Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"Lower taxes aren't enough," he said, for instance. "When you hear some so-called conservative Bircher or some follower of William Buckley Jr. call for lower taxes, beware. There's a man who's squishy soft on IIluminism. All taxes are robbery. Instead of attacking Joan Baez, a real American should support her for refusing to pay any more money into the Illuminati treasury in Washington."

The next week was even more interesting: "White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism has often told you that there's no real difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Both are pawns of the Illuminati scheme to destroy private property and make everybody a slave of the State, so the International Bankers of a certain minority group can run everything. Now it's time for all thinking patriots to take an even more skeptical look than ever before at the so-called anti-Il-luminati John Birch Society. Why are they always putting up those stickers saying, 'Support Your Local Police'? Ever wonder about that? What's the most important thing to a police state? Isn't it police? And if we got rid of the police, how could we ever have a police state? Think about it, fellow Americans, and Remember the Alamo!"

A few of these new strange ideas had come from various right-wing anarchist periodicals (all secretly subsidized by Hagbard Celine) that Canvera had mysteriously received three months earlier and hadn't glanced at until swallowing the AUM. The periodicals had been mailed by Simon Moon, as a joke, in an envelope with the return address Illuminati International, 34 East 68th Street, New York City- the headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations, long regarded by the Birchers as an Illuminati hotbed. "Remember the Alamo," Canvera had picked up from Bowie Knife, a publication of the Davy Crockett Society, a paramilitary right-wing fascist group which had splintered off God's Lightning when their leader, a Texas oil millionaire of gigantic paranoias, became convinced that many apparent Mexicans were actually Red Chinese agents in slight disguise. Later, the dogma became retroactive and he claimed that the Chinese had always been Communists, all Mexicans had always been Chinese, and the attack on the Alamo was the first Communist assault against American capitalism.

The third week was quite remarkable. Evidently, AUM, like LSD, changed some personality traits but left others fairly intact; in any event, in Canvera's irregular evolution from right-wing authoritarianism to right-wing libertarianism, he had somehow managed to arrive at a thesis never before enunciated except by Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade. What this rare man did was to give a three-minute spiel in favor of the right of any person, of either sex, to use any other person, of either sex, with or without their consent, for sexual gratification of any sort needed or at least desired. The only option he granted the recipients of these intimate invasions was the reciprocal right to use the initiator for their own needs or desires. Now, most of the people who regularly called Canvera's phone service were not offended by any of this; they were Lincoln Avenue hippies and dialed him only when stoned, for what they called "a really weird and far-out head trip," and they were bored that he was no longer as funky as in his old Negro-baiting, Jew-hating and Illuminati-castigating days. However, there were a few members of White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism who called occasionally to check that their contributions were still financing the dissemination of true Americanism, and these people were severely puzzled and finally disturbed. Some of them even wrote to WHORE headquarters in Mad Dog, Texas, to complain that there was something a little bit peculiar in the Americanism lately. However, the president of WHORE, Dr. Horace Naismith, who also ran the John Dillinger Died for You Society, Veterans of the Sexual Revolution, and the Colossus of Yorba Linda Foundation, was in it only for the money, sad to say, and had no time for such petty complaints. He was too busy implementing his newest fund-raising scheme, the Male Chauvinist Organization (MACHO), which he hoped would milk mucho denaros from Russ Meyers, illegal abortionists, pimps, industrialists who regularly paid female workers thirty percent of the salaries of men doing the same jobs, and all others threatened by the Women's Liberation Movement.

The fourth week was, to be frank about it, definitely bizarre. Canvera discoursed at length on the lost civilization that once existed in the Gobi Desert and denounced those, such as Brion Gysin, who believed it had destroyed itself in atomic war. Rather, he asserted, it had been obliterated when the Illuminati arrived from the planet Vulcan in flying saucers. "Remember the Alamo" was now replaced by "Remember Carcosa," Canvera having discerned that both Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft were describing this tragic Gobian society in their fiction. The hippies were again delighted- this was the funky kind of trip that had originally made Canvera a mock folk hero among them- and they especially appreciated his call for the U.S. to abandon the next moon shot and launch a punitive expedition to Vulcan both to wipe out Illuminism at its source and to avenge poor Carcosa. The WHORE regulars, however, were again upset; all that concern with Carcosa struck them as creeping one-worldism.

The fifth week, Canvera took a new turn, denouncing the masses for their stupidity and proclaiming that the boobs probably deserved being governed by the Illuminati since most of them were too dumb to find their own behinds in a dark room even using both hands. He had been browsing through a volume of H. L. Mencken (sent to him over a year earlier by El Haj Stackerlee Mohammed, ne Pearson, after one of his put-prayers-back-in-the-public-schools tirades); but he had also been pondering an invitation to join the Illuminati. This document, which came in an envelope with no return address, informed him that he was too smart to stay with the losers all his life and ought to climb on the winning side before it was too late. It added that membership dues were $3125, which should be put in a cigar box and buried in his back yard, after which it promised "one of our underground agents will contact you." At first, Canvera had considered this a hoax- he received many put-ons in the mail, together with pornography, Rosicrucian pamphlets, illustrated with the eye-and-pyramid design, and pretended fan letters signed by such names as Eldridge Cleaver, Fidel Castro, Anton Szandor Levay or Judge Crater, all of course cooked up by his Lincoln Avenue audience. Later, however, it struck him that 3125 was five to the fifth power and that convinced him a True Illuminatus was indeed communicating with him. He took the $3125 out of his savings account, buried it as instructed, made a pro-Illuminati recording as a gesture of good faith and waited. The next day he was shot, several times, in the head and shoulders, dying of natural causes as a result.

(In present time again, Rebecca Goodman enters the Hotel Tudor lobby in answer to the second mysterious phone call of the day, while Hagbard decides George Dorn needs to be illuminized further before Ingolstadt, and Esperando Despond clears his throat and says, "I want to explain the mathematics of plague to you men…")

Actually, poor old Canvera's death had nothing to do with the Illuminati or with his former compatriots in WHORE. The man had been practicing the libertine philosophy of his post-AUM phone editorials and had tampered with Cassandra Acconci, the beloved daughter of Ronald Acconci, Chicago Regional Commander of God's Lightning and a long-time contributor to KCUF. Acconci arranged, via State's Attorney Milo A. Flanagan, for the local Maf to do a hit on Canvera. But there are no endings, any more than there are any beginnings; it next developed that Canvera's seed lived on in wedlock with Cassandra's ovum and was in danger of becoming a human being within her previously trim abdomen.