Little Evi gives the Boss an Apple – or – the more things change, the more they stay the same

"Who mothered James Joyce? Beyond a doubt it was Lewis Carrol despite the dissimilitudes between Alice and young Künstler Dedalus who must never learn to fly."

– John 'Swifty' Heusamen

Of course, and just like x-mass presents, most punishments handed out to juvenile offenders exhibit little protective concern with biting snakes or other environmental dangers, but on the contrary, are distributed for bringing harmless bits of it, the outside, inside, tracking all over the house just like melted crayons on a dirt floor end up writing on the wall. There are also the more material matters of oral experimentation with bugs in rugs, spitting up pottage in the cottage or vocalising famine or the discomfortures of excrement, confined in their britches designed to hold more before leakage – like speaking out of turn, disrespect for schedules (not to mention elders and their conveniently fragile properties: begotten and forgotten goods not immune to breakage) – wandering attention, curious distraction, acquiring tastes, trying to make some sense of it. Were it not for the subtly forged internment of morality into budding bodies (guilting themselves for that very internalisation), it would seem their sanctions are truely random. Then we hear again from the considerate factions:

'but we are only providing necessary tools for coping in a cruel world'

...where allowance is always contingent upon one's performance of chores or others' expectations, not excluding sycophantic, but hypoactive parroting after primary minions of the principals of education, never good enough, peeling away onion skins till ought is left inside, not even a mouse nor her opinion. No dirty rat with stealth and guile, a bird by any other name should ask politely for crackers, remembering always that government is just a kindly father (or a pack) armed with the latest in pesticidal protection (safeguarding Roy from rexicide) and never merely a racket.