A DAY AT THE RACES

I happened to run across this story while surfing the web. I thought it was apropos to the times we’re living in. The author of the website on which I found it says it’s a science fiction story written by Kilgore Trout. Many of you will remember that Kilgore Trout was a kind of alter ego for Kurt Vonnegut. To say the least, he wasn’t a successful writer. He sold very few of his stories, and supported himself by delivering newspapers-- something like that. If I remember correctly, he lived in a basement apartment in a mid-western city.

Anyway, this particular Kilgore Trout science fiction story never found its way into any of Kurt Vonnegut’s books. According to the author of the website, Vonnegut had planned to put it into a book tentatively titled, “Bimbleman’s Magnum Opus”. Unfortunately, he died before the book was finished.

I tried to link to it but the website has been taken down. Here is a rough synopsis as I remember it. I’m sorry, but I can’t write as entertainingly as the original author. The story is called “A Day at the Races”.

A DAY AT THE RACES

By Kilgore Trout

As remembered by Manny Lagatuta

In the early part of the twenty first century, a small group of prescient, individuals from around the world began to realize that virtually all of mankind’s difficulties had exactly one root cause.

It wasn’t religion or conflict over resources. Rather it was a specific person, a person they identified as “The Original Asshole”.

The Original Asshole was the guy whose self absorption and delusions of grandeur had caused all of our wars and most of the famine, pestilence, ill will, bad faith and general discomfort.

The Original Asshole lived for no other reason than to have power over other people and impede certain of them on their journey (depending on where they wanted to go, of course). Whenever he saw something that was free and happy, he wanted to kill it or humiliate it or enslave it or all three. It was never quite determined just how he came to be this way, but there was an overall consensus that the Original Asshole had been, in one way or another, impacted by Original Assholes who had come before. These Original Assholes had, themselves, been impacted by still earlier Original Assholes and so on, backward into eternity. This circumstance caused the Original Asshole to have an irresistible, subconscious need to hurt other people, muck around in their affairs, make them toe the line and otherwise, prevent them from being free to find their way in this life.

Put another way, the Original Asshole needed something to hate far more than he needed something to love.

In the beginning, the Original Asshole did things which, to say the least, puzzled those around him. However, through habitual association over thousands of years, many people simply became conditioned to endure his quirkiness so that, eventually, what had previously been seen as unacceptable behavior, came to be regarded as more or less normal. As time went along, others even began to enable him in his insanity.

Insanity like—for instance-- forcing thousands of men and women, and boys and girls to cut rocks into giant cubes weighing a couple of tons apiece and stack them into enormous piles in the desert. Of course, it goes without saying that this absurd undertaking made life unbearable for those who actually did the work. Untold numbers of men and women and boys and girls—who probably would have preferred to be doing something else entirely-- were worked to death or had their limbs crushed or spines permanently, excruciatingly twisted into funny shapes. It later turned out—and this is the screamingly hilarious part-- that the Original Asshole had caused all of this human misery just so that later generations would see the big piles of rock and think to themselves, ‘Gee whiz!, the guy who piled up all that rock must’ve been really something’.

Also, he wanted a little room where his carcass could rot without being disturbed.

Now and then, objections were raised. There were those who, on given days, just didn’t want to stack rocks in the desert. They wanted to go fishing instead. Or sometimes they just wanted to lay around naked with their women folk. After carefully, thoughtfully communicating their wishes to the Original Assholes, they were summarily killed.

NOTE: For thousands of years after the Egyptians piled up all that rock in the desert, said piles were held out as examples of human ingenuity. The story you are reading is about the period during which they came to be seen as monuments to human stupidity.

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As time progressed, Original Assholes—greater and lesser—came and went until…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

…. beginning in the mid nineteenth century, they flowered into a series of Uber Original Assholes with names like Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Engels, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and Joe Stalin to name a few. Because of the advanced state of communication and technology at the time, these Original Assholes were able to take the whole Original Asshole schtick to levels never before dreamed of.

Like Original Assholes before and since, they decided that everyone should live in accordance with their simplistic, nonsensical, but mostly just insane view of reality. They then set about forcing as many people as possible to do that very thing by convincing subordinate Original Assholes to rub out those who didn’t want to go along with the program. Because they were armed with the single minded myopia of the Religious Zealot, they were able to take an extremely long view of the project they had undertaken. In other words, they were able to steal little bits of freedom here and there over decades and decades so that comparatively few people caught on to what they were doing. And because they were armed with the single minded myopia of the Religious Zealot, they didn’t have the slightest aversion to murdering millions and millions and millions of people at a swat whenever the opportunity presented itself. They even came up with methods for doing this in the most efficient manner possible. This was all because they had lovingly nurtured to glorious maturity, a burning, niggling hatred of the people they referred to as ‘Middle Class’. They hated this group passionately because—they told themselves-- the middle class were a lot of bigoted, narrow minded, low-lifes who were beneath contempt. They told themselves this because they needed to feel morally justified in their hatred. The Original Assholes felt that this Middle Class needed to be slapped down and put in their place.

As you’ll recall, whenever Original Assholes see anything free and happy, they want to kill, humiliate or enslave it.

Naturally, they couldn’t voice these sentiments aloud or in so many words, that would have given away their true intentions, and the middle class they so hated would have clubbed them to death like baby seals.

So the Original Assholes pretended to care deeply and sincerely about the concerns of the Middle Class. They speechified constantly about their deep love and concern for the middle class in dulcet oh-so-sincere tones. But in private, when they thought no one was listening, they ridiculed the objects of their hatred as stupid, gap toothed hillbillies. Secretly, they were pleased when bad things happened to the middle class because—as far as the Original Assholes were concerned—they deserved it.

Original Assholes who came later, realized that the basic, already perverted, dynamic, pioneered by the previously named Original Assholes, could be further perverted and disfigured so that Original Assholes everywhere could use it to make other people do whatever the Original Assholes wanted them to. All hell broke loose as Original Assholes the world over weaponized hatred and love and guilt. All hell broke loose as they tricked millions of people into believing they wanted peace when really, they enjoyed seeing people victimized by violence, (the more perverted the better). And all hell broke loose as they tirelessly, gleefully promoted uncertainty and incivility and devised ways to make mischief and mayhem and cause misery for those they had decided to hate.

In the United States of America, the Original Asshole had a fair amount of success among the children of the wealthy who had never known strife or uncertainty of any kind. All of the hard battles had been fought by people who came before. Consequently, the children of the wealthy had only known relative peace and relative freedom and relative civility. They hadn’t been inoculated against evil by exposure to small doses of it. They didn’t know what humans are capable of.

They were sitting ducks.

These kids were easily tricked into believing that good is bad and right is wrong and black is white and truth is lies. They didn’t know any better. They spent their youth playing at peace and love, while under their noses, the Original Assholes du jour— perverted old men with kind, knowing eyes and sympathetic smiles-- colonized their minds with hatred and murder and violence. These Kindly old men were the ones who had risen to the top of the Original Asshole ladder. They were the ones who had become the most adept at seeming to be something they had ceased to be long ago. Often, these Kindly-Old-Men--Original-Assholes had spent their childhoods being daily indoctrinated by other chronically, clinically depressed Kindly-Old-Men-Original-Assholes. Others of them had grown up attending musty, dark, dank, dead, old cathedrals and synagogues and mosques full of Priests and Nuns and Rabbis and Mulahs who shook their fingers at them and beat them and sexually abused them and told them they were horrible pieces of shit and made them hate themselves (and consequently everyone else).

When you think about it, it’s not at all surprising that they developed into, weak, pathologically deceitful, twisted branches who were addicted to anti-depressant medications and who hated anything which was free and happy. When you think about it, it’s not at all surprising that they wanted to turn defenseless children into weak, pathologically deceitful, twisted branches who are addicted to anti-depressant medications and who hated anything which is free and happy cus’…..

Misery loves company dontchaknow? (That’s just another way of saying that people in hell want to drag other people into hell with them). That’s a fact.

One of the Original Asshole’s most successful recipes for causing shit for other people went something like this:

1). Make a huge mess

2). Blame someone else for making the mess.

3). After you’ve succeeded in pinning the blame on some innocent party, step in and pretend to be concerned over the aforementioned mess.

4). People cede authority to you because of your obvious concern over the mess you created in the first place.

Of course, the OAs themselves never had to take part in cleaning up the messes they made. Someone else always did that.

Original Assholes had no qualms about putting any of the above into practice because, for them, lying is just a tool. At some point in their lives, they had made the conscious decision to permanently discard anything you and I would recognize as honesty or integrity or good will.

For good measure they made sure to encourage the veneration of ugliness in all its forms.

And, as if all that weren’t bad enough, the people who had previously made everyone laugh and told stories and jokes and made music, morphed into a lot of evil, insane clown Original Assholes.

Wheeeee!!!!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At this point I should probably back up slightly and point up the fact that the Original Assholes had convinced themselves that they were the good guys.

No kidding.

They reasoned that it was a wonderful thing to cause so much shit for other people because—in the end—like, a really long ways down the road—you know, sometime in the far, far, far distant future—no one was at all sure when—but after they had destroyed everything it had taken thousands of years to build, they were going to replace it all with their version of a bright, shiny, pristine, perfect world. And, like the insane Religious Zealots they were, they had absolutely unassailable faith and hope that someday, it would be so.

Go figure.

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After decades and decades of this nonsense, it finally dawned on a few observant persons of action, that if the Original Asshole could be eliminated as a factor, an awful lot of Mankind’s more serious problems would up and disappear.

At about this same time, it dawned on these same, observant persons of action that we knew enough about the progression of history to predict, with a high degree of certitude, which Original Assholes were likely to cause the most shit.

At about the same time, it occurred to this same group of observant men and women of action, that if there were some sort of negative consequences associated with being an Original Asshole, perhaps there would be fewer Original Assholes in the first place.

At about the same time, it dawned on these same, observant persons that there was a resource available which no one, up to that time, had thought of. A resource which might finally allow the human race to escape from the Original Asshole!!!

It was such a simple idea. Why hadn’t anyone thought of it before?

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Now, it just so happened…. that there were certain men and women who didn’t particularly want to continue existing on planet earth. They didn’t want to go on living, but they were conflicted because they didn’t want to die meaningless deaths either. These were often older people without families or anyone who really cared for them. They had lost all interest in life and they had become comfortable with the idea of moving on to another place. Also, they didn’t want to end their lives in some lonely bed in some lonely convalescent center full of tubes and IVs and chemicals and so forth. There were others who simply wanted to do something useful. They wanted to do something useful and meaningful, but they knew that if they acted by themselves, all their efforts would probably come to nothing. All of them fell into the category “People with nothing to lose”.

So…a seed was planted.

One by one, without any apparent initializing sequence, they began to eliminate the Original Assholes.

It started with a guy in Chicago who had, what would later be commonly called, a Malignant Narcissistic personality. A few decades earlier, he had attempted to blow up a bunch of people who had never hurt him in any way whatsoever. At the time he said he was doing it because he was a serious revolutionary, but really, he did it just because he was mean and he thought it would be fun to blow up a bunch of people who had never hurt him in any way whatsoever, (As I pointed out earlier, one of the more disturbing traits of the Original Asshole is his amusement at seeing innocent people and things injured and humiliated).

His parents were rich so they were able to afford the best legal representation money could buy.

He got off scott free.

As time went on, he became famous among other Original Assholes for what he had done. They took a picture of him standing on an American flag. They thought it was funny because they were self-absorbed, hate-filled freaks who couldn’t stand to see anything free and happy. He made a really good living encouraging impressionable children to become self-absorbed, hate-filled freaks who can’t stand to see anything free and happy.

Anyway, one day, an older gentleman—a veteran of a war brought on by a previously mentioned Original Asshole named Adolf Hitler—nonchalantly strolled up to this guy from Chicago and, without fanfare or malice, popped a cap in his ass. More specifically, he perforated the Original Asshole’s pudgy panus with a couple of slugs from a thirty-eight special. In a matter of a few seconds, the sticky, red liquid which was key to allowing the Original Asshole to be animated, flowed out of his body onto the pavement.

Just like that, no more Original Asshole.

The attendees at his funeral spoke ad nauseum about what a wonderful person he had been, and so on and so forth. But really, everyone was thinking, ‘Is this thing ever going to end? I wonder what they’ll serve at the dinner afterwards. It had better not be some lousy rabbit food. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse’.

The guy who shot the Original Asshole was tried in court but the authorities were never able to secure a conviction. The word had spread that any juror who voted guilty would be hunted down and beaten to the point of quadriplegia.

Also, he was judgment proof, (a legal term), so they couldn’t sue him.

In fact……the people of The United States of America took up a collection for him so that, when all was said and done, he and his family actually pocketed a tidy sum.

Another Original Asshole’s career ended when a rental truck plowed into him as he sat in traffic in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This particular Original Asshole had once been a famous comedy writer for a late night television show which was broadcast from New York City. Later, after becoming a hate filled, pathologically deceitful, pathologically dissembling freak, hardly recognizable as human anymore, he decided to run for the United States Senate. After winning his Senate race—narrowly-- dishonestly-- he was visiting his home state when the incident involving the rental truck happened.

Like a bolt out of the blue, a fully loaded, twenty six thousand pound U-haul truck, going about sixty miles per hour, struck his stationary, twelve hundred pound, environmentally sensitive, hybrid vehicle.

His spinal cord was neatly severed, as if by a magical pair of scissors.

After that, he had to stop being a hate-filled, freakish, Original Asshole because he was too busy being a shriveled up, glassy-eyed, drooling tuber without a thought in his head. His Nigerian caretakers, who were supposed to be changing his adult absorbent under-garments every day, quickly became frustrated over the fact that scarce resources were being used to maintain his useless, putrefying corpus in, something resembling, a lifelike state. They would have preferred it if those same resources had been used to improve the lives of young, innocent children who had not yet become Original Assholes. Because of this, they would often allow him to sit for days in his own excrement before they would clean the puss-filled, abscesses on his bottom.

Of course, the Original Asshole had very little to say about it one way or another.

Occasionally he would make unintelligible gurgling noises.

From time to time, people who had known him in his earlier days came by to visit. Sometimes they would be photographed with him as he stared mindlessly at the camera.

When interviewed by the Police investigating the accident, the guy driving the rental truck said something like; ‘Whoops, I guess I just spaced out. Sorry. My bad’.

He was judgment proof, (a legal term), so for him, life went on pretty much as before.

Now it’s important to note that the guy driving the U-haul truck hadn’t the least bit of malice in his heart toward the Original Asshole. He just wanted him to stop being an Original Asshole, that’s all. And when you think about it, isn’t that is a very small thing to ask?

After that, it was a somewhat bigger fish’s turn. Said fish was a multi-billionaire of Eastern European descent who had once been convicted of insider trading in France. In addition, he was rumored to have engineered a severe economic downturn in the United States of America which had caused a lot of needless suffering. He had also been instrumental in purchasing the Presidency of the United States of America.

He was giving a speech at a college in D.C. when an older gentleman, wielding a sawed-off-shotgun, strolled—again, nonchalantly-- up to the Original Asshole and blew a fist-sized hole in his nasty, wrinkly, old gut. The Original Asshole bled out in about five seconds.

No one much cared.

The people who were going to inherit portions of his sizable estate released statements to the press saying how profoundly, deeply they mourned the passing of the Original Asshole, but really….

No one much cared.

He wasn’t a particularly likeable fellow.

The man who shot him was eventually released because—you guessed it-- they were unable to empanel a jury which would convict him.

Suddenly, it was open season on Original Assholes—the politicians who secretly hated those they claimed to support, rogue judges, corrupt reporters who intentionally mislead those who had trusted them, entertainers who had only disdain for their audiences—the whole lot.

Thousands of years of deceit and prevarication and bald-faced lies were being put right by simple acts of pure, unadulterated truth. One by One, the Original Assholes—who lived only to have power over others and who couldn’t stand to see anything free and happy without wanting to kill it or humiliate it or enslave it or all three and who derived a sick pleasure from causing shit for other people—were unapologetically, unceremoniously gunned down in the street in broad daylight. One by one they were turned into signposts. The signposts said “Caution, maybe you should re-think your decision to become an Original Asshole”.

And Original Assholes far and wide were having second thoughts. From the outside looking in, it appeared as though people—who had no discernable connection to one another-- were acting on their own, without any direction or coercion, for the good of people they had never met, people they never would meet, people they might not like if they did meet them, and people who hadn’t yet been born.

That was precisely what was happening.

NOTE: It’s important to emphasize and expand on the fact that this particular social upheaval was distinguished from previous such events—commonly called revolutions—by the fact that those who did the shooting, killing and maiming, aimed only at the highest rungs of the Original Asshole ladder. The more thoughtful and creative among them were able to take out the uppermost rungs. The lower rungs, were chopped out by those who were more headstrong and spontaneous.

There were no confrontations with soldiers or the police who, after all, were only men and women, with families who depended on them to come home at the end of each workday.

Also, they exhibited absolutely no hatred toward the Original Assholes even as they crippled them or ended their lives. Their attitude toward the Original Assholes was similar to the attitude one might have toward a clogged toilet. Beyond that, they were completely unorganized and had no connection to each other or to any particular group. The only thing they had in common was this; each of them had found out, more or less suddenly, that they had a deep, profound need—a love really—of simple human freedom. Up until that time, they hadn’t thought much about the goodness they had always derived from being a part of a country in which simple, unadorned, unfettered human freedom was as common as water in the ocean. Once it became clear that the Original Assholes meant to murder their new found love object, they got mean. Like cornered animals, almost in unison they sprang beautifully, seamlessly, thoughtlessly into action as if on cue.

The Original Assholes were frightened and perplexed. They held hearings and impaneled investigative committees for the purpose of getting to the bottom of the whole affair. All of their efforts came to naught. Finally, in utter frustration, they called out the military.

That turned out to be a huge mistake.

You see, some time earlier, the Army had been sent to fight a war in a foreign country. After having some success in fighting that war, the soldiers’ mission was sabotaged by many of the very people who had sent them to fight in the first place. A lot of men and women—boys and girls really-- were needlessly killed or maimed as Original Assholes in their own government actively took the side of their enemies.

The soldiers all felt as though they had been betrayed by those who had been elected to lead them and look out for their interests. They felt this way because they had, in fact, been betrayed by those who had been elected to lead them and look out for their interests.

Now, there was a long standing military policy which dictated that no soldier had to obey an order which he or she felt was immoral. Consequently, when the soldiers were ordered to attack their own people or enforce marshal law, they just… didn’t.

For similar reasons, members of the various branches of Law Enforcement followed suit.

A collection was taken up for their legal defense. That turned out to be completely un-necessary since the commanders, who might have suspended them without pay, suddenly thought better of it.

Having been left naked as jaybirds, the Original Assholes who couldn’t stand to see anything free and happy without wanting to kill it or humiliate it or enslave it or all three and who derived a sick pleasure from causing shit for other people, rather abruptly concluded that there was absolutely no future in being an Original Asshole.

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EPILOUGE

There were a number of side benefits to all that had come to pass.

Malignant Narcissism, the, more or less, scientific term for being an Original Asshole, came to be understood, once more, as a serious personality disorder. In other words, the term “healthy ego” was shown to be something of an oxymoron.

Also, military conflicts, as they had been known in the past with their millions of casualties and shattered lives, no longer existed. Nations continued to maintain armies and military equipment and so on, but there seemed to be less and less need for them. The era of “War Conducted With A Few Well Placed Bullets”, had arrived.

In addition, it was discovered that by motivating the narcissistic side of the Original Asshole’s personality, while moderating the malignant side, (through the implied threat of an untimely, probably painful demise), he could be made into a tool to benefit society at large.

You see, the Original Asshole is defined by his or her inordinate love of attention and adulation. Inside, he’s always screaming, “Look at me, ain’t I somethin’?”

The Original Asshole is, in fact, enslaved by his own inflated self conciet. As long as you can massage his ego, he will do almost anything, much like a trained monkey who, literally works for peanuts. Consequently, he can be made to do the sort of, mundane, but necessary, work that normal people, like you and I, don’t have time for because we’re too busy fishing or laying around naked with our women folk. Work like, being a President or Senator or Congressman.

Through enlightened control of the Original Asshole, societies across the globe became emancipated.

Over time, some Original Assholes even developed a – somewhat—more or less—kinda-sorta sincere concern for those for whom they were making important decisions. Of course they still had to be watched carefully. And of course, from time to time, one or two here and there had to be subjected to an attitude adjustment. Nevertheless, things were markedly improved for all concerned.

WOW!! Malignant Narcissism, de-malignified and controlled, as a tool to benefit society, now we’re onto something. (I made up that word “de-malignified”, you may use it if you like).

*“And everyone—who had a talent for it—lived happily ever after”

THE END

*From the movie, “The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen”

There are a couple of Vonnegut / Trout stories which I feel to be related.

One is called “Harrison Bergeron”. You can find it in a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s stories entitled something like, “Welcome to the Monkey House”. It’s a story about a futuristic society in which everyone is forced to be exactly, physically, equal in every respect.

The next is a Kilgore Trout story which can be found in a book called “Breakfast of Champions”--I think. It’s about a traveler from another galaxy who comes to earth to warn us of impending doom. Unfortunately, he is only about two inches tall. Still more unfortunately, he can only communicate by farting and tap dancing. His spaceship happens to land in a drinking establishment where he begins furiously farting and tap dancing. He is finally killed when a drunken patron mistakes him for a match and repeatedly rakes his head across the bar in an attempt to light a cigarette, a kind of ‘voice-crying-in- the-wilderness’ tale.

SOMETHING YOU CAN DO

In the nineteen twenties—I believe—a Soviet dissident wrote a book entitled “We”. It was a work of fiction about a futuristic Soviet society. Some have speculated that George Orwell’s “1984” was suggested by this book.

Anyway, it’s my understanding that the book “We”, was actually distributed in the USSR through a very unique method. Thousands of copies were typed by hand and distributed covertly.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, feel free to download this document and leave printed copies—lots of them-- lying around.

Just in case they begin to censor the internet….

Which they most certainly will…

Soon.

Posted by Manny Lagatuta at 12:29 PM 0 comments
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