The Therapist or the Dictator? or The Tale of the Flying Paper (excerpt from Sage and the Scarecrow)
When the apocalypse comes and wipes out the digital world with its digital afflictions, people will seek out refuges of paper. These places will look something like universities but with higher walls. People we might have called professors in the past will look more like monks and will be called something else.
If they are called “professors” it will mean something else entirely. They will seem even more irrelevant than they are today. Still, when the cell phones die and we’re left to wander the earth, we will see these places with the high walls and think, “Food?”
Not, “Food for thought?” just “Food?”
*
I was worried that Angie was going to follow me, so I took an unorthodox path downstairs, avoiding the elevator, waiting several minutes on the second floor, and then proceeding down to the first floor. I knew Angie. I knew she might come out of my dorm and try to find me.
As I left my dorm building, I realized that my nerves were pretty shot. I began to wish I’d brought a book or something because reading always calmed me down. I wandered around campus for a little while, just thinking about the uncomfortable experience with Angie.
I would wander around campus and let my own neuroticism swallow me up whole.
No, I couldn’t do this. I had to occupy myself with something. Anything. I needed to go someplace where I could just sit and gather myself. I thought about visiting my English Professor, maybe talking about my final paper. I hadn’t started yet, and the end of my semester was approaching. I was behind in everything. I had let everything linger.
It suddenly occurred to me that I should see my therapist, Jamie Plath, one last time. Not for therapy, but just to say goodbye. He was a doctoral student who was graduating that semester. I had seen him just once that semester and had never gone back. Right about then, however, I was feeling like I wanted to talk with someone.
Not another session, but a goodbye. Perhaps if he wasn’t there, I would book another session. I walked into the mental health clinic. It was much more packed than usual and I tried not to look any of the students in the eye. Certainly, I didn’t want to start a conversation with any of them.
I asked the receptionist if Jamie Plath was there. She checked her schedule. Then she shook her head. “I don’t think he’s going to be working here anymore. He’s left the nest already, I think. Do you want me to make an appointment with someone else?”
“No, I just wanted to say goodbye.”
“Well, that’s sweet of you. I wish I could give out numbers, but I can’t. It’s clinic policy. Was there something else I could help you with?”
“No, that’s it. Thank you.”
*
In the apocalypse one of these “universities” takes me in.
They see that I’m hungry. They don’t know that I’m made out of straw. They don’t know that I’m in love with a girl named Jennifer. They offer me some rice. There is no meat. Meat is hard to come by.
“But we still have books,” one of them says. “Paper books. You can read. We haven’t eaten them yet.”
That’s how I know they are noble creatures.
*
I went to the Psychology Department to see if perhaps Jamie was still there. The office was nearly vacant and I was able to go right past the empty secretary’s desk and knock on his door. His name was still on the door, but his office was locked.
I waited at the desk of the secretary. She was only gone for about ten minutes and was soon back with a cup of tea.
“Hey, I’m looking for Jamie Plath. Is he going to be coming back?”
She looked like she was a senior or a young graduate student. “Were you a fan of his?” she asked.
“In a manner of speaking.” She smiled a smile that was equal parts noncommitted and amused. I thought I could see something behind that smile. What did that smile say about Jamie Plath? Admire at your own risk, perhaps. There was a story there, but I was too dense to read it at the time.
“I don’t think so. I think he’s already off to better things. Probably just forgot to take his name off the door.”
“Could I have his phone number? I just wanted to thank him for all his help with a project I’ve been working on.”
“Sorry, I don’t think we’re allowed to give out phone numbers. I can give you the email he has on his university registry, though.”
She wrote it on a yellow sticky note and I thanked her for her hospitality.
*
Nothing to read. Nothing to read. Like a metronome in my mind, these words ticked the time away.
I wasn’t ready to go back to my dorm. Angie might still be there.
There was one refuge on campus for me. The library.
*
If he had had a nicer suit, I’m sure Jamie Plath would have worn it. In the one meeting I had had with him, he reminded me more of an MBA student than of some cornball therapist from Goodwill Hunting. No Robin Williams here. Just good ol’ sense and the refusal to deal with nonsense.
His first question was simple: “So, what happened?” Not how do you feel or why are you here? What happened?
“I don’t think anything happened. I think people were just worried about me because I was getting animated in class.”
“Why were you getting ‘animated’ in class?”
“It’s complicated.”
I knew deep down he wanted me to answer his first question. After all, for someone like Jamie, it was always about the details of the thing. What happened? his eyes seemed to be asking me.
Later, he made me fill out the survey I neglected. Of all the questions on the survey, probably the only one he cared about was whether I was on drugs.
*
I didn’t answer any of Jamie's questions directly. Instead, I offered him a scenario.
“Let’s say someone was dying. And you loved this person more than anything. You take this person to a hospital and the doctors, the nurses, and the administrators -- you get the feeling like they don’t really see this person as a human. They see this person as a box to be checked or a system glitch to be managed. So, this society exists around you that turns people who should be caring about people, thinking about humans in the most humane way possible, and instead, they are just things in the world to be managed. I wonder, doctor, is that how you see me? Do you see me as something to be managed, solved, and then forgotten? If you did, then wouldn’t that legitimate my quest.”
“Your quest?”
“My quest to find a fundamentally better society.”
I didn’t say perfect. Perhaps that’s what I meant, though. Perfect.
*
In the first few weeks, the books nourish me. I find that long hours of reading and writing have made me weaker, but have also made my time in the garden more enjoyable. I enjoy simple conversations and complex conversations.
Sometimes the conversations are practical. How do we make the plants grow? How do we shelter our fragile bodies from the harsh winter? How do we hide from the hordes of thumb-twitchers that existed outside our high walls?
Other times, the topics are more complex: How do we perfect our lives to avoid harming others? How do we cultivate superior forms of empathy? This last question is mine, and as soon as I ask it, the people we might call “professors” find a new respect for me. They treat me as one of them.
They still don’t know that I’m made of straw.
*
I asked the librarian if she knew where I could find Jamie’s dissertation. She informed me that not all dissertations were registered in the system yet, but that often the newest ones were displayed in a glass case where the other dissertations were kept. I thanked her and went to find the dissertation.
*
There are other things I remember from my session with Jamie.
“Before we go any further, I want to ask you a question. What are you going to do after graduation?”
“I’d like to keep the conversation direct on you,” my MBA / therapist replied.
“Think of this as part of my therapy. What if I stepped back and told you that I just wanted to know. I won’t judge. I just want to know. This will be part of the trust-building process.”
It took a little more cajoling, a little more baiting, but finally, he told me. He had already gotten an offer from a major airline to do research on pilots. He was supposed to help Boeing make airplane procedures less stressful for pilots.
That really didn’t seem like such a bad life. He was very business-like, very professional, but not in a phony way, just in the kind of way that indicated he was very serious about making money.
There was a story there, though. The story of Jaime Plath. Perhaps when he started graduate school he wanted to help people with very serious problems. Then, somewhere down the line had felt so defeated that he realized that all he really wanted to do was make a little bit of cash.
I could imagine this guy going to work every day in a suit and tie and asking pilots very seriously whether they were more scared of knobs or switches, whether automation made them feel inadequate, and how this was affecting their sex life.
*
My university library was crowded with people. Some looked like they hadn’t slept in a very long time.
I found my therapist’s dissertation displayed prominently with other recently completed dissertations. How many long years? How few people will read it?
Borderline Personality Order -- The Role of Disclosure and Community Support Systems. Such a brilliantly simple and unassuming title.
Borderline personality disorder. Borderline -- to be on the border between here and there. Personality -- the thing that makes us unique snowflakes in the world. Disorder -- the state of not being order, that which those on the borderline feel most comfortable with.
*
One of the monks/professors casually informs me that the walls of our sanctuary will not hold.
The hordes of thumb-twitchers are at the gate, mindless zombies that scavenge for food and move their thumbs meaninglessly as if their electronic devices were still with them.
“We have no weapons, either,” he says. “Our superior empathy has disarmed us in the most literal sense.”
I feel bad about that. The empathy was my fault.
And since the monk/professor has cultivated superior empathy himself he says, “Don’t worry. It’s not your fault. We all wanted the same thing in our hearts. But the people beyond those walls don’t want empathy. They want our food and quite possibly to eat our brains. Once that is done, they’ll eat our paper too.”
*
I would later find out that Jamie was the same therapist that Angie went to see, but that later he had advised Angie to notify her parents and seek “more professional” help. Angie, of course, blew up and told him what he could go do with himself. She then started stalking him, calling his house repeatedly, showing up at his office, things like that. She claimed later that the therapist had slept with her.
I really felt sorry for the guy when I heard about that. I think Angie got worse once I left school. I learned all about this stuff after I’d left school through a friend—it’s kind of sad to think about.
*
I also remember this about our session. You’ll probably need to know this one for later on.
“Your dad died recently,” he said. “Tell me about that.”
“How do I begin to tell you? What words...no, nothing.”
“Could it be that these fantasies you’re having, of creating a better world, are ways to deal with your father’s death, of repressed emotions you’re not dealing with?”
“That’s exactly what I would expect a therapist to say. Do you know what my dad would say?”
“No, what would he say?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I never will. And I felt a pain so deep it reaches into me today.
*
I really liked Jamie. I don’t know why, but I felt like I could call him by his first name.
I could see him going to work for this big airline and helping out these pilots. Every week he would check his bank account and let out a sigh of relief. But this sigh of relief was also relief that he wouldn’t end up in some call center trying to swindle pensioners out of their life savings.
His dissertation shows me this. It also shows me he had a sister. It was right there on the dedication page. She had borderline personality disorder. She’s dead and now he can’t get her back. Some girl like Angie, worse than Angie.
No way to help her.
*
I thought I was on a roll. I was on some tear about John Rawls, distributive justice, and a bunch of other stuff, that in retrospect appear to me as dead ends. I was half thinking about these ideas and half listening to what Jamie was saying.
He asked me again. “Do you know why you’re here?”
I didn’t know how many times he had asked that question, but it was possible that had just repeated that sentence over and over again until I finally heard him.
“Because I called one of my professors an amoral monster with the compassion of a microprocessor, and said that in the future there’ll be a world where people of his kind don’t exist. I said that I would make sure people like him didn’t exist. And then I think I said that if I met one more professional, one more supposedly responsible adult in a position of power, who couldn’t feel the pain of another human being right next to them I would end them.”
“Actually, what you said wasn’t nearly as bad as that.”
“Oh, well...I’ll try harder next time.”
*
Eventually, the subject of my dad’s funeral came up.
“I didn’t go. I’ve never liked funerals. Besides, he wouldn’t have cared. All the important things I needed to say to him, I said at home. He would’ve thought it was a load of nonsense.”
“Did you cry after he passed?”
“I did enough crying while he was sick.”
He asked me a few more questions, but I wasn’t listening.
I asked him, “Do you ever tell any of your patients, ‘Yes, all your fears and paranoias are completely justified and it’s the world that should change, not you’?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Sometimes I’d like to,” he said. “But the truth is it’s easier to change yourself than to change the world. There are things I’d like to change. I guess maybe I’d like someone to tell me that I could change it all. Then again, that person would be a different kind of monster. Someone with a youth mob and guns, instead of advice and medication like me.”
That made me really think. “It’s either the therapist or the dictator then?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
I looked up at Jamie in his nice suit. I suddenly admired this guy. He was listening to me. He knew I was on some wavy ocean steering between the Scylla of apathy, amorality, and neglect and the Charybdis of fascism and totalitarianism.
And that was the crux of it. With his suit and tie, he made me think that perhaps this -- my quest -- wasn’t a complete waste of time.
*
I just read the last few pages of his dissertation. It was dry and mechanical the way all dissertations are dry and mechanical. They are neither friend nor foe but are there simply as a way of providing food and efficiency. Who knows if they have the capacity to make our lives even a little better or if in the apocalypse they will become the ammunition for new atrocities.
There are times, though, in between the lines, where I can hear a small siren call: save my sister, save my sister, save people like my sister.
*
“Load them up.”
It had come to this. The barbarians are at the gate. Deprived of their cell phones and electronic media, the masses had soon resorted to cannibalism, brain eating, and walking around in a daze, their thumbs moved in the air frantically typing away imaginary digital messages into the ether.
“OMG. No brains today. Lame!”
For a while, we had lived in peace and our walls had held. We had nourished ourselves with paper books in ways that made us feel good and righteous, connected to a larger legacy of people seeking to be better people. But now, we were about to be destroyed by our own complacency.
Our only defense is the antique cannons kept from the early colonial periods. The gunpowder we made by following the instructions of an old chemistry textbook. We load the dissertations first, they being the most dispensable. Who knows what we would launch next? Who knows if we are better than the barbarians?
There are more dissertations than we could have ever have imagined and they make glorious explosions of paper as they meet the thumb-twitchers.
“Should we save anything?” one of the monks/professors asks me.
“No,” I say. “Fire every last one of them until their thumbs stop moving.”
“But what of our empathy and high-minded ideals?”
“If they were made of a solid mass, I would load them up too.”
As the reams of bounded paper exploded against the bodies of the thumb-twitchers creating little patches of paper and chaos, I couldn’t help but think: Their authors would have wanted it this way.
If they are called “professors” it will mean something else entirely. They will seem even more irrelevant than they are today. Still, when the cell phones die and we’re left to wander the earth, we will see these places with the high walls and think, “Food?”
Not, “Food for thought?” just “Food?”
*
I was worried that Angie was going to follow me, so I took an unorthodox path downstairs, avoiding the elevator, waiting several minutes on the second floor, and then proceeding down to the first floor. I knew Angie. I knew she might come out of my dorm and try to find me.
As I left my dorm building, I realized that my nerves were pretty shot. I began to wish I’d brought a book or something because reading always calmed me down. I wandered around campus for a little while, just thinking about the uncomfortable experience with Angie.
I would wander around campus and let my own neuroticism swallow me up whole.
No, I couldn’t do this. I had to occupy myself with something. Anything. I needed to go someplace where I could just sit and gather myself. I thought about visiting my English Professor, maybe talking about my final paper. I hadn’t started yet, and the end of my semester was approaching. I was behind in everything. I had let everything linger.
It suddenly occurred to me that I should see my therapist, Jamie Plath, one last time. Not for therapy, but just to say goodbye. He was a doctoral student who was graduating that semester. I had seen him just once that semester and had never gone back. Right about then, however, I was feeling like I wanted to talk with someone.
Not another session, but a goodbye. Perhaps if he wasn’t there, I would book another session. I walked into the mental health clinic. It was much more packed than usual and I tried not to look any of the students in the eye. Certainly, I didn’t want to start a conversation with any of them.
I asked the receptionist if Jamie Plath was there. She checked her schedule. Then she shook her head. “I don’t think he’s going to be working here anymore. He’s left the nest already, I think. Do you want me to make an appointment with someone else?”
“No, I just wanted to say goodbye.”
“Well, that’s sweet of you. I wish I could give out numbers, but I can’t. It’s clinic policy. Was there something else I could help you with?”
“No, that’s it. Thank you.”
*
In the apocalypse one of these “universities” takes me in.
They see that I’m hungry. They don’t know that I’m made out of straw. They don’t know that I’m in love with a girl named Jennifer. They offer me some rice. There is no meat. Meat is hard to come by.
“But we still have books,” one of them says. “Paper books. You can read. We haven’t eaten them yet.”
That’s how I know they are noble creatures.
*
I went to the Psychology Department to see if perhaps Jamie was still there. The office was nearly vacant and I was able to go right past the empty secretary’s desk and knock on his door. His name was still on the door, but his office was locked.
I waited at the desk of the secretary. She was only gone for about ten minutes and was soon back with a cup of tea.
“Hey, I’m looking for Jamie Plath. Is he going to be coming back?”
She looked like she was a senior or a young graduate student. “Were you a fan of his?” she asked.
“In a manner of speaking.” She smiled a smile that was equal parts noncommitted and amused. I thought I could see something behind that smile. What did that smile say about Jamie Plath? Admire at your own risk, perhaps. There was a story there, but I was too dense to read it at the time.
“I don’t think so. I think he’s already off to better things. Probably just forgot to take his name off the door.”
“Could I have his phone number? I just wanted to thank him for all his help with a project I’ve been working on.”
“Sorry, I don’t think we’re allowed to give out phone numbers. I can give you the email he has on his university registry, though.”
She wrote it on a yellow sticky note and I thanked her for her hospitality.
*
Nothing to read. Nothing to read. Like a metronome in my mind, these words ticked the time away.
I wasn’t ready to go back to my dorm. Angie might still be there.
There was one refuge on campus for me. The library.
*
If he had had a nicer suit, I’m sure Jamie Plath would have worn it. In the one meeting I had had with him, he reminded me more of an MBA student than of some cornball therapist from Goodwill Hunting. No Robin Williams here. Just good ol’ sense and the refusal to deal with nonsense.
His first question was simple: “So, what happened?” Not how do you feel or why are you here? What happened?
“I don’t think anything happened. I think people were just worried about me because I was getting animated in class.”
“Why were you getting ‘animated’ in class?”
“It’s complicated.”
I knew deep down he wanted me to answer his first question. After all, for someone like Jamie, it was always about the details of the thing. What happened? his eyes seemed to be asking me.
Later, he made me fill out the survey I neglected. Of all the questions on the survey, probably the only one he cared about was whether I was on drugs.
*
I didn’t answer any of Jamie's questions directly. Instead, I offered him a scenario.
“Let’s say someone was dying. And you loved this person more than anything. You take this person to a hospital and the doctors, the nurses, and the administrators -- you get the feeling like they don’t really see this person as a human. They see this person as a box to be checked or a system glitch to be managed. So, this society exists around you that turns people who should be caring about people, thinking about humans in the most humane way possible, and instead, they are just things in the world to be managed. I wonder, doctor, is that how you see me? Do you see me as something to be managed, solved, and then forgotten? If you did, then wouldn’t that legitimate my quest.”
“Your quest?”
“My quest to find a fundamentally better society.”
I didn’t say perfect. Perhaps that’s what I meant, though. Perfect.
*
In the first few weeks, the books nourish me. I find that long hours of reading and writing have made me weaker, but have also made my time in the garden more enjoyable. I enjoy simple conversations and complex conversations.
Sometimes the conversations are practical. How do we make the plants grow? How do we shelter our fragile bodies from the harsh winter? How do we hide from the hordes of thumb-twitchers that existed outside our high walls?
Other times, the topics are more complex: How do we perfect our lives to avoid harming others? How do we cultivate superior forms of empathy? This last question is mine, and as soon as I ask it, the people we might call “professors” find a new respect for me. They treat me as one of them.
They still don’t know that I’m made of straw.
*
I asked the librarian if she knew where I could find Jamie’s dissertation. She informed me that not all dissertations were registered in the system yet, but that often the newest ones were displayed in a glass case where the other dissertations were kept. I thanked her and went to find the dissertation.
*
There are other things I remember from my session with Jamie.
“Before we go any further, I want to ask you a question. What are you going to do after graduation?”
“I’d like to keep the conversation direct on you,” my MBA / therapist replied.
“Think of this as part of my therapy. What if I stepped back and told you that I just wanted to know. I won’t judge. I just want to know. This will be part of the trust-building process.”
It took a little more cajoling, a little more baiting, but finally, he told me. He had already gotten an offer from a major airline to do research on pilots. He was supposed to help Boeing make airplane procedures less stressful for pilots.
That really didn’t seem like such a bad life. He was very business-like, very professional, but not in a phony way, just in the kind of way that indicated he was very serious about making money.
There was a story there, though. The story of Jaime Plath. Perhaps when he started graduate school he wanted to help people with very serious problems. Then, somewhere down the line had felt so defeated that he realized that all he really wanted to do was make a little bit of cash.
I could imagine this guy going to work every day in a suit and tie and asking pilots very seriously whether they were more scared of knobs or switches, whether automation made them feel inadequate, and how this was affecting their sex life.
*
My university library was crowded with people. Some looked like they hadn’t slept in a very long time.
I found my therapist’s dissertation displayed prominently with other recently completed dissertations. How many long years? How few people will read it?
Borderline Personality Order -- The Role of Disclosure and Community Support Systems. Such a brilliantly simple and unassuming title.
Borderline personality disorder. Borderline -- to be on the border between here and there. Personality -- the thing that makes us unique snowflakes in the world. Disorder -- the state of not being order, that which those on the borderline feel most comfortable with.
*
One of the monks/professors casually informs me that the walls of our sanctuary will not hold.
The hordes of thumb-twitchers are at the gate, mindless zombies that scavenge for food and move their thumbs meaninglessly as if their electronic devices were still with them.
“We have no weapons, either,” he says. “Our superior empathy has disarmed us in the most literal sense.”
I feel bad about that. The empathy was my fault.
And since the monk/professor has cultivated superior empathy himself he says, “Don’t worry. It’s not your fault. We all wanted the same thing in our hearts. But the people beyond those walls don’t want empathy. They want our food and quite possibly to eat our brains. Once that is done, they’ll eat our paper too.”
*
I would later find out that Jamie was the same therapist that Angie went to see, but that later he had advised Angie to notify her parents and seek “more professional” help. Angie, of course, blew up and told him what he could go do with himself. She then started stalking him, calling his house repeatedly, showing up at his office, things like that. She claimed later that the therapist had slept with her.
I really felt sorry for the guy when I heard about that. I think Angie got worse once I left school. I learned all about this stuff after I’d left school through a friend—it’s kind of sad to think about.
*
I also remember this about our session. You’ll probably need to know this one for later on.
“Your dad died recently,” he said. “Tell me about that.”
“How do I begin to tell you? What words...no, nothing.”
“Could it be that these fantasies you’re having, of creating a better world, are ways to deal with your father’s death, of repressed emotions you’re not dealing with?”
“That’s exactly what I would expect a therapist to say. Do you know what my dad would say?”
“No, what would he say?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I never will. And I felt a pain so deep it reaches into me today.
*
I really liked Jamie. I don’t know why, but I felt like I could call him by his first name.
I could see him going to work for this big airline and helping out these pilots. Every week he would check his bank account and let out a sigh of relief. But this sigh of relief was also relief that he wouldn’t end up in some call center trying to swindle pensioners out of their life savings.
His dissertation shows me this. It also shows me he had a sister. It was right there on the dedication page. She had borderline personality disorder. She’s dead and now he can’t get her back. Some girl like Angie, worse than Angie.
No way to help her.
*
I thought I was on a roll. I was on some tear about John Rawls, distributive justice, and a bunch of other stuff, that in retrospect appear to me as dead ends. I was half thinking about these ideas and half listening to what Jamie was saying.
He asked me again. “Do you know why you’re here?”
I didn’t know how many times he had asked that question, but it was possible that had just repeated that sentence over and over again until I finally heard him.
“Because I called one of my professors an amoral monster with the compassion of a microprocessor, and said that in the future there’ll be a world where people of his kind don’t exist. I said that I would make sure people like him didn’t exist. And then I think I said that if I met one more professional, one more supposedly responsible adult in a position of power, who couldn’t feel the pain of another human being right next to them I would end them.”
“Actually, what you said wasn’t nearly as bad as that.”
“Oh, well...I’ll try harder next time.”
*
Eventually, the subject of my dad’s funeral came up.
“I didn’t go. I’ve never liked funerals. Besides, he wouldn’t have cared. All the important things I needed to say to him, I said at home. He would’ve thought it was a load of nonsense.”
“Did you cry after he passed?”
“I did enough crying while he was sick.”
He asked me a few more questions, but I wasn’t listening.
I asked him, “Do you ever tell any of your patients, ‘Yes, all your fears and paranoias are completely justified and it’s the world that should change, not you’?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Sometimes I’d like to,” he said. “But the truth is it’s easier to change yourself than to change the world. There are things I’d like to change. I guess maybe I’d like someone to tell me that I could change it all. Then again, that person would be a different kind of monster. Someone with a youth mob and guns, instead of advice and medication like me.”
That made me really think. “It’s either the therapist or the dictator then?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
I looked up at Jamie in his nice suit. I suddenly admired this guy. He was listening to me. He knew I was on some wavy ocean steering between the Scylla of apathy, amorality, and neglect and the Charybdis of fascism and totalitarianism.
And that was the crux of it. With his suit and tie, he made me think that perhaps this -- my quest -- wasn’t a complete waste of time.
*
I just read the last few pages of his dissertation. It was dry and mechanical the way all dissertations are dry and mechanical. They are neither friend nor foe but are there simply as a way of providing food and efficiency. Who knows if they have the capacity to make our lives even a little better or if in the apocalypse they will become the ammunition for new atrocities.
There are times, though, in between the lines, where I can hear a small siren call: save my sister, save my sister, save people like my sister.
*
“Load them up.”
It had come to this. The barbarians are at the gate. Deprived of their cell phones and electronic media, the masses had soon resorted to cannibalism, brain eating, and walking around in a daze, their thumbs moved in the air frantically typing away imaginary digital messages into the ether.
“OMG. No brains today. Lame!”
For a while, we had lived in peace and our walls had held. We had nourished ourselves with paper books in ways that made us feel good and righteous, connected to a larger legacy of people seeking to be better people. But now, we were about to be destroyed by our own complacency.
Our only defense is the antique cannons kept from the early colonial periods. The gunpowder we made by following the instructions of an old chemistry textbook. We load the dissertations first, they being the most dispensable. Who knows what we would launch next? Who knows if we are better than the barbarians?
There are more dissertations than we could have ever have imagined and they make glorious explosions of paper as they meet the thumb-twitchers.
“Should we save anything?” one of the monks/professors asks me.
“No,” I say. “Fire every last one of them until their thumbs stop moving.”
“But what of our empathy and high-minded ideals?”
“If they were made of a solid mass, I would load them up too.”
As the reams of bounded paper exploded against the bodies of the thumb-twitchers creating little patches of paper and chaos, I couldn’t help but think: Their authors would have wanted it this way.
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