Theory of evolution or no theory of evolution, human beings take it for granted that I hold them above other animals, that I consider them superior. When in fact for me, whether they are humans, walruses, or sardines makes not a whit of difference. When a man takes a dive I certainly don’t grieve more than when, shall we say, a microbe or a turnip bites the dust. To tell the truth, in many ways I prefer turnips; at least they remain silent and like many other cruciferous greens have a genuine vegetable dignity. Not to mention the large marine mammals, to which I’m deeply attached. How could anyone imagine I would prefer the lowest of humans to a nice walrus? That’s just crazy.
Every day (wo)men pursue the relentless genocide of animal and vegetable species they’ve been carrying out for some time now, every day they trample a bit more of what they call their environment (as if it had been made for them!), every day they use their cunning, I wouldn’t call it intelligence, to scrape the bottom of the barrel of resources, with the idea that anything that comes in handy has been reserved for their exclusive use. By now their frenzy has become fury; they are literally destroying the wee planet to which they’re attached by gravity. Unlike bacterial colonies that proceed in silent dignity toward death, drowning in their own excrement, humans do everything they can to make sure the end will come in the most chaotic, horrific way possible.
What’s especially chilling about them is their dogged and fanatical materialism. They direct all their mental and physical energies (not insignificant despite their mediocre longevity) to squandering and dissipating everything under the sun, unable to rest until they’ve consummated their part of the damage. The only thing they can agree on is the need to provoke as many catastrophes as possible. Unlike, for example, ants and bees and other social species, they’ve never shown much solidarity, and every year less. I’m no hard-line conservative, mind you, but I see no reason to wreck and demolish everything.
Most of the so-called environmentalists—and this is something I want to emphasize—are even worse: they not only think they are superior to the animals, but better than their species-mates who mistreat so-called nature. They’re convinced that their speeches and spiels help save the globe from catastrophe, that they themselves are doers of good. They too profit from the coming dilapidation of all things, they too live like nabobs while passing their time lecturing everyone else. They seem to think humanity can keep up a five-star hotel lifestyle without causing any damage. All they need to do is use biodegradable detergents, separate the household waste and put a solar panel on the roof to solve the problem. They want to have their cake and eat it too. As they say.
It did occur to me right from Day One that a single species out of the many might take the upper hand and subjugate the others. To tell the truth, I thought it would be the lions, or the scorpions, or one of the fighting ants. I wouldn’t have bet a nickel on them, those apes playing the smart-asses. Honestly, I thought extinction was their fate: delicate as they are, them and their squidgy, amorphous pups that look like they’re made of mozzarella. Instead, they used that Jesuitical guile of theirs to compensate for being vulnerable, and then just hung in there until they had taken down all their enemies including some who were a lot more powerful, leaving nothing but scorched earth behind them. It took them a while, but now they’ve established their dictatorship and they think it’s just how things are. Only, they still need to salve their consciences, and so they’re always signing petitions to save whales, Asian tigers, tropical forests, etc., etc.
BIG HANDS ALL OVER THE PLACE
God is not the sleepy old fart that many believers imagine—let’s get that straight. He likes to keep up with what’s going on in the cosmos, he intervenes when he needs to, although intervention doesn’t necessarily mean throwing a giant tantrum or staging a Biblical-scale massacre. There are also moments (and these can go on for several million years) during which he just loafs around in his (as it were) slippers. Mostly when nothing much is happening, when the stars are living out their adamantine life cycles, the galaxies evolving as galaxies will, and even on the subatomic level all is going according to plan. When trying hard as I might to come up with something to do, I can think of nothing that can’t be done tomorrow. I won’t say I sleep, a god never sleeps, but my condition isn’t much different from that of a bear in hibernation, or a brumating snake. Let’s just say I take things easy.
But then, bang! everything shifts and suddenly I have a thousand pestiferous problems to resolve, millions of things to look after. Rush over here, race over there, put out that, dam up this, patch up the other: I can barely keep on top of it all. And things have gotten distinctly worse since that appalling bungler homo sapiens started making all kinds of trouble: war, epidemics, slaughter, genocide, annihilation. Not only collective disasters but a myriad of individual emergencies. Women starving to death, children mistreated, children put in terrible danger and subjected to agonizing torture. Seven billion individuals, no matter how irresponsible they are, are still seven billion in need of a hand. Sometimes I feel more like a social worker than God. Hardly that high-handed hothead the Bible talks about.
This time, however, there’s no holocaust, no fatal siege where the victims have run out of water and their throats burn dry with thirst and fear. There’s just a girl whose sexual mores leave something to be desired, a girl who can’t stop making herself available. I’m lost here; I can’t tear my eyes away from her and I can’t understand why. I never dreamed I’d find myself in a mess like this. If it weren’t a state as far as possible from divine, in fact quite incompatible with it, I’d say I’m confused.
Around midnight there aren’t as many cars coming, and the toads in heat seem to have learned to keep to the right. Don G. has now begun spinning an astronomy lesson for Ms. Einstein’s benefit, meanwhile supplying her with ginger-flavored chocolate squares, well-known aphrodisiacs.
Two casual clicks and he switches off their headlamps and begins pointing out the constellations and individual stars, commenting on their colors (indicating temperature), their ages, velocities, varieties of nuclear fission. Speaking in very cogent phrases (it must be said), he discourses at length on the recent discovery of Sagittarius A*. Small as it is, that black hole is a million times heavier than the sun, he informs her, talking the way you would about a sprinter who never loses a race. Raising an arm to point it out to her he nearly grazes her breast—he adores women with girlish breasts—and gives her a blast of the male hormones saturating his breath. She doesn’t back away because she’s captivated: she, too, a toad frozen in the headlights. All she would have to do to save herself would be to step back—and instead she continues to listen to his singsong spell about the supermassive hole around which the Milky Way’s hundreds of thousands of stars revolve.
Bingo, I say to myself as the strapping seducer lunges toward her and kisses her on the mouth. Some things that happen are so predictable that even a drunken tree sloth could see them coming, no need to posit divine intuition. Which doesn’t make the matter any less annoying. She doesn’t throw herself into it but nor does she push him away, and he, deciding that he now has free rein, pushes her up against the stone wall and lets his hands roam up and down and all over the place. This too is part of the script, of course, but still, she could have given him a shove and run away. Nope, she kisses him passionately in turn, her too-far-apart eyes half-closed, the palm of her hand moving over his chest as if washing a window.