Chris Banyas
Editor-in-Chief
I am the man, the well-fed man, in charge of the terrible knob/The most pleasing thing about it, it’s almost a permanent job/When the atom war is over, and the world is split in three/A consolation I got, well maybe it’s not, there’ll be nobody left but me.
I sit at me desk in Washington in charge of this great machine/More vicious than Adolf Hitler, more deadly than strychnine/And in the evening after a tiring day just to give meself a laugh/I hit the button a playful belt and I listen for the blast.
I am the man, the well-fed man, in charge of the terrible knob/The most pleasing thing about it, it’s almost a permanent job/When the atom war is over, and the world is split in three/A consolation I got, well maybe it’s not, there’ll be nobody left but me.
If Brezhnev starts his nonsense, and makes a nasty spell/ With a wink and a nod from Nixon, I’ll blast them all to hell/And as for that Fidel Castro, him with the sugar cane/He needn’t hide behind his whiskers, I’ll get him just the same.
I am the man, the well-fed man, in charge of the terrible knob/The most pleasing thing about it, it’s almost a permanent job/When the atom war is over, and the world is split in three/A consolation I got, well maybe it’s not, there’ll be nobody left but me.
If my wife denies me conjugular rights or me breakfast milk is sour/From eight to nine in the morning you’re in for a nervous hour/The button being so terribly close it’s really a dreadful joke/Abut with me ass, as I go past, and we’ll all go up in smoke.
I am the man, the well-fed man, in charge of the terrible knob/The most pleasing thing about it, it’s almost a permanent job/When the atom war is over, and the world is split in three/A consolation I got, well maybe it’s not, there’ll be nobody left but me.
Now I’m thinking of joining the army, the army that bans the bomb/ We’ll take up a large collection, and I’ll donate me thumb/For without it, I am helpless, and that’s the way to be/You don’t have to kill the whole bloody lot to make the people free.
I’ve thought about this for a long while, several years in fact: why do Americans have such a strong propensity to gun violence? Why do Americans still struggle with racial tension and hate? Why can’t Americans work together with the rest of the world instead of against them? Why are guns so integral to America? Why have they become so fetishized?
Certainly many of these issues are deeply ingrained into the human subconscious, and are absolutely not limited to Americans, but just because they are evident elsewhere does not mean that their existence should not be questioned.
While I don’t necessarily have an answer to the beginning of that question, I believe that there is a simple solution to a large portion: somewhere along the line, Americans decided they didn’t want to live in fear.
Take for example the idea of a preemptive strike. We will annihilate you before you annihilate us. This concept has existed since the dawn of time, when warring clans bent on survival had to choose whether to destroy or be destroyed.
But it has gone so much further than that.
Guns are purchased for “self-defense,” but what is that really? I want to kill them before they kill me.
Take the epidemic of marriage and relationship disintegration: I want to hurt them before they hurt me.
Our foreign policy has made us into some pseudo World Police, and why? We want to be rid of them because we are afraid of them.
Fear, in its most visceral form, is suffocating. To genuinely live in fear must be abhorrent, and it is surely something that I and almost everyone who will read this will have never experienced, and will never experience.
Fear is closely entwined with hate. What else may fear become but hate when there are no options left?
“Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant for you. Hate. Hate.”
Oh Harlan, you card.
Since the days of the first nuclear tests, the image of a finger hovering above a button has become synonymous with the concept of power.
“The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.”
How terribly wrong this is.
Imagine a world in which every individual that did not meet the criterion of normalcy held by the person in power was eliminated.
Do you know what would happen?
Divisions within the remaining population would fester and slowly begin to ooze from the surface. Soon another culling would take place as that dangerous notion of what is “normal” is put into action by a rapidly shrinking majority.
In very short order, there would be one individual left, who would have the very deserved privilege of screaming in the darkness for no one to hear.
Vulnerability is a tough thing to ask of someone. To prostrate oneself before some unknown thing is tantamount to relinquishing all control and placing total trust in someone else, and this is exactly what we don’t do in this country anymore.
Why do so many people fear Muslims? Because it is easier to label them and live in fear of that label than to take even a moment to try and understand them, to see that they are nothing more or less than human beings trying to make their way in the same world.
Why do so many people own guns? Because it is easier to participate in an arms race than it is to have difficult discussions with people, and rightly so: why should you trust someone you don’t know?
Why do some people have such a problem with homosexuals? Again, because rather than take five minutes to talk to them and try to get to know them, to be vulnerable in their presence, it is easier to spew hate speech and patronizing biblical nonsense.
Eventually America will end up being Them to someone else’s US, and things will not work out as they have over the last two centuries, and it is precisely at that time that our children will reap what we have sewn.
“I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet … AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge …
I have no mouth. And I must scream.”
