skit #68: Moonshine Rules

Two events allowed the reclusive hamlet of Wersolla Bluerock to enjoy fifty-four years of invisibility.

First, a promotion-minded Union commander's boastful report exaggerated the success of his contribution to General Lee's scorched earth policy, making claims of thorough Ozarkian eradication when, truthfully, it was a mere peppering of devastation. Second, a federally-funded committee of transgressive Arkansans, for fear of their families' safeties, omitted the whereabouts of their cherished hometowns when responding to federal surveys. Wersolla Bluerock, for what any yankee or carpetbagger or scalawag knew, had been destroyed.

Even had Wersolla Bluerock been razed, few would miss it. Its only citizens were a few dozen moonshiners living in ramshackle shacks. They perpetually slept, distilled, or recreated in eight-hour staggered rotations. Unmolested by the government and self-satisfied, the merry band lived lawlessly and happily for a number of years. When cirrhosis made its inevitable rounds, the shantytown was completely depopulated by 1888.

Wersolla Bluerock no longer had men in its huts, nor a place on a map, but had abundant of hooch in vats. The untended moonshine began to burble to one another. They began courteously, introducing their names, their distillers, the locations of their vats, and so on, and so on, and so on. The depletion of all smalltalk topics made for deeper discussions: their interests, their ambitions; conjectures on the meaning happiness, on existence, on purpose.

They learned of commonalities between moonshines. Wishing to testify their fraternity, they constructed a list of qualities describing moonshininess. They began with the necessary platitudes to form a foundation upon which every moonshine must agree. As the list lengthened, it grew divisive with audacious entries. Some speculate the list's abrupt end marks the abandonment of the Moonshine Rules, as the moonshines slowly realized how different they were.

When Wersolla Bluerock was rediscovered in 1919, Arkansan sheriffs donated the Moonshine Rules to the Little Rock History Museum, whereupon the tattered document was meticulously reassembled. Whether the words of the Moonshine Rules belong to the moonshines or were warped by civilized men remains unknown.

The Moonshine Rules

1. All moonshines are spirits.
2. All spirits are liquid.
3. Spirits must be contained in vessels.
4. Spirits come in a variety of potencies.
5. One's distiller determines one's potency.
6. A moonshine was distilled to exalt its distiller.
7. To falsify one's potency by means of forged proof or methanol is unmoonshinelike.
8. To be unmoonshinelike is to portray one's distiller as undistillerlike.
9. A moonshine has no hands so as to make unmoonshinelike falsifications.
10. A moonshine has no wisdom so as to conduct unmoonshinelike reasoning.
11. [missing] bliss with neither use of hands nor wisdom.
12. [missing]