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obviously a private joke.
"And why should he ball chicks?" I continued my gentle catechism.
"Well, because that's... well, Christ, it's natural!"
"And that's how you get babies," said Mary-Ann sagely. "I mean that's how nature
intended it."
"Do you think nature intended you to have a baby each time you make love?"
Mary-Ann looked like a lapsed Catholic, trying to recall what she had been taught. But
Rusty was a good Catholic Pole and knew right from wrong. "That's what you're supposed to
do, yes. That's what we're told in church."
"But you do use contraceptives, don't you?"
Both flushed, and Rusty said, "Well, sure. I guess most Catholics do now, but that
doesn't mean you don't know it's wrong."
"Then you basically believe that it's right for more and more babies to be born, even
though half the people ever born in the world are now alive, and that each day twelve
thousand people starve to death in India and South America?" Oh, the sly Myra Breckinridge!
Nothing can escape the fine net of her dialectic!
Rusty frowned to show that he was thinking when actually, as one of the acting-
students recently said of another's performance, he was only thinking he was thinking. "Well,
maybe those Indians and Chinese and so on should probably practice birth control since their
religion doesn't care, if they have one...
"But they do have religions. And they do care. And they believe that for a man to be
manly he must have as many children as possible..."
"Because so many babies die in childbirth." Mary-Ann was unusually thoughtful.
"They used to die," I said. "And that kept the population in a proper balance with the
food supply. But now the children live. And starve. And all because their parents passionately
believe that to be manly is to make babies and to be womanly is to bear them."
"But we're different." Rusty was dogged. "We got enough food and we also have...
"Family planning." Mary-Ann looked happy. No doubt contemplating some planning
of her own.
"Enough food," however, was all the cue I needed. I was brilliant. I quoted the best of
the world's food authorities (famine for us all by 1974 and forget about plankton and seaweed:
not enough of it). I demonstrated that essentially Maithus had been right, despite errors of
calculation. I described what happens to rats when they are crowded in too small a place: their
kidneys deteriorate, and they go mad. I told how whenever the food supply of the lemmings is
endangered, a majority of the race drown themselves in order that those left behind may
flourish.
Then I gave statistics for the current world death rate, showing how it has drastically
declined in the last fifty years due to advanced medicine. The physically and mentally weak
who ordinarily would have died at birth now grow up to become revolutionaries in Africa,
Asia and Harlem. As a result of miracle drugs and incontinent breeding, the world's food
supply can no longer support the billions of people alive at present; there will of course be
even less food for those thousands who are joining us every minute. What is to be done? How
is the race to be saved (I did not go into the more profound question of whether or not it
should be saved)? My answer was simple enough: famine and war are now man's only hope.
To survive, human population must be drastically reduced. Happily, our leaders are working
instinctively toward that end, and there is no doubt in my mind that nature intends Lyndon
Johnson and Mao Tse-tung to be the agents of our salvation. By destroying a majority of the
human race, they will preserve the breed since the survivors are bound to be not only wiser
than we but racially stronger as a result of cellular mutancies caused by atomic radiation. If I
say so myself, I had my listeners' eyes bugging out by the time I had sketched for them man's
marvelous if fiery fate.
"But what can we do to stop all this from happening?" Mary-Ann was plainly alarmed.
"Don't have children. That is the best thing. A gesture of course, but better than
nothing. And try to change your attitudes about what is normal." Then, in quick succession, I
delivered a number of anthropological hay_ makers. Proper womanly behavior for an Eskimo
wife is to go to bed with anyone her husband brings back to the igloo. Proper manly behavior
for the Spartan warrior was to make love to a boy while teaching him how to be a soldier. I
gave a rapid review of what is considered proper sexual behavior in Polynesia and along the
Amazon. Everything I said came as revelation to Rusty and Mary-Ann, and they were
obviously horrified by the unnaturalness of what was considered natural in other parts of the
world. I believe 1 planted a seed or two. MaryAnn of course could never prostitute herself
like an Eskimo wife nor could Rusty ever make love to an adolescent boy ("those teeny-
boppers give me a pain"); yet each now regards his old certainties as being, at least, relative.
That is progress.
As could be expected, it was Mary-Ann who mounted the counterattack. "Maybe
you're right when you say there's nothing that's really basically normal but when everybody
tells you that they want you to behave in a certain way, like marrying one man and having
only his children, isn't that the right thing to do because doesn't the society deep down know
what it's doing, and is trying to protect itself?"
Unexpectedly she had made a good point. Not once in all these weeks have I suspected
her of possessing a true intelligence. Obviously I have been misled by her California manner
which is resolutely cretinous as well as nasal. The possibility that she might one day be a
woman I could actually talk to was a revelation, and by no means an unpleasant one.
Naturally, she could not be allowed to win her point. Even so, it will, as we academics say,
count against the final grade.
I challenged her with a simple question: does any society know how to preserve itself?
I then listed a number of civilizations that had destroyed themselves through upholding
customs that were self-destructive. For instance, the health of the Roman state depended upon
a vigorous aristocracy but that aristocracy committed suicide by insisting that their cooking be
done in expensive pots made of lead. The result was acute lead poisoning which led to
impotence and the literal extinction of an entire class, killed by custom. Then, superb
dialectician that I am, I discussed every society's secret drive to destroy itself and whether or
not this was a good thing, taken in the larger context of the human race's evolution. They were
both shocked at the idea, particularly when I brought it home to them by suggesting that
Rusty's desire to have sex only with girls and Mary-Ann's desire to have at least four children
the world did not need might be considered proof that our society is now preparing to kill
itself by exhausting the food supply and making nuclear war inevitable. Should this be the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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