The Banjo Players Must Die | Page 2

power vacuum the size of something really big. There was no unipolar world order, nor a bipolar one[Gladly, unicorns and bisexuals survived this purge.] There wasn't even a tri-polar world order[The triceratops had, woe, perished long before.] . There wasn't a quadripolar or pentapolar world order either for that matter, although that is most likely because those words don't really exist and were just made up. The world rapidly became so un-polar that - much to their embarrassment - the Dictionarium Aegyptum forgot to include the word polar in the 2187 edition and got it wrong in the next:
polar: poo`LAR - (anachr.) 1. The tendency to sexual arousal when exposed to banal legal minutiae 2. An obscure skin condition ("I have a polar on my bum." - "You have a what? ") 3. Something remarkably like an obscure skin condition 4. The tendency to discuss banal legal minutiae when initiating sexual congress.
Dictionarium Aegyptum
After 2044, the world lived in a state of mundane and unenthusiastic nationalism, with a plurality of nation-states actually getting along with one another, and ignoring one another when not getting along instead of exchanging invective and weapons of mass destruction.
In 2051, the Arabs and the Jews made peace, having exhausted their respective supplies of race-laden swear words and not feeling inclined to making any more up[Had the Egyptians and Israelis been sufficiently motivated, they could have learned Finnish or Swedish and kept at it for another few centuries.] . The Americans forgave the Cubans in 2054, and the Cubans forgave the Americans a few decades later for forgiving them when they had done nothing wrong. In fact, peace reigned; the Dalai Lama made the Chinese Politburo (which as a historical event might suffer some dilution from the fact that the Politburo had some years earlier reformed itself into a dance club), the tree-hugging bleeding heart hippies became mainstream (of course, mainstream reacted by ambling off somewhere, breathing through its nose and rolling its eyes), and dogs picked up their own feces.
This nauseating state of utopia fortunately didn't last long; once again from Stromgard's Concise Account of History, Abridged:
"...therefore they could do only one thing; admit defeat and move on. Not that this deterred them very much; it wasn't much longer until they resumed the struggle, undeterred by any deterrents which may previously have been.
Not that they remembered particularly much at that point what the whole struggle was about, just as I don't quite recall either. But that was never the point. The nobility is in the struggle, and the struggle ..."
Concise Account of History, Abridged - Stromgard
Or, perhaps slightly more lucidly, from The Pocket Guide to Human History by Caldwell[Despite the widespread use of Caldwell's work as a passable guide to Stromgard's quality work, not much is known of Caldwell himself. Not even his first name is known though it is rumored to be Catherine. Caldwell was otherwise widely maligned for writing sensible books and died in abject poverty of a broken heart, gonorrhea, Brussels sprouts syndrome, and of unspecified and vague ass pains.] :
There were those whom global peace, understanding, and cooperation didn't suit. The arms industry soon tired of producing weapons systems that would never be used for anything other than hunting rabbits and squirrels. Plastic button manufacturers were forced into bankruptcy; the lack of political strife drove down demand something horrible.
It could only end badly.
The Pocket Guide to Human History - Caldwell
Without political strife, it got boring quickly. Religious strife wasn't an option either, since it had pretty much been done to death by the Semitic peoples in the Middle East; religious conflict as an art-form had been perfected there and had been laid to rest complete. And, truth to tell, one couldn't simply have plain old strife, it had to have a qualifying adjective of suitable character to validate it and lend it gravitas.
For once, humanity was at a genuine loss for something worthwhile to kill each other over.
They tried out botanical strife in Guatemala, but there was something about fighting over palm fronds which smothered enthusiasm. Boustrophedonic strife erupted briefly in Canada but petered out quickly amidst angry cries for new types of strife with more pronounceable names. The University of Two Goats, Arizona produced a paper proposing typographical strife, but the idea failed to imprint itself outside the limited circulation of academic journals. A Belgian priest - finding that his profession could not survive without people killing each other in large numbers over trivial differences of opinion - proposed that we change the way strife is spelled to stryphe, thereby enabling people to engage in ethnic stryphe without the feeling that they are reinventing the wheel. This triggered a violent bout of semantic strife which did not die down until Father Manicurus was dispatched to the aphterlyphe. The southern German province