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Once upon a time in the land of Dexter Vector, people of the left hand were oppressed. Why? Because it was the right thing to do. Lefties could not vote, nor marry right-handed people; they could not work at the better jobs, and wherever they lived they had to carry permits at all times. All but the simplest education would have been wasted on them. They were sinister. It was well-known that this was the right way to build civilization.
Renee was a pretty little girl born to an ambidextrous mother and a left-handed father an unfortunate love-match, as sometimes happens even to the most blest families. Naturally, her mother’s family cast her out when she told them the truth: “I love him,” she said, “and that makes it all right. Both parents poured their souls into Renee, the focus of all their love and hope.
One day when she was five, they saw their worst fears realized: she wrote her name with her left hand, in big clear letters. So Renee’s mother called her brother the only one of her family who would still speak to her. They arranged for Renee to go far away, to be raised as a right-handed person with right-thinking people.
But Renee’s uncle did not hide her true identity from her, and the righteous ways of the world troubled the child. A dutiful girl, she painstakingly learned to write with the correct hand, and to do all things properly. Still she knew that something was terribly wrong. Her uncle warned her it was not right to speak of it. One day when she was just becoming a woman and would carefully arrange to be by herself to think, she found in her uncle’s garage, hidden away like an old error, a rusty musty left-handed monkey wrench. With the sense she was doing something deliciously naughty, she hefted it with her own left hand and instantly a genie appeared out of a small, counterclockwise cyclone, clad in grubby overhauls and smelling of WD-40.
Her heart rose: perhaps the geni could help her right the ways of the world? “Are you here to grant me three wishes?” she asked.
“No, but I will grant you three lies.”
Renee was puzzled. It is not right to lie.
“You know that if you lie, you will lose your immortal soul?” The genie demanded, taking the wrench away from her, and then giving it back to her right hand. She nodded.
“By my powers, I grant you the right to tell three lies, with use immunity from damnation,” he explained. “But if you ever tell a fourth, you abandon your immortal soul.”
With that, he vanished in a clockwise whoosh of blue smoke, leaving a large oilstain.
From that day, Renee worked diligently at becoming a right-handed person. She did well in school, and was accepted to the finest, most exclusive college of all. When she filled out the application, she paused at the routine statement required by the government: “I am not now, and never have been, a left-handed person.” Thus, she used her first lie, marking “right” with a bold hand.
In college, she met a wonderful, well-connected and wealthy right-handed man, who though he showed the right-thinking prejudices of his society friends, still had a good heart. They fell in love, and were married and as Renee walked up the aisle, she saw two shabbily-dressed old people in the back row, on the left (depending on which way you were looking). Her heart sank, but she rightly focused on the key vow required by the ceremony: “Do you, a right-handed woman, take this right-handed man to be your husband?” Her second lie was plain: “I do”, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.
So they grew rich by applying their brains (especially hers, which he rightly recognized) and his social connections, and thus she became involved in politics. Resolutely, she set out eroding, and then openly fighting blind bigotry and discrimination against left-handed people. She was on the right side of history. More and more Dexterians realized that, in truth, their society was moving in circles. For years and then decades, step by step progress was made. Renee sought high office, and then still higher, until finally she was a candidate for President of Dexter Vector, the first woman ever nominated, and she was close to victory.
Then in the last, decisive debate, her desperate opponent brought up the ugly rumor his campaign had been whispering for months: “Can you look the people in the eye,” he cried, “and deny that you are not yourself secretly a Leftie,” he nearly spat the word, “and that is the real reason you are destroying all that is right in Dexter Vector?”
Renee was waiting for this, which she had at first been dreading, and then gradually waiting for, as for redemption: “No,” she said, looking all Dexter Vector in its unblinking electronic eye, “I am, always have been, and always will be a proud, right-handed, right thinking, right-acting person.”
And she won in a landslide. In her two terms as the first female President, left-handed people won the right to vote, and all laws oppressing them were swept aside. Under her leadership, the transition was far easier than anyone expected. By the time she left office, no one could rightly remember why it had seemed so important that left-handed people be denied all. Her rectitude and integrity was legendary “Right as Renee” became a clichZ˙. After all she had accomplished, her slightest act, merest word, became a powerful moral guide for the renamed Republic of Excelsior.
So she retired, old and full of honors, to tend to her family her grown children, and grandchildren, some of them offspring of marriages
