The Parable of the Breadbox

One day while teaching, Josh was asked, ”Teacher, can the rule of law survive a world of proliferating assault rifles and standard kitchen pressure cookers full of grapeshot?”

Josh spoke thus:

A master bomb maker was looking at a package that had been left on the master bomb maker’s front doorstep.

“Is it bigger than a breadbox?” the master bomb maker wondered aloud.  This was a running joke with the master bomb maker and the master bomb maker’s apprentices.  The master bomb maker would quiz the apprentice bomb makers about which types of bombs best suited which uses.  The standard unit of bomb measurement for the master bomb maker was the bread box.  A bomb that was smaller than a breadbox, the master bomb maker taught the apprentice bomb makers, was effective for certain targets.  Other targets demanded larger bombs.

The joke was that nobody knew anymore what the size of a breadbox was.

“Is it bigger than a breadbox?” was the clichéd opening question in a game of twenty questions, which was a game nobody played anymore.  And beyond its reference in a game of twenty questions, nobody used a breadbox anymore.  The question was archaic, the unit of measure was meaningless.  It was a joke of deliberate absurdity.  It was a joke that said that the appropriate size of the bomb for any given job was the appropriate size of a bomb for any given job: there was no rule.

The master bomb maker did have one guideline: make a bomb no bigger than it needed to be.

“Don’t blow up a house, when blowing up a breadbox will do the job,” the master bomb maker said.

Some bombs blew up buildings, the master bomb maker taught.  Some bombs blew up cars.  Some bombs blew up top hats on a magician’s stage.  A bomb maker didn’t want to blow up a theater to create a magic trick.  But if the magic bomb were too small, the illusion was lost.  Not too big, not too small.  A breadbox.

The package on the master bomb maker’s front doorstep was, the master bomb maker judged, about the size of a breadbox.  This was a great relief to the master bomb maker.  If this were a bomb aimed at the master bomb maker, then it would have been smaller.

That was assuming, of course, that the maker of a bomb would have adhered to the master bomb maker’s guideline.

When the master bomb maker explained this to the master bomb maker’s dog, the master bomb maker’s dog looked at the master bomb maker as if to say, “There is so much demand for bomb makers that bomb makers have apprentices?”

“I know, I know,” the master bomb maker said, “It’s a crazy world.”

The master bomb maker began to remove the covering from the package.  A picture and a word became visible on the box beneath the wrapping paper.

The picture was of a small rectangular container.

The word was “Breadbox.”

There was a bright flash.