I have become an oppressed peasant.

I became one earlier this week, when I found out that the Hostess company was in danger of bankruptcy and Secret Service agents were, uh, partying with Colombian whores.

As the comforts of the common toiler vanish, the bodyguards of the elite roll in the arms of foreign prostitutes.

This is how it was at the end of the Roman Empire, when you crouched in your hut, gnawing a hard crust of stale bread, while far away in Rome, the emperor and his intimates drank costly wine cooled in snow and ravished beautiful slaves brought from every corner of the known world.

From the front yard/dunghill of your hovel, you could see the rapidly crumbling stones of the Roman road, and you remembered how the emperor's troops used to come swinging down that road, tall and strong.

And you thought how the bread was whiter in those days and not nearly as stale.

I'm a reporter on a midsized daily newspaper, a journeyer into distant suburbs, a peasant hoeing the rocky fields of town politics, grubbing up stories from the hard earth of school committee meetings and one-vehicle, non-fatal car crashes.

And you might have seen me, pausing from my life of ceaseless toil, sitting in the cab of my pickup truck, parked in front of a convenience store, breaking from my shift to enjoy a Hostess Fruit Pie (very often cherry) and a cup of coffee, metaphorically leaning on my hoe and staring at the horizon.

While, far away, the emperor's bodyguards rolled in the perfumed arms of Hispanic whores.

I found out that same week that the Hostess company was considering bankruptcy, that it was trying to break its unions and weasel out from under its pension promises. Its employees, peasants like me, may soon squat in their huts, gnawing that hard, dark bread.

What's it mean?

Well, as always, it means that it's lonely at the top and crowded at the bottom. It means that the man who waits patiently for a cup of coffee and a Ho Ho on his break pays for those who enjoy imported vodka and a couple of hos on their break.

As a columnist over the last 20 years, I've moved from attempting to contemplate politics intelligently, to bitter humor, through rage and on into a deep sadness that Twinkies will not touch and Ring Dings cannot mask.

At first, I though it was my own advancing age that gave my surroundings a darker color every year, but now I know I live at the beginning of the end of things, at least in the pokey little parts of America where I've always lived.

The plant shuts down, and the Twinkies stop coming, though you can still afford those stiff, sugary knock-off Twinkies that they sell in the dollar store.

And if you're smart, or just cunning, you try to get a job in the emperor's palace, because there is no comfortable cream-filled middle anymore, only millions living in endless uncertainty and thousands living in endless, undignified revel amidst the broken precepts of democracy and morality.

They are simple things, really, maybe not even symptomatic.

Greedhead CEOs push their workers to the wall, perhaps ending my dear, stupid tradition of eating a fruit pie at break time. At the same time, Secret Service agents, whom we are endlessly told will "take a bullet," pause to take a bimbo back to the hotel.

And, later, to haggle over price until the cops come.

Just a little more, just a few more small deprivations, just a few more scandals, and I'll be ready to heave a rock through the nearest rich man's window.

Like millions of you, my health insurance goes up in price every year, and my deductible increases all the time. I no longer have a guaranteed pension plan, like my father did.

Every comfort must be taken from us. Every certainty must be toppled. Every cushioning must be removed, while the people at the top are padded until they can't feel even life's smallest knock.

How many fruit pies does it take to start a revolution?

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit, www.creators.com.