Welcome To Opine

Prologue

Old Opine Rhyme:

O pale blue sun in thy blue sky,
How doth thee light upon mine eye!

Haloed with thy white corona,
Art thou bloomed from fair Pomona?

Old Opine Parable:

A Negro at a slave auction crawls over to a white man, begging for water. When a slave trader sees this, he walks up to the white man.

“Kick that nigger!” the slave trader says to him.
The white man turns and kicks the slave trader.
“Why’d you do that for?” the slave trader says. “I said kick the nigger!” “It makes no difference to me,” the white man replies, “I’m blind!”

Excerpt from People’s Guide to Foolery, by Clover Watsonia:

“Mr. Chazos, would you like the newest model smart phone, or the model from last year, which is almost exactly the same?”

“Which is the more expensive?” “The newer model.”
“Then it’s the best. I’ll take it!”

“Mr. Chazos, would you like the newest model car that comes with all the newest technology, or last year’s model, which has last year’s technology but has a better safety record?”
“Which is the more expensive?”

“The newer model.”
“Then it’s the best. I’ll take it!”

“Mr. Chazos, would you like your son to attend our new trade school, which will train him how to speculate on the stock market and profit off the financial economy; or our liberal arts school, which will pre- pare your son for graduate study while offering exposure to a more broad-based curriculum studying the greatest achievements in art, literature, music, history, philosophy, ethics, and all the social and natural sciences?”

“I’ll take the trade school!”
“Really? But the liberal arts school is the more expensive!”
“Hey buddy, I’m not buying a lousy phone or car here! This is my son’s future we’re talking about!”

One

‘Twas the blood squibs that mattered the most.

The device was simple enough for use by an elementary school morality play about the Fools: like a tiny stick of dynamite, a small tube encloses a detonator wired to an electronic trigger, linked remotely. Press the button and it launches a jet of fake blood. A convincing blood spurt was crucial to ensure the comic element was not diminished in the slightest. After all, what good is any morality play about the Fools without the comic element? Laughter was the undisputed panacea for all social stresses in Opine. Laughter was the catharsis through which the Fool’s Bane was lampooned. The social, mental, and physical benefits of laughter were true way back then, billions of years ago, for the Ancients, as they were now. As always, the topic for the play was chosen at random. There were way too many viable topics to warrant a hierarchy of value, or relevance. And way too many to exhaust over a lifetime of morality plays. Any one would do just fine. The Find, which we shall address shortly, provided more than enough material for ages to come.

This particular play was dealing with the inception of the Americas. You cannot fully appreciate one of these morality plays unless you are there. The exhilaration of the spurting blood, the laughter, the release, it all had to be experienced firsthand. Morality plays were a catharsis for the ancient Greeks, as were the Olympic games. The gladiatorial spectacles were a catharsis for the ancient Romans, as was the insatiable bloodlust back then. And, in the absence of violence and war, dramatic portrayals of violence and war, for thousands upon thousands of generations. This, however, was a different kind of catharsis. This was psychological purification of the highest order. This was fostering a State of Contentment, in real time.

The parents beam with delight as second grader Aster Bottlebrush, dressed as a Spaniard, approaches another child dressed as a Native American. “We Spaniards are here to take over your land of Hispaniola,” Aster says, in that wonderfully placid monotone, like it was the first reading. “You will dig in the mines for gold.” The other child answers, “But this is our land. You can’t do this to a peaceful people. Can we please live together in peace?” “No,” Aster answers, “you will do as we say. We are your masters now.” “That is cruel and unjust,” the Native American answers, “and we will resist you.” Aster raises a plastic matchlock musket. “Then you shall all die,” he says. “By 1508 we will massacre three million of your people.” Aster pulls the trigger, snap. Blood squirts from the wound in a thin jet. The child wheels around and the blood sprays the parents. They roar in laughter. The grinning teacher claps.

The next two boys step up, pockets of laughter still lingering, one boy dressed as a Native American, the other as an English settler. “Powhatan,” the settler says, “some of our friends ran away to you. Please return them.” “They were starving, and came to us for food,” Powhatan answers. The English settler raises his musket. “If you do not comply, you will die.” Powhatan replies, “It was you who settled on our land, yet we did not attack you.” The English settler says, “None of that matters. We will burn your houses down, burn your crops, take your queen from you, and then take your children in our boats and blow their brains out.” Snap, the blood squirts, the range especially impressive. As the child falls, some of it spurts into a woman’s mouth as she laughs. Her laugh becomes gargled: “Ha-guhguhguhguh, ha-guhguhguhguh,” though she doesn’t mind because fake blood at public events like these was always washable, and flavored, this one as strawberry vegan cheesecake, and it was considered a privilege to be showered with fake blood ridiculing the Fools. The entire room is resplendent with pride and delight. Their children were learning, educating, entertaining, and purifying, all at once.

Now it was time for a pair of girls. It didn’t matter that they were girls. The point would come across, regardless. And the comic element. “One of your Pequot Native Americans killed one of our white men,” the girl dressed as an English settler begins, with the same mono- tone as the boys, the same wooden expression. “We shall punish him,” the other girl responds. “But you should know the white man he killed kidnapped one of our own.” The English settler raises her musket. “None of that matters,” she says. “We shall make war on the Pequots. We will massacre your people. Not only the warriors, but also your innocent men, women, and children. We will set fire to your villages. We will cut to pieces anybody who does not burn in the fire.” Pop, squirt. And then half the class dressed as settlers closes in on the other half dressed as Native Americans, firing their toy plastic muskets and the spurting is a sprightly celebration of thin red streamers, bathing kids, bathing the parents, all in uproarious guffawing as the classroom quickly becomes showered in the joyous revelry of meditative therapeutic purifying Opine bliss and how the parents were so proud and how the teacher was so proud and there was more ha-guhguhguhguh and this was only the first act, there was so much more to come, so much more teaching and so much more learning, and don’t forget laughter, the panacea for all social stresses, the beloved unlimited reservoir of laughter supplied by the unlimited reservoir of the Fools.

‘Twas the blood squibs that mattered the most.

Two

Chunky happy Nerine Bayberry, dressed in the customary Opine colorful flower pastels, entered the Boxwood Borough Revelation Chamber, the room full of exactly one hundred children, dancing what amounted to a cross between an Irish jig and a Scottish highland dance, although those places, Scotland and Ireland, were meaningful only insofar as they represented long-lost territories inhabited by the Ancients, some of whom, of course, were the Fools. “Some” was the best quantitative approximation one could ever say about the population density of the Fools, as everybody knew the relevance of their legacy rested solely on their influence upon Opine’s present State of Contentment, to be presently revealed by the all-important rite of passage ceremony at hand, the Revelation.

The term Revelation was of course taken from the Bible, one of the many, many digital documents recovered from The Find, though it must be understood that the people of Opine, the Opinions (the first “i” pronounced with a long vowel), completely disregarded its Biblical significance when selecting an apt designation for this all- important event enlightening eight-year-old children to the wonderful history of their existence. The story of the Biblical Revelation was well-known, but of course not taken seriously. Indeed, it was lampooned regularly among the other myths, not because they were myths—indeed, the historical and moral teachings of myths were of paramount literary and sociological importance—but because there were actually people back then who read similar passages from the Bible and took them at face value, as if they actually happened, or as if the dark, foreboding portents within would actually happen. As a professor quipped, “Let me know if the world ends, so I can say I told you so!” The Opinions were trained at very early ages to separate the sublime from the ridiculous, and the ridiculous offered exhaustive opportunities for education, entertainment, and therapy, all critical to maintaining a balanced State of Contentment.

There were one hundred children dressed in adorable cute flowery outfits in the chamber because one hundred was a nice round number and every bubbly Revelation teacher was responsible for one hundred children. Every child is told by their parents this was a very important event in their lives and their Revelation was the first step to their understanding of how they came to be Opinions. The beautiful part is that all the children would completely accept what they heard because in Opine, the word “opinion” was not in circulation as a common noun, except in Ancient parlance, but as a proper noun to describe their common heritage as the people of Opine. Opinions had tastes but they didn’t have opinions about what was true, because to have an opinion about what was true would imply there are facts independent of universal truths, and anything other than a universal truth to an Opinion would be very much like anything other than a fact to us, like saying the daytime sky is yellow when it is in fact blue. The Opinions cannot distinguish between a fact, like “the sky is blue,” and a universal truth, like “no one individual possesses more natural human worth than another,” because each of these statements occupy the same plane of truthfulness.

So when chubby chirpy Nerine Bayberry stopped dancing and the children stopped laughing, the children never questioned what Ms. Bayberry had to tell them in her characteristically Opine-bubbly style. Because questioning her would be like questioning the existence of the blue sun in the blue sky. She told them the truth and they all knew it was the truth before she even told them the truth. She told them that the planet they were living on, Opine, used to be called Earth. That billions of years ago it had been revolving around another star the ancient inhabitants (christened the Ancients) had called the Sun, in a completely different solar system in a completely separate galaxy. Then, around five billions years later, just about when the Sun was beginning its red giant phase, the galaxy known as the Milky Way had merged with the galaxy known as the Andromeda, and somewhere along the line Earth had been gravitationally ejected out of its orbit, spending a million years as a rogue planet before being gravitationally captured by a blue star, a very unique type of blue star called a blue dwarf, evolved from a red dwarf.

Ms. Bayberry was very lively as she danced around the screen pointing to happy bubbly graphics of ancient Earth and its white star (it was not yellow but white, that is the truth), and then to its new star, a star that used to be a red dwarf but was now a blue dwarf because it had increased its surface temperature over many millions of years and would eventually cool to a white dwarf and finally a black dwarf. And how wonderfully lucky they were that what used to be called Earth had been gravitationally captured, along with a single moon about three-quarters the size of the Ancient moon, by this puny little blue dwarf star, and how lucky they were that billions of years later the evolutionary process that had led to complex life on Earth, beginning with a primordial soup and ending with all the richly variegated plant and animal species so meticulously preserved on the digital documents within The Find, had all risen again, and that this most likely happens quite often in the universe, for as long as there was a planet the right distance from a star, life would indeed be resilient, it would arise, given the right conditions to trigger the processes and feedback loops and chemical reactions necessary to eventually spawn self-replicating complex life, given the happy coincidences of time and circumstance, because that is what the Opinions knew and understood it to be, happy coincidences, not preordained fate, not divine fortune, not some supreme being’s will, but just another universal truth, another lucky roll of the cosmic dice, another validation of the way things have been, and are, and always will be. Time and circumstance rule all.

All told, modern Opinion astrophysicists calculated that it took approximately nine billion Earth 1.0 years from the demise of Homo Sapiens 1.0 on Earth 1.0 to the emergence of Homo Sapiens on Earth 2.0 (this translates to about fourteen billion four hundred million years on Opine, where the year is 228 days). It sounds like an eternity, but nine billion years is a blink of the eye in the lifetime of the Cosmos.