Origins

I'm not sanguine about humanity's prospects for the future, but it's one of those fun facts that Armand Hammer gave a copy of Hugo Rheinhold's Ape with Skull to V. I. Lenin, where it reposed on his desk until death. Hammer rather grandiosely claimed that Lenin died gazing at his gift; the laughter still echoes in the Kremlin.

I was afraid of nuclear holocaust when I was in high school. Funny thing is, Americans and Russians had vastly more in common than we ever let on — deep in our Philistine American souls, we knew no country that could produce the Bolshoi Ballet would ever blow up the world. It was Progress, in the old Victorian sense, that eventually emerged as the world killer — global warming, climate change.

Who knew? Of course, there's always Muslim fanatics to overcorrect that and send us all back to the Middle Ages. Given the almost limitless Muslim appetite for self-immolation (Moorish Spain comes to mind), and nukes in an increasingly brittle Pakistan, maybe meeting the advancing horrors of global warming with the insanely spastic terrors of nuclear winter will turn out to balance the Earth after all — balancing it on the skulls of the profitless.

Note to Mother Nature: Next time, no brains for apes!