Given the Pollyanna, rose-colored-spectacle similarities between humans now and the
Edwardians a hundred years ago, it behooves us to already begin laying plans for
recovery following whatever global disasters await us just around the next
pseudo-diplomatic, environmentally destructive, economically eploitative corner.
For those rusty on their history, the Edwardians were those happy-go-lucky Europeans
(so much beloved and celebrated by Merchant, Ivory, et al.) circa 1900-1910 who lived it
up bigtime on the fruits of a century of empire, successfully ignoring the few Cassandras
crying in the distant wilderness about coming catastrophe.
Sure enough, the Edwardians succeeded in pretending all was well. Even when disaster
finally befell them in August, 1914, they persisted in their blindness, proclaiming loudly
that the war wouldn’t last more than a month.
No need here to recount the symptoms of our own looming disasters. Look around in the
pages of this publication and you’ll find them quickly enough. No one, not even our
most skilled doom-and-gloom prophets can say what the specific outlines will be when
catastrophe finally befalls us. The only certainty, for those willing to examine
the sheeps’ entrails closely, is that an abyss lies open before us whose maw
is vastly bigger and hungrier than the one that consumed the best and brightest of Europe
ca. 1914.
Given that inevitability, and given the short-sighted, greed-centered leaders of the
present world, there’s really nothing left to do but try to think beyond the
abyss—and yes, in spite of the gloom, we do think, some will survive.
For those lucky (or unlucky) few, who may perhaps be reading this post-apocalypse, we
offer a few suggestions from inhabitants of the pre-apocalypse quagmire
concerning what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how to re-construct the world so that
it won’t happen again.
Do’s and
Don’t’s
for the Post-Apocalypse World
| DO |
...banish all persons whose family name is "Bush" to a
barely sustainable quonset hut in Antarctica, contact with the outside world
being limited to a monthly food-drop consisting of pretzels, three-day-old chicken fried
steak, Diet Dr Pepper, and a case of long-neck Lone Star beer. |
| DO |
...convert all properties of said families to permanent
memorials to the soldiers and civilians who died as a result of said
families’ pursuit of wealth and power. |
| DO |
...install any surviving Floridian whose last name is
"Harris" and who once "worked" as the Florida secretary of state as a
"hostess" in one of the seedier back alleys of Bangkok. |
| DO |
...give any former presidential advisor whose initials are
"K.R." the choice between getting his weight down to 160 pounds or lifetime
employment as a latrine cleaner in the slums of Bombay. |
| DON'T |
...allow any female personage, no matter how svelte, who is black
on the outside and whiter-than-white on the inside to occupy the position of Chief
Toady in any future world government. |
| DON'T |
...allow vehicles of a width greater than five feet
on any surviving roadway in the world. |
| DO |
...re-stripe said roadways in accordance with these new, narrower
widths (thereby instantly increasing the capacity of the world’s
tire-based transportation by a good 25%). |
| DO |
...allow restaurant- and bar-owners to decide 1) whether patrons
can smoke, and 2) what they can smoke, up to and including you-know-what. |
| DO |
...discourage the most insidious, invidious forms of brain-washing,
which either lulled the citizenry to sleep or which encouraged their belligerence, namely advertising
and organized religion, by requiring both industries to pay double the tax
imposed on other commercial activities. |
| DO |
...forbid all hunting and fishing except on the
part of those who must hunt and fish to eat. |
| DO |
...require five years of meditation-training
before allowing any individual to own a gun. |
| DON'T |
...allow any person to reproduce who believes that the best ways to
rear children were codified more than 1,500 years in the past. |
| DON'T |
...allow any leader who has not been wounded in battle
to send young men and women into war. |
| DON'T |
...allow any mutilation of the bodies of infants
or children for any reason whatever. |
| DO |
...require second-language study to begin in all
schools the world over in first grade and to continue through high school. |
| DO |
...make the incomes of public-school teachers
equal to those of physicians. |
| DO |
...make the commission of physical violence of ANY kind
against any child a heinous crime with suitable punishment. |
| DON'T |
...allow any person to be a candidate for public office who has not
1) completed an advanced degree in the study of history, and 2) three
years of public service in the slums of his or her country. |
| DON'T |
...allow any person to be a candidate for public office who
believes 1) might makes right, 2) God speaks to him or her or to his or her
advisors, 3) the rich deserve to be rich, or 4) the poor we shall always have
with us. |
| DON'T |
...allow any person to be a candidate for public office whose loved
ones, when in doubt, shop. |
|
|
