Man’s answer in his more barbaric stage was always VIOLENCE. If you weren’t obeyed, use VIOLENCE!

If you were balked, use VIOLENCE!

If they wouldn’t bow or scrape or wouldn’t lick the boots, then VIOLENCE was the answer, fit for one and all and, in particular, YOU.

But where did all this violence get Man? Where did rows of trenches men for four years filled with uncounted dead get Man? Just where the A-bomb and the H-bomb and the Z-bomb will get him.

Back to barbarianism ! Let’s blow it all up ! Let’s splatter Earth and all her pleasant ways to atoms and to shreds. VIOLENCE! Ah, that’s the answer, isn’t it? The very thing to do to little kids. Blow them up! That stops their weeping. Kill them all. They only die but once. But do they? Do they now?

What a foul trick fate waits to play upon the Men of Violence. They blow it all up. They spatter their homes and kids and fishing poles from here to Kingdom Come. They blow it all up and blow themselves out of their heads.

And they aren’t dead ! They’re still alive and only the body is dead and nothing is solved. And, oh my, isn’t it messed up!

No priest was there, no Gabriel with a cornet solo to play them into Pearly Gates.

Not even the wasted coals of hell exist to greet them.

They blasted everything in sight and the other men blew back and they all blew out of their silly heads and charred derbies and caps and homburgs and what did they see?

They saw a world they’d ruined all out of political cause and glee. They saw bodies where their kids had been and bones where their hat had been and embers where their lives had been. And all nicely radioactive now. And nothing with which to rebuild the world. Nothing. No order. Just chaos. No bodies. Just fish. No grass, just radiation.

A planet as bald as a burned egg. And that’s their win. And they’ve earned the right to build it back with nothing to work with and no people to talk to and no fishing pole, no books, no blueprint.

The joke’s on them. They did live. They did come back. There wasn’t either death or heaven and it’s all to do again.

Too bad the rest of us are being asked to come along too. Otherwise it would be such a good cruel joke on these MEN OF VIOLENCE.