Pope Francis arrived in New York yesterday afternoon just 46 hours too late to save the church’s secret envoy Cardinal Yogi Berra from the savage grammarians who had pledged to kill him on National Punctuation Day Thursday. The Pope addressed reporters on the steps of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue:
“This whole trip was scheduled especially to confront the faceless evil that wields the red pen and destroys the futures of those who do not use perfect English.”
The Pope went on to pledge that he will canonize the undercover Cardinal who’s divine tongue caused chaos and suicide in English departments throughout American Academia.
Lawrence Peter Berra was born in St. Louie in 1925. In 1942, he was recruited along with his buddy and neighbor Joe Garagiola by their hometown Cardinals to play professional baseball. Joe was offered a $500 signing bonus while Yogi, under a secret arrangement made by the Catholic Church and the Divine Spirit of St. Louis, was offered only $250. The snub was only a cover for Berra to be inducted into the Vatican’s College of Cardinals which had not been fielding a team since the global conflict began. The supposed talent scout for the New York Yankees then spirited Berra into Italy which was controlled by Mussolini’s Fascists at the time.
Getting a first hand look at the evil system in Italy and in two clandestine forays into Germany and Austria, Berra began to draw the parallels between European fascism and American Educational Dogmatism and Anglophilia. While books were being burned under Hitler in Germany, text books began to tyrannize both adults and children in America by setting strict limitations on their use of the “Mother Tongue.” Local expressions and pronunciations were being spelled out of existence as grandparents were condemned as ignorant and unschooled.
In schools teachers enforced the organizing of written thoughts into sentences and paragraphs- demanding that theses display a beginning, middle and end so that even our thoughts and minds were being imprisoned in a biological model of generation and mortality that denied eternity and salvation.
English, once a living language, spoken and created daily by the greatest geniuses of humankind- Shakespeare, Bacon (also the greatest breakfast of humankind), Johnson and Johnson (Ben and Sam before the baby powder) was being reduced into the croak of corpses imposing their arbitrary, elitist cacophony on the masses in an attempt to shut them up. Literacy had been hijacked by self appointed and tenured “professors” of the language. Words not organized according to the dictates of the English dictators were dismissed summarily as incorrect or ungrammatical.
More recently arrived ethnic groups surrendered their children to the government for indoctrination. Rather than enriching communication and contributing to the creation of a truly American language, immigrants buckled to Anglophiles and the minority Anglo-Americans whose senseless, inconsistent bastard language English which now, thanks to the dons of Oxbridge, was deader than Sanskrit.
Cardinal Berra knew that with the entire world on fire America was its only hope so he returned home and joined the United States Navy. Under the cover of a seaman second class, Berra sailed to India. Reasoning that the rigidity of the English language was manifesting in its speakers as a muscular rigidity throughout the body, Berra undertook the study of health improvement in one of the six schools of orthodox Hinduism known as Yoga. The British were already near rigor mortis in their posture and movement so Berra sought to release the body in order to release the tongue and, hopefully, the soul.
After mastering the subtleties of Hatha yoga and manning an attack boat on Omaha Beach, Berra returned to the New York after the war and got a job that offered constant travel and exposure to the public- the two key ingredients for his strategy to introduce and indoctrinate the American public as to the virtues of physical flexibility and abdominal breathing. His ministry took him to all the major cities in the country where he proved popular with local reporters. Soon his quotations were circulated along with pictures of the Cardinal in Eastern inspired sitting positions and squats. His signature crouching posture between the official and ball slapper probably became the first recognizable yoga posture in the United States and was imitated by others in his profession. Thus, Cardinal Berra became known as “Yogi.”
Realizing that the national media of his time was enslaved by the Chicago Manual of Style, Cardinal Yogi didn’t attempt to preach the liberation of soul and body but designed subtle and brilliant semantic riddles or koans to tie up the grammarians while directly addressing the deepest reaches of the human spirit. “It ain’t over till it’s over. If you see a fork in the road, take it.” though grammatically correct they explode the insidious, underlying intention of grammar: to control and limit the thought and expression of the masses.
Cardinal Yogi used his life, his body, his words and even his face to break the suffocating stranglehold of “proper usage.” Like a myth manifested in pinstripes, Yogi’s entire being was a poem of freedom and expression and with his loss “the future ain’t what it used to be.”
Some will miss Yogi for his contribution to New York baseball at which he was rumored to be adept.
Goodbye, Yogi
Don Arrup
Satire1
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