The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

at his own jokes, god is now finally able laugh at ours: an androgyne wrapped in the cloak of mother nature and raising the shield of paternity. Created to live outside ourselves, experiments of temporality, we take revenge by toggling our maker’s gender roles to reflect the needs of each stage of civilization. When small tribal populations with high mortality rates were the rule, a fertility goddess was called for; when expansion and conquest was paramount, an aggressor deity. das goddess having sowed the soil in blood and der god having dwindled native pagan populations through disease, a new transformation is now required to fit the age of equality: die deity, safely neutered by a definite article to make us all feel uniformly privileged.

      The new myths: baby zeus playing with scented candles instead of lightning bolts, safeguarding his adolescent skirt-chasing with spermicide. As a result of his imposition of free choice on the erotic escapades of the olympians, the generations of heroes are omitted from the Ages of Man. Hopping from Arcadia to the Iron era, Homer’s jingoism is disregarded in favor of an abridged edition of Hesiod. By the time Virgil has nothing to write about and bowdlerization leaves no one avid for Ovid, the people are weary of polytheism and ready for something less hierarchical. Shaving his beard, plucking his eyebrows, applying black eyeliner, getting a pixie cut, donning a purple robe, a drag queen yahweh struts down main street at the head of the diversity parade, waving to the groupies. One does not pray, but claps to a new world order: “Thou shalt not segregate bathrooms,” “Thou shalt not take the name of humanity as a singular masculine pronoun.” Unrepentant men with type A personalities become doomed to an afterlife as Chihuahuas; traditional housewives with a closetful of mom jeans are punished as polyandrous phalaropes.

      Absolute Philanthropy