Dearest Text Message,

            Text, I read with delight that you have recently married the beautiful Semaphore Flag. I do hold out some reservations that she might be too old-fashioned for you, but what do I know? I have been on this trade mission for some hundreds of years now, and you may have altogether changed. Cheers to the newly named Mrs. Semaphore Message! Likewise, please stop by and visit my siblings: Back, Front, and Side Pocket. I miss the pants out of their stitching. I hope that I may here lay out a marketing plan that will see me home soon. The North Americans of Earth are a disparate lot, and though they all left their homes in hope of establishing some greater measure of freedom, it is only recently that I have settled upon a product that we might universally sell to them.

            Let me say that when I first arrived, I thought this mission hopeless. This land was filled with naught but nomads. Read the words of one such ‘native’: “hast thou as much ingenuity and cleverness as the Indians, who carry their houses and their wigwams with them so that they may lodge wheresoever they please” (qtd. in LeClerq 50). Imagine! Travelling all this way from planet Rupert, thinking no being could live without our 17-foot tall toaster ovens, and these are the people I encounter! No, I left them alone. Altogether, they seemed entirely set in their ways. As noted by the human Matthew Scroggins, the natives heftily employ “Us vs. them rhetoric.” We have no desire to be “them.” If their wigwams are a symbol or their freedom, our toaster ovens could be nothing but a captivity tool.

            I briefly held some hope for the first arrivals from Europe. They came for religious reasons. Now, we the Rupertians have several billion years of evolution and The Truth on our side. We know that the Universe was created by the Giant Panda which lives on Jupiter. I stopped by and gave it a high five on the way to Earth. As we know, the Giant Panda likes nothing more than composing and singing pop songs. I thought, if we could talk G.P. into putting out a song book, we could move a lot of copies. Unfortunately, this plan had its faults.

            The first settlers from Europe were the Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the Puritans who settled in the Massachusetts Bay. Both thought themselves English colonies, but the Pilgrims called for a clean break from the English church, and the Puritans advocated reform from within the church. The historian Richard Maxwell defines their mutual goal as being an “innovating principle… in the idea that the Bible, rather than any established religious hierarchy, was the final authority. Therefore every man, every individual, had direct access to the word of God.” Well, would these cultures not be well served by the true words of the Great Panda? The God of the Bible is, after all, a false prophet. Unfortunately, I deemed not. The Puritans were given to casting out people who disagreed with them. When one Anne Hutchinson deemed that she could know ‘God’ without aid of the church, “much time and many arguments (were) spent to bring her to see her sin, but all in vain, the church with one consent cast her out” (Winthrop 163). They similarly cast out one Roger Williams, and we might have been able to market some books in his Rhode Island settlement. He contended “God requireth not an uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state” (The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution). Unfortunately, he was just as certain as the others that non-believers would not be saved. He simply did not believe in forcing someone to read the Bible. Mr. Williams would not have been eager for us to set up shop. Freedom to all of these early settlers was freedom to believe what they already believe.

            I kept after the idea of marketing the true words of the Great Panda for some time. Now, I won’t pretend I like his stuff. Songs like “Oooh, Baby, Baby” and “Baby, Can You Dig Your Panda” are really just insipid drivel, but that doesn’t mean we can’t turn a profit on it. I finally discarded the idea after reading the poetry of Edward Taylor. His Meditation 8 includes “I kening through Astronomy Divine/The World’s bright battlement, wherein I spy/A Golden Path my Pencil cannot line,/From that bright Throne unto my Threshold ly./And while my puzzle thoughts about it pour,/I find the Bread of Life in’t at my door” (ll. 1-6). He thinks this pencil line is a symbolic path to salvation, but little does he know that it’s the true path to the Panda, if he is looking the right direction. His metaphorical conceit implies that God’s grace is something worth looking for, and it can be taken into your soul. How, then, can I give them the true words of the Great Panda, knowing that the Panda’s lines are so inferior to those of its creations? The Great Panda offers no redemption. No, the best market in which to sell is calm and docile.

            After some time, the people of North America were taken up with what they call Enlightenment thought. This current era is predicated on the belief that humans may observe and understand how the world works, quite aside from needing divine explanations. It is the human Ann Brady who finally tipped me off as to what our marketing scheme should be. She says that how the man Benjamin Franklin “seeked to improve and perfect himself was shown in his Autobiography by his mentions of his mistakes, which he calls ‘errata.’ He mentions them and then points out ways in which he tries to remedy them to show his audience how he seeks to learn from his mistakes and perfect himself in the future.” Franklin historian David Larson notes that this book “is the most frequently translated literary work of nonfiction that has come from the United States.” This thing is huge. Here is an era where freedom means freedom to 'improve yourself' through any damn thing you can be convinced of. We have a new man on the Enlightenment horizon, Adam Smith, and from what I understand he is all about turning a profit. According to economist Alan Krueger, “To Smith, enlightenment (is) for the masses” (http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/08_16_2001.htm). Let's hope so. It's time for the invisible hand of the market to efficiently deliver knowledge to these chumps.

            Here is what I propose: what is your half-sister, Oprah Winfrey, up to? I know it’s a long trip. It will probably take a couple of hundred years to get her down here, but if Franklin is any indicator, this continent is going to have a fierce appetite for self-help literature, and I think she is the lady for the job. She can write books. Hell, she can probably even have her own magazine. I think after hundreds of years of study, I’ve found what these people have an appetite for. Sure, we both know they’ll always be wheelwrights and cobblers, but if there’s one thing North Americans want, it is to feel that they have more potential than they actually have. Tell Oprah to pack her bags. It’s time we sell that hope to them.

Greedily, your friend, Hip Pocket

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