Sausage Party (2016): Serious, Open-Minded, Open-Ended, "Dialogic," Raunchy (Strongly Theological) Satire

Sausage Party (2016): Serious, Open-Minded, Open-Ended, "Dialogic," Raunchy (Strongly Theological) Satire

Sausage Party. Dir. Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. Story by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Jonah Hill. Script by Rogen Goldberg,

        Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir. USA: Annapurna Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Nitrogen Studies Canada, Point Grey Pictures

        (production) / Columbia Pictures (US distribution), 2016.

            Sausage Party is far from a subtle film, but it is complex — satires tend to be overstuffed — and nuanced: "dialogic" in a rich sense suggested by Dustin Griffin of debating with itself issues in contention in our culture.

            For example of an issue: religion. There is indeed a religion in Sausage Party, with ethnic variations.

            As Jordan Hoffman summarizes the premise in a brief review in The Guardian (10 August 2016), the main action of this very adult cartoon is set in a supermarket (one in a chain in a chain called Shopwell's): a supermarket world that competes for our attention, in traditional satiric fashion, with the plot and characters.

The supermarket is what Erving Goffman might call a total institution. Its occupants (food from around the world) are kept compliant by an unprovable belief system. If they are good and obey the gods, they will one day be chosen and taken to the “Great Beyond” (outside the gleaming automated doors) in a cart. But they will only get picked if they remain pure of spirit; the “unfresh” get tossed into a dusty bin by a sadist tormentor (actually just a teen bored with his job). This fear prevents sausages and buns from getting intimate, despite their urges to conjoin.

Of course — spoilers here, if you're really fastidious about such things — of course, the "Great beyond" is a human world where the denizens of the supermarket are almost all food, or items to be consumed in other ways, e.g., as a vaginal douche or a condom.

            Unless seriously messed up from injected bath salts, the "gods" of the world of Sausage Party are humans blissfully unaware of their (our!) monstrous cruelty to foodstuffs — we have the horrific early shot of a woman munching on carrots, baby carrots! [i] — and the myth of the Great Beyond is not imposed by the store's human management but is introduced as an act of kindness by a small group of stoner "imperishables,": a Native American Firewater, African-American Grits, an apparently Euro-American Twinkie (called "Twink"), and a drummer. In the world of this Shopwell's, these immortals share the same … let's say ontological status as the fresh and canned foodstuffs, except they are relatively eternal, enlightened, and serve like demigods intermediary between the food characters and the unthinkingly cruel human "gods.

            The "real" situation of the food (and I'll justify those "scare quotes" later) — the real situation of the denizens of the supermarket is horrible. The first victims we see in the very non-Great Beyond are those baby carrots being chomped on raw and a nice Irish potato being flayed ("peeled" in the human euphemism), partially blinded (as some eyes are plucked out), and boiled.

            These food folk need what one of Henrik Ibsen characters in The Wild Duck (1884) calls, in English translation, a "vital lie" or "life-lie": the "Basic Lie that makes life possible." The lie of the Great Beyond shields the food characters from the horror of their existence and, embodied in their morning song ("The Great Beyond") gives hope, joy, and a touch of musical beauty to their lives.

            On the other hand, in addition to being a lie, the myth of the Great Beyond as it has evolved on the various food aisles also underlines a food-stuff morality that has become puritanical and stands in the way of  many of the characters' shucking their wrappers and engaging in sex. Not all the characters, but very definitely the leads have their sexuality blocked by what they believe is the demands of the gods for their purity. Of course we real-world supermarket-shopping humans do want our food pure, but not in that way, and the foods' focusing in on purity as a sexual matter is an astute comment on the bad happy of religious folk to take the word "morality" to mean "sexual morality" and bodily purity to refer mostly to sex.

            If you know Plato's Allegory of the Cave, or grew up on stories and narrative films, you know that someone will come back to the supermarket with the Truth of the foodstuff condition and that there will be a more or less Heroic quest to confirm the Truth. And both occur. A jar of honey mustard is returned by a careless shopper-god who wanted regular, and Honey Mustard (the character) warns the other food of their fate in a very non-Great beyond when the shoppers get them home. The lead frankfurter, Frank, quests for the Truth and gets it from Firewater and the other imperishables and a large recipe book — there may be a classic Twilight Zone episode lurking in the background here — and mal-formed frankfurter Barry returns from the Great Beyond to tell his experiences with the baby-carrot-eating shopper and later with a doper who's used bath salts like heroin and broken through to communication with his food. Barry brings back confirmation of what Frank has learned, plus the head of the doper. (It's a long, funny sequence, and a detailed synopsis can be found on line.) But what do you do with a Truth that's way more than inconvenient? One that's downright awful?

            That is a serious question in the film, and its relevance for the audience is signaled by having a definitely un-mad scientist in a chewed or otherwise mutilated piece of gum in a powered wheelchair talking a whole lot like Stephen Hawking and elegantly serving as a character-correlative for a scientific worldview and cosmology.

            "The Great Beyond" is the supermarket version of "You'll get pie in the sky when you die," and "that's a lie" (although some of the fruit going to the Great Beyond may end up as pie) — and a lie that blocks pleasure in the here and now, before the food gets bought and prepared — chopped up, skinned, cooked to death, to be more graphic. And, verily, even so for real-world religions that block pleasure and resistance to injustice now and promise eternal happiness "Beyond": beyond our lives and our world, in this case for a soul separable from one's doomed body.

            On the other other hand, a purely materialist, up-to-date scientific cosmology renders the human species radically insignificant and trivial, and most of us studiously ignore the probable impending extinction of our species — most species do go extinct — and, in realistic, "Big Picture" terms, the utter meaninglessness and triviality of any human individual.

            How should we handle bringing that sort of news to anthropomorphic cartoon foodstuffs or to most real-world people?

            Sausage Party wisely answers the question by suggesting we should bring such a discouraging, hope-killing word gently and in a way that respects people's desire to avoid the inevitable pain of mortality and the quite possible possibility of that mortality coming in really awful ways.

            Frank delivers the Truth initially via the store's extensive TV screens and speaker system, with little effect: the food won't believe his blasphemy nor his page from that gruesomely illustrated (from a food point of view) recipe book. But small, mal-formed, underappreciated Barry — this folk motif was a moldie-oldie when it appeared in Beowulf — frankfurter Barry has returned with news of liquefied and injected bath salts opening the doors of perception between food and the evil gods, and proof that the shopper-gods can be killed.

            The Shopwell's inhabitants prepare the bath salts, use the liquid to poison the points of those long party toothpicks you use to skewer appetizers, and rebel. The result is a Twilight of the Evil Gods as a kind of Ragnarok at Ralph's — okay, its "Shopwell's," but "Ralph's alliterates — followed by a food orgy of roly-poly-polymorphous sexual perversities of impressive ingenuity and energy — which is presented as a happy dramatic climax and a Good Thing.

            And yet … Well, Gum/Stephen Hawking, that voice of Reason, has told the lead foods and us of other supermarkets, and the more cynical among audience members might rejoice in the joyful killings of customers and crew in this Shopwell's but wonder about the others or even what the upshot will be at this store. The action of the film is set in the US on the 3^rd and 4^th of July, and older Americans anyway might start thinking about what will happen on The Day After this Revolution.

            Or not.

            There is a nasty habit in big-money apocalyptic films that you can kill off huge numbers of people and have an upbeat ending so long as the main characters come through all right and there's some restoration, usually of a family, such as at the end of the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds (2005). If you want to take a jaundiced view of Sausage Party, you can accuse its makers of simply not inviting the audience to think about — or care about — what will happen to most of the foodstuffs "the day after the revolution" (and orgy) when/if the outside world impinges on the world of this Shopwell's, or, if audience members do think about it at all, to just rejoice in the survival of the lead foods. A more generous reading could place Sausage Party in  the tradition in serious satire of a final turn that denies any kind of simple, didactic, moralistic closure — happy or sad. At the very end of Sausage Party, in the After the Revolution/After the Orgy Coda, the main characters are told by the reliable Gum that the real reality is that they are cartoon characters and can reach the real "Great Beyond" through a kind of stargate into the world of their makers, the world of the producers, directors, actors, and crew who made the film Sausage Party.

            In the final action of the film, Frank and the major characters join hands and go through the stargate-ish portal to get at Seth Rogen and Edward Norton (imaged as cheap versions of the giant head of the Wizard of Oz) to, in the on-line words of a guy or gal called Jeremy, "cut the strings loose from these puppet masters." Or whatever; the truth we see is the main characters' walking together into an unknown future in a totally different reality, leaving the aftermath of one hell of an orgy for sure but also a victory that we may believe will endure, or not.

            That is what we see at the end of the film, what we see while still caught up in "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" (my emphasis). Members of the audience know we are watching a cartoon, and we're reminded of that fact and that it was made by Rogen and Norton and a large group of other real-world human beings. And we know, if we think about it a moment that the real real real reality is that we are sitting in a movie theater watching flickering lights on a screen and listening to recorded sound telling a wildly improbable tale of fucking sentient, anthropomorphic talking foodstuffs!

            In Sausage Party, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, Kristen Wiig, and their merry band/Usual-Gang-of-Idiots list of very talented collaborators give contemporary audiences a fine example of what effective satire can deliver: a serious, seriously raunchy obscene kick in the assumptions that can get us laughing and should get us thinking. The film reduces to the absurd and the grotesque any happy faith in comforting lies, and also targets arrogant attempts to force upon fictional foods and real-world humans Truth and "truths" that may be at best only part of larger realities.

            Bad and even most mediocre satire give us "monologic," one-voiced propaganda or pedantry insisting on a simple truth seen from one point of view. Great satire gives us a combination of voices, several views, and open endings.

            And I haven't even mentioned the politics in Sausage Party.

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Note

         [i] Note Roald Dahl's "The Sound Machine," The New Yorker, 17 September 1949: 29 f., where a man invents a machine that may, or may not, allow humans to hear "sounds beyond the normal human range, including screams from plants when they are cut or trimmed." I had not read the Dahl story but had read a comic book variation on it, allowing me to tease a vegetarian friend about his fiendishly eating vegetables, explicitly mentioning his munching on baby carrots. The comic may have used a Harvey Kurtzman script, "The Sounds from Another World," Weird Science #14 (September-October 1950), a piece cited by Bill Schelly in Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created MAD and Revolutionized Humor in America, whom I quote above in this note (p. 154).

Religion, Atheism, Body Counts, "Foma," and a "Vital Lie"

         Among the comments on The Diane Rehm Show for Friday, 15 January 2016, one complains that Derek McGinty, the guest host, had much too quickly dismissed a call for (ultimately) eliminating religion to eliminate terrorism and other bad things. McGinty said the idea was — if I heard right — a "nonstarter."

         The commenter was right to resent the offhand dismissal, but McGinty had a point, given the numbers. Atheists are a small demographic, while believers' numbers are massive. The world may be moving toward the secular — and a recent book called Big Gods suggests that there is the possibility of an ethical, post-religious world — but currently the idea of large numbers of people giving up their beliefs and accepting a life of "Emptiness! Emptiness! All is empty" and futile is a nonstarter.

         A relatively objective, scientific, realistic assessment of the human condition is that the human species is trivial even in just our universe, to say nothing of a multiverse in which the vanishingly small significance of our galaxy approaches literal nothingness in what may be an infinity of worlds. Statistically normal people want significance for humanity and even individual human lives, and it's difficult to justify such ideas without some sort of leap into the absurd. Believing in God is a leap of faith; beginning that in The Big Picture some individual human is significant is just "counterfactual," what Kurt Vonnegut labels a "foma" in Cat's Cradle (1963): a comforting lie.

         Other numbers that need to be looked at are body counts, conveniently tabulated by Matthew White on line and in The Great Big Book Of Horrible Things. Religion (God knows ...) has produced an impressive number of human corpses and other atrocities, with the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions no slouches in slaughter. Still, humans are capable of killing humans in massive numbers for reasons less rationally elegant than religious fanaticism. Simple greed and arrogance led to the small-scale genocides of California Indians during the Gold Rush, and — unless you buy the Christianizing and "Civilizing Mission" bullshit propaganda — the large-scale murder in King Leopold's Congo and other places in colonized Africa. Genghis Khan felt the Mongol form of the Mandate of Heaven, but his conquests with their forty million dead were mostly nitty-gritty political. And, of course, Stalin was officially an atheist and didn't pay a whole lot of attention to spreading the doctrines of the Russian Orthodox Church.

         Certainly Idealists and Guys With Theories and Weapons are major threats, especially when they believe that the real human reality is in a soul separable from the body and of infinitely more value than the body. The Theory, though, doesn't have to be specifically religious, just idealistic enough to get fanatical about. Or, as with slave trades and slave economies, millions can suffer or die for other people's profit and joy in power. 

         It is probably a "foma" to believe that God exists and cares about human life and indirectly gives our lives meaning and purpose. To use an idea from Henrik Ibsen's Wild Duck (1884), that human life has value may be a kind of species "vital lie," or "life-lie": a necessity for survival.

         Ara Norenzayan observes in Big Gods that most psychological research has been done on the "weird brains" of people who are "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic." That's a minor point for me; the major one is that the great majority of people are not weirdly wired and part of such statistical normality is religious belief. That's about as close as you'll come to an objective fact, and atheists who want the world to "get real" need to deal with that fact. They also need to deal with the implications of a rigorously materialist view of the human condition. The "Emptiness! Emptiness" of Koheleth ("Ecclesiastes") is one starting point for that discussion; so is the rigorous philosophy amid the twisted pornography of the Marquis de Sade in the "Manners" pamphlet — "Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen …" — in Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795). The mad but logical Marquis can argue that murdering someone doesn't really destroy life, on balance, since if you bury the body and dig it up later, what we'd call biomass has, if anything increased; and there's no particular reason in nature — only in humans' bias in favor of humans and human consciousness — to prefer the biomass of a living human to that of the organisms of putrefaction.

          Me, I am by temperament a vulgar Pragmatist — I check out where logical premises are going before accepting them — and one who read some Existentialism for Dummies at an impressionable age and took a fair number of courses in the life sciences. I'm also a Vonnegut fan. There's much bracing stuff in Koheleth and de Sade and Vonnegut and Jean-Paul Sartre in simplified translation. Still/So, as a practical matter, I'd prefer it if my fellow humans carefully follow beliefs that hold down body counts; and I'd prefer it if people who see themselves as tough-minded toughed it through the implications of their beliefs.

Hard-Headed Science-Fictional Romantic (A)Theism: The Mystic Leaps in Arthur C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END and SPACE ODYSSEY

 

            In August of 2011, there was an exchange on the ListServ of the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA-L Digest, 13.24) among some heavy hitters in the field — Elizabeth Hull, Eric Rabkin, James Gunn — on the tone and meaning of the conclusion of Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 novel, Childhood's End. The ending is both somber and sublime and a test — perhaps a kind of Rorschach test — of readers' values and worldview.

            In the climactic sequence of the novel, the prepubescent children of Earth come together in a mass with each former child showing "no more emotion or feeling here than in the face of a snake or an insect." The controlling aliens in the novel, "The Overlords themselves were more human than this," but the lead Overlord tells the last human, watching with distress Earth's former children, that he is “searching for something that is no longer there. […T]hey have no more identity than the cells in your own body. But linked together, they are something much greater than you" (ch. 23, [Ballantine 1953: 202-03]).

            To that last man and to just about any reader, the transition from children to … this is appalling. In their development, the children at first appear savage and then what we would call subhuman: filthy to start with, and then appallingly destructive, sterilizing the world around them, and finally destroying it. They are on their way free from "the tyranny of matter" (ch. 20, p. 183), but this allows a contempt for the body and for nonhuman life: The adults of Earth have been dead for a while, typically in despair at the loss of posterity and their world, typically by suicide in one sense or other (ch. 20, p, 185; ch. 21, p. 188; ch. 23, pp. 208 & passim).

            Finally, what has quickly evolved from the children of Earth absorbs into itself the energies of the planet and leaps like a "great burning column" into the "Overmind": an evolved entity beyond matter and energy, combining as many species as It (I'm going to capitalize the "I") can find for further evolution. Finally, the Children are gone, and the Overmind departs: "They had leeched away the last atom of [… Earth's] substance. It had nourished them, though the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs toward the sun" (ch. 24, pp. 216-17).

            Where they are going is foreshadowed by the dreams of the first child to begin the metamorphosis as he moves in his subconscious with increasing fearlessness and enthusiasm "into the universe that was opening up before him," including visions of "Sidereous 4 and the Pillars of the Dawn"; as one of the Overlords says, "and there was awe in his voice. 'He has reached the center of the Universe'" — though perhaps just the local universe, our galaxy — "And," adds the head Overlord, "he has barely begun his journey," envying the leap that will destroy the human species but which his species cannot make (ch. 18, pp. 170-80; ch. 20, p. 185).

            With no exception I can recall, my students who spoke up on the end of Childhood's End really disliked it. I would cite to them how the Overlords envy humans for being able to evolve beyond individuality and the material world. I'd read Clarke's pulling out all the figurative stops in a crescendo of prose/poetry to describe the children of Earth's fiery apotheosis. And I'd quote the judgment of the last man — a humanist romantic — on what he had seen of the end of his kind: "Yet it was fitting; it has the sublime inevitability of a great work of art" (ch. 24, p. 205).

            Nah. They'd have none of it, at least not those who spoke up. Individuality was too high a price even for immortality and participation in a kind of godhead.

            So we moved on to Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as novel and film, where another final man, in a sense, retains his individuality but becomes Star-Child (ch. 47), a god-like entity in communication with the other gods (ch. 32, "Concerning E.T.'s"). I pointed out to my students that the ending of Childhood's End, although indecorously flashy, was in a well-established Eastern tradition of becoming nothing to become All, and that 2001 was in the Western tradition of the Superman/Übermensch, as signalled by Kubrick's use of Richard Strauss's tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra — which makes the transcendent theme pretty damn problematic, given the Nazi horrors Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas on supermen either led or got dragged to.

            Now I have problems with the whole set of issues involving apotheosis, transcendence, supermen, separable souls, and the Platonic-Christian-puritanical tradition of asceticism and the denigration of the body.* (Ancient Egyptians, Spartans, and others come in here also, but in complex ways, and also some of the far more recent Cyberpunks, who know better.) Still, I admire Clarke for confronting head-on a problem in what we might call humanist-Romantic- secular-scientific SF: all us geeks who think of ourselves as hard-headed but really, really want SF adventure in galaxies far, far away, or at least our local group.

            This issue is handled by that head Overlord, Karellen, in what amounts to a press conference addressing the human species under his supervision. "

                "There has been some complaint, among the younger and more romantic elements of your population, because outer space has been closed to you. We had a purpose in doing this; we do not impose bans for the pleasure of it. But have you ever stopped to consider—if you will excuse a slightly unflattering analogy—what a man from your Stone Age would have felt, if he suddenly found himself in a modern city?”               “Surely,” protested the Herald Tribune, “there is a fundamental difference. We are accustomed to science. On your world there are doubtless many things which we might not understand — but they wouldn’t seem magic to us.”               “Are you quite sure of that?” said Karellen, so softly that it was hard to hear his words. “Only a hundred years lies between the age of electricity and the age of steam, but what would a Victorian engineer have made of a television set or an electronic computer. And how long would he have lived if he started to investigate their workings? The gulf between two biologies can easily become so great that it is — lethal.”
               […]               “And there are other reasons why we have restricted the human race to Earth. Watch.” The lights dimmed and vanished. As they faded, a milky opalescence formed in the center of the room. It congealed into a whirlpool of stars—a spiral nebula seen from a point far beyond its outermost sun.               “No human eyes have ever seen this sight before,” said Karellen’s voice from the darkness. “You are looking at your own Universe, the island galaxy of which your Sun is a member, from a distance of half a million light-years.”               There was a long silence. Then Karellen continued, and now his voice held something that was not quite pity and not precisely scorn.               “Your race has shown a notable incapacity for dealing with the problems of its own rather small planet. When we arrived, you were on the point of destroying yourselves with the powers that science had rashly given you. Without our intervention, the Earth today would be a radioactive wilderness.               “Now you have a world at peace, and a united race. Soon you will be sufficiently civilized to run your planet without our assistance. Perhaps you could eventually handle the problems of an entire solar system — say fifty moons and planets. But do you really imagine that you could ever cope with this?”               The nebula expanded. Now the individual stars were rushing past, appearing and vanishing as swiftly as sparks from a forge. And each of those transient sparks was a sun, with who knew how many circling worlds ...               “In this single galaxy of ours,” murmured Karellen, “there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. Even that figure gives only a faint idea of the immensity of space. In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world.               “Your race, in its present stage of evolution, cannot face that stupendous challenge. One of my duties has been to protect you from the powers and forces that lie among the stars — forces beyond anything that you can ever imagine.”               The image of the galaxy’s swirling fire-mists faded; light returned to the sudden silence of the great chamber.               Karellen turned to go; the audience was over. At the door he paused and looked back upon the hushed crowd. “It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man." (Part II, ch. 14, [Ballantine 1953: 136-37]) 

            One of those "younger and more romantic elements" (with the unRomantic name of "Jan") becomes the Last Man, and he, too, comes to this conclusion, and does it looking at the extinction of humankind and the leap to the stars of the beyond-human children. After noting "the sublime inevitability" in the passing and surpassing of the human species, the last man sees that "[…] the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears."

               At the end of one path were the Overlords. They had preserved their individuality, their independent egos; they possessed self-awareness, and the pronoun “I” had a meaning in their language. They had emotions, some at least of which were shared by humanity. But they were trapped, Jan realized now, in a cul-de-sac from which they could never escape. Their minds were ten — perhaps a hundred — times as powerful as men’s. It made no difference in the final reckoning. They were equally helpless, equally overwhelmed by the unimaginable complexity of a galaxy of a hundred thousand million suns, and a cosmos of a hundred thousand million galaxies" (CE ch. 23, p. 205).

            And at the end of the other path is either disillusionment or something godlike. In Clarke's mostly capital-G Godless universe, it had to be something that had, highly improbably, evolved.

            The usually hard-headed, often hard-science thinker and author Arthur C. Clarke ran into the hard facts of not just the great barrier of the speed of light but, even if that barrier could be broken, the sheer immensity of the universe. And that was the universe of 1953 and 1968, not the increasingly plausible multiverse of the 21^st century.

            We could joke back in the 1980s about Carl Sagan's pronunciation of "billions and billions of stars" and the line as many of us remember it that "We are made of starstuff." Neil deGrasse Tyson says the same things, with an additional generation of science behind him, and with a better voice. We joked, but these ideas are literally awe-inspiring, at least if one has a working imagination and sense of awe.

            That starstuff and "billions and billions of stars" also should be daunting, since Sagan and Tyson can take us through the universe only through the spaceship of the imagination. As places for Romantic exploration, "The stars are not for man." And "no, nor woman neither," as Hamlet added to a somewhat related comment on human beings as "how like a god!" and "this quintessence of dust" (2.2.300-06).

           

            Clarke's mystic leaps are either audacious or cowardly, depending on how you want to look at them, and the ideas are dangerous (and Eric Rabkin did a penetrating brief critique on Childhood's End in the ListServ exchange). Still, they should be kept in mind every time we see a space opera or any variation on the theme of (actual title in 1940), Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Insofar as we take them seriously, Clarke's mystic leaps are a variety of leaps of faith into the absurd. Any idea of human beings "conquering" the universe or the galaxy or even more than a handful of stars: that is what is ever-so-politely called in scientific and scholarly discourse, "counterfactual." Less politely put, galactic spacefaring is fun fantasy I thoroughly enjoy, but also thoroughly Romantic and fantastic bullshit; and in the Flash Gordon/universal conquest vision, parochial — and delusional. Given the suffering and evils of our world, a comfortable Theist is pretty contemptible and possibly dangerous; given the immensity and indifference of the universe, a comfortable atheistic SF fan hasn't thought things through.

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         * Note

                  "Ursula K. Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke on Immanence, Transcendence, and Massacres." Extrapolation 28 (Summer 1987): 105-29.