The White Man's Appendage

No matter how many lies Pinocchio tells, his nose will never match that appendage protruding from the White Man's face. It glides through the air, slices through land and skims over the oceans to land in places far away, with a thud that raises much dust. When the clouds finally settle, one can't help but marvel at how much wallop a singular nose could pack. The sheer destructive power of the White Man's Nose is a wonder to behold, a phenomenon to be feared, a force best not messed with. If it only kept to within a mile's radius of the face it belonged to, wouldn't this world have enough fresh air for all to breathe?

It all began with religion, perhaps. The quest of the Nose to spread the White Man's ideas and ideals. Since it was too far back in time for me to know enough about it to put it down as fact, I can only speculate that the Christian missionaries only got violent at first when they felt threatened by the already violent missionaries of Islam. We had missionaries before that too, as any Buddhist will tell you, for instance. And while I do know of at least one expansion campaign that ended when the king converted to Buddhism, I do not know of any that started for the same reason.

Never quite content with small fare from among their own populace, or those of countries near by, the Nose always itched from exotic flavours from distant lands. So it brought disease to a mighty civilisation, whose one big shortcoming was lack of immunity to various strains of germs, on account of not having initially lived lives filthy enough to birth the plague and such. Such a weak populace was not nearly good enough to take back home as slaves, so merely their gold and women had to suffice.

However, the black man, sitting blissfully in the original garden of Eden, was sniffed out soon enough by the prodigious Nose. I mean, it was only natural I suppose, given how long the Egyptians and Persians had already troubled the Greeks and Romans. Using the force of cordite, slavery was made in to an institution at a never-before imagined scale. "Uncivilised" as the black man was to the refined senses of the Nose, it was only too easy to treat him at a sub-human level, to say the least.

But not everything about the Nose is bleak. It also championed causes like capitalism. Even if it meant crushing local trade and produce abroad for better profits at home, even if it meant crushing local governments abroad for the sake of bananas, even if it meant creating monsters where none existed because socialism, in any of its avatars, was not paying off enough.

Ah yes, let me not forget to mention the spread of technology that the Nose has ensured, all for the betterment of the human existence, obviously. Profit margins have nothing to do with it. The colonists always knew what was best for the colonised, their superior technological ways always better than the savage ways of the natives. Why let the tribes fight each when they can play cricket instead? And why use the camera shutter technology only for photography when it can also be used to make machine guns?

Even morality is something that the Nose always knows the best about. And since it knows best, it is a sacred duty to shine the same light on so many lesser mortals that dot the planet. Of course, part of the morality is the discourse on how everyone should grow a Nose. A uniform world is the best sort, is what the Nose seems to think, according to me. A uniform world where the original Nose still calls the shots, which becomes easier to do as everyone will be more compliant.

So enter the nasal dance of democracy and liberty. Ah, this seems to be the chosen favourite of the Nose, resonating as it does with most people on the planet. Not that I am a fan of democracy, or even humanity ("Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever": Bill Hicks), but even if I were to support this democratic quest, the Nose is certainly not the way to go. "People must have the right to follow their chosen path for the future, and since they cannot do it themselves, we must help them along the way." Wow. This is what they forgot to add. "Let us first enslave and ship fit people from all these foreign lands, kill many of the rest, except the servants of course, in the lands we choose to inhabit, take their possessions even if we were to spare their lives, build a vast empire based on the labour and lives of millions, treat the world as our playground and divide lands based on our conveniences or sense of guilt when we have to depart for home because we couldn't keep our shit together. And oh, let us not to forget to sow deep seeds of discord that shall give us the chance to come back here and play some more soon."

Ah, what a burden it must be, having a white man's Nose.