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(10/3/01)
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In trying to decide what I would want to contribute as part of a thoughtful reflection on what transpired on 11 September 2001 in New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, I found the following passage from The Autobiography of a Parasite. It is a lengthy quote from the preaching of old Dr. Baldwin, a figure of historical force in W. E. B. Du Bois's 1959 novel Mansart Builds a School. The parasite discovered that novel in 1973, and the passage compelled him to embark on the selfless effort to try and think in a world increasingly at war with thinking, increasingly at war with life. The effort took the parasite to the brink of truth, where he found many fellows but few Americans.

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"All this is written. It is an accumulation of hates and animosities; a clash of counter-strivings covering centuries. Paradoxes have at last met. Europe, Asia, Africa and all the Americas have been preparing for this for centuries. It has announced itself in Trilogies; African slavery, Asiatic wealth and White Supremacy; Slums and Poverty, Ignorance and Crime, Disease and Death; Aristocracy and Power, Comfort and Luxury, Society and Gambling; Philosophy, Science and Technique. We have talked of Absolute, Final, Longest, Biggest, Highest. We have pretended to distinguish Truth, Lies, Good, Evil. . . .

"Greed nailed the world together into one snarling, scratching, fighting ball of human hatreds. We are One, cried the priest with black hypocrisy; we are One cried Science with pale contradiction. We are not One and never will be, cried the Crowd as they chased bawling scoundrels and bitches into the dens of Gain. They made armies, well-regulated whorehouses and rationed gin mills. They built beautiful battleships to spew out at frequent ports great bunches of wild young stallions to rape the frightened women of lowly races and cheaper classes.

"They lied with prayer and cheated on the altars of sacrifice. Yesterday men like angels of Resurrection flew up into the sun-kissed skies and burned the homes and flattened the shops and ripped the guts out of women and children to the Glory of God and Love of Man. Valiant knights sneaked beneath the blackness of deep waters to rip the bellies out of unsuspecting argosies filled with clothes and food and steel for the starving and freezing, whose cries swept the Seven Seas.

"Such was the brave and heroic battle of the bastards and skunks who were decorated with medals and stars. They did to others just what others did to them and more and worse if anyway possible. They kicked the Prince of Peace in the teeth and crowned him with bayonets. Great nations, too poor to build schools, libraries and hospitals, were rich enough to build magnificent warships at ten million dollars apiece, to prowl the seas for prey or scare the weak into slavery. They could not cure Cancer, but they could spread Syphilis. They tore the towers of cathedrals neck from jowl to erect offices for profit.

"Now come the statesmen in serried ranks, brave in apparel and venerable in mien: the Sons of Beliel from London; the snakes from Paris; the jackals from Vienna; and the rats of the First Families of Germany. Stupid old generals and half-baked colonels; ignorant Admirals and Captains who will now blunder and waste, kill and cripple, strut and whore and swagger, and come home to be made rulers of men, to talk wisely of matters of which they knew nothing, while hysterical women gape, dribble and applaud.

"It will be One War, from 1914 on and on for a century, a war with only interludes of Starvation and Insanity. The preachers and priest—the bishops and metropolitans begin to run, begin to climb their towers to escape the rising, licking filth of blood and spittle, begin to explain, begin to remind and prophesy: Hear ye. Hear ye! Make straight the...