2011
Censor This
by Reuben ZammitThis is the way Karl told me the story:
Once, a long time ago, in the early to mid-19th century, in a faraway kingdom close to here, which was actually a sultanate, there reigned a Fat Bastard. Every morning he would send his closest friends to shovel the fat of the land into their fancy aristocratic carriages, and every evening they would return to shovel the lard they collected into his kingly golden-striped trousers; thus did the Fat Bastard grow.
Fat Bastard knew that he could only count on his friends and that many people resented having their fields, which they tilled from noon to noon, between one sip of wine and the other, yield up their fat to him. Countless other people were also weary of having to pull his friends’ carriages, laden with their neighbours’ and relatives’ fat, up to his palace gates, while still other people weren’t very happy at being obliged to stoke fires all the time in order to fumigate the city from his squelching and belching.
These were only the people who had the worst time of it. There was also a large number of merchants-who-were-not-his-friends who were not so very happy at seeing less and less fat in circulation. It was a very miserable sultanate.
Fat Bastard was not fond of either runner beans or criticism, so he outlawed both. He knew that the slightest whiff of a runner bean might sew up his tummy for good, and no more night-long banquets of fat and fat and fat. (And he had also heard somewhere, though he disbelieved it, that the free circulation of runner beans and of ideas might actually make people smarter.) And so he decided to play it safe and at first people made only a small fuss about it, but as the years grew longer and the sun got increasingly senile, serious concerns began to be voiced in very, very, very private circles. People began to miss their beans, and what with the sultan stealing all their land’s fat, they had scarcely anything more to digest. Citizens, tummies rumbling with hunger for real food, never able to keep down for long the wafer-like whitewashed newspaper they were reduced to ingest with their wine, started organising and attending midnight banquets, where gluttony supposedly took place, but in which discreet amounts of runner beans where half-defiantly smuggled and popped between prim lips.
When Fat Bastard started sending his mastiffs to crash and ruin every party, people finally got really pissed off. They each got a kitchen knife, tossed his mastiffs a biscuit, and set off for Fat Bastard, who promptly ran away and left the free republic behind him. Everyone, except for his friends (who were good at playing pretend), was very glad to see Fat Bastard off. Because they could not lay hands on him, they laid hands on his palace, and, after stealing the feminine lingerie in which he used to dress, they turned his royal chambers into a whore-house, putting an old madam who liked to wear spikes on her head and a book and torch (to read in the dark) in her hands in charge. Then they turned his ballroom into a parliament house and passed a new law which established the right of all individuals to eat and/or circulate any vegetable they liked. Only one clause did they attach to this much cherished law, and it was a proviso which stated that vegetables could only be eaten and/or circulated as long as it didn’t cause others harm and disturb peace and order. Which was reasonable, amen.
All went okey-dokey for four months (Karl gurgled, retched and spat out a gob of emerald-green bile) until the Friends pointed out that the carrot, with its end tapering to a point, could easily, either intentionally or accidentally, poke someone’s eye out, and should be banned from circulation. Some of the people, who needed sharp eyesight in order to see others cheat them better, protested and tried chasing the friends with kitchen knives. Of course the silly people were rounded up by the mastiffs (who were being fed cookies every day now) and shot. From there the achievement of a perfect society was a walk in the park. The Friends eventually and gradually managed to outlaw peas (they could make someone slip), potatoes (they impaired taste and caused harm to the individual’s culinary judgement), onions (they made people cry), lettuce (they attracted snails which upset some people), tomatoes (too easily used as projectiles) and runner beans (they grossed out the Friends, who were the most important people in charge, and consequently disturbed peace and order) with virtually no resistance. In fact the only thing people were allowed to eat was fat, which was mostly the property of the Friends.
So in the end everyone died except for the Friends. The good news is that the desert climate of the sultanate has kept both Friends and the starved very well preserved for you to see, in an excellent mummified condition.
Karl added, ‘So be it,’ and laughed like the bitter young man he was.
