“Calamities of the Last Pauper” (1982)
Updated: 3 days ago
The question then arises, what poverty is required by the practice of this counsel or, in other words, what poverty suffices for the state of perfection? The renunciation which is essential and strictly required is the abandonment of all that is superfluous, not that it is absolutely necessary to give up the ownership of all property, but a man must be contented with what is necessary for his own use. Then only is there a real detachment which sufficiently mortifies the love of riches, cuts off luxury and vain glory, and frees from the care for worldly goods. Cupidity, vain glory, and excessive solicitude are, according to St. Thomas, the three obstacles which riches put in the way of acquiring perfection (Summa, II-II, Q. clxxxviii, a. 7). —Arthur Vermeersch, "Poverty." The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 12.
Lafferty can be confrontational, especially if you don’t share his perspective. When I considered writing about this, one story immediately came to mind: "Calamities of the Last Pauper." It’s one of his crankier works, unlikely to garner much affection, yet fascinating and overlooked. The story addresses poverty, divine order, and the consequences of utopian reform.
Its theme was important to Lafferty, and I suspect many readers would part ways with him over it. It helps explain his work, particularly Cathead’s poverty and suffering in Past Master (1968). When confronted with such immiseration, I imagine some readers thinking, This must be just a metaphor. Surely he doesn’t actually believe this kind of misery is justifiable.
Lafferty’s traditionally Catholic views allow him to craft what can appear to be anti-versions of Le Guin’s "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973). He enjoys provoking readers by writing such stories.
The story opens after an apocalypse: the world has eliminated poverty, but this well-intentioned change has brought disaster.
Before the apocalypse, one holdout remained: John Bochtan. He refused to be reclassified as anything but a pauper, making him an inconvenient anomaly and prime material for a public spectacle.
Lafferty begins by addressing us directly:
This account is for those who were too young or too unborn to have seen the denouement of ‘The Death of the Last Pauper’ live (the death was live) on the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show. And ninety-six percent of today's population are too young to have seen it.
The trick of the story is that Bochtan isn’t poor in the sense of lacking material resources. As The Catholic Encyclopedia puts it:
The vow of poverty does not necessarily or as a general rule exclude the capacity to possess in common, that is to say, to have a common stock of property at the common disposal of the possessors, provided that they do not dispose of it in any manner Contrary to the accepted rules and customs.
Lafferty takes this view of poverty as detachment from excess to an extreme, challenging non-Christian notions of wealth and spiritual poverty.
“John Bochtan had a personality that had made him unpopular even when there were numerous paupers. Bochtan was what used to be called a wise guy (they don’t have them any more), what used to be called a ‘show boat’ (they don’t have them any more either). In addition to being the last poor person in the world he may have been the last wise guy and the last show boat also. And these types simply could not be allowed to exist in a modern society. John had the use of plenty of money and property, including a yacht with crew, but he refused to take title to these things. He swore that they would reclassify him out of his poverty only over his dead body.”
Bochtan has all the amenities of great wealth. Yet he is poor in spirit, a salt-of-the-earth man. He is a smart-ass and a showboat. Still, he reflects the New Testament ideal of detachment from worldliness. On this reading, his relationship with material things is not disordered. But this kind of poverty is no longer tolerated by the viewers of the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show.
Powerbrokers like Pasqual Ratrunner (“The poor we will not always have with us”) want Bochtan gone. Towering demiurges, prophets, and weathermen warn of catastrophe if he—the last pauper—disappears. When Bochtan is murdered live on television by Hit-Man Henson, the world descends into chaos. The earth shakes. Storms rage. Waters desalinate. Yet sea levels rise as the rocks give up their water. This is a Lafferty twist on Exodus 17:1-7 and Numbers 20:2-13. In those stories, water flows from the rocks of Horeb and Meribah—classical symbols of God’s provision and miraculous intervention.
What looks like punishment is, in fact, love: God caring enough about people to send them back to the Ice Age.
In this frozen future, survivors live with Stone Age tools. The story is recorded under these dire circumstances. At the end, we learn the narrator inscribes it on the shoulder blades of a Woolly Rhinoceros.
“For a while there I feared that I would not be able to wrap this account up properly. I had used up everything I had to write on. And I had gone out hunting four days straight and not killed the prey I needed to finish this chronicle. But this morning I killed one in the first hour, a large, male, Wooly Rhinoceros. In another hour I had what I needed out of the carcass. Now I have something to write on again.”
Lafferty also continues his critique of the media. The global talk show becomes a stage for divine intervention. The Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show reaches the entire world in all languages simultaneously, with most television sets equipped to let each person hear it in their own language. He repeatedly shortens this to GBLLSYMS, a name that carries (for me) a phonetic echo of “bull systems” and “bullshit.”
Lafferty contrasts this universal broadcast with the real Pentecost (Acts 2:6–11). Instead of the Holy Spirit granting understanding, we get a cheapjack substitute. Google Translate avant la lettre.
In place of divine revelation, television. A counterfeit miracle. A counter-Pentecost that replaces spiritual unity with mass communication.
This is the hubris of Babel. Shared understanding is a great good, but submission to manufactured consensus is not. Yet the show has open lines to "numinous persons." It suggests that no part of life is fully secular. Lafferty writes:
But of these shows it was only the forerunning GBLLSYMS that had the "numinous valves" on their switchboards. By reason of these, all numinous persons (plapper-angels, demiurges, elementals, principalities, specially-impressed mortals, and God himself) would automatically have preference given to their calls to the programs.
Lafferty even has a demiurge deliver a verse imprinted by God:
When none be poor and none have fault, And all own silver laver;— The leaven turns to lump, the salt No longer keeps its savor.
The caller who calls himself God, however, turns out to be George Orvil Dunsworth, a writer using a gadget to fool the numinous valves. The world is too busy with entertainment to heed the warnings.
"Calamities of the Last Pauper" is about the destruction of sacred order. Lafferty suggests that society and creation are not just material arrangements; they participate in divine meaning. Within that order, the poor hold a cherished place. As St. Lawrence said, “The poor are the treasure of the Church.” Their presence calls others to virtue: compassion, generosity, and dependence on God.
Bochtan’s enemies on the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show are eager to see the last pauper erased. When he dies, they don’t realize they’ve killed more than a man. They’ve severed the final filament of meaning holding their world together. The poor weren’t just inconvenient. They were Christ’s instruments of grace.
The story presents poverty of spirit as a form of grace, the visible reminder of Christ’s presence among the lowly. Lafferty builds on the Gospel’s depiction of Christ identifying with the poor, as in the words, “I was hungry, and you gave me food.”
Had the world tolerated Bochtan, perhaps grace would have remained. Instead, by erasing poverty, the television hosts and viewers erase something deeper: their connection to mercy and meaning. And the oceans become unsalted because the savor has gone out of the world.
For Lafferty, this perverts justice: the world convinces itself it has solved poverty by erasing the poor in spirit.
Lafferty knew that Rerum Novarum (1891) set the foundation for modern Catholic social thought. Pope Leo XIII affirmed that the poor must be protected from exploitation and that class conflict must be resolved through justice and charity. This did not mean eliminating an entire class:
“The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth.” (Rerum Novarum, §19)
But the media-centered world of "Calamities of the Last Pauper" takes the opposite approach. It refuses to coexist with poverty in any form, deciding instead that the only solution is to abolish the poor themselves.
This is the nightmare of modern ideologies. Both capitalist and communist visions have, at times, treated the poor as a problem to be solved rather than as people to be loved. Lafferty exaggerates this impulse to its extreme, presenting a world where poverty is “cured” not through justice, but through categorization, reclassification, and ultimately, execution.
Quadragesimo Anno (1931) built on Leo XIII’s teaching by warning against both excessive individualism, which ignores the duty to the poor, and collectivist tyranny, which sees people as disposable in service of a utopian ideal. In Bochtan’s death, Lafferty gives us the worst version of both. The world is so obsessed with its own material success that it refuses to let one man exist outside its system. His dignity is overridden by the collective.
"Calamities of the Last Pauper" fiercely rejects the false distinction between spiritual and material poverty. But I’m torn between two readings:
On one hand, Lafferty doesn’t reconcile these forms of poverty because the damned world of the story refuses to. The poor aren’t just erased; they take the world’s meaning with them.
On the other hand, the story feels like it needs some synthesis, even if just a cockeyed Laffertian one, to make sense of spiritual poverty in a post-scarcity society. While Lafferty often pulls against definitive endings, here the lack of closure suggests, at least to me, that the inciting idea hasn’t been pushed far enough. This, I believe, is why the framing device falls flat. I would have preferred fire to ice.
Current notes:
Bibliographical Note
Lafferty’s work-history card records completion on December 11, 1981, and submission to Virginia Kidd on December 12. It records a sale to Dennis Mallonee for $160.
First published in Fantasy Book, November 1982.
Sources: R. A. Lafferty, work-history card for “Calamities of the Last Pauper,” R. A. Lafferty papers, 1979-002, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; Internet Speculative Fiction Database, “Calamities of the Last Pauper,” https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1424871.
