Big Mamma’s Joke

Big Mamma’s Joke

 

A Nuclear Holocaust and Burning to Death in Climate Warming are tricky little twins who have one ultimate goal — the extermination of the human race.  Holocaust is impatient and wants to get it done and over with.  Climate Warming, let us call him, Charboy, takes its time and gloats at the decades of human misery it will impose before it manages the final extinction of the species by roasting.  Holocaust is only accidentally kinder, and embraces torture, but not for eons.  Charboy is sadistic and loves to impose long-term inescapable suffering as it slowly burns the earth to a crisp.  These tricky twins are the progeny of the dead, the nonliving, the non-breathing — the corporations of the world that are nourished solely by profit, and, as the nonliving, they hold no respect for life in any form.

The most interesting phenomenon is that man has not only created his god in heaven but these equally invisible entities on earth, these corporations, that, in turn, have given birth to the tricky twins.  How remarkably deranged that man should have created these monsters with no soul, and no conscience, these lifeless leviathans that will sell life for dollars, health for dollars, morality for dollars, love for dollars, and, indeed, they will sell the planet itself along with every twig and tree every blooming rose and chirping bird along with all its human creators if there is offered or even imagined the most distant hope for dollars.  And in the end, we, the creators of these killer corporations to whom we have enslaved ourselves, are as helpless against our own creations as a child tied on the tracks before an oncoming, runaway train.

I say Big Mamma Up in the Sky looks down on this with disgust.  If we sit quietly and listen to the murmuring of a mountain stream we can hear what she is saying:  “Just look at these creatures called humans whom I have created in my latest experiment.  It has been a dreadful mistake.  I gave them the will to survive.  This brought on their eagerness to kill each other.  I gave them a mind to create, but they created not only beauty but invented every horror and instrument of destruction knowable in the universe.  I gave them the desire for pleasure.  But that turned into greed and prolificacy.   I gave them love, but the underside too often prevailed which is their apathy to suffering and their hatred of their fellow man.  Yes, man was a mistake.  A very bad one.   Perhaps my worst.

“But, as always, I shall have the last laugh.  With man I have no need to intercede.  These madmen will either blow themselves off the planet with nuclear bombs or burn themselves off the planet with global warming.  And their masters, those mindless corporations, unwittingly work night and day to terminate the species since corporations see a vast profusion of dollars in bombs and global pollution, all of which proves that madness and evil ultimately prevail.

“But no.  Lest I forget:  the concepts of good and evil are human creations.  Without humans there is neither good nor evil.  Without humans there is only beauty.  My intention was to design these humans to see and marvel at my works.  But with their insane destruction of their own habitat, that which is beautiful shall revert into the eternal unseen until, of course, I nominate some other creature that deserves to replace mankind, one that can fully appreciate my work.

“Ah, yes, how could I have forgotten?  I shall next try frogs.  Even now in these late times I hear them still singing.  They are bursting with such joy.  They sing all night.  They do not kill each other.  Yes, pollywogs and frogs will be my next great masterpiece.  My frogs will thrive in hot, polluted waters and radioactive slime.  Oh, how I love them!  I will give them a third eye so they can see my beauty in 3D.  Yes, of course, I have loved them all along, but their simple beauty has been overshadowed by the larger, noisy creatures.  And, yes, it is true.  I have created frogs in my own image.

“You didn’t know that?  Well, that is the best joke of all.”