Once upon a time in a town very far away from anyplace that ever made any sense, there was a pond just outside the village square. Lovers would walk hand in hand along the trail near the water's edge, mindful not to break any of the numerous town ordinances about how friendly couples could and could not get in public, and exactly what combinations of genders those couples could consist of in this good old fashioned family-values town burgeoning with lily-white rosy-cheeked boys and girls frolicking in the summer sun. Mothers pushed their baby strollers, and people would picnic on the grass along side the lake. Children would feed the ducks and cast their lines into the water in hopes of snagging a sunfish or a carp. Life was good in this small American town.

Then, one day, the city fathers needed to find a way to spend up some extra money before the end of the year, because they knew that a surplus of accumulating cash could lead to lower taxes, less town revenue, and fewer justifiable contracts to their friends who fed them kickbacks to help pay for that apartment over in Sin City where they stashed the mistress and spent most of their time finding kinkier reasons to take massive dosages of antibiotics not issued by the hometown HMO.

So in marched the men wearing hardhats who took enough water samples from the town lake to fill the Mayor's swimming pool that mysteriously appeared in his back yard shortly after the main road had been re-paved with blacktop that buckled up in heaving dunes and sinuous waves the day the mercury hit the staggering heights of 82 on the Fahrenheit scale. That was back in late April, and lo and behold, on the day of the next town council meeting, the water sample people presented their findings. "Feces!" the engineer exclaimed with the disgust and certainty of a civil servant standing neck high in a cesspool of hidden agendas. "There's too much feces from the ducks in the pond, and the O2 level is dropping." No one knew or cared what O2 was, but, after spending a lifetime in politics, they were all quite familiar with feces, so they listened as if they were scientists setting out to save the planet. "My recommendation," the engineer continued, "is that the fair citizens of this town must stop feeding the ducks, then those ducks will stop producing all that feces." The town fathers nodded their heads in agreement, and all those in favor said: Aye.

They promptly enacted a law making it illegal to feed the ducks, and, as could only be expected, this pissed off an awful lot of ducks who were as used to a free handout as the welfare baby factories over in Sin City. Ducks have no political lobby though, and, being only a bunch of uneducated ducks, they did the things uneducated ducks do: they walked all over town, panhandling and looking for some food. They marched in great white quacking migratory herds across people's lawns loudly serenading the folks as they ate their rich dinners, stuffing their faces with the very things the ducks had grown accustomed to eating in their laid-back suburban life style before the council waged this unconstitutional discriminatory genocidal war against them. Many citizens could not bear the quacking cries of the hungry ducks, so a highly sophisticated secret feeding network evolved to save the ducks from sure starvation, slow death, and, perhaps, an untimely appearance on somebody's plate. People would scurry through the storm drainage system, and food would appear outside various grates and manhole covers around town.

But what goes in one end of a duck naturally comes squeezing out the other end someplace else, this time, all over the lawns of wealthy white people who pay Mexican gardeners hundreds of dollars a month to maintain those lawns. Property owners complained, but the ducks had become a great money generating enterprise for the town. Special police armed with video cameras and night scopes caught people on camera giving free handouts to the ducks, and the town revenue soared as the courts grew clogged with case after case of duck-feeding law-breakers subsequently charged with several escalating classes of feeding misdemeanors and felonies. Law practices sprang up overnight. Local colleges offered masters programs in the emerging field of duck law. More judges and stenographers had to be hired. Then there were the posters and the T-shirts and other spin-off industries. A television series had been proposed. Deal makers had their eyes on opportunities undreamt of only a few short months earlier. Duck's rights activists began demonstrating in the center of town, but when a bus load of outsiders showed up with their signs and bags of fresh bread, they were all arrested, tried, and sent off to prison to serve long sentences without parole. Times were good for the village, because with all that extra traffic, the roads needed re-paving, and it was around that time that the Mayor's new deck sprouted from the ground like a summer beef tomato.

It was also around that time that one of the fine citizens grew tired of shelling out hundreds of bucks worth of tickets every time one of his kids got caught on camera illegally feeding the ducks. Since he was the local Krazy Glue distributor, he cautiously lured all the ducks into his yard with the bread crumbs he surreptitiously laced the ground with, and while a decoy feeding operation over on the other side of the lake drew the attention of the duck detectives, he squirted a little shot of glue up the asshole of each of the town ducks to prevent them from defecating all over his increasingly greasy lawn.

Now a little bit of Krazy Glue can go a long way, as this distributor always told his customers, and the ducks didn't seem to mind all that much; in fact, they rather liked it in a perverse sort of way, being that they were only uneducated ducks and could not see the grander picture unfolding before them. For the next few days, they acted as if nothing were wrong. They would race toward unsuspecting visiting tourists, quack, and act like the cute ducks that they were. Invariably, the tourists would feel sorry for the ducks, feed them a piece of sandwich, and the next thing these tourists knew, they got their asses hauled off to court where they were promptly arraigned and not only fined for their feeding improprieties, but charged for court expenses to boot. In the mean time, the ducks grew fatter and slower, and the O2 level rose, as the city engineer predicted it would. The lake thrived with all sorts of polysyllabic organisms that are normally killed off by the creature that feed upon the organisms that eat the duck feces, and the ecosystem thrived in its own uniquely distorted way. The duck dicks, as the detectives came to be designated, noticed the ducks growing excessively large and lethargic, and they knew in their hearts that someone was evading their infrared surveillance in some deviously sneaky way as yet to be discovered. More consultants were hired, and they collected as much overtime as they could physically tolerate, spying with their telephoto lenses and filming and digitally processing the images on their new high-tech image analysis system the town had procured for their new logistics and command center, along with the post graduate student operator who had gotten his Ph.D in real time convolution integrals and deblurring technology as a result of all that spill down peace dividend talent seeping its way back into the public sector economy. The Mayor was enjoying a vacation in Bermuda with his brand new bare-breasted Polynesian secretary, who didn't take standard dictation, while his wrinkled prune of a wife told the ladies at the lawn party that he was researching advanced management techniques at a conference of Mayors in Cleveland. She really did think that's where he was, and the town ducks grew still fatter and lazier, with their little ducky anuses coated with a fine film of cyanoacrylate cement.

Now, the Fourth of July was a major event in town, and people from miles around would come to watch the fireworks exhibit over the lake. Thousands would sit on the lawn, drink beer, publicly urinate, eat popcorn and cotton candy, and feed the ducks, which, of course, was illegal this year. By now the ducks were so large they could barely float, and they didn't look so good as far as ducks go. They clumped together in the center of the lake, low in the water, like bulging tankers on their way to the refineries. The Mayor had just returned from another working vacation, and he stepped to the podium to give his famous speech about America and freedom and the opportunity to do whatever the heck you want in this great land of ours, as long as it wasn't feeding the ducks. It grew dark, the crowd grew bored, and then the fireworks show began. Shells from mortars exploded high in the sky, and dazzling phosphor trails radiated in all directions displaying every blazing color of the rainbow.

Then, through the rocket's red glare, with bombs bursting in air, a duck suddenly and quite unexpectedly lifted off the surface of the water, like a buzzing balloon released from between a pair of slippery fingers. The duck sputtered and spiraled skyward as its intestines emptied through a ruptured nozzle, propelling it with the force of a water rocket, and it accelerated up, up, and away, beyond the thousand points of light in the sky. Even Krazy glue has a design limit, and in the blink of an eye, another duck whistled off, out of control, spraying its accumulated load into the dazzled and awe-struck crowd below. And one by one, as America celebrated another proud birthday, these poor astonished ducks, completely unaware of this cruel physics anomaly of gastronomical pressure release, burst forth from the water like angry Polaris missiles, never to be seen again. The city engineer threw his arms up in despair while contemplating plummeting O2 levels, but the crowd applauded with every dramatic fine feathered departure from the surface of the lake. At first, even the Mayor thought this was a rather impressive special effect, but he learned otherwise when the fireworks subcontractor sued the town because this duck thing was not mentioned in his contract. Many appeals later, the aberrant case of duck law was brought before the state, and ultimately the Federal court, where the town was finally ordered to pay the fireworks company $4.6 million for breech of contract and damaging the fine reputation of a highly-respected group of pyrotechnicians, who, by now, were spending an increasing amount of time on the psychiatrist's couch learning to deal with their complex stress management issues.

The Mayor was re-elected on a platform that he would drain the lake and transform the new landfilled real estate into a shopping mall. Though many people liked the lake, the fish, and the ducks, they caved in when it was explained with charts, graphs, overhead slides, and fancy animated web sites that it would bring in fresh capital to help pay off the lawsuit award for that fireworks disaster. Now the Mayor has aluminum siding and a funky little Japanese garden next to the pool, and when his wife visits Vegas with her friends, he can often be seen sipping wine and eating a fine meal with his Polynesian secretary in the posher districts of Sin City, where no one has ever seen a duck behave in any manner other than assuming the succulent candle-lit resting position in the medium-rare environment of a plate, surrounded by vegetables and sauce, followed, of course, by a little something extra after the meal, proving once again, that ducks exist for one and only one purpose in life.

Bon appetit.

Quotes from Marion Barry, Mayor of Washington, D.C.

"The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity during this long period of increment weather."

"I promise you a police car on every sidewalk."

"If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very very low crime rate."

"First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. And second, what can I say? I'm a night owl."

"B**ch set me up."

"I am clearly more popular than Reagan. I am in my third term. Where's Reagan? Gone after two! Defeated by George Bush and Michael Dukakis no less."

"The laws in this city are clearly racist. All laws are racist. The law of gravity is racist."

"I am making this trip to Africa because Washington is an international city, just like Tokyo, Nigeria or Israel. As mayor, I am an international symbol. Can you deny that to Africa?"

"People have criticized me because my security detail is larger than the president's. But you must ask yourself: are there more people who want to kill me than who want to kill the president? I can assure you there are."

"The brave men who died in Vietnam, more than 100% of which were black, were the ultimate sacrifice."

"I read a funny story about how the Republicans freed the slaves. The Republicans are the ones who created slavery by law in the 1600's. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was not a Republican."

"What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary?"

"People blame me because these water mains break, but I ask you, if the water mains didn't break, would it be my responsibility to fix them then? Would it??

"I am a great mayor; I am an upstanding Christian man; I am an intelligent man; I am a deeply educated man; I am a humble man."