Asylum Earth. Charles Bragg

over and over and over again for centuries. You know, the twenty minute joke about the Pollack, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew, the Negro, the Chinaman, the nun and the midget who were stuck on a Boeing 7 4 7 with engine trouble over the Atlantic Ocean. I won't finish the joke now. You'll probably be hearing it someday yourself, and I don't want to spoil it for you.

      Only God can make a tree.

      God had dozed off.

      Satan had planned for this carefully. Selecting the lushest, most verdant, fertile garden of paradise, he gleefully turned it into a desolate, barren wasteland where no life flourished, no flower grew. He felt ten feet tall.

      This was his most malevolent masterpiece. This huge, festering, open sore in the earth's crust, with red oozing gashes where clear rivers once flowed.

      God was stirring now. In his after-nap haze, he had trouble remembering exactly when and how he had created something as magnificent as the Grand Canyon.

      The balance of nature?

      I think we're talking leftovers.

      FRANCIS OF AZUSA

      The wild creatures of the world have never had a greater friend than Francis of Azusa.

      His sweet nature and kind heart affected his ideas about the animals he loved so much, in a way that can only be viewed as poetic. Nature's indifferent ways were not his ways.

      For example, Francis was sure that possums play dead for the same reason he prayed-so they would be ready when the real thing came along. He hoped that someday dolphins would let us in on what they found so amusing. He believed that almost all warthogs led celibate lives, and that the few who din't, imagined they were doing it with gazelles.

      He felt that whales are bored stiff, that's why they beach themselves, that bumblebees and hummingbirds must be exhausted, woodpeckers get terrible headaches, and penguins are freezing their buns off. He was certain that bats used sonar because they can't stand the way they look either. He wanted to find out who ate dead vultures.

      Those were just some of the things Francis of Azusa was determined to do something about.

      Even sympathetic animal rights groups thought his methods extreme.

      He ran with the morons at Pamplona and tried to reason with them. He tried to get cheetahs to develop a taste for acorns and berries and leave the wildebeests alone, but they chased his ass all over the Serengeti Plain.

      He got a lamb to lie down with a lion, but when he got back from a lunch break he was surprised to find that the lamb had left.

      He abandoned his crusade to turn nature's predators into vegetarians when he realized that some plants have central nervous systems.

      Yet no sparrow fell that did not cause his heart to ache. The gentle and saintly Francis could not even bring himself to swat a mosquito.

      He died of malaria.

      The innocent wild creatures of the meadow, vale, forest, and plain did not mourn, nor really notice his passing. And in the spruce woods, deep in fern and thistle where he peacefully rests today, the rain falls and the wind blows just as it always has.

      The Garden of Eden

      I THINK ALOT, THEREFORE I AM A LOT.

      THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

      General Robert E. Lee, the military commander of the Confederate forces, graciously accepted the complete surrender of Ulysses S. Grant and the Union Army at Appomattox. The bloody American Civil War was over. The South had won decisively.

      President Jefferson Davis moved immediately into the White House.

      Abraham Lincoln received a full pardon and spent the rest of his days peacefully caring for his lunatic wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.

      The South had won the war, and, in effect, all the states now had the right to secede from the union and become independent nations, with their own flags, their own armies, and their own laws.

      The Balkanization of the United States began not long after. The fragmentation of the states dwarfed the behavior of the very Balkans themselves.

      There had always been the states of North Carolina and South Carolina, a Virginia and a West Virginia. Now they were countries. Then came a North New Jersey and a South New Jersey, a West Rhode Island as well as the regular Rhode Island. The Grand Canyon state became Lower Arizona and Upper Arizona. Greater Delaware and, would you believe, the oxymoronic Lesser Delaware were created. So was the independent Island Empire of Staten. There was a Main Maine and the Other Maine. All sovereign nations.

      The corn growers of Kansas joined with the string bean farmers of Oklahoma to form the new nation of Succotash.

      Portuguese was declared the official language of Kentucky.

      Not long after declaring their independence, Arkansas and Mississippi went to war when the IQ test scores of the elected leaders of both of those states were released by Connecticut's ruling military junta headed by Generalissimo

       G. Armstrong Custer.

      About the same time, a most tragic confrontation occurred in Outer Pennsylvania. A buggy full of Amish thugs raided a Quaker quilting bee and stole several shawls. The conflict that followed will forever be known in military annals as the Plowshare War.

      The bloodiest encounters were fought between the Irish Communist Militia of Massachussetts and the Falangistas of California. It came to an end when they joined forces to oppose barbarian invaders from the north-Viking dairy farmers from Wisconsin and Minnesota.

      A seemingly minor border incident awoke the "sleeping tiger" of the retired elderly of Florida. They bravely repulsed the incursions of the beer guzzling Peckerwoods of Alabama.

      As