I hear that the tyrants in Washington are proposing than an enormous soft-wares and computing monopoly be broken up. The ladies must be broken-hearted that the soft-wares are in jeopardy. What lady does not relish the plush touch of ermine on her cheek, the airy intricacies of a panel of lace, or the cloud-like embrace of a velveteen settee? I pity the poor, weak-minded biddies. Thank God my fiancee, Miss Bernadette Fiske, did not live to see such trauma.
I predict that the computing will go down the chutes, too. The Republic needs men of stout and sober mind to do the computing, the ciphering, and other such bean-counting, and if they are out of work, we will become as ignorant and back-ward as the most miserable out-post of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I have heard my son V. Lucius mention the existence of machines that can process sums and words at lightning speeds through binary-coded instructions. But I cannot imagine how these frigid automatons could ever take the place of the warm sound of a quill rustling against a nice, heavy piece of cream-colored ledger-paper.
The thing that boils me most is all this trust-busting. I don’t bank-roll the goddamned Supreme Court so it can avidly participate in the undoing of our Republic’s most ruth-less captains of industry! There is entirely too much ruth as it is! First, they went after the Steel Trust. Then the Oil Trust. Then the Beef Trust. What next, the Haberdashery Trust?
I shudder to think that my beautiful new son N. Aeschylus will grow up never knowing an air-less, stultifyingly uncompetitive market-place. That is why I have decided to make his childhood as merry and free from care as possible. He shall have his own hobby-horse and box-kite, and he may eat all the mince-pie he wants.
I had one of The Onion’s staff lithographers render an image of little N. Aeschylus so that the public may at last look upon my precious boy. Look how much he resembles his father at the same age!
T. Herman Zweibel, the great grandson of Onion founder Friedrich Siegfried Zweibel, was born in 1868, became editor of The Onion at age 20, and persisted in various editorial posts until his launching into space in 2001. Zweibel’s name became synonymous with American business success in the 20th century. Many consider him the “Father Of American Journalism,” also the title of his well-known 1943 biography, written by Norman Rombauer.
