The anarchists posing as conservatives seem to believe they can go it alone when the new Dark Ages arrive.

Really? How are you going to pay for bullets? Who’s going to print and back up this thing we call money? Gold’s only a glimmer of what’s needed, especially if you’re starving in a famine.

Who’s going to refine your oil? Maintain your highways? Even if you think you’ll be all off-road travel, just wait till you hit a river. (Bridges are costly to build and maintain.) Or cross someone’s fortified fields. Or run into the Chinese army taking over.

The way you’re headed, an arrow and slingshot will be your ultimate weapon in the rubble of what we’ve known as civilization.

I’m praying we’re smarter than that. And like Woodpecker, I’m getting a lot angrier than I’d like.

Welcome to Woodpecker’s Crank Tank.

He’s thinking of moving it to Washington.

Seems he’d have a lot of company, most of them better-dressed.

What if the One Percent moved out of the United States? Where would they go that wouldn’t tax them heavily? Much more heavily than here? Or where they wouldn’t gain so much from the public purse?

Or would they just huddle behind their own Big Wall – a much cheaper option than the one proposed for the southwest corner of the United States.

I presume they’d still be relying on our dollars, too. The kind the Treasury prints.

Besides, they couldn’t take all their assets with them. This is where their wealth’s generated, after all. Really. Even when their banks are Swiss.

As for the lunatic fringe? They would have real reasons to worry. Who else would back them, financially?

When it comes to history, Woodpecker has a long memory.

It’s all been drilled in his head. One tap at a time, as it were.

These days he’s thinking there are good reasons to be nervous. The whole tree’s infected and the wind’s rising.

It used to be the Party that Freed the Slaves. The Party of Lincoln and his idealistic, compassionate vision with its drive toward greater equality. The party of yeomen, essentially.

These days, in the long shadow of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, it’s looking more and more like the Party to Re-Enslave, with the working classes as its target. No matter our race, creed, or ethnic origins, Pharaoh’s watching us from his palace. Or more accurately, his high-rise suite or private jetliner.

Remember, the only entrance to that ancient stratosphere was through birth, just like most of the One Percent today. (By marriage is a new twist, incidentally, for what, one percent of the One Percent?)

From our end, just imagine what eliminating the minimum wage would do, especially if a job’s required to get any public assistance, as some are proposing. Right to work? What about the other half of that exchange, implicit in the work ethic, the right to a livable wage?

Where I’m from, the work ethic is an essential component of the American way, a cornerstone of liberty and well-being. Curiously, its primary support in the public arena has come from a self-described democratic socialist rather than those who claim to support free enterprise. Seems to me there’s a serious disconnect somewhere.

Looking at the American economy of the past half-century, with its continuing erosion of the middle-class and the implicit right of a livable income in the exchange of the work ethic, I keep hearing a warning for us to avoid selling ourselves into slavery.

I can’t find an exact passage in Scripture, but we can see the way it happens after Joseph invites his brothers to Egypt. Over the years, they fall prey to bondage. As the story of Moses demonstrates, the pathway to freedom is quite a struggle.

We have warning signs in the growing inequality in wealth (as American pharaohs hunger for more), the rising percentage of have-nots, the burden of student-loan debt many graduates have no hope of paying off (not on the wage levels being offered, should they even find jobs in the fields they’ve prepared for), and so on.

Well, Ronald Reagan once said, “If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth.”

I doubt he expected it could be a rallying cry for the Left, much less the Center.

By definition, a billionaire has at least a thousand million dollars. There are, by one count, 492 billionaires in the U.S. They and their families would fit in a single hotel, if they’d settle on something less than a suite. Think about that. They own more than half of the nation’s wealth.

In this election cycle, Woodpecker doesn’t sound nearly as angry or outrageous as I’d expected. The tone of conversation has definitely shifted, and maybe its drift.