This is a very short (long, by these boards' standards) essay by Harlan Ellison. And I typed it all in, just for you fuckers.
It's from a book called "Mind Fields," with pictures by this amazing artist, Jacek Yerka. Google him, and you'll see what I mean. Probably one of the most awesome combination of artwork and essays of the '90s. I added some dashes, spaces and bolded the names and stuff, to make it easier for you all to read, but I spent a couple hours, with the book, typing it in, bitches. Unless I made a typo, everything is verbatim, including the italics. Ellison could easily post here.
This is awesome.
Under the Landscape
Harlan Ellison
Look at this world. It's a nice world. Let me tell you about this nice world. Then you make the decision under which landscape you would wish to reside, light or dark.
In the year 1993 the following series of incidents took place:
-- Evelyn Kadovitz, age 10, saw her mother shot to death at an automated teller machine by a street thug who was so stupid he killed her before she could withdraw her money. Evelyn saw it up close and personal -- as the TV anchorman put it -- from the front seat of her mother's car, parked twenty feet away.
-- Le Duc Hoang, age 16, was so severely beaten by a gang of Hispanic vatos locos when he refused to give him his lunch money one block from the industrial trade school he attended, that he lost the use of his left eye, walked with a limp because of the cross-section of femur removed from his left leg, and was thereafter unable to keep his thoughts straight enough to hold down a regular job. So he became a ward of the state.
-- Garnett Rowland Hall, age 11, was sent to live with his uncle and aunt in Detroit when his mother and father went through a nasty divorce. His uncle, Mykel, and his cousin, Oliveen, were hard-pressed and they "loaned him out" to an elderly gentleman in the neighborhood who paid them for proper use of the boy, three times a week. Garnett developed anal herpes and syphilis.
-- Jorge Cervantes, age 13, while at a youth outreach summer camp, fell afoul of a twenty-year-old counselor who hated spicks. During swimming lessons, the burly counselor managed to drag Jorge under at the edge of Lake Wapakanetta, and held him down in the goo with one foot while holding on to an overhanging tree limb for balance. Jorge almost drowned, but was resuscitated, having floated to the surface thirty yards away. He suffered severe brain damage from the attack. The counselor got away with it.
-- Mary Peruso, age 15, was gang-raped by a group of fraternity actives and well-favored pledges one night as she was completing her kitchen clean-up chores at the frat house. It was after a homecoming game beer keg bash, and the thirteen boisterous Greeks took her repeatedly, laying her out and bending her forward over a large butcher's block table in the house's huge kitchen. Afterward, afraid someone would find out, they thought of killing her, but instead -- because she seemed so befuddled and tabula rasa -- and because she was bleeding so badly -- they pooled their finances, put a hundred and eleven dollars in her shirt pocket, took her forty miles out of town, and abandoned her on the freeway.
-- Zachary Shuffer, age 12, was so regularly and so strenuously "purged" by his zealously religious mother and father, that he had to wear a rubber undershirt so the welts and open sores from the scourges and willow rods would not bleed through his shirts and draw attention to him in grade school. He learned to love Christ, to love Mother and Father, to love the pain and to love the fire they used on his feet and genitals, pain and fire that drove out the devil in him.
------------
As adults: Evelyn Kadovitz ran a retirement home and poisoned thirteen old ladies to benefit from their insurance; Le Duc Hoang became a dealer in crystal meth and other potent commodities, specializing in selling to members of his ethnic peer group; Garnett Rowland Hall developed an unnatural attraction to small boys, haunted movie theaters where he could meet them and pick them up, and having done so he sodomized them and cut their throats and dismembered them and mailed the dried pieces of their bodies to General Post Office addresses throughout the United States; Jorge Cervantes was fit only to be a day laborer, because he was big and slow and took direction, but he also got angry easily and even the slightest reproach in a bar or on the job would turn him into a crushing machine that broke men's backs; Mary Peruso became a drug addict and a prostitute who quickly became a carrier of AIDS but who continued to work the streets, infecting dozens of men and women; Zachary Shuffer was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a firebug, and a drive-by shooter specializing in nigg3rs, atheists, and Those Who Seek to Undermine Our Way of Life.
--------------
In the year 2009 the PI implant was perfected. PI stood for Passion Inhibitor. In the nice world under the first landscape, the implant was used on hundreds of thousands of "aberrants."
--------------
Evelyn Kadovitz washes floors and windows in a large office building. She is unmarried and lives alone with cats. Le Duc Hoang works in a 7-Eleven as a clerk on the midnight-to-seven shift. He lives with his widowed mother. Garnett Rowland Hall sorts mail rejected by the main sorting machine in a branch post office. He had a child from his brief marriage, but the baby was born without a nose or legs. Jorge Cervantes is a stevedore. He has angina and is grossly overweight, but never raises his voice, never raises his hand. Mary Peruso washes dishes and serves as a kitchen assistant in the co-op dining hall of a major American university. Zachary Shuffer sits at home a lot. He is on welfare. He never married, he cannot read, he likes television.
-------------
In the year 2009 the PI implant was perfected. PI stood for Passion Inhibitor. In the nice world under the second landscape, the implant was rejected out of hand by both the medical community and the government.
-------------
Evelyn Kadovitz became a Victims' Advocate and eventually organized a powerful Congressional lobby that aided thousands of helpless women and children. Her likeness can today be found on the $2.00 stamp. Le Duc Hoang travels back and forth between the Far East and the United States ten times a year, setting up businesses and exchanging intellectual properties. This year he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Garnett Rowland Hall is a poet. He is the "Poet Laureate" of three African nations that have adopted him as the soul of their heritage. His latest holotape of the sold-old concert of his readings at Carnegie Hall is in the top ten bestsellers of this quarter. Jorge Cervantes has opened his fiftieth disease control center in Asia. This brings to three hundred and two the number of centers he has designed, sited and funded, and built in the disadvantaged nations of the world. Mary Peruso won the Oscar this year for her role as Mother Teresa in the film adaptation she wrote of her bestselling biography. Zachary Shuffer found the cure for cancer. And contributed three million to volcano relief in Italy.
---------------
It's a nice world. A Nice World, here under the landscape. Where did you say you lived?
---------------
Edited for a bigger first image, smacka, hope that helps
