Once upon a time, so way back then that you can hardly even picture the time, a really rather together family decided to safari out across the savannah and the deserts and mountains, not only the physical deserts and mountains and ice fields, but also the hot and stormy deserts and mountains, the freezing expanses of icy ignorance, the seas and oceans of superstition because they felt, sort of, uncomfortable with it all.
They’d had some kind vision that they wanted to come into the light and comfort of reason and learning and, by and by, get a square meal inside of them all.
Without having to go to war and kill everyone for it, that is.
And this good family and its descendants spent millions of years travelling and reasoning and learning and shedding dark violent superstitions for a life of love and logic and cooperation, a life where they weren’t prey any longer and where they ceased praying and everything could be sorted out with words of wisdom and everyone minded their own bloody business.
One fine late spring day, with the apple blossoms just on the point of flowering, sun high in the sky, the Johnson family arrived in the pretty little town of Vultureville, just on the edge of the known world.
Vultureville, with its multifarious stadiums of worship, its palaces of legal drugs, its courts of industry and its picture houses and picture boxes of manipulated emotions and its blind belief in itself and its righteousness flowing from each and every window and door.
Like god's sunbeams from a terribly remembered Charlton Heston film.
Each and every door the Johnsons passed opened up to caverns of pious uprightness and sermons full of dead useful advice. Really dead advice, carved in gravestones.
Each and every door they passed, each opened to its host’s welcoming smile and an arm across the shoulder guaranteeing companionship and fraternity and love and support, and warmth, because these Vulturites had naturally selected in just such a way that they appeared to be the same species as their guests, except, of course, they were vultures in granny and granddad mourning garb, snow white hair, balding, scrawny necked, with sort of hooked noses.
Home baked bread and roasting coffee smells wafting from their kitchens included free of charge. Free of charge, so to speak.
At each and every door a different flavour was offered, a different kind of love and each love was, essentially, love yourself first and the mostest and the rest just better tag along or else. So, at each door was a different solution and all the solutions were incompatible but wisdom wasn’t to be listened to, or asked for, nor was it wanted and definitely couldn’t be found in sharing a conversation.
"That path isn’t the path to submission, brothers and sisters," whispered, hissing, the faithful.
The Johnson family, and those of their relatives, were a reasonable, respectable bunch, live and let live, minding their own businesses, keeping their noses out of the muck and were, of course, offered cringingly over the top hospitality and evidently forced smiles at each and every sunny threshold, and, having learnt to be respectful, swallowed, in doses just small enough to go unnoticed, a bite of bile from each and everyone’s superstitions, superstitions they’d spent millions of years turning their backs on.
"Sow those seeds! Sow those seeds, brothers and sisters, in the name of John Doe!"
Well, the Johnson family didn’t believe a word of it all, of course. Never had in millions of years. They didn’t believe a word of every host’s gifts of unreasonable potions for happiness and fulfilment, because they were already truly happy, and, though they didn’t believe a word of it, they were respectful, but, however, at each sign of respect a damned liberty was taken. Each and every demonstration of respect left them open to more and more pecking away at their common sense, at their idea of common ground, pecking away, pecking back in time, pecking back through millions of years of travelling and reasoning and learning and the shedding of dark violent superstitions, pecking back into dark, violent ignorance.
Right, so, of course, the Johnsons got themselves a pretty awful reputation. Got it quicker than you can catch a cold in a nursery school playground on a freezing January afternoon, real fast.
They'd become nasty bad evil mean people.
"Outlaws!"
I mean, they accepted hospitality without expressing enthusiasm, but didn’t want to make a single donation. They listened respectfully, but never learnt. They listened, and that showed respect and that was a concession one step too far and that was it.
"Where was their cash contributions?" Whined The Poisonous Faithful.
Even if they’d been charged and put on trial by The International Court of The Alliance of Civilisations, the ICAC, the outcome would have been the same.
By the time the family got to the end of main street Vultureville, they were just a pile of bones picked clean, nothing left for even a starving fly to buzz over.
A pile of bones, bleached white by the burning sun.
A pile of bones.
And that’s where Stanley Kubrick’s great ape came into the picture, isn’t it?
*Note, the photograph illustrating Bug Eyed Peter's bedtime story is a long distance digital shot of a fertilizer plant run on behalf of the ICAC in the suburbs of Vultureville by an organisation belonging to the sphere of action of The Born Again Priest and his cronies.
Extra information on the activities of The Born Again Priest can be found under "The Born Again Priest" tag.
No comments:
Post a Comment