The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, designed by the masterful Tadao Ando, is that city’s foremost cultural treasure. Its five shining concrete-and-glass pavilions are surrounded by a glittering reflecting pool, beyond which the skyscrapers of downtown thrust into the blue prairie sky. The Modern’s galleries hold some 2,600 works of art by the likes of Picasso and Pollock, Serra and Serrano. The high glass walls are designed to flood the galleries with natural light; they are not designed to repel an attack by Clobbersaurus.

Two blows from his scaly fists sufficed to shatter the tall front doors, even though it was the first Sunday of the month, when anyone can enter for free, even half-ton lizardmen. A sweep of his spiked tail destroyed a stand of reasonably-priced Yoshitomo Nara collectibles. Anselm Kiefer’s masterwork Papst Alexander VI: Die goldene Bulle hung on the far side of the entry gallery; “Monstrous pile!” snarled Clobbersaurus, and ripped the canvas in half with his powerful claws. “Flee, ye sons of man!” he shrilled in his lizardly voice, and the patrons did just that, streaming through the destroyed doors and to the safety and security of the nearby Kimbell Art Museum, which displayed works no later than the Post-Impressionists. Its limestone vaults were built during the Cuban missile crisis; Clobbersaurus would be no threat to them.

From the top of the obscenely ugly forty-three story Burnett tower, the Lone Wrangler brooded over his city. As near as he could tell, all seemed to be at peace, and – Land o’ Goshen, was that the sound of forty-foot glass walls shattering?

The Lone Wrangler dove off the tower, clicked his thrustospurs together, and rocketed westward along 7th Street. By Gum, the east wall of the Modern was down, the shards reflecting in the reflecting pool like so many shredded goldfish, and someone was mangling his favorite Josef Havel sculpture.

“Clobbersaurus! I shoulda known! All right, ya varmint, drop that there exquisite leadcast and let’s get to fisticuffs!”

“Wrangler! My quarrel is not with thee, but with this so-called ‘art’. I would fain wipe my crevasse with this Diebenkorn’s Urbana #6, but since my transformation, I no longer excrete, so the act would be symbolic rather than practical – I will settle for spindling and mutilating within my mighty talons! Urbanal, more likely! Ha!” And he shredded the hapless painting.

“All right, Mr. Saurus, you step away from the neoplasticism, nice and easy-like. Let’s step outside and have us a tussle. I reckon I kin whip you six ways from Sunday.” Keep his gums flapping, the Wrangler thought, and get him away from the priceless art. “Let’s settle this like man and lizardman. If’n ya ain’t yeller.” His hands moved slowly to his pair of 1876 Colt Laser Action Revolvers.

“My quarrel is not with thee, Wrangler, but with the masters of De Stijl! Regardless, I will not hesitate to pulp thee into pallid palimpsest, shouldst thou seek to cross swords. Avaunt, varlet!” And before the Wrangler could draw his guns, Clobbersaurus vaulted to Carl Andre’s Tau and Threshold sculpture, which he hurled at the Wrangler with all his might, smashing through Dan Flavin’s irreplaceable Diagonal of May 25, 1963. “My true objective awaits upstairs. Harry me not, for I smash for the greater good!” Clobbersaurus tromped upstairs, flinching briefly at Andy Warhol’s self-portrait.

The Wrangler clicked his boots together and rocketed up the stairs, crashing into Clobbersaurus and knocking him forward, where he sprawled beneath Rothko’s Light Cloud, Dark Cloud. The Lone Wrangler’s heart sank. Once confronted with abstract expressionism, Clobbersaurus would enter a killing rage.

“Maybe we ought to parlay a little,” the Wrangler said, leveling his Laser Actions at Clobbersaurus’s head. “What’s got yer hackles up?”

“These execrable canvases,” Clobbersaurus growled. “Look at them! What have we here? Three rectangles on an orange background, rendered with the consummate skill of a palsied six year-old! How many millions did the museum pay for this dreck? Once art sought to uplift, to elucidate, to move! Now it only confounds, confuses, obfuscates! It creates barriers where it ought to pierce them. It corrupts where it ought to beatify; it is an elitist exercise in absurdism that destroys hope and the quest for meaning, engineered with its own extinction!”

The Wrangler considered the piece. “I always understood Rothko was about the interplay of colors and such-like.”

“And Rembrandt isn’t?” said Clobbersaurus bitterly.

“Well, now, that’s just backwards-lookin’,” said the Wrangler. “We got to move forward.”

“We are under no obligation to innovate for its own sake. So-called innovation gave us this abortion!”

The Wrangler scratched his head. “Well, I don’t know about that. . . ”

“Allow me to phrase it this way. Wrangler, what is the income of your everyday persona?”

“I do okay. Maybe forty-five big ones a year.”

“And Messire Rothko splashed this dross out in a month, and earned seven million for it. You could do this. Your child could do this, could he not?”

“Well, yeah! It doesn’t seem fair, really! How do they get away with it?”

“Obfuscation, Wrangler. It is a stranglehold on our creative throats. It is an insult to the intellect of a nation. It is injustice on a national scale. For every Joseph Beuys, there are a thousand unburied corpses.” And Clobbersaurus shed one crystal tear.

The Wrangler holstered his guns. “Get on up, Clobbersaurus,” he sighed.

“Thou wilt not stand in my way?”

“Shucks! I’ll help you! Then I’ll take you to Jamba Juice and buy you a smoothie.”

“The Blueberry Blaster is rich in antioxidants,” Clobbersaurus rumbled, raking his talons across the canvas.