Experimental convo

Dear diary,

I’m exhausted from fretting about selling our apartment—not from accomplishing anything or from finishing tasks; I’m only worn out from worrying—so I need to scribble an entry here just to burn up anxiety; but I don’t feel like putting any energy into polishing my thoughts (normally when I present my thoughts in these entries they are polished and prettily poised, not desperate like the cries of a Parisian soul trapped in a U.S. body); so I’ll write a dialogue without caring where it goes or how interesting it ends up. It’s just an experiment.

*

We’ve been watching you for eons, from our microscope.

You mean telescope?

No, microscope. Although we appear the same size as you, here on earth, we’re actually much bigger than you, in reality. What you call “the whole wide world” is just a droplet—like pond water—between two slides in our science lab.

God, I hate science.

So do we. That’s why we paid you a visit. To escape from the tyranny of harmony. We want to learn how you earthlings do it: how you’ve mastered greed and deceit and hatred and folly. And how you have this money-merit system that keeps everyone in agony. It looks so fun. How do you distrust love while worshiping war? Teach us your ways.

Well actually, I’m sort of against all that stuff that you listed. I’m a righteous bambino; I write in my diary and post my entries on this weblog where I whine about the unfairness of the current system. So I’m the wrong one to tell you how to be more like whoever runs this nightmare.

According to our records, you’re a multi-billionaire who feels guilty for having acquired his wealth in a cruelly rigged system during times of record-breaking inequality.

That’s right.

And you’d like to trick the Judge of Souls into liking you, by performing an act of philanthropy that won’t cost you a fortune; therefore you’ll spend some spare change… how, exactly?

I aim to buy up all the currently vacant houses, then legally transfer their ownership so as to solve homelessness.

Is that worldwide or just in the U.S.A.?

Only here in the States. – Let’s be humble and think small. (I’m not interested in actually sacrificing anything; only in the appearance of having sacrificed.)

OK, but what about the next generation? All the up-and-coming people, those who are infants now but will, if the LORD permits, grow up to be cowboys. So then we’ll need another multi-billionaire to come along and rain down charity, or else the problem will revive, like a god who keeps resurrecting, or like mold or bacteria.

Yeah, and the more you try to eradicate bacteria, the more resilient it gets, because it believes in the Nietzschean aphorism “Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.” So not only will homelessness seep back into the realm of public problems just one generation after solving it, but it will require a SUPER-multibillionaire to battle this new strand of SUPER-poverty. So here’s what I propose. We should alter the weather and climate conditions so that they’re favorable to humankind. That way, none of us will need to worry about housing. We’ll all just live outdoors, in our birthday suits, and hunt thunder-lizards.

Sounds great: that’s an excellent idea. Plus, since weather and climate are things that float all over this globe of ours, I assume that in thus solving the poverty problem in the Americas, you’ll also have solved it for the rest of the nations of the Earth.

No. Only the States deserve to enjoy my magic. Thus all the ideal weather and climate will be chained down to our coastlines, so they can’t drift away. Or we’ll put a big trough there, to catch them. The rest of the nations of Earth will have nothing but snowstorms constantly. But we will manufacture a new type of pressboard with wood pulp and other lumber scraps…

Ah, you’re thinking of making this new pressboard your number-one export.

Yes, so that the foreign nations can purchase our product to build their cabins with. Or if they don’t like the word cabin, they can call them huts or cottages or lodges – like The Black Lodge from Twin Peaks (1990).

But with employment at 100%, and with crime at an all-time low, and with zero homelessness, and no more war, malnutrition, medical malpractice or sex trafficking, what will you do with all the policemen? I’m afraid they’ll be bored.

Yes, that’s the premise of my favorite film Wrong Cops (2013). That’s why I like that movie so much: It is humorous. But I must correct you: one of your statistics is a little off. Instead of keeping employment at 100%, I plan purposely to lock it at 1%.

Well I have two questions, after hearing that. Question one: Why do such a thing? And I forgot the second question.

Well, think about it: Full employment means everybody’s working. Is that a desirable condition? I say no. Working is hard work; it’s drudgery; in fact, it’s slavery—Why should anyone brag that their country consists of 100% slave laborers? So, quite the contrary, I am introducing a program that eliminates all work…

But you said you’d keep employment at 1%, not absolute ZERO…

Yes, because, just like profit-generating diseases (that is, treatable ailments that my corporation deems more lucrative to let flourish than to treat, as the termination of each disease would eliminate also the profit that is generated from treating it), you can never snuff the phenomenon of work entirely. There will always be a little deviance that seeps thru the cracks of the system, because of St. Paul’s sin. I’m a realist, so I know that I’ll never be able to get everyone to relax and quit their job; no, some workaholics will sneak in an hour of work, when nobody’s looking. So that’s why I set my goal at 1% instead of the true freezing point. Healthy nourishment always comprises the majority percentage of any rodent poison.

So is this also the reason why you shall never disband the federal police, the FBI?

Yes, you’re a good guesser today. You see, it’s my understanding that, in the eras when all police were simply local, there was no way to fight a crime that exceeded the bound of any given state. For, let’s say that you’re a officer of the law employed by the State of North Carolina, and I’m a transnational cat-burglar. Let’s say I’m currently one hundred miles and running, and you’ve been chasing me for ninety-nine of those miles. Now, let’s say that, when I reach my hundredth mile, I cross the state border. I’m running to the right, on the map: to the east, out of North Carolina, and I now enter California. Remember that the Earth is not a flat pancake, it’s an ellipsoid dinner roll: so if one departs from North Carolina on its eastern border, one does not simply fall into an Atlantic void; no, North Carolina is fused to the left edge of Cali. However, the cop who’s chasing me (that’s you, the Devil’s advocate), cannot simply enter California hot on my trail and handcuff me to the nearest pre-cursed fig bush, because that’s out of his jurisdiction. Instead, the cop falls into an Atlantic void. It’s where the old lie about the city of Atlantis comes from.

And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it, “No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever.” . . . And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots. (Mark 11:13-14; 20)

But what about the crimes that span many states? How will we ever bring democracy and freedom to the world, if our law enforcement officers all got swallowed up, long ago, by the Bermuda Triangle?

I’ll tell you how to solve this ancient dilemma. Are you familiar with what they call the Continuum fallacy? It goes like this. You claim that God can never grow a beard. So I call you a blasphemer. But then you explain your assertion, to prove your point—you say: “Behold, the LORD is clean-shaven this morning. Now, one single day of hair growth will not leave a bald-faced liar with a beard like Moses’. Look how thick and full Moses’ beard is – such marvels are not simply spoken into existence, no: these things take time, like mankind from monkeys. One must let meat marinate. Therefore, you’ll never catch God with more hair than a five o’clock shadow. And this is proof of intelligent design in nature. Everything happens for a reason. The LORD will never let himself be seen in public sporting facial hair, lest he stand near his prophet and cause the audience to realize that the two are being played by the very same actor. As long as only ONE glues on the fake beard, disbelief is suspended: the truth is secure.”

Well that makes perfect sense, thank you. But I still don’t fathom how a police officer, who is tethered to his home state, can enter a chrysalis and then burst forth as a Federal Agent, able to transcend every border.

I can explain that as well. You know how a subatomic particle cannot enter into our realm of spacetime without being accompanied by his anti-self? That’s called the double-entry system of accounting. Every business transaction must involve two tallies; and assets always balance out liabilities. You know there are six “flavors” of quarks: up, down, bottom, top, strange, and charm; as well as six types of leptons; twelve gauge bosons, among which are the eight gluons of the strong force, etc. Well let’s say that a strange quark and a charm quark want to patronize an intergalactic nightclub. That’s fine, so far everything’s legal and above-board, as long as their anti-particles enter the bar alongside them. So the strange quark must be chaperoned by a normal anti-quark, likewise the charm by something unnaturally repellent. The same goes for the rest of the aforesaid list: leptons must be born in conjunction with anti-leptons; and gluons with tearoffs, etc.

I see what you mean: the FBI cannot come into existence without the mob. Traditional crimes sanctioned by God in his commandments—murder, theft, dishonoring one’s parents—cannot leap from state to state, as they’re all rooted to a precise instant on the continuum of spacetime; only trafficking of contraband can transcend statehood enough to move about, and wander to & fro upon the map, therefore the prohibition of certain substances becomes a necessity. It all makes sense now. Without the so-called War on Drugs, both the federal law enforcement particles AND their complimentary (anti-matter) mobsters would be engulfed by social harmony. For democratic oversight of a transparent government would be the demise of clandestine federal intelligence AS WELL AS the underground crimes they purport to fight. In other words, the problem and the solution are both merely problems, born at the same moment, spoken into existence by humankind, and they share the trait of privatized operation. Private federal crime-fighters must offset the private federal law-breakers, to maintain the balance of discord, lest we slip into utopia and become another Atlantis, forever lost in the void of eternal bliss.

To return to physics, what you’re implying is that any subatomic particle in three-dimensional space which chooses to obey the regulations of quantum mechanics must be either a boson (with integer spin) or a fermion (with odd half-integer spin).

No, in truth, I’m really just riffing off another of William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”:

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

End of experiment.