Bless Me Father, I Ate A Lizard.

The Captain Looked Defensive. "you Regard Our Customs As Primitive?"every Society To Its Own Tastes, Captain. The Wisdom Of One Society Would Be Folly For Another. Who Is Qualified To Judge? Only The Universe, Which Passes The Judgment Of Survival On All Peoples.

Bless Me Father, I Ate A Lizard.

That's Where All Of Us Are Standing Now, He Thought. On The Fat Kindling Of Past Sins.

Listen, Are We Helpless? Are We Doomed To Do It Again And Again And Again? Have We No Choice But To Play The Phoenix In An Unending Sequence Of Rise And Fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, The Empires Of Charlemagne And The Turk: Ground To Dust And Plowed With Salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned Into The Oblivion Of The Centuries. And Again And Again And Again. Are We Doomed To It, Lord, Chained To The Pendulum Of Our Own Mad Clockwork, Helpless To Halt Its Swing? This Time, It Will Swing Us Clean To Oblivion.

What's To Be Believed? Or Does It Matter At All? When Mass Murder's Been Answered With Mass Murder, Rape With Rape, Hate With Hate, There's No Longer Much Meaning In Asking Whose Ax Is Bloodier. Evil, On Evil, Piled On Evil. Was There Any Justification In Our 'police Action' In Space? How Can We Know? Certainly There Was No Justification For What They Did - Or Was There? We Only Know What That Thing Says, And That Thing Is A Captive. The Asian Radio Has To Say What Will Least Displease It's Government; Ours Has To Say What Will Least Displease Our Fine Patriotic Opinionated Rabble, Which Is What, Coincidentally, The Government Wants It To Say Anyhow, So Where's The Difference?