my unpublished novel continues with a framing device designed to artfully excuse the wildly apocryphal fable that follows; a fable that will become the backbone of the book as its fictive world is extended across time toward an equally fabulistic modern day.
while the stories were allowed considerable latitude--sometimes becoming surreal farces when anthropomorphized concepts would cavalierly spout horrible honesty--they were usually restrained to the possible, if not the probable. the fables, however, were allowed to go wherever i needed them to go. their targets were frequently bedrock concepts i deemed had gone culturally unexamined for far too long, and this, i felt, required a decontextualization that fairly demanded invention.
when i received my compulsory education, i experienced a unit of the curriculum devoted to fiercely criticizing communism. the criticisms were fatuous and naive; mere name-calling and unsupported declarations. of course, communism was touted as a failure compared to capitalism, but only as it had been attempted in recent history, not as it had once occurred, essentially, at the dawn of homo sapiens sapiens. communism, in a very real sense, is how we actually live apart from our capitalist endeavors. we share and we care for each other because that's our nature; it's how we evolved and how we stay in play as a species on this planet. we only compromise this natural morality when our own survival is itself compromised. and that threat of extinction is the dirty little secret at the dark heart of capitalism.
which dark heart is the subject of the fable that follows.