I don’t think I’ll ever understand politics. I was just beginning to accept that vast right wing conspiracy theory, when suddenly we’ve switched gears. Now we’ve got people talking about left wing conspiracies.

I always have to stop and ask, “O.K., the left wing is the liberals, and the right wing is conservative, but which ones are the communists?”

The whole thing reminds me of a cattle rancher I used to see often. This fellow (we’ll call him Albert) knew the left wingers from the right wingers better than anyone I’ve ever known.

If Albert were here today he would say, “Those liberals we send to Washington D.C. wouldn’t know a vast conspiracy if they saw one. This isn’t half of that. This is more like a half-vast conspiracy.”
I bumped into Albert years ago when I stopped at the grocery to buy a newspaper. Our little town had a local paper, and we had two major dailies delivered from out of town.

One of the daily papers was large and liberal, while the other was small and more conservative.

Albert noticed I was buying the liberal paper and nearly fainted. “How far left can you get?” he asked.

“Oh?! I don’t plan to read it,” I told him. “I just use it for starting fires.”

I should confess I always buy the bigger newspaper. That’s one of the paradoxes of my conservatism.

I don’t like the liberal paper, but I buy it because it weighs more. It seems like a better value.

Albert was more strict in his conservatism. He wasn’t very fond of environmentalists, and someone who writes a newspaper column, as I do, might be termed a “syndicated communist.”

He was a good-natured fellow, though, and nobody was ever offended. I should say nobody except the sheriff’s deputies. They might have been offended once or twice.

Albert had a tenuous relationship with the sheriff’s office. His cattle roamed over large tracts of timberland and they were constantly getting lost, shot and/or butchered.

Then, he would call the sheriff’s office, and they would send someone out to investigate. The sheriff’s deputies did their best, but solving these cow mysteries was no easy task.

A deputy’s inability to find the culprit would cause Albert to remark, “Those sheriff’s deputies couldn’t track an elephant with a nosebleed in two feet of snow.”

One night I was sitting with a group of ranchers around a meeting table, when Albert said, “Somebody butchered another one of my calves the other day.”

“Did you report it to the sheriff?” one of the ranchers asked.
“Yeah, I called them up,” Albert said. “But they’ve got a smart aleck young deputy in there; and when I told him who it was he hung up on me.”

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.