Previously, -FUPPETS- brought you an excerpt of Robert Anton Wilson's (RAW) book NATURE'S GOD. Many of RAW's books are fictional tales, but many are collections of essays on various subjects that RAW found interesting enough to think and write about, even if they all blend together, for fact comes from fiction, and fiction is based on facts.
Today's Excerpt Of The Day is from his massive meta-novel collaboration with fellow writer and Playboy magazine editor Robert Shea. That work is THE ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY. In this book, the writers sought to create a story that included each and every single conspiracy theory ever postulated to them by the readers of Playboy who sent in rambling, incoherent, fear-ridden letters detailing every nefarious plot and occult conspiracy known to man, and many unknown to man. The book is a true mindfuck in all respects. This passage concerns one of the many characters in the Trilogy, a little person/midget by the name of Markoff Chaney.
The Midget versus the Digits
The Midget, whose name was Markoff Chaney, was no relative of the famous Chaneys of Hollywood, but people did keep making jokes about that. It was bad enough to be, by the standards of the gigantic and stupid majority, a freak; how much worse to be so named as to remind these big oversized clods of the cinema's two most famous portrayers of monstro-freaks; by the time the Midget was fifteen, he had built up a detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed (he hated that word) the relative misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin and even Robert Putney Drake. Revenge, for sure, he would have. He would have revenge...
Damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the average, the whole measurable world that pronounced him a bizarre random factor. Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul he declared war on the "statuatory ape," on law and order, on predictability, on negative entropy. He would be a random factor in every equation; from this day forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the Midget versus the Digits....
His first overt act began in Dayton the following Saturday. He was in Norton's Emporium, a glorified 5 & 10 ¢ store, when he saw the sign:
NO SALESPERSON
MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR
WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION
OF A SUPERIOR.
THE MGT.
What! he thought, are the poor girls supposed to pee in their panties if they can't find a superior? Years of school came back to him ("Please, may I leave the room, sir?") and rituals which had appeared nonsensical suddenly made sense in a sinister way. They were trying to reduce us all to predictable units, robots. Hah!...The following Wednesday, the Midget was back at Norton's and hiding in a coffee urn when the staff left and locked up. A few moments later, the sign was down and a subtly different one was in its place:
NO SALESPERSON
MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR
OR GO TO THE DOOR
WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION
OF A SUPERIOR.
THE MGT.
He came back several times in the next few weeks, and the sign remained. It was as he suspected: in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below. It was the chains of communication, not the means of production, that determined a social process.. Nothing signed "THE MGT." would ever be challenged; the Midget could always pass himself off as the Management.
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