Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

42 Beelzebub in America

42.919

“I think I might as well remark now at the very beginning of my elucidations about these Americans, that those three-brained beings there, especially the contemporary ones, who constitute the root population on this part of the surface of your planet, are in general almost all occupied only with these dollar businesses.

42.919

“On the other hand, with the trades and ‘professions’ indispensable in the process of being-existence, exclusively only those beings are occupied among them, who have gone there from other continents temporarily, and for the purpose, as is said, of ‘earning money.’

42.919-20

“Even in this respect, the surrounding conditions of ordinary being-existence among your contemporary favorites, chiefly among those breeding on this continent, have been transformed so to say, into ‘Tralalaooalalalala,’ or, as our respected teacher Mullah Nassr Eddin would define it, ‘a soap bubble that lasts a long time only in a quiet medium.’

42.920

“Among them there at the present time, these surrounding conditions of ordinary collective existence have already become such, that if, for some reason or other, the specialist professionals of all the kinds necessary for their ordinary collective existence should cease to come to them from the other continents to ‘earn money,’ then it is safe to say that within a month the whole established order of their ordinary existence would completely break down, since there would be none among them who could even so much as bake bread.

42.920

“The chief cause of the gradual resulting of such an abnormality there among them is, on the one side, the law established by them themselves in respect of the rights of parents over their children and on the other hand the institution in schools for children of what is called a ‘dollar savings bank’ together with the principle of implanting in children a love of such dollars.