The third book, and remember that we’re only up to 1907 now, is called Ozma of Oz. There’s little mention made about the origin story of the fourteen-year-old Princess, but there are many passages thick with praise for her inestimable beauty.

It’s not a great book, and number four is worse, but the fifth one (The Road to Oz) redeems, in my eyes, by introducing another highly unusual and for me identifiable character.

The Shaggy Man is a beatnik or hippie type; way, way before his time, which in itself says some damn interesting things about the American subconscious.

Even more amazing is that Baum paints him in a largely sympathetic and even at times admiring light–not at all what we’d expect from the traditional interpretation of Traditional American values.

After Dorothy meets him randomly in Kansas, she does her best to show him the road to Butterfield as he asks, but the way is confused for them both by an unseen magic, and in the end it turns out that he only wanted to know which road went to Butterfield so that he could avoid that particular road. And now they are lost together.

“Will your folks worry?” asked the shaggy man, his eyes twinkling in a pleasant way.

“I s’pose so,” answered Dorothy with a sigh. “Uncle Henry says there’s ALWAYS something happening to me; but I’ve always come home safe at the last. So perhaps he’ll take comfort and think I’ll come home safe this time.”

“I’m sure you will,” said the shaggy man, smilingly nodding at her. “Good little girls never come to any harm, you know. For my part, I’m good, too; so nothing ever hurts me.”

Dorothy looked at him curiously. His clothes were shaggy, his boots were shaggy and full of holes, and his hair and whiskers were shaggy. But his smile was sweet and his eyes were kind.

“Why didn’t you want to go to Butterfield?” she asked.

“Because a man lives there who owes me fifteen cents, and if I went to Butterfield and he saw me he’d want to pay me the money. I don’t want money, my dear.”

“Why not?” she inquired.

“Money,” declared the shaggy man, “makes people proud and haughty. I don’t want to be proud and haughty. All I want is to have people love me … ”

In other words, I am happy and even a little proud to report that the Shaggy Man is a heartfelt Anarchist and Anticapitalist.

This holds both true and admirable for the author until near the end of the book, when Baum seems to lose the plot a little, or at least the spiritually political import of his ideas and ideals.

Introduced to the rich and royal splendor of the Emerald City, the ShaggyMan feels abashed and ashamed by his shagginess.

But Ozma in her wisdom has provided him a wardrobe full of clean and new garments of rich fabric, but cut shaggily like his old ones.

After one taste of that heady brew and those fancy threads, he’s begging to be allowed to stay forever in the fairy kingdom, and not ever have to go back to a materialist native land who never understood him and never would.

Shagginess is thus reduced from a rational response to an irrational economy, a rejection of progress and 19th century robber-barony, into a fashion statement and a consumerist dream. Thus, everything important and interesting about it is lost.

With a little thinking on the matter, I believe this is the perfect ending to the Shaggy Man’s origin story. The barely mentioned element of tragedy at the end turns his tale from a simple anarchic celebration, into a very useful cautionary tale.

There are times when I long for more money and more comfort in my life. I might well have gone myself to Butterfield and shook that man down for my fifteen cents. I’m not as good as the Shaggy Man in his original form. I’m not as good as Kwai Chang Caine, who would also neither give nor accept money for anything.

But in my heart of hearts, I believe pretty passionately that if I never had to want for anything–if all my material needs were guaranteed to be met in perpetuity with a grand and final retirement–then just about anything important or interesting about me … would be lost too.

I didn’t care for being a penniless hobo, it’s true.

I cared even less, though, for being respectable and what they call gainfully employed, which means being eternally answerable to an endless upward spiral of Boss Fools, from goose-stepping Chairs to well-dressed and genuinely evil CEOs.

The important and interesting things about me are all about how I’ve tried to square that wicked circle, and truly be free, not just from pinheads and their dumb daily demands, but from the Game itself, and the monopoly money it runs on into a million different dead end brick walls.

Without that ongoing tension and conflict threading through my life and words, I expect I’d be one damn boring read. So I’ve quit playing the lottery, and I don’t ever intend to travel to the Emerald City and be adopted, not even if I had an open invitation from the most beautiful Princess who ever lived.