Another Parable of a Madman

THE MADMAN----Have you not heard of that madman who logged into Blogger in the bright morning hours, clicked over to Lem's, and cried incessantly: "I seek GOP! I seek GOP!"---As many of those who believed in GOP were hanging around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has GOP gotten lost? wrote one. Has he fallen ill without insurance? snarked another. Or is he cowering in Washington, D.C.? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a Cruz? immigrated?---Thus they snarked and laughed...


The madman posted into their midst and stared at them with his shiny black eyes. "Whither is GOP?" he cried; "I will tell you. You have killed him---you. All of you are his murderers. But how did you do this? How could you usurp half the political bandwidth? Who gave you the satellites to rule the entire heavens? What were you doing when money unchained from its value? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from the nation's original sin? Are we not plunging into guilt and debt continually? Backward, collaterally, forward, in all directions? Is there still any left or right? Are we not now straying, as through an infinite nothingness? Do we not feel the breath of empty black space? Has it not become colder? Is not the dark knight continually closing in on us? Cold grinding grizzly bear jaws hot on her heels?  Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the golddiggers who are barrying GOP? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Parties, too, decompose. GOP is dead. GOP remains dead. And you have drowned him in your Tea Pee."

"How shall you comfort yourselves, ye white murderers of all murderers? What was highest and mightiest of all nations that the world has yet seen is bleeding to debt under those knaves: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What new festivals of solstice, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this guilt too great for us? Must we ourselves not become GOP's simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater debt; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this guilt -- he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and refreshed his page again looking for responses; but they, too, were silent and stared at their screens in astonishment. Silence. At last he threw his mouse on the ground, and it cracked into pieces and shorted out. "I have come too early," he wanted to say to them; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached their ears. Even electrons and photons require time to travel wires and optical fiber; the light of hip-hop stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant Hip-hop stars---and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several LDS tabernacles and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of GOP?"