I should’ve known you would be clever enough to spot that mistake! Of course, I wanted to do the only honorable thing and include the entire rest of the sentence that I was completely uninterested in, for fairness’ sake. After all, I lived in an “America Town” Potemkin village during my espionage training as a deep-cover agent and it was there that I learned your American concepts of fair play and simple decency. Much to my shame, however, my political commissar in the atheist, secular humanist conspiracy overruled me at our secret weekly meeting, pointing out that if those few words were ever noticed by red-blooded American patriots like you, that they could shatter the world order we are so stealthily putting in place.

That tears it. You’re onto us, now. Might as well come clean. Whereas people once thought of ‘progressivism’ as what happens when investigative journalism into needless social ills caused by runaway greed and short-sighted exploitation leads to laws that right those wrongs — about food safety, child labor, housing conditions, workplace safety, honesty in civil service, systems of parks and protected common resources, protections against monopolies and commercial cartels, for instance — you’ve exposed us for what we’re really about. That is, a plot out to get you in particular. Sure, we spend our lives dedicated to sin in exactly the terms in which you would understand it, but we never tire of our work getting you specifically good, mad and helpless to do anything about it.

People don’t realize, because we work ceaselessly day and night to subvert specifically you and your civil society, how much time it takes on the little things. There is so much little to do! It would be one thing if we could focus on the important things, like making it so you can’t call the guy next to you on the line down at the plant any of the names you grew up calling his kind, without getting called into the office and chewed out. But we can’t. For every time we make you call somebody a name under your breath, we have to spend ten times that much effort selling your favorite beer company to a foreign conglomerate so they can actually use reclaimed urine in the supply chain. Hours each day slipping subversive, satanic messages into popular music. Endlessly finding ways to make your children resent you for how you come home every day smelling like you’ve been at work putting food on their table. It takes years of very intense coordination to design computer chips that do your job faster and cheaper than you do, that not only replace you at your job but also carry on multi-year affairs with your wife behind your back.

I’d like to sleep in on Sunday mornings, but instead, I have to timesheet hours I spend making your dog age faster and love you less. You think that’s what I want to do? No, it’s what we as progressives have to do in order to weaken your otherwise unbeatable free enterprise system. We thought by pretending to be human beings, we the invasion fleet from the planet Zoltar would be able to escape detection. Little did we count on young, successful, sexually virile, sports heroes like you figuring out that our primary aim has been to sap your resolve, keep you from raising your chin up high and shaking your fist in righteous rage. Clearly, we failed. Good for you, Eagle Eye.

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