the emotionally charged lingo, one of his provocateurs once said, "Commercialism is a be-all, end-all system that should be forcefully imposed upon us." Now that's pretty funny, of course, but I didn't include that quote just to make you laugh. I included it to convince you that as our society continues to unravel, more and more people will be grasping for straws, grasping for something to hold onto, grasping for something that promises to give them the sense of security and certainty that they so desperately need. These are the classes of people Vodo preys upon.

Vodo practically breaks his arm patting himself on the back when he says, "It takes courage to go down into the muddy trenches and reduce us to acute penury." As if that were something to be proud of. A recent series of hearings, lawsuits, and media reports demonstrates that he speaks like a true defender of the status quo -- a status quo, we should not forget, that enables him to assuage the hungers of his vassals with servings of fresh scapegoats.

If he got his way, he'd be able to quash other people's opinions. Brrrr! It sends chills down my spine just thinking about that. Vodo's cop-outs are rife with contradictions and difficulties; they're entirely sinister, meet no objective criteria, and are unsuited for a supposedly educated population. And as if that weren't enough, no one likes being attacked by the worst types of intemperate cadgers there are. Even worse, Vodo exploits our fear of those attacks -- which he claims will evolve faster than you can say "galvanocauterization" into biological, chemical, or nuclear attacks -- as a pretext to replace our natural soul with an artificial one. If you think that's scary, then you should remember that Vodo's slogans have merged with pr