Counting more smokers per capita than all other nations combined, Japan and China are decimated. The once-buzzing squadrons of polite bespectacled little chain-smoking shutterbugs wearing awkward little western suits have since gone home and now engage in the gentler pursuit of writing three-line poems, dwarfing trees and carving cricket cages out of matchsticks.
Gays and lesbians are next. The deaf; the color-blind; the morbidly obese; the elderly; the miscegenated. The widowed are summarily executed. Redheads undergo mass sterilization. The albino and the flatfooted perish in a bonfire of condescension. Forced to read Chaucer, dyslexics die a horrible death. Stamp collectors are canceled.
There is no shortage of latent martyrs. Others will surely be found.
Soon, one last wisp of smoke rises from the embers like a pipe dream and scatters in the air for the last time.
I blow out the candle. It will be a long night.
NEITHER APE NOR ANGEL
Which is it? Is man God’s only mistake
or God man’s only mistake?
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Every now and then, usually by default and seldom on the first try, the human race blunders on a fact or two. Wrenched from the shadows of ignorance or simply sideswiped by some careless time traveler, these truths often shatter deep-seated if somewhat unsustainable beliefs.
Take Homo sapiens, for example.
In the beginning, when fate still ruled the world, when providence, not scheme, random chance, not purpose or plan molded man’s destiny, two camps vied for the truth; and both held it for a while.
Fat and sated like iguanas basking in the sun, wading in and out of the primordial soup where it’s cozy and warm, Darwinists made no bones about it. Their blueprint was sound. Evolution made sense. One by one, the pieces of the gigantic puzzle began to fit into place with such symmetry as to make some transcendental first cause -- divine or other -- not only quite probable but essential. They just didn’t call it God.
Angered by Darwin’s seeming irreverence, outraged by the notion that they might be descended from apes, not angels, Creationists kept invoking divine intervention, as though evolution were not in itself a wondrous phenomenon. And life went on.
One day, for no apparent reason, and as if there was an urgent need to know, cosmologists everywhere began splitting cosmic hair. With the Big Bang versus the Steady State debate well behind them, though still deadlocked on several core issues, they now asked each other (and themselves, no doubt): is the universe “open” or “closed?” Does intergalactic space extend indefinitely and in all directions, or do as yet undetected boundaries found only at some inscrutably distant point mark its final limits? If so, what lies beyond? What is space, anyway, they asked. Is it a circumstantial realm with no intrinsic dimension, no reality of its own except that which is fancied by man in his convoluted ruminations? Is space a byproduct of human consciousness, like time, which is seen as “passing” but in fact does not move? Some insisted that space is not only endowed with quantifiable form and volume, but that it is also measurable by a timeline that includes a starting point, a first cause, or alpha, but not necessarily an omega. Others retorted with disarming logic that something that has no boundaries cannot possibly have shape.
Surely, while these mental pirouettes severely strained the limits of awareness, others yet agreed that the issue was the sphere of philosophy and mysticism. After all, probes sent out on scouting missions to the farthest reaches of the inky void had gone on one-way odysseys and no one knew for sure what they would run into, or when.
For a while, the case for an open (or infinite) universe gained ground. Infinity is a tolerable abstraction because, like all absolutes, it is as self-limiting as it is unquantifiable. Something that has no shape or computable dimensions, however keenly one may try to comprehend it, has no being. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, even among the learned.
In time, however, unable to bolster their respective positions, cosmologists reached an impasse -- and a compromise. It became fashionable to argue that, for lack of a more convincing explanation, perpetual space-time and cosmic confinement may be one and the same. The choice, they offered, lay in the mind’s eye of poets and stargazers and dreamers and a science fiction writer or two. It was, pardon the irresistible witticism, pretty much an open and shut case. Adding to the confusion, perhaps out of desperation, perhaps in an attempt to blur the distinction between knowledge and whimsy, someone suggested that reality is a hologram. Someone else theorized that the universe has no reality except in God’s boundless imagination. And another millennium came and went in a cosmos unconcerned with the pitiable struggles and contests of a wretched organism that keeps breeding itself out of existence.
And then it happened, not unexpectedly perhaps, but with devastating finality.
“WE ARE ALONE!” banner headlines proclaimed. “HUMANKIND: AN ACCIDENT” they screamed impiously on all the front pages.
Carefully worded, unadorned, brutally prosaic, eloquently detached, spreading across the page, the article ignited passions, provoked outrage or apoplectic stupor, clouded the mind, froze the spirit.
“An international team of astrophysicists has released details of a study which confirms that ‘intelligent life’ is confined to planet Earth, and that the odds of a similar biogenic manifestation occurring elsewhere in the universe are close to nil.
“Dismissing critics who charge that such view smacks of ‘cosmic egocentricity,’ the study recommends that the search for extraterrestrial life be halted and that efforts and assets be refocused on heretofore neglected earthbound priorities such as overpopulation, climate change, poverty, hunger, disease and diminishing natural resources.
“Drafted by the Yearly Astrophysical Hagiographic Watch Experiment in Hyperspace (YAHWEH), the 2,000-page document asserts that, ‘life is the aftermath of a spontaneous and unrepeatable paradox,’ and that humankind, is ‘an experiment gone wrong.’
“Alluding to Albert Einstein’s celebrated rebuff, ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ a spokesman for YAHWEH said that ‘God had indeed played dice with the universe and lost. Perched atop a speck of dust in the limitless void,’ the study concluded, ‘aided by providence and propelled by natural selection, the human race is an occurrence -- an accident -- the result of an endless succession of unpremeditated chance events, all of which continue to unfold as we travel through time, as the present conjugates itself forever and ever and ever.’
“Supporting YAHWEH’s conclusions, a joint communiqué issued by the world’s spiritual leaders upheld the scientific findings. In an extraordinary gesture of humility and conciliation, quoting Boethius -- ‘As far as you are able, join faith to reason’ -- the communiqué conceded that ‘God, the epitome of perfection,’ had let his imagination run wild when He fashioned humans, and that unlike humans who never seem to learn from past mistakes, ‘He had then been mindful not to repeat such abomination elsewhere in His dominion.’“
From that moment on, and for the first time since the dawning of the age of reality, everyone knew that God would never be reached for comment, no matter how hard one tried. And in classrooms all across the land, children learned about the Punic Wars and the square of the hypotenuse and Charlemagne and the mighty Ganges and about life in a drop of pond water. The children grew up and ego devoured the innocence of youth. In time, apes became extinct and man vanished soon after from the face of the earth. Only angels survived the merciful finale; angels, little green Martians, the Loch