"They're trying to force our kids to stay in school so they won't be able to go to work. Who's going to get the jobs at McDonald's if our kids are forced to stay in school? I'll tell you-Mexicans, that's who."

A Fox Fruitcake monitor said schoolchildren were particularly vulnerable to the virus. "They're very impressionable," the monitor said. "If they're exposed to radical socialist ideas that brainwash them, they may come to believe that slacking off isn't the way to succeed. The results would be catastrophic."

Other parents feared the virus would have even more severe long-term consequences. "It's insidious," said Watt A. Nutt of Memphis. "Once it's in the schools' video systems, it can take over the whole curriculum and start indoctrinating our kids in hard-core Communist ideas, like the world isn't flat, and 2 + 2 isn't 5."