Elders jazzed their brains with. They laughed right away when the idea popped up in their heads that they were the glory of the Universe, and that they were supposed to colonize other planets with their incomparable magnificence. They knew exactly how clumsy and dumb they were, even though they could talk and some of them could read and write and do math. One author wrote a series of side-splitting satires about Tralfamadorians arriving on other planets with the intention of spreading enlightenment.
But the people here on Earth, being humorless, found the same idea quite acceptable.
It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big male animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator.
The people down here just ate that up!
Another thing the Elders liked about Earthlings was that they feared and hated other Earthlings who did not look and talk exactly as they did. They made life a hell for each other as well as for what they called lower animals.¨ They actually thought of strangers as lower animals. So all the Elders had to do to ensure that germs were going to experience really hard times was to tell us how to make more effective weapons by studying Physics and Chemistry. The Elders lost no time in doing this.
They caused an apple to fall on the head of Isaac Newton.
They made young James Watt prick up his ears when his mothers teakettle sang.
The Elders made us think that the Creator on the big throne hated strangers as much as we did, and that we would be doing Him a big favor if we tried to exterminate them by any and all means possible.
That went over big down here.
So it wasnt long before we had made the deadliest poisons in the Universe, and were stinking up the air and water and topsoil. In the words of the author, and I wish I knew his name, Germs died by the trillions or failed to reproduce because they could no longer cut the mustard.¨
But a few survived and even flourished, even though almost all other life forms on Earth perished. And when all other life forms vanished, and this planet became as sterile as the Moon, they hibernated as virtually indestructible spores, capable of waiting as long as necessary for the next lucky hit by a meteor. Thus, at last, did space travel become truly feasible.
If you stop to think about it, what the Elders did was based on a sort of trickle-down theory. Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at
the top cant stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.
But the Elders scheme of having the misery of higher animals trickle down to microorganisms worked like a dream.
There was a lot more to the story than that. The author taught me a new term, which was Finale Rack.¨ This was apparently from the vocabulary of pyrotechnicians, specialists in loud and bright but otherwise harmless nighttime explosions for climaxes of patriotic holidays. A Finale Rack was a piece of milled lumber maybe 3 meters long and 20 centimeters wide and 5 centimeters thick, with all sorts of mortars and rocket launchers nailed to it, linked in series by a single fuse.
When it seemed that a fireworks show was over, that was when the Master Pyrotechnician lit the fuse of the Finale Rack.
That is how the author characterized World War II and the few years that followed it. He called it the Finale Rack of so-called Human Progress.¨
If the author was right that the whole point of life on Earth was to make germs shape up so that they would be ready to ship out when the time came, then even the greatest human being in history, Shakespeare or Mozart or Lincoln or Voltaire or whoever, was nothing more than a Petri dish in the truly Grand Scheme of Things.
In the story, the Elders of Tralfamadore were indifferent, to say the least, to all the suffering going on. When 6,000 rebellious slaves were crucified on either side of the Appian Way back in good old 71 B.C., the
Elders would have been delighted if a crucified person had spit into the face of a Centurion, giving him pneumonia or TB.
If I had to guess when The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore¨ was written, I would have to say, A long, long time ago, after World War II but before the Korean War, which broke out in 1950, when I was 10.¨ There was no mention of Korea as part of the Finale Rack. There was a lot of talk about making the planet a paradise by killing all the bugs and germs, and generating electricity with atomic energy so cheaply that it wouldnt even be metered, and making it possible for everybody to have an automobile that would make him or her mightier than 200 horses and 3 times faster than a cheetah, and incinerating the other half of the planet in case the people there got the idea that it was their sort of intelligence that was supposed to be exported to the rest of the Universe.
The story was very likely pirated from some other publication, so the omission of the authors name may have been intentional. What sort of writer, after all, would submit a work of fiction for possible publication in Black Garterbelt?
I did not realize at the time how much that story affected me. Reading it was simply a way of putting off for just a little while my looking for another job and another place to live at the age of 51, with 2 lunatics in tow. But down deep the story was beginning to work like a buffered analgesic. What a relief it was, somehow, to have somebody else confirm what I had come to suspect toward the end of the Vietnam War, and particularly after I saw the head of a human being pillowed in
the spilled guts of a water buffalo on the edge of a Cambodian village, that Humanity is going somewhere really nice was a myth for children under 6 years old, like the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.
Cough.
Ill tell you one germ thats ready to take off for the belt of Orion or the handle on the Big Dipper or whatever right now, somewhere on Earth, and thats the gonorrhea I brought home from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, back in 1967. For a while there, it looked like I was going to have it for the rest of my life. By now it probably can eat broken glass and razor blades.
The TB germs which make me cough so much now, though, are pussycats. There are several drugs on the market which they have never learned to handle. The most potent of these was ordered for me weeks ago, and should be arriving from Rochester at any time. If any of my germs are thinking of themselves as space cadets, they can forget it. They arent going anywhere but down the toilet.
Bon voyage!
But listen to this: You know the 2 lists Ive been working on, 1 of the women Ive made love to, and 1 of the men, women, and children Ive killed? It is becoming ever clearer that the lengths of the lists will be virtually identical! What a coincidence! When I started out with my list of lovers, I thought that however many of them there were might serve as my epitaph, a number and nothing more. But by golly if that same number couldnt stand for the people Ive killed!
Theres another miracle on the order of Tarkingtons students being on vacation during the diphtheria epidemic, and then again during the prison break. How much longer can I go on being an Atheist?
There are more things in heaven and earth…
27
H
ere is how I got a job at the prison across the lake on the same day Tarkington College fired me:
I came out of the garage, having read that germs, not people, were the darlings of the Universe. I got into my Mercedes, intending to go down to the Black Cat Caf? to pick up gossip, if I could, about anybody who was hiring anybody to do practically any kind of work anywhere in this valley. But all 4 tires went bloomp, bloomp, bloomp.