The Grinning Stick Ones

"Oh, look at you, you are such wonderful people," he said, standing on an upside down white plastic bucket.  Hundreds of the natives squatted in the dirt  beneath a broiling sun and grinned up at him.  They had only some beans and rice and corn to eat every day and they were quite bony.
". . . you smile and dance so easily," he said, "how wonderful you are . . ."
All their lives they had bathed in a dirty river, then put on their floppy old black trousers and wrinkled white shirt or if a woman, she daintly dressed in an old long black skirt that rats had eaten holes in and she would tie a tattered white rag around her breasts, and music was made by beating sticks together and everyone danced, grinning and chattering some in worthless dialect.

". . . you are so happy," he went on, "what wonderful people you are, always grinning and happy, grinning profusely on your "holy" days as you scutter barefoot to your "holy" grass hut to worship some mysterious force that some long ago power told us about . . . oh, you are so industrious, ploughing up your ground with sticks to plant your corn . . ."
They always ran to the mountains to escape the constant monstrous, howling winds and floods that annually destroyed their villages, but they continued to worship the all-powerful, mystical, "holy" force and kept on chattering and grinning and cackling through the few rotted teeth that they had left.
". . . you love me as you did the powerful people who could read and write and they taught me and made me your master because I am one of you and I love you and have beans and rice brought to you and I teach you what the loving Spirit tells me to teach you . . . so continue to  worship the Spirit as our ancestors did in the Stone Age, but continue to worship the Spirit of the powerful people, too, and I will continue to be your master . . ."

"Thank you, master!" they all shouted, grinning and beating the sticks.
" . . . I will continue to represent you at the United Nations where Stick people like us have much  power," he said, "and are taking over the world -- with the help of the terrorists . . . ."