Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

(THE SNAFU PRINCIPLE)

The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned Things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it The psychotherapist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.

– Never Whistle While You're Pissing, by Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H.

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.

It was in college (Antioch, Yellow Springs, 1962) that Markoff Chaney discovered another hidden joke in his name, and the circumstances were- considering that he was to become the worst headache the Illuminati ever encountered- appropriately synchronistic. It was in a math class, and, since this was Antioch, the two students directly behind the Midget were ignoring the professor and discussing their own intellectual interests; since this was Antioch, they were a good six years ahead of intellectual fads elsewhere. They were discussing ethology.

"So we keep the same instincts as our primate ancestors," one student (he was from Chicago, his name was Moon, and he was crazy even for Antioch) was saying. "But we superimpose culture and law on top of this. So we get split in two, dig? You might say," Moon's voice betrayed pride in the aphorism he was about to unleash, "mankind is a statutory ape."

"… and," the professor, old Fred "Fidgets" Digits, said at just that moment, "when such a related series appears in a random process, we have what is known as a Markoff Chain. I hope Mr. Chaney won't be tormented by jokes about this for the rest of the term, even if the related series of his appearances in class do seem part of a notably random process." The class roared; another ton of bile was entered in the Midget's shit ledger, the list of people who were going to eat turd before he died.

In fact, his cuts were numerous, both in math and in other classes. There were tunes when he could not bear to be with the giants, but hid in his room, Playboy gatefold open, masturbating and dreaming of millions and millions of nubile young women built like Playmates. Today, however, Playboy would avail him not; he needed something raunchier. Ignoring his next class, Physical Anthropology (always good for a few humiliating moments), he hurried across David Street, passed by Atlanta Hope without noticing her, and slammed into his room, chain-bolting the door behind him.

Damn old Fidgets Digits, and 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 statutory 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.

He took out the pornographic Tarot deck, which he used when he wanted a really far-out fantasy for his orgasm, and shuffled it thoroughly. Let's have a Mark-off Chain masturbation to start with, he thought with an evil grin.

And, thus, without ever contacting the Legion of Dynamic Discord, the Erisian Liberation Front or even the Justified Ancients of Mummu, Markoff Chaney began his own crusade against the Illuminati, not even knowing that they existed.

His first overt act- his Fort Sumter, as it were- began in Dayton the following Saturday. He was in Norton's Emporium, a glorified 5 amp; 100 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. Mathematics, of course. They were trying to reduce us all to predictable units, robots. Hah! not for nothing had he spent a semester in Professor "Sheets" Kelly's intensive course on textual analysis of modern poetry. 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; Marx had been wrong, lacking cybernetics to enlighten him. Marx was like the engineers of his time, who thought of electricity in terms of work done, before Marconi thought of it in terms of information transmitted. Nothing signed "THE MGT." would ever be challenged; the Midget could always pass himself off as the Management.

At the same tune, he noticed that the workers were more irritable; the shoppers picked this up and became grouchier themselves; sales, he guessed correctly, were falling off. Poetry was the answer: poetry in reverse. His interpolated phrase, with its awkward internal rhyme and its pointlessness, bothered everybody, but in a subliminal, preconscious fashion. Let the market researchers and statisticians try to figure this one out with their computers and averages.

His father had been a stockholder in Blue Sky Inc., generally regarded as the worst turkey on the Big Board (it produced devices to be used in making landings on low-gravity planets); profits had soared when John Fitzgerald Kennedy had announced that the U.S. would put a man on the moon before 1970; the Midget now had a guaranteed annuity amounting to thirty-six hundred dollars per year, three hundred dollars per month. It was enough for his purposes. Revenge, in good measure, he would have. He would have revenge.

Living in Spartan fashion, dining often on a tin of sardines and a pint of milk from a machine, traveling always by Greyhound bus, the Midget crisscrossed the country constantly, placing his improved surrealist signs whenever the opportunity presented itself. A slowly mounting wave of anarchy followed in his wake. The Illuminati never got a fix on him: he had little ego to discover, burning all his energies into Drive, like a dictator or a great painter- but, unlike a dictator or a great painter, he had no desire for recognition. For years, the Illuminati attributed his efforts to the Discordians, the JAMs or the esoteric ELF. Watts went up, and Detroit; Birmingham, Buffalo, Newark, a flaming picnic blanket spread across urban America as the Midget's signs burned in the stores that had flaunted them; one hundred thousand marched to the Pentagon and some of them tried to expel the Demon (the Illuminati foiled that at the last minute, forbidding them to form a circle); a Democratic convention was held behind barbed wire; in 1970 a Senate committee announced that there had been three thousand bombings in the year, or an average of ten per day; by 1973 Morituri groups were forming in every college, every suburb; the SLA came and came back again; Atlanta Hope was soon unable to control God's Lightning, which was going in for its own variety of terrorism years before Illuminati planning had intended.