A Box of Egos: Goodbye

Scott Bradley

"I didn't even have a chance to say goodbye," mourned cleaning lady Jenny, who asked her last name be withheld. It was Jenny who, while doing her nightly cleaning of the facility where the now celebrated box of egos is housed, found the box empty. "I always peeked in to say 'Hi'," says Jenny, "they seemed to like it."

The loss of these egos has caused a great deal of consternation and debate among the attending scientists. "Why and how they lingered as disembodied entities was what we had hoped to determine," said one neurologist. "That they would suddenly disappear shouldn't surprise us; the surprise was that they lingered at all."

"But where did they go?" asked another scientist. "They became nothing and went nowhere," answered another. "We don't know that!" exclaimed another. "Perhaps we should have brought in a chaplain after all," opined yet another. "In the end, we are faced with life's most fundamental question — one that science cannot solve."

Whether solvable or not, there are no end to opinions about the fate of the egos, though they can be lumped into two basic camps. "Some believe they continue to exist in some form or another," said a psychologist, "others believe that they are now altogether extinct. But the key word here is 'believe'; this is something we shall never know, at least in this life."

There are some, however, who think they do know. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) declared at a rapidly organized news conference, "As God-fearing people we know these egos still exist; the question is: Where? If they have escaped into the community at large, our nation may be at extreme risk. Once again the Obama Administration has proven itself incapable of protecting the American people. I and my colleagues are about to introduce emergency legislation which will greatly strengthen the ability of our military and intelligence authorities to gather information from, detain and, if necessary, execute American citizens suspected of posing a threat to American freedoms."

Asked whether this did not infringe on those same freedoms, McCain replied, "Sometimes you have to destroy freedom to save it." "Just like this 'hero' bombed villages in Vietnam to save them," quipped an attending reporter.

In any event, this reporter will greatly miss these egos and the controversies they spawned. Goodbye! And good luck!

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.