The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel

Now come the banks, the office buildings, the blank brutal facades of steel and Plexiglas, the necrosis at the core of the spreading metastasis. Space-age sleaze.High-tech slums. Nothing new. But the streets and sidewalks are full of people, during business hours, and that too, like the poolrooms and cigar shops, is a pleasing sight. Here where the streets remain narrow (out of necessity) and the sidewalks wide, the human beings retain some rights, and I am happy to pause at the first red light (something I don't always do), to comtemplate the natives. Fungible, yes, perfectly fungible people, but human all the same: young secretaries from the suburbs - slim, blond and rosy-cheeked; middle-aged laborers from the south side of town - short wide dark and oily-harired; the entire spectrum of the white, pink, brown, high yellow and mulatto beige, navy blue and Congolese black. They're all here, the beautiful and handsome, the cretinous, ugly and horrible, the deformend, the hungry, the hairy, the bald, the mad, the cunnkng and the idiot.Scum of the earth. Salt of the world. Glory and disgrace of the animal kingdom. (Horns blowing...) The beast that came down from he trees, loped across the savanna and bashed the brains out of the first kudu it could catch. The anthropoid that later gave us Socrates' speech to the Athenian assembly, the Gregorian chants, the Upanishads and the Tao, discovered the tomato and the baking of bread, invented the vacuum cleaner and the internal combustion entgine, the music of Hungary and the Sublime French Revolution -!