"The great electric globe was still shining with a milky whiteness that paled the stars and splashed the foliage.  He looked right and left, at the opposite bench and at the pedestal of Byron's statue.  At last, quite close to him, between his legs, he saw a crowd of grimacing, villainous faces, wrinkled like the muzzles of camels.

  "They wagged their chins from side to side, they stuck out tongues like shoe soles, they winked their eyes at him slyly.  Some of these ugly faces had only one eye and its lid drooped halfway over the eyeball..."

  "The professor felt his alarm melt away.  His heart returned to its normal size and he began to examine these grotesque mannikins with scientific detachment.

  "'Ah!' he said to the one with the long nose.  'Lift your pant leg a little so that I can see!'"

  "Mr. Paraskevas looked at them one after another.  There was almost a score of them milling about.  The longer he looked at them, the more confident he became, until finally his features broke into a smile and he laughed heartily.

  "That seemed to please the visitors.  They murmured approvingly and the sound rustled like dry leaves in the wind."

  "Of course, I recognize you," said the old academican, striking the ground with his cane...From the time my grandmother first told me at the family hearth what kind of creatures you are, up to now when I have completed the most exhaustive study ever made of Goblins, it is you who have taken up my time and it is you I have lectured about."

  "Which means that you don't exist.  So there." 

  "The professor spoke triumphantly, brandishing his cane aloft like a conqueror waving a flag above a vanquished stronghold."

  "Haw-haw-haw!"  The Goblins laughed uproariously."

  "Then how is it that so many of you learned professors have been taken in?  You've racked your brains and wasted your time all these years even though we don't exist, eh?  Does your science exist if it deals with things that don't exist?"

  "The others said, 'E-e-e-e-h?' and waited for his reply with their heads thrust forward."

  ".... striking his breast proudly.  'You are merely our own creation.  We have formed you out of our fears and anxieties.  That's it.  All these that go to make you are ours.  Your ugliness, your wickedness, your indecency, your erotomania, your rutting goatishness which you hide under your rags, your dropping filth over everything-- all this is ours and we project it on you to ease our minds...."

  

  Then the Goblins take the professor dancing, down to a fountain in the park, past marble busts on a path.  "They trampled flower beds and finally arrived at the entrance of the Zappeion."

  A wild farandole ensued.  The professor gets caught up in hoopla-ing until the Goblins decide to go.  "Mr. Paraskevas looked around and found himself alone...."

             ~from "The Goblins" by Stratis Myrivilis, Translated by Abbott Rick, copyrighted 1959

"The Americans have lost their sense of identity.  The country is falling apart physically and politically because of the speed of information.  The American bureaucracy, political and educational, was set up for very slow speeds of the printed word and railways.  At electric speeds, nothing in the U.S.A. makes sense."

  ~Marshall McLuhan visionary of the TV dinner, The New Majority with Ed Fitzgerald, CBC Television, 1970