a plastic Cleopatra, but not before pulling her brake, and his thoughts travel back, as to the edge of a precipice, to the Crash of 1998. Overnight, in an instinctive feeling of revulsion, the public turned its back on all the products then flooding the market. That which yesterday enticed, today was what an ax is to a tired logger, a washboard to a laundress. The eternal (it had seemed) enchantment, the spell cast by biology on the human race, was broken. Thereafter, breasts brought to mind only the fact that people are mammalian; legs, that they have with what to walk; buttocks, that there is something also with which to sit. Nothing more, but nothing more! How lucky McLuhan, that he did not live to witness this catastrophe, he who in his later works had interpreted the cathedral and the spaceship, the jet engine, the turbine, the windmill, the saltcellar, the hat, the theory of relativity, the brackets in mathematical equations, zeros, and exclamation points as surrogates and substitutes for that single function which alone is the experiencing of existence in the pure state.
This line of reasoning lost its validity in a matter of hours. The specter of extinction hung over humanity. It began with an economic crisis compared to which the one of 1929 was as nothing. The entire editorial staff of
Playboy,
in the forefront as ever, set fire to itself and died in flames; employees of striptease clubs and topless bars went hungry, and many leaped from windows; magazine publishers, film producers, huge advertising combines, beauty schools went bankrupt; the entire cosmetic-perfume industry was shaken, as was lingerie. In the year 1999, there were thirty-two million jobless in America.
What now was still capable of exciting the publicâs interest? Trusses, fake humps, gray wigs, a palsied figure in a wheelchair, for only these did not suggest the strain of sex, that onus, that curse, that grind; only these seemed to guarantee protection from the erotic threat, hence respite and peace. The governments, aware of the danger, were mobilizing all their forces to save the species. In newspaper columns there were appeals to reason, to a sense of responsibility; clergymen of every faith appeared on television with sublime exhortations and admonitions, reminding their flocks of higher ideals, but this chorus of authorities was listened to by the general public with little enthusiasm. Nor did the sounding of the official trumpets help, the proclamations enjoining people to get a grip on themselves. The results were negligible; only one unusually law-abiding nation, Japan, gritted its teeth and followed these injunctions. Then special material incentives began to be instituted, honorary degrees and distinctions, prizes, awards, citations, medals, and fornication competitions (the trophies were loving cups); when this tack also failed, repressive measures were taken. But then the populations of whole provinces began to evade their procreative obligation, teen-age draft dodgers lay low in the surrounding forests, older men presented forged certificates of impotence, and the public boards of enforcement and supervision became riddled with graft, for everyone was readyâif need beâto keep tabs on his neighbor, to see that he wasnât shirking, though he himself avoided that dreary labor as much as he could.
The time of the catastrophe is now only a memory sifting through the mind of the lonely old man as he sits on Cleopatraâs knees in the basement. Mankind has not perished; fertilization now takes place in a way that is sanitary and hygienic; it is not unlike inoculation; after years of ordeal a stabilization of sorts has taken over. But culture abhors a vacuum, and the terrifying suction of that emptiness caused by the implosion of sex has drawn, into the vacated place, food. The gastronomy of the day is divided into normal and obscene; there exist perversions of gluttony, glossy restaurant publications with centerfolds,
This line of reasoning lost its validity in a matter of hours. The specter of extinction hung over humanity. It began with an economic crisis compared to which the one of 1929 was as nothing. The entire editorial staff of
Playboy,
in the forefront as ever, set fire to itself and died in flames; employees of striptease clubs and topless bars went hungry, and many leaped from windows; magazine publishers, film producers, huge advertising combines, beauty schools went bankrupt; the entire cosmetic-perfume industry was shaken, as was lingerie. In the year 1999, there were thirty-two million jobless in America.
What now was still capable of exciting the publicâs interest? Trusses, fake humps, gray wigs, a palsied figure in a wheelchair, for only these did not suggest the strain of sex, that onus, that curse, that grind; only these seemed to guarantee protection from the erotic threat, hence respite and peace. The governments, aware of the danger, were mobilizing all their forces to save the species. In newspaper columns there were appeals to reason, to a sense of responsibility; clergymen of every faith appeared on television with sublime exhortations and admonitions, reminding their flocks of higher ideals, but this chorus of authorities was listened to by the general public with little enthusiasm. Nor did the sounding of the official trumpets help, the proclamations enjoining people to get a grip on themselves. The results were negligible; only one unusually law-abiding nation, Japan, gritted its teeth and followed these injunctions. Then special material incentives began to be instituted, honorary degrees and distinctions, prizes, awards, citations, medals, and fornication competitions (the trophies were loving cups); when this tack also failed, repressive measures were taken. But then the populations of whole provinces began to evade their procreative obligation, teen-age draft dodgers lay low in the surrounding forests, older men presented forged certificates of impotence, and the public boards of enforcement and supervision became riddled with graft, for everyone was readyâif need beâto keep tabs on his neighbor, to see that he wasnât shirking, though he himself avoided that dreary labor as much as he could.
The time of the catastrophe is now only a memory sifting through the mind of the lonely old man as he sits on Cleopatraâs knees in the basement. Mankind has not perished; fertilization now takes place in a way that is sanitary and hygienic; it is not unlike inoculation; after years of ordeal a stabilization of sorts has taken over. But culture abhors a vacuum, and the terrifying suction of that emptiness caused by the implosion of sex has drawn, into the vacated place, food. The gastronomy of the day is divided into normal and obscene; there exist perversions of gluttony, glossy restaurant publications with centerfolds,
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