A Divine Joke
AFTERTHOUGHT
By JOHN WELLS
HAVING nothing very much to think about the other day until the air hostess reached me with her pre-rehearsed smile and pre-packed plastic tray of miniaturised goodies, I was rather fool- ishly musing on the ad- vantages of being alive at this particular moment in history. I had been read- ing Smollett's account of crossing the Channel with his family in 1763, and was considering how happy he and all the other sympathetic figures of the past would have been, assuming that they were fortunate enough not to be burned with petrol bombs or starved to death in a famine, to be here now eating roast Aylesbury duckling at 30,000 feet, and still to be able to wander about in the forests and fields and among the poetic ruins they wandered among in the past. I then got home and watched a television programme in the `Tomorrow's World' series, I think, and called for some reason Challenge.
This dealt at some length with what is some- times called the shadowed side of life. Men in white coats were shown picking through card- board boxes full of children's teeth, measuring the amount of Strontium 90. We were shown dying fish sinking slowly to the bed of poisoned rivers beneath a grey scum of detergent and sewage, scrawny-necked broiler hens clucking desperately in their automatically-operated death cells, birds and insects lying dead in a barren landscape of smoking bonfires, killed by insecti- cides. A grey human face filled the screen and we heard the sound of his amplified breathing as he sucked down the poisonous smoke that drifted across the picture, and we looked at the soot-encrusted lungs of dead city-dwellers. We were told how little food there was to support our exploding population on this forsaken planet, and were asked to look forward to a time when we should live packed like sardines
underground to preserve the surface of the earth for agriculture, eventually reduced to eating pro- cessed excrement. For those dwelling too opti- mistically on this prospect there was a film of the heart of the United States defence system, where, inside a mountain and behind foot-thick steel doors, pale-faced technicians are already tending the computer that will probably one day rain down the equivalent of six tons of TNT on every human being on earth.
Now for the true believer in human progress I can see that such a situation could be regarded as a `challenge.' In a hundred years we shall have destroyed every hydrogen bomb on earth, cleansed our rivers, colonised the planets or be living in idyllic crystal globes in orbit about the earth. The burden of work will be lifted from our shoulders and, equipped with artificial hearts and organs, we shall dance at the age of 202, flower-bedecked, through the spacious groves of the Golden Age. Though the individual may feel powerless to answer the challenge and to bring about the revolution, we can place our future with confidence in the hands of those pale-faced men with the white coats in the mountain.
The religious, too, must find the forecast com- forting. Concrete proof at last that the heavens and the earth are not only doomed to pass away, but are actually at this moment in an advanced state of decay. Prophetic maps showing the Vale of Armageddon can be confidently unrolled once again, and similarities discerned between the television film and Biblical prophecies con- cerning the Last Days. Even those who have had their doubts in the past about the resurrec- tion of the body will no doubt be able to accept the possibility now as one of the side-effects of radiation. The flesh can now be seen to be cor- rupt, and even for those nervous of hell fire, life on earth can be presented as so unpleasant as to make even that preferable.
For the less secure, though, the programme had a somewhat crushing impact Conscious like everyone else of my inability to intervene in any way, either by urging heavy industrialists not to discharge their corrosive waste matter into our lovely rivers, or by feeding cautionary aphorisms into, the Doomsday Computer, I considered creeping about with a handkerchief to my nose, nibbling at health foods and completing a few simple tasks before the inevitable white flash and scorching wave of heat. No long-term plans seemed worth pursuing, and much of the glow seemed to have dimmed from the appearance of things.
Anxious to settle my feelings before going to bed—the programme was put out in the middle of the evening in order to allow the maximum time for gloomy pondering—I finally decided that contemplating the death of the earth, with its rivers gradually coagulating and growing sluggish, its habitable surface shrinking and its air growing poisonous was similar to con- templating the death of the individual, with all the same symptoms, and could therefore be dis- missed as a luxury from everyday life, and only indulged in when Seeking Depth. It also struck me that the whole process, from the Creation to the final flash, might possibly have unusual theological implications. The growth of life on the planet, born in flame, and growing towards the last self-inflicted cataclysm as surely as a flower grows to a seed-pod, bore a familiar pattern. The long build-up, the impression that this was all leading somewhere, the addition of alluring and fantastic details, and then the sudden sick and destructive conclusion, all had a striking similarity to the form of the 'joke.' Perbaps the Bishop of Woolwich is wrong after all. Perhaps there is an old man with a beard up there in the sky : perhaps even a lot of old men with beards, all telling dreadful jokes with sicker and sicker endings. Let us hope the author of this particular one remains inactive and delays the punch-line a little longer. Unfortu- nately, we shan't be there to laugh.
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