Coincidance - Principia Discordia

220 COINCIDANCE
new one, but therefore a worthy antagonist. Debate was more stimulating
than agreement, to the old priest, after 23 years in confinement. Seamus
Muadhen grabs overriding performance constraints in the woods of Ohio.
No, it wasn't the airplanes through the plumbing.
Father Benoit's new friend was Donatien Aldonse Francois de Sade, a
short blonde Marquis from the south, who had been imprisoned for
blasphemy, profanity, sedition, heresy, atheism, buggery, sodomy, abuse of
controlled substances and annoying his mother-in-law.
De Sade cheerfully told the priest he was guilty on all counts, and
unrepentent. "You should meet my mother-in-law," he said, explaining the
major offense that had gotten him in trouble.
The priest and the Marquis spent many pleasant afternoons in the
courtyard discussing whether the universe were a mindless machine or the
creation of a loving God. The priest argued in terms of philosophy and
metaphysics, but the Marquis was temperamentally an empiricist and
argued always in terms of what the world was actually like. "Look at the
smallpox," he would say. "Kills a few hundred thousand every month all
over Europe. What kind of Benevolent Intelligence decided to give us that as
a birthday present? Did He have constipation that day, to put him in a foul
enough mood to perpetuate such a fiendish joke at our expense?"
"But the physicians now seem to have a cure for the smallpox," Benoit
would say. "Surely such inspirations are given to human minds by a Higher
Intelligence."
"I have talked to more physicians than you," de Sade would reply. "The
bright young ones who are making all the radical discoveries are atheists like
me. They say the body is a machine. No soul inside, just gears and levers of
complicated sorts. They cure more patients with that atheistic idea than all
the prayers of the dark ages combined have ever been reputed to cure."
And so on. It kept both the old priest and the young nobleman amused
during the years of incarceration. Each knew he would never convince the
other.
A 24-foot gorilla is unreliable in the basement. Testimony is visualized
through the plumbing over my nude body.
By the Spring of 1778, the Continental Army was beginning to rise from
its symbolic death at Valley Forge and at last started to give the British some
real problems. Colonel Seamus Muadhen didn't have to turn Jefferson and
Paine into Raftery and O'Lachlann to stir up the enthusiasm of his Celtic
brigade: there was optimism in the air, perhaps because the Continental
Army had survived longer than any rational mind could have expected.
In June came the battle of Monmouth and their greatest victory in the
war thusfar. Military authorities later explained why the Continentals
should not have won that battle; in military logic, it was an impossible victory.