I must admit that my relationship with my man-servant Standish has been strained ever since he won a kingly fortune in a sweep-stakes last year. In spite of his new-gotten wealth, he chose to remain in my employ, because it is, after all, the only life he has ever known. But some-times I think it is also because he wants to rub it in my decaying face. Upon winning, he bought all the servants comfortable shoes, including the lowly field-hands. Even the furloughed convicts who boil down pine trees into turpentine in my vast forest have been receiving an extra pullet or two in their monthly rations. Recently, I decided I’d had enough.
“Standish!” I screamed. “It is only through the most negligible of legal technicalities that I am unable to usurp your fortune. But all this Christian charity is not welcome in a Machiavellian house-hold such as this. Have you forgotten what we have accomplished together, boy? Who helped me put ant-paste in Henry Cabot Lodge’s coffee? And who stole the secret of fire and refused to return it to the American people until they produced $2 million in gold bullion?”
Standish looked quite sheepish and shuffled his feet. I knew that would get to him! But he sanctimoniously replied that his generosity was a way to soothe his deep shame about his past. He said he would one day have to answer to his Maker, and that he wanted to depart the Earth knowing that he had fully atoned for his sins. The fool! Does he not realize that you find religion only when you’re on death’s door-step, when you beg for the Lord’s forgiveness like a pathetic wretch? I cannot tell you how many times I’ve done that. Then I invariably recover and return to being a capital ass-hole.
Then Standish said some-thing so abominable, my catheter shot clean out of my prick. He said he had directed most of his fortune toward the founding of The Standish Foundation, an organization devoted to helping former organ-grinder monkeys find new, non-organ-grinding jobs.
“I’m an old man my-self, sir, and I don’t need all this money,” Standish said. “Why not use it to assist those who need our help, such as millions of displaced organ-grinder monkeys?”
“Organ-grinder monkeys?” I said. “Screw organ-grinder monkeys!” I am glad that my late bosom friend, the ruth-less steel magnate J. Titian McBrodie, did not live to see such hideous misuse of wealth! This is the same gentle-man who abducted the entire state of Pennsylvania during a steel-workers’ strike in Pitts-burgh. To this day, the authorities have never found it.
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.
