Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [52]
Was Dr. Trout ever in for a surprise, though! Not only were these birds obscenely fat, and thus easy prey for predators. They were exploding, too! Spores from a tree fungus growing near Dalhousie nests found an opportunity to become a new disease in the intestinal tracts of the overweight birds, thanks to certain chemicals in the bodies of blackflies.
The new life-style of the fungus inside the birds at one point triggered the sudden release of quantities of carbon dioxide so copious that the birds blew up! One Dalhousie, perhaps the last veteran of the Disappointment Lake experiment, would explode a year later in a park in Detroit, Michigan, setting off the second-worst race riot in the Motor City’s history.
49
Trout wrote a story one time about another race riot. It was on a planet twice as big as Earth, orbiting Puke, a star the size of a BB, two billion years ago.
I asked my big brother Bernie in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and this was long before the period of the rerun, whether he believed in Darwin’s theory of evolution. He said he did, and I asked how come, and he said, “Because it’s the only game in town.”
Bernie’s reply is the tag line of yet another joke from long ago, like “Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch!” It seems a guy is off to play cards, and a friend tells him the game is crooked. The guy says, “Yeah, I know, but it’s the only game in town.”
I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation, but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin’s theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747.
No matter what is doing the creating, I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous.
And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding-dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly: “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!”
Kilgore Trout, the ornithologist’s son, wrote in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: “The Fiduciary is a mythological bird. It has never existed in Nature, never could, never will.”
Trout is the only person who ever said a fiduciary was any sort of bird. The noun (from the Latin fiducia, confidence, trust) in fact identifies a sort of Homo sapiens who will conserve the property, and nowadays especially paper or computer representations of wealth, belonging to other people, including the treasuries of their governments.
He or she or it cannot exist, thanks to the brain and the ding-dong, et cetera. So we have in this summer of 1996, rerun or not, and as always, faithless custodians of capital making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety.
For Christ’s sake, let’s help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it is.
Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.
Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.
Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.
Yes, and any dream of taking better care of our people might as well be a transvestite hermaphrodite without some scheme for giving us all the support and companionship of extended families, within which sharing and compassion are