From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Jan 23 2003 - 20:53:43 MST
Alice in Wonderland, a.k.a. the present writer, asked:
> Just desserts? For what crime touching directly on the US?
and thought of MINORITY REPORT, PhilDick/Spielberg's vision of a world where
people were punished for crimes they might later commit, a toxic circularity
which led me to recall a passage in STRIPED HOLES:
====
Human people living in Australia during this time frame were protected in a
number of useful ways from doing things that might have caused them injury.
For example, they were not allowed to purchase "hard" mind-influencing
drugs because to buy heroin, Ecstasy or LSD made, distributed, and sold in
accordance with the Pure Foods Act would have worked atrocious ruin upon
their moral fiber.
As a result, the rather small proportion of human people who wished to use
these substances were encouraged by the government to break into other human
people's private homes and remove all the portable objects they found there,
especially cell phones, notebook computers, video and DVD machines, and then
take them down the road to shops where they could be exchanged for drugs. If
the residents objected, the shit was to be beaten out of them until they
ceased objecting.
Although this might seem a long-winded procedure, it had a number of
immediate benefits. It inspired a welcome spirit of enterprise in the
community of drug users. This spirit had been badly sapped in other quarters
by the unchecked spread of the welfare or "nanny" state.
It increased the market for new computers and DVDs, while ensuring that
those people who could not afford new machines did not have to go without.
It meant that police officers could supplement their inadequate incomes by
helping run this arm of the chamber of commerce without adding to
bracket-creep or otherwise encouraging contumely toward the demands of the
Taxation Department.
Best of all, it led to the swift deaths of many of the human people with an
appetite for drugs, whose injected supplies could now be fortified without
social censure with crippling bacteria, AIDS viruses, strychnine, ground
glass, and other additives. This was desirable because most of the human
people living in Australia at that time detested the drug fanciers for their
hatefully heedless habit of bursting unannounced into non-drug-using
people's homes and taking away, after first beating the non-drug-using
people shitless, all the portable goods the original owners had worked long
and hard to purchase.
=======
Is there an analogy of some kind lurking here? Perhaps.
Damien in Wonderland
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