eating at the little red hen's table

Well there's a shaggy dog story to start the day, and then it ends with a pun.  I hardly think this is good behavior in the univied halls, hence not the work of a good boy.  What could have caused this bad behavior?

Why is there bad?   In a world where everybody is good and everybody looks out for each other and would give each other the proverbial shirt off their back, why do some act badly, keep their shirts on their backs and indeed take yours when your head is turned, sit down at the little red hen's supper table and expect to get a fat slice of bread?

Because they can get away with it.  Because everybody else is good (altruistic) and they expect everyone else to be good and they assume that the bad person must have found a shirt that looks just like the one that disappeared off your back, and must have done something to help make that bread that is being sliced.

Not the little red hen of course, and truth be told not hardly anybody else.  Even kindly Uncle Ken can tell when a couple minutes of his morning routine are stolen by a shaggy dog story.

This is the selfish gene theory of good and evil and vengeance.  First off we don't have one gene that says don't steal that shirt or one that says always help out the little red hen. We have a variety of genes and in various combinations they can give us a tendency towards certain behaviors.  Every time the long tailed devil approaches Ms Egg with a box of chocolates and a bouquet of flowers the genes are shaken up.

See if you're a bad guy (unaltruistic) among good people you can get away with murder you can steal, you can freeload, and your life is so free and easy that you have lots of offspring who carry on your evil ways and they have lots of offspring and pretty soon there is no little red hen for that table of freeloaders and the tribe starves to death.

But here's another tribe who are altruistic enough, but along with good in their genes they also have vengeance, something that causes them to be on the alert for being had and makes them want to punish thieves and freeloaders, and what the hell, folks who cross them.  Thus the bad genes are held in check and the tribe thrives and becomes the human race that we know today.


So how about that White Shadow (Pence)?  Did I not say that he had a lean and hungry look?  Well maybe I didn't, but I meant to.  Actually I kind of made up that lean and hungry look thing.  He looks like a straight arrow, a boy scout, to me.  But you know even the purest in heart among us (and I am thinking of you Beagles without sin) must sometimes kill the king to save the country.