As a freshmen in college, I was required to read Jonathan Swift's, “A Modest Proposal.” This eighteenth century satirical short story proposing to boil and eat children so shocked so me, that I still remember it more than forty years later. It was Swift’s intention to the shake ruling classes out of their complacency and denial about the extreme poverty in Ireland. In that spirit, I gave this speech at my "Toastmasters" Club.

Throughout man’s existence, some folks have always oppressed others. Because they liked the thrill of control, wealth and power. This is still true today.

In the beginning, such oppressors were big hairy beasts, who broke bones with sticks and stones to dominate groupies, tribes and clans.

Over centuries, hairy beasts have always used the latest tech-toys to increase death and destruction to help enlarge their playgrounds. Kings and queens moved pawns, knights and armies around seas, countries and continents. Like pieces on chessboards. Their tools included everything from thumbscrews to stretching racks. From catapults to cannon balls.

However, technological advances have changed the way hairy beasts can now play their games. Because of electric shavers, cell phones and airplanes, even the hairiest ones can now sneak among their subjects like foxes, rats and weasels. Presently one of the biggest beasts can hide in caves or polished palaces. From there, he can direct the destruction of far-off tall buildings with simple voice commands and clever keystrokes. Like playing Nintendo, Pac Man or Doom.

Will it only be a function of time before Armin’s Avalanche Axiom will kick in? Hairy little games are spreading around the globe and these might grow into an avalanche to crush our species.

But rejoice! Great thinkers have also developed tools which big beasts can now use for bloodless exploitation. Until recently, these included printing presses, radio and television.

I will cite but one of many examples of how to reap wealth without the bloody gore. One merry band of beasts prints money, issues notes, bonds and bills. Most of which are IOU's backed by nothing but promises. Promises as phony as, “I promise pot for every chicken, it takes a village to boil a child, I will leave no dollar behind.”

A line graph of the dollar shows its value more or less steady from its gold-backed beginnings until the 1913 creation of the Federal Reverse System. Since then, this system has been reversing the rewards for your labors. Since then, your money’s buying power has been diving towards the bottom like a swan dive from a cliff. This proves that hairy beasts have been “inflating,” that is devaluating our money, by excessive printing of notes, bonds and bills. And they can continue doing so until IOU nothing.

And someone else might own everything.

How do I know this can be so? As children one of our very few toys was a boxful of worthless paper: German Reichsmark bills over-printed with sinister black numbers in the millions and billions.

During the Weimar Republic the Reichsmark lost value by the hour. For example, a builder in the town where my uncle was an architect, built a two-story all-masonry house with a basement. This took him almost two years. His reward in the end: A big pile of IOU-nothing paper which could buy only one pencil.

The after-effect of this out-of-control printing of IOU's: - National Socialist beasts flattened the maddened masses like road-kill cats. Like they almost did me. Like the flattened cat my mother once tried to feed me.

Again rejoice! Many global socio-technological trends are now joining, to also allow little you and little me to be big hairy beasts. Now everyone can either be a real beast or a virtual beast. And we need not worry much about being punished. When caught doing beastly deeds, we simply admit to having “made mistakes.” Instead of getting our heads locked in stockades, to be spit upon by the passing public, we now receive one hundred years of suspended probation, sympathetic on-the-couch counseling and “paid administrative leave.”

Because Gore invented the Superhighway, even the lowest classes of the masses can now be hairy beasts. We can be virtual beasts even while slouching on couches, in our pajamas, with laptops connected to the Net. With Websites and emails, we can sell false promises and rip off victims all over the world. We can sneak into each other’s homes, databases and brains. We can poison the minds of children, invite them to sex orgies and rot out the foundations of all civilizations: Families of mothers, fathers and children.

Internet couching also “grows” huge tidal waves of blubber bubbling and bobbing over our continent. So much so, that Big Brother has declared obesity an epidemic illness. As such, beastly Medicare program participants can exploit the dwindling productive workforce to pay for perilous non-workable diet plans, pills and stomach amputations.

Therefore this exuberant former slave cannot wait to grow hair, hooves and horns. This exuberant beast can continue the work of the recent nearby “psycho-social rehabilitation service provider” for Medicare. That particular “counselor” was caught making feeding-frenzy “mistakes,” but is undoubtedly already gorging on greener "nutrients.” Should I get caught making “mistakes,” I’ll be suffering from Multiple Messy Post-Traumatic Stress to reap further rewards from Big Brother‘s little taxpayers.

I was born into a socialistic society, which was voted into existence with the best intentions by the befuddled masses to solve the economic disasters of the Weimar Republic. Within a few years, this republic grew into a monstrous beast. And thinking back of the beastly socialism of my youth gives me the creeps.

Therefore I have to wonder! I have wonder how today’s Big Brother creeping socialism will end! But mostly I have to wonder about how today’s wealth-blessed beasts will react during the next hyperinflation or economic depression. I have to wonder, because I have rarely held a book event, when someone has not confided in me a personal hairy horror story.

I think I just chickened myself out. So when I’ll get home I’ll shave and fry this morning’s pile of spam.

Madam Toastmaster.