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both Marxism and its less vulgar child, Political Correctness in American colleges and universities, today, even though Jesus’s latter-day ducklings would gag on the very thought. There was a seventy-two-year-old field experiment in Marxism, 1917–1989, that failed gruesomely. But Marx’s idea of one social class dominating another may remain with us forever. In medical terms, Freud is now considered an utter quack and a dotty old professor. But his notion of sex as an energy like the steam in a boiler, which must be released in an orderly fashion or the boiler will blow up, remains with us, too. At this moment, as you gaze upon these pages, you can be sure that there are literally millions of loin spasms and convulsions taking place throughout the world that would not be occurring were it not for the words of Sigmund Freud.
    And this, the power of one person to control millions of his fellow humans—for centuries—is a power the Theory of Evolution cannot even begin to account for…or abide. Muhammad’s words have enthralled and ruled the daily lives of 35 percent of the people on earth since the eighth century. And that rule has only grown stronger in our time. Jesus’s words held sway over a comparable percentage of the world’s population for one and a half millennia before weakening in Europe during the last half of the twentieth century.
    Words are artifacts, and until man had speech, he couldn’t create any other artifacts, whether it was a slingshot or an iPhone or the tango. But speech, the font of all artifacts, had a life no other artifact would ever come close to. You could lay aside a slingshot or an iPhone and forget about it. You could stop dancing the tango and it would vanish forever…or until you deigned to dance again. But you couldn’t make speech lie down once it left your lips. The same remark could make your nieces and nephews crack up with mirth and laughter and make your brothers and sisters loathe you forever. Mighty men could say the wrong thing, and tens of thousands of little men might lose their lives in the war that followed right after the words came out of his mouth. Or a weak man might get drunk one night and say something romantic to a pretty girl. He wakes up in the morning with a terrible hangover, kneading his forehead and consumed with guilt because of the sweet possessive looks she’s giving him. She has no trouble putting him in a box and tying it with a ribbon and giving him to herself as a wedding gift…the kickoff of sixty-two years during which he has a chance to find out just how stupid she is and how lovely she isn’t—all of it the result of a little drunk speech he uttered back in another century.
    Soon speech will be recognized as the Fourth Kingdom of Earth. We have regnum animalia, regnum vegetabile, regnum lapideum (animal, vegetable, mineral)—and now regnum loquax, the kingdom of speech, inhabited solely by Homo loquax . Or is “kingdom” too small a word for the eminence of speech, which can do whatever it feels like doing with the other three—physically and in every other way? Should it be Imperium loquax, making speech an empire the equal of Imperium naturae, the empire of Nature? Or Universum loquax, the Spoken Universe…this “superior intelligence,” this “new power of a definite character”?
    Last night I was riffling through the pages of a textbook on Evolution. I came upon a two-page spread with a picture on the left-hand page of a chimpanzee and her baby settling in for the night upon a three-pronged fork in a tree. On the right-hand page was a picture of a troop of gorillas stamping down a stretch of underbrush into crude nests for the night.
    I looked up from the book and out the window upon two rather swell hotels, just a few blocks from where I live in New York City, the Mark and the Carlyle, which is thirty-five stories high…two air-conditioned, centrally heated, room-serviced, DUX-mattressed, turned-down-quilted,