Land of Geysers
Once upon a time there was a land exceptionally rich in mud geysers, a very important strategic natural resource. Experts believed that there were more geysers spewing 100% pure mud in that country than in all the other countries put together. Its citizens had every right to be proud of such an advantage, the more so that mud was practically the only reliable export item they possessed.
It is generally known that in all the eastern countries rich in oil, all citizens, young and old, share in the national income; in a way they bathe in black gold. And the same was true of the country I am talking about; every resident, regardless of age, sex, rank, social status, or religious creed, had the privilege of bathing in the mud without restriction, because there was plenty of mud produced by this fertile land. The envious neighbors called the residents of that country Geyserians.
The smart Geyserians had long learned to put their main resource to a variety of profitable uses, in lieu of other natural wealth their land lacked. In the first place, they used geyser products as liquid fuel to propel the most important political vehicles. Mud was an effective substitute for water to wash hands after manual work, to wash clothes, and it was a good medicine cleansing all systems of the organism, from roof to basement.
People in the Geyser Country learned to use geysers from early childhood; even at the maternity hospital newborns were washed in fresh warm mud. Thus “baptized,” the children would make excellent careers, reaching the top of the hierarchical ladder in politics, business, even the Church. Then, many years ago, a problem arose with media presentations starring such people. For some reason, people in other countries regarded them as Blacks, but the Geyserians were inherently resourceful, so they used negative film.
Small wonder that the so-called New Black Wave should dominate the Geyserian arts, so that black, very black, ultrablack, and parablack constituted the most favored palette for the painters, actors, and writers. Color televisions quickly went out of vogue. Their 128 hues no longer interested anybody, audience, politicians, not even television journalists. Often the home screen, usually gathering the whole family, would show just a perfect ultrablack square all night long. The mental overload was sustained, but not by all; women and people with weak nerves often displayed symptoms of indigestion.
Alas, the geysers did not have a stable operating mode. They would spew up more mud now and less later, although the populace had no cause for worry, as the historians and statisticians felt sure that with time the mud resource would not be depleted, but on the contrary, would increase in geometrical proportion. Indeed, here and there, in the most unexpected places like theaters, prestigious editorial, ministerial offices on the tenth floor or even higher, a new mud geyser would suddenly gush out.
At those sad periods when, for some unknown reason, geyser activity declined, the most important units of the government machine would falter and the country’s international image would suffer considerably. Overnight, the popularity or print run of some media outlets would drop to almost nil; the faces of different politicians on the home screen would become surprisingly identical (even their wives could not tell them apart), and the people had to get down from the political heights to the flatland of everyday life materialism.
Fortunately, there would always be someone very brave. He would just go and drill a deep well and from it would gush a new powerful geyser, much to the joy and amazement of his fellow countrymen and foreign observers. The new geyser would paint everything and everybody around in the luxurious black that could not be washed off (for twelve generations). Such a geyser, drilled for the good of society, would stir the sleepy life of the country, because except for new geysers nothing ever really happened. It would become a generator of truly radical ideas in the heads of Geyserian politicians and journalists. More often than not, a wonder boy would discover still another hue to the fresh black and happy fellow citizens would splash the new mud over one another, dancing round the new geyser and playing in the mud.
