The park had been a haven for pigeons, sparrows and squirrels, drawn by the generosity of pedestrians in distributing crusts of bread and other items of food for them.
It must have been in early September, more than two months ago that, walking through the park, I saw signs posted everywhere that read: Please do not feed the pigeons. Within a week a codicil had been added to these messages stating that an ordinance to this effect had already been voted on in City Hall and that large fines for infractions were being debated in the City Council.
It was my natural assumption that there were some good reasons in back of this. No doubt the pigeon populations had grown disproportionately, or were rapidly becoming a nuisance in other ways. I stopped feeding the pigeons and continued to use the park, putting the matter out of my mind.
This did not last long. When I entered the park in the early morning a few weeks ago I encountered about 20 young persons, all graduate students and lab assistants at the CSL, strolling about the park and randomly throwing around quarters! They responded to my questions in a friendly manner and, quite frankly explained that they were preparing the initial stages of a handsomely funded research project designed to try to coax pigeons into the global monetary system!
I was dumbfounded. Why would anyone want to do that? One of the students was sent over to talk to me. He was doing a double major in Psychology and Political Economy. After studying every important economist from Adam Smith to Marx to Keynes to Milton Friedman, he'd reached the conclusion one basic idea shared by all economic theorists, Right and Left, was that the survival of large economies dictated an endless quest for new markets. Those that found them thrived, the rest went under.
As he talked to me he threw about the quarters like a farmer in a Courbet painting or a girl in a poem by Wordsworth. His tone became decidedly pedantic as he continued:
"Unless their markets are constantly expanding, nations are doomed to extinction. As the normal operation of supply and demand push the prices of commodities down to bare subsistence,corporations that want to carve out a niche inaccessible to their competitors must search abroad. In the meantime surpluses build up in the warehouses, leading to incalculable losses. Large numbers of people are thrown out of work, living standards plummet, the masses of the unemployed become breeding grounds for revolution, society is thrown into chaos, etc., etc..."
"But", I asked, "Why pigeons?"
"I suppose you're the kind that doesn't bother to read the newspapers!", the sarcasm in his voice was unmistakable, "We are entering the worst economic disaster since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution! The human race is finished! The Global Village has already been turned into the Global Slum!"
He sneered: "It's not longer a matter of selling jalap to Zulus"
I recognized the quote of a line from Joyce's Ulysses, and smiled. This was a cultured individual.
" No new viable markets are going to be found in the human race, so we're forced to open our horizons to the animal kingdom."
He offered to introduce me to the director of this research project, Doctor A. Malthus, evidently a distant relative of the celebrated economist. It was somewhat surprising to me that he should come from the same family, given that his doctrine was the total opposite of his forbearer: Malthus argued that the population of the human race was increasing too quickly for agriculture to keep up with it, while this man was saying that there weren't enough human beings to supply enough customers to keep the wheels of production on the move.
Dr. Malthus told me that the Department of the Treasury and the Fish and Wildlife Service were pumping lots of money into projects like his. The ultimate aim of all such efforts was to bring as many animal species into the global money economy. The world's largest financial institutions, at least the ones that are left, are willing co-partners. They have voluntarily diverted a sizable percentage of their multi-billion dollar bailouts to provide start-up money for research in the burgeoning field of Animal Cognitive Neuro-Economics!
"If we can get birds, monkeys and dolphins to live by buying and selling", he beamed, "we can condition them to buy everything from swimsuits to blue jeans to umbrellas! And wouldn't that be grand?!"
"And guns!" I commented, not without malice "Don't forget guns!'
"Of course. It's long been recognized that Darwinian evolution is in desperate need of retooling. Get the animals to implement the laws of fang and claw with AK-47's, howitzers, grenades! As long as they pay us for them in dollars, euros, pounds, yen! As they continue to tear each other to bits as they've done for millions of years, we can lean back in our easy chairs watching the big bucks roll in."
One might quarrel with his morality, but one had to admire Dr. Malthus' ambition. How, I wanted to know, did he intend to create a new consciousness in pigeons by throwing about quarters?
"Yes, a good question. Our goal is nothing less than the creation of the New Capitalist Pigeon, through a combination of Behavior Modification, Cognitive Science and ideological indoctrination, self-criticism rallies, pep talks, clarification of thought seminars, and the promotion of status symbols.
"What you haven't seen are the new lines of bird feeders coming out of the factories. These hold repositories of bird food above a plastic spigot, and a tray on a chain dangling underneath for holding the discharges. To one side is a slot for dropping in, from a height of about two feet, the quarters, nickels and dimes that activate them. They've been thoroughly laboratory tested and will soon be deployed in public parks in all major cities.
"At first the quarters will be disbursed free of charge. You're witnessing that stage right now. After the birds have gotten conditioned to using change to get their food, we're going to stop the hand-outs. That will compel them to fly about preying on human beings foolish enough to leave their spare change lying about."
"You mean you're going to train them to be thieves?"
"Well, yes, but only as a first stage in bringing them in line with customary human behavior. Clearly that can't go on indefinitely. After about ten years during which we hope they will become rapacious predators ever on the search for spare change, we're going to force them to work! Work! We'll make honest pigeons of them yet!"
"Well, Dr. Malthus: if it takes a decade to train pigeons to join the mainstream of the global economy, how long will it take to train the other animal species you have in mind?"
"Centuries I suspect. Several centuries; but it will be worth it. With a bit of luck (and research in this area has only begun), we hope to be able to arrange the world economy in such a way that all major financial crises, depressions and crashes fall on our animal partners, with no repercussions or fallout on humanity. You may not believe it, sir, but our fundamental objectives are compassionate, not malevolent."
I said good-bye to Doctor Malthus and walked rapidly back to my own apartment. There I picked up my bank books and went back out again to remove all of my savings. After sewing my life's savings up in a mattress, I put all my coins in a safe. Finally I barricaded my doors and all my windows.
It is only a matter of time before the onslaught on the human race so well imagined in the duMaurier-Hitchcock scenario, The Birds, becomes a reality!