Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

To this end we offer our expertise in the arts of dressing, carving, preserving, packaging, provisioning, and distributing. We propose to bring into operation the newly outfitted mobile meat dressing plants we have developed and installed in recycled postal vehicles, school buses, and tour buses. The largest of these mobile plants have the capacity to strip from the bone, dress, cut up, package, and refrigerate or freeze the edible portions of ten or more carcasses every half-hour. Using these flexible instruments in the field we will have the capacity to respond to situations almost as soon as they happen, much as does the international press; in fact, we expect to cooperate with the media, sharing information so that each agency can arrive at a scene of production expeditiously, while the matter is still fresh. We hope that as such events are planned by factions in conflict we will have instilled enough confidence in the various parties that they will not hesitate to contact us as soon as they determine to carry out events appropriate to our mission. We hope to function out of neutrality and humanity, much as does the Red Cross or the Red Crescent.

— How do you know when one of these is dead?

— I like to kick it, and if it doesn't moan or wiggle that's enough to assume.

— What about brain dead?

— That's a given. I can't worry about that. As far as I'm concerned you're brain dead unless you show me different.

Many of our operators have been well trained, are former employees of Swift and Company, and among them a goodly number express interest in training other citizens to perform these acts of conservation when the number of carcasses is too small for our machines to process efficiently. Packages of these comestibles can be distributed effectively through various food share programs, once the stigma against the nutriment is dissipated. We should be able to educate the people to this, through slogans, and through an appeal to the common sense of most good citizens in need. The meat is not unpalatable when flavored; much like pork, it is said, though some compare it to turkey; and through repeated exposure many will likely develop a taste for the product. It can be sold cheaply in stores in frozen ten-pound bricks, and the income from this commodity used to repair infrastructure that invariably suffers while this foodstuff is being created.

— Okay, first let me ask you what you're looking for yield-wise. Kilotons? Megatons?

— Why not? A good yield is good, right?

— Lady, I look at you and I want to give you the benefit of my experience. You're like a newcomer, is it not? Yield is like size, like it isn't necessarily size that counts. Am I right? I mean about size.

— Well, size…

— When I first got into this business, it was about five billion per device, and the yield was tiny by present standards. That's when they were building “fatman,” “trinity,” “little boy,” “number four,” that series. Hey, wait a minute, come to think of it “number four” is still available. You could get it bargain basement. Still in the crate. Depends on what your purpose is, if you can go with a smaller yield. They would love to recover some of that R&D money. It's got collector's value. That could be a nice unit for you, as a thing to have around as an antique, maybe. You could keep it somewhere, show it off. But if you need to use it, you know; with a thing like this, you use it you lose it. Like poof, KABAAM. That's the downside of this kind of collection.

— My purpose is, as an individual citizen, and as a woman, it's to explode the first citizen initiated—

— I'm all for it, okay. Depends on what you're looking for, quantity-wise. You want some B61s, we've got a few available. Or there's a box of W78s, wrapped and ready to go. A short wait for the W80-1s, and the B61-11s. Scads of B83s, if that's what you're looking for.

— Well, I was just thinking one was all I need.

— One?

— To start with.

— I could have stayed in bed for one. That's like asking for one peanut.

— How many do you think I need?

— Wait. Let's approach it this way. What are you looking at for a delivery system? Have you thought that one over yet?

— Well, my plan is to…

— Hold on. Let me pitch this for you first. What I'd like to involve you in is a B-2A Spirit, at two-point-six-billion a copy, and it's worth every dollar you spend over the B52H, even if at list that looks good for 42.9 mill. a pop. No muss no fuss with the Spirit. You maybe don't have aeronautical skills, so you might have to hire a pilot; that's all, as far as crew. With the B52H you'll have a payroll. Realistically you could fly this Spirit thing yourself, lady. It's like your boudoir in the sky.

— I'm going to do it underground. We're preparing the hole myself. I intend to produce here the first underground nuclear test conducted by a private citizen, who is a woman. That's what I want you to understand. I'm doing this as a woman.

— Attagirl. I'm all for it, whatever you want to do, but let me see if I can raise for you another option, another way to think about it. Have you ever thought underwater? It's much more feminine, like a water ballet thing. I'll tell you, for a limited time I've got a price on a sweet boat for you, a submarine, Trident, Ohio-class. Completely armed for four billion plus or minus. You can do what you want with it. I'm assuming you're a U.S. citizen.

— Right now, one device. One thing, that's what I want to do.

— Sweetie, I can't talk just one device. If I could, I would; but I put together packages. I'm not in a retail business. I hate to disappoint a sweetheart like yourself, so what I'm going to do, and I might get shot down for this, is give you the name of a friend of mine at Whiteman in Missouri. Even with him it would be a lot easier to talk if you want quantity, but he's done single items before, you know, for idealistic reasons. You've got the talent to convince him this is a good cause. Guy's got a heart. So I can't give you a price on what one of his beauties goes for, retail; but he'll want his cash in advance, and it's a different business he does. He won't deliver. You'll have to pick it up. He drops it off a truck into a ditch by the road, and you've got to be there quick, to grab it out of the ditch.

A HUMBLE SUGGESTION: CONCLUSION

There could well be corollary psychological benefits to this practice we propose, some improvement that might soon be seen in the spirits of the people constrained to effectuate the activity that creates our product. These are mostly men who see themselves as having no choice in the matter, and know that historically such events are inevitable as the culling of the herd, if one were to go so far as to husband one's peers as he would dumb beasts; yet there is much pressure on them to suffer recriminations and feel guilt for what they do. Why should they feel guilty, if they are doing what will inevitably be done? Making their efforts through our auspices result in a product of great benefit to the many who are in need will do much to alleviate whatever loss of morale occurs in the ranks of those performing the inevitable. A general upliftedness could be the result, a great sunrise over what once was called merely a killing field. I can't but think of the difference we might have made in Cambodia, in Vietnam, in Rwanda, and looking back into dimmer histories, if we followed the Turks into Armenia, if we could have been at Wounded Knee, or with the charges of King Leopold in the Congo. You could utilize us in Afghanistan. Please consider our services in Iraq, maybe Korea, could be Kashmir. We are totally mobile. When we consider the healthier and more profitable outcomes that could have followed the Germans through their Holocaust had our technology been practical at the time, it makes us weep, makes us almost weep.