Barbara was a buttoned-down school teacher who taught civics to her elementary school students. The virtues of citizenship, higher thinking, and most important of all-- "fair play". To join the roundtable of community issues and solve something so public-minded as setting up a stop sign so the children could cross the street safely while holding the hand of the crossing card. That's what "good government" was all about.

But lately, Barbara sensed that something was wrong--

A new, unholy presence set up it's door in the bucolic town of Bedford Falls-- fully intending to get itself elected to the Missouri State Senate regardless of community trust, fair play, and not stabbing your opponent in the face with back-alley Lee Atwater tactics.

The national Republican league set up offices in this peaceful, Democratic-run town, with the aim of getting THIS MAN in power:

Indeed, what decade-- WHAT CENTURY-- had he dug himself out of? What of moderate social progress? What of the community bake sale, that the ultra-right derided as "government socialism"? Quite naturally, Barbara's reaction was this:

And the conservatives began their slick, direct-mail campaign to lull the average voter into believing that John Lewis-- the candidate-- had their better interests at heart. Tax cuts for small business owners, slimming down on "government waste", and other populist ideas that somehow never came into fruition once they had actually won their paper-sailing majorities. Barbara stood on her porch, and saw the ruse for what it was:

But volunteers kept coming to her door, and she continued to shake her head "no". Once she started handing out anti-John Lewis campaign literature on her own, anonymous sources began to smear her good name throughout the community, accusing her of being "some kind of pinko". It was a dirty, underground campaign, that was for sure. But Barbara wouldn't budge in her convictions.

Then one night, around the stoke of 12, they began their full frontal assault-- waking her out of bed. A ruckus, a trumpeting, a bejewled battering ram of a GOP elephant ready to crunch down her door and keep her from walking around with a sign outside the voting precinct. Barbara's reaction at this torch-lit procession was horror:

What the conservatives didn't count on, however, was the shotgun that Barbara kept for such emergencies. Running down into the basement, she grabbed the cartridges and shells, loading them up with steely-eyed determination as Woody Guthrie wept on her coach like a broken-down anarchist pussy. Emma Goldman continued to scratch out dry, humorless tracts as Barbara kicked open the front door with a boot  She stood out on her porch and shot that elephant dead. It shuddered to it's knees, then fell over with a "thump!".

Through it all, the unearthly groans of a defeated mob who had never known a rout quite like this. Had a liberal finally stood up to them? Barbara fired warning shots in the air, and they loped off back to their campaign headquarters like soft-bottomed Rush Limbaugh huffers.