history lesson

by genghis gilgamesh

wendell manfred barrett iii was the richest man in the world, and the meanest and nastiest. he hated the whole human race because he felt that it did not properly respect him. one day wendell made what many people would take to be an improper advance to a young woman named hester hathaway, and hester rebuffed him and laughed in his face and called him a creep. for wendell, this was the last straw. he decided to avenge himself on the ungrateful human race, which did not appreciate him and which he had heretofore treated with such restraint. he bought up all the food in the world, and had it dumped into the deepest parts of the indian and pacific oceans. chaos and famine ensued, all over the world. wendell had a good laugh. but he had gone too far. his malicious prank accomplished, overnight, what centuries of theorizing snd propagandizing by socialist idealists had failed to do - turned the people of the world against capitalism. spontaneous uprisings against the world’s capitalist overlords were sparked in the largest cites all over the world and quickly spread to what was left of small towns and the “countryside”. capitalism was over. the human race reclaimed its natural birthright of peace and cooperation, and the long nightmares of war and oppression and exploitation were over. many years later, a graduate student named wanda wellington decided to write a paper on wendell manfred barrett iii. she went to the library and did some research. what she found she surprised her. it turned out that wendell manfred barrett iii had never really existed, and that his exploit of buying all the world’s food and dumping it in the ocean had never happened. the story had been made up and spread on the media of the time by the people who controlled and administered that media. credit for the “original story” was generally assigned to “ g r westbrook”, about whom or what no information survived. but the story had achieved its purpose, and the human race had been living happily ever after ever since. there was nothing to complain about, even if there had been somebody or something to complain about it to. wanda, sitting in the sunlight streaming through the window of the library, could not argue otherwise. and yet in some strange way she felt cheated.