B952 <=> B954 [BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 953]

“’Astonishingly smart fellows, these Americans; even their bread is something extraordinary; so “superb,” so “white” and simply charming – really the splendor of splendors of contemporary civilization.’

“But that from this deformity of wheat, their bread results in being ‘worthless’ and, furthermore, constitutes another of the innumerable factors in the spoiling of their stomachs – what is that to them? Are they not also in the front rank of contemporary what is called ‘European civilization’?

“The most curious thing in all this naivete of theirs is that they give the best and most useful of what Nature forms in this divine grain for their normal existence, to the pigs, or simply burn it, while for themselves they consume that substance which is formed by Nature in the wheat only for connecting and maintaining those active elements which are localized chiefly, as I have already said, just under the husk of the grain.

“A second and also rather important factor in the disharmonizing of the digestive function of these unfortunate American three-brained beings, is the system which they have recently invented for the elimination from themselves of the waste residue of their first-food; and that is to say, the ‘comfortable seats’ of what are called their ‘water closets.’

“In addition to the fact that this maleficent invention was and still is one of the chief factors in the said disharmonization now proceeding in them themselves and also in almost all the beings of the other continents – who, by the way, have already begun in recent times very jealously imitating them in all their peculiar methods of ‘assisting’ their transformatory functioning – your favorites, thanks to this invention of theirs, now striving to fulfill even this inevitable being function of theirs with the greatest possible sensation of pleasant tranquility, have got, as it were, a new incentive for the jealous service of their god ‘self-calming,’ which as I have already said more than once, has been and still is for them almost the chief evil engendering and evoking all the abnormalities of their psyche as well as of their ordinary being-existence.