jeff@rtech.UUCP (Jeff Lichtman) (10/04/85)
All this talk about pornography reminds me of the book "Breakfast
of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut. It is a satire of cultural garbage.
One of the characters in the book is Kilgore Trout, a failed science
fiction writer on a trip to an arts festival. On the way, he stays overnight
in a porno theater to save the price of a hotel room. I quote without
permission:
"The movie theater where Trout sat with all his parcels in his lap
showed nothing but dirty movies. The music was soothing. Phantasms of a
young man and a young woman sucked harmlessly on one another's apertures
on the silver screen.
"And Trout made up a new novel while he sat there. It was about an
Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and plant
life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate
food made from petroleum and coal.
"They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food
was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities
were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but dirty
movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of business somehow,
but without interfering with free speech.
"They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and
Don said, 'Yes.' They asked him if the movies were *really* dirty, and
Don replied, 'As dirty as movies could get.'
"This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty
movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-cushion
vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.
"It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time
to think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already seen
on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house lights went down.
The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.
"So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there
wasn't any picture. There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then
the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male humanoid
eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue
and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his time about eating the
pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera
focussed on his Adam's apple. His Adam's apple bobbed obscenely. He belched
contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language
of the planet:
"THE END
"It was all faked, of course. There weren't any pears anymore. And the
eating of a pear wasn't the main event of the evening, anyway. It was a short
subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.
"Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and
their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an hour
a short a half - soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and
gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed more than a foot from
their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam's apples. And then the father put
the cat and dog on the table, so they oculdn take part in the orgy, too.
"After a while, the actors couldn't eat any more. They were so stuffed
that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they didn't
think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table
slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty
pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.
"The audience went wild.
"When Don and his friends left the theater, they were accosted by
humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and butter and
peanuts and so on. The whores couldn't actually deliver these goodies, of
course.
"The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would
cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.
"And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and
full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake."
--
Jeff Lichtman at rtech (Relational Technology, Inc.)
"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent..."
{amdahl, sun}!rtech!jeff
{ucbvax, decvax}!mtxinu!rtech!jeff