User:Jack Merridew/Blood and Roses

<div style="border-width: 1px 2px 2px 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #976684; box-shadow: 0.1em 0.1em 0.5em rgba(0,0,0,0.75); -moz-box-shadow: 0.1em 0.1em 0.5em rgba(0,0,0,0.75); -webkit-box-shadow: 0.1em 0.1em 0.5em rgba(0,0,0,0.75); border-radius: 1em; -moz-border-radius: 1em; -webkit-border-radius: 1em; width: 320px; margin-top: 3px; margin-left: 1em; padding: 0.5em 0.75em; background-color: #f9f9f9; background: -moz-radial-gradient(bottom right 90deg, farthest-side, #fff4fa, #f9f9f9); font-family: Perpetua, Palatino, Bookman, 'New Century Schoolbook', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 110%; text-align: left; clear: right; float: right;">  Blood and Roses was a trading game, along the lines of Monopoly. The Blood side played with human atrocities for the counters, atrocities on a large scale: individual rapes and murders didn't count, there had to have been a large number of people wiped out. Massacres, genocides, that sort of thing. The Roses side played with human achievements. Artworks, scientific breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions. Monuments to the soul's magnificence, they were called in the game. There were sidebar buttons, so that if you didn't know what Crime and Punishment was, or the Theory of Relativity, or the Trail of Tears, or Madame Bovary, or the Hundred Years' War, or The Flight into Egypt, you could double-click and get an illustrated rundown, in two choices: R for children, PON for Profanity, Obscenity, and Nudity. That was the thing about history, said Crake: it had lots of all three.  The exchange rates — one Mona Lisa equalled Bergen-Belsen, one Armenian genocide equalled the Ninth Symphony plus three Great Pyramids — were suggested, but there was room for haggling. To do this you needed to know the numbers — the total number of corpses for the atrocities, the latest open-market price for the artworks; or, if the artworks had been stolen, the amount paid out by the insurance policy. It was a wicked game.  The sack of Troy, says a voice in his ear. ''The destruction of Carthage. The Vikings. The Crusades. Ghenghis Kahn. Attila the Hun. The massacre of the Cathars. The witch burnings. The destruction of the Aztec. Ditto the Maya. Ditto the Inca. The Inquisition. Vlad the Impaler. The massacre of the Huguenots. Cromwell in Ireland. The French Revolution. The Napoleonic Wars. The Irish Famine. Slavery in the American South. King Léopold in the Congo. The Russian Revolution. Stalin. Hitler. Hiroshima. Mao. Pol Pot. Idi Amin. Sri Lanka. East Timor. Saddam Hussein.  "Stop it," says Snowman.  ''Sorry, honey. Only trying to help.''  That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland. This was the point of the game, said Crake, when Jimmy complained. Jimmy said that if that was the point, it was pretty pointless. He didn't want to tell Crake that he was having some severe nightmares: the one where the Parthenon was decorated with cut-off heads was, for some reason, the worst. — From Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood  

 

DRV×2:
 * Deletion review/Log/2009 August 15
 * Deletion review/Log/2009 August 23

non-free use rationale

 * It is a short excerpt from a full length book, Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood; page 89, in paperback edition ISBN 1844080285.
 * The source of the quote has been acknowledged all along.
 * The quote is used as critical commentary on Wikipedia culture.
 * Criticism, parody and satire are well established non-free use doctrines; see fair dealing and limitations and exceptions to copyright.
 * This use is beneficial to the project by being educational.
 * The use is for a non-commercial purpose.
 * It is being used as a sidebar to User talk:Jack Merridew, and such usages are common in userspace.
 * It does not interfere with the author's ability to make a profit on her work.
 * As an excerpt of a copyrighted work, no free version is available.