Tales of ordinary madness
There’s an old short SF story, that’s truly, deeply, darkly funny. I don’t remember the name of the author, the name of the story even but it goes like this:
There’s been some nuclear war. That old Cold War wipe-out everybody was so fearful of. The Cuba crisis, comrade Krushev claiming he would bury us. Shit, people wrote songs about it (to the tune of some Russian composer, who would most probably, from his quiet grave, have thought that would be reason enough to set the bombs flying.)
Nowadays, some lunatics fly into two towers, kill a few thousand people and the world behaves as if it’s seen the pale riders of the Apocalypse planning for a team-building weekend. Hello…? Is anyone still even vaguely connected to the rational world? During the first world war there were a million casualties just during the battle of Verdun.
Ah, but if Osama and others got the chance, they would drop atomb bombs on all of us.
And that’s reason enough to do away with civil liberties in our own countries, invade others, condone torture and kidnapings and the spending of billions of dollars on…? Well, no-one’s really sure on what precisely but it sure ain’t winning the hearts & minds of the rest of the world.
Absolutely, Osama and his evil ilk would probably like to kill a Hell of a lot more people. You know what, though? He’s not the only one. All throughout history there have been people like that. Sometimes they succeed in fulfilling their mad dreams, for a while; sometimes they don’t.
Unless the rest of us choose to follow some mad piper, a lunatic can kill and kill and kill to his heart’s delight, for some time, but his actions will still be meaningless and of no lasting moment. Madmen don’t change history – and neither do saints, nor knights in shining armour.
History is like this huge mammoth tanker: you can change its course but only slowly. Revolutions don’t change history. Look at the French revolution, the Russian revolution: lots of bloodshed and decades of turmoil but when the dust settled things proved not very different from what they were right before the first blood was drawn.
Then what about the first world war you mentioned? That war started because one madman shot Franz Ferdinand, didn’t it? No, it didn’t, actually. The Peace Palace in Holland’s The Hague was built at the end of the 19th century, by representatives of most of Europe’s leaders who were worried about the massive arms race between their countries. They could smell war on the air, so they built this peace palace and invented some council that would work to find peaceful solutions for international problems.
Big surprise: it didn’t work. No peace palace can stop a war that’s in the air – and no madman with a gun can start one, if history isn’t ready for it at that point in time. Same with Osama and other bloodthirsty irritants. They and their actions are meaningless. They, like Auden’s poem said about poetry, cannot make things happen.
Yes, they are pests – bloody pests even but only the kinds of dreaming & dangerous fools like Bush and his cronies will curfew a whole town, set fire to surrounding villages and hand out big money and even bigger guns to all comers because one rabid cur has been making a nuisance of itself on the town’s square.
Anyway, back to that SF story. So, there’s been some nuclear fall-out between the two super powers and now the world lies broken & barren.
Ah, but there stands – or stumbles – the last man on earth. He seems to be in some pain. He’s certainly not a happy camper. He’s looking and looking and looking for something, or someone. Then, after days or weeks or months of searching he finally sees another survivor: a woman, no less.
So, the world may not exactly resemble that first Garden but here are two people who have at least another chance to play Adam and Eve. Maybe there’s still some hope for the world.
The man greets the woman. He’s still in considerable pain:
“Are you a dentist?” the man asks the woman.
“No.” she says.
“Damn” says the man and blows his brains out.
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
