For several days, the mailboxes in my neighborhood stood with their jaws hanging open. "No bombs in here! No siree!" they proclaimed in hollow voices. But it's not the bombs that my jaw is hanging open about. It's the letter that came with them.

Our local news anchor read the letter in its entirety on the evening news. With the anchor's dramatic voice-over, the words scrolled across the screen in a font size of "gigantic," in case you had accidentally hit the "mute" button while a contact lens simultaneously popped out. Golly, what more could the bomber ask for? The letter consisted mainly of phrases like, "In this society you are forced to [blah]," and, "I'm here to help you realize [blah]." Did this God-complex drivel really merit such hoopla that reputable writers only dream of? (Watch out: Now that Oprah's Book Club is canned, you might spot Toni Morrison sidling up to your mailbox.)

After bombarding viewers with poor grammar (reportedly responsible for several cases of Post-traumatic Punctuation Syndrome), the news cameras panned over to a local law-enforcement official who presented his lengthy, detailed profile of the celebrity - uh, felon. Yawn. Now here's a real profile: "Naive Liberal Poseur with a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook, acquired through bartering his Little, Brown Handbook of composition - a 'good trade' he undoubtedly bragged about later."

Clearly, this bomber guy felt he was the only one who had the brains to question the government (and the utter genius to do it with pipe bombs). The kicker is, he got the chance to peddle his unoriginal ideas right to the source, like something out of a B-grade horror flick with a catchy trailer trumpeting, "When direct marketing goes wrong ... very, very wrong." No editors to impress, no dues to pay, no pen name to struggle with. (Luke Helder? Sounds like a Midwestern yahoo who likes to play with matches ... or explosives.) Nope. None of that. Just his message on our TVs, telling us, "Hey, capitalists/zombies! I'll lead you from your utopian ignorance - just follow the string of exclamation points!!!"

We respectable citizens still possessing our Freshman Composition copies of the Little, Brown Handbook shouldn't despair, though. Justice will be done. Sure, he'll serve some time, but don't stop there. Give him something to do. Make him labor in the gravel pit? Too easy. Force him to put his letter through the standard editorial process? Now that's punishment.

First, provide him with a critique group (a.k.a. chain gang) to tear his letter apart and leave him slumped over it questioning whether he should ever voluntarily relinquish his yard time for the mighty pen again. Then, after several iterations of this, put him in solitary confinement where he can spend days addressing envelopes to publications and stuffing each one with a SASE, a stilted manuscript of the infamous letter, and an awkward cover letter. (Later he'll write on his dirt-floor journal, "After buckling/conforming to the chain gang's suggestions/oppression, the so-called properly placed participles jumped out at me like little exploding mailboxes!")

When all of his manuscripts come back with form letters of rejection two weeks later, inmate Helder will spend the day eating chocolate (or, if they don't get that in prison, bugs) and crossing out every other word in his text. He'll stuff more envelopes. He'll eat more chocolate (or bugs). He'll drag himself off his spring-punctured mattress every day to receive his mail from the jeering hand extended through the bars. After six months of submissions and $102.75 in stamps that his dad paid for, he'll actually get a hand-written comment scribbled on one of the form letters. It'll say, "Don't you know nobody takes you seriously until you're 40?" followed with ... a smiley face.

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