The banjo players must die or, why the universe kind of ended, and whose fault precisely that is

182 Pages·2007·0.727 MB·English

by  Josef Assad

Contents
1 Them, their Banjos, Him, and Those 1
2 Goats, Plans, and Lumpy Cushions 15
3 Of Faith and Reason 39
4 When the Foot Cushions Attack 60
5 Glassy-Eyed Stares Aplenty 79
6 The Primary Conversion Cycle 97
7 Repent! The Fancy Dress Ball is Nigh! 132
8 It Ain’t Over Till the Fat Lady Moans 146
9 Epilogue 169
About this book 174
License 176
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The Banjo Players Must Die
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Copyright (cid:176)c 2007 Josef Assad
ThisbookisreleasedundertheCreativeCommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license. The full license may be viewed at http:
//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode.
For a brief summary of what this means, skip to the License section at
the end of this work.
This is released version 1.0. Errata (hah!) will be found on http://
sancairodicopenhagen.com/tbpmd.html. The author may be contacted at
[email protected].
For Chiara, despite the fact that she will never read or like this book,
being a Roman Catholic,
For the unwilling,
For the easily amused,
And for anyone who thinks incense and hard work makes the monsters
go away.
Chapter 1
Them, their Banjos, Him, and
Those
Of science and logic he chatters
As fine and as fast as he can;
Though I am no judge of such matters,
I’m sure he’s a talented man.
Winthrop Mackworth Praed – The Talented Man
No one knew where they came from; their origin was clouded. Oh, there
were theories of course, but there was no evidence. All attempts to scour
the records of antiquity for clues were fruitless. No matter how far back in
history you went, there they were. Running. Screaming. Pleading for mercy
and receiving none. Their appearance did not appear to have changed much
in the course of several eons; it suited Darwin’s proponents well to ignore
them, for they did not evolve. They were the universal constant; always
there, always persecuted, always the fugitives from the oppressive forces of
divine moral rectitude, and always – always – defiantly playing away on their
banjos.
* * *
This is the story of several things, all of them individually very conse-
quential but collectively all rather banal and uninspiring. This book brings
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The Banjo Players Must Die
you the true story of the End of the World, for varying and often very sparse
degrees of true, end, and world; this should not dampen your enthusiasm for
this historical account, as history shows us time and time again that histor-
ical accounts are often worth very little other than the tablet it is chiseled
on1.
This story is told from the privileged perspective of one with access to all
the insiders. As anyone who reads tabloids will know, that means that this is
also an account of whom had sex with whom, when, how, at what expense,
and whether they got a discount or not. More intriguingly however, we shall
reveal also whom didn’t have sex, and we shall also discuss all the different
forms of sex for which this holds true. After all, angels are major characters
in the story of how the world ends, and angels represent purity2.
Everything in this account has been fact checked for authenticity3. For
reasons which wouldn’t piss off unless you read the entire account through to
its end, we cannot determine at which point in human history this account
will be read. We have therefore provided historical context and will describe
the way the world changed into the disturbing place it was around the time
when Doomsday was planned.
* * *
Right up until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world as we
know it had clung – like a determined but very odd cheetah to a clothesline –
toarudimentarysemblanceofrationality. Whenthelastfastfoodrestaurant
closed down in 2044, Western civilization lost its cultural foothold in the
world and the Egyptians began their ascendancy. In the words of Dr. Harvey
Stromgard4:
“...in every sense of the word. What was unusual, however,
was not the lack thereof, rather the abundance of diminished
quantities of such qualities. This failed to have much effect in
1With any luck, we can replicate this success at obscuring counterintuitive assertions
in unnecessarily long and circuitous sentences many times in this account.
2For now.
3By a crack squad of baboon fetuses.
4Dr. Stromgard was professor of Miffed Garden Furniture at the Arizona Institute of
Everything for which Public Research Funds Are Available.
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CHAPTER 1. THEM, THEIR BANJOS, HIM, AND THOSE
general, however, though it must be said that the general situ-
ation did nudge slightly right and perhaps a little towards the
periphery too. All in all, not something one would want to really
claim adherence to.”
Which is all well until one considers the catastrophic impli-
cations which have historically risen as consequence of rigidly
determined modalities, especially those considering catastrophic
implications.
Concise Account of History, Abridged – Stromgard
The decline of the Western cultural paradigm left behind it a power vac-
uum the size of something really big. There was no unipolar world order, nor
a bipolar one5 There wasn’t even a tri-polar world order6. There wasn’t a
quadripolar or pentapolar world order either for that matter, although that
is most likely because those words don’t really exist and were just made up.
The world rapidly became so un-polar that – much to their embarrassment
– the Dictionarium Aegyptum forgot to include the word polar in the 2187
edition and got it wrong in the next:
polar: poo‘LAR–(anachr.) 1. Thetendencytosexualarousal
when exposed to banal legal minutiae 2. An obscure skin con-
dition (“I have a polar on my bum.” – “You have a what?”)
3. Something remarkably like an obscure skin condition 4. The
tendency to discuss banal legal minutiae when initiating sexual
congress.
Dictionarium Aegyptum
After 2044, the world lived in a state of mundane and unenthusiastic
nationalism, with a plurality of nation-states actually getting along with
one another, and ignoring one another when not getting along instead of
exchanging invective and weapons of mass destruction.
In 2051, the Arabs and the Jews made peace, having exhausted their re-
spectivesuppliesofrace-ladenswearwordsandnotfeelinginclinedtomaking
5Gladly, unicorns and bisexuals survived this purge.
6The triceratops had, woe, perished long before.
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The Banjo Players Must Die
any more up7. The Americans forgave the Cubans in 2054, and the Cubans
forgave the Americans a few decades later for forgiving them when they had
done nothing wrong. In fact, peace reigned; the Dalai Lama made the Chi-
nese Politburo (which as a historical event might suffer some dilution from
the fact that the Politburo had some years earlier reformed itself into a dance
club), the tree-hugging bleeding heart hippies became mainstream (of course,
mainstream reacted by ambling off somewhere, breathing through its nose
and rolling its eyes), and dogs picked up their own feces.
This nauseating state of utopia fortunately didn’t last long; once again
from Stromgard’s Concise Account of History, Abridged:
“...therefore they could do only one thing; admit defeat and
move on. Not that this deterred them very much; it wasn’t much
longer until they resumed the struggle, undeterred by any deter-
rents which may previously have been.
Not that they remembered particularly much at that point
what the whole struggle was about, just as I don’t quite recall
either. But that was never the point. The nobility is in the
struggle, and the struggle ...”
Concise Account of History, Abridged – Stromgard
Or, perhaps slightly more lucidly, from The Pocket Guide to Human His-
tory by Caldwell8:
There were those whom global peace, understanding, and co-
operation didn’t suit. The arms industry soon tired of producing
weapons systems that would never be used for anything other
than hunting rabbits and squirrels. Plastic button manufactur-
ers were forced into bankruptcy; the lack of political strife drove
down demand something horrible.
It could only end badly.
7Had the Egyptians and Israelis been sufficiently motivated, they could have learned
Finnish or Swedish and kept at it for another few centuries.
8Despite the widespread use of Caldwell’s work as a passable guide to Stromgard’s
quality work, not much is known of Caldwell himself. Not even his first name is known
thoughitisrumoredtobeCatherine. Caldwellwasotherwisewidelymalignedforwriting
sensible books and died in abject poverty of a broken heart, gonorrhea, Brussels sprouts
syndrome, and of unspecified and vague ass pains.
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CHAPTER 1. THEM, THEIR BANJOS, HIM, AND THOSE
The Pocket Guide to Human History – Caldwell
Without political strife, it got boring quickly. Religious strife wasn’t an
option either, since it had pretty much been done to death by the Semitic
peoples in the Middle East; religious conflict as an art-form had been per-
fected there and had been laid to rest complete. And, truth to tell, one
couldn’t simply have plain old strife, it had to have a qualifying adjective of
suitable character to validate it and lend it gravitas.
For once, humanity was at a genuine loss for something worthwhile to kill
each other over.
They tried out botanical strife in Guatemala, but there was something
about fighting over palm fronds which smothered enthusiasm. Boustrophe-
donic strife erupted briefly in Canada but petered out quickly amidst angry
cries for new types of strife with more pronounceable names. The University
of Two Goats, Arizona produced a paper proposing typographical strife, but
the idea failed to imprint itself outside the limited circulation of academic
journals. A Belgian priest – finding that his profession could not survive
without people killing each other in large numbers over trivial differences
of opinion – proposed that we change the way strife is spelled to stryphe,
thereby enabling people to engage in ethnic stryphe without the feeling that
they are reinventing the wheel. This triggered a violent bout of semantic
strife which did not die down until Father Manicurus was dispatched to the
aphterlyphe. The southern German province of Bavaria experienced some
ethnic strife in the early twenty-first century, and it was quickly reprimanded
by its neighboring countries for its manifest lack of originality.
In many unexpected ways, this desperate quest for a new form of strife
influenced and transformed the global psyche. The longer the human race
suffered the pestilence of unity, peace and harmonious coexistence, the more
odious became the stench of desperation for destruction. Bad things sim-
ply stopped happening; in 1996, there had been 590 televised news channels
broadcasting a nourishing and endless stream of meaningless and very sat-
isfying destruction. In 2100 there were three, and they broadcasted for a
total of three hours a day. Three hours, regurgitating historical footage of
calamities and cataclysms and past conflicts as filler for what scant misery
their reporters could find or fabricate. In 2100, it was possible for a citizen
to go several months without the faintest excuse to get pissed off.
This unbearable state of affairs wreaked havoc on society. All novel forms
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