Chew on this, Mother Goose

Historically, fairy tales serve two purposes. They are employed to either convey a timeless message to children or scare them into good behavior. I will not stoop to passing judgement on the wisdom of this practice. After all, fairy tales have been around a lot longer than I have.
Consider the story of Hansel and Gretel. Two children are abandoned by their parents (a horrifying prospect for any child) and find themselves in the clutches of a wicked witch who, despite her residence in a house made of ginger bread, is more twisted than certain Lonoke High School principals.
She doesn’t want to molest them. She wants to cook and eat them. Talk about a cause for bad dreams!
The children, through their own courage and ingenuity, escape this nightmarish scenario and go on to lead happy, productive lives. We are not told of any lingering psychological damage, just that they “lived happily ever after,” whatever that means.
I know I said I wasn’t going to pass judgement, but really! Is it any wonder the so-called “classic” fairy tales have fallen into disfavor with child care experts and early childhood educators? I mean, modern life is frightening enough. Who needs to dredge up terrors from the 16th century? You might as well try to put children to sleep by telling them about the merry adventures of Atilla the Hun.
With this happy thought in mind, gentle readers, your humble correspondent will now proceed to add to the genre’ of literature broadly defined as fairy tales. Better step back and give me a little room.
Once upon a time, there was a small fiefdom. I know you’ve heard about kingdoms, earldoms and dukedoms, but this was a fiefdom. Don’t ask me why anybody would want to live in a place with a silly name like that. I’m just telling the story. I don’t do details.
Anyway, the fiefdom had a somewhat complicated system of government. A group of citizens, elected by their peers, made some of The Rules, kept track of the portion of The Rules made by higher authorities, and hired an Administrator to enforce The Rules, and to take care of day-to-day operations.
The Rules were a pretty big deal, at least on paper. Some of them made sense and some were the product of knee-jerk reactions to temporary situations.
Like most pontifications, The Rules were expressed in the carefully chosen words of an obscure language known as “Legalese.” Very few people were fluent in this language, with the result that very few people actually understood what The Rules meant.
This proved to be something of a stumbling block to efficient government until somebody figured out that if they didn’t understand The Rules, odds were that nobody else did, either. This lightened the load quite a bit, since everybody now felt free to interpret The Rules however it suited them at the moment.
Although the common folks in the fiefdom were not prone to urbane sophistication, they did have a pretty good idea of what was right and wrong. They became more than a little uncomfortable when they were told it was imperative that The Rules be followed to the letter in one instance, but could be all but totally ignored in another.
Predictably, after a while none of The Rules were taken very seriously by anybody, with the result that everybody was worse off. The children of the fiefdom suffered in particular, since they could never figure out when to follow The Rules and when not to, and consistantly managed to do the wrong thing at the wrong time.
In the end, the feifdom collapsed in on itself because its foundation of order and trust was weakened.
And what is the moral of the story? To paraphrase a wise man of the afore mentioned 16th century, “Those who fail to practice moderation in all things, achieve success in nothing.”