On a deeper level-there is always a deeper level- Williams was a scientist who didn't believe in science because he had been cured of polio by witchcraft.
But Blake Williams didn't believe in witchcraft, either. He didn't believe in anything. He regarded all belief systems as illustrative data in domesticated primate psychology.
"The study of human beliefs is an ethologist's heaven and a logician's hell," he liked to say.
Actually, Blake Williams hadn't been cured of polio by witchcraft, exactly. He had been cured by the Sister Kenny method.
But he grew up thinking it was witchcraft. That was because all the experts in Unistat at the time-the members of the American Medical Association, who would not admit there were any other experts on health-claimed the Sister Kenny method was witchcraft. They also said it didn't work.
Since the Sister Kenny method obviously had worked in his case, Blake grew up with the gnawing suspicion that the experts didn't know what the hell they were talking about. He was also intensely curious about all forms of witchcraft, which eventually led him to become an anthropologist.
Young Williams soon enough discovered-on his very first field trip, among the Hopi Indians-that witchcraft does by God and by golly work, after all. He began, tentatively and secretly, sharing his knowledge with carefully selected colleagues. Most of them were pretty evasive about the whole subject, but Marilyn Chambers, the author of the epoch-making Neuroanthropology, was star-tlingly blunt.
"Everybody who's been in the field knows that," she said with a kind of weary patience.
"But why doesn't anyone say so?" Williams asked, still young, still naive.
"Freud and Charcot once had virtually this same conversation," Dr. Chambers said, "but the topic then was the sexual origin of the hysterical neuroses of Victorian women. Charcot invited Freud to be the goat and talk about it in public…"
"I see," Blake Williams said slowly. He did see.
THE CAT AND THE DOG
If we accept multiple universes, then we no longer need worry about what "really" happened in the past, because every possible past is equally real.
–joseph gerver, "The Past as Backward
Movies of the future," Physics Today,
April 1971
"He who mast--… who hesitates is lost," Marvin Gardens said one day in the Confrontation office. Joe Malik considered it one of the most interesting Freudian slips he had ever heard and recorded it in his diary, where it was, of course, subsequently scanned by the Illuminati.
Marvin and Joe never got along well, but that was because Marvin regarded Joe as an extraterrestrial invader and Joe regarded Marvin as a nut.
"Marvin is emphatically not a loony," Justin Case had been heard to say quite often. "He's a genius. The greatest put-on artist since Hitchcock. Nobody recognizes what a great satirist he is."
"Justin Case," Marvin said when that was repeated to him, "thinks he's being liberal, but he's just another victim of brainwashing by the Amazon Invasion."
Marvin Gardens had been traumatized by the 1970s and always referred to the Women's Liberation Movement as the Amazon Invasion. He believed, or pretended to believe, that the ringleaders were all extraterrestrials who had arrived by flying saucer in 1968 and were boldly conspiring to seize supreme power everywhere through what he called semantic black magick. "They've atomized the language and created a semantic smog in which ordinary humanity is obliterated by abstractions like 'chairperson' or simple mammalian erotic signaling is politicized into a new sin called 'sexism.' Any male who dares to oppose them is stigmatized as a 'male chauvinist,' and any female who opposes them is labeled a victim of male brainwashing. Obviously, within a decade, they will command the key posts in all areas of industry (they've captured publishing already) and then government will fall. Probably, then, the males of their species will start landing and we'll all be enslaved. (Some of the males may have landed already; look at the Manhattan literary scene.) It's the sweetest infiltration job in the history of galactic espionage. For merely daring to reveal their plans, I am smeared by them as a 'male chauvinist pig,' which is ten times worse than an ordinary 'male chauvinist' and equivalent to an SP on the Scientologists' hit list."
Some agreed with Justin Case that Marvin was kidding, that he had merely seen an opportunity-the chance to attain fame and fortune by espousing a bitterly controversial extreme position. Others, however, claimed he was dead serious, and was a classical case of cocaine paranoia. Marvin always pointed out, when either of these theories was mentioned in his presence, "there is a third possibility. I might be right. In that case, how convenient for Them that my sanity and sincerity are so often called into question. It almost looks as if They are conspiring to defame my character. Are they afraid that some might listen to me before it's too late, before the takeover is complete?"
Marvin's principal enemy, among the male half of the population, was Frank Hemeroid, of course. Hemeroid, oddly enough, hardly even knew of Marvin's existence and, hence, was incapable of being harmful to him by intention. That didn't matter. He was still the enemy with a capital E. At times Marvin had even suspected him of being extraterrestrial, like the leaders of Women's Lib.
Hemeroid earned his animosity entirely by the books he wrote, which were full of treason, according to Marvin. Actually, Hemeroid's novels merely reflected the 1970s literary society around him, in which most people were a little weird and all of them were losers. Hemeroid carefully depicted a world exactly like that: Most of his characters were weird and all of them were losers. The critics, who were all losers, called him a brutal realist. Marvin called him a traitor to planet Earth.
Marvin wrote about all this in dialogues (he rather fancies himself as being of Platonic disposition) in which the speakers were Frank Hemeroid, representing 1970s values and reality-constructs, and Ernest Hemingway, Marvin's childhood hero who had been consigned to the literary garbage heap when the extraterrestrials took over. Hemingway, in these dialogues, represented Man, individual Man, the universal maverick, as he was before the extraterrestrial invasion.
The dialogues were full of things like this:
FRANK: Did you ever really believe in your own myth, you old faker? Did you think you could come out of a neurotic suicide-prone family and by sheer Will transform yourself into a hero, a brave man, a great artist, a boxer, a big-game hunter, a cult figure, an image of courage and of grace under pressure? Didn't you know you were a worm, that all men are worms and cowards, and that you'd be beaten at the end? Didn't you know you'd be like all the rest of us and give in to self-pity and self-doubt and pull that final cosmic trigger?