To My Heirs:
A Spaniard disturbed my weekly pinochle lark in Hades with Stalin, Hitler and Perry Como to query what I thought of this past week-end's reunion of undead Hoiles on Goat Hill. I reckoned it was the annual family gathering to sacrifice a young socialist on my grave, but it turns out my grandson Tim and other goldbricking Hoiles are once again trying to sell Freedom Communications and its flagship Orange County Register—the company forged from the effluvia of my iron balls—to Bolsheviks.
Barter the Register? Are you inbreds insane? Why don't you just etch a hammer and sickle over the entrance of my Grand Avenue shrine?
I knew I shouldn't have died. Ever since that day, the Register has become a joke. Its sad descent started in 1979, nine years after I joined Lucifer in his fiery Eden, when you brought in a bunch of Huns and thrifty Scotsmen to make Freedom and the Register “more respectable.” The fish wrap these asswipes now hawk should be called the Orange County Proletariatbecause it runs weepy expositions arguing that tax-supported schools and government-dependent urchins are worthy of benignancy. And what is this malarkey that poses as my editorial page? It's one Alan Bock coronary from becoming Soviet.
This is not my Register, by gump, and I blame its demise on all my bloated brats who recruited these slack-jawed ruffians without the Hoiles liberty gene to guide them. But I put special culpability on Tim and his sire, Harry.
During the 1980s, Harry persistently tried to buy out everyone else in the family because he felt our dispatch was betraying my founding principles. A pulchritudinous approach! But when that didn't work, he resorted to constant assumpsits seeking to dissolve myenterprise. Harry was so reviled that the rest of the clan reached an agreement to sell Freedom stock only to one another. Too bad Tim, while inheriting his father's ego, didn't get any of Harry's commitment to liberty. It stands to reason that daffy whippersnapper is the evil spawn of Harry. It's common knowledge the best part of Harry ran down my knickers.
Consarn it, I didn't stab my brother Frank in the back in the 1920s just so I could have my spoiled seed sell my gazette to Commie bastards. I didn't build a reputation so loathsome that the Marxist Time magazine once called me “a crabby, Bible-spouting zealot” who was “famed for his ultra-reactionary political philosophy”—didn't do all that, I say, just so my periodical could lose the libertarian reputation that ensured that my ingrate progeny never had to work at a real job in their lives.
But heavens to von Mises, the fifth generation of Hoiles decided to continue my legacy by voting to purchase thick-witted Tim's shares in Freedom Communications. We are a rare breed—the family-owned newspaper that sticks to its politics, damn public opinion or logic. And the little ankle-biters of my brood—not you fourth-generation lollygaggers—wish to carry it on! Now if they'd only re-educate that pinko Gordon Dillow. . . .
A pox on Otis Chandler!
Raymond Cyrus Hoiles
(Channeled by Gustavo Arellano)
