COLUMN: Apples should fear Satan
Only the few who have been chosen by virtue of their programming might can protect the weak and the ignorant.
Why has this been done? To what end has this creature of destruction and mayhem been created? Are we being tested?
Yes, my children, we are being tested by the Powers That Be. It has been decided on the Celestial Plane that institutions such as Our Fine School have grown fat with information, ready to be struck like the proverbial goose. This plague upon our house comes not from the hand of a mere man, but from a hand directed by God.
After all, God is the Creator of All Things, including such fabulous products as Cheez-Whiz, Jell-O, Valium, hot dogs ... anything which you might take internally. And in His Wisdom, God knew the universities and the corporations would hoard their files of data and dirty pictures just as the kings and emperors of old gathered gold, silver, frankincense, myrrh and the jawbones of their slaves, buried in storehouses.
But retribution is never far behind for the greedy. The God of Old had a flamboyant style: destroying cities with a rain of fire and brimstone (Ever been hit with a brimstone? Man, it smarts.), sending forth plagues of locust and disease, turning disobedient people into pillars of salt. Back in those days everybody knew you didn't mess with God.
Nowadays God has toned down His modus operandi. Having passed from His tempestuous teen years into a kind of relaxed early adulthood, God now makes His presence known in small ways: potatoes shaped like Mary, Elvis sightings, public humiliation of Jimmy Swaggart, UFOs. The Angry God of Retribution has become the Unknowable God of Small Mysteries and Miracles.
Once upon a time, faith was not only important, it was vital for survival. If you were starving in the desert, you bet your sweet ass you'd believe when manna fell from the sky and filled your stomach. People who were "in" with God received word of important events (such as 40 days and 40 nights of rain) before the shit hit the fan. Everyone else got to tread water.
We now forecast our own weather, eliminating the need for God's Early Warning System. Eventually we'll even be able to control the weather. God, naturally, has foreseen this and to some extent I'm sure it irks Him. After all, He may not be much for wiping out entire zip codes these days, but natural phenomena have always been handy for doling out divine retribution.
We have angered God with this so-called "progress" of ours, in which we divest God of his powers to end lives, destroy crops and smite members of the general populace. God has found the need to diversify his repertoire of punishments and disasters in order to keep the mortal population on its toes.
The original tool for this project was Satan. I'm not talking about the impersonal computer program, but the very personal, cloven-hoofed, bat-winged, fiddle-playing, mortal-tempting, horned harpy from Hades. That's right, I'm talking about the Prince of Darkness himself. Beelzebub was created by God to provide us with distractions and eventually punish those who fall into his ways.
But with the march of progress we have created distractions never before imagined, and punishments so grim that even Lucifer can only shake his little goatee at our inventiveness. Although the world beyond this one is timeless, this one is not, making change necessary even in the realms of the divine and the damned. So God has fired the Fallen Angel, and created a computer program to take his place.
In the end, the expression "as on earth, so in heaven" directly translates, even with regard to mechanization of labor, loss of management jobs in the private sector and disenfranchisement of the work force. After all, why pay someone to do a job when a computer can do it for free? And what could be more hellish than being eternally tortured by some computer program trapped in an endless loop?
Tempora Bona Volvant and keep in mind that even if you unplug your computer, Satan will find you.
Jym Schwartz is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Geology and Geophysics.
This item appeared in the Opinion section of the April 7, 1995 issue.
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