Eugene Costa
My blogs
| Introduction | "Life is a game, but it's the only game in town." (EAC) |
|---|---|
| Interests | In the midst of teaching a course about Ancient Egypt, which I had no interest in doing, since I had been hired to teach and research Greek and Roman history, it occurred to me that Frank Zappa's refrain, "Call any vegetable--call it by name--and the chances are good that that vegetable will respond to you" was a penetrating analysis of the Neolithic Revolution, in which the ancestors of present humanity identified and named items like skunk cabbage and eggplant, and in which those vegetables, named and attended, responded. The response was monoculture, the state, and organized religion, in which priests took control of the seed and in the name of Deity developed the concept of ownership, including their ownership of the harvest. They managed this by making the folks planting the seed and cultivating the vegetables believe that they, the priests, had a direct line to God, and that God listened carefully to what they had to say. Work was thereby invented, and the resultant monoculture is partly responsible for the decline of Homo Neanderthalensis into Homo Sapiens, the latter of which species recently named itself, with its usual absurd and empty egoism. After long millennia the vegetables have won and have succeeded in domesticating the human race to work, vegetarianism, and other mindless activity, like the Suburbs. This the Priests had not foreseen. |
Compose the lyrics to a new national anthem that features an animal sound at least once:
What cannot be named?