Comprobatio (com-pro-ba’-ti-o): Approving and commending a virtue, especially in the hearers.
“We’ve endured a lot and accomplished a lot here on Cellblock Five. Mickey: Your shivs make my world go around. I’ll never forget seein’ Kelly laid out on the concrete floor, wounded, pumping blood like an oil well, trying to say something before he went to the great beyond. And Sam, Jeez Sam: Your cell-made raisin ‘wine’ sent us all over the top last New Year’s Eve when we beat the shit out of three guards and sent them to the hospital. You are the vintner of vintners and I commend you. And Ox Eye Teddy, every time you sing ‘Memory” from ‘Cats,’ we all sit in our cells and cry like babies—murderers, thieves, burglars, embezzlers, and arsonists—criminals of all kinds, heaving with sorrow, emotionally taken to the edge of repentance from the song you so movingly sing.
All of you have something to offer that makes us a strong integral whole, strengthened by our common motive and desire to excel, to be all we can be. And it is Ox Eye’s singing that brought to me, Machine Gun Gerry, the idea that we should do something together so our ‘Memory’ holds fewer regrets, that our past misdeeds may be overshadowed by what we may accomplish today, for families, friends, and the state of Iowa.
We will make earrings, and sell them on Etsy.”
These are the opening paragraphs of my new book “Pardon Me.” I am a Business Professor at Golden Chance University in Mojave City, California. We specialize in making greedy and unethical young men and women into greedy and unethical entrepreneurs specializing in exploiting desperate people to achieve their ends: wealth and power.
My book is a fictional account of a group of imprisoned felons, who, through a rigorous program of threats of physical harm, coupled with blackmail supported by a well-considered archive of photographs undeniably documenting a variety of the Warden’s misdeeds, mostly of a sexual nature, we are able to start a profitable business. With a Warden reticent to being arrested and humiliated, and beat-up by his wife, it was smooth sailing all the way.
The prisoners’ utilization of threats and blackmail illustrates the variety of sources that capital may spring from, and that it needn’t be money that initiates the creation of a viable business, such as the prisoners’ earring business.
One character in the book, Weelon Cruk, is a self- absorbed loose canon who nearly ruins the plan with his grandstanding. We show our readers how he is “quietly” put away in the prison laundry. I use this to show my students the importance of consensus and how people who think for themselves need to be terminated.
It’s no surprise that I have recently been appointed Head of the Small Business Administration by our beloved President. “Pardon Me” Will point the way toward the reaffirmation values that will “Make America Great Again.” As our country prepares to take a giant step backwards I am proud to be the wind beneath its wings, traveling the yellow brick road back to the future. Here I come!
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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