Fucking heroes.
Does anyone, anywhere, anywhen actually enjoy the company of a fucking hero? (And by "anyone," I don't mean the rest of yon lightworking, do-gooding, democratizing tetchers busy grumbling about the kids on the lawn.) Fucking reflected glory all getting in your eyes. Who needs that shit?
Anyway.
I'd like to introduce you to a not-hero of mine. Today is his feast day, though you probably didn't know it until right now. Today, the ninth of November, we commemorate - nay, we celebrate - the memory of an accidental friend of human liberty.
He was not, in keeping with the theme of things, a good man. But you can't trust good men. They're always trying to fix people. And, their loathing for dark corners, cobwebs, dust bunnies and frailty is frightening, when you really get down to it. Scratch away at the chrome what coats a good man's life, and underneath you'll almost always discover a violator.
Not the window breaking teenager who scares good capitalists pretending to be radicals because she rejects their greedy ownership of consensus. I mean, the maximalist kind. The totalizers. The fuckers with systems, a list of proscriptions, a book of prescriptions, and a sippy cup of moraline always in grasping, clutching hand.
A good man is always a rapist in the waiting. He wants penetrating insights. He wants you to have 'em as well. He wants to penetrate your life and fill you up with the holy semen of his enlightenment. He wants to spear you with the truth. He wants to lance the very flesh of history with his righteousness.
No. You can't really trust good men, can you? Especially the ones with who come with tablets of the law and other systems.
Hmph.
Today is not the feast day of a good man. He was better than that, though we should be clear that he was not an improvement.
Today, we commemorate a friend of the despised, the trod upon and the forgotten. It's just too bad that there weren't more of him. One of them might have got to Johnson, as well. Or Kissinger. It's all good. We don't have to be choosy. We can indulge ourselves with an expansive amenability.
It's a feast day, don't you know?
And since this is not a day dedicated to one of the thousand and one faces of sky-god, cattle king, serpent* killing Dyeus Piter - lord of the holy rape and the lightning penetration - you can do whatever you want. Whatever. As in, anything. Your level worst, if you've got it in you. I recommend the strategic placement of aerosol dispersing canisters of sheep urine in your local financial district, timed to produce maximum mist during the lunch hour. Or, lacking that concentration of brokers and bankers, there's always the option of redecorating an executive's prized automobile with a mixture of bovine placental ejecta and gumdrops. There are so many possibilities, we're dealing with chaos here.
It's up to you.
If you can spare a moment, maybe during a sales projections meeting, or when the drive through car line is at it's noontime longest, or at the exact moment your boss is about to ask you to stay on after your scheduled shift ends, or whilst being lectured on productivity goals, or as your human resources rep is about to have you sign off on the latest revised conduct policy, remember to say, in whatever tone, and with whatever volume suits you and the moment best, "Thank Oswald!"
Because, really, thank Oswald. A truer friend of the dispossessed than a hundred hundred workers in light...
* - woman, natch
9 comments:
I chuck out a hosanna to John Dillinger now and then; after all, he died for our sins.
Heh. I like that elissar. A Dillinger Psalm.
A quick wave to our NSA friends.
Hah, fish. One hopes they wouldn't interpret the Festival of Oswald in the wrong light. Looking out from the rookery, we're just celebrating Oswald as one of peasant harbingers of the later-in-the-year Circus of Misrule.
It's too bad that where the foolscap tops the head of a player wielding a marotte the Court's sénéchal sees in his hand the hint of menace, or the wired garotte.
re: "A good man is always a rapist in the waiting. He wants penetrating insights. He wants you to have 'em as well. He wants to penetrate your life and fill you up with the holy semen of his enlightenment."
"I'd rather have a man come at me with an axe than with an idea."
-- Edward Abbey
No room to go into it here (or to entice the NSA to follow me in my years-long obsession with archetypal psychology and the poetic basis of mind), but this sense that the hero archetype is sorely in need of such discounting is very much in line with the work of the late psychologist James Hillman -- who was all about reading life as metaphor, much as Jack does in what I've quoted above.
Mark,
Sticking within the poesis, there is really no more brutal an age than the heroic age. This is what our bootstrapper friends fail to understand. But, they've got stiff competition from the prophets of Green Mother Nature, who also imagine themselves the heralds of a once and future heroic age of balance, symmetry and natural alignment - of the restoration of the purity of the virgin Gaia.
That they fail to see the spider poison the fly, the frog gobble the spider, the cat toy with the frog and the human cage the cat recommends against their heroic naivete. Because the ass ends of both visions - and I do mean their rectal openings, and what therefrom ensues - is heroic brutality.
For the bootstrapper, the premeditated murder of amity and affection, conviviality and immediacy. For the bhakti of Back To, it's the Great Dying of the superfluous.
They are amiably aided by the hauteur of the good liberals and grudgingly assisted by the astonished!shocked!betrayed! and relentlessly offended conservatives, each in service to a heroic state, one wearing a seraphim's crown, the other the dinner jacket of a jumped up mafioso.
The liberal's angel has a mean motherfucking sword strapped to his belt, and Don Minarchia is drunk on bad whine and a maudlin sentimentality that would make David Lanz playing the music of Krishna Das with David Grey on back vocals seem like Nordic Death Metal.
:-D
The first time I really fell in with a prophets of Green Mother Nature crowd was when I started deadpanning to others that "Truth is also the first casualty of 'Peace, man' (final two words accompanied by fingers raised in a peace sign)."
Abbey again : "Saving the world should only be a hobby."
Unfortunately we live in a nation of heroes. Americans love to strut their stuff in a Superman suit though superman is a fucking Nazi. So was The Shadow for that matter. Sneaking around all invisible and shit, the guy was endlessly killing people by accident. But I like listening to his old radio shows when I eat dinner. That’s because I hate television and stopped watching it years ago.
But you know nobody is a hero unless others make him or her a hero. Look at the guy who got beaned with a canister in Oakland, he was a hero because everyone says he was a marine, not only that but an Iraqee war veteran hero. I don’t know if he was over there killing Iraqi in fact I don’t know a damned thing about him but I’m so sick of military hero worship I could puke. Maybe the guy was a file clerk and never shot his gun but protesters were quick to make him a hero not just because he got beaned in the head but because he was military as if that explained everything, did his fucking duty. The strong silent type with vacant eyes, all polite and shit like a good dog. Maybe the guy was sickened by what he saw in Iraq, I have no idea, but in the process of turning him into a hero the protesters turned themselves into whores, used the guy’s bad luck to show how great they are as if to say “we aren’t a bunch of hippies, we got ourselves a genyoooine Iraqi military marine on our side.”
Nobody wants liberty because freedom is the goddamndest loneliest place there is. It’s also way too scary for most. People are slaves because they want to be.
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