The Menace of Unregistered Piccolos

Mack Hall, HSG

The Menace of Unregistered Piccolos

(In green accordance with the green Cliché’ Protection Act of 1904 as greenly amended in 2008 and greenly interpreted by a green and hemorrhoidal federal GS-4 clerk this week, no predictable puns on frets and sour notes were employed in the green construction of this green column)

With the falling dollar, the worst unemployment since 1945, a border so open that the Mexican army makes unopposed raids into the USA, and the ownership of what remains of our economy by our merry friends the People’s Liberation Army, we can take comfort in the fact that our federal government is at last striking back – against Gibson Guitar.  

Extremist Gibson craftsmen in Memphis and Nashville have been terrorizing the American people long enough with their unregistered guitars manufactured from unauthorized wood.

But all is not lost – in the past few weeks crack squads of federal commandos have mounted bold raids against jihadist woodworkers armed with chisels of mass destruction.  Evil guitars have been seized, as well as undocumented alien wood.  The records of the un-mutual activities of the out-of-control Gibson Guitar workers may well lead to a series of trials in the spirit of Roland Freisler, the patron not-a-saint of the modern federal judiciary.

Something styled the Lacey Act and the whims of the Forest Stewardship Council, the Customs service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service (Fish?  Wildlife?  Guitars?) are used to suppress guitar manufacture and ownership in these United States.  A maker of guitars must be able to provide to any of the increasingly numerous and pestilential types of federal police documentation about the species and national origins of any wood used to build a guitar in this country.  Further, any American who owns a guitar must also be able to provide documentation to any of the many types of federal police about the species and national origins of any wood in a privately-owned guitar.  Failure to do so will result in a fine and in the seizure of the guitar.

Don’t try to cross a border or board an aircraft with a guitar you want to keep – if you don’t have the paperwork for your guitar and some fellow with a federal badge wants your guitar, it’s his.

You’ll never see your guitar again.

How’s that for a topic for a protest song, eh?

Your possession of a guitar or any other musical instrument containing wood is now a crime of which you are automatically guilty unless you can document your innocence.  What sort of wood is in any part of your great-grandpa’s fiddle?  Prove it, citizen.  That old guitar you bought in a pawn shop and restored?  Your papers, please, citizen.  The piano your ancestors bought in the 19^th century?  Tell us what we want to know about the ivory and the wood, citizen.   Your grandma’s old high school Bundy clarinet from the 1950s?  You must explain yourself, citizen.

And what offense has the Gibson Guitar company committed against The People to find itself particularly singled out by the regime?

What a better world this would be if the internal security police were to lay aside their stinkin’ badges, their pistols, and their warrants and other inky blots and sit with the Gibson Guitar workers at their work benches for an hour.  Imagine a federal agent who never had a real job learning how a craftsman selects and processes a bit of wood for a guitar fret.  Imagine federal judges learning something about work and art instead of oppressing workers and artists.

In anticipation of Labor Day the feds did an Eliot Ness on guitar makers; maybe in memory of 9/11 they’ll bust some uppity flutists.

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