The Revolution of Lowered Expectations had triumphed. By 1984 nobody in the country had any higher expectations than a feudal serf.
Actually, the apotheosis of Furbish Lousewart V had been engineered by the same group of alpha males who had been promoting the Revolution of Lowered Expectations all along.
These were very cunning old primates in several of the most skillful predator bands on Terra. Because of the stealth and skill of these bands-made up of successful predator families that had been intermarrying for several generations-they collectively owned 99.4 percent of all the territory and resources of Unistat.
They only owned about 40 percent of the rest of Terra, and that seriously annoyed them.
The Revolution of Rising Expectations annoyed them even more, because it led many primates to argue that the reason poverty and starvation still continued in an advanced technological society was that Somebody Was Getting More Than Their Share. Whenever anybody asked who that Somebody might be, all eyes turned on these royal old primate males who owned so much. The eyes were not friendly. Sometimes, in far-off lands where these royal primates did not completely control the governments, some of their boodle was actually seized and redistributed to the people they had stolen it from. As Rising Expectations had mounted in the first half of the century, this regrettable pattern of expropriation also escalated.
The alpha males of these tough old predator families did not like this at all. They therefore invested a prudent sum in promoting the careers of everybody who preached Lowered Expectations, from Ralph Nader and the Club of Rome to Oriental gurus and the neo-Stoics of the post-Marxist Left.
When Furbish Lousewart came along, they invested in him, too-enough to buy the election for him.
THE QUANTUM CONNECTION IS UNMITIGATED
When Justin Case returned from the John the mad Simon Moon was still reading his nightmare version of the American Dream.
"Upper guns thou wilt, marxafactors," Moon intoned, half-chanting. "A gnew gnu cries nixnix on your loin ardors [O my am I?] as the great Jehoover fouls his files [Seminole cowhand] with marching looter congs. What a loop in the evening, bloody-fouled loop! Lawn ordures for Crookbacked Dick, pig-bastchard of the world. See, it's the stinking onion coop. Say, it's the slimey deepsea doo-dler. By the wampum of caponey. O turnig on, Duke Daleyswine, lardmayor of burning-town! They'll chip away yore homo hawks."
"Hughes Rockefeller Exxon," the drunken writer was muttering into his martini glass. "Thieving motherfuck-ing…"
Justin decided the party was degenerating and left. In the foyer he had to pass Marvin Gardens and Josephine Malik and heard:
"Male chauvinist paranoid!" (Josephine to Marvin.)
"Extraterrestrial brainwashed" (Marvin to Josephine.)
Justin decided morosely that the literary world had never been the same since the drug revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. "Pretty little boidies picking in the toidies," he said gruffly to both of them and walked out.
Justin had no idea where he had gotten the words about the pretty little boidies from. He assumed it was the Afghan hash going around at the party.
"I know all about your plansss," Marvin Gardens was snarling at Jo Malik, in his coked-up Peter Lorre voice. "I know why you picked Hemingway to discredit and defame. I know what you and your extraterrestrial friends are planning to do to humanity, you cold-blooded fiendsss."
"You know," Jo said, suddenly tired of her own anger, "you really ought to lay off that coke, buster."
"Yess, yess, claim that I'm paranoid, that's the usual tactic-"
"I say you two," Epicene Wildeblood drawled, "did either of you see Cagliostro?"
"The magician?" Jo asked.
"Well," Wildeblood asked with infinite patience, "is there another Cagliostro?"
Marvin and Jo exchanged equally puzzled glances.
"I guess he hasn't arrived yet," Jo offered finally.
"What?" Wildeblood frowned. "Why, he's been here all night."
Marvin and Jo exchanged glances again.
"I guess we missed him," Marvin said gently, with the ghastly smile of one who humors a deranged mind.
Wildeblood glared at him and stalked off.
That was really heavy hash, Jo decided. Wildeblood had been hallucinating a guest who wasn't even there.
DEMATERIALIZING GORILLAS
Knee-jerk liberals and all the certified saints of sanctified humanism are quick to condemn this great and much-maligned Transylvanian statesman.
–william F. buckley, jr.,
The Wit and Wisdom of Vlad the Impaler
The Warren Belch Society held its annual meeting on January 2, 1984, while POE was busy mining downtown Washington with homemade atom bombs. The Society knew nothing of this and was more concerned with disappearing gorillas in Chicago.
Their tiny office was dominated by a huge oil painting of Schrodinger's Cat, executed in weird orgone-blue hues by their founder and presiding officer, the eccentric millionaire, W. Clement Cotex. All active members of the Society-eight of them, to be exact-were present.
The Warren Belch Society had been founded after Cotex had been kicked out of the Fortean Society for having bizarre notions. The purpose of "the Belchers" (as Cotex jovially called them) was to investigate those aspects of scientific theory and those alleged occult events which were regarded as "too far out" by the unimaginative Forteans, who are willing to investigate UFOs, rains of crabs and fish, girls who might have turned into swans, and similar matters, but, like their founder, the late Charles Fort, drew the line at the dogs that said "Good morning" and then vanished in a puff of green smoke.
Cotex, admittedly, was an intellectual surrealist. The name of the Society, for instance, was deliberately taken from the most obscure of all the lawmen of the Old West, Marshall Warren Belch of Dodge City, who had unfortunately been shot to death when his pistol jammed during his very first gunfight. It was Clem Cotex's claim that the Everett-Wheeler-Graham-DeWitt interpretation of the Schrodinger's Cat paradox was literally true. Everything that could happen did happen. There were infinitely many universes, each one the result of a collapse of the state vector in a possible way. Thus, somewhere in superspace, there must be a universe in which Marshall Belch's pistol didn't jam and he lived on to become famous. There were probably TV shows and movies about him by now, over there in that universe. Or so Cotex argued.
In general, as good empiricists, the Belch Society was more interested in odd facts than in odd theories. A UFO Contactee who could jam zippers by looking at them. A man found dead in St. Louis with his throat torn as though by the fangs of an enormous beast, with no animal missing from the local zoos (the famous Stimson Case of 1968). Documented instances of a fat bearded man with jolly eyes seen near chimneys on Christmas Eve, with a bag of toys over his shoulder. Bleeding Catholic statues. Flying Hindus. Dematerializing Buddhists. Kahuna fire-walkers. Why the signs always say WALK when the streetlight is on red and DON'T WALK when it is on green. Books in which the permutations of the phrase "heaven and hell" appeared at random intervals, forming a Markoff Chain.