forgotten. No one knows for sure whether he was insane or whether those he caught in his devilish trap had lost all reason.
And peace eternal reigned at last upon the remnant few left to ponder the incongruity of being God.
THE LONGEST NIGHT
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there,
wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams
no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Edgar Allan Poe
Smokers rebel. Segregated, sneered and coughed at -- “ours is an unreasoned, even absurd pleasure,” they fume, “but it shall not be abrogated.”
“Smokers may well have the right to smoke,” nonsmokers retort, “but that entitlement deprives us of our right not to inhale their foul exhalations.”
Intoxicated by their own emissions, if not by their disregard for the well-being of others, smokers reject their nemeses’ argument as “capricious and arbitrary.” Citing the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence which, they insist, endows them with certain inalienable rights, they counter that smoking is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Sensing free publicity, the Environmental Protection Agency promptly sides with nonsmokers in hopes of diverting attention from its own hazy record.
Arguing that the smoker vs. nonsmoker issue is constitutionally insoluble, the Supreme Court recesses for an afternoon nap.
Smokers keep puffing in designated areas where it is still tolerated, thanks to civil libertarians who would gladly lay down their own lives to protect a smoker’s right to die of heart disease, emphysema or lung cancer. Evenhandedness often leads to absurdity.
Fights erupt. Spontaneous demonstrations turn out ugly crowds in cities around the world, all barking savage insults and threats.
In the City of Brotherly Love an angry roar rises from the mob. All heads turn in unison toward the third-floor landing of a once-elegant townhouse. At the end of a rope suspended from a flagpole flying Old Glory, bound together like ham-hocks, dangle the cadavers of a man and a woman caught smoking in defiance of an ordinance prohibiting such activity within city limits. Stirred no doubt by feelings of altruism, anti-smoking vigilantes had rammed a fistful of cigarettes down their throats.
A few bury their faces, horrified or overcome with shame. Others flee the ghastly scene, vomiting in their tracks. The rest, their qualms flaking away like dead bits of conscience, keep looking in mute fascination.
Wholesale persecution soon follows.
In Los Angeles, the police purge smokers from their ranks and transfer them to the sanitation corps. Most adjust quite well once they discover the metaphysical connection between police work and garbage.
The earth sizzles with rage. The world goes amok.
In Washington, several legislators who at long last concede that smoking is a deadly addiction countenanced by other legislators because it generates huge taxable revenues -- introduce stiff anti-smoking bills. Others, who refuse to return certain favors graciously extended by the tobacco lobby, are slain.
Tobacco companies respond by making falsehearted anti-smoking pronouncements on television and radio, and in print publications. “Smoking is addictive and dangerous to your health,” their ads proclaim. What is left unsaid is that their factories continue to produce millions of cigarettes -- just in case. Their domestic profits slowly turning to ashes, the tobacco companies now rot the unregulated lungs of the Third World.
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
