"Now Look What You Made Me Do!"

from The Golden Apple
by Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson

What really happened was that everybody was squabbling over the apple and working up a sweat and pushing one another around and pretty soon their vibrations -- Gods have very high vibration, exactly at the speed of light, in fact -- heated up the apple enough to unleash some heavy fumes. In a word, the Olympians all got stoned.

And they saw a Vision, or a series of Visions.

In the first Vision, they saw Yahweh, a neighboring god with a world of his own which overlapped theirs in some places. He was clearing the set to change its valence and start a new show. His method struck them as rather barbarous. He was, in fact, drowning everybody -- except one family that he allowed to escape in an Ark.

"This is Chaos," said Hermes. "That Yahweh is a mean mother', even for a god."

And they looked at the Vision more closely, and because they could see into the future and were all (like every intelligent entity) rabid Laurel and Hardy fans and because they were zonked on the weed, they saw that Yahweh bore the face of Oliver Hardy. All around him, below the mountain on which he lived (his world was flat), the waters rose and rose. They saw drowning men, drowning women, innocent babes sinking beneath the waves. They were ready to vomit. And then Another came and stood beside Yahweh, looking at the panorama of horrors below, and he was Yahweh's Adversary, and, stoned as they were, he looked like Stanley Laurel to them. And then Yahweh spoke, in the eternal words of Oliver Hardy: "Now look what you made me do," he said.

And that was the first Vision.

They looked again, and they saw Lee Harvey Oswald perched in the window of the Texas School Book Depository; and he, again, wore the face of Stanley Laurel. And because this world had been created by a great god named Earl Warren, Oswald fired the only shots that day, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy was, as the Salvation Army charmingly expresses it, "promoted to glory."

"This is Confusion," said Athena with her owl-eyes flashing, for she was more familiar with the world created by the god Mark Lane.

Then they saw a hallway, and Oswald-Laurel was led out between two policemen. Suddenly Jack Ruby, with the face of Oliver Hardy, stepped forward and fired a pistol right into that frail little body. And then Ruby spoke the eternal words, to the corpse at his feet: "Now look what you made me do," he said.

And that was the second Vision.

Next, they saw a city of 550,000 men, women and children, and in an instant the city vanished; shadows remained where the men were gone, a firestorm raged, burning pimps and infants and an old statue of a happy Buddha and mice and dogs and old men and lovers; and a mushroom cloud arose above it all. This was a world created by the cruelest of all gods, Realpolitik.

"This is Discord," said Apollo, disturbed, laying down his lute.

Harry Truman, a servant of Realpolitik, wearing the face of Oliver Hardy, looked upon his work and saw that it was good. But beside him, Albert Einstein, a servant of that most elusive and gnomic of gods, Truth, burst into tears, the familiar tears of Stanley Laurel facing the consequences of his own karma. For a brief instant, Truman was troubled, but then he remembered the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.

And that was the third Vision.

Now they saw trains, many trains, all of them running on time, and the trains criss-crossed Europe and ran 24 hours a day, and they all came to a few destinations that were alike. There, the human cargo was stamped, catalogued, processed, executed with gas, tabulated, recorded, stamped again, cremated and disposed.

"This is Bureaucracy," said Dionysius, and he smashed his wine jug in anger; beside him, his lynx glared balefully.

And then they saw the man who had ordered this, Adolf Hitler, wearing still the mask of Oliver Hardy, and he turned to a certain rich man, Baron Rothschild, wearing the mask of Stanley Laurel, and they knew this was the world created by the god Hegel and the angel Thesis was meeting the demon Antithesis. Then Hitler spoke the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.

And that was the fourth Vision.

They did then look further and, lo, high as they were they saw the founding of a great republic and proclamations hailing new gods named Due Process and Equal Rights for All. And they saw many in high places in the republic form a separate cult and worship Mammon and Power. And the Republic became an Empire, and soon Due Process and Equal Rights for All were not worshipped, and even Mammon and Power were given only lip-service, for the true god of all was now the impotent What Can I Do and his dull brother What We Did Yesterday and his ugly and vicious sister Get Them Before They Get Us.

"This is Aftermath," said Hera, and her bosom shook with tears for the fate of the children of that nation.

And they saw many bombings, many riots, many rooftop snipers, many Molotov cocktails. And they saw the capital city in ruins, and the leader, wearing the face of Stanley Laurel, taken prisoner amid the rubble of his palace. And they saw the chief of the revolutionaries look about at the rubble and the streets full of corpses, and they heard him sigh, and then he spoke the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.

And that was the fifth Vision.

And now the Olympians were coming down and they looked at each other in uncertainty and dismay. Zeus himself spoke first.

"Man," he said, "that was Heavy Grass."

"Far fuckin out," Hermes agreed solemnly.

"Tree fuckin mendous," added Dionysius, petting his lynx.

"We were really fuckin into it," Hera summed up for all.


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