Proving that all bureaucracies, wherever they breed and multiply, inevitably expand beyond their initial mission statements, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps announced its intention to begin patrolling the 4,000-mile US-Canadian border in an attempt to stop illegal immigration from that northern neighborhood.

Minutemen volunteers, according to news reports, "park themselves in lawn chairs on the US side of the border, with binoculars and cell phones, ready to report illegal entrants."

"It's not about being a vigilante," Mark Forrest assures us from his lookout post in Oregon.

The Minutemen, as most know, is a patriotic group of hall monitors who want to keep Mexicans on their own side of the line drawn in the sand. Since the US Border Patrol is inadequate, Minutemen began patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border in April, then expanded to include the whole southern edge of the national road atlas.

Imagine the prestige and political clout the Minutemen will muster once they're powerful enough to man the entire Canadian frontier. Next project: draw a line in the water and keep those Cuban innertubers and driftwood riff raff off our coastline.

But now a small liberal spin-off group of the Minutemen has taken up arms. Not weapons, just arms. They are the Equal Opportunity Affirmative Action Nonsexist Cooperative of Minutepersons.

"It's not just our unsecured foreign boarders that threaten our society," Grover Groom grimly grumbles as he surveys his two-block patrol area of Elmblight Street in downtown Beshoygan, Michigan. "We have internal problems."

Grover Groom is on a mission to stop illegal jaywalking.

"The crosswalks at the corners are clearly marked," Groom gripes. "If people would just stay between the lines like they're supposed to, society wouldn't be threatened with confusion and chaos and fascist commie anarchy."

In Haxawachie, Texas, Minuteperson volunteer Hattie McBatty is on the lookout for police checkpoint evaders. "Our fine law enforcement officers set up checkpoints for very good reasons," Ms. McBatty states forcefully from behind the viewfinder of her disposable drugstore camera. "I don't know what they're checking for, but that don't give drivers no right to turn around and go the other way when they see a checkpoint. If people would just toe the line we would have a perfectly safe town."

Minuteperson activist Dilbert Dooley, pencil and pad at the ready, scans the row of cars parked outside the Kwiky Kart Konvenience Korner located just inside the New Jersey state line. "Far's I'm concerned," Dooley drawls in deep disgust, "any New Yorker that crosses the line to buy stuff in New Jersey is a tax evader. New York needs every bit of sales tax it can git, and these here evaders are givin' it to Jersey instead."

Dooley stuffs a pinch of snuff into his cheek and proudly displays the official New York tobacco tax stamp. "Just wait'll they start puttin' them RFID thingies on everything that's sold in a store," he smirks. "My son says all the cops gotta do is sit by the road with a RFID detector thingie and then run down them evaders. Yep. That'll teach 'em to cross over the line."

Farther south, brothers Ronnie and Lonnie Wraughtwyler are ardent Minutepersons with a mutual cause. "I love you, Bro," says big brother Lonnie, "but I really think you oughtta stay up there with your fellow DamnYankees."

"You're my brother," replies Ronnie, "but you belong with your like-minded Southern Crackers."

The Mason-Dixon Line, they explain, hasn't been enforced since the end of the Civil War.

"You mean the War of Northern Aggression!" snaps Lonnie Wraughtwyler.

"The Illegal Southern Treason!" brother Ronnie retorts.

Amidst cries of "white trash" and "arrogant snob," the brothers agree on the need for a cultural dividing line.

True-blue Minutemen, however, have more on their minds than preventing illegal aliens from breaching our borders and snatching those cushy garbage collecting and toilet bowl scrubbing jobs away from willing American workers. They want to keep drug smugglers and terrorists out as well.

But any libertarian trainee can tell them how to do that. End the drug war and smugglers will be replaced by a few legitimate importers. And stop the terror threat by ending the government's fifty-year foreign policy of backing and baiting and toppling and befriending and funding and arming and regime-changing and sucking up to despots throughout the Middle East.

So what would the Minuteman nannies have to do if real peace and freedom were ever allowed to break out in America? Maybe draw their lines in the sand and invent Olympic Beach Hopscotch?