"In banded iron deposits of archaic Greenland lies the record of the first bacteria to form a democracy. Tiny columns and monuments crowned their proud stromatolith and mighty nutrient channels flowed with the rich commerce of capitalism. For many elections their democracy prospered, weathering the fierce storms and radiation of Earth's wild youth, until then. Then. A slick son-of-a-bitch who oozed feel-good proteins challenged a noble old war hero and the microbial populace fell for the huckster. Immediately after the election, the first predators evolved, and the tiny democracy was eaten. Until the end of time, living organisms will know the terror of being devoured alive, all because a patch of dumb germs had to go and vote for the liberal."
"Through limpid Ediacaran seas roved living triskelions, scintillating with wisdom and irredescence. Each lobe of the Tribrachidium heraldicum embodied a different virtue:
The parwise lobe assigned perfect valuation to every stone, animal, plant, and patch of mud. With this lobe the heraldicum consumed and secreted the gnorlikai, energy-rich globules that served as currency, accurate to the nanoliter and storeable indefinitaely. Particularly wise and hard-working heraldica were noted by their bulging sacs of gnorlikai, with which they had the energy to spawn many times, or engage in ever greater feats of Free Trade.
The oltwise lobe bristled with taste buds, receptive cilia, and electrosensitive villi, ever vigilant for threats to self and society. When this lobe detected a sullen Spriggina skulking about the financial district, or a pack of delinquent Dickinsonia having a siesta in the charniodiscus-groves, it responded with overwhelming force, launching hundreds of stinging tendrils to pierce and paralyze. The heraldica never built weapons, for they grew their own perfect Defense.
The glylwise lobe was perhaps the most important of all. It had a single chemosensitive pit and a single gland, which secreted the compound glylenn, unique to each individual heraldicum. But this chemical was more than just an identifier, for it carried every connotation of being; social worth, disease, affiliation with pious or deviant organizations. Through this gland the heraldica maintained a perfect hierarchy, discriminating against the undesireables and elevating the righteous to Full Citizenship, which bore the fruit of Suffrage.
But since the heraldica could discern every possible nuance of being with this lobe, it allowed them to sense, by its absence, the Perfect Being. A being so unlike themselves, yet so sublime, that they worshipped it as their God. And that being was Jesus Christ."
I gasped and genuflected. "But gramma, what happened to them? If they were so clever why did they go extinct?"
"Until recently that has been hard to understand. The texts say that in a time of great crisis, two of the most upstanding heraldica their Republic had ever known faced each other in electoral combat. One of them was a scion of elder wealth, and his parwise lobe bulged strangely with many gnorlikai. He had slain many enemies with his oltwise lobe, so many that a disgusting gaggle of protogooks singled him out for capture and torment, and although he bravely escaped, his tendrils could no longer extend fully. Only his ability to sense the Perfect Being was questioned, but his excellence in the other realms overshadowed this rumored deficiency.
The other candidate was outwardly a smart and godly young heraldicum who had made his way in the world through hard work and grit. But who was he, really? A blasphemous necromancer who dug the gnorlikai from the graves of great heraldica past, who smeared his body with their illustrious glylenn, who snatched identity-fragments from corpses and pulped them into a hybrid sheen of grotesque secondhand glory? That's what some commentators are saying. A dangerous demagogue using coded language to stir up the cesspools of the undesireables, promising them rights they don't deserve? That's readily apparent if you just listen to reality, and not the pap the mainstream media feeds down your gullet with funnel and tongs. He was a bad heraldicum. Poo poo and pee pee, although in the proterozoic, effluent was too primitive to differentiate.
But whatever foul wizardry he may have employed was successful. Records of the aftermath end abruptly with the Cambrian Explosion, when disgusting bilaterians and radiates overran the Earth. The graceful triadic symmetry of the heraldica, a living testament to the Holy Trinity, was erased forever, and that is why our symmetries are filthy and we should be ashamed."
I nodded and slapped myself.
You know what happened next. The Cambrian democracy of the mighty anomalocarids, proud predators who crushed and slurped the trilobites, whose bodies were twisted mockeries of the Holy Symmetry. Yet a dark anomalocarid from dubious seas came and said, elect me thine leader, for I am the hope of the West, the change that calves glaciers and warms bays, the inheritor of the shroud of sainted Progress. And the anomalocarids, once holy and puissant, ate their civilization and shat it into rubble at the words of their false prophet.
Then came the democracy of the Eurypterids, magnanimous merchants of abyssal jewels, whose glimmering schymbylanthes may still be found on certain beaches by true and abstinent conservatives, if they pray hard enough. Their civiliztion fell, consumed by a plague of fishes after the election of a charismatic naif."
Then came the democracies of other organisms, each one a harmonious society of hierarchy and law, and each one destroyed by choice, by the incredible self-stab betrayal of its own electorate to itself. In every downfall, a heresiarch to spearhead the plummet. And so the tectonics of history rumbled on."
"By the late Cretaceous, the saurian civilization had achieved a degree of technological and thaumaturgical dominance unsurpassed in the history of the world. Huge scandium-hulled ships with nuclear thrusters traded with Sigma Draconis and Epsilon Eridani, and titan smokestacks billowed with majestic soot that gave the entire atmosphere a respectful somber hue. The troodontid high-priests opened obsidian doorways into netherworlds locked inside the downy hairs of a baby fern, the feather of a dromeosaur, a grain of salt. Caravans of seismosaurs cracked the Earth with the weight of free trade, and living sacrifices to Yahweh depleted entire continents of warmth and motion. It was truly an age of wonders.
By their scrying and dowsing, the troodontid priest-caste discovered the existance and fates of all preceding democracies. They issued a press release. Staggered with the weight of untold millenia of tragedy bursting all at once upon the collective psyche, the entire living mass of Earth paused in a day of silence. Photosynthesis and cellular respiration ceased, every ion gradiant stopped flowing, every tentacle and claw, stilled. Life returned slowly, with a new awareness of peril.
Even with forewarning, the priests knew that the same fate--a critical election, a mysterious stranger with black powers of persuasion--could befall their own mighty nation. They redoubled their seances and archaeological delvings, trying to capture every nuance of the downfalls of their predecessors. They inscribed massive wards around their cities, potent sigils inked with precious pigments culled from the innermost crevices of the earth and the farthest filaments of the stars. So powerful were these anti-glamour magicks that even simple thieves and con-saurs were repulsed, their twitching carcasses locked in concentric morgues around the cities.
Still the priests worried. One of their number, a bright young troodon with crisp sable plumage, noted that in all recovered histories the Destroying One had risen from the ranks of the lowly. Perhaps if the vast underclass of saurian society had its conditions improved, the Destroying One would not wish to rise, being content with his lot. The other priests concurred, and drafted a letter to Congress. Many new laws were passed that ran contrary to the noble dinosaur philosophy of "to the strong go the morsels; to the weak, the red chasm of hell." The poor were paid more, and given free healthcare, and they became paragons of indolence. But they were content, and the priests felt safer.
Maybe this is enough, said the smart black troodon, but what if the Destroying One comes to us from the lands of our enemies? Although our armored fleets and cunning spies are powerful, they cannot vanquish everyone or see into every hostile nook. If we were to talk to our enemies--I know, I know, but this is a matter of ultimate importance--if we were to talk to them, perhaps we could negotiate a deal where they informed us of any unusual specimens among their lower classes. Again the priests concurred, and envoys were sent. To the cobalt depths of the barbaric elasmosaurs, the furnace-caves of Kladregh-Nogh, the asteroidal citadels of the crystalline Ggohlzumdee, the intrepid diplomats voyaged. Some returned with success; others were returned liquefied in crude copper amphora, which could not muffle their bubbling screams. But the priests felt safer.
I knew what was coming next, for my grandmother had told me many times before. I gripped the hem of my blanket and shivered.
"To pay for the gluttening of the poor, and the concession tributes demanded by the hostile nations, Congress had to make cuts somewhere, for the saurians were strong believers in fiscal discipline. The only way they could free up enough funds was by cutting the defense budget--"
a ghost of a whimper fled my lips
"--and tithes to the Church. No longer would the 6th Tyrannosaur Legion guard the coasts of the Tethys Sea, proud ranks with tungsten-penetrator teeth and iridium ray-guns; no longer would the Starcruiser Xaltrissa battle gibbering flocks of mutant pterosaurs in the gulfs beyond Mars. The great Cathedral of Gondwanna, which had stood for tens of millions of years, stalwart granite pillars that could shelter a thousand sauropods, was forced to shutter its gemstone windows. Goodly dinosaurs across the realm prayed for their country, while the fattened poor hooted and fornicated.
God heard those prayers, but in his infinite wisdom he had other plans for the nation of dinosaurs. Their most pernicious enemy, the Hive-mind of Betelgeuse, was a sprawling Dyson ring of living matter that held everything in common, even thoughts. This red menace had spent a thousand years mining iridium, the same rare element that shielded the dinosaurs' most potent weapons, and shaping it with mind-rays into a moon-sized bullet.
By the time the dinosaurs' radar detected it it was too late. The death-rays of their fighters were useless against the iridium juggernaut, and the nuclear cannons of the Xaltrissa had been sold for scrap, to pay for cadillacs and crack for the poor. In the chaos of a panicking planet, the priests did a valiant thing. The collected history of their democracy, and of all the democracies that had gone before, were gathered into a signle volume and were to be buried in the strongest vault of an ancient monastery.
But when they opened the doors of the abandoned structure, they beheld a wretched thing: the smart black troodon-priest was capering nakedly, plucked of his feathers, and cackling. His bare body was slathered in shocking tattoos of the least-cultured sort, Tweety Pteranodon and the Tasmanian Deinonychus wearing lowered sunglasses and striking a badass pose. "THAT'S ALL, FOLKS!" shrieked the black priest. "THAT'S ALL! CHICXULUB DRAWS NIGH! THROUGH NIGHTED ABYSSES OF ULTIMATE VOID SHE FLEW, AND I URGED HER EVER ONWARD, FOR I AM NYARLATHOTEP THE CRAWLING CHAOS, BARAKOBAM THE SUNDERING CLAW, AND I HAVE TOUCHED YOUR WORLD! HAHAGHAHAGADGHSHA--" a priest drew his death-ray and vaporized the hideous creature, then turned the weapon on himself. The remaining priests fulfilled their mission, and we know no more of the dinosaurs save what scant bones we may dig.
I shuddered and reached up to touch the wooden crucifix of my necklace. My grandmother sipped tea from an old tin cup.
"Ever since the fall of the dinosaurs, the world has been a wicked place. None more so than those Egyptians--don't you ever go near a pyramid, boy. I've seen them around, these days, on the outskirts of the forest where we ain't supposed to go. Jesus save us from what those pharaohs called up, because the government sure won't. How could so many of us been so blind--"
My grandmother was tearing up. She shut the massive tome in her lap, our family's copy of the Conservinomicon, whose intricate glyphs record everything that has transpired on this planet, and just why the liberals should be blamed for all of it.
In the night beyond our window, strange fires glowed. This had been a city, before, but the liberals were burning it down, great circles of them chanting incantations until violet flames consumed the towers, interlacing polygonal flames whose motions were jerky, stop-motion, unnatural.
I wondered then and I wonder now-- will any democracy ever survive? Even armed with billions of years of knowledge, the dinosaurs, and we Americans, fell victim to the liberals' machinations. Is this a law of thermodynamics? Is entropy the decay of subatomic democracies, is the heat-death of the universe foreordained by obscure liberal dogmas in unlimned dimensions?
We true conservatives can only pray.
