What I learned at Math Camp...

[It's my birthday and the picture to the right is the bouquet of flowers I get every year. It is a picture of the only Weapon of Mass Destruction which has ever actually been unleashed upon a human population. What follows is an essay supposedly put together by the legendary Ichabod Rain -- that's what my un-employed angel from the Third Galaxy tells me anyway. Apparently, events there are pretty much parallel to those in our own world, so I post it here, as it is better than anything I could think of to say today.]

When I was a little boy, growing up in Poosah City, I attended a “Math Camp” one summer at Poosah State University. It was real cool. Six weeks away from home! My dad, bless his heart, gave me some fatherly advice. As he drove me to the train, speaking out of the side of his mouth, he said, “Be sure and use a rubber so you don’t get any girls pregnant!” That was the total sum of my formal sex education, everything else I got from Readers Disgust and Ploughboy.

That’s all you’re going to hear about sex in this post!

Hmmn, haven’t had enough?

Okay, here’s some more: sex, sex, sex, fornication, sex, sex, sex.

Satisfied?

The reason I’m telling you about this summer is because I learned something very important and mind boggling at the Math Camp, but I’m going to have to go a bit roundabout to explain it to you.

When the great “War to End All War”, started it wasn’t said, “Okay, folks we’re going to play a little game where five million young men will be slaughtered during four years of boom and bang run by senseless idiot shithead reusable asswipes who, only God knows how, happen to be our generals and prime ministers”.

No, it was much more nobly put. Koteps the Perv, the Emperor of Bottomslops, told his subjects, “You will be home before the leaves fall…” Yeah, right! His subjects wiped the drool from their mouths and shouted, “Hoorah!” and off they marched as the bands played like lemmings to the fall.

They marched off to four years of living in rat infested, mud filled trenches while their leaders passed the time finding new ways to get them killed, such as charging into machine gun fire, inhaling refreshing clouds of chlorine gas or watching their skin boil away from drops of blister gas. An awful lot of leaves fell before a lot of people never came home.

But Peace came! Now THAT is something always announced! They waved some flags but the band didn’t play quite as loud because most of the trombone players were dead…

The problem is that they never publish the important footnotes, like “Peace has begun and will last until the seeds we have sown for the next war have grown and are ready and ripe to suck the life out of yet another generation…” and that is exactly what happened. A sort of precursor to the Supreme Hole came to power in Bottomslops, which was no longer a Empire and when their Fearless Leader was finished it wasn’t even a real country for while.

I was born during “The War to Make the World Safe for…” yeah, they keep changing what it was for, so you need to check the papers to know how to fill in the dots. That’s why I usually say, “…Safe for Whatever”.

We won that war because we were the good guys, and God was on Our Side. On the other hand, the soldiers of Bottomslops, they had “God is with us” on their belt-buckles and Emperor of Bedpan, the other bad guys, he was a God, or descended from one anyway. Maybe God hedges his/her bets, I really don’t know.

In any case, God or not, we won that war in a stupendous flash of light and heat – a blast like none the world had ever seen. On the day I was born, we dropped a hell bomb called Little Brat on Bedpan and killed an awful lot of people.

In a metapsychic sense, what we’d done was “bring the sun down to earth in the sight of men”. That’s written somewhere in the Book of the Holy Idaho, which is why I put it in quotes. But nobody understood what it was we had done. All anybody understood was that the War was over, which is always worth shouting hurrah over. They waved a lot flags and the bands played louder than ever before because we had a lot more trombone players now. We were the good guys and God really was on Our Side, and damn well better stay there because we had Our Hell Bomb.

Nobody understood, but I did, because we dropped the Thing on my birthday, therefore I grew up with a kind of obsession about it. Every time my birthday rolled around it was always, “X years ago we dropped the Hell Bomb.”

Sooo, wake up, dear hearts, because I’m about to get to the point of my little lecture. While I was at the University, I discovered they had on microfilm newspapers going back to before I was born. I went back in time to that day, expecting to find headlines in letters ten inches tall, “WE GOT THE BOMB!!!” or “WE BLEW BEDPAN TO SHIT”.

I had heard about something all my young life, which in the end is likely to make us go the way of the dinosaurs and the trilobites, but there was nothing, nothing, nothing at all. Two or three lines stating that we had used a “new kind of bomb”, that was all.

This is what I discovered at Math Camp:

Events of great importance are rarely announced for what they are when they occur. In fact, the rule of thumb is, the greater the importance, the less attention will be given them – historical reality is brought into focus by time.