I respectfully submit for your approval the text of the speech I am prepared to make to the Food and Drug Administration:

Ladies and gentlemen, you may tear down the honored pictures from the halls of the United States Senate, desecrate the grave of George Washington, haul down the Stars and Stripes, bulldoze the Lincoln Memorial, and rape the Statue of Liberty in broad daylight, but your crime would in no way compare in enormity with that of giving minuscule thought-room to the merest notion of meddling with the composition of CHOCOLATE! Mess with CHOCOLATE? Hell, NO!

Anyone who would meddle with CHOCOLATE is bereft of taste-buds, taste in general, general intelligence, and any knowledge whatsoever of the finer things that life has to offer. You may compare the discordant croak of the bullfrog to the melodious tones of a nightingale, the classic strains of Mozart to the fart of a Mexican mule, the puny prick of a pipsqueak politician to the rowdy rod of a Roman gladiator – but change the composition of CHOCOLATE! Hell, NO!

Hear me! Any person who would meddle with CHOCOLATE is the original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds beyond the River Styx! Sired by a hurricane, dammed by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, and related to the small-pox, he is akin to Sudden Death and General Desolation! Blood is his natural drink! And the wails of the dying is music to his ears!

Lay low and hold your breath? NO! Anyone who would simply stand by and allow this is guilty of turning loose an abomination! Meddle with the composition of CHOCOLATE? Anyone who would allow CHOCOLATE to be fiddled with would use the meridians of longitude and the parallels of latitude for a net, and drag the world's oceans for whales! He would massacre isolated communities as a pastime and use the boundless vastness of the world's deserts for his private graveyard! He would turn off the sun, hide the stars in a septic tank, put the sky to soak in a mud puddle, hang the world's rivers from a clothesline, unbuckle the belly-band of Time, and hang a funeral shroud over the moon to spite young lovers.

But—allow any such misbegotten creature from beneath the Abyss to mess with the composition of CHOCOLATE?

Never! The world will again pause and wonder at the iniquity and malevolence of any lop-eared, lantern-jawed, half-assed, wobble-brained, scum-sucking hyena who even gives thought-room to the blasphemous notion of messing with the nature of CHOCOLATE!

HELL, NO!

Don Firth