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He was against everybody’s reproducing, since human beings were, in his own words, “about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.”
“The difference is that we have the misfortune of knowing what’s really going on,” said Bergeron, “which is no fun at all. And this has given rise to a whole new class of preening, narcissistic quacks like yourself who say in the service of rich and shameless polluters that the state of the atmosphere and the water and the topsoil on which all life depends is as debatable as how many angels can dance on the fuzz of a tennis ball.”
Bergeron’s epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this: We could have saved it, but we were too doggone cheap. Only he didn’t say “doggone.”
To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete’s foot.
If you stop to think about it, what the Elders did was based on a sort of trickle-down theory. Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can’t stand, they have to be leakage and overflow. But the Elders’ scheme of having the misery of higher animals trickle down to microorganisms worked like a dream.
And here I am capitalizing “Black” and “White” sometimes, and then not capitalizing them, and not feeling right about how the words look either way. That could be because sometimes race seems to matter a tremendous lot, and other times race seems to matter a little less than that. And I keep wanting to say “so-called Black” or “so-called black.” My guess is that well over half the inmates at Athena, and now in this prison here, had white or White ancestors. Many appear to be mostly white, but they get no credit for that. Imagine what that must feel like.
“At least we still have freedom of speech,” I said. And she said, “That isn’t something somebody else gives you. That’s something you have to give yourself.”
“What makes so many Americans proud of their ignorance? They act as though their ignorance somehow made them charming.”
