New World Order
It was a horrible mistake.
That something this bad could happen as a matter of mispronunciation was bewildering, but there they were--in a world paved with graphs.
Certainly, "a world paved with grass" is what World President Lucas B. Boehner had said he hoped for, or at least it is what he had meant to say. It's what I heard, anyway. But everybody else heard the man proclaim that what he hoped for, more than anything else, was a world paved with graphs, and since President Boehner was shot and killed ten minutes after he announced his hopes for this thing, he couldn't set the record straight. Deep analysis of video footage, by humans and computers alike, as well as semantic analysis by linguistics experts from around the world, revealed the last wishes of the new martyr: a world paved with graphs.
At first, the usual groups protested at the usual locations. There was a march on Washington: "Greenery, not Goonery!" it was called. Heads appeared on television shows and talked about the absurdity of it all. Graphs are not things that can pave, they urged. Rivals pointed out that, technically, neither is grass. Grass is, they crowed, the opposite of pavement. Grass is organic and alive. Paving implies cement. Graphs can be made of cement. Grass cannot. It was a good point, and the winning one.
So the world became paved with graphs. It was weird. No oceans of grass, no slender green stalks shivering in the breeze. No children blowing dandelion seeds on plains that stretched across continents. No fat, smiling lawnmower lobby (for that's really who owned President Boehner--everyone knows it). In fact, the lawnmower lobby--Big Lawnmower, they now were called--had become mobsters and common thugs, now involved not only with lawnmowers, but rackets, books, and the occasional violent incident. A body was found at the bottom of the Hudson, tied to a John Deere relic from 1998.
The graphs were varied and odd. Most people took them in stride. I can say now that I did not much care for the things. Bar graphs could be made into stairs. It was difficult to find so much valid data that lined up exactly in the right way, though, and it was decided early on that there was to be no repetition and that each graph had to mean something. A meaningless graph is not a graph at all, but abstract art, is what they all said. President Boehner did not dream of a world paved with abstract art.
Entire cities were razed and redesigned with their boulevards tracing the disparate lines of a line graph. Driving became difficult, as intersections were rare, and hardly ever perpendicular. The pavement itself was imprinted with pictograph-style images of cartoon cars. In more populous areas, there were more imprints of cartoon cars. Out in the country, there was only one cartoon car every five miles. There, it was almost possible to forget that the world was paved with graphs. It was hard to get a permit to move out there, though, because after awhile, it's where everyone wanted to go.
In the suburbs, President Boehner's most enthusiastic and sentimental constituents--often members of the stupid quasi-religious group "Graphs Top Grass" took the man's words to heart and combatively pulled up their lawns and replaced them with little wooden, metal, or plaster sculptures of bar graphs and pie charts, usually homemade. It was these people, numbering in the hundred millions, who caused lawnmower sales to plummet. Dolts and morons, all of them. Any time one of them was interviewed on tv, you could bet your trousers that that person would have big buck teeth. They all did.
In a few years, the Empire State Building was torn down and replaced with a thing that was supposed to be a flow chart detailing how to proceed should there be an act of terrorism. The Chrysler Building was torn down and replaced with an org chart detailing the balance of power in the World Military. It was hard to read. Making buildings that you can go in and that are also graphs is really hard. It was a strange age for architecture. Most buildings, though, got away with having histographs painted on their facades. Political and historical themes were common.
In 2903, ten years after Boehner's assassination, a worldwide civil war broke out over the question: is a periodic table a graph? I think it is. The World Supreme Court decided it was not, and scientists rioted in every major city. Word had it they were backed with the brawn of Big Lawnmower, or else they never could have pulled it off. Posters of Boehner were burned and defaced with feces of every type. Graphs were chopped down and made erroneous. Greenery began to sprout between the cracks of the pavement, since the caretakers with the chemicals were too afraid to do their jobs. It was around this time that I went into hiding and grew the beard.