It was unexpectedly instructive.
In every post-civilized society …
there is a group of people completely bought into the System, a minor nobility, invested in keeping things as they are, because that is to their ultimate economic benefit (or at least, they are convinced that this is so, whether it is or not).
These are the people who fly flags, always vote, and thank you for your service.
Whether or not these people think of themselves as liberal, they are inherently and deeply conservative by nature. They fear change, they hate change … unless change is marketed to them like a new phone, or a social media …
and they will always be gung-ho for any war, so long as the killing can be justified by framing it as consonant with the march of enlightened progress. “Making the world safe for democracy”, and shit like that. Especially since it is rarely them getting limbs blown off. No, that’s for other mother’s children. Fate, you might say; or the will of the lord. “Thank God i wasn’t planted in one of those shithole countries”, or neighborhoods, here in the land of the free.
Melting civilians by the tens of thousands in Japan was the right thing to do, can’t you see? They only would have suffered longer without the patriotic euthanasia. We are the Compassionate, blessed of the Lord.
And Vietnam: we had to burn the people and the villages, in order to save them.
Genocide? No, honey, that’s self-defense.
I’m not making shit up. These are their words.
***
I’m the other kind.
Dispossessed. Disaffected. Not even working class, but purely lumpen-proletariat.
Evolutionarily anarchistic.
I may be overeducated and hella smart compared to others in my invisible class, but that makes no essential difference, when we are keeping score, and we are always keeping score.
It’s the nature of the Beast we inhabit and fondle and pray to.
***
The nobility are all insane with a rapacity that is to their lives as water is to a fish.
(You won’t find that syllogism on your SAT.)
Down here, we are all insane with grief and very dull, ordinary kinds of suffering.
The Madness permeates every hour of every day, every thought, either way.
Are you ready for some football? Or ice cream for breakfast? Of course you are.
These anodynes take the sharp edges off the psychopathic agony.
They soothe.
I don’t have Netflix. I have cigarettes.
It’s the same shit either way. Slow poison and self-deletion, whichever way you cut it.
And getting stuff, like subscriptions or addictions, out of our lives as best we can, is God’s work.
For various uncertain values of divinity.
The right and true values of divinity.
And I’m here to preach them, motherfuckers, until I, with the blessing, am enough of a threat to the rotten established order that they have to put me down like a literate but rabid dog.
Bring it.
I’m here and I’m waiting for you and I don’t have one god damn thing left to lose.