| |
As debt-finance-led production and consumption devour field and forest across the globe, rendering soils, seas, lakes, rivers and the very air itself stale and unwholesome, the human race is well on its way to the end as foretold by Eimar O'Duffy in…
Description
ASSES IN CLOVER (1933) forms the final book of O'Duffy's Cuanduine Trilogy of satirical fantasy. The first volume, King Goshawk and the Birds (1926), is set in a future world devastated by 'progress' and ruled by King Capitalists. King Goshawk, the supreme King Capitalist, decides to buy up all the flowers and birds, placing them in the theme parks for which an entrance fee is charged. Enraged at this desecration of nature and human rights, an ancient Dublin philosopher calls the mythical Cuchulain back to earth. He sires a son, Cuanduine, whose task is to right the wrongs perpetrated by the capitalists. The second volume, “The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street” (I928), follows a Swiftean pattern, being set on the planet Rathe. In “Asses in Clover”, O'Duffy continues his humorous tirade at the follies of twentieth-century politics and economics. After destroying King Goshawk's International Air Force before it can devastate Ireland with deadly weapons of mass destruction, the demi-god Cuanduine is outflanked by Goshawk's economic advisor, the real power on earth. Finally despairing at the folly and wickedness of humanity, Cuanduine departs from this world. In the final chapters world depression followed by a great war destroys civilization. For O'Duffy, the 'Procrustean remedy' - the adaptation of society to the economic muddle through the paid employment system - lies at the root of the problem.
|
