“Maybe when our sexuality is acknowledged from birth, and when no restraint is placed on its expression, save if that is mean, or for vengeance, jealously incited, or just impersonal lust, when we grow up with a long list of lovers in adolescence and then settle on one, we’ll be more generous than we’d imagined, fifty years back.
“In fact, the idea of sex performed as generousness never got any time, in my youth. We constructed it to be selfish, possessive, if nothing else, and we sure spoiled a lot of love, not to say most marriages, by that tomb structure. A man admires a generous wife, always did. But what about a wife who carries the virtue into sexual acts, occasionally? And yet, why is this not a virtue as great as any other the Christians named?”
We see a lot of such hints of hope, here, these days.
Faraway is pretty lovely, of course, as Nature made it, and man changed only a little that he had to. It’s a loving town, in a way unknown in other cultures, especially those last, greatest, most civilized “triumphs,” with the shortest fuses such arrogance sets, and the biggest bang when they go.
5. The First World Cataclysm
PERSONAL NOTE TO MILES AND ALSO BOARD READERS, FROM THE EDITOR:
Seen from this time and place, it is difficult to remember, as the first world cataclysm approached, how hard many men and women tried to prevent the future that became fact. For all who did not even live through the interval, a correct concept of people and their behavior at the time will be near to impossible to form without special help. If we are asking ourselves how we “let” it happen, what will future readers of this work ask? What will they imagine? Unless the project envisioned here (or some other with the same end) is successful future generations will assume that “everybody” living between 1950 and 2010 was too utterly different to relate to, in any way. We will appear to have belonged to a different species.
The present and future generations will know that science is knowledge, nothing else, and that the work of scientists is to advance knowledge and/or teach what is on hand and how to add more. They are clearly aware that technology is not science but applied parts of science, and that technicians, engineers, gadget-inventors and so on are not scientists at all. Further, we stress education in the whole of science, not just one field. So future people must be led back to the public state of mind in, say, 1975.
The difference between science and applied science had not then been made, even for “highly educated” persons. Technology was “science” to the masses and their elected or appointed authorities. They couldn’t “think scientifically” because the word itself set them thinking about artifacts, gadgets, miracle drugs, space ships or nuclear power plants, which the masses didn’t understand even technically. Where opinion on technological matters was needed, they consulted technicians, not scientists, whom they wouldn’t have understood, probably, and whom they considered woolly-minded, impractical, dreamer-professor types. The mere suggestion that scientists were the only truly “worldly” people around would have made them laugh merrily.
But even scientists were not educated, as a rule, in all major sciences. Such an individual would have been called, in those days, a “generalist”—as a term of derogation. For it was widely believed that any “generalist” was possessed of a mere smattering of knowledge of superficial sorts, since it was believed that there was far too much, in the whole of science, for any one man to learn well. To the specialist, that “learning well” meant learning in minute detail. Even he did not conceive that the major lines of the main branches of science could be learned well, and kept up with as they advanced—well enough, and more, for general understanding and, so, accurate “extrapolation,” as they called foresight.
Scientists themselves rarely tried or bothered to learn much outside their “field.” A physicist would be considered very “wide-ranging” if he had a working understanding of the main branches of that one discipline: astrophysics, nuclear physics, solid state physics, cryology, radiation propagation physics, engineering, laser physics and a broad understanding of chemistry, inorganic, at least. Such a specialist seldom had time, the urge, a reason or, even and often, any chance to add, from a freshman course in biology, the steps and main lines in the hundred or more vital branches of that science, or “life science.” Where could any such person, if he existed, add years of enormously intense inquiry into (and experience in) the psychologies? Or inorganic chemistry?
And every passing year meant a “generalist” would have to put new towers of data on top of old, as well as look into fresh fields, some with names but a year old! Finally, human beings, scientists like the rest, with few exceptions, disliked to be found wrong or ignorant—a situation which up to then all men felt as humiliating. Few welcomed a correction that repaired an idea in error or supplied a lesson in a field in which he was not informed.
Unbounded curiosity lets the imagination learn without limit, indeed, makes the process fun. It was not so thought of in 1970 or 1980 or even 1990. Educators now are most urgently trying to teach that being corrected, put right, being relieved of some firm belief that is proven false, is a joyful experience, a source of elation. But then it was regarded as an injury to the ego, shameful and shaming, an insult even, and, personally as well as socially, a wound.
The material I have offered in the following part of the survey is to show that condition as near universal in the old days. When a group brought up some topic of importance, a member who was ignorant of it would not say, “I don’t know” if he could avoid that “confession,” for it would be seen as humiliating. I shall not include the predictions of the scientists who saw where the world was going, for, though startling when they were made, they are more nearly ancient history now than prophecy. But a comment by one of these scientists was especially astute:
“A guy in Iceland will catch a cod with an odd spot on its gills and then another and then write the Icelandic Forest and Fishing Agency that something’s going wrong with cod. That’ll be the first news of what will turn out to be the death warrant of a few hundred million people. But the agency will file the letter and do nothing. Then some professor will publish a monograph on A New Fungus Affecting Five Species of Teleost Fishes. Nothing will happen there either, till the myriads start to die and then it will be recalled that old Doc Bernard A. Bergman made the discovery. The mold will then be called Bergmani but nobody will ever remember Hans Johnssen spotted it first.”
The “rice blast” had such a start—and such an end, too, though the middle story differs. From here, then, I turn to the first of the great world cataclysms and to how it initially came to notice. I now enter a photocopy of a letter that reached the Foundation for Human Conservancy shortly after its date of sending.
WILL GULLIVER
Head man, Human Saving Foundation, Mr. Standish, Smithe Skyscraper on Avenue Five.
City of New York,
July 11th, 1985.
Dear Mr. President:
My name is James Rolle and I live in Louisiana near a town called East Jefferson Parish, name same, Route 1, Box 126. I have not much schooling. I and my brothers have some tenant land and raise some cotton and rice and the usual yams and collard greens and chickens and hogs. Not far from here is a United States Government Plant Experimental Station and has been, for some years. These people have test plots of many farm things. There’s some land nobody’s farmed for years, near their place, and I found that it puts up, every summer, a pretty decent stand of rice, various types seeded from stuff the federal folks are planting. For a couple of years me and the wife, Ella-Maytell, with some of our nine kids, been hand-gathering this here rice as it gets ripe and thresh it out with flails. Not a big deal. Maybe we get two bushel of mixed-up kinds of rice or so, otherwise gone to waste. But we’re poor and nobody ever threw us off that weedy land and who owns it I have no infor. This summer, tho, when it was time for the heads to be ripe, most sorts, anyhow, we set a day off and took baskets and went to cut the rice to lug to the cabin. It was all
dead. Every kind that the wind seeded from that federal place. Not a grain in the whole lot was anywhere near eatin’ size or hardness, jest teeny and now turned soft, as the plants was, also. I was worried. I seen, last few days, the plots of rice them federal science folks have made is beginning to die the same way. I ask a superintendent, a nigger but college-educated, what’s the trouble. He isn’t a Tom type but he tells me they’re gonna find out, but haven’t so far. Says it must be a wilt, a mold, or something of the kind but I sure I seen every wilt and rice-pest they is, nothing like this. If this trouble spreads there’ll be a lot of poor farmers this season, even big ones, too. I thought maybe you was the right place to inform. Rice is a thing folks eat a lot. Hope this letter isn’t a bother. Best wishes to your company for savin’ folks, we need help.
Sincerely,
JAMES ROLLE
That letter was sent on by somebody in the mail department to somebody in our Division for the Study of Plant Diseases. There, it lay around for a time but was finally answered by a Tolbert Thackery, who, I assume, was one of the thousands of students serving as volunteers in dozens of Foundation activities during summer vacations. I haven’t checked him and perhaps should. Most of these undergraduates or graduate students were training in special fields and found their time with us very useful. The Foundation, by then, was anything but popular with the masses. Professors and teachers tended, however, to admire it and urge students to volunteer, even when that urging had to be covert.
Young Thackery, if I’m right about him, answered the Rolle letter the day it hit his desk. That was a week after its arrival, no more. Here’s a carbon of Thackery:
Dear Mr. Rolle:
You sent your letter to the right place. The Foundation for Human Conservancy is very interested in what you wrote. If any further rice crops, including those at the experimental station, are showing further signs of dying or blighting like those you described, we would like to know. For if what you reported is more than a local and limited blight, or the like, some freak event which occurred in the very small area you have under observation, surely the Agriculture people are doing something and, in any case, we at this Foundation would like to send an observer. Many thanks for your kind letter to us, for your keen observation and your quick action. I enclosed a stamped, self-addressed air mail envelope to save you any cost in your reply.
Yours sincerely,
TOLBERT THACKERY,
Dept. of Plant Diseases
There was no reply from James Rolle.
But, ten days later, Thackery did get an envelope, smudgy, smeared, sent by regular mail and containing two clippings from the issues of East Jefferson Weekly Journal and Cajun Courier.
One was from an obituary column and briefly noted the burial of James Rolle, farmer, after his death in a “hunting accident” on land where he was poaching. The tone of that notice might as well have said, “a shiftless, no-account, thieving nigger.”
The other clipping from a front-page story with a two-column heading reported that the reason for the “recently erected canvas fencing around the Experimental Station and for the quarantine of all employees at the Station” was a sudden appearance of an unidentified “blight.” The station manager had ordered the protective measures to insure that the blight would not get beyond the confines of that plant grounds. It added that the disease was being studied intensively and a counter to it or cure for it was to be expected very soon.
That pair of clippings was carried to the worried Mr. Thackery’s superiors and they dispatched a team of specialists to the area. There were three in the team, two plant pathologists and a mycologist whose specialty was fungus on edible crops. They found all roads to the Federal Station were closed and guarded by armed men. When, returning to their motel that afternoon, they tried to question local people, they got evasive answers. The editor of the weekly, reached by phone at his home, said, once the caller identified himself, “We’re saying nothing because there’s nothing to say, Doctor. Federal orders. If there is any such a blight, it’s halted and under control. Meantime, more rumors would only panic people.” He hung up.
The next morning, as the Foundation team prepared to make a survey by rented car of the vicinity, they were taken under “protective custody” by “marshals” and put on a plane for New York. The armed “custodians” did not have identifying insignia.
This cavalier, near-incredible act was not without precedent in past decades. As Miles was in Alaska and I had gone to Belgium on two other disaster situations, the acting head let the Louisiana matter stand till one of us returned. The first happened to be Miles and by then the story was out. In the airport, in Chicago, Miles picked up a paper with a banner headline:
GULF COAST RICE DOOMED
Texas Crop Endangered
Half-Billion-Dollar Export Cereal
Prey to Unknown Blight
Headlines, yes. But American headlines.
American headlines for a week or thereabouts.
Then the headlines began to speak of the West Indies, of the Philippines, Japan and, less definitively, of China.
EDITOR’S PERSONAL NOTE RESUMED:
In the following fifty pages, Miles, I have entered every diverse account I could find, to give the variety of the effect on nations, on masses, on individuals, and to fill in the whole horror. I have entered records of the (eventual) fifty billion the USA appropriated to lease bottoms to convey food to that stricken world which depended on rice to exist.
I have given some pages, translated into lay terms, to show how the entire fraternity of “advanced” or “technological” nations became just that, a fraternity, devoting every bit of the spare energy, the surplus foods, they could to save the rice-dependent billions. It was estimated in mid-1986 that one third of the world’s biologists and at least twenty per cent of all other relevant scientists were fully or partly engaged in the effort to halt what became known as the Rice Blast or Black Blight.
I have entered eyewitness accounts of cannibalism in a dozen regions and described the “human meat markets” that rose openly in more than fifty nations. And I have also presented, somewhat against my will, those shocking examples that became fairly numerous and quite vocal, of people who opposed “wasting treasure on trying to save the yellow race,” people who often resurrected the Hearst term, “Yellow Peril,” for our stricken fellow men. Included with such grisly assertions are a few by certain demographers and kindred experts who were crass enough to point out that the Black Blight, soon world-wide, was solving the population explosion problem. I also have entered parts of a discussion by worried scientists on the possibility that the Black Blight might, in some not inconceivable mutant form, attack other grains, wheat, oats, barley, corn and so on.
I included a tape recording made by a federal team that overflew the areas of death late that summer. Most of the cities in rice-dependent regions were on fire or had burned, a predictable fate when the inhabitants were either dead or had abandoned their homes. Forest fires were equally commonplace and I have the USSR figures, gathered in 1989 and more accurate than our own, of the timber lost in those conflagrations, roughly a third of the world’s virgin trees of commercial value.
I included the fact that many rice-eaters died because they would eat no substitute grains. That cause of death, starvation, however, was minor for a time in many populous areas. For soon enough human flesh became the usual food of those billions. When it ran out, which was a year to three years from the beginning, the cannibalistic survivors died too.
I have graphic accounts of the initial efforts by all non-affected nations to allow stricken people to immigrate. And I have proud accounts of the ships that sailed to the dying world of rice-eaters to gather a cargo of the hungry and bring them to Europe, the USSR and USA.
I documented the next rather swift change in that initially generous and humane endeavor. For as such immigrant hordes arrived, ill with countless diseases not even endemic in most of the “civilized” lands, thei
r bones showing through their flesh, unable to speak any language of their saviors, spreading their diseases, too weak and too untrained to work, the public tide of resentment rose and the immigration program was halted.
Japan’s brilliant and long-lasting effort to feed its people, as civilized as any, finally failed when the Japanese had nothing left to trade or barter, but after some twenty million of them, chosen for their technical skills, had been accepted in other lands—with families at first, later alone. But by that point the willingness, in America, or any other similarly able nation, to accept more starving aliens had vanished. I have a very beautiful account of a man who thought he was the last to be alive on Honshu, not correctly, but near enough: his fire-suicide poem.
My collection of scientific efforts to save man from this mighty foe is highly laudable of many. Scientists in thousands perished when stranded in some suddenly abandoned area where they had gone to do research. The effort to find the agent of this Black Blight was magnificent. For, of course, to find a remedy, the cause had first to be discovered.
It was observed that the black horror spread faster than any previously known blight, rot, smut, wilt or the like. Indeed, it seemed almost to flare up spontaneously in regions remote from any then infested. It killed every form of rice used for crops, every experimental mutant or hybrid, and all plants with a fairly close relationship to rice, including a variety of grasses and “weeds.” But it attacked no other farinaceous species, or the world would have died nearly to the last man.
It had soon become scientifically certain, or as near certain as science ever admits, that the cause was not a fungus, insect, bacterium, virus or the like. No single scale, mite or other organism, however tiny, was found in a sufficiently wide sample of the dead or dying rice. Meanwhile, of course, there were the expectable exchanges of blame between nations. The USA was charged, and with some validity, as the agent of the horror—which was guessed by the Soviets to be some sort of escaped “military disease or gas.” “Imperialist America” had developed it and let it escape—that or, with greater subtlety, some other sort of chemical recombination of some such secretly devised weapon meant for war.
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