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War of the Worlds by Hugo Chavez, Chapter One.

11 Apr

April 11, 2011

War of the Worlds by Hugo Chavez, Chapter One.
With apologies to H.G. Wells.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal and as greedy as the Americans; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with an investment might scrutinize the transient figures that swarm and multiply in his bank statement. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little monetary affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over finance. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older cultures of space, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of sovereignty upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most men fancied there might be other economic systems upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and capitalistic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. If truth be told, certain countries of Earth use far more of the sun’s resources than most of the other countries together. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence yet all of the decadence of the Satan of the Northern Hemisphere.

Yet so vain is the American man, and so blinded by his love of money, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Such is the arrogance of the United States. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.

The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet from the destructive gases belched from the American manufacturing plants that pollute even my country has already gone far indeed with our neighbor. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. In all essence, it is a testament to the proven fact that capitalism breeds climate change and that one day our Earth shall follow our celestial neighbor to certain capitalistic doom. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of possible bankruptcy by necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, yet hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas. Truly, this is the assurance of capitalism. What is not owned must be owned, what is not theirs must be taken.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, even as we struggle against The United States, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them. I have said it already; I am convinced that the way to build a new and better world is not capitalism. Capitalism leads us straight to hell.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction capitalism has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its so-called inferior counties. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? Would America not sacrifice Venezuela to ensure its own survival? Yet would we stand with them? We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world. Venezuela is used to defending itself and fighting imperialism.

Their planet is being destroyed under their own noses by the capitalist model, the destructive engine of development, … every day there is more hunger, more misery thanks to the neo-liberal, capitalist model. The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety–their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours–and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. However, scientists are forever at the mercy of their dollar-dealing bankers. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet–it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war–but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. Wall Street cannot interpret the fluctuations of the stock market, could the Arecibo Array do better? All that time the Martians must have been getting ready. They knew, as do I, that No part of the human community can live entirely on its own planet, with its own laws of motion and cut off from the rest of humanity.

NOTE- you can compare this to the original at http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/warworlds/b1c1.html

Hugo Chavez quotes were found at http://thinkexist.com/quotes/hugo_chavez/

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Stopping the Phone Book Insanity. (Phone Book Blog 4)

14 Mar

March 14, 2011

Regular readers of this blog may recall that last year the various companies dumped enough phone books in my lobby that we could have built a second (and probably cleaner) building next door. The proverbial house of cards would have nothing on us.

After yet another company’s useless phone book was dumped in my lobby I (metaphorically) ran out on the porch and shook my fist, yelling that they better keep off my lawn or else. Or else what? Or else another blog. This one prompted a response by someone who is actually in the phone book biz and tried to defend them. Sad, really.

Well, no less a respected newspaper than the New York Times took up my call. OK, so they were probably planning the story anyway, but I say that I prompted their article about the utter waste that is the printed phone book. Flying in the face of all reason, not to mention facts, I stubbornly say that I scooped them.

And that was not the only time I have scooped the mainstream media.

I assume that by now you have clicked on those links and are now thoroughly up to date with all the ways the phone book is unneeded. Of course I also assume that the United States will have a sound fiscal policy in my lifetime so I may not be too secure in my assumptions. (However, I do think that I am safe in my assumption that the Mets will not make the playoffs this year. Or next year.) In short, the internet gives tons more info and the phone book doesn’t list cell phones, which only a measly ten bazillion of us have.

The phone book is roughly 4.2 times more useless than the average human appendix. At least the removal of an appendix is an excuse for a doctor to charge enough to make his next four boat payments. What does the removal of a phone book gain anyone but a more crowded landfill? Sure, we can recycle them, but who wants to go through all of the bother when it would be so much easier to not print the book in the first place?

It isn’t like the production of the phone book keeps a lot of people employed. All it takes is one guy to go to his computer and hit “alphabetize.” Hemingway does not write phone books. Granted he’s dead, but were he alive I suspect he would not write a phone book. And the printer? The phone book is a once a year contract. I’m sure they could find another high school newspaper to fill the time if they stopped the phone book.

And we’d have a lot more trees.

One group of people the phone book does keep employed are the people who write those silly ads that scream ARE YOU INJURED? and ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION. Who needs them? The less things that scream erectile dysfunction the better.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that someone actually needs the phone book. And yes, I really do believe there are one or two people like that in every city. Elderly shut-ins looking up the names of old friends to see if they are deceased. Weirdos who like to see their name in print. The random business owner who stubbornly believes that a four line ad in the yellow pages gets them more traffic than promoting their website on Google. But do all those people need five phone books? One phone book is enough to stand on to reach the top shelf. If you need more height go stand on a chair.

Phone Book Season kicked off late this time around. Last year by the end of January we had already inundated the sanitation department with seeming millions of phone books tossed out in the street. For weeks little kids were making forts out them and playing cowboys and personal injury attorneys. This year the phone book didn’t stick its head out of its hole until the third week of March. It saw its shadow, came out, and Mayor Bloomberg fired it and 4,600 teachers despite having a budget surplus of about 3 million dollars. (True dat. The teacher thing, anyway.)

But a funny thing happened on the way to my lobby. (No, not this blog- I said “funny.”) For some reason we have so far (fingers crossed) only gotten one company’s phone book. Last year we had five. And get this- instead of the about 1/4 trillion books we received last year, we got only enough books for less than half of the apartments in the building. I know what you’re thinking- how many people took the phone book this year? Good question. After a week of watching the piles sit there like lumps of dirt- or just like phone books, take your pick- it looks like maybe four were taken. And this is a six-story building.

There was a new twist this year. Along with the phone book we sometimes get a restaurant guide from a phone book company. That one has all the takeout menus we usually find shoved under our door and later toss away in one handy volume so we can toss them all away at the same time. We didn’t get that this year. Instead we got an attorney guide. That one I took.

My main reason for taking it was to see if my lawyer was in there. He was not. But I don’t take that as a warning sign. If it doesn’t bother me that his letterhead has another lawyer’s name scratched out and his penciled in with a purple marker why should this? And besides, the volume is only about 60 pages thin- a mere pamphlet, really- and seems to list the same dozen lawyers over and over. Look up personal injury and you’ll find a huge full-page ad for “Lawyer Company X.” No, that is not their real name. I don’t want to be sued; these are lawyers I’m mocking! Turn to bankruptcy and you’ll find the same ad for “Lawyer Company X” but with “personal injury” changed to “bankruptcy.” Want to make out a will? Same company, same ad. The only thing that is different between them and my lawyer is that mine was too cheap to buy an ad.

So the lawyer book is a waste but it takes up less room and killed less trees so I don’t feel so bad about not recycling it and just tossing it down the garbage chute.

(I reread that sentence, saw I used “so” three times, began it with a conjunction, and it is thisclose to being a run-on. I left it anyway. Sometimes it is the voice that counts more than the content. Especially this content.)

The bottom line of all this mishigas (Google it) is that I fully expect this to be only the opening salvo in my war on sanity- sorry, I mean war on the phone book. One company down, four to go. If the tanking economy means we will only be getting a sensible number of phone books, for that one reason I am grateful that New York is in trouble.

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