"Harlan Ellison - Paingod & Other Delusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

But now it’s ten years later and yesterday a friend of mine’s sixty-five-year-old mother got mugged and
robbed in broad daylight by two black girls. It’s ten years later and a girl I once loved very deeply got raped
repeatedly, at knife-point, in the back seat of her own car in an empty lot behind a bowling alley in the San
Fernando Valley by a black dude who kept at her for seven hours. It’s ten years later and Martin Luther King is
dead and Super Fly is alive, and what am I to say to Doris Pitkin Buck, who lost her dear and magical Richard on
the streets of Washington, D.C. to a pack of black killers who chose to stomp to death a man in his eighties for
however much stash-money he might have been carrying?
Do I say to that friend of mine: when they went to drag the Mississippi swamps for the bodies of the civil
rights workers Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman they dredged up the bodies of sixteen black men who had been
cavalierly murdered and dumped in the muck, and no one even gave a damn, the newspapers didn’t even make much
of a note of it, that was the accepted way to handle an “uppity nigger” in the South? Do I say that and hope I’ve
said something rational?
Do I say to that girl I loved: every time you see a mocha-colored Maid or waitress it means her
great-great-grandmother was a sexual pin-cushion for some plantation Massa’, that rape and indentured bed
service was taken for granted for two hundred years and if it was refused there was always a stout length of
cordwood to change the girl’s thinking? Do I say that and hope I’ve drawn a reasonable parallel?
Do I tell brave and talented Doris Buck, who never hurt anyone in her life, that we’re paying dues for what
our ancestors did, that we’re reaping the terrible crop of pain and evil and murder committed in the name of White
Supremacy, that white men rob and rape and steal and kill as well as black, but that blacks are poorer, more
desperate, more frustrated, angrier? Do I say that and hope to stop her tears with logic?
Why the hell do we expect a nobility of blacks that whites never possessed?
Of course I don’t say that pack of simple-minded platitudes. Personal pain is incapable of spontaneous
remission in the presence of loss. I say nothing.
But my days of White Liberal Guilt are gone. My days of championing whole classes and sexes and
pigmentations of people is gone. The Sixties are gone, and we live in the terrible present, where death and guilt
don’t mix. Now I come, after all these years, to the only position that works: each one on his or her own merits,
black/white/yellow/brown. Not all Jews are money-gouging kikes, but some are. Not all blacks are slavering
rapists, but some are.
And we come to the question again and again, what kind of a god is it that permits such misery…are we
truly cast in his image, such an image of cruelty and rapaciousness…were we put here really to suffer such torment?
Let the Children of God answer that one with something other than no-brain jingoism. Mark Twain said, “If one
truly believes there is an all-powerful Deity, and one looks around at the condition of the universe, one is led
inescapably to the conclusion that God is a malign thug.” That’s the quote that caused me to write “The
Deathbird.” It’s a puzzle I cannot reason out.
I doubt. I have always doubted since the day I read in the Old Testament-the word of God, remember-that
there was only Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, and then Cain got married. To whom? To Eve? Then don’t tell me
what a no-no incest is.
Isaac Asimov assures me it’s a rational universe, predicated on sanity and order. Yeah? Well, tell me about
God. Tell me who He is, why He allows the foulest hyenas of our society to run amuck while decent men and women
cower in terror behind Fox locks and Dictograph systems. Tell me about Him. Equate theology with the world in
which we live, with William Calley and Kitty Genovese and the people who keep their kids out of school because the
new textbooks dare to say Humans are clever descendants of the Ape. No? Having some trouble? Getting ready to
write me a letter denouncing me as the AntiChrist? “God in his infinite wisdom” you say? Faith, you urge me? I
have faith…in people, not Gods.
But perhaps believe is not enough. Perhaps doubt serves the cause more honestly, more boldly. If so, I offer
by way of faith

Paingod
Tears were impossible, yet tears were his heritage. Sorrow was beyond him, yet sorrow was his birthright. Anguish
was denied him; even so, anguish was his stock in trade. For Trente, there was no unhappiness; nor was there joy,