CoL49 (6) Either ... or ...

[Robin Landseadel]

Speaking of Tristero, odd stamps and anarchist disorganizations . . .	

	"Now Father," appealed Moline, "how many sons write home as
	regularly as our own here?"

	"That's just it. Pinhead!" he spat. As a stamp collector of average
	obsessiveness, his unhappiness with his son had grown from
	bewilderment into an all but homicidal rage. It seemed that
	young Ewball had been using postage stamps from the 1901
	Pan-American Issue, commemorating the Exposition of that
	name in Buffalo, New York, where the Anarchist Czolgosz had
	assassinated President McKinley. These stamps bore engraved
	vignettes of the latest in modern transportation, trains, boats,
	and so forth, and by mistake, some of the one-cent, two-cent,
	and four-cent denominations had been printed with these
	center designs upside down. One thousand Fast Lake
	Navigation, 158 Fast Express, and 206 Automobile inverts had
	been sold before the errors were caught, and before stamp-
	collector demand had driven their prices quite through the roof,
	Ewball, sensitive to the Anarchistic symbolism, had bought up
	and hoarded as many as he could find to mail his letters with.

	"Even right side up," shouted Ewball Senior, "any nincompoop
	knows enough to keep stamps in mint condition-uncanceled,
	original gum intact! for chrissakes-otherwise the secondary-
	market value goes all to hell. Every time you mailed one of
	these letters here you wasted hundreds, maybe thousands of
	dollars."

	"Exactly my point, sir. Inversion symbolizes undoing. Here are
	three machines, false idols of the capitalist faith, literally
	overthrown-along with an indirect reference of course to the
	gunning down of Mark Hanna's miserable stooge, that resolute
	enemy of human progress-"

	"I voted for McKinley, damn it!"

	"As long as you are truly penitent, the people in their wisdom
	will forgive you."

	"Rrrrr!" Oust Senior threw the letters in the air, dropped to all
	fours and charged screaming at Ewball, into whose ankle he
	unhesitatingly sank his teeth. Ewball, in considerable pain,
	sought with his other foot to step repeatedly on his father's 	
	head, the two men filling the air of the parlor meanwhile with
	language unfit for the sensitive reader, let alone those ladies
	present, who gathering their skirts and moving cautiously, were
	attempting to pull the disputants apart, when all at once the
	curious Oedipal spectacle was interrupted by a loud gunshot.
	AtD, Pages 977/978