You have to be cruel to be kind.

"The damned bridge was closed!" exclaimed Bridezilla, rushing into her psychiatrist's office.  "Oh, no!  I cursed on a Sunday!"

"God understands your cursing, and I understand your tardiness," replied Dr. Ermann Esse.  "Please relax and make yourself comfortable.  Did you know they are filming bridge shots for a Captain America movie?  Imagine that!  I read Captain America when I was a boy."

"Dr., please!  Aren't we here to talk about me?"

"Of course, my dear!  I was just giving you a chance to catch your breath and sip your drink."

"I had the craziest dream last night!  Thank goodness the colonel was out with the groomsmen getting tuxes when I woke up, and he didn't catch me screaming."

"You refer to your fiance as 'the colonel'?"

"I've just gotten in the habit, while planning this wedding," said Bridezilla.  "You get much faster service when you say 'the colonel' than when you say 'Alex' or even 'Alexander'.  And people offer you military discounts!  I got 20% off the tiramisu wedding cake, and they threw in the dry ice for free.  Plus they said they'll give me 10% off a lemon or strawberry cake if I want to do that on the side--because they said some people don't like tiramisu, but I never met anybody who didn't like tiramisu?!"

"I don't care for it," said Dr. Esse.

"Oh, no!  I forgot your wedding invitation!  But I'll put it in the mail tomorrow."  (Dr. Esse was not concerned--his expert opinion was that the wedding was not going to happen, anyway.)  "But this nightmare!  Oh, my God!"  (Dr. Esse nodded encouragingly.)  "I was in this party bus for crazy horror movie fans, and the driver was going like 90 miles per hour--which was bad enough out in Maryland, but then he kept going that fast even as we approached Georgetown!"

"Why were you going to Georgetown?"

"I don't know!  Some sort of horror bookstore event they wanted to attend.  But I managed to jump out of the bus, which seemed less scary than waiting for the bus to crash in the narrow streets of Georgetown.  And then I went straight over to see the President of the United States, but it wasn't at the White House, and it wasn't Obama--it was a Bush daughter, except she was a secret Bush daughter that nobody had known about.  She had just captured all these prisoners and was making them wash their hair with hand soap and showering them off in a large room like concentration camp people, but then she wasn't so cruel because she did let me hand out hair conditioner."  (Dr. Esse stopped taking notes after jotting down the word "cruel".)  "Then I finally got in to see this President Bush, and she was consulting a talking doll--it was one of her advisers!  It was the creepiest thing I've ever seen!  I had a doll that looked like that when I was young, but it didn't talk, and I certainly never asked it for advice!  (I only asked my teddy bear for advice.)  So then President Bush was talking about their efforts to capture and airlift an orca, but the plane wasn't strong enough, so they were going to put a hook in the orca's eye and drag it across land, and I thought that was the cruellest, most disgusting plan ever--bad enough they were going to put a hook in its eye, but how could it survive out of water for so long?"  (Dr. Esse underlined the word "cruel" twice.)  "She was finally ready to listen to me, and I told her about the speeding bus in Georgetown, and she thought local law enforcement could probably handle it, but she would send some federal troops in just to be on the safe side.  Then all of the sudden I was back in Georgetown, and the horror bus people were trying to get revenge on me for ratting them out!  Then I woke up just as they were trying to grab my ankles and drag me down into the Canal."  She shuddered and looked up at the shrink for his answer.

"What I hear you talking about is cruelty," said Dr. Esse.  ("Huh?")  "Cruelty," repeated the shrink.  "That is what is gnawing at your subconscious:  cruelty to the prisoners, cruelty to the killer whale, and then cruelty to you.  Who are the prisoners?  Who is the killer whale?"  Dr. Esse felt that the prisoners were the invited wedding guests, and the orca was Colonel Alexander Wolfbugler, but he waited patiently for Bridezilla to reach this conclusion on her own.

"What about the secret Bush daughter president and her talking doll?  The whole thing was about unnatural horror and creepiness!"

"Those elements accentuate the feeling of fear in the dream, but the ultimate cause of the uneasiness is the presence of cruelty."  (Bridezilla just stared at him in perplexity.)  "I believe the cruelty was not caused by supernatural phenomena but by very natural, very human phenomena."  (Still no response from Bridezilla.)  "Search your feelings.  Let's start with the orca--a killer whale.  This is a large, fierce animal that inspires fear in most people, but you wanted to protect it in the dream from a most unusual fate.  Who in your life is like a large, fierce animal that inspires fear in most people but concern in your heart over his unusual fate?"

"Wayne La Pierre?"

Dr. Esse frowned, fearing that Bridezilla might not be psychologically ready to get the colonel off the hook until she literally saw him floundering up to the wedding alter.  But by that point, it would be too late for Dr. Esse to protect her from the revenge of the wedding guests!  He sighed, and made a quick note to himself to bring some chloroform to the wedding in case he had to induce a fainting spell for her own good.

Outside Dr. Esse's office, Glenn Michael Beckmann also had Wayne La Pierre on his mind, and was writing a lengthy blog post about him on his laptop in McPherson Square.  "Yeah, I purchased Army surplus assault rifles from Blue Sky Productions!" wrote Beckmann.  "All good patriots did!  Only traitors would pay Russians for Kalashnakovs!"  He stopped, thoughtful for a moment.  "The Uzis were a special case, of course--buying those, you were supporting Israel.  So, yeah, buy American when you can, and then buy Uzis when you can't.  Now, of course, if you steal a Kalashnakov off a commie, then you're entitled to keep it--that's a completely different situation.  But this Washington Post article slamming Blue Sky Productions and Wayne La Pierre is a disgrace!  (That's my main point.)  Now, did I know anything about that plane crash during the Grand Jury inquiry?  Well, gee, that was a long time ago--I might have known something about it, but I can't remember now!  ;-) .  But you know, even the best gun can't protect you from a plane crash, LOL!  But, seriously, we all need assault rifles because the worst way to die would be from tyranny that you could have prevented.  Yeah, maybe a woman is more likely to be murdered by a man she knows that by anybody else--especially if she's pregnant--but whose fault is that?  She should buy a gun of her own!  If I had a baby on board, I would be packing heat all the time!  Actually, I am packing heat all the time, ha ha ha!"  He looked up and saw a white pigeon dove staring at him strangely.  "Oh, yeah, and HAPPY ORTHODOX EASTER to all you Christians holding down the fort in Jerusalem!  Righteous!  Thanks for bombing Syria, I think--actually, that whole situation is getting kind of confusing for me, but I'm sure y'all know what you're doing!"

"That whole situation is getting kind of confusing for me," said John Doe to the ghost of Henry Samuelson, on a park bench on the other side of McPherson Square.  "Israel is bombing Syria because of Lebanon?  I thought Lebanon was the Switzerland of the Middle East."

"That's beside the point!" said Ghost Henry to the temporal lobe epileptic.  "These wars started centuries ago--they just have better weapons now."

"Righteousness is the best weapon," said Doe.

"And righteousness with a neutron bomb is even better, but does anybody listen to me?" asked Ghost Henry.

"My vision of the new Palestine definitely did not have a neutron bomb!  Well, gosh, Henry!  If your Ghost CIA does something like that, what's the point?  Then you'll have millions and millions of angry ghosts in the Middle East.  I don't think Switzerland is like that at all!  How is that an improvement?"

Over in Virginia, Bridezilla was returning home from her secret shrink appointment.  She had already forgotten about Dr. Esse's advice because she had been listening intently to NPR on the car radio--trying to understand the Middle East at a level in which she could have an intelligent conversation with her fiance--Colonel Alexander Wolfbugler!  But it was exhausting, because he would always have a thousand times more salient information than she had!  "Hi, honey!" she called out.

"You accidentally dropped two hairbrushes into the washing machine," he said.

"Oh, that wasn't an accident!  That's how I clean them."

"That's gross!" he said.  "There's hair all over the towels!"

"Most of it comes off in the dryer."

"Well, it didn't," said Wolfbugler.

"Well, I could put them in the dishwasher, but then there might be hair caught on the silverware."

"The silverware?!  You can't put a hairbrush in the dishwasher!  The hair will clog up the strainer!"

Bridezilla wasn't sure what strainer he was talking about, and she was desperate to change the topic of conversation.  "It's such a pity about Hezbollah, isn't it?" she said, gently removing the basket of partially folded (slightly hairy) towels from his reach.  (He loves touching my hair!  I don't know why seeing a little of it on the towels is such a big deal!)

"What?  Yeah, Hezbollah," he said cautiously, with a hello kiss that he suddenly remembered he owed her.  "Oh, did you see the Washington Post before you left?  The "Sunday Style" section is about weddings!"

"You think I should take wedding advice from the Washington Post?!"  (She said the name of the newspaper like it was the National Enquirer.)  "My wedding plan is already finalized!"  (She pointed him to the 5-inch wedding binder on the coffee table--which currently had only seven "URGENT" flags still affixed to its pages.)  "Are the tuxes taken care of?"  (Wolfbugler nodded yes.)  She picked up the binder and turned to the tuxedo page:  "You didn't remove the flag," she said.

"I thought you liked to remove the flags yourself," he said, his pulse racing.

"Oh, you're so thoughtful!" she gushed, suddenly in love with him again.  "You really do get me!"  With that, she started pulling his clothes off, but then remembered she still hadn't taken that flag off the tuxedo page....

Out on their apartment balcony, a bluebird of happiness signaled to her mate that this was no place to lay her eggs, and they flew off in search of a safer environment.  Nearby, a flock of starlings laughed in the trees, and some sparrows waited on the ground for another wedding cake to come crashing down.