The simple fact is we've all become numb to Jeff Gahan's signature Shade Eradication Program.

What Judge Cody wants, Judge Cody gets -- with valet efficiency. The remainder of us wait years for our stumps to be ground and replantings to occur.

Meanwhile, Gahan's shadeless semi-walkability proceeds apace. It's an exquisitely banal dictatorship ... but it's our exquisitely banal dictatorship, with anchor cuff links and everything.

Team Gahan has clear-cut virtually the entire city, so it's the perfect time to begin pretending the junta cares about trees.

Surely not since the founding Scribners set out to clear land for the civic forerunner of present-day New Gahania have so many trees fallen as during the reign of Jeffrey I.

He insists more trees have been planted than cut, though the documentary evidence of such remains hidden safely within the labyrinthic bowels of Lawyer Gibson's Information Protection Program.