Wads of Money and Fires of Dung

Dear George,

The only noble death is the death that leaves a wasteland in its wake. (It is my fervent wish that when my carcass is in the ground, the grass above it will rot, its roots will turn to muck and the nutrients will flee the soil, leaving only a sterile mound of sand to mark my demise.)

I think often of death, especially when I meditate on your greatness.

I look forward to the day when we have finished trashing the earth, when all that remains of our forests are sterile fields of mud, when monoculture leaves the world’s top soil blowing in the wind and when the world’s water tables have been drained to produce designer bottled water for the upwardly mobile.

Your legacy will be the sand and mud of creation from which all life has vanished. It will be a world in which emaciated creatures stumble aimlessly about looking for whatever scraps of food remain.

You have set into motion the birth of a democratic world in which the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust are equally wretched. It will mark the return to a golden past in which the struggle for survival will wean out the weak and give all honor and glory to the strong and the brutal.

Life will be an economic utopia in which money will be used as kindling to start fires of dried dung and the outcome of all transactions will be determined by who wields the biggest club.

It will be the era of the natural man, who is one with nature as he competes with the animals for the few roots and berries that remain and experiences the challenge of gnawing on rotted carcasses. We will see the emergence of a new man, created from genes reconstituted by the radioactive dust that will enrich the air for generations to come.

Death is sweet. Its embrace melts our petty problems and puts them into proper perspective. Best of all, death is one hell of a profit center as we turn out its instrument of destruction and accumulate the wads of money that one day will insure that the rich will have bigger fires than the poor.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones