(Cont.)
So, when the working people saw that Bryan had left, they enjoyed a thirty-day orgy in his honor: it was very loving and pleasant.
Now there remained the Volcano, Moses, and the multitudes. Their aim was to reenter Emerald City by the same route that the spies took, in the beginning of this scripture.
Then, when Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvardite, heard that an escaped workforce from the Empire was storming the southern border of his college, he rearranged the syllables of his first name so that he became a young girl named Dorothy, and she then rounded up a party of her unschooled friends and went to meet the infiltrators. She brought her little dog Toto too.
(Mr. Graeber requests that I insert here his quick breakdown of Dorothy’s little band: The scarecrow was a farmer who had no brain and thus got foreclosed on by the banks; the tin woodsman represented the industrial proletariat, which lacked the heart required to act in solidarity; and the cowardly lion was the political class that recoiled from doing anything to solve the economic depression that was upon them.)
And the laborers vowed a vow unto the Volcano, and said, “If you will truly deliver our enemies into our hands, then we will utterly destroy them and their city, and we will ruin their institutions.”
But the volcano of potential halted the voice of the masses, and muted its vow, and said: “You have got the wrong idea. I do not wish to deliver up the Harvardites to you; please turn your minds away from this proposal of ‘utterly destroying’ everything. Whatever is desirable and harmonious about their institution and their city, let us embrace and bolster: graft yourselves onto it. And whatever is ugly or harmful, let us revise it.”
So the workforce of the Volcano met with Dorothy and her friends, and they mixed and mingled. Everything went swimmingly.
§
But now let me back up and tell you about another subsection of the working class which did not cooperate. While the above group was succeeding, a separate small sector of arrogant knaves decided to go their own way. These fellows pooh-poohed the Volcano’s advice and instead began to journey away from Mont Blanc in the direction of the Red Ocean (you’ll remember that another band of fools tried a similar thing in an earlier chapter), thinking to compass the Celestial City. And Moses went with them. Now, Moses did not join their group because he believed in their stubborn plan; on the contrary, he wished to go along with the majority on the spy-route with the Volcano; but the wild man with the goat eyes took Moses aside and said “There is a pack of strays that I’m concerned about: please accompany them; help them out when they run into trouble. We’ll meet again later, when your group rejoins ours. You’ll be taking a long-cut, a diversion; call it a scenic route. I will stop somewhere in India, waiting for you.”
So Moses went with this offshoot troupe, and they were much discouraged because of the way.
Immediately these pilgrims began to lament their predicament, and they said to Moses: “Why can’t your One True God simply overthrow Lord Bunyan and take the Celestial City for himself? There’s juicy fruit, all along the boulevard, and I heard that they have the tree of life there, too. Then we could go straight through and settle Eldorado by Thursday. But, as it is, everywhere that we wander, there’s always a meat shortage, neither is there any water; and our soul is beginning to tire of this light bread, bleached white and prone to mold, which your god keeps sending us. Why can’t he cause it to rain potato cakes, deep fried? Or seasoned rice? We don’t wish to seem ungrateful, but this is the World Creator we’re talking about: you’d think that nothing would be too difficult for him; it seems odd that his blessings are so severely limited.”
At this point, Vice Chancellor Bunyan from the Celestial City sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many people of the workforce died.
Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, “We are sorry! We did not mean anything that we said above! We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Volcano, and against you, O Moses, dear friend; please write a formal apology for us, and send it by a messenger to the volcano of potential, and add a postscript asking him to take away the fiery serpents from us.”
And Moses calmed the people and said: “This serpent plague is not the work of our god Yahweh. Yahweh and the serpents work as a team, whenever they do whatever they do. The serpent is like the jester of Yahweh’s court: a divine fool, who is secretly the cleverest among his attorneys; he’s rather the deity’s double-goer than his nemesis. No, these snakes are not from our Volcano. As it is written, ‘if Antichrist cast out Antichrist, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand? Every kingdom thus divided is brought to desolation.’ [Mattew 12:25-26.] But the volcano of potential desires harmonization and prosperity, not death and destruction. To use fiery serpents as weapons is the signature move of Vice Chancellor Bunyan; so I assume this attack was launched from the Celestial City. He probably glimpsed us on his security monitor. Either that, or his gang of flying monkeys – that is to say, his host of cherubims – caught sight of us and tattled back to their master. Anyway, it’s no hindrance: although these creatures that he set upon us have indeed been genetically modified to breathe sparks, it’s not enough even to cause a burn; and it is our good luck that Aesculapian serpents are naturally nonvenomous. So all our people who appear to have perished are simply sleeping – it is called the placebo effect. Now, behold these snakes entwining my caduceus: they’re the same type, albeit slightly more brazen. So I can just touch everyone with this wand, and it shall heal them. In fact, all you need is to look at it and you will live. Those who have died shall resurrect, and those who are yet alive shall become born again.”
Thus Moses lifted up his caduceus, with the brazen serpents helixing its staff, and it happened that, if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld Moses holding the rod of god, he was cleansed holistically and became immaculate in body and mind. Any existing ailments were restored, and all sins were forgiven.
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