A Critique of PopCulture, Society, International Relations and Education

The garden was entering its final throes of bloom. Barely any green reached the eye through the riot of colour that it had become. Blooms of all colors and sizes littered all the space the eye could capture in the garden. The only place which didn’t look like it was dressed for a particularly grotesque ball was the fence. A staid, ten foot high bush fence protected the garden from the vouyers of the world. Itself completely unadorned, and unremarkable. Unlike the guards of the queen it made no claim to fame, or notoriety. It merely stood, and in standing performed its function, or perhaps it wasn’t even aware of its function.

No one really ventured into the garden. It was too tumultuous and bright. People felt it too easy to destroy what they called the beauty of it, for lack of a better world. After all, it is hard to call blooming flowers disgusting. And yet beauty, strangely, was appropriate, having been applied to so many things even more vile. No one knew how or when the garden was tended, a gardener existed, in some recess, but he was never seen amongst the plants.

The truth was that the garden had become itself. And had learnt to take care of itself, and didn’t need to be tended anymore. It was growing, blooming, and leafing off itself, and no one seemed to notice or mind. Or perhaps they did, but did not know what it was they were looking at to begin with. Was it a well tended garden? Or a weed patch? Was their a method to its insanity? Or… and not knowing the answers to these questions, and not wanting to ask questions in appropriate of them, they just let it be.

That was until little Heidi got lost in it.

How that happened was quite interesting in itself. Apparently she was following a bunny that happened to run across her while she was sitting in the lawn. Entirely ignorant of what bunnies can be like, and especially the kind that wears pocket watches, waist coats, and speaks in guttural tones about its own lack of punctuality, she was though, spared this more thorough introduction the bunnies, and also the subsequent adventure of an endless slide down a hole.

All that did happen was that seeing his bob tail, predictably ‘bob’ across the lawn, she got excited and in childish glee began to chase it about. Now for the bunny this naturally signaled trouble. Because they hate celebrity, and at the rate this girl was going, it seemed the glass house was to be its fate, or at least the mesh house, which was equally permeable to sight.

Quite worried the bunny proceeded to pace in circles thinking of ways to escape, till finally in desperation, it decided to pass through the ‘garden.’ The garden itself was seen as a place of unimaginable dread among bunnies. And for good reason. Bunneis lived of the roots of plants, but in the garden, the plants were inviolate, and all powerful. For a bunny this represented an overturning of the very laws of its existence. It was almost as though the bunnies had met their neo ala matrix.

However they’re few things bunnies hate more than celebrity, and death is only rumoured to be one of them. So he took the plunge into the garden. And she unpredictably followed after.

You know, that’s probably the one thing about children I hate. They take so long to be trained. To understand what it means to be human, and to behave like one. As children we’re still liable to do things that are unpredictable, while the one and probably only thing we’re trained our whole lives to attain is a comfortable predictability. Occasionally this predictability is useful the human being trained like when villagers use the same tracks to go through forests for years and years, even though it no longer is the best track. It keeps other walkers of the forest away from them, but most often this predictability plays against the human being itself, making that one track the ideal place for robbers to ambush him.

So poor, untrained Heidi, did something the bunny hadn’t counted on. And surprised him by following him, even when it became plainly evident that he was heading for the garden. The bunny raced in, among the stalks, which were mostly tall enough to have a few bare inches of stem near the ground. Using this space, the Bunny tried to dash right through the garden.

Heidi could see the stalks shake in a line from where the bunny jumped in, and so she headed through as well. Unfortunately her bulk though minimal by most standards was enough to injure, in its passing, some plants. A couple of broken leaves branches resulted from the first few steps she took in the garden.

Slowly as she waded further in. The stalks came up to her chest, and she had to hold her arms high to manage to swing them as she waded forward, she stamped her first stem, and sent it to the ground amidst other stems. Its beautiful small blue flowers scattering to the wind as it fell, like tear drops. Its leaves fluttering, and clutching at its brothers, desperate to find a hold, flailing, but ultimately falling to the mighty stamp of a human, it lay still. Bent, and almost broken a couple of inches from the ground, its stem was stained with an odd white.

The garden took notice. It had stood too long to tolerate such impudence from something as insignificant as a human, a blotch on its perfection, and an unprovoked assault on one of its members, this could not be brooked. Interestingly the garden and humans, which it till now had only considered with a mild aversion with which one regards a lesser being, similar to which the white skinned man considered the coolie, and now loathed, with the same promise of destruction that a slave owner swore when confronted with an unwilling slave, had something in common. Both humans and garden believed it worthwhile to react with crushing violence to attacks which were unprovoked. Unwilling to even consider that attacks, or violence inflicted upon one party may only be an foreseen by-product energies applied in a wholly different direction, like chasing a bunny, or the desire for one’s own state.

The ravages of WWI are too well documented to merit another mention here, but, the adventure of Heidi definitely requires a conclusion.

The garden decided its vengeance, and the next step she took, the normally sure footed Heidi tripped, and slipped, and in a manner satisfactorily like the stem she’d crushed before her, she flailed and cried and panicked, and possibly bruised her self, much to the satisfaction of the garden’s sense of vengeance. Which being considerably primitive was still of the order of an eye for an eye, a more modern legal system might have felt that Heidi deserved a life sentence.

The garden then closed in around her, and blocked out the sun from the sky, and filled her lungs with pollen and a cocktail of nauseating scents, and then securely drugged, it punished her. Thorns were pressed against all her bare skin, tendril whips were lashed against her thighs, her hair was showered with earth and she was dragged on her face back towards the margins of the garden. Every plant she passed tried to do some damage, but thankfully, most could just abuse her, and in a language she didn’t even know existed.

Still they were those that whipped her, and those that poked her, and scratched her, and tore at her clothes, and some that even did draw blood. And so she was deposited on the margins of the garden, a dirty, disheveled hurt and aching parcel of humanity that did not understand how it had met its fate, or why… which probably the one time in her life, when she did actually have something in common with the majority of humanity, which like her rarely knows why its knees are bleeding and who to blame for the blood.

Dazed as she lay there, she was spotted, and cried over and cleaned up, and taken care off, and consoled with chocolates and promises of ponies, and whatever else girls like to believe will make them happy, and she was indeed happy at the prospect of all that she’d probably not get.

Somehow no one seemed to concerned with how she had come to be in such a state, the usual concerns about what people call a girl’s honor, giving a lack of education far too much credit, were unheard, and no one seemed particularly curious, or red eyed about catching the culprit. I suppose everyone guessed it, and everyone agreed, in that beautifully predictable way, we humans have, not to mention it, as anything of that nature was just not possible… so they let the garden be.

And as usual a third party took advantage of that highly sought predictability we believe to be the highest human achievement, and call it culture, bearing, even pedigree, or genes, and sometimes, in truly a disrespectful manner, education.