Fragments

The first interaction between a liberal polity and its citizen is a brutally imperative question - "why do you deserve to eat?"

What a horrible introduction! When we look at the ideology's genesis myth, the assumptions are not stacked so mercilessly against the individual. The Lockean natural man exists in a realm of self-sufficiency. With the labor of his body he acquires the means of self-preservation, at least. He may build a shelter, and by so doing acquire a right of property therein. He may hunt for food, and by obtaining it acquire the right to eat. He approaches the social bargain from a position of adequacy in nature. Life in society is sensible not because it guarantees against destruction, but because it promises improvement. The man has desires which exceed his individual capacity for satisfaction. But in community with other men, by efficiently exchanging the product of one another's labor, this man can transcend the raw subsistence of the state of nature.

Perhaps it is odd that Locke then moves on to discuss the slave, rather than the child or the infirm. It should be evident that the naturally endowed "executive power" of the individual is not sufficient for even bare survival in a large class of people. But I'm a poorly read fellow, it's been a long time since I reviewed my Locke, and I can't say he never discusses it.

Whatever these historical ideals, it is hard to agree with Locke that they coherently exist in the present social world. Men and women are endowed with labor, by virtue of their bodies. But the notion that these bodies have an independent source of purpose defies the manifest evidence of our senses. Unless we've entered this vale of tears with title to a patch of ground, the human individual hasn't a choice to spurn the society of his peers. We depend upon others for our subsistence, not upon the fruit of our labor or the fruit of the ground.

In modern society, there are three ways to support oneself. One can be pitied, one can be predatory, or one can be useful. These are the three modes of survival - charity, force and utility.

Observation - charity towards the young. Cannot be a bargain. Even if the parent expects future return on investment, the child can't be considered a contractual party. The bargain is never stated, the choice never given. And the probability of repudiation would be high (the unreality of an ideal).

Observation - charity and humiliation. Life on the floor. As much as it says, starvation is rare. Beyond that, how much to note? Public housing, welfare, patrons and grifters. The norm of utility.

Observation - the predator. A vigilant state. Reduction of the malefactor. Charity as punishment (deprived of liberty, existence as a one-sided promise.)

Observation - the useful.

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I want to be a liberal. I claim to be a liberal. I aspire to liberalism. But...

In contemporary American politics, the identity of liberalism has become a cramped position. In the hands of Republican polemicists the word is little more than a vacant slur. In the hands of mainstream discourse, regardless of partisan affiliation, the word is an indinstict mess applied indiscriminately to any and all left-of-center positions - including a plethora of materialist social movements that are inimical to the very idea of liberalism. A liberal willing to acknowledge the difficulty of the ideology and the history of ideas which has shaped it might seek refuge in a clarification - but one finds that the term "classical liberalism" already has libertarians squatting in it, defecating upon its principles like a cholera-infested camp of hoboes. One hears word that liberalism retains an identity in the larger world - though if this be truth, the evidence suggests it's a tarnished one.

So there isn't much to be said for my self-definition. The language available to utter it distorts my identity beyond recognition. And yet, I have long insisted upon it. I have often been a political fanatic, raging in zealous solitude.

I want to destroy my belief. My belief in liberalism hardly exists outside my private language. I do not hope to surrender it. But I lack conviction, and I see no path to sincerity but destruction of the beliefs to which I cling. I want to believe in spite.

Reading Note: Gore Vidal's Burr

For preservation's sake, below are reading notes - the introductory salvo for a dialogue which never occurred.
---------------
What are we to make of this novel? This work of "historical" "fiction", two terms who rest so uneasily together that I can't even fit them into the same set of quotation marks? What does this book mean? What does it say? Does the one overlap with the other? Is truth stranger than fiction? Is fiction a stranger to truth?

Personally, I'm inclined to read Burr first and foremost as a novel. In it's opening passage, the book presents us not with itself, as a book, but with a historical document, a purported excerpt from the pages of the New York Evening Post written in the salacious tone of the gossip pages. A wealth of factual information economically relayed, with suggestive parentheticals bulging out of nearly every sentence. It sets the mood, bringing us into the randy world of broadside broadsheets that has always marked the nation's celebrity/political discourse.

But this newsprint curtain lifts just after the turning of the page, and our narrator steps forth, inviting us past the foyer of caricatures and cartoons, and into the world of fleshly people. We're not sitting on a streetcorner in New York reading the scandal sheet. We're sitting under the eaves of the Jumel family manse, with "all that aged flesh commingled" just above our heads.

We meet Charlie Schuyler, the cynical poet with the witty pen, the smutty mind, and the sharp eye who is going to introduce us to Aaron Burr, the man he is paid to serve and is paid to destroy. We are here to observe Aaron Burr, but through frosted glass, as Gore Vidal channels Charlie Schuyler channeling Aaron Burr. Can we trust Aaron Burr's narrative of himself? Can we trust Charlie Schuyler's narrative of Aaron Burr? Can we trust Gore Vidal's narrative of Charlie Schuyler? What are they here to tell us? Are they even here to tell us of themselves, or do they speak to something larger?

The America of Burr strikes me as a marvellous accident of arrogance, venality, and incompetence. Every founding father is marred by a flaw, a faultline running across their dignified exterior and penetrating deeply into the fundamental core of the statesman or general. Washington is an unsightly figure with "the hips, buttocks, and bosom of a woman", "no experience of modern warfare," an "expression...grave, but somewhat vacant." Washington, the man, despite these indignities is propelled to power on the force of back-handed virtues. Despite his incompetence, "at least he looked like a general." "it was his genius always to look the part he was called upon to play." Even in victory, Washington remains a failure. At Monmouth Courthouse, "the plan to interecept them had entirely failed; and we sustained heavy casualties for nothing."

Jefferson is cowardly, promiscuous, and vain. "it was Jefferson who was the heretic, and Montesquieu the true believer in democracy." (p. 158) "It was a passionate form of self-delusion that rendered Jefferson as president and as man (not to mention as writer of tangled sentences and lunatic metaphors) confusing even to his admirers." (160) "he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power." (202) "Jefferson's behavior was like that of a woman who has decided to destroy the man - or rather the men... - who spurned her." (359)

The political genius is one of appearance rather than substance. Hamilton, the bastard nobility, "realized better than anyone that the world - our American world at least - loves a canting hypocrite." (p. 270) Hamilton "realized from the beginning that only through politics could he make the United States the sort of aristocratic pond in which he would most like to swim and glitter." (149) On pg. 54 Burr suggests the presence of a flaw, wondering if Hamilton "saw the flaw in me as I saw the one in him?" But what that flaw might be remains opaque. Burr "alone had the means and talent to be what [Hamilton] most wanted to be, the president." "He was envious, I was not."

By way of contrast, Burr was a man of substance, nearly propelled to his proper height, but somehow denied the prize. "Of all the new republic's political leaders, I was the most reluctant." (p. 149) Burr's successes and failures are endowed with a strange passivity. On p. 53, "I hurled Hamilton from the mountain-side, and myself fell." His "political career began, properly" through the pressures of Geroge Clinton. "He offered me the attorney-generalship of the state, a position I did not want. But pressure was brought to bear on me." (p. 150) Upon the election of 1800, Burr solemnly declares "let it be said once and for all, I would have refused the presidency on the practical ground (putting aside honour like a Virginian) that it was plainly the sense of the people of the United States that Jefferson be the president" (224). In their infamous duel, Burr places his trust in fate. "Hamilton fired first." (269) "I could do nothing but what I did. Aim to kill, and kill." (270) On the decision to invade Mexico, Burr reveals "I was sketpical. Jamie overrode me." (281)

His failures are always conveniently crafted by the flaws of those who surround him. In the battle of Quebec, "had the men followed me and met with Arnold's troops... Canada would today be a part of the United States." (50) But of course, "due to the untimely death of Montgomery, the cowardice of Campbell, the defection of Enos, we failed." (50) "It should be noted that my plan to harass Staten Island was finally accepted by Washington, who entrusted the task to our drunken general, the Scots peer Lord Stirling. Not knowing the terrain, he failed." (89) At Monmouth Courthouse, "I gave the order for attack... but fate interevened.... we lost, fatally, the initiative, thanks to Lee's abrupt withdrawal and to Washington's refusal to do more than make a perfunctory feint at the British position." (95)

As he ages, it is not his common sense confounded by the foolishness of his superiors, but his virtue confounded by the venality of his competitors. Of the duel, "I did not realize with what cunning Hamilton had prepared his departure from this world, and my ruin." (266) Of the election, "I made no move to gain the presidence. I behaved honourably and, as Theodosia foretold, I have regretted it all my life." (226) His plot, "I ought to have been more suspicous of Jamie than I was. But I could not, simply, take him seriously. No one could. That is how he came to deceive Washington, Hamilton and me, not to mention any number of other Spanish and American potentates, military and civilian." (281)

And yet, in spite of all his sweet demurral, Burr is a relentless opportunist. He crafts deceitful opportunity at the slightest convenience. He marries Jumel to finance his plot against Mexico, plays Federalists against Republicans, mocks, scorns, deceives, and manipulates. Burr MAKES his world, but in the doing of it, not in the narration. Elevating illegitimate children to the highest posts of power, bringing himself within grasping distance of empire and power. He tells us a story with remarkable bluntness and candor, offering forthrightly the stories of dalliances and escapades... opinions of historical figures unvarnished with condescension to "official" mythology. Burr hides in plain sight, like any true magician, drawing our eyes to the color while pulling away the source of his true motives. Even the novel itself culminates in the sudden drawing of the rabbit out of the hat, a proof that all Burr's force is, at root, motive.

Vidal chooses to open his afterword with a dubious claim against "traditional" history, which is evidence of ignorance or disingenousness, claiming that he's reserved "the right not only to rearrange events but, most important, to attribute motive - something the conscientous historian or biographers ought never do." (429) Leaving aside the falseness of this charge against history, this claim is highly dubious. Burr is presented, in his own words. But are those words meant to be seen as truth? Burr renders a narrative of staggering accomplishment propelled by incredible passivity. Schuyler's own life, his cynical manipulation of his connection to Burr and the import of that relationship for contemporary politics, similarly portrays himself as a hapless pawn who coincidentally but opportunistically brings in the bacon. And Vidal too drapes his narrative in the pacifying net of "history" to obscure his motive, his larger claim against America... his POLITICAL charge, disguised as historical fact.

I think this is a fascinating novel. I think Schuyler is a fascinating character. I suspect I see Vidal's motives, and at last I think I perceive Vidal the Polemicist, lurking below the pages of Vidal the Novelist.

A list of tales

Exodus (Old Testament)
Survivial in Auschwitz (Primo Levi)
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville)
The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri)
The Aeneid (Virgil)
Paradise Lost (John Milton)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
The Four Voyages (Christopher Columbus)
Metamorphoses (Ovid)
Guillver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)
The Republic (Plato)
Autobiography (John Stuart Mill)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
Ulysses (James Joyce)
The Blazing World (Margaret Cavendish)
Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Anonymous)
The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosinski)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Gospels (New Testament)

More magical thinking.

Postulate: Comprehension is blasphemy.

The success of philosophy is not measured by the ground which is covered, but by the stasis obtained at its outer limit. We think to optimize our ignorance.

The ethical dilemma: How should I act?

The political dilemma: How should we act?

The legal dilemma: How should you act?

If the sociopath is the diseased doing, then must not the ontopath be the diseased being?

I'm likely to return. These anguished musings are doubtlessly misleading. But sooner or later, I must surely find the words to entrap Mephistopheles. Until then, be well.

Apologies

I'm in a state of cognitive ferment. I make these notes available because they may be of interest and you may be of assistance. But they are the product of an agonizing process. I'm trying to make sense of something, but I haven't a clue as to what it is. These words are more like a spell than a treatise - talismanic chants aspiring to conjure up my demon and give it a shape I can comprehend.

We've been discussing evil, motive and law. Let's take a step back for a moment.

A moral proposition declares its object wrong or right.

A legal proposition adds a "therefore" clause.

"It is wrong to kill therefore killers shall be punished."

"It is right to apprehend killers therefore informants shall be rewarded."

So we might be able to make the case that a moral statement isn't an "ought" at all. To state a moral proposition is to declare what is. Only its legal implication prescribes an ought.

If we assume that moral propositions are realities in themselves this would go some distance to explain the tension between morality and reason. If the real and the rational are perpetually estranged from one another then morality as descriptor is opposed to reason.

But is a moral descriptor a fundamentally different proposition than a perceptive descriptor? We can argue until dawn whether the sky is actually blue. But the heavens will ultimately serve as evidence to support one proposition or the other. Misleading as the evidentiary appeal may be (why don't we consider the sky black?), moral propositions lack even such grounds for support. We can conduct a million abortions each year, no amount of repetition will bolster or denigrate the position that such actions are a moral wrong.

This may also explain why intution plays such a strong role in moral debate. If we are arguing the color of the sky, my perception will clearly indicate that it is black. Nevertheless, you may convince me that as a categorical statement, "the sky is blue" is true, despite its contradiction of my nighttime perceptions. Similarly, I may be brought to concede that a moral proposition is true despite its inconsistency with my moral perceptions. Moral propositions may be impervious to empirical validation, that doesn't mean they're impervious to rational critique.

But how can moral propositions be descriptive of reality if their referent enjoys no physical existence? How many other descriptoins can meet such a demanding standard? "San Francisco is 350 miles away." That is true for me. It's not true for you. It may not be true for me tomorrow. The truth of the statement is contingent upon the precision of its articulation and the context of its apprehension.

New Post

To resume the discussion from the post immediately below (technical difficulties):

The law defines as a crime as the commission of a prohibited act (actus reus) with a culpable mental state (mens rea). The Model Penal Code identifies four relevant mental states - purpose, knowledge, recklessness, and neglect. Any legislative definition of a crime should state with specificity which degree of culpable mental states are required to render the prohibited act criminal. There are some rules of construction for determining relevant mental states when the legislative text is silent. A special category of legal wrongs - termed "violations" - are ascribed without reference to any mental state. There's some great potential for mischief in that category, but that's discussion for another time.

It's a commonplace among lawyers that "motive is often confused with intent" by lay people. Motive is not used by the law to determine criminality - rather, it is offered as evidence to establish the existence of a culpable mental state. If I stand to inherit $20 million upon your death, that fact supports the inference that I purposely caused your death. My motive of self-enrichment reinforces the conclusion that I intended to murder. If I shot my best friend under the overpass, my lack of motive may support the inference that I neglectfully caused his death.

Once this legal distinction has been grasped, lawyers are free to snicker at the moral simpletons who ascribe moral value directly to motives. You may find it more abominable that a killer murdered to gratify abnormal sexual lust than that another murdered to acquire financial gain. But the lawyer would reduce both motives to identical significance - they establish that the actions were intended to kill and thus place both murderers in the same category of culpability.

Of course, the law often retains the same categories it licenses its practitioners to demean. Motive does acquire legal significance within the context of "justification and excuse" - moral calculations that are performed subsequent to the determination of criminal guilt. Under the law you may have purposely killed your wife's lover, but your motive of blind rage may yet exonerate you. You may have intended the death of the mugger, but your motive of self-defense may justify it. Your motive doesn't abolish the criminality of your act, but may excuse or justify it.

The archaic category "abandoned and malignant heart" does represent a normative judgment on the moral value of motives. Those who ascribe to the ALI's schema of culpability treat this description as a quaint relic, a laughable expression of the conceptual chaos which bedevilled earlier schemes of criminal law. The mockery is inappropriate, because it does submerge the very real moral gap lying between the law as it was and the law as it seeks to be (and to be fair, many state legal systems have been resistant to many of the proposals of the Model Penal).

But the law seldom claims to be co-extensive with morality. The law requires adherence to its precepts. It allows moral disagreement with those precepts. The impossibility of moral consensus makes law necessary - no action is so abhorrent that no person would do it. If any action were so abhorrent, no law would be required to prohibit it, since there would be no danger of such a crime's commission.

So, as a person struggling with American law, I perhaps have two issues. The first is what the moral value of motive properly should be. The second is what the legal value of motive should be. Morally, we do have intutions about which motives are noble, which are execrable, and how they may be meaningfully compared to one another. But the law can't deal with mere intuitions. It seeks to give form to those intuitions so that legal standards can be navigated even by those who are morally estranged from the legal system's foundations.

It seems an easy case that laying out an anticipatory scheme of motives would be more difficult than laying out a coherent scheme of intentions. But the difficulty of articulating a taxonomy of motives may be a simple function of the present absence of such a taxonomy. Nothing in the ALI's scheme of intention is self-evident, and the manner of its articulation is clearly the product of intensive reflection. Presumably similar attention could be paid to the issue of motive, leading to articulation of a "system of motive" equally comprehensive and general to the that of intention.

But does one want a legal system tailored to judge the evil of subjectivities? Is that even a good idea? Might it be a necessary one?

Evil Notes

I've been reading Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neiman.

Some categories, as defined by Neiman:

• Natural Evil - when bad things happen to people. Earthquakes, fires, floods and plagues.
  
  
• Moral Evil - when people do bad things. Crime, abuse, neglect.
  
  
• Metaphysical Evil - The gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. The ways in which reality systematically fails to conform to rational values.

In Neiman's account, the Englightenment begins with the human attempt to reconcile the Lisbon earthquake with faith in a benevolent reality. To do her subtle argument great violence, let's say that the Lisbon leads to rejection of the category "natural evil." Destruction wrought by the random and indifferent forces of nature was cabined off from discussion of evil. Human technology could forestall some evils, and with time would ward off more. If contingency should overwhelm our precautions, if nature should cause destruction which we were capable of warding off, then there would be a political question to be resolved, not a metaphysical one. Katrina reveals that governments should build strong levees, draft reasonable evacuation plans, and mobilize strong relief efforts - not that the universe is fundamentally disordered by inflicting suffering upon the innocent.

It's a good book, a great discussion, I recommend it highly. And now I'd like to ignore it completely. Or, to put it another way - I'd like to proceed with some thoughts. Please consider my debt acknowledged in general for I may fail to notice it in the particular, and in no case does a statement necessarily reflect one made by or amenable to Neiman.

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An evil outcome. "That should not have happened to you."

An evil action. "You should not have done that."

An evil essence. "That is not how things should be."

How is evil recognized? Is there an a priori definition of what constitutes an evil?

There isn't. Hence the seduction of relativism. The definition of "evil" relies upon intuitive labels. The state murders its citizens if it determines them guilty of crime. I may consider this justice. You may consider it an abomination. In all likelihood, we reach our initial stance on this issue intuitively. There may be moral propositions which attract a high degree of consensus - "Jews should not be wiped off the face of the earth." But, sadly, I can think of no moral proposition so outre that it has no proponents. And I'm sure if we found such a proposition, its identification alone would cause supporters to gravitate towards it.

None of this is to say that moral propositions can only be considered through intuition. Just because a moral proposition is formulated intuitively, does not mean it is determined by intuition. Moral argument is possible. But it can be very difficult.

Moral persuasion requires justification by alien standards. Moral tolerance requires irresolute moral predicates.

It is often argued that evils cannot be quantified. Toting up body counts or assigning utility values to human suffering and drawing assessments that "this is more evil than that" cannot be done. Such an outlook requires adoption of a moral predicate itself. Obviously it can be done, and is in fact done by folks of a utilitarian bent. In high school I remember encountering a philosophy textbook that refuted the utilitarian argument in something like the following terms:

Imagine a "torture show," in which an individual was subjected to physical torture for the pleasure of a large viewing audience. The small gain in pleasure experienced by millions of viewers may exceed the great loss in pleasure suffered by the victim of torture. But not even utilitarians defend such a scenario.

That was back in the days before Fear Factor. I consider it a "textbook" example (pardon the pun) against resorting to the indefensible imaginary. It is difficult to imagine any behavior which humans have not or will not engage in. It is impossible to imagine any which some will not defend.

These are notes, not a thesis... so some fragments:

• What is suffering? Incomplete destruction.
  
  
• Are aesthetics and morals flip sides of the same coin? Is an aesthetic failure an act of flawed creation while moral failure is an act of flawed destruction?
  
  
• If evil is defined in terms of destructions - lives, joys, objects which should not have been destroyed - is every moral proposition a theodicy of the status quo?
  
  
• Intent - the desire to create an outcome. Motive - the desire to obtain an outcome. Culpability - a legal term of art expressing a variable mental state relative to a given act.
  

Let's elaborate upon that last one for a moment. This distinction has been tormenting me lately, but every time I seem to seize hold of it, it evaporates in my hands.

The law defines as a crime as the commission of a prohibited act (actus reus) with a culpable mental state (mens rea). The Model Penal Code identifies four relevant mental states - purpose, knowledge, recklessness, and neglect. Any legislative definition of a crime should state with specificity which degree of culpable mental states are required to render the prohibited act criminal. There are some rules of construction for determining relevant mental states when the legislative text is silent. A special category of legal wrongs - termed "violations" - are ascribed without reference to any mental state. There's some great potential for mischief in that category, but that's discussion for another time.

It's a commonplace among lawyers that "motive is often confused with intent" by lay people. Motive is not used by the law to determine criminality - rather, it is offered as evidence to establish the existence of a culpable mental state. If I stand to inherit $20 million upon your death, that fact supports the inference that I purposely caused your death. My motive of self-enrichment reinforces the conclusion that I intended to murder. If I shot my best friend under the overpass, my lack of motive may support the inference that I neglectfully caused his death.

Once this legal distinction has been grasped, lawyers are free to snicker at the moral simpletons who ascribe moral value directly to motives. You may find it more abominable that a killer murdered to gratify abnormal sexual lust than that another murdered to acquire financial gain. But the lawyer would reduce both motives to identical significance - they establish that the actions were intended to kill and thus place both murderers in the same category of culpability.

Of course, the law often retains the same categories it licenses its practitioners to demean. Motive does acquire legal significance within the context of "justification and excuse" - moral calculations that are performed subsequent to the determination of criminal guilt. Under the law you may have purposely killed your wife's lover, but your motive of blind rage may yet exonerate you. You may have intended the death of the mugger, but your motive of self-defense may justify it. Your motive doesn't abolish the criminality of your act, but may excuse or justify it.

Some Thoughts

Dramatis Personae:
A man.
A gun.
A bullet.
Another.
A deus.
A machina.

[ANOTHER is standing stage right. MACHINA is standing recessed stage center. DEUS is standing inside MACHINA. ENTER MAN stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET. MAN is thinking about his mother.]

GUN: bang.
BULLET: whizz.
ANOTHER: Aaack! I've been shot!
MAN: Did I hear something?

[ANOTHER dies. DEUS exits MACHINA. ANOTHER lives again. DEUS enters MACHINA. MAN exits stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET.]

ANOTHER: That was a close call.

[ENTER MAN stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET. MAN is thinking he'd like to kill ANOTHER.]

GUN: bang.
BULLET: whizz.
ANOTHER: Aaack! I've been shot!
MAN: You had it coming, you bastard.

[ANOTHER dies. DEUS exits MACHINA. ANOTHER lives again. DEUS enters MACHINA. MAN exits stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET.]

ANOTHER: That was a close call.

[ENTER MAN stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET. MAN is thoughtless.]

GUN: bang.
BULLET: whizz.
ANOTHER: Aaack! I've been shot!
MAN: Gracious! How careless of me!

[ANOTHER dies. DEUS exits MACHINA. ANOTHER lives again. DEUS enters MACHINA. MAN exits stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET.]

ANOTHER: That was a close call.

[ENTER MAN stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET. MAN is out of mind.]

GUN: bang.
BULLET: whizz.
ANOTHER: Aaack! I've been shot!
MAN: Both notes rather flat.

[ANOTHER dies. DEUS exits MACHINA. ANOTHER lives again. DEUS enters MACHINA. MAN exits stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET.]

ANOTHER: That was a close call.

[ENTER MAN stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET. MAN is bent on vengeance.]

GUN: bang.
BULLET: whizz.
ANOTHER: Aaack! I've been nearly shot!
MAN: Drat!

[MAN exits stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET.]

ANOTHER: That was a close call.

[ENTER MAN stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET. MAN is troubled by doubt.]

GUN: bang.
BULLET: whizz.
ANOTHER: Aaack! You've been shot!
MAN: Yup.

[MAN dies. DEUS exits MACHINA. MAN lives again. DEUS enters MACHINA. MAN exits stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET.]

[ENTER MAN stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET. MAN rebels against the cosmos.]

GUN: bang.
BULLET: whizz.
MACHINA: Aaack! I've been shot!
MAN: To kill the God, you must break the machine.
ANOTHER: Hey! I was content.

[MACHINA dies. DEUS exits MACHINA, looks around nervously. MAN exits stage left, accompanied by GUN and BULLET.]

DEUS: That was a close call.

[Curtain falls.]