philippic

Posted: March 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: writes.me | 2 Comments

Living in this cosmopolis, I’m in daily contact with folks from all over everywhere. This has the effect of rubbing America in my face. The simple fact is that the lives of our ordinary people have much more in common with those in Russia or China than they do with those in any of the similarly wealthy fairylands scattered across northern and western Europe, aka “real countries.” People from real countries believe the purpose of a government is to boringly provide useful services for its citizens. People from the aforementioned named countries and most others may or may not believe this as well, but the point is generally rendered moot by a powerful overclass controlling the machinery of government to keep their money and fuck everybody else.

And that’s where a unique feature of American politics comes into play. A unique feature. You know, like a giant melanoma on the tip of the nose. Our political narrative is that we could have ourselves a fairyland, but choose not to, because that would violate the sacred right of the overclass to fuck over whomever they wish. And, on the one hand, we talk in hushed superstitious awe of that being the natural order which cannot be transgressed, and, on the other hand, we’ll boldly proclaim that order is something we must uphold. Looks to be a paradox–upholding a natural order–but it is not. It’s an illustration of the belief that we’re God. The God we’ve come to worship anyway, crafted in our image, with a penchant for letting people live in poverty and get sick and die as a means of upholding His order. A lazy God who can stay home and watch TV, content in the knowledge that everything’s going according to plan.  You ask most Americans, God made the natural world, kicked back, and cracked a non-alcoholic beer.  I don’t know where they got that.  It’s not biblical.  It’s not even Genesis.  It’s some pagan caricature, maybe demonic possession. (My take on the bible is that the act of Creation was like opening Pandora’s jar, and God’s been just barely keeping pace with the fallout ever since; an artist who’s taken on a project that very well might be too much, but He’s still trying.  I mean, how many holy books have sequels?)

Anyway.

It is no longer Right wing pundits that get my blood up. It’s my friends. It’s the idea that there exists a “smart” conservative politics, opposed to the sensational rabble-rabbling of talk radio. It’s also the toothless heartless mutant bastard hybrid son of the granola fringe and Ayn Rand. It’s Ron Paul. It’s “small business.” It’s “grassroots.”

If there’s an American Left, a real American Left, devoid of lip-service to our carnivorous holy cows, I have not encountered it outside the person of my mother. My mother does not have the vocabulary to articulate her sensibilities. She’s well-educated, but she never learned the words because she’s impervious to bullshit. She won’t get in some debate involving lots of reified concepts and obscure proper noun ambushes and cliches and axioms at the mere mention of which one should kowtow. No, she smells the gas and holds her breath. She sees problems. She sees obvious solutions, i.e. not invoking magic. No trickle-down anything. No this-leads-to-that. The Babel noise of her peers flies past and her only response is “we’re being robbed.”

A friend recently said, “I’ve known you for a number of years and I still wonder if you have any convictions.” I replied, glibly, “Just outstanding warrants.” I felt guilty later, because he’s right. It’s about time. So here’s a conviction:

America’s sin is cowardice. We love football and action movies and military adventurism but we’re terrified of real fights. We’ll hang out with bullies and laugh and say “good one!” every time they slap us in the face, just to make it absolutely clear that, you know, we could have done something, had we minded, but we didn’t mind. We go ahead and hate each other for the same reason, all hanging out with the same bully, bully smacking our friends, us sticking up for the bully. And as our family members age and fall into pitiable conditions, we can direct our anger at them for not doing better, for putting us in the position of caring for them when we lack the means to care for ourselves. Our buddy comes by to smack us for not doing better. Hey, good one.

The secret of American politics, what makes all of it so pious, is that we don’t actually want to know if we can change anything. We don’t want to know what happens if we hit back. Better to live with the illusion of power than the reality of helplessness. I should say, the reality of violence. Real fights for real reasons.  That we can lose.

There will be no return to some former age of righteous prosperity. The old wages for labor departed with the times and nothing so artificial as to bring them back can have any tenure. It is the advance of technology which places both the means and the gains of production into fewer and fewer hands. The benefits of our system are still out there, we just lack access to them. Our standard of living has always been zero-sum. The current balance for most of us continues to plunge red, while a few live better than monarchs of old could have dreamed. It is in this light that I suggest the piety in your approach to providing for you and yours is misplaced. There’s no fruit left on the tree; somebody made a machine to pick it all.  Good on him!  Yes.  Now.  Will you be a monkey, clambering to higher and higher branches? You’re a hell of a burden, every time you fall. Will you fight over what little the other monkeys have managed to pick?

I think the first step from here is to go ask the guy with the machine to share. Politely. We should probably all go together and ask as a group. I know, I know, that looks threatening. But I think it’s a lot less threatening than what will happen when we’re starving. We will rip each other to pieces faster than that guy can throw us fruit.  Somewhere on the tail of all that, if anybody’s left alive, come the guillotines, and everybody loses, the end.  Maybe we could have a little losing and a little winning up front instead.

The counterargument to this invariably relies on sanctimony and metaphysics, is invariably reducible to “but that’s forbidden.”   I’m ready to respond in kind.

a. julliard gabrielli and the elixir of vanity

Posted: March 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: fiction | Leave a comment

The volcano had been painted pink and two massive similarly-colored spheres had been placed at its base; this was my introduction to A. Juliard Gabrielli.  Throughout our helicopter’s approach I could sense antiaircraft turrets trained on us, the same that had just a few years prior wiped out the entire Gabrielli clan alongside the Gabrielli & Gephardt board of trustees.  We circled to the back of the volcano where a landing strip had been defoliated through the jungle, capped at one end by a black square of tarmac, and there we set down.  Gunmen in animal masks closed on us within seconds; a rabbit placed a black hood over my head.  I felt myself being led out, then hoisted onto a stretcher to which I was then strapped.  The stretcher glided away from the suck of the chopper blades into the screeching jungle, which was in turn muted when elevator doors slid shut.  When the sensation of descent ceased, I could hear a faint bass throbbing, growing ever louder with my approach.  Suddenly, the sound was overwhelming.  My body was freed from the stretcher and my head was freed from the hood.  I blinked as a powerful blacklight flashed my retinas.

I was in something akin to a nightclub.  A pair of poledancing robots occupied a central stage, gyrating.  They had pig lamps for heads and torsos molded from white plastic.  A cephalo-megaphone DJ feigned scratching between them.  Covering the walls to either side of the stage large screens displayed maps and graphs, giving the impression of a war room.  There was a dance floor and a number of C-shaped black velvet sofas.  All were empty but one, where A. Julliard Gabrielli sat, legs crossed, arms wide over the back of the couch.  I approached him.

He said: “Money is useless.”

I said: “I’ve come about chewing gum.”

He said: “I know why you’ve come.  Sit down.”

I sat.  We watched the robots dance.

He said: “I told my father I wanted nothing from him.  No assistance, no trust fund, no place in his will.  I told him I wanted no part of his fortune.  I told him I would always be worthless.  I swore I would squander whatever I was given, or use it in whatever way would vex him most.  He said, ‘as long as you’re happy.’  I swore I would not be happy.  I told him that the only way I would embrace happiness would be if he came to detest me, to wish me ill.  However, I told him that should he appear to do this, I would assume it was owed to an underlying wish for my well-being.  I would ignore it.”  Julliard snapped his fingers and ordered a rifle-toting turtle to bring him a cigar and a carafe of cinnabar.  When they were delivered, he decanted red quicksilver into a scotch glass and asked me: “Mercury?”

I declined.

He said: “It’s the elixir of life, but it doesn’t work.  So many pursued it to their graves.  When I inherited my fortune, at first I thought to have it discovered.  But money is useless.  It cannot be used to do useful things like discover the elixir of life.   So I had the Jiajing Emperor’s exact formula replicated instead.  The one that killed him.  This is the elixir of vanity.  Ku Fu was immortalized by dying in his quest for immortality.  I will not gain immortality by dying in ironic imitation of a man who was immortalized pursuing immortality.  You see?”

I nodded.

“I did not spite my father to spite my father,” he went on.  “I did this because my older brother had done everything to please him, to be a good heir.  He had no sense of the Oedipal basis of meaning, my brother, how to engage vanity.  And while my father was largely pleased, I knew he was secretly dissatisfied with such simple and absolute affection.  My family was very loving.  Very close and kind and devoted.  I was no exception to this.  I lived in impoverished obscurity, panhandling to subsist and making use of my spy network to determine the precise moment to strike.  I acquired my spy network by means of seduction alone: seducing, seducing into seducing, once even seducing into seducing into seducing. “

“In keeping with the Oedipal basis of meaning, did you seduce your mother?” I asked.

He winced.  “Don’t be crass.  I seduced my father’s mistress.  I misspoke before.  The Oedipal is no basis.  It is but another layer of onion skin above the core futility of the human condition.  We find meaning in that which explicates futility.”

“Ah,” I said.  “You mentioned a ‘moment to strike.’  Was that the opening of this facility?”

“Yes, the opening of this facility.  One accident and I skipped over a hundred people to inherit a sum of wealth scarcely imaginable.  But this was not my motivation.  You already know and understand my motivation.”

“To dutifully best your father and reveal the underlying futility of the human condition,” I said.

He nodded.  The bass thumped.  The robots gyrated.

I said: “I want to depart before the bombing commences.  Please tell me about the chewing gum.”

Again he nodded, not looking away from the stage.  “I have dedicated my entire life to engaging vanity.  The explication of futility.  Well, there have been exceptions, but those didn’t go anywhere.  And what is more vain than chewing gum?  Simulated eating.  Sometimes done to freshen breath, but it prompts the release of acidic digestive saliva and sours the mouth.  What is more vain than chewing gum—save an effort to halt the supply?  Damming that river of polymers for the most fleeting of instants before it simply flowed around.  At best!  In truth, I barely caused more than a price spike.”

I said: “You caused incalculable damage to the global economy.”

He shrugged.  “It’ll mend.”

I said: “Well, what’d you do with all the gum?”

“What had not been made, I aborted.  I bought or reallocated the chemical components on a massive scale.  What had been made I purchased and mostly dumped in the sea.  Imagine!  Even now, the oceans of the world are filled with little fish chewing gum.”  He mimicked a fish chewing gum.  “Of course, many containers were brought here.”

“The balls outside,” I said.

He nodded.

“So have you any gum?” I asked.

He withdrew a pack of peppermint sticks from his breast pocket and handed it to me.  “You had best away.  It won’t be long now.”  A screen showed his gunmen boarding a boat, discarding their masks overboard.

I thanked him, shook his hand, and turned to part, only at the last moment saying: “You know, you’re wrong about money being useless.”

“Oh?”

I tapped my brow with the packet of gum.  As I walked away, just over the techno I heard A. Julliard Gabrielli vomit the elixir of vanity.  I have no doubt he smiled at his reflection in the resultant pool.