Bluto, parts 3396 - 3399

 3396. Seeing that I had no idea what he was driving at, he said, “Imagine that some men are wandering in the desert and they have been lost for many days. They come upon a wrist-watch, and one of them says, ‘look a watch, somebody has been this way before.’ Then one of the other men says, ‘No, perhaps that watch came into being by accident over billions and trillions, or an infinite number of years.’”

 3397. “Then the first man says, ‘Listen you moron, first of all the earth has not been around for an infinite number of years, and also, so what if the watch came about by accident, even if I grant you that, what about the expansion band, and don’t you think it is pretty odd that over this infinite number of years the band says ‘Spidel’ and it is spelled correctly, and the watch says Bulova?  No, there is a watch here, so obviously there were people here.”

 3398. Bluto went on, “Now, see that squirrel over there, just the claw of its back foot, is more complicated than a wristwatch, just its eyeball makes a wristwatch look like child's play, and the squirrel's brain is in another category of complexity compared to tinker toys like a wrist watch.”

3399. Fortunately for me, I had heard the wristwatch argument about God from my brother one time because he was making fun of the fact that I thought God knew everything that we did.  But my brother drew the opposite conclusion and used a dog as an example instead of a squirrel: a dead dog.

Bluto, parts 3392 - 3395

 3392. Have you ever watched those T.V. programs about victory at sea, when the destroyers are getting ready to fire their huge guns? First the barrels swivel around, and then ponderously the height of the barrel is adjusted. Or when a tank has spotted an enemy, and as the turret swivels and at the same time the barrel comes down as the tank continues to roll along.

 3393. Those movements were just like Bluto’s movements, as he prepared to blast me and my feeble arguments off of my soda box. I was looking right down the barrel when he went off.

 3394. “See this fist,” Bluto said. “I believe in God because of this fist’” Mr. Sacco’s fist, I would like to point out, was not the same as your ordinary fist. It was a fist that had many times got jammed in machinery, or cut on other people’s teeth, and its scars, dents and discolorations were hardly concealed by its covering of oily hair.

3395. But Bluto was not talking about his fist, he was talking about his wristwatch, it turned out, as I realized from the sermon he began to preach to me.

Bluto, parts 3388 - 3391

 3388. Bluto believed in God. I know because I asked him about it the next day in the truck. 

 3389. I said, “Tell me Mr. Sacco, do you believe in God, since you say there is a higher law about the soda machines, if there is a higher law of the soda machines, the source of the higher law would have to be God wouldn’t it.”  At work, and actually all the time I called Bluto Mr. Sacco.

 3390.  At first Bluto reacted as if he had not heard my question.  He just kept driving and looking around as if he wanted to find a parking place. Then he pulled in to a spot, turned the engine off and turned in his seat to face me sitting there on my soda box. I could see in the glare in his eyes, and the long pause before he started to speak, that he felt my question was a direct threat, and an assault on his theories.

3391. And it was a serious threat, because if there is no supreme being, or if you can’t prove there is a supreme being, then how could you formulate all of those theories about higher laws. My brother took it even further telling me that some people thought that if you can’t prove God exists then there isn’t even any reason to look both ways when you cross the street, since nothing matters.

Bluto, parts 3384 - 3387

 3384. I may have been only thirteen, but I knew something about arguments and the use of logic. The reason was because of my brother. You may remember that I mentioned that he was two years older than I, and was so smart that they had to get special tests for him, because the regular ones were too easy for him.  

 3385. Once they tested his reading speed and it was one thousand two hundred words per minute. That was his speed because that was as fast as the machine could go. I didn’t believe it however, and I tested him myself with a Readers Digest, at the kitchen table.

 3386. He would read the Reader’s Digest like another person would look at a picture book, then he would answer any sort of question you might put to him about what he had read. Having read so much his head was full of all sorts of ideas, and just a week before he had read “The History of Philosophy” by Bernard Russell. 

3387. Then, after he would read something like that, he would ridicule me by showing me how stupid I was because of the numerous dumb things he thought I believed.  So, like Jimmy, I decided to trip Bluto up in the same way my brother would do to me. 

Bluto, parts 3380 - 3383

 3380. The baseball bat was just like my chipped tooth in that Bluto started talking about smashing up the soda machine because he happened to notice the bat next to the counter. Nevertheless, I knew Bluto hardly at all, so when he picked up the bat I was not certain what was coming next. But he replaced the bat before Sal came back into the office.

 3381. Bluto’s point was this, in a nut shell. A sensible and intelligent person would be obligated, if he had any feelings of right and wrong, to vandalize and smash up soda machines at every opportunity. 

 3382. The God given right to destroy the machines should be protected by law. The fact that the police protect the machines was a perfect example of how our government and its judicial system was created upside down, protecting criminals, and punishing people who were doing the right thing.

3383. “There is a higher law,” Bluto said, “and one is obliged to obey it if one has any self-respect. Just don’t ever let yourself get caught obeying that higher law.”

Bluto, parts 3376 - 3379

 3376. The Coca-Cola didn’t eat up the string for some reason, just the teeth. The dark brown color on the teeth was very impressive to a seven year old but we imagined that you could just wash it off, but imagine out surprise when the teeth got smaller and smaller, and then disappeared altogether. 

 3377. So when Bluto said that soda destroyed a person's teeth he was absolutely correct, but he didn’t stop there. Bluto’s ideas about soda had a radical, even a revolutionary aspect to them, and sometimes, from that argument about soda by itself, I could picture his desire to see the overthrow of the government, the onset of anarchy and the coming of the end of the world.

 3378. In the Sunoco station on Eagle Street Bluto stopped to buy gas and while we were there he bought both of us a soda from the machine in the office. While we were drinking these sodas he continued his lecture about the evils of the Coca-Cola, and the Pepsi-Cola companies.

3379. “You see the problem is the economic system in this country,” Bluto was saying in the Sunoco station on Eagle Street, the one where the guy who runs it has no memory because of being injured in the war. The gas-station owner’s name was Sal, and he was outside washing the windows of Bluto’s truck. We were in the office. Sal kept a baseball bat next to his cash register.

Bluto, parts 3372 - 3375

 3372. He went on, “So you chip your tooth but you aren’t going to be angry are you because the rock got there by accident. It had to be an accident, why would anyone do something like that on purpose? If you put rocks in people’s food on purpose that would be a crime wouldn’t it?”

 3373. This was the way that Bluto always explained things to me, by asking obvious questions that could have only one answer. But even though these questions could have only one answer Bluto would sit there staring at me with his mouth agape and not go on with his lecture until I had answered his rhetorical question.

 3374. But even though he knew what the answer had to be, even though he knew the exact words I would have to say, even so, when I would say, “yes,” he would roar out “no” and bang his fist on the steering wheel. Then he would precede with his lecture but substituting the Pepsi-Cola company for the rock sandwich.

3375. I had to admit that Bluto had a point about this business of the Pepsi-Cola company being like food with gravel mixed in. There was no exaggeration about it. My second-grade teacher asked us to bring to class teeth we had lost and she tied them to strings and hung them in a glass of soda. The next day the teeth were brown, and at the end of the week they were gone, all that was left was the string.