Imagine something. Is that too much to ask? It won’t take much effort, and when it really starts happening you won’t have to imagine any more.

Around 2020, a disease expresses itself in the human population. A very embarrassing and serious disease. It has some clinical name, but everyone on the street calls it “well, you know…that.”

It only affects men. The symptoms are a pretty quick death.

Maybe we can identify the pathogen responsible. Maybe it’s something too synergistic and vague to nail down – a complex multi-stage infection caused by the interaction of multiple benign bacteria.

But one thing’s clear: it’s universal, and it’s incubating in anyone. There’s nowhere to quarantine so it won’t get out, and nowhere to quarantine to stop it from getting in.

But one group is spared: gay men.

To be more exact, men who have been sodomised.

This disturbing fact provokes the kind of consternation-fuelled investigation where you can almost imagine sweat dripping off the researchers’ fingers. Yes, it’s true. If you’ve taken it up the ass, you will not get the disease.

Ipso facto, if you do not wish to get the disease, you must take it up the ass.

We try to find a more…dignified way of conferring protection, but no dice. Artificially douching your colon with a man’s semen doesn’t work. Likewise, anal penetration is not the trigger. Those who practice “pegging” are dying at the same rate as everyone else. You have to actually have a gay man ejaculate into your asshole if you want to stay alive. Why? How does this work?

Good question, but until we figure it out…how badly do you want to live?

Society now looks quite a bit different.

The gay bathhouses of the 1960s are reopened, and become filled with men with shivering hands, thousand-yard stares, and evasive speech.

Fashion designers, architects, and artists have an excellent survival rate. The theme of the age for doctoral theses becomes something like “Anal Lube Hermeneutics – Towards an Understanding of Post-Plague Survivor’s Guilt Through the Work of Foucault.”

Members of the clergy and mullahs survive at far higher rates than average. They credit spiritual benediction and prayer for their survival.

The incumbent President of the United States – a family-values Baptist from Alabama – makes the controversial decision to have gay sex and save his own life. Everything’s handled with the utmost discretion, but unfortunately the gay “donor” had a tiny spycam in his pubic hair. The video is sold to the Daily Mail for a record-setting eighty million dollars.

Mostly, things become very, very awkward.

You’ll be meet a well-dressed businessman in Fleet Street or New York, shake his hand, and then break off eye contact as soon as possible. You’ll both be thinking the same thing. Very recently, perhaps only yesterday, you had another man on your back. And his balls were touching yours. Anyway, what’s the Stockholm Securities Exchange doing?

And there’s always troubling warnings from the CDC and NIH labs. The plague is mutating, evolving. Who knows if gay sex will still be enough to confer protection tomorrow. Sometime soon, dog semen might be the cure. Or dolphin semen. Whatever. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it – perhaps literally.

Can we have a moment of silence for all the fairytales disemboweled by their authors’ insistence that they have a moral message?

The Narnia stories are some of the best/worst out there. Ambivalent? Yes/no. Sometimes, CS Lewis’s imagination takes flight, and Narnia becomes a place of haunted splendor. Other times, Narnia is shallow and facile, with characters in constant danger of puncturing their paper-thin world with an errant swordpoint. CS Lewis keeps using them as a delivery vehicle for his moral views. His fairytale world seems fabricated and unconvincing when you realise that the fauns and centaurs are there to preach the views of a 20th century English professor.

Why does Edmund Pevensie have to die?

What crime has he committed? The word “traitor” is bandied about…who did he betray? He was not a citizen of Narnia. He swore no oath of fealty to Aslan. From his perspective, he met a nice lady who promised to do nice things for his family, so he’s throwing his lot in with her. Sounds fair. Is his crime that he was gullible, easily mislead? For fuck’s sake, he’s a young boy, talking to the embodiment of the devil. She could probably convince Henry Kissinger to eat the turkish delight.

Roger Ebert once said “You can’t have heroes and villains when the wrong side is making the best sense.” And it’s hard to view Edmund as a bad person when he’s only doing the things you and I would do, in his place.

Yes, he meets some other characters who speak ill of the witch, but who doesn’t spread rumours about their enemy during a war? What reason does he have to believe the beavers’ and Tumnus’s version of events, instead of Maugrim’s and the dwarf’s?

It gets worse when you consider that the witch’s turkish delight is described as enchanted: you will always want to eat more of it. All of Edmund’s decisions after meeting the witch were made with highly impaired judgement. How does it make sense to treat him as a bad guy, either from the reader’s point of view or from Aslan’s?

CS Lewis is trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents here, and it’s a problem he never manages to solve. You can actually see the exact moment when he gives up, and just declares ex cathedra that Edmund knew he was joining the side of evil.

“She was jolly nice to me, anyway, much nicer than they are. I expect she is the rightful Queen really. Anyway, she’ll be better than that awful Aslan!” At least, that was the excuse he made in his own mind for what he was doing. It wasn’t a very good excuse, however, for deep down inside him he really knew that the White Witch was bad and cruel. ”

This is shitty writing, and you can almost hear pipes and water mains burst inside the story. You can’t just declare by fiat “this character is evil”, you have to let their actions earn it. Edmund’s don’t. He’s a villain with no villainous acts, a guy on a wanted poster with his crimes reading “he was mean to his sister.”

But the Chronicles of Narnia are still great books, or at least fun books. You just have to indulge CS Lewis a bit. They’re like Saturday morning cartoons where every now and then the super hero jabs a finger at you through the screen and delivers a PSA about saying no to drugs and staying in school. Although in Narnia’s case it’s often more like saying no to school and staying in drugs.

Here’s West Hunter with an example of how following long inductive chains can cause you to arrive at wrong conclusions that perhaps end in Iraq getting buried in a ten-foot-deep layer of white phosphorus.

I would like to supply a similar case.

In 1989, a Missouri-class battleship called the USS Iowa was test-firing its 16-inch guns. Something went wrong. As explosive charges were loaded into the breech of gun turret number two, they suddenly detonated, sending the explosion back into the turret crew. Forty-seven servicemen died in a wash of fire.

How did it happen? The gun barrel in question was cold. No cold weapon had ever caused a spontaneous explosion in all of recorded maritime history. Navy investigators found traces of brake fluid, calcium hypochlorite, and steel wool inside the barrel. The remains of a sabotage device?

The story developed an interesting Brokeback Mountain-esque winkle when it was revealed that Clayton Hartwig, captain of the centre gun, had been in a covert relationship with a sailor in the turret crew. What’s more, he’d been in charge of the loading operation. Was this an act of revenge from a jilted lover? Both men had died in the explosion.

Elaborate theories of sabotage and murder-suicide looked right past the real reason for the explosion. Additional bags of explosives called “trim bags” are normally inserted into the main charge to correct for weight variations. Unlike the explosives in the main charge, the “trim bags” are not tightly packed, making them susceptible to the shock of the gun’s power-driven rammer. The Iowa, incidentally, had a rammer that forced the bagged explosives into the breech 0.6 meters further than regulation guidelines, and with greater force. The explosive charges remain stable under heavy pressure, but the loosely-packed trim bags were very unstable under those conditions.

A second technical inquiry established that the chemical remains in the gun barrel were most likely from a mixture of cleaning fluid, lubricants, and seawater. No reason to suspect conscious sabotage.

Finally, a test rig was built that simulated the Iowa’s 16-inch cannon, as well as the over-ramming. It was done five times, ten times, fifteen times, but nothing happened.

The testers persisted. As Nassim Taleb would point out fifteen years later, you have to make outliers part of your plan. Even if cold explosions almost never happen, you cannot escape the awful tyranny of that “almost”.

On the 18th test, the charge exploded inside the cold barrel, blowing the test rig apart.