The Midget versus the Digits
from The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
The Midget, whose name was Markoff Chaney, was no relative of the famous Chaneys of Hollywood, but people did
keep making jokes about that. It was bad enough to be, by the standards of
the gigantic and stupid majority, a freak; how much worse to be so named
as to remind these big oversized clods of the cinema's two most famous portrayers
of monstro-freaks; by the time the Midget was fifteen, he had built up a
detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed (he hated that word) the relative
misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin and
even Robert Putney Drake. Revenge, for sure, he would have. He would have
revenge...
Damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the
average, the whole measurable world that pronounced him a bizarre random
factor. Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul he declared
war on the "statuatory ape," on law and order, on predictability, on negative
entropy. He would be a random factor in every equation; from this day forward,
unto death, it would be civil war: the Midget versus the Digits.... His first overt act began in Dayton the following Saturday. He
was in Norton's Emporium, a glorified 5 & 10 ¢ store, when he saw the
sign:
NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR.THE MGT.
What! he thought, are the poor girls supposed to pee in their
panties if they can't find a superior? Years of school came back to him ("Please,
may I leave the room, sir?") and rituals which had appeared nonsensical suddenly
made sense in a sinister way. They were trying to reduce us all to predictable
units, robots. Hah!...The following Wednesday, the Midget was back at Norton's
and hiding in a coffee urn when the staff left and locked up. A few moments
later, the sign was down and a subtly different one was in its place:
NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR OR GO TO THE DOOR WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR.THE MGT.
He came back several times in the next few weeks, and the sign remained. It was
as he suspected: in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to
come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work
situation that they never see what is going on below. It was the chains of communication,
not the means of production, that determined a social process.. Nothing signed
"THE MGT." would ever be challenged; the Midget could always pass himself off
as the Management.
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