Only a good sport like myself could have believed that the human race would improve with time. Truth is, it’s been a catastrophe from Day One, and will continue to be so until the end of the End Times. Man’s first thought was to steal an apple, his second to steal another by working as little as possible, his third to use the stolen apple to take sexual advantage of an innocent, and so on down to the present day. Matters that start out this badly can never be fixed; I should have guessed that back in the days of the McIntosh in the Garden. Instead I kept thinking that sooner or later they would wise up. I kept trusting in what seemed to be tiny steps forward. Progress my backside: by now pornography and homosexuality flourish unchallenged. Look what just happened before my very eyes!
Their problem is that they’re utterly immoral. Always pontificating about honesty and goodness—ever since the day they learned to emit sounds with their vocal chords—and always inventing the most repellent perversions. They blather on about their good intentions and nice theories, write mountains of edifying books—and then commit the most atrocious acts. They love evil, they’ve always loved it and they always will: it’s inscribed in their DNA. No ape has ever written a thousand-page tome on ethics, but neither has any slaughtered his companion and eaten her heart. No hippopotamus ever turned serial killer, no polar bear insisted his race was superior to that of the browns, no cow ever proposed to gas and burn all his colleagues with different noses. Men, however, yes. Just open a history book.
This is not pique, to be sure: I am and I remain imperturbable. Imagine, a god that has fits of rage or suffers, that’s all we need! I’m disappointed, very disappointed, but disappointment has nothing to do with being hurt. Humans have disappointed me, that’s all. Once, twice, ten billion billion times, and finally I’ve had it. Whatever some cretin might think, one of those halfwits who think human beings are essential to me, that I’d be nobody without them, the deplorable depravity of that girl was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. Truth is, I had come to the conclusion that (wo)men were irredeemable long before her.
Of course they’re taking care of it all by themselves, but I can also give them a push. The way you drop a lit cigarette butt in a dry forest, or plant a kick on a door that’s already closing. I could provoke the ire of some dictator so he blasts off missiles left and right; I could simply blow up a couple of nuclear power stations, or design some deadly new epidemic disease. The dreadful wars and famines and disasters on disasters would arrive all on their own, no need to wear myself out. And of course I have great expectations of climate change, bête noire of Vittorio, down there in Australia.* And if I should get impatient because it’s all taking too long, there’s always the giant asteroid option. A beautiful big blossom, and that’s that. It might be the cleanest way out, esthetically the most modern.
* However, reader, I don’t intend to bore you with his adventures among the marsupials and the descendants of British colonial thieves. When a character leaves the stage he’s gone and it would be crazy to put the klieg lights on him again. Is he still involved with the Tyrolean push-up girl from the plane? That’s his business! He can do as he likes in Australia, nobody cares anymore.