Dear George,
Tripartite metaphors make life so much easier. They take its messy bedlam and reduce it to a set of manageable categories that explain everything. How much saner our insanity becomes if we reduce our fevered brains to super-ego, ego, and id. Our forefathers blamed the Devil; we blame the id. As a scientific category, the id drains the evil out of evil, because natural instincts are amoral.
We also simplify things when we reduce the cosmos to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. This reduction frees us from all that confusing scientific data that only clutters up our minds and makes it difficult to take any sort of manly action because scientific laws are few and hypotheses are many.
The only exception to our propensity for tripartite metaphors is in foreign affairs where a bi-polar Manichaeism rules. Here we reduce diplomacy to the simple proposition, “You are either with us or against us.” It is sweet; it is short; it is simplistic. It does not get much better than that.
I ran across another useful tripartitical metaphor in Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Times. Bauman uses his metaphor to describe the historical progression that has gotten us to where we are gotten today. I was stoned when I read his book, so I may distort his thinking, but what the hell, that is something you do sober. What his metaphor details is our relation to the natural balance that has the earth crawling with too much life.
He starts with the gamekeeper, that apparatchik of yore who sliced off peasants hands when he caught them poaching in the lord’s forest. The gamekeeper’s concern was maintaining the natural balance of the forest by discouraging over hunting by starving peasants.
Next came the farmer who moved mankind from a natural balance to a planned balance through crop rotation and other responsible agricultural practices.
Then came the corporatists whom Bauman describes as the hunters. Hunters do not give a shit about balance, be it natural or planned. All they care about is the kill, and they will destroy balance to make it. The history of the hunter is a history of increased efficiency. In the early days, spear, bow and musket did not cut it. Kills tended to be few and far between. Hunters obsess over the efficiency of maximized returns. It was only a matter of time before a bean counter, in a stroke of genius, realized that you maximize the kill by destroying the animal’s environment. There are not many hiding places in clear-cut forests; trout croak and rise to the surface in polluted streams.
Thus, was our prosperity born.
You are a master huntsman, George, and oil is the kill you pursue. Like the hunter you live by the corporate Golden Rule: kills count; the environment doesn’t The only hope we have of maintaining our standard of living is to create a global wasteland, and you are the man best qualified to do the job.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
6:04:47 AM 
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