‘Puter’s been watching with some interest the flooding in the Midwest. You see, ‘Puter lived in Missouri during the Great Flood of 1993. Leaving aside for the moment the flooding’s likely impact on grain prices, and therefore ultimately on retail food prices, it’s an interesting dilemma.

The Army Corps of Engineers blew up levees on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River, below its confluence with the Ohio River, flooding out 130,000 acres minimum of agricultural land and farm homes.

Now, levees are extremely useful. In many years, they protect fertile farmland from river inundation, which permits more effective use of America’s land. Levees and damming also have destroyed the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers’ delicate wetland ecosystems by preventing the annual flooding needed to sustain them. This in turn affects the wildlife dependent on the wetlands for survival. Levees have also encouraged people to build homes and towns in areas that would frequently flood but for the levees. When the levees fail, and they always do, more people are at risk than would have been had the levees not been there in the first place. This is not to say that levees are bad, or not worth the cost. It simply got ‘Puter to thinking.

Levees are good analogs for many government programs. Each program starts out with good intentions. It quickly builds a rabid consituency dedicated to keeping it in existence, regardless of cost. The program encourages uneconomic behavior, further adding to the number of constituents. Eventually, the program outstripps its original mandate and becomes captured by its constituents and assorted hangers-on getting rich off the federal dollars.

It seems to ‘Puter that this is true of just about every government program, from levees to welfare to defense.

In the case of Missouri’s levees, the government built barricades had to be literally destroyed in order to save a town. ‘Puter’s betting many other government programs are going to have to be destroyed in order to save the public fisc, and it’s about time we started seriously talking about our options.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.