Somehow a
stop must be put to this perpetual cycle of violent enamorment and equally
violent disaffection, which has transformed virtually every last former or
potential hyperoccidental person into
an apparently incorrigible wanton;
hyperoccidental humans must somehow come to engage libidinously with
commodities in a more redeeming—or at least less revoltingly damning—manner. They must come to feel no shame in employing
certain commodities that do indeed make their lives easier while being
decidedly unglamorous by comparison with more coveted objects either in the
same commodity-genus or in more coveted commodity-genera; and they must come to
covet commodities that they will wish to hold onto once they obtain them. And as a complement to this recalibration of
the hyperoccidental consumer’s libido, the hyperoccidental producer must come
to keep his own libidinous energies blinkeredly vectored towards the designing
and manufacturing of products that invariably address the needs and desires of
consumers; he or she must come to keep these energies from pathologically running
off into any of the pernicious side-channels that I itemized and analyzed in
the middle part of this essay—viz., Sadism, cart-before-the-horse-ism,
Pygmalionism, and dilettantism masquerading as artisanship. The producer must come to know and feel that
he aut al. is making the consumer’s life easier or more enjoyable at least up
to a point and after some fashion, and to be satisfied with this
knowledge-cum-feeling. And because the
present system of hyperoccidental life is organized—or rather misorganized
(rather than disorganized, for it is certainly not quite chaotic)—in such a way
as to facilitate the pathological off-running of productive energies into the
above-mentioned productive side-channels, producers will at least initially
have to be forced to project their
energies along the above-mentioned wholesome, virtuous vector; they will at
least initially have to have the above-mentioned blinkers imposed on their temples and held
in place there. The development and
implementation of the technical and administrative means of producer-coercion I
leave as an exercise for the wonkishly inclined non-DGR, who may after all find
his aut al.’s work much easier in the near future, and perhaps even in the
immediate future, than in the present; for the irrationalities and discontents
of the present hyperoccidental system of life are become so perfervid and
multifarious that a merely middling disruption of that system—say, a disruption
thereof on the scale of the so-called financial crisis of 2008—may suffice to
persuade producers of the necessity
of altering their diabolical ways, in which case one will be in the relatively
enviable position of merely breaking them of bad habits of whose perniciousness
they are already convinced. As to the form or structure I envisage such a productive-cum-consumptive
dispensation’s eventually taking: in the first place, it would be completely
devoid (or, in the purblind eyes of wooly-minded sentimentalists, bereft) of all non-locally consumable
luxuries, such that tourism would
join feudalism, mercantilism, Fabianism,
etc. in the ism section of the
junk-heap or rubbish-tip of history. Air
travel both intracontinental and intecontiental
would be ruthlessly restricted to absolutely
indispensable trips by governmental or commercial officials officially
designated as traveling soandsos (soandso is to be understood here as a family-friendly alternative
to a certain less flattering title rather than as a placeholder for virtually
innumerable more flattering ones); this restriction would be all the more
bearable for being likewise imposed on the highest-ranking of all governmental
and commercial officials—on heads of state and so-called CEOs. Routine intercontinental travel would be
restricted to commercial maritime traffic—to the literal shipping of goods at very slow speeds. Routine intracontinental travel would be
restricted to locomotive transport—ideally at speeds no greater than those
attainable by the average mid-twentieth-century steam train. Routine local travel—travel by ordinary
schlubs and schlubessess to and from their places of work, residence, and
recreation—would be restricted to shanks’s mares, bendy buses, trams or
streetcars (so no more Subways, Metros, Tubes, or U-Bahns), and taxis, with the
taxi-meters pegged to twice the average hourly wage; such that if the average
schlub or schlubess elected to take a two-hour taxi ride to and from, say, the
local zoo, of a Sunday afternoon, he or she would have to work four hours on Monday
to cover the cost. These restrictions on
travel would salutarily serve not only to curb the restrictees’ craving for redundant experiences, for experiences
that may just as readily and fully be had at home as abroad (whether at home be defined as one’s home polity
or one’s home ZIP-code or abroad as
halfway around the world or halfway into the neighboring ZIP-code), but also to
quash the utterly unfounded and misbegotten sense of empowerment a human individual tends to derive from being
transported at high speeds in machines to whose design, manufacture, and often even
(i.e., whenever he aut al. is not in the driver’s or pilot’s seat) governance
he aut al. has contributed absolutely
nothing. Engines of data processing
and transmittal would be arrested at their present stage of technical development,
and the satellites that facilitate their functionality would be allowed to fall
into disrepair and thence into the bits of ocean and poor-sod’s-rooftop
classically fallen into by abandoned space junk. Such an imposition of inertia on these
engines of whoredom and their extraterrestrial robot pimps would not only
immediately arrest the abominably dehumanizing cycle of mobile phone-purchasing,
upgrading, and discarding, but also quickly effect the salutary epiphenomenon
of rendering communication with people in distant locales as expensive and
inconvenient as it was before the mass-commercialization of email in ca. 1995,
and thereby making the multi-milliard-strong mob of addicts to so-called (and
indeed woefully miscalled) social media realize that there is nothing they give
less of a toss about than what some tosser in B*m***ktu supposedly thinks about
their taste in wombat guano-dip, anal-dilating calipers autc. The minuscule minority of persons genuinely
desirous of carrying on long-distance correspondences may rely, as in the old
days, on the mail trains and ships, which will enable them affordably to
exchange dozens of paper letters per year with each of their pen-pals within
their home polity, and at least a good half-dozen thereof therein with each
thereof in other polities. Once
salutarily deprived of the aeronautically-cum-electronically induced illusion
of agency via the two above-itemized measures, the hyperoccidental consumer,
who has in reality been but a sort of Ancient Mariner or wandering non-goy for
at least the past quarter-century, will at last be able to come back into his
aut al. own as a full-fledged consumer,
as an habitual user of commodities, of tangible, edible, strokable, etc. things that afford him aut al. genuine
pleasure and comfort. For consumer
libido-management’s sake I would restrict each of these proper, thingy
commodities to three lines, three models or versions-cum-prices—a budget or econo line, a midmarket line,
and a luxury line. In every case even the budget or econo line
would offer serviceable yeoman service–so there would be no more cheap
disposable ballpoint pens filled nearly to the tip with dried ink or cheap disposable
razors with blades blunter than those of butter knives. The mid-market line would offer a few extra
whistles and bells, as they used to be called, and the luxury line would offer an
at-least-rough (and often quite-smooth-indeed) technical quasi-equivalent of the version of the product available towards
the end of the twentieth century. So,
for example, whilst the luxury line of men’s dress shoes would not necessarily
be constituted by Italians out of materials sourced from the upper Po Valley—or
wherever else in Italy the most select tanneries were sited in ca. 1990—they
would be made largely or exclusively by hand by someone, be that someone a
Poughkeepsiean, and largely and exclusively out of leather from somewhere, be
that somewhere the upper Hudson Valley, just as the most upmarket shoes of ca.
1990 were. Such a rigidly three-tiered
hierarchy of commodities would salutarily restrict both consumers’ and
producers’ libidinous horizons and yet provide ample scope on both sides for
peering down one’s lorgnette at the sub-banausic tastes of the next bloke aut
al. The brewer of the exquisite Sierra
Nevada pale ale-style luxury beer could look down his aut al. lorgnette at the
brewer of the yeomanlike National Bohemian lager-style budget or econo beer,
who could in turn look down his aut al. lorgnette at the upmarket brewer for
contenting himself with shaving with a mere pivot-headless old school Gillette
Good News-style budget econo razor, who could in turn be out-lorgnetted by the
user of the mid-market old-school Gillette Sensor-style midmarket razor, who
could in turn be out-lorgnetted by the producer of the luxury Colgate-style toothpaste
with stripes and breath-freshening crystals.
The combinations and permutations of such thereby-enabled down-lorgnette-peering
are, if not quite infinite, then at least multitudinous enough to keep a Fibonaccianly
expanding human species busy until the Maxwellian extinction of the known
universe. (Whether and how lorgnette-production
will be able to keep adequate pace with the production of all the other
commodities throughout this conceivably multi milliard-year period is
admittedly an open and sorely vexing question, a question subtended by the
genuinely frightening question of whether lorgnettes themselves will have to be
stratified into econo, midmarket, and luxury lines, and further subtended by
the downright terrifying question of whether such stratification will lead to a
conceivably nearly never-ending spiral of out-lorgnetting; but I trust the
abovementioned wonks will manage to sort out all these questions in a manner eventuating
sooner rather than later in impeccable and imperturbable pan-hyperoccidental comity.) Such a political-economic dispensation would
also afford producer and consumer alike ample encouragement and opportunity to
reflect, to meditate, on matters not exhausted by his aut al.’s immediate engagement
with the commodity immediately to hand etc.
N.B. that I write of immediate
engagement and immediate
ready-to-hand etc.-ness, for such reflections or meditations would by no means
necessarily be utterly divorced from the Warenwelt,
from the world of commodities, after the manner at least supposedly propounded by
Plato’s, Kant’s, et al.’s metaphysical writings. Nosirautaleebob: for the present writer
envisages the typical scene of such reflections or meditations centering on a
grizzled, wizened octogenarian gent aut al. sitting at a tailor’s shop and
waiting to try on, à la the heroine
of Wings, his aut al.’s first
entirely bespoke, custom-tailored suit.
As he sits there he cannot help thinking back to the day, some sixty
summers (or winters) earlier when he acquired his very first suit (barring the
birthday one, of course), a perfectly yeomanly serviceable off-the-rack ensemble
that, along with quarter-dozens of its fellows, stood him in yeomanly good
stead for decades. Why, I remember I courted [or was courted by] Suzy [or
Bob or Pat] in that first suit; I
remember how she [or he or they] made fun of how baggily
it sat on my a(*)**(e) and shoulders. I
couldn’t say as I’d ever noticed so much as a bagette [sic on the absent u]
of that bagginess before or could notice such a bagette even then, but at that
very moment I resolved to myself like a shot that, by golly-cum-haitch or cee,
for Suzy [aut al.]’s sake, when I’d made me fortune I’d get an
entirely bespoke, custom-tailored suit that fitted me like a bespoke,
custom-made glove, only with encasements for legs and arms instead of for
fingers. And now at last I have made me
fortune and am at last being fitted for that bespoke, custom-tailored suit. Pity [here he aut al. man-aut al.-fully
stifles a sniffle] Suzy’s no longer here
to see me togged out in the blessed thing, but at least I’ve still got the
jacket from that very first off-the-rack suit of mine hanging in her
wardrobe. Why, it did her serviceable
yeoman service as a bathrobe years after it had got too shiny at the elbows to
pass muster at the office [here he aut al. man-aut-al.-fully stifleth
another sniffle]. To be sure, I dare not assume on trust
that every last man, woman, et al. in the hyperoccident will be capable of
assuming such a touching and redeemable long-range psychic-cum-affective engagement
with a given commodity-class as is instanced by this hypothetical gent aut
al.’s peri-sartorial reverie. Indeed, to
be sure, I dare say that an at-least-statistically-more-than-negligible proportion
of the pan-hyperoccidental populace will prove incurable of their (or should
that rather be its?) appalling
addiction to the enamorment-cum-disaffection cycle; who, even once they possess
a manifestation of the most upmarket version of a given commodity-class will by
no means rest satisfied, who immediately upon being presented with such a
manifestation, will ejaculate, Is that
all there is? Is there no Version
Umpteen-Milliard Point in the offing? and thereupon void uninhibitedly from
every duct and orifice in an unregenerately infantile-cum-hysterical
combination of outrage and despair. By
way of remedying this defect in my schema, I propose the institution,
construction, and operation of a hyperoccidental
gulag, of a group (albeit not necessarily specifically an archipelago, for it may function equally well as a network, congeries, et-plurissima-c.) of production facilities to one of
which each such malcontent would forthwith be consigned and thereupon forced—if
necessary at gun-or-even-more-threatening-weapon-point—to participate—without
remuneration and in a decidedly menial capacity—in the manufacture of the
budget or econo line of a given commodity.
After a few days—if not hours—of such participation, the o********ing
preponderance of these malcontents would undoubtedly cry Uncle!, Oncle!, Onkel!, autc.-aut-Auntie!,
Petite Tante!, Tantchen!, autc.,
whereupon they would be sent back to
their respective cities, towns, Gemeinde, autc. (respectively) of former
residence, where they would promptly revector their consumer libidos towards a
different commodity-class than the one whose dissatisfaction with which landed
them in the gulag; they would promptly begin yearning to upgrade to the
mid-or-upmarket line of some commodity-class with whose budget/econo or
midmarket line they had hitherto contented themselves. The former beer connoisseur would come to
take an interest in midmarket or luxury shoelaces, scones, sconces, autc.; and
the former shoelace connoisseur in midmarket or luxury beer, scones, sconces,
autc. As to the treatment of the
recidivists, of that lamentable but doubtless inevitably still
more-than-entirely negligible residue of former gulag inmates who upon being
returned to the relative wild of the marketplace persisted in manifestations of
infantile-cum-hysterical dissatisfaction with the commercial status quo: these
patently incorrigible malcontents would be shipped or trained back to the gulag—but
this time round they would be obliged, and if need be, compelled, to enter the
premises not through the gateway or aperture labeled “PERSONNEL” but rather
through the one labeled “MATÉRIEL.” (Incongruously yet somehow fittingly
classy, ain’t it, that there accent aigu’d
capital ee?) And once inside their
allocated (and doubtless outwardly corrugated) usine, they would be slaughtered no less humanely than cattle and
thereupon incorporated into the ingredients of whichever budget/econo line of
commodity-class to whose manufacture that usine
was dedicated. Ideally, in the best of
all possible malcontent-reclamation schemata, each malcontent’s corpse would
contribute to the contents of the budget/econo line version of whichever
commodity-class whose luxury-line version he aut al. had petulantly affected to
find dissatisfactory. Accordingly, and
for example, a toothpaste connoisseur who had found luxury-line stripes and
sparkles atop his brush-bristles not quite posh enough would end up having bits
of him-aut al.-self forced into tubes of stark white budget or econo-line toothpaste
(whose efficacy as an abrasive would incidentally be greatly increased by the high
human-bone content). Of course the bienpensant sentimentalists would
doubtless raise a massive hue, cry, and stink over such a proposal, doubtlessly
([sic] on the appended ly, for it has
at least traditionally made all the difference in the hyperoccident) under the
auspices of the blood-dripping-typefaced slogan, “REMEMBER ‘SOYLENT GREEN IS
PEOPLE; IT’S PEOPLE…!’” In doubtless
hopeless resistance to this cry (hopeless because I would doubtless be torn to
pieces and more than figuratively if decidedly politically incongruously
devoured in the midst of the aforementioned resistance), I would equably and firstly
remind these mawkish raisers to be chary of quoting secular dystopias as
scripture, lest they find themselves in the dock at history’s next reenactment
of the Nuremberg trials. In this
connection one salutarily recalls, for example, the history of the reception of
the Terry Gilliam-directed cinematic dystopia Brazil, which throughout the first decade of its 1985 release was unanimously
hailed as a masterly-ly damning indictment of a hyperoccident supersaturated
with consumerist gluttony and Thatcherite-cum-Reaganite political paranoia. But when the destroyer of the Oklahoma
Federal Building in 1995 cited Brazil
as one of the principal impetus (sic on absence of a plural-designator [fourth
declension, natch]) to his act (principally, one supposes, on account of the
film’s by no means peripheral or understated polemic against bloody paperwork), the film was
summarily expunged from the bienpensants’
mandatory viewing queue and re-designated an interesting if ultimately ab*****e experiment in the newspapers’
drafts of Gilliam’s obituary, wherein it had formerly been simply termed the director’s masterpiece. Such a fate may yet befall Soylent Green—only in negative, such that
the scenario presented as dystopic in the film will come to seem downright
utopian by comparison with the by- then-status quo, such that the tactical
cannibalism decried in the film will come to seem much less barbaric than the strategic cannibalism since imposed as a
reality by a power that I dare not yet
name, such that, indeed, the hyperoccident’s failure to actualize such
tactical cannibalism at a timely historical moment will come to seem a
catalytic precursor to the imposition of such strategic cannibalism. In the second place, I would point out that
in toothpaste we are dealing with a compound that when used properly is
ingested only in minute quantities no matter what it happens to be composed of,
such that the quantum of human remains ingested during the typical brushing
session employing this bone-enriched toothpaste would verge on the minuscule or
infinitesimal—certainly not significantly larger than the quantum of human
skin, spittle, nasal mucus, and blood snuffed up and ingested by the typical
present-day commuter during a typical bus, tram, or subway-actuated commute. As regards commodities plainly and
exclusively produced for ingestion—why, then, mere accuracy in labeling will
axiomatically ensure that nobody eats some portion of his or her grandmother or
second cousin twice removed by mistake.
A sirloin, Porterhouse, or Delmonico steak is after all unambiguously a
cut of beef, such that any vendor who
wished to hawk cuts of human flesh under the auspices of the typical butcher’s
lexicon would be obliged at minimum to label his aut al.’s cuts sirloin,
Porterhouse, Delmonico, etc.-style long
pig-steak. And in the third and final
place, literal corporeal incorporation into the body politic is simply and
unequivocally what such unregenerate backsliders would deserve; it would be the most condign tit-for-tat-ish retribution for
(or of?) their manifestly incorrigible consumerist Whiggism, inasmuch as that
unless checked, and prontissimo, the
present pan-hyperoccidentally pandemic spiral of libidinous consumerist
Whiggism will inexorably destroy us, the pan-hyperoccidental body politic, in toto, even in the absence of the destructive
intervention of a power that I still dare
not yet name. In short and in full,
while consumer commodities as a general and relatively trans-historical class
can greatly enrich our lives by affording immediate creature comforts and
palliating the tedium vitae, they can
as yet do nothing in the way of alleviating the dolor moribundi, the ever-crescent somatic misery attending the
irreversible seeping-away of life with advancing age. (Here of course I am going to be assailed by
a two milliard-strong horde of liver-spotted, elephant-hided old coots
screaming, We’re all living longer!!!!! Don’t’ you understand that,
Godmotherfuckingdammit[?], WE’RE ALL LIVING
LONGER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!—a remonstration that I believe bears
contesting, but even if it is as true as it would like to believe it is—i.e.,
even if we are not only merely being better preserved in our aged frailty [as
the present writer suspects], but also aging more slowly—it can at most and
best very slightly r*ta*d the encroachment of the dolor moribundi; it cannot make even the average sexagenarian trillionaire
of the present [who invariably suffers from diabetes, hypertension, or the gout
and has no reasonable grounds for assuming that he will make it to seventy, let
alone to the post-centenary age still attained by only a minuscule proportion
of the hyperoccidental population] feel a jot less somatically or
meta-somatically miserable than the average quadraganerian millionaire of the
seventeenth century [who was as-yet unafflicted by such ailments and had all
reasonable grounds for at least hoping that he would exceed his Biblically
allotted threescore and ten by an additional decade].) And such being the incontrovertible case, the
social propinquity of the present state-of-the-art consumer commodity-gourmandizer,
the serial owner of manually portable engines of data
transmittal-cum-processing, cannot but be a vexation to the non-alcoholic spirits
of his aut al.’s less vicious contemporaries.
The quasi-Shostakovich of Testimony
wrote or said that living in the Soviet Union during the middle Stalin years
was like being continually beaten with a stick while being told, “Your business
is rejoicing; your business is rejoicing.”
But as the father in The Cranes
Are Flying’s disparagement of his daughter’s enthusiastic preparations for
May Day has shewn—admittedly in hindsight, from the vantage point of the
Khrushchevian thaw, and therefore possibly at least slightly contestably—even
in those middle Stalin years, at the very nadir of political independence and
so-called individual self-expression in the U.S.S.R., the hyper-optimistic
Party line was by no means doxa among the Soviet citizenry. Contra quasi-Shostakovich, in those years
Vanya or Masha Stolichnaya apparently did not
have to respond to the stick-beating by marching about and muttering, “My
business is rejoicing; my business is rejoicing,” except in officially
organized public settings. In this
respect and to this extent, he or she was blessed by comparison with the
extremely rare present-day hyperoccidental who is not a dedicated slave to the
grind of gourmandizing manually portable engines of data
transmittal-cum-processing. For however lachrymosely these gourmandizers
may affect to be dejected, dismayed, or alarmed by this or that pseudo-political
issue–by, say, climate change or the increasing proportion of so-called
conservative judges on the U.S. Supreme Court or the so-called gender pay gap—the
truth is that to the very bottom of their spiritual boots they are dedicated rejoicers who are convinced that the
future of the entire universe lies before them as assuredly as if they were
newborn immortals, that they are going to live more than figuratively forever
merely because they are in possession of the most up-to-date engine of data-transmittal-cum-processing. When these gourmandizers-cum-rejoicers are
appreciably younger than the rara avis of
a non-gourmandizer-cum-rejoicer on whom they inflict their propinquity or
presence, the RA finds that presence merely somatically irritating, inasmuch as
he can at least conceive of chalking it up to the usual, and indeed
quasi-traditional, étourderie of the
young, to the same passions that at least supposedly gave rise to the hula-hoop
craze, Beatlemania, brand-name athletic shoe fever, and indeed brand-name fat
fluorescent shoelace fever, etc. Not
that he expects more than the tiniest fraction of these younkers to give over
their addiction to such mechanical ignes fatui as they grow older, but merely
that inasmuch as he is unable to specify which of them forms a part of that
tiny fraction, he is willing—albeit so faintly as almost to be reluctant—to
give the entire horde of them the benefit of the doubt on that score; and then
he aut al. reflects that the smoothness and sleekness of the plastic engines
sorts well with the almost Pillsbury Dough Boy-worthy unwrinkledness of these
younkers’ rubbery flesh. In a word, for
all the unbearable somatic intrusiveness of these younkers, the RA acknowledges
that there is a certain aptness (NB,
ye younkers, that I didn’t write app’dness)
to their gourmandise-cum-jouissance. But when they—the
gourmandizers-cum-rejoicers—are older than the RA, the RA experiences a degree
of dejection-cum-horror that no mere comprehensive tour of the municipal morgue
or catacombs could ever engender in his aut al.’s spiritual organism; this on
account of multiple discrepancies—the discrepancy between the novelty of the engine
and the decrepit ancientness of its eulogist, the discrepancy between the adolescent-like
if not child-like wide-eyed enthusiasm of the eulogist—the enthusiasm of
someone being astonished by something utterly new—and the incontrovertible fact
that he aut al. has already lived through hundreds if not thousands of such
fads and so by all rights ought to be as jaded to them as a sexagenarian
Clydesdale, the discrepancy between the antiseptically aromatic olfactory aura
exuded by the engine and the putrescently emetic aura of decay (a combination
of halitosis and sewage that no assiduous tooth-brushing-cum-ass-wiping can
ever even half-expunge, at least from the quadragenarian olfactory bulbs of the
present writer) exuded by the eulogist; and above all else, the discrepancy
between the eulogizing of this brand-new engine and the conduct appropriate to a human individual doomed to decay in the imminent future. If engaging with the latest drone-operating
or A*r *&*-locating software would enable these revoltingly decrepit
saps-cum-sacks to avoid ascending “extinction’s Alp” a minute later, there
might be some plausibly commendable argument in favor of such engagement; but
of course nothing could be laughably truer than the absolutely mutual alienability
of degree of facility with techno-gizmo frippery and biological longevity: no
matter how high a certain nonagenarian scores at Candy Crush or Whateverdrones
Do-Competitively, he or she is more or less doomed to descend into the grave
earlier than even the poorest-scoring vicenarian. In short if not full, the relatively young RA
cannot help feeling that it is his civic, religious, moral, and gustatory duty
to beat the elderly data-processing-cum-transmitting engine-gourmandizer with a
stick whilst screaming into his aut al.’s doubtless hearing aid-aided ear, Your business is despairing; your business
is despairing!; but of course there would be absolutely no point in doing
so, inasmuch as the aged gourmandizer’s uninterrupted adjurations to the RA to
buy the latest bit of techno-gadgetry are effectively unoutdrownable adjurations
to rejoice that are being dinned into the RA’s ear and his own ear simultaneously,
and inasmuch as the aged gourmandizer has the virtual entirety of the remainder
of the hyperoccidental world on his or her side. The RA ought not to waste a microjoule of his
declining vital energy on cherishing the faintest hope of talking his aut al.’s
contemporaries or elders into an awareness of their moribundity; rather, he aut
al. ought to be exploiting with ruthless jealousy every opportunity to take
cognizance in utter solitude of his aut al.’s own moribundity, of the
ineluctable ebbing away into nothing of all that he aut al. has held dear. To be sure, the environs in which he aut al.
will ineluctably be compelled to entertain this cognizance-taking will ineluctably
fall short of the ideal environs therefor enjoyed by the heroine of Wings—at the most intimate resolution,
in place of a bespoke form-fitting suit he aut al. will at best be vouchsafed
an off-the-rack ensemble consisting of a so-called dress shirt and a pair of
chino-slacks; at a slightly less intimate resolution, in place of a late
nineteenth-century silk-upholstered fauteuil he aut. al will be sitting in a
barely self-supporting broke-back all-plastic office chair; and at the least
intimate but most intrusive resolution, he aut al. will be all-but-ineluctably
precluded from sustaining his aut al.’s meditations by the impossibility of
flushing his aut al.’s toilet or of blocking out the ever-recurring noise of
fire engines approaching his aut al.’s building for the umpteen-thousandth time
and carrying personnel flush with ever-crescent exasperation destined to
eventuate in a hose-aside-tossing ejaculation of Fuck my motherfucking pension: let the motherfucking spoiled-rich cocksuckers
burn to death. And to be sure, he
aut al. will have no memories of Wings-worthy
heroism to cherish; he aut al. will be unable to solace himself with the
reflection that he aut al. has helped save his aut al.’s rodina or Vaterland or patria from succumbency to an undeniably
atrocious enemy through life-threatening acts of stuntmanship. All the same, he aut al. will be able to solace—nay, congratulate; nay-squared fellate,
cunnilingulate, or analingulate—him aut al.([’s]) self with the reflection that
he aut al. spent his aut al. ([’s]) earlier life altogether more virtuously, altogether
more commendably, than virtually every single one of his aut al.’s living
contemporaries spent his aut al. ([’s]) own—that however objectionably he aut
al. may have trifled away his aut al.’s ([’s]) younger years, he aut al. at
least assuredly did not squander the
early 1980s on wondering whether to opt for VHS or Beta, the mid-1990s on mulling
over which relatives and pseudo-friends to include in and exclude from his aut
al.’s long-distance plan, the early 20-oughties on pondering whether or not to
put a second mortgage on his abode to facilitate the purchase of a Blackberry,
the late 20-oughties on ruminating which so-called avatar to cultivate in
so-called second life (’Member that vast moth-eaten old thing,
longest-in-the-tooth millennials?), or the mid-20-teens on hefting which of
18,000 genders-cum-sexual orientations to select on Tinder, and that
accordingly he aut al. is entitled to regard him aut al.([’s]) self as a
genuine hero, if not as an outright demigod, by the pantywaist Lilliputian
standards of his aut aut al.’s sub-degenerate pseudo-age. To be sure, unlike the heroine of Wings, he aut al. will never enjoy the
meta-aesthetic solace of knowing that his aut al. ([’s]) meta-heroism is at
least appreciable somewhere, in some
conceivably empirical bosom, inasmuch as the system of life that most recently
sanctioned such meta-heroism, namely that of the U.S.S.R. in its later decades,
has been thoroughly and probably entirely universally discredited—i.e.,
discredited even within every last square verst
of land formerly constituted by the U.S.S.R. itself. To be sure, in a not inconsiderable
proportion of those versts, there is
a not inconsiderable amount of nostalg(h)ia
for the Soviet days, but it is extremely difficult to determine how much, if
any, of this nostalg(h)ia is
orientated specifically towards the Soviet system of life. The pan-hyperocidental idée reçue that all hankering for the spirit of pre-1991 in
present-day Russia (not to mention Belarus and a duo or troika of Stans) is
simply a stalking horse for nostalgia for quasi-national geopolitical greatness
has already been put in its place in a heterodoxical sense earlier in this
essay; in other words, I have, I believe, already shewn that to the significant
but not necessarily overweening extent that such nostalgia is meta-geopolitically
based it is not entirely ill-founded. Hic et nunc I am exclusively concerned
with the non-quasi nationally, non-geopolitically orientated residuum of this
nostalgia, a residuum wherein I fear the former Soviets (or, rather, former
Soviets plus their post-Soviet progeny) are simply toking on the same
historical tunnelvision-inducing spliff as their hyperoccidental contemporaries. No passion has proved less extirpatable from
the hyperoccidental psyche than nostalgia for the so-called swinging
sixties—for Beatlemania, Carnaby Street, flower power, Woodstock, Altamont
(sic), and all that; but the qualities of that micro-epoch that present-day hyperoccidentals
treasure most highly—viz. flamboyance, sensual indulgence, and social protest—are
by no means the ones that were most definitive in the eyes of those who were
living in and through it. And to be
sure, the present writer is by no means the first to note that there is a
discrepancy between the swinging sixties as they were experienced and those
selfsame sixties as they have been more recently imagined, but the received
critique of the received view has in timeless Whiggish fashion selectively
singled out only those discrepancies that serve in hindsight to cast the
present pseudo-Leftist worldview of sentimental, consumerist quasi-inclusionism
in a favorable light—it delights in pointing out, for example, that back then
even the trendiest young radio DJs often spun the hottest new choons while
wearing the sorts of dour black three-button suits and ties favored by their
fathers, or that even in the trendiest districts of central London and downtown
Manhattan it was then impossible to find a restaurant that offered an edible
rogan josh, let alone an enjoyable awaze sigga tibs or mabyar kernewek—at least after eleven p.m. of a Sunday-night
to-Monday morning. In other words, the received critique lays
into the conservatism and austerity of the microepoch, and
presupposes that all that was wanting to make that micro-epoch as virtually
perfect as the present one was a sort of MS Word format painter ([sic] on the
absence of satirical asterisks: for who has any reason to be afraid of
Microsoft in the light of its limping, laggardly, and, indeed, downright
arthritic performance qua hunter-devourer in the present pack of Big Bad
Wolves?)-esque application of the particolored flamboyant-cum-transgressive
bits of the micro-epochal picture to the monochrome [grayscale, while perhaps more technically accurate, cannot be
employed here on account of the post-1960s {the terminus a quo would fittingly appear to be a 1979 occurrence in
the aforementioned Testimony} skunking
of shades of gray qua endlessly
self-renewing roll of self-exculpatory bum-fodder long before it was
post-flushingly incorporated into the title of the most notorious pornographic
novel in history to date] conservative-cum-austere bits. The received critique fails to recall that
much of that conservatism and austerity was but an epiphenomenon of decades-old
governmental policies that were then regarded as but the barest of fair-dealing
by the mainstream left and but mildly irksome by the mainstream right, but that
now would be regarded as both starry-eyedly idealistic and ruthlessly draconian
by the extremes of either stereo-speaker.
In the main I am thinking of the stratospherically high rates of
taxation of income in hyperoccidental polities on both sides of the Pond. In the United Kingdom of the mid-to-late
sixties the top income-tax bracket rate was 95% (i.e., over twice the present
top rate of 45%); in the United States it was substantially lower, but at
within sniffing distance of 80%, it was still more than twice as high as it is
now, and in the cases of both polities, the shift from a top bracket above 50%
to one below 50% is highly significant, signalizing as it does a pan-political-spectroscopic
shift from a view that the very wealthy ought to be net benefactors of the
State to a view that they ought to be the State’s net beneficiaries. If the present writer were pressed to point
to a single index or catalyst (or even, it is to be hoped, index-cum-catalyst)
of this shift, he would point to the Beatles song “Taxman” from their 1966 LP Revolver, a song where the lyricist,
George Harrison—presumably already the second-poorest of the Fab Four in the
light of his established third-place rank in the songwriting credit-queue—kvetches
about how terribly overtaxed he is, and pisses all over both the then-current
Prime Minister, Harold Wilson (Labour), qua reigning taxmaster and the then-current
opposition leader, Edward Heath (Conservative), qua taxmaster-in-waiting (et rien de plus [i.e., very much not any sort of Margaret Thatcher avant la lettre]). It is said that Harrison penned the song as a
consequence of being elevated to the aforementioned top tax bracket as a
consequence of the fresh inundation of his bank account with Beatles royalties;
that he wrote it because he was outraged at the discovery that now that he was
making serious money he was going to have to give most of it up. Never mind that the remaining five per cent
would still allow him to live more luxuriously not only than the average-heeled
British dustman or nurse or bus driver but even than the better than
average-heeled British doctor or lawyer or banker: he, George had—by his own
account as obliquely delivered in the song—earned
all that l.s.d. (i.e., £.s.d., not the other LSD, although presumably he also
believed he had earned every microgramme of that substance that fell onto his
tongue) and was therefore entitled to keep every ½d. of it. Nowadays the Beatles are principally
celebrated as supposed working-class guttersnipes who supposedly proved for the
supposedly very first time in human history (albeit not quite single-handedly;
i.e., albeit alongside such supposedly likewise superlatively gifted British contemporaries
as Michael Caine and Georgie Best) that toffs had no monopoly on nous or (ugh!)
creativity by transforming the entire
world (or at least the non-toffish sector thereof) into a mob of hallucinogen-gourmandizing,
nudism-affecting, flyswatter-detesting peacemongers by dint of the sheer
supposedly ineluctable, John Henry-defeating steam engine-esque, force of their
supposed innate genius, and their championing of hedonism and pacifism is now universally
assumed to have marched-hand-in-OPP with a rock-solid material and objective
solidarity with the supposed class they supposedly emerged from, a rock-solid
material and objective solidarity with the working class. But the truth, as “Taxman” shews, is that the
Fab Four’s ascent to superstardom and descent into hippified dissipation both
evinced and effected their utter and unequivocal repudiation of the working
class, a ruthless off-scraping of their former socioeconomic fellows like so
many Penny Lane dog turds from the crepe rubber soles of their Carnaby Street desert
boots—this inasmuch as they begrudged the contribution of the preponderance of
their wealth to the coffers of the welfare state of which the working class
were the principal beneficiaries. And
their attitude and behavior has become a pattern for all post-1960s
working-class aspiration in the hyperoccident, a pattern that has become
ever-more practicable to follow thanks to an ever-less financially taxing set
of income-tax codes. The de facto
life-plan for every sub-wealthy young person in the hyperoccident of recent
decades is to become phenomenally rich as a pop musician, athlete, or actor and
then, and only then, give something back
to the community he aut al. came from—but only just as much as he aut al. chooses
and only to those people and institutions in that community whom he aut al.
happens to like. Back in the ’60s there
could have been no question of such a person’s giving back his aut al.’s supposedly hard-earned millions, let
alone choosing how much of and to whom to give them back, because he aut al.
effectively never would have had them in the first place, because they would
have been instantly signed over to the Internal or Inland Revenue Service. What I am trying to convey in this meta-hyperoccidental
digression is a sense that the ancient pre-1970 system of life for which I pine
so ardently is by no means even broadly socialist, let alone Communist or even
further alone Soviet, but rather world-maintaining,
in essence, and that the most supposedly radically redistributive of policies
on the hyperoccidental table–notably those put forward by the
Corbinistas—contain precious little of this essence even by comparison with the
most supposedly reactionary policies of the 1960s. While the spoiled fat-cattish whinging of
“Taxman” sounds proto-Thatcherite or proto-Reaganite to present-day
hyperoccidental ears—or, at any rate, would
sound proto-Thatcherite or proto-Reaganite thereunto if any thereof could be
prevailed upon to have themselves syringed clear of Beatlemaniacal wax before
listening to the song—the truth(s) is or are both that the Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan of 1966 never—or at most very seldom—dreamt of reducing the
maximum income tax-bracket rates to their present low water-mark and that the Jeremy
Corbyn and ?? (by default I suppose the Stateside incumbent Jeremy Corbyn
counterpart is still Bernie Sanders) of 2019 never—i.e., not even very seldom—dream
of restoring that rate to its 1966 high water-mark. Corbyn et ?? dream no such dreams not because
they regard their realization as impracticable or (as I suppose even the most
punctilious student of philosophy would now be compelled alternatively to put
it) unrealistic but because the
metaphysical-cum-metapolitical assumptions that would perforce underlie such
dreams are no longer intelligible to them or to their presumptive constituents—much
after the manner of (as Adorno points out in his lecture on Kant via a citation
of [insert author cited by Adorno]) certain metaphysical-cum-theological
questions about the Devil that ceased to be intelligible over the course of the
seventeenth century. In 1966 the avowed
principal goal of the hyperoccidental State was the maintenance of something
called society, a term that back then
and there was more or less semantically coextensive with what I have been
calling world, inasmuch as it was the
only portion or version of the world that most hyperoccidentals then seriously
contemplated trying to maintain. The
hyperoccidental rich then voluntarily, if not exactly enthusiastically, relinquished
most of their earnings to the State because they believed in the paramount
importance of the maintenance of society and further at least hoped that the
State qua guardian-cum-caretaker of society would put these earnings to worthy,
society-maintaining use. Of course, even
back then and there, there arose acrimonious disputes aplenty over whether the
State’s collected revenues were being apportioned fairly and justly, and
even back then fairly and justly were often mere adverbial
stalking-horses for whatever suits me
best; but never mind that—the point to be made here is that back then and
there, however egoistic one’s goals may have been, the road to their attainment
would always have to pass through the semiotic tollbooth of society; that back then and there, the principal
outcome of any given proposed or already-in situ policy would always have to be
represented—and, to the formidable extent that it was open to scrutiny, at
least half-truthfully so—as at least ultimately beneficial to society. Long before 2018, the notion of society as a political rallying-point
became at least as unintelligible throughout the hyperoccident as the notion of
the Devil or Satan as an ever-present personal tempter had become throughout
the hyperoccident of 1700. Here again
there is a weltansichtsbruchisch “Taxman”-like
moment—the moment in 1980 when Margaret Thatcher notoriously asserted, “There
is no such thing as society.” But the
true Weltansichtsbrüchigkeit of the
moment inheres not in the assertion itself but rather in the supporting
assertion that immediately followed it.—viz., “There is a living tapestry of men and women and people” etc. With this assertion, Mrs(.) Thatcher sought
to nominalize the implacably
impersonal abstraction that society
was, is, and ever will be; to reduce that abstraction to an aggregation of
particulars—in this case of particular human individuals. Mrs(.) Thatcher’s defenders among her fellow-Conservatives
often cite this supporting assertion in counterproof of her Leftist detractors’
contention that she was essentially a latter-day Scrooge in petticoats. Like
you southpaws, the defenders counter-contend, Mrs(.) Thatcher cared about the day-to-day sufferings
[or better yet, sooferings] of Joe and Suzy Bloggs, so there! But in promulgating this supporting assertion
nearly two-fifths of a century ago, Mrs(.) Thatcher effectively outed herself
as a member of the new-school Harrisonian politically pan-spectral pan-hyperoccidental
anti-societal Devil’s party, a party that Jeremy Corbyn had perhaps already
joined by then and in any case has obviously long since joined; such that in
citing this supporting assertion in remonstration with their Labour opponents
her present-day defenders are undermining and indeed annulling the polemical
force of their remonstration by proving that they are as staunchly loyal in
their membership of that diabolical party as Jeremy Corbyn. For in nominalistically fetishizing the
particular human individual at the expense—indeed, at the utterly bankrupting
expense—of an implacably abstract abstraction such as society, one automatically and axiomatically rejects every action
and indeed every impulse to action that is not somehow vectored towards the
immediate gratification of a specific person—and even more specifically towards
the immediate gratification of either the agent or would-be agent
him-autc.-self or some other person in immediate physical propinquity to him
autc. And so, however horrifying such a
revelation may look and sound to the empirically very probably nonexistent eyes
and ears of the present writer’s fellow society-oriented Weltanschauer, according to the lights of each and every present-day
avowedly politically orientated hyperoccidental human individual regardless of
his aut al.’s official political allegiance, each and every hyperoccidental
human individual is a sort of bonobo Robinson Crusoe—in other words, a
quasi-sub human ever-alert to opportunities for both self-advancement and the
more-than-metaphorical orogenital gratification of his aut al.’s immediate
neighbors. The pan-hyperoccidentality of
this sea-change is evident in each and every shadow-governmental reprimand
uttered by Mr(.) Corbyn and his underlings and Ms. Pelosi and hers. To be sure, like their titular 1960s
predecessors, these Labourites and Democrats want the State to spend more money
domestically, but their pet domestic spending projects all center not on
reforming or otherwise modifying the body politic en bloc but rather on
new-modeling and indeed retooling the individual citizen, on teaching him aut al. new skill sets so that he
aut al. can be more competitive in an increasingly globali(s/z)ed labo(u)r
market. Naturally not one of these
projectors has yet got(ten) round to picturing to him-aut al.’s self the
ineluctable principal result of any successful such atomically apportioned mass
retooling–viz., an American or British version of the same sort of labor drain
that has beset such eastern-European polities as Rumania and Bulgaria; for it
is surely unreasonable to the point of madness to expect a person who has
single-mindedly and successfully maximized his or her economic competitiveness
not to shuffle off from Buffalo or Sheffield to Bangalore or Guangzhou or wherever
else he aut al. can be most munificently remunerated for the plying of his aut
al.’s newly acquired skills. On the one Crusoean
hand, then, the present pseudo-left is merely intent on achieving the same hyperindividualistic
ends as its titular political adversaries, only by very slightly different
means (for for all New Old Labour and the Old Old Democrats’ superficial
hysteria about economic inequality, not a single currently serving Labour or
Democratic MP or congressperson has so far dared to hint at the advisability of
raising the maximum income tax bracket-rate beyond a few percentage points),
and on the other bonoboan hand, it is obdurately unwilling to implement any
sort of policy that would inconvenience even ever so slightly a single
practitioner or beneficiary of any of the arse-wiping sub-professions—nursing,
teaching, home-care provision, and social work.
When, for example, Mrs(.) May included in her last election manifesto (the
right-Pondial equivalent of a Stateside campaign
platform) a proposal to require wealthy elderly persons receiving
publicly-funded nursing services at home to offset some of the cost to the
State with some portion of the appraised value of their property, Mr(.) Corbyn
et al. pounced all over her and the manifesto-point with rabid tigerine
ferocity, denouncing it as a dementia tax,
a ruthless assault on poor li’l auld nans and granddads without the physical
or intellectual wherewithal to wipe their own bums—and supposedly to be
deprived of the financial wherewithal to supplement the intellectual and
physical lacuna with paid help should Mrs(.) May have her way with them. Mr(.) Corbyn et al.’s tigrine tirades against
this proposal reminded the present writer of nothing so strongly as the wave of
protests by the so-called notch babies over here in the States in the late
1980s. The notch babies were a cadre-cum-tranche
of retirees born within a certain year-frame who owing to some sort of verbal
glitch were receiving more than their legally entitled share of the Social
Security Administration’s pension-pot, and who petulantly insisted on
continuing to receive this unwarranted windfall of a surplus even after the first
cadre-cum-tranche of their juniors on the retirement timeline began receiving
the smaller legally allowed amount. The
notch babies’ cause was by no means a sizeable plank in the platform of the
Democratic opposition to the conservative Republican political hegemony of Reagan
and G.H.W. Bush; to contrary, the notch-babies’ harangues were scorned and
spurned by most non-notch babies of every political stripe, inasmuch as most
non-notch babies recognized that these harangues were founded on no firmer
grounds than the haranguers’ chronological seniority, on the grounds that they
were older than their prospective successors, and therefore automatically
entitled to a larger fund of pecuniarily evinced compassion. The
notch babies were no poorer on average than younger Americans, and so requiring
them to receive no larger a share of the Social Securitarial pie than their
juniors certainly did not entail their making a greater sacrifice than these
juniors; it merely entailed, rather, their making a sacrifice equal in
magnitude to the latters’, and not being vouchsafed special treatment on
account of their more advanced age. Similarly—or,
rather, identically, minus a single, purely formal transposition—Mrs(.) May’s
proposed tax, in being directed specifically at elderly rich people, and in
prospectively eventuating in their becoming merely slightly less rich, was not expecting
its prospective contributors to give up anything they actually needed, to make
any grievous, starvation-threatening sacrifices; it was merely expecting them
to contribute a share of their wealth more comparable to that contributed by
younger people with a level of financial wherewithal that was overall
comparable in magnitude but that happened prevailingly to take the as-yet-more
taxable form of income recently earned in work.
But of course, sentiment cannot deny that it is more pleasant to be
young and rich than old and rich, and so in a political landscape dominated by
sentimental nominalism, any policy that proposes to treat even the richest
oldster primarily as a rich person rather than as an old person will be met
with howls of execration from the other side of the aisle or chamber regardless
of the party of the proposer. Not that
the prospective contributors to the so-called dementia tax were the only
sentimental bloc to wrest crocodile tears of mingled pathos and outrage from
the opposition. The home-care providers
also elicited unreserved sympathy from the Corbynites, inasmuch as, so it was
argued, if rich oldsters were obliged to make out-of-pocket contributions to
their personal maintenance, some portion of them might very well opt to forego
home care altogether, and then dozens if not hundreds of bum-wipers would scandalously
be compelled to seek bum-wiping gigs elsewhere—and who, out of all the
practitioners of all the work-lines in human history, was less deserving of
being out of work, than a bum-wiper, in the light of his aut al.’s unquestioned
ability to deliver a palpation of the anus that in point of loving intimacy
could not be obtained even from the most upmarket massage-parlo(u)r masseuse? Last and perhaps not only not least but even
most, the offspring of these moneyed Methuselahs were commiserated with on
account of their prospective besetment by the imponderably excruciating dilemma
of whether to sack the home-care worker, affix a clothespin to the old shnoz,
roll up their aut al.’s shirt(y)sleeves, slip on the latex gloves, and apply
the wet-wipe to Ma or Pa’s schphincter themselves for the sake of inheriting a
property worth its originally assessed lower-seven-figure value or keeping the
old cul-swabber on the payroll at the cost of inheriting a property assessed at
a measly upper-six-figure value. Don’t
get me wrong old non-DGR-ian fruit or fruits: for all my sarcasm, in a deeply
Clintonian sort of way, I feel the pain
of all three blocs in the preceding scenario.
I appreciate that getting old and infirm is not only extremely
unpleasant but also in a cosmological sense extremely unfair; so unfair,
indeed, that all the money from all the treasuries of all the States in the
world can never make it seem bearable, let alone deserved, and that an aged
invalid cannot but feel that he aut al. is entitled to every last 1/2d.
contributed to his aut al.’s upkeep by any State with the power to make that
contribution at whatever cost to its other constituents. I also appreciate that losing a position of
remunerative employment à la our counterfactual sacked bum-wipers is painful,
demoralizing, and even potentially life-threatening, particularly when the
position involves the application of a skill that one has grown accustomed to
practicing with generally acknowledged mastery.
I even appreciate that it is painful to have to forego a
long-anticipated if ultimately gratuitous financial boon à la the dementia
taxees’ prospective put-upon offspring.
What I do not appreciate is the universally assented-to assertion that
these three blocs—whose material interests incidentally and eye-burstingly
obviously do not converge, and indeed ultimately diverge as dramatically
centrifugally as oil, water, and Kryptonite—merely in virtue of collectively
describing a particularly violently tearjerking triadic tableau, are entitled
to privileged consideration by a State that perforce must, or at least ought
to, regard all its constituents as inhabiting and constituting a mighty
force-field of desiderata the potential gratification of each of which must, or
at least ought, only (to) ever be considered—within humanly compassable limits,
of course—in the light of its potential gratificational drain on the remainder
of the force-field. Aging and death are
indeed indescribably horrible, but inasmuch as they are both destined to come
to all, and inasmuch as the moribund aged materially depend on the vital young
to prolong and ameliorate their lives, the State cannot be expected to favor
the moribund old unconditionally and unreservedly; it must consider whether some
proposed alleviation of some immediate financial burden on the moribund old will
be likely to impair the vital young’s ability to contribute adequately to the
sustenance of the entirety of The Entity Formerly Known As Society (a.k.a.
TEFKAS)’s constituents including the
moribund old. As for prospective chomage on the bum-wiping front, while
it indeed cannot be rationally denied that bum-wiping is an essential service
in any TEFKAS-type entity in which, say, more than 1% of the population is or
are unable to wipe his aut al.’s or their bum or bums him aut al.’s self or
selves, it also cannot be rationally asserted that even in such a TEFKAS-type
entity bum-wipers, merely in virtue of the ineluctably distasteful and
corporeally intimate nature of their work, are automatically entitled to
ever-more-remunerative employment as bum-wipers and automatically exempt from
the quasi-obligation to acquire new
skill-sets that is relentlessly and remorselessly enjoined on all economically uncompetitive
hyperoccidentals as a matter of course should their established métier not
routinely entail (pun unabashedly intended because incontrovertibly
irresistible) the wiping of a bum.
Indeed, I cannot see why an out-of-work or economically downwardly
mobile bum-wiper is automatically entitled to a more effusive draught of pity
than an out-of-work or economically downwardly mobile practitioner of the most
ethereal-cum-least analocentric line of work–than, say, an out-of-work concert
violinist or theoretical mathematician.
For however direly TEFKAS-type entities may in general need bum-wipers,
in any TEFKAS-type entity there needs must at least occasionally arise situations
in which no further bum-wipers are needed and practitioners of super-ethereal métiers
such as concert violinists and non-applied mathematicians are in direly short
supply—for example, the inaugural planning-session of an international cultural
exposition to be exposed in an arena sited cheek-by-jowl with one of the world’s
largest and most highly accredited hospitals. As for the prospective
poor rich middle-aged sods who would have stood to finish up a rung or two or
possibly even three lower on the absentee landlord ladder under Mrs(.) May’s
schema—well, for all the present writer’s Clintonian commiseration with them,
he qua middle-aged hyperoccidental unable even to afford to rent two rooms (albeit decidedly not sub-qua envier of their
already-outright-owned ten rooms in their first and second houses but rather sub-qua
demonstrator of the feasibility of surviving into middle age without owning a
square micrometer of property) is ultimately obliged to tender them a stern
adjuration of Grow a pair—or, indeed, an
au pair, if need be! Seriously,
Schlöndorffs, we will assuredly have to wait until Moore’s law mandates the
invention of a quantum violin to express the precise quantum of compassion due
to these pampered jades of East-to-Southwest Anglia. And yet I must emphatically iterate that the
real culprit in point here is not the selfishness of the plaintiffs but the
entire personalizing mindset that has perforce drawn wildly disproportionately
close attention to their plaint. The prima vista sobering but secunda vista invigorating truth that
all conscientious fillers of a labor-exacting position—conscientious bum wipers
very much included—must acknowledge is that one does immeasurably more good to
one’s fellow TEFKAS-members by simply reliably and dispassionately discharging
the duties impersonally and abstractly specified by one’s position than one
could ever do by considering each and every commissioned task as somehow
impinging on a specific living, breathing, s**ting, etc. human being with a
specific history of health complaints, athletic-club allegiances, dietary
preferences, favorite colors, etc. That
this truth has been utterly forgotten throughout the hyperoccident was made
appallingly evident to the present writer via a fairly recent (i.e., ca. May
2018) Radio 4 special panel program(me) on the topic of friendship, a
program(me) hosted by a purportedly eminent Harvard professor of philosophy
whose name lamentably but ultimately inconsequentially escapes me. The purported object of the discussion was to
determine whether friendship—defined as the cherishing of persons known
personally to oneself—was ultimately a good thing inasmuch as it perforce
interfered with one’s ability to cherish persons unknown to oneself who might
be far more needing and deserving of one’s cherishment than one’s friends. The philosopher mediated on-air contributions
from people scattered throughout the hyperoccident. Both the philosopher and all the
contributors, no matter how vehemently any of them many have disagreed with any
of the others, seemed to conceive of the entire range of beneficent human
social life as being comprised and exhausted by two actions: the dumping of
cash directly onto somebody else’s physically propinquitous head or the
application of wet-naps directly to another person’s physically propinquitous
bum. And in the eyes of all of them the
sole quandary or quasi-dilemma faced by present-day human beings as social
entities was the safe-for-under-sevens video game-like one of how and where to
dispose of one’s finite personal stores of cash and wet-naps. The easiest, the most convenient, stratagem
(so every single person on the programme presupposed) was to bestow these
stores exclusively on the heads and bums of the people whose immediate physical
propinquity one routinely had the hardest time avoiding—i.e., one’s friends—inasmuch (and only inasmuch) as
one thereby spent less on transportation.
On the other hand (so every single person on the programme also
presupposed), unless one happened to be the next-door neighbor of the most bum
wipe-and-cash deprived person on the planet, in adhering to the easiest and
most convenient stratagem one was at least in a relative sense bringing
monetary-cum-analitersive coals to Newcastle.
Consequently, the immediately consequently-cum-subsequently emergent anti-localist
faction of the contributorship maintained, one was absolutely duty-bound to hop
onto the very next plane—be it a two-seater 1980s ultralight—to whatever
godforsaken (or perhaps, in the light of the well nigh-life threatening exorbitance
of the cost of living in certain parts of the present so-called First World,
ostensibly god-blessed) corner of the
planet the most bum wipe-and-cash-deprived person thereon happened to reside
and to dump every last bucketful of cash in one’s possession onto his aut al.’s
head and wipe his aut al’s bum until one’s last canister was empty or there was no longer any bum left
to wipe. To which assertion an
immediately subsequently emergent retro-localist counter-faction of the
contributorship heatedly rejoined that inasmuch as long-distance travel itself
exacted a considerable outlay not only in cash but also in wet-naps (for who
can ever stay feeling truly fresh down
there by dedicated means of the mere quarter-dozen or so microliters of
soap and water exactable from an airliner toilet over the course of even a
battering ram-provokingly lengthy plane-trip loo break?), one might actually
and after all be able to do more good by staying close to home and nurturing
the heads and bums of one’s friends, inasmuch as caeteris paribus one would
thereby retain a larger store of cash and wet-naps than one’s globetrotting
fellow would-be do-gooders. At a
certain conveniently taped-Big Ben-chime-minus-two minutes-sited moment in the by
then well-nigh-life and death altercation between the two factions, the
philosopher-presenter stepped referee-esquely in with an ejaculation of Whoa, whoa, whoa; let’s just wet-wipe
ourselves off for a second! and then proceeded to wring his auditorily
expressible hands underneath a to-all-auditory-appearances sincerely rueful
acknowledgment that the whole business of sorting out this whole cash and
wet-wipe apportionment sub-business was a deucedly if not c**tishly complicated
sub-business, and that perhaps in the light of this complicatedness the least
unethical course to take consisted in spending three-fifths of one’s time,
cash, and wet-wipes with the most bum wipe-and-cash deprived person on the
planet, the remaining two-fifths with one’s propinquitous so-called friends,
and donating the total of frequent-flyer miles accruing from trips to the
far-away person to one’s propinquitous friends in ratios directly (or was it
inversely?) proportional to their propinquity. At no point in the program(me)’s hour-long
duration did either the philosopher-presenter or any of the contributors evince
the faintest notion of—let alone make the briefest reference to—either a
version of propinquitous friendship that was not utterly given over to
cash-bestowing and bum-wiping or a version of bum-wiping-cum-cash-bestowing
that did not involve the immediate personal presence-cum-total subjective
involvement of the wiper-cum-bestower. The entire domain of work qua site of both avowedly
involuntary aid-provision and graduated personality and propinquity
was as conspicuous by its absence from the discussion as the absence from the
present Grand Canyon of whatever used to be in it when it was still the Grand
Smoothie. Not that I then attributed or
now attribute this absence to some deliberate, calculated, and purposive
exorcism of this domain by the agency of either the contributors or the
presenter—but the reflection that the absence presumably was not deliberate,
etc., that it was presumably instead a massive collective blind spot, was and
is all the more chilling. For while I am
as inured as a bare-assed rodeo zebra-rider to present-day so-called
intellectuals’ universal and ineradicable public
subservience to moronic pseudo-thought, and even to their universal and
ineradicable private will to be
subservient to such pseudo-thought, I really do have quite a hard time getting
my head round the notion that the true and right way has simply never crossed
such so-called intellectuals’ minds, that these so-called intellectuals are
simply ignorant or oblivious of that way. When, say, an eminent philosopher of law argues
that the U.S. Constitution’s provision of a right to bear arms cannot
conceivably be interpreted as extending to the possessors of semi-automatic
guns on the grounds that the so-called founding fathers (the so-called is of course mine and not the
philosopher of law’s, who unlike the present writer is Paul-esquely duty-bound
to revere the ScFFs qua champions of Whiggism even if he aut al. is also
duty-bound to contemn them as rich white [and hence persumably 24/7
slave-cum-woman-beating] men) avowedly conceived of this right as dedicatedly
subserving “the maintenance of a well-regulated militia” and there are no
longer any such things as militias in the U.S. apart from self-styled bands of anti-federal
nuttos who have revived the term militia in
tendentious opposition to the likes of our eminent philosopher, when, I say, an
eminent philosopher of law argues something to such an effect, the present
writer merely rolls his eyes and gnashes his teeth out of his genuinely utterly
politically disinterested resentment of the PoL’s patently feigned oblivion of
the ScFFs’ Article Five, which maketh provision for amending the U.S.
Constitution to make(n) the law of the pan-U.S.-ial land whatever is stipulated
in the text of the proposed amendment; such that if there is really no longer
any need of any such thing as a militia,
and consequently no longer any right to bear arms (very much inter alia semi-automatic weapons), the
pan-U.S. constitution should be made to reflect this supersession of
exigencies—viz., an amendment
stipulating that militias are no longer needed and that citizens should be
restricted to carrying popguns, slingshots, and so on, up to and inclusive of
whatever level of firepower the amending authority deems fit to be possessed by
Joe and Suzy Sixpack (or whatever else I last called them)—when, I resay, an
eminent philosopher argues something to the preceding effect, I do not so much
as dream that he believes in the logical cogency of the foundations of his
argument; I assume, rather, that he has not irrationally assumed that the net
benefit of semi-automatic rifles to the TEFKA(US)S-type entity is outbalanced
by their detriment thereunto and that a false awareness of the outbalancing
must somehow be massaged into the living text of the extant U.S. Constitution
lest yet another lone gunman unleash another cartridge of semi-automatic
grapeshot into the flesh of another gosling gaggle of schoolchildren. I resent such an argument out of a love of
truth (and decidedly not out of a
love of guns, which I really would like to see disappear altogether from the
United States [preferably along with cars {and, indeed, perhaps one could send
them all off at the same time by packing all the guns into all the cars and
remote-controlling the latter one by one off a cliff or collection of cliffs}]),
but I still understand it; I
understand why a person would wish to misrepresent the law for political
expediency’s sake. But when such a
philosopher argues that all human social life exhaustively entails the
exchanging of personal favors, I cannot but conclude that he lives in a very
different Lebenswelt from or to the
present writer’s own. Indeed, the whole
notion of a contradiction between local altruism and global
every-man-for-himselfism strikes the present writer as preposterous in the most
etymologically strict sense, inasmuch as he has done his best to organize his
own Lebenswelt along exactly
antithetical lines—in other words, to be ruthlessly egoistic in the electively
personal domain of his Lebenswelt and
ruthlessly altruistic in the unelectively personal-cum-impersonal domain
thereof. In more concrete terms: the present writer has
done his best both to banish the bestowing and exacting of favors upon and from
his friends and to bend over backwards or go the extra mile, as they say, in
the service of the coworkers, near-strangers, and indeed utter strangers whom
his job-duties require him to service.
The idea, for example, of setting a friend up to a drink or a feed or
being set up to a drink or feed thereby has long since been anathema to him; in
dining or drinking out with a friend he always ruthlessly insists on paying his
exact share of the bill, and not a Communist-or-pig-f**kerly cent more or less. And as for doing any of his friends what is
incredibly distastefully known nowadays as a solid—i.e., at least in his specific case, a favor that would
materially inconvenience him by, say, disrupting his Alltag or occasioning any greater-than-average physical
exertion—why, he would now sooner do several (say, at least five)
multi-centiliter-sized liquids
through the traditional intrusive medical conveyance; complementarily, he at
least flatters himself that he would now sooner do an equal number of such
liquids through such a pipette than ask any of his friends to do a so-called
solid for him. He has come, indeed, to
conclude that, to the extent that human
corporeal (i.e., as distinct from spiritual,
and perhaps even more distinct from emotional)
frailty permits, the quasi-institution of friendship ought to be given over to
the disinterested enjoyment- of each other’s (or one another’s) company—or at
least to attempts at such enjoyment—and
devoid of exactions and performances of mutual service. For long and painful experience of varying
degrees of handedness has shewn to him that such exactions and performances
cannot but even in the short run lead to peevishness and resentment chez both the exactee-cum-performer and
the exactor-cum-beneficiary and in the long run lead to the breakdown of the
friendship. And how could it be
otherwise? For what is service without
pecuniary remuneration but slavery?—and who among us—at least among us nice people—wishes to be either a slave
or a master to his aut al.’s friend; i.e. to a person that he aut al. is quasi-axiomatically
obliged to regard as his aut al.’s equal?
What is more, in TEFKAS-type entities such as ours (and I am pegging
this ours to an us composed of most inhabitants of most polities since Hammurabi’s Babylon),
it is generally downright perverse to rope one’s friends into performing one a
service, given that there are generally ready-to-hand scads of strangers not
only willing but cheerful to perform that selfsame service, not only and most
(and quite unjustly) notoriously because they must be paid in hard cash in
recompense but also because—at least in the non-gig-cum-zero hours contract
economy, even in its least labor-friendly (i.e., most union-busting) sectors—there
is a determined temporal-cum-functional scope and limit to their
service-rendering. As a waged employee
of the moving firm of Starving Students or Desperate Actors or, indeed, Enthusiastically
Omnipositional Whores, Inc. or Ltd., one can be certain—however hyper-meretriciously
the company brand name may suggest otherwise—that one will not be asked to do
anything but tote and lift boxes and crates or to tote so much as a boxlet or
cratelet beyond a certain previously stipulated time-limit whether the move one
has been commissioned to abet has been completed or not. By contrast, as an unwaged dogsbody who has
been roped into helping one’s friend move house, one is expected to be present
and actively toting and lifting until the move has been completed, whether this
completion exacts an hour or a hundred hours or indeed a thousand hours; moreover,
qua dogsbody—i.e., laborer with no specific function—one cannot be certain that
once the move has been completed one’s friend will not extend the compass of
his aut al.’s lasso by commissioning some fresh task on the spot, by, e.g.,
exclaiming, “Hey, old chum, now that we (sic)’re all moved in, why don’t we add
an extra touch of class to the premises by spackling the ceiling? I just happen to have brought over a
ten-gallon spackle-tub from the old place: it’s now in Banker’s Box #87632 over
there at the bottom of that stack of five BBs.
Would you be ever so kind as
to unpack it? And while you’re at it,
love, would you be ever so kind as to
unpack my spackling knife—how I wish
I had a second one so that I could share this forthcoming pleasure with you—in
BB #98765 at the bottom of that stack of nine BBs? Tah-cum-cheers. You’re a real gem.” A famous Seinfeld
episode illustrates not only the scandalousness but also, and frustratingly,
the obduracy of the mutual bum-wiping model of friendship. This is the episode in which one of Jerry’s
baseball idols, the New York Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez, introduces
himself to Jerry as an admirer of his work as a standup comedian. Jerry is delighted to meet Keith not only on
account of his prowess as a baseball player but also because he is reputed to
have other interesting interests—notably the history of the American Civil War. The two men agree to meet for coffee. Everything is set for the blossoming of this
new acquaintanceship into a full-fledged friendship on the present writer’s
model—which is to resay, a dyadic forum for mutual entertainment via the
discussion of topics of disinterested interest to both parties. But before they have even properly begun to
discuss any such topics, Keith meets Jerry’s ex-girlfriend Elaine, and begins
to devote all his social energies to wooing her—ultimately unsuccessfully. Immediately after the termination of his
liaison with Elaine and without having yet had a proper disinterested chinwag
with Jerry, Keith announces that he is moving house and asks Jerry if he would
be willing to help him shift the movables.
After a slight hesitation, Jerry ruefully but emphatically declines on
the grounds that he hasn’t known Keith long enough. The rejoinder elicited a collective
belly-laugh from the live studio audience, and presumably continues to elicit a
collective belly-laugh from the rerun-viewing domestic audience, because of a
universally presupposed assumption that helping even the slightest of
acquaintances move house is a minor imposition.
But Jerry is—and was—very much within his rights to decline to help with
the move, for from Keith he has hitherto been vouchsafed the merest skin or
husk, of a friendship, and been denied its very meat or pith, and therefore
owes him absolutely nothing. The vast mobility of Seinfeld fans, together with the entire Seinfeld production team–very much including Mr. Seinfeld
himself—doubtless view Jerry’s spurning of Keith as a locus classicus of the purported notorious all-consuming
selfishness and egoism of the show’s quartet of protagonists, but the present
writer can never watch this episode without shuddering with horror at the prospect
of making a new acquaintance anywhere outside
his place of work for fear of being conscripted into a lifetime of indentured
servitude to a mere name affixed to a sort of orders-barking zombie or animated
mannequin. And with what unspeakably
immense relief does he flee from the social world of so-called free time to his
office job, wherein at least from nine to five-thirty five days a week he can
be sure that nobody will require him to do him aut al. a solid and wherefrom he can be genuinely certain that he is making a positive difference in people’s
lives in virtually directly inverse relation to his degree of personal
affective engagement with them! He makes
this positive difference by simply doing what he is asked to do—not only by his
supervisors but also by a class of persons who in a different domain of service
would be known as customers—as
punctually and accurately as possible.
To be sure, he cannot be certain that the work he performs is ultimately
vectored towards a noble or even harmless goal, but this is of absolutely no
concern to him, for he ultimately believes that it is neither at all worth his
while nor any of his business to ponder the merits of that goal; the tripartite
realization that he is not leaving other people in the lurch, that he is
helping to maintain the Johnsonian system of life, and that he is setting a
good example for others in his immediate propinquity who might otherwise get
the notion that it is acceptable to slack off, suffices to satisfy him that he
is not laboring in vain. Of course
whenever anyone expresses satisfaction in doing his aut al.’s job well as an
end in itself as I have just done, he aut al. is immediately accused of
yearning to be the commandant of a Nazi death camp, but the accusers never stop
to consider that the Nazi-German system of life for the most part involved
people just following orders that had
nothing to do with the death camps and plenty to do with keeping unincarcerated
Germans alive. That a plurality if not
majority of these unincarcerated Germans were aware of the death camps is well
established, but that they each and every one of them deserved to die, and indeed
would from every point of view have been better off dead, as a consequence of
this awareness, is a contention that I dare say not even the most deeply
aggrieved survivor of the death camps has yet seriously proffered. The truth is that throughout the human history
of the world, people who have just followed orders out of whatever motive have
done much more good than their ethical antipodes, people who refuse to follow
orders as a matter of principle (i.e., generally, Whigs, proto-Whigs, or
neo-Whigs). In any case, the present
writer has no need to place himself in as reprehensible a place-cum-time as
Nazi Germany to imagine himself living in a polity in which his relatively
depersonalized deontological work ethic is more palpably reaffirmed. He can indeed imaginatively emigrate to any
pre-1970 post-World War II occidental polity, and preferably to the
post-Stalin-epoch U.S.S.R., a polity whose system of life was utterly given
over to such a work ethic, and in which the worst that could possibly happen as
a consequence of one’s following orders was the exile of some tetchy scientist
or writer to unincarcerated life in some Soviet analogue to a perfectly livable
provincial town like Rapids City, South Dakota or Moscow, Idaho. Whether any currently extant polity within the
confines of the borders of the former U.S.S.R. is relatively impersonal deontological
work-ethic-affirming enough to serve him as an actual, non-imaginary
emigration-destination is to say the least highly debatable. Armenia, Georgia, the Baltic States, and
(the) Ukraine all strike him as being too consumed by Russophobia to
countenance, let alone reward, any exertion of effort that is not in some way
at least purportedly intended to offend or undermine Mr. Putin and the Russian
State; the present writer imagines not being able to phone-requisition an order
of paperclips in one of these countries without signing off with a heartily
yawped Fuck Putin! in the national
language, or signing an affidavit swearing that not a single one of these
paperclips will ever cross the border with Russia for the duration of its
functional existence in any capacity.
The various Stans, in virtue of having apparently never arisen from a
condition of semi-savagery to one of full-fledged society-dom (and in this
respect incidentally resembling certain of their never-Sovietized neighbors
that I dare not name), most likely do not hold onto the relatively
depersonalized deontological work ethic even as a memory; one assumes that to
be a functionary in such a polity is to serve the State only in name, that in
reality one is always a fawning dependent of whichever warlordling or petty
chieftain secured one one’s position. I
have heard a few encouraging things about Belarus—that it is no enemy of
Russia, that it harbors no yearning to join the European Union, and that it contains
a thriving tractor factory operating along exactly
the same 100-percent State-actuated lines as those established at its founding
way back in nineteen-forty-something.
But I do not know how large a proportion of the productive sector of the
Belarussian political economy as a whole is organized along such lines, and
some more-than-faint rumblings I have heard about internet startup companies in downtown Minsk suggest that however
large that proportion may be, it is diminishing in and at a predictable
tech-humpingly hyperoccident-aping way and pace. As for the mighty Snuffleupagus in the
former-Soviet room, the Russian Republic—well, by dint of listening between the
lines of the unremittingly Russophobic hyperoccidental media coverage of that
polity, the present writer fancies that he has been able, à la a
hyperoccidental intelligence service-employed eavesdropper on Soviet radio and
television during the Cold War, to divine that the present Russian State’s raison d’être is at least not completely exhausted by the aim of
eradicating Mr. Putin’s personal enemies; to divine, indeed, that it continues
to carry out many of its Soviet-epoch world-maintaining functions, and, indeed,
to carry them out at a conceivably higher level of both effort and return than
any of its hyperoccidental quasi-counterparts.
I have learned, for example, that a year or two ago Mr. Putin aroused
much public discontent by requiring government employees to work through the
so-called holiday season (i.e., not to work on Christmas Day itself but merely throughout
the week or so leading up to it), and more recently by raising the minimum age
at which a man could claim a retirement pension from something like 60 to something
like 62. While of course in absolute
terms both of these retrenchments constituted a net loss for world-maintenance
and the deontological work ethic in Russia, in the light of the base from which they started, their modesty of scale, and their unpopularity, they patently bespeak a
perduring world-maintenance standard comparable to the Soviet standard and far
superior to anything of the kind in the hyperoccident. In hyperoccidental polities, the minimum
retirement age for both sexes has been being raised steadily over the past
twenty years from an average base age of 65 to 68 or 69 and is projected to
rise to about 75 within the next decade; and although governmental employees
constitute an enormous chunk of the workforce, announcements of austerity
measures imposed on such workers are met with near-universal applause and schadenfreud-ian drooling. And of course, in reporting on
what they insufferably smugly term Mr. Putin’s woefully belated and inadequate reforms,
the vile hyperoccidental propagandists have shamelessly represented the lower
baseline retirement age as but a manifestation of Russia’s contemptibly low
average life expectancy and the superior baseline working conditions enjoyed by
government employees as but a manifestation of muleheaded Russian inefficiency,
of Russia’s obstinate failure to get with the hyperoccidental program of lean,
mean, market-driven political-economic machinery. They, the hyperoccidental propagandists, at
least affect to suppose that the only reason Russian men are now allowed to
retire at sixty is because 999 out of a thousand of them is doomed to drop dead
before the age of sixty-five (and naturally to do so while guzzling his third
extra-dry Standart martini of the morning), and that nobody under any
circumstances ever chooses to be an employee of any government ever instituted
unless he aut al. is too stupid or lazy to participate in the so-called private
sector. That the supposed fifteen-year
shortfall in male life expectancy in Russia is a Russophobic meta-statistical
exaggeration seems quite likely, but even if it is not—i.e., even if most
Russian men really do get to enjoy a mere five years of retired life—the
current 60-year-old Russian minimum retirement age bespeaks a more humane
attitude to the labor force than its mathematically nearly doubly generous
hyperoccidental counterpart (nearly [and only nearly] doubly generous because if the average hyperoccidental now
lives to be 80, as hyperoccidental meta-statisticians now claim [doubtless
autophilically exaggeratedly], and is allowed to retire by 70, his aut al.’s
retirement constitutes a full decade or one-eighth of his aut al.’s entire
lifespan, whereas the Russian man enjoys a mere five-sixty-fifths or
one-thirteenth of his aut al.’s entire lifespan, and one-eighth is a bit more
than 1.6 times as much as one-thirteenth), inasmuch as, as I have already
pointed out in this essay, the modest average increase in life expectancy throughout
the hyperoccident has not been attended by the slightest decrease in the rate
of aging, such that while there may
well be more seventy-year-old living hyperoccidentals than seventy-year-old
living Russians, the average living seventy-year-old hyperoccidental is no less
aged, no less decrepit, than the average seventy-year-old Russian, or indeed than
his aut al.’s now-dead fellow-hyperoccidental seventy-year-old was two
centuries ago. Such being the case, unlike
its hyperoccidental counterpart, the earlier Russian minimum retirement age at
least still vouchsafes the Russian pensioner a few years of pre-decrepit
leisure; it recognizes that once one has done one’s bit for one’s entity
formerly known as society (or conceivably, in today’s Russia, even society
itself still), one is entitled to relax for a while in a corporeally fulfilling
way, to expend one’s still-vital corporeal energies in pursuits entirely of
one’s own devising and for one’s own gratification; it does not presuppose that
one ought to keep working in the service of some other entity merely because
one is physically still capable of doing so.
In the present hyperoccident, such a view of later life is no longer
intelligible, let alone fashionable. In
the present hyperoccident, the notion of having done one’s bit is no longer
active outside the minds of such universally derided dinosaurs as the Duke of
Edinburgh, because there is no longer any generally active notion of a social
whole to which this bit might belong. In
the present hyperoccident, one always conceives of oneself as an individual
working in the virtually or actually immediate propinquity of other individuals
(whence the universal contempt in which government qua intrinsically impersonal
institution is held); one is always a whore or a bum-wiper condemned to walk
the streets in search of tricks until one is no longer strong enough to push
one’s Zimmer frame or to wipe bum after bum after bum ad post-nauseam until one
is in immediate, dire need of a bum-wiper oneself. To the extent to which Russia has resisted
falling into line with this hyperindividualizing, hyperpersonalizing tendency
of the hyperoccident (an extent vis-à-vis which I freely admit to being not
very well informed), I applaud it; and, indeed, I am prevailingly enthusiastic
about all the ways and registers in which Russia has not seen fit to keep
up-to-date according to hyperoccidental lights.
I believe that liberalization of hyperoccidental laws on homosexuality
should have extended as far and no further than the decriminalization of
homosexual acts—in the U.S. this specifically entailed (and perhaps still
entails) the repeal of the anti-sodomy acts included in the statute books of
many States in the late 1990s and probably still included in a few of them
today. Sure, these laws presumably have not
been even occasionally enforced in any State since the Stonewall police raid of
1969 (although of course with that presumably
I presumably have retroactively brought into existence a 2018
incarceration-exacting enforcement of such a law in Texas or Alabama), but for
form’s sake it is fitting to get rid of them, not so much because what happens between two mutually consenting
adults in the privacy of their own bedroom is nobody else’s business as
because what happens between such a couple therein cannot become anybody else’s business unless some busybody is
determined to make it such. I did
not and do not approve of the extension of marriage rights and their attendant
tax privileges to homosexuals because I am suspicious of the extension of
rights and privileges of any kind to anybody (on the other hand, a universal repealing
or annulment of heterosexual marriage
rights and their attendant tax privileges would have suited me to the ground),
and I am vehemently opposed to the creeping legal normalization of the entire
farrago of transsexuality, asexuality, and gender queerdom on metaphysical
grounds that I have mentioned above and explicated elsewhere. In general the pan-hyperoccidental turn from
mere toleration to outright celebration of formerly so-called
alternative lifestyles over the past-quarter century genuinely and thoroughly disgusts
me, and to the extent that Russia remains merely tolerant of such lifestyles I
believe I would find it a more congenial national polity of residence than my
present one. To be sure, in letter
Russia’s law against homosexual propaganda constitutes a very flagrant instance
of political intolerance, but I
cannot help being sympathetic to it spirit, for it was instituted in reaction
to representations of formerly so-called alternative lifestyles in the hyperoccident-originating
cinematic and televisual fare with which Russia is nearly as heavily inundated
as any polity west of the old Icey, and as I have already explained far above,
any positive cinematic or televisual representation of any so-called lifestyle
is intrinsically propagandistic, inasmuch as all lifestyles are intrinsically
self-commodifying and ever in search of a higher exchange value.
But my affection for Russia qua last (or, at its least
residual, antepenultimate) bastion of
the old Lebenswelt of the greater
occident emphatically does not extend
to those aspects of its system of life constituted by revivals of specifically Russian
(or, at their least parochial, hypo-occidental)
folkways and institutions. Most notably
among these revivals, the Russian Orthodox Church’s recent acquisition of
influence and prestige leaves me cold because, as I have explained at length
far above, the entire Orthodox strain of Christianity contributed remarkably
little of substance to the pan-Occidental intellectual tradition even in Russia
itself and because in its revived form the ROC is pandering to all the worst,
the most regressive, tendencies in present-day pan-occidental religious life—hippiefied intellectual minimalism,
kitschy incense-saturated theatricalism, and stadium-church holy-rollerism. Indeed, it would perhaps be best to view the
resurgence of the ROC not as a properly religious phenomenon at all but rather
as a Russian-branded strain of the pseudo-religious sector of the consumer side
of the pan-hyperoccidental economy, an observation that prompts me to observe
further and more generally that I harbor absolutely no illusions about the
average Russian consumer’s overall sales resistance–that I by no means suppose
that the residuum of U.S.S.R.-style doing-one’s-bit-ism on the productive side
of the Russian economy has been complemented by any sort or trace of a residuum
of U.S.S.R.-style use value-orientated contentment with adequately serviceable
goods on the consumer side. So, for
instance, while I despise Mr. Zvyagintsev as an artist and
moralist, I suspect I have no good grounds for disparaging him as a
documentarian, and specifically no good grounds specifically for supposing that
the average present-day Russian materfamilias does not spend the preponderance
of her time on any more redeeming pursuits than searching for and purchasing
beauty remedies via her mobile phone, just like her hyperoccidental
counterpart. But even this suspicion
affords me a kind of grim consolation, inasmuch as it suggests that the
old-school-ness, the oil and natural gas-driven-ness, of the commercial sector
of the productive side of the Russian economy has been no impediment to Vanya
and Masha Stolichnaya’s attainment of a high degree of affluence, or at least
whatever passes for affluence in the hyperoccident nowadays. I likewise suspect that I have no good
grounds for doubting the truthfulness of Mr. Zvyagintsev’s depiction of the inadequacy of world-maintenance in
present-day Russia, for believing that the average mid-sized Russian city does
not have a handful of abandoned buildings like the flooded high-rise in which Loveless’s juvenile lead meets up with
his best school chum and possibly meets his doom, or that the average Russian
police detective is not as helplessly resource-bereft, and consequently as
ineffectual, as the one assigned to finding that juvenile lead after his
disappearance. But complementarily I know that the United States has
absolutely no good grounds for being smug about its world-maintenance record
given that there are hundreds if not
thousands of abandoned buildings within a five-mile radius of the room in
which I am typing the present essay, and the inefficacy of the police force of
the mid-sized city in which these buildings are sited is internationally
notorious. Of course, as an
English-speaking person with a command of irregular past participles, I am
expected to be scandalized by the oligarchical
character of Russia’s commercial sector, by its dependence on a few big fat
cats who line their furry pockets with the hard-earned rubles of Vanya and
Masha Stolichnaya (or at least those of their compatriots who are sensibly and
decently hyperoccidental enough in their tastes and habits to drink top-shelf
white wine instead of Stolichnaya), but I surmise that it is safe to say that
there are few if any things about which I have ever given a smaller negative
toss than this Russian commercial oligarchy, inasmuch as I feel as though as a
citizen of the present-day United States I am already living in a commercial
oligarchy from which I derive absolutely no material or spiritual benefit. For after all, there are only four or five
U.S.-headquartered corporations about which one ever hears anything nowadays,
and I have absolutely no interest in any of those four or five corporations’
prosperity—no interest, that is, in both the sense that I couldn’t give the
smallest negative tosslet if each and every one of them vanished from the earth
to the fullest conceivable extent (i.e., if not only their corporate charters were
dissolved and their assets absorbed into the global body economic, but if every
chair, laptop, desktop, screw, widget, and Ben Wa ball at their headquarters
and branch offices were melted down into a single amorphous mass and absorbed
into the global body proctologic), and the sense that I do not own a single
cent, red or otherwise, of stock in any of those four or five concerns, or
indeed in any other concerns. In this
respect, or to this extent, I am a model prospective Soviet citizen, a citizen
of a polity in which there is no need for a stock market because there is no
large-scale private enterprise. This is
why the sardonically rueful concessions of Trumpophobic econo-wags on NPR and
Radio 4 have no piquancy chez my ears’ palate, why I couldn’t care less about
the fact that despite being a clueless
nincompoop, Mr(.) Trump has somehow made the Dow soar to
umpteen-dozen-bazillion points, GDP grow at umpteen-dozen percent per annum,
gasoline prices drop to inflation-adjusted pre-Great Depression-levels, &c.—because
none of this is reflected in or by the most minuscule improvement in my
personal quality of life. And yet as an
English-speaking American with a command of irregular past participles, I am
(in Althusserian parlance) interpellated
as a grand rentier by everyone else; whoever I encounter immediately assumes that I am living off some sort
of annuity or trust fund or portfolio; as an English-speaking American with a
command of irregular past participles I am universally implacably denied the
consolation of styling myself one of the
left-behinds (i.e., one of those who have failed to keep up with the
Joneses, Patels, Gonzalezes, aut al; not one of the sinister bum-cheeks) in
which the steel-workers and pig-f**kers of the Rustbelt and Heartland theme
parks are positively encouraged to revel by professional bilge-spewers on both
the so-called left and the so-called right—this despite the eye-burstingly
obvious fact that in the most telling register of existence in a Golden
Calf-worshiping EFKAS such as ours, the
register of one’s consumerist appetites,
these steelworkers and pig-f**kers manifestly have not been left behind by so
much as a nanometer. To be sure,
whenever a journalist happens to be in the room, they whinge and bellyache like
the professional beggars in The
Threepenny Opera about their plight as supposedly unemployable would-be
producers, but the moment they have been deprived of an audience of prospective
cash-shedders, all they do is whinge and bellyache about their financial
incapacity to purchase the latest A***e handset, or to upgrade to a warp-speed
Wifi connection, or to go on a month-long skiing holiday in Gstaad, just like
their armpit-f**king so-called elite counterparts in the big coastal
cities. To be sure, the professional
bilge-spewers are by and large correct—albeit effectively only trivially
so—that the unemployed Rustbeltean and Heartlandian steelworkers and
pig-f**kers find it financially more difficult to purchase these commodities than
do the Coastlandian pseudo-elite armpit-f**kers. But here the end of the professional
bilge-spewer’s commonwealth forgets its beginning. If in the end the unemployed steelworkers and
pig-f**kers were genuinely interested in getting back into steelworking or
pig-f**king for its own sake, qua métier, they would not care a jot about their
inability to purchase trendy commodities; rather, they would accept any
steelworking or pig-f**king gig that paid well enough to enable them to put the
cheapest adequately alimentary food on the flimsiest of tables (yes, that’s
right: store-brand food and flimsy store-brand tables and nothing but, not only
for them but also for their god-awful whelps—so, no vacations to the regional
casino or amusement park, let alone to sodding Gstaad or Disney World). The abominable but undeniable truth is that not
only in the end but as close to the beginning as one can get without being at
the beginning itself, these steelworkers and pig-f**kers are solely interested
in getting back into steelworking and pig-f**king qua means of purchasing trendy
commodities, commodities that they desire above all else, and such being the
case they are as close to being as happy as a pig in shit as a pig can ever be
without actually being in the shit itself—into which they will in any case
almost inevitably soon tumble, albeit admittedly not quite as soon or swiftly
as their Coastlandian pseudo-elite armpit-f**king contemporaries. The present writer, by infinitely more
pathetic contrast, yearns insatiably for things that the present world cannot
supply at all but that the world of the recent past could supply at least in a certain n*****dly measure, and such
being the case, he has been left behind to
a degree and in a sense of which neither the Rustbeltian and Hertlandian
steelworkers nor their professional bilge-spewing boosters can have the
faintest inkling, but of which he surmises at least a kuchka or two of extremely-long-in-the-tooth Russians still have
more than a mega-inkling, and such being the case, he, the present writer,
feels a certain metaphysical bond with present-day Russia that both t***ps and
transcends any metaphysical bond he may enjoy (or, rather, endure) with any
other polity, a metaphysical bond that he suspects is doomed to extend to the
term of his biological existence and that in any case is doomed to last until that
highly improbable moment when Russia becomes not only acceptable but hip in the
eyes of the hyperoccident, the moment when exactly the same sorts of Anglophone
hipster bienpensant assholes as are
now driving up the rents in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore are driving up the
rents in Moscow and Petersburg. The sad
and doubtless terminal incarceration-eventuating truth is that for the best
part of a generation the present writer, a wight ycleppt Douglas Robertson, has
regarded his native hyperoccidental world-segment as little better or other
than a gigantic Douglas Robertson-ignoring engine, and that inasmuch as he
began to notice the world-segment ignoring Russia at just about the same time
as it began ignoring him, he cannot but regard present-day Russia’s fortunes as
being somehow metaphysically conjoined with his own. The two of us seemed to have gotten firmly
metphysically hitched back in the late 1990s, during the so-called dot-com boom
or bubble, a micro-micro-epoch wherein it was constantly being said by
everybody and his grandmother (or rather everybody but the present writer and
his grandmother, whom he admittedly cannot recall saying anything to this
effect) that thanks to the apparently miraculously unstoppable expansion of the
interweb, high-paying jobs were available for the asking nationwide, that
indeed, if one wanted a job starting in the low six figures one had only to ring
up the HR department of any tech-orientated company and fart into the handset
of one’s telephone. The present writer
was not finding this received nonce-wisdom borne out by his personal
experience; indeed, he was finding himself bouncing from one menial temp job to
another and barely scraping together a low five-figure income. And bizarrely if in some sense explicably
(i.e., inasmuch he was in the habit of listening to news radio at work, to the
sporadic and unpredictable extent to which he was permitted to do so), he now
associates each of these miserable temp assignments with some specific setback
or slap in the face contemporaneously suffered by the Russian Republic. He recalls, for instance, a certain moment in
1998 when filling a copyediting position that he was destined to be offered
only to have it snatched away from him with shameless discourtesy when a woman
who had definitively refused it suddenly changed her mind, he heard a certain
snootifying male NPR commentator fly-swattingly remark that Russia’s economy
was then the size of Illinois’(s). And then in 1999, when he was working as a researcher—i.e., journal article-fetcher-cum-photocopier—at
the Baltimore medical institution that need not be named, a position in which
he enjoyed the singular distinction of being praised to his face by his
supervisor with the words You’re like
furniture, he recalled it being reported that then-Russian president Boris
Yeltsin had indignantly and apoplectically spluttered that NATO’s then-just-commenced
bombardment of Yugoslavia could lead to
nuclear war—i.e., not that it would specifically provoke Russia to launch a
nuclear first strike against the United States, but that a nuclear exchange
between unspecified parties would somehow consequently just sort of happen.
Here, I readily perceived, the belligerence of Yeltsin’s tone had been
belied and ultimately t***ped by the vagueness and noncommittalness of his
phraseology: he believed that this non-Russia-involving attack on the
traditionally closest of Russia’s wholly non-Russian Slavic allies, namely
Serbia (for the entire Yugoslavian experiment that was coming undone at that
moment had merely temporarily marginalized the Russo-Serbian entente fraternelle), not only entitled
but fairly enjoined him to utter the
sort of apocalypse-threatening threats that Nikita Khrushchev had uttered a
generation-and-a-half earlier, and in defense of a much fresher alliance with a
much remoter country (namely that with Fidel Castro’s Cuba), and he knew that the
still-world-annihilatingly formidable size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal enabled him to utter such threats, but
at the same time he concluded that the present state of geopolitical public
opinion did not authorize him to
utter them—this simply and brutally because, as mentioned before, a full four-fifths of a decade after the
dissolution of the USSR, Russia still had an economy the size of Illinois(‘s)
[or, rather, probably, that of some slightly smaller or larger US state like
Indiana or Ohio, given that we are now talking about 1999 and not 1998]; or, in
superficially entirely different but fundamentally exactly consubstantial terms,
because Russia had not yet managed to captivate the global consumer market with
any commodity that rivaled the captivatingness of the hyperoccident-originating
commodities whose inaccessibility had allegedly brought about the USSR’s
downfall–because it had not yet managed to come up with its own commercially
sexier version of a miserably uncomfortable plebian garment like blue jeans, or
of an unendurable sexually creepy pop star like Michael Jackson. Gone throughout the hyperoccident was all
memory of Boris Yeltsin the visionary admirer of Houstonian
supermarkets-cum-deplorer of their Soviet counterparts, of Boris Yeltsin the heroic
resister-cum-reverser of the 1991 coup that had ousted poor Mikhail Gorbachev
(perhaps the noblest political martyr of the twentieth century who did not
suffer outright biological death for sticking to his convictions) and had
bidden fair (or foul) to plunge the U.S.S.R. back into the horrible old early
1980s when blue jeans and Michael Jackson records were still only available on
the black market. By 1999, in every last
pair of hyperoccidental eyes apart from the present writer’s, Boris Yeltsin was
first and foremost a mere loose-necktie’d booze-hound whose opinion on any
subject apart from the best means of getting govno-litso’d before lunchtime was not to be granted a microsecond’s
audience. The present writer had suffered
a drop in status and prestige as precipitous as—albeit less widely publicized
than—Mr. Yeltsin’s between the very early 1990s and the very late 1990s. In the very early 1990s he had been the
golden boy of the academic humanities in Gulf-Coastal Florida, a lad who had
very nearly single-handedly garnered his county a third-place trophy in the
statewide high-school academic quiz tournament (and would have garnered it a
first-place trophy had he not, in answering the question “What was the native
country of the author of The Praise of
Folly?” cavalierly—and hence quite knowingly—taken it upon himself to cut
through the ever-vexed Gordian knot of a question of whether to call the
Netherlands the Netherlands or Holland by proffering the patently
adjectival—and hence patently unacceptable—word Dutch [to this day, he regards this ill-adjudged substitution his
most egregious tactical mistake and seldom lets a day pass without applying the
memory of it as a curb on his present inclinations towards cavalierdom]); by
1999, his academic achievements long since forgotten by every Floridian and his
grandmother (including, very probably, the PW’s own), he was one of the
lowliest and most obscure dogsbodies or peons in the entire State of Maryland,
if not the entire Mid-Atlantic, and no mean booze-hound either. How could he avoid feeling sympathetic to or
with Mr. Yeltsin in that year? To be
sure, this sympathy had gradually been being stoked by a phenomenon that had
not provoked an apoplectic response from Mr. Yeltsin, albeit that it had set
the stage for the bombardment of Yugoslavia, namely the piecemeal but
inexorable expansion of NATO via its absorption of most of the former Warsaw
Pact countries. Even now, when my
Russophilia is perhaps at its all-time height, I must in all candor and
frankness confess that my outrage at this expansion has always principally
emanated from its violation of the fundamental laws of logic and nomenclature
rather than from its equally indisputable violation of the fundamental rights
of Russia qua geopolitical power. From
September 1991 at the very latest onwards, we in the hyperoccident were being
told by all the Sunday-morning talking heads and their respective
grandmothers—by each and every think-tank pundit (regardless of the political
orientation of his or her tank), retired or active U.S. general or admiral,
former or current White House official et al., that the Cold War was over, that
it was as moth-attractingly closed a chapter in world history as the Era of
Good Feeling, the Regency, and the Pornocracy—nay, as the Heptarchy, if not the
Tetrarchy. Such being the case, by all
logical and nomenclaturial rights, the organization named NATO, an organization
whose foundation was consubstantial with the beginning of the Cold War inasmuch
as it had been expressly founded to resist potential Soviet territorial
incursions into western Europe, should have simply disappeared in a puff of
logic. Instead, it was not only
surviving but growing—not so much like the most obvious metaphorical vehicle, a
cancer—even if in the moral register this expansion was indeed as pernicious as
the big C—as like one of those human freaks of genetics who suddenly start
increasing in height and strength in middle age, for whereas a cancer burgeons
in inverse proportion to its prospects of survival, the existential prospects
of this logically impossible expanding NATO seemed to be getting ever brighter. At the time, nobody in the present writer’s Umwelt seemed to be at all bothered by
this absurdity, inasmuch as none of them ever, ever, ever talked about it; at the time he was obliged, nay, compelled to
suffer his botheration in absolute solitude—and even if he had gone farther
afield than his Umwelt in search of
consolation he would have come back with unshouldered lachrymal ducts, unless
he had happened to alight (as he would have been quite unlikely to do in those
days of [specification of certain
technological limitations of those days omitted on the grounds that ALL
SPECIFICATIONS OF PREVIOUS TECHNOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS ARE INEXORABLY
WHIG-FELLATING]) on a certain New York
Times interview with George F. Kennan, wherein the well-nigh-infallibly
wise nonagenarian retired diplomat logically decried NATO expansion as “the beginning of a new cold
war.” And now, a full twenty years later…he is still compelled to suffer his botheration in absolute solitude,
inasmuch as he has yet to meet a single hyperoccidental who believes that the post-1991
expansion of NATO was logically preposterous or indeed in any other wise a bad
thing, despite how egregiously bad a bad thing in every wise it has turned out
to be. To a man, woman, gender-queer
pseudo-person, and child, every human individual he now personally knows lays
the blame for the present parlous state of the peace in Europe–and indeed for
practically every other present calamity down to his, her, autc.’s own personal
case of toothache, lumbago,
or athlete’s foot—squarely and entirely on the shoulders of Russia. Things have turned out exactly as Kennan predicted just over twenty years ago: “Of course there is going to
be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we
always told you that is how the Russians are – but this is just wrong.” Wrong this may be and wrong this indeed undoubtedly
is, but this is what is now universally taken to be true throughout the
hyperoccident; this has become doxa—that
which goes without saying—across the hyperoccidental pseudo-political spectrum,
and this is nowhere more fervently championed as doxa than in that spectrum-eme
formerly most sympathetic to the old Soviet Union, the supposedly liberal wing
of the U.S. Democratic Party, by whom the arch-spouter of We always told you that is how the Russians are, the only very
lately late Republican senator John McCain (whose uncannily apt alphabetical echoing
of Joseph McCarthy [whose corpse is in its own right doubtless undergoing
rehabilitation at many a supposedly left-wing think tank even as I type {a
rehabilitation that will doubtless be applauded most fulsomely by the members
of R.E.M., who 32 years ago explicitly railed against that corpse’s exhumation (“You’ve
got to understand,” the long-since-Rasputin-bearded Michael Stipe will
doubtless then intone, “back in ’87, we were just clueless kids; we couldn’t
appreciate what a wonderful human being Joseph McCarthy was because we didn’t
understand how incorrigibly evil
Russia had always been”} ] has seemingly gone unremarked by anyone but the
present writer) has been canonized as a supposed champion of such supposedly
timeless and transnational democratic values such as gay marriage and
gender-neutral toilets; and in whose eyes the slaughtering of more U.S. troops
than served in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq between 1950 and the
present would be but a niggling price to pay for staving off a Russian invasion
of (the) Ukraine or the tiniest of the Baltic States. To be sure, for the past nineteen years, the
reins of the Russian State have de facto
if not always de jure (for we must
not forget the 2008-2012 presidency of Mr. Medvedeev) been in the hands of Mr.
Putin, having been passed to him by Mr. Yeltsin at the exact dawn of the
millennium as reckoned in the vulgarian calendar (i.e., January 1, 2000, as
against the proper millennium-advent,
January 1, 2001), and Mr. Putin is a bird of a very different feather (as the
aforementioned Mr. Kennan once described Franklin D. Roosevelt vis-à-vis
Herbert Hoover) from Mr. Yeltsin. And to
be sure, he is a bird whose featherdom arouses a good deal less sympathy chez
the present writer than did Mr. Yeltsin’s, inasmuch as while for aught I know
he may drink enough Stoli or Standart before lunchtime to incapacitate a horse,
he gives the decided impression of being an absolut(e) teetotaler, a man who,
to invert and amplify Mark Twain’s famous expression, would rather decline one
drink than a hundred German adjectives; which is ultimately of course merely another
way of saying that he invariably plays his cards close to his chest, which is
admittedly the very same attribute that bothers my Russophobic adversaries the
most about him. But the sad or alarming
truth is that in point of fact at least up until the annexation of Crimea, the
present writer tended to find his own opinions on Russia’s geopolitical
disposition jibing with those of Mr. Putin, not, to be sure vis-à-vis him qua
anti-Yeltsinian bird qua cold fish but rather qua head of a by and large
circum-occidentally beleaguered Russian State.
In particular, he remembers bristling with well-nigh-porcupinal virtual
perpendicularity on Mr. Putin’s behalf when towards the end of his first term
or not long after the beginning of his second one—so, in 2012 or 2013—President
Obama soft-shoed with characteristic smirking glibness an anti-missile defense
system on the shamelessly ostended ostensible grounds that it was to protect
the United States against attacks from such only dimly prospective nuclear
powers as Iran and North Korea, despite the prospective deployment of the
system within closer striking distance of Russia. The present writer admits to having been
highly put off by the annexation of Crimea, but not so much—and here one may
witness a beautiful counterpoise to his principal reasons for opposing NATO
expansion—because the Crimea supposedly rightly belonged to (the) Ukraine as
because, like that Russian bit of the Balkans including Kant’s home town, it
was separated from the rest of Russia by an expanse of intervening non-Russian
territory. The present writer is, after
all, nothing if not a champion of the coextensiveness of political and physical
geography. The poisoning of the Skripals
and the ensuing send-up travesty of a cover-up thereof are even more upsetting;
but they do not even vaguely adumbrate an exposure of Mr. Putin as the well-nigh-omniscient-cum-omnipotent,
implacably malevolent, and irredeemably evil James Bond villain as which
hyperoccidental bienpesant received
opinion seems relentlessly determined to expose him. That Mr. Skripal, in virtue of his
intelligence-transmitting activities on the Continent, had pissed off Mr. Putin
in some significant way is readily inferable.
That Mr. Putin had obliquely but ultimately unmistakably groaned for Mr.
Skripal’s liquidation à la England’s Kings John, Hank II, and Hank IV., though
not quite likely, is also not quite improbable. But that Mr. Putin ordered Mr. Skripal’s
liquidation via the nerve agent whose administration not only nearly killed Mr.
Skripal and his daughter, but also temporarily incapacitated a bystanding English
policeman and killed a remote Englishwoman, seems virtually impossible,
inasmuch as Mr. Putin’s personal and political interests are too closely bound
up with the City of London to elicit him to provoke a war with the UK for the
sake of liquidating a single personal enemy—as is, indeed, and complementarily,
suggested by the UK’s materially extraordinarily
muted response to the incident (cf., incidentally, Russia’s extraordinarily
muted response to American bombardments of ruling regime-held sites in Syria). But
of course underpinning all the outrage against the Skripals’ poisoning is the
matter of UK citizenship or British subjecthood or whatever; bienpensant received opinion adduces as
apodictic the assertion that even if the attack had been executed via an AK-47
barrage on Mr. Skripal’s sole person, and at a site miles from any potential
collateral damage to another person, it, the attack on Mr. Skripal, would have
been grounds for a declaration of war on Russia, given that Mr. Skripal was
(and remains) a UK or British subject.
But to assert as much is to fall painfully back on to the thousand cans
of worms long since opened by the innumerable phenomena of international immigration
and emigration besetting every single polity in the hyperoccident; inasmuch as
these phenomena have revealed that the choice of whether to grant or deny
citizenship or subjecthood of a given polity is invariably and ineluctably a
political choice, a choice invariably made at the instance of whatever sort of
figure the granting or denying polity wishes to cut either on the so-called
world stage or in the eyes of its domestic constituents. The current British (or UK) government does not
make it at all easy for the sub-professional Poles and Romanians resident in
Britain to become British (or UK) citizens or subjects because it does not find
the services rendered by any specific Pole or Romanian to be indispensable to
Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and it does not wish to alienate the
non-immigrant portion of the UK’s population.
The present writer knows nothing of the terms under or the process by
which Mr. Skripal obtained U.K. citizenship or subjecthood, but he suspects it
had little to do with any sort of Inland Revenue-replenishing labor he was
expected to perform in the ensuing years and decades and almost everything to
do with the fact that he was an enemy of the UK’s current Goldstein, Vladimir
Putin—in other and admittedly highly cynical terms that citizenship or
subjecthood was granted to Mr. Skripal with the express intention of touching
off just the sort of scandal that has been touched off by his attempted
assassination. As for the shameless
implausibility of the cover-up: yes, it was unspeakably offensive in its
unsurpassable smart-assedness, but in palliation of that smart-assedness one
must remember that from the moment of the discovery of the poisoning onwards,
the preponderance of hyperoccidental journalistic and governmental utterance on
it posited it as an act carried out at the direct and explicit behest of Mr.
Putin and in scrupulous conformity with his exact instructions (e.g., notably,
vis-à-vis the choice of N******k as the weapon and a perfume bottle as its
medium of conveyance), and hence as a de facto act of war on the United Kingdom. In the face of such penultimate-scene-of-Frankenstein-esque fury, in the face of
such furious convergent collective determination of such a large party of
accusers to find one wholly guilty of the worst charges, with no possibility of
adducing extenuating circumstances in one’s defense, what is the point in
concocting an even remotely plausible alibi, let alone of admitting the truth? Vis-à-vis the Skripal case, all the truth
that is so far publicly known is that the two men whom the UK police agencies
regard as the poisoners managed to carry a super-lethal quantity of N******k
into the UK. Because, as asserted above,
it is quite unlikely that Mr. Putin would choose to kill a single person with a
WMD, this successful exportation of the N******k suggests that in present-day
Russia either security controls on WMDs are remarkably lax or the people entrusted
with keeping these weapons under lock and key are extraordinarily corruptible. The revelation of such a genuinely horrifying
state of meta-military affairs in the Russia of twenty years ago, Boris Yeltsin’s
Russia, a Russia wherein the head of State was assumed to be a complete if
harmless f**kup, would have elicited much appalment but also much sympathy from
the hyperoccident; from Westminster, London, Paris, and Washington there would,
to be sure, have been stern calls for the immediate and massive upbeefing of
security at WMD storage facilities but also emollient offers of munificent
financial assistance in the effectuation of that upbeefing, and Mr. Yeltsin, in
virtue of having no face to lose, would have been none the worse for accepting
such succor, in the eyes of either the world or the Russian citizenry. If such a(n) SoM-MAs were revealed to be the
case in today’s Russia, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Mr. Putin, in virtue of having
been puffed up by the hyperoccident into a well-nigh omniscient-cum-omnipotent
clone of Satan, and consequently been not only obliged but compelled to represent
himself as such to the Russian citizenry, would have to abdicate immediately,
and perhaps even to commit instantaneous suicide. Whence, it seems not only likely but
ineluctable to me, the recent travesty of a cover-up, or some other sort of
equally risible alternative travesty of a cover-up. The truth, no matter what it is, is so
more-than-merely-figuratively-fatally embarrassing to Mr. Putin, that he must
paper it over with something, no matter how implausible, and indeed the more
implausible the better, provided that it does not make him seem a jot less
fundamentally knowing and powerful. All
this in way of partial exculpation of Mr. Putin’s recent conduct should not by
any means be taken to imply that he’s a great
guy or indeed even a middlingly decent guy; that he is a jot less
reprehensibly megalomaniacal, petty, or vengeful—in short, any less of an asshole—than even his most vituperative
hyperoccidental critics assert. But it
is the present writer’s gamily pungent suspicion—admittedly a permanently
unverifiable one given that it reposes on a preterit counterfactual state of
affairs—that Mr. Putin’s assholishness qua assholishness has not played any
sort of substantially determinant role in Russian history; whichistersay, inter
mulitssima alia, that he suspects that had Mr. Putin been treated differently,
and mainly more kindly, by the hyperoccidental geopolitical establishment from
his initial on-taking of the reins of State back in 2000 onwards, he would at
this moment be, in the reputed phraseology of FDR qua booster of the head of State
of a certain banana republic, though a
son of a bitch, at least our son of a bitch (TBS, the supersession of son of a bitch by the no means
indisputably semantically coextensive asshole
as the chief pejorative in American English renders the equivalence dicey to
say the least). Current bienpensant doxa holds that Mr. Putin’s
entire political entelechy-cum-ambition consists in reviving tsarism in letter,
spirit, and body during his present term of office, in getting himself crowned Tsar
Vladimir the First-cum-Fourth (cf. the accession of James the First-cum-Sixth
to the English throne in 1603, only the other way round). At the moment, in January 2019, this doxa is
conceivably well-founded after a certain fashion (i.e., after exactly the same
limited if not necessarily trivial fashion in which the less popular
supposition that Emmanuel Macron is striving to become another Louis XIV is
well-founded), but it would almost certainly not have been well-founded back in
2000. One must, after all, remember that
Mr. Putin was hand-picked by Mr. Yeltsin as the latter’s successor, and that
accordingly—i.e., that although Mr. Yeltsin was undoubtedly a booze-hound he
was equally undoubtedly not a complete moron—for all his patent
different-featheredness from Mr. Yeltsin in point of personal habitus and
ethos, the Mr. Putin of 2000 must by default be regarded as committed to a view
of Russia’s political Schicksal that
was not radically different from that of Mr. Yeltsin, a view of Russia as a
proud and ambitious but by no means militarily imperialistic liberal democracy
with a capitalistically organized economy, a sort of genial commercial
rival-cum-political clone of the likes of the US, Japan, and the EU. To be sure, not long after his accession to
office, Mr. Putin admittedly injudiciously remarked something to the effect of The collapse of the U.S.S.R. was the
greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. At the time, this remark was pounced all over
by Russophobic bienpensant
hyperoccidentals as supposed evidence of Mr. Putin’s ambition to restart the Cold War at its coldest
point, perchance by means of a second invasion of Hungary and Poland; and ever
since then, the ever-swelling ranks of the Russophobic bienpensant mobility have savored it as supposedly incontrovertible
evidence of the deep-seatedness of Mr. Putin’s tsarist ambitions, but in the
light of Mr. Putin’s hand-pickedness by Mr. Yeltsin, the present writer judges
it more rational to conclude that Mr. Putin was then quite disinterestedly lamenting
the demise of the Soviet Union qua unifying
political-cum-geographical-cum-linguistic geo-politico-historical to-be-reckoned
with force. The Putin Doctrine, to the
extent that there ever has been one, is neither monarchical, nationalistic, nor
imperialistic: it prizes and takes retrospective pride in the Soviet Union as a
mighty, bi-continental polity comprising many nationalities yet united by a
single system of government and a common language or lingua franca, Russian,
that aspires to be no more than a second language in sub-polities wherein other
languages are more reflexively spoken. As
Mr. Putin acceded to the Russian presidency over a mere but formidably
proportioned rump of the Soviet Union, but also inasmuch as within this Russian
rump the nationalistic-cum-linguistic discontents of avowedly non-Russian
collectivities continued to fester in little, he promptly set about doing his
best to keep his Russia as Soviet Union-like as possible—most conspicuously by
quashing Chechen paramilitary insurgencies and an effort by Georgian-speaking
Ossetians to be annexed by Georgia.
Whether Mr. Putin behaved even marginally ethically in effecting these
Soviet Union rump-preserving efforts is, to say the least debatable—but so are
most if not all chief executive-ordered exercises of military force within or
without any polity; domestic and peri-domestic military interventions have
lately been more scandalous in hyperoccidental eyes merely because they have
tended to occur less often in the hyperoccident—as is attested, for example, by
the pan-hyperoccidental uproar at Mr. Trump’s entrustment of the patrolling of
the U.S. Mexican border to the U.S. army, in contrast to the
pan-hyperoccidental quiescence that greeted his slightly earlier bombing of
Syria. In any case, the fundamental
political divide in today’s Russia is rooted in causes that date far beyond the
quelling of the Chechen and Ossetian insurgencies, causes that date back to the
Soviet epoch. Inasmuch as Mr. Putin
openly styled himself a nostalgist for-cum-restorationist of the old Soviet
system of political life, the post-2000 domestic political landscape of Russia
tended to be defined by the citizenry’s attitude towards the Soviet system;
those who had benefited from the old Soviet system in any net way whatsoever
tended to support Mr. Putin, and those who had in any net way whatsoever been screwed
by the old Soviet system of life tend to oppose him. Ever since then, of course, the proportion of
the Russian citizenry who retain personal memories of life in the Soviet Union
has been steadily diminishing and the proportion of that citizenry who have no
memory of life in a Russia not governed by Mr. Putin has been steadily
increasing; and consequently the Russian political landscape has become
increasingly defined by Russians’ attitude towards Mr. Putin qua head of State
in his own right, their attitude towards what he himself and specifically has
or has not done vis-à-vis this or that definitively post-Soviet matter of
political interest. (Case in flagrantly obvious point: the matter of same-sex
marriage, which, although a political flashpoint in present-day Russia, was
never even brought to the table in the Soviet Union, or indeed in any pre-1991 hyperoccidental
polity.) For all that, the most
conspicuous figures in the pro-Putin and anti-Putin camps alike are still
pre-1991ers who seem to remain prevailingly guided by their attitudes towards
the old Soviet System. Thus, when some
four or five years ago the Putinite orchestra conductor Valery Gergiev led a
Russian organized-and-styled concert for peace during a brief truce in the
Syrian conflict, bienpensant
hyperoccidentals were up in all non-chemical arms about this dashing darling of
the hyperoccidental opera houses and concert halls’ supposed defection to the
supposed dark side. But the present
writer scarcely dreamt of raising an eyebrow on hearing the news of Mr.
Gergiev’s participation in this event, for a year or so before that, he had heard a radio interview in
which Mr. Gergiev gushed about the superb opportunities for cultural enrichment
he had enjoyed as a tyke in the 1950s and 60s despite then residing in some
miniature armpit of a town in the hinterland of the Caucasus; in particular
about the frequency with which concerts by the illustrious likes of his future
fellow-conductor Yuri Temirkanov and the Leningrad Philharmonic were given
there. Obviously—so this gushing
revealed—Mr. Gergiev had never defected
to Mr. Putin’s side but had been on his side all along, had cleaved to him qua standard-bearer
of the old munificent Soviet cultural dispensation qua generous patron of the
great surviving Soviet-epoch orchestras and opera and ballet companies. Complementarily, and slightly later, the
present writer, thitherto almost entirely ignorant of any particulars about
Gary Kasparaov apart from his prowess as a chess-player and his passionate
loathing of Mr. Putin, came to understand whence the latter quality emanated
when on Desert Island Discs Kasparov devoted
quite a significant proportion of his interdisc patter to the misery he had
experienced as a minority half-Armenian growing up in Soviet Azerbaijan; and quite
a significant portion of that portion to some sort of anti-Armenian riot or
quasi-pogrom in which the Soviet authorities had declined to intervene. In thus adducing these two reductiones ad hominem, I by no means
wish to call into question the sincerity or probity of either side of either army on the present Russian
political battlefield (let alone to redeem Mr. Putin and damn his opponents, as
my hyperoccidental detractors will doubtless accuse me of attempting to do),
but merely to inject what I hope is a salutary dose of nominalism into the
misguidedly ultra-essentializing character of every current—or at least every
famously current—description of that battlefield. Mr. Putin is held to be incorrigibly abominable
by his opponents both within and without Russia because of his supposed
incorrigible embodiment and enactment of opposition to democratic principles,
institutions, and practices, but the truth is that even within the smugly
self-styledly democratic hyperoccident there is nothing even approaching a
consensus about either which sorts of principles, institutions, and practices
are inherently democratic or the extent to which the inherently democratic
character of a given principle autc. entails its indispensability as a
universally applicable political norm.
At the moment the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is the global
poster-child of democracy, and there is nothing that bienpensant hyperoccidentals dread more than her now-well-nigh
inevitable (because self-declared) abdication of the chancellorship, inasmuch
as her successor will well-nigh-inevitably be a person less strongly committed
than she to the present smorgasbord of bienpensant
political causes (a smorgasbord whose most coveted dishes are of course manically
unreserved xenophilia and grimly implacable Russophobia). But this selfsame Angela Merkel (whom,
incidentally, the present writer does
regard as the most capable and virtuous of present major hyperoccidental
polity-leaders despite her poster-child-dom) would have long since become hors de combat politically had she been
subject to the limitations on terms of office imposed on her de facto counterparts and de jure colleagues in many
president-headed republics—notably, in the United States and Russia. Indeed, it was a constitutional
two-consecutive term-limit on the Russian presidency that provoked Mr. Putin’s 2008
do-se-do with Dmitry Medvedev—a do-se-do whereby Mr. Medvedev temporarily
became president and Mr. Putin prime minister and that provoked outraged cries
of Lip-service-cum-the cofounded cheek! from
every corner of the hyperoccident. By
then, Mr. Putin had been president for a mere eight years, six years less than
the fourteen comprising the presidency of the thitherto longest-serving French
president, Jacques Chirac and (at least inclusively) Mrs. Merkel’s present
chancellorship; and even now, a decade after the do-se-do, his total stint at
the helm, inclusive of his four years as nominal first mate, has not yet
reached the two-decade mark. If limitation
of executive or quasi-executive power to periods of less than a decade is an
inherently indispensable democratic constitutional institution, then Russia is
an essentially and fundamentally more democratic polity than France, Germany, or
the United Kingdom; and Mr. Putin can indeed be blamed for merely paying
lip-service to it—but by this same token, Mrs. Merkel must be regarded as four-sevenths
as anti-democratic as Mr. Putin; if it is not, then Mr. Putin cannot be blamed
on democratic grounds for merely paying lip-service to such a limitation. Of course, to my blasé if not insouciant
treatment of the electoral fortunes of the various hypo and hyper-occidental
polity-leaders as mutually fungible, the bienpensant
hyperoccidental mobility will reflexively scream that Mr. Putin’s election
campaigns have been riven or riddled with
corruption, and hence that democratically speaking his electoral victories
have been but pseudo-victories, and further hence that in a polity conforming
to a truly democratic electoral process the citizenry would have sent him to
the Coventry of Russia (viz., Archangelsk) in 2008 at the latest. To this bienpensant
cri de coeur the present writer is inclined to reply with a malpensant cri de cul to the effect that
Corruption! has lately become the
principal rhetorical tool of the most pernicious of the hyperoccidental would-be
corrupters themselves, to the extent (admittedly nonexistent in the present
writer’s case) that one regards the will of the people as the sacroscanct, inviolable virgin.
The eye-burstingly obvious case in point is the since-January
2017-never-ending judicial (or perchance juridical?)
hullaballoo over the question of the actuality or extent of Mr Trump’s
collusion, coition, etc. with the Russian government during the 2016
presidential election campaign. Even in
the event that Mr. Mueller’s investigation reveals that Mr. Trump signed his
soul over to Mr. Putin in blood and in quintuplicate, this revelation ought to
have no bearing on Mr. Trump’s present legitimacy as president, inasmuch as his
enamourment with Mr. Putin was no secret during the election campaign, and
indeed was not denied by Mr. Trump himself when his opponent, Mrs. Clinton,
took occasion to remind voters of it. In
the tens of millions, Americans knew that Mr. Trump was a Putin-f**ker, and they voted for him anyway. And so the bienpensant would be-corrupters of hyperoccidental democracy have
been compelled to take their fury out on the very demos of whom they style themselves the most dedicated and sole
legitimate collective champion; for although, to be sure, they are
guilty-conscious’d or prudent enough not to impugn this selfsame demos for being simply stupid or porcifutuaceous, they make no hummingbird’s eardrum bones about
declaring it to have been so gullible as to have been irresistibly misled and
seduced by Putin-fueled Trump-boosting rhetoric, to have been led as
ineluctably as the Pied Piper’s rats into the river Trump by Russian so-called
Twitterbots masquerading as Stateside pig-f**king Trump supporters. They would have us believe that Bob and Suzy
Pigf**ker were so abjectly beholden to their own pigf**kerly ethos-cum-habitus
that a Tweet of Yeehaw! If Gospodin Trump wuz pig Ya’d love him big
time from Yuri Trumpf**ker would suffice to win them over to a presidential
candidate towards whom they otherwise would have been indifferent if not
downright antipathetic. They (i.e., the beinpensant hyperoccidentals, not Bob
and Suzy Pigf**ker) would have us believe that the Trump-boosting half of the demos—in presumptive utter contrast to
the presumptively thoroughly enlightened Trump-detracting other half thereof—was
so utterly indifferent to straightforward reportage from conventional media
sources that Trump advocacy from any old Trump-trumpeting Twatter would be
accepted by them as incontrovertible proof of Mr. Trump’s eligibility. And in this solicitation to belief they (i.e.,
again, the beinpensant hyperoccidentals,
not Bob and Suzy Pigf**ker) may very well be right—excuse me, not right, but, rather, correct. But the present
writer maintains that even if they are therein correct, the ultimate blame for the
above-described gulling of the demos
is not to be laid at the feet of either Mr. Putin or Mr. Trump, or even at
those of Joe Twitter, but rather at those of the demos itself—at the feet of its own seemingly abominably
incorrigible gullibility; a gullibility whose political weaponization antedates
Twitter by centuries if not millennia and might just as effectively have been
weaponized during the 2016 campaign if all parties to it and would-be
interlopers into it had been confined to operating via stagecoach and hand-operated
printing press, or even via ox-cart and cuneiform tablet. In every polity at every point in recorded
human history there have been people inclined to believe any assertion about
the political lie of the land that issues from the mouth, pen, etc. of any Tom,
Dick, Harry, Thomasina, aut al.; and in most occidental polities at least since
the invention of periodical journalism (i.e., since ca. 1700), there have been
political agents keen on capitalizing on this inclination by posing as
Tom…Thomasina, et al. American
journalism has certainly never been any stranger to such imposture, and indeed
by the 1830s the reputation—whether warranted or not—of Americans as peculiarly
game for and adept at such a shenanigan was so strong as to compel Honoré de
Balzac to mis-dub our sometime newspaper-mongering founding father Benjamin
Franklin its inventor. Balzac referred
to the actual non-invention in question as a canard, and instances of it have been more than occasionally termed
canards even in the Anglosphere, although
they have most often been designated by the less French-sounding noun hoax.
That the utterly gratuitous term fake
news has lately been coined to describe this phenomenon in specific
connection with the so-called social media and been subsequently exploited as a
term of abuse by both sides of the present U.S. pseudo-political divide is, if
hardly surprising (i.e, in the light of the horrifying political amnesia that
has lately taken hold of the hyperoccident [as instantiated, by, for example,
the far-abovementioned semiotic switcheroo of red and blue qua designators of
political allegiance]), nonetheless deeply troubling, inasmuch as it suggests that
everyone in the United States but the present writer has forgotten that the ability
to gauge the probability of an assertion in relation to established facts and
probabilities has tended to be posited as a basic prerequisite not only for
citizenship, but also for mere adulthood in
virtually every sort of polity under the sun since Mesopotamian times. To be sure, the entire industry answering to
the name of advertising presupposes
that even the mentally ripest adults are entirely lacking in this ability, but
for that very reason neither this industry nor its victims have ever enjoyed
the slightest modicum of respect or sympathy in any polity under the sun since
Mesopotamian times. If a given
toothpaste purchaser has purchased a given brand of toothpaste because an
advertisement has represented a user of that toothpaste as ineluctably
erotically successful, and this purchaser subsequently enjoys no erotic
success, although we are outraged at the advertiser’s confounded cheek in
having imposed such an imposture, we do not principally
react with outrage at the purchaser’s misleading by the advertiser but rather
with contempt for the purchaser for having been so easily misled by the
advertiser. We do not bewail the advertiser’s
interference in some presumptively preexistent commercial process wherein would-be consumers are supposed to be
given nothing but the hard, cold, unadorned facts about the products that they are
presumed to have the wherewithal to purchase.
Now, if at the moment of purchase the cashier somehow ends up charging
the gulled toothpaste purchaser an amount ten times as high as what the tube is
actually supposed to cost, that is an entirely different s***y. In such a case, whether the overcharging is
the result of a calculating error on the part of the cashier or a calculated
miscalculation by his aut al.’s commercial masters, it is patently the seller
and not the buyer who is to blame. In
such a case, we may indeed legitimately talk of interference in the commercial
process, but here the commercial process consists entirely of non-mental
arithmetical operations, of the mechanical copying of data from one site to
another. The analogous situation in any
electorally driven political process is the tampering with ballots deposited either
virtually or actually at polling stations.
At no point has it been even inconclusively shown that the Russians
engaged in such tampering in the 2016 election.
Such being the case, Mr. Trump’s election to the presidency, however
regrettable, must be regarded as a fair cop in U.S.-Constitutional terms. But of course, pseudo-left American doxa now
holds that these terms count for naught, that Mr. Trump should not be regarded
as the legitimate U.S. President, inasmuch as he did not win the majority of
the popular vote, the vote of the
preponderance of that very demos whom
the pseudo-left evidently regard in an even more contemptible light than shit’s
bastard younger brother; pseudo-left American doxa now holds that the electoral
college on which the securing of the presidency has always constitutionally
depended must be abolished, inasmuch
as it (like the U.S. Senate, which at the
moment [i.e., solely because the Democrats failed to secure control of it
at the most recent midterm] is likewise held in disfavor by the American
pseudo-left) gives disproportionate political weight to small States and
thereby thwarts the realization of the will of the nationwide majority. But here once again the end of the
commonwealth envisaged by the bienpensant
bilge-spewers forgets its beginning, inasmuch as Mr. Trump notoriously or
famously secured the Republican nomination in the very teeth of the most
doggedly rabid resistance of the Republican establishment, of the GOP political
machine dominated by the very wolfish, cash-glutted fat-cats the bienpensant mobility had done everything
in their power to thwart in the preceding presidential election; secured it,
namely, thanks to the nationwide hegemony of the primary system, whose gradual
adoption over the course of the twentieth century made the selection of
presidential candidates ever-more democratic
and thereby rendered the electoral influence of party-political machines
ever-more marginal. And hey, babe, it’s
not like I’m saying that the malpensant
American political mobility, the pseudo-right, the boosters and arse-lickers of
Mr. Trump, are any more consistent in their attitude towards democratic
institutions and practices than their pseudo-left adversaries, that they have
been any less prone to decry the supposed stolenness of an election that their
man, woman, aut al. ([sic] on the aut al.,
for for aught I know the Trumpites would go b**ls deep in campaigning for a
transsexual candidate provided that they,
zhe, aut al. were an avid-enough
gun-collector or zealous-enough proponent of a Mexican-border wall) has
happened to lose, or to ascribe deviations of the popular will from their own
notion of magnetic north to ineluctable brainwashing by some virtually
omnipotent individualized Pied Piper of a bugbear. Thus the
pseudo-left’s ascription of the supposed corruption of the political
consciousness of the pigf**kerly salt of the earth of the so-called heartland
by Vladimir Putin is neatly complemented by the pseudo-right’s ascription of
the corruption of the assf**kerly salt of the earth of the two coasts by George
Soros. And hey, babe, it’s not even like
I’m saying on a more general plane that the porqueria
of a Staatslandschaft that is the
present American political scene illustrates the inherent shortcomings of
democracy or the inherent superiority of an authoritarian system of government to
a democratic one—or, rather, in the specific context of the present essay, a
consistently pseudo-democratic polity like today’s Russia to an inconsistently
genuinely democratic polity like today’s United States. All and what I’m saying, rather, is, that in
the present system of global life it is difficult to imagine any system of
government in which any less than a teensy-tiny bit less than half the
population governed by it would not be radically pissed off and perpetually
stroppy. Doubtless a heck of a lot of
Russians are discontented as heck about being presided over by Mr. Putin, and
by now—i.e., several years since his last big coup on the international stage
(viz., the annexation of Crimea) and only a year or so since his most recent
c**k-up thereupon (viz., the Skripal poisoning)—that heck-of-a-lot probably
amounts to a most, but it is almost
certainly not a most large enough to
be converted into a so-called overwhelming majority by even the most
scrupulously monitored snap-presidential election. It is, indeed, very probably nearly exactly
the same size as the modest most of Americans that now detests Donald Trump
thanks to the modest diminution of his so-called base since the 2016 election,
and it is therefore by no means straight-facedly convertible into the sort of
psychologically integrated personification of the Russian people whose will would automatically, categorically,
and legitimately be reasserted by Mr. Putin’s removal from office and
replacement by Mr. Kasparov or the most virtuous and sagacious Pussy Rioteer. To be sure, it is regrettable and disturbing
that several-to-many Russian citizens and former Russian citizens have ended up
in prison or even dead in consequence of non-violent political or journalistic
activity against Mr. Putin, but one is by no means within one’s rights either
to assume that it is fear of ending up imprisoned or dead themselves that has
principally deterred the presumptive modest anti-Putin most from making their
anti-Putinism more demonstrative, or to blame that most for not being more
visibly outraged by the homicidal ferocity of Mr. Putin’s personal vindictiveness. Presumably the main reason that most of the slight majority of Russian people who
do not on the whole care for Mr. Putin do not publicly take up banners and
placards against him is that they that they do not care enough about not caring
for him to be arsed to stitch together an anti-Putin banner or Sharpie-and-staple
together an anti-Putin placard, which to say both that their quotidian life under
Putin’s presidency has not yet become so onerous that any short-term disruption
of that life bids fair to make it less onerous and that they cannot bring
themselves to be sufficiently vexed at the disruption of the quotidian lives of
strangers to put the restoration of these strangers’ quotidian well-being ahead
of the maintenance of their own. And for
this political quiescence or lethargy they
are, I repeat verbatim (barring the change to the passive voice), not to be blamed. Ever since the Second World War it has been pan-hyperoccidentally
quasi-doxical—i.e., wholly doxical among the bienpensants plus semi-doxcial among the malpensants—that the slightest infringement of the State on the
civil liberties of even a single individual calls for immediately putting one’s
own life in immediate peril on the grounds that tomorrow it could be me who is being tortured, imprisoned without
prospect of trial, etc. But to the
admittedly debatable extent that one is entitled inductively to extrapolate
from the past, the grounds are utterly fallacious, inasmuch as in even the most
tyrannical polities of the past three-quarters of a century the persecution of
political dissidents has not tended progressively to impinge on the general
citizenry in an ever-widening dragnetical arc; inasmuch as even in such
polities a citizen has generally been assured of surviving—and indeed thriving
to the extent that the local system of life permits—to the very end of his aut
al.’s natural, provided that he aut al. does not go out of his aut al.’s way to
advertise his aut al.’s attitude towards the State or other Powers that Be (or
that then Be’d). Admittedly, has not tended is a fudge that covers at
if not a multitude then at least several handfuls of egregiously sinful regimes
that have delighted in imprisoning and killing people just for the heck of it
(e.g., the Khmer Rouge and the Kims’ in North Korea), but Mr. Putin’s present
regime, like that of all post-Stalin Soviet regimes (and indeed Stalin’s own before
ca. 1936) emphatically is not one of these several handfuls. Not that tyranny of the sort exerted by Mr.
Putin is not intrinsically objectionable—albeit in the name not of democracy
but of basic human decency—but that sincere, wholehearted,
one’s-own-life-endangering objections to a tyranny can really only ever begin
at home, the home of someone immediately impinged upon by that tyranny. To adduce an analogous Stateside case that
will doubtless appear tasteless in the extreme to all but the plus malpensants
of malpensants: the present writer was genuinely horrified by
President George W. Bush’s establishment, in the aftermath of the attacks of
September 11, 2001 of the Guantanamo Bay
detention center—horrified, namely, by this establishment qua
roughshod-cavalcade over all sorts of national and international constitutional
rights, but he felt no impulse whatsoever to take to the streets in protest of
the establishment because he was not in the least bit afraid of being unconstitutionally
detained in the detention center himself, inasmuch as he sported neither a
traditionally Islamic forename or surname nor the merest ghost of a beard. (This was, after all, nearly a decade before
beardiness became the prime signifier of hipness among non-Islamic
hyperoccidental men.) When, on the other hand, a few years later that selfsame
President George W. Bush extended daylight saving time so sneakily and at such
short notice that the present writer became aware of the extension only when certain
of his electronic devices—but only certain
of them (for many of the impinged-upon software designers had not had
sufficient time to implement the requisite so-called patch)—stole an hour’s
march on his wristwatch on that first accursed second Sunday in March (I
confess I am unable either to part or do anything clever with the repetition of
march in the preceding clause)—well,
he was not only horrified but also outraged. Why? Well, in the first and more general
place because he was and is by either nature or habit a Nachtgeschöpf, a creature of the night, who had and has long resented
daylight saving time altogether on account of its prolonging of the sun’s stint
above the western horizon; who loves the winter not least because it guarantees
that he will return home from work in the dark, and loathes the summer not
least because it compels him to go to bed if not quite “by day,” then at any
rate when day is still the freshest and hence most sleep-disrupting of
memories. To the smartass who is now
thinking of pointing out to me that what daylight saving time adds to the
evening it subtracts from the morning I concede that, yes, were I Nachtgeschöpf who kept a radically bohemian
quotidian schedule, were I some sort of week-round partier addicted to staying awake
from midnight till dawn, I would most certainly love DST as much as I now loathe
it, and would welcome each and every extension of DST as an augmentation of my chronographic
fund of pleasure. But as I am a Nachtgeschöpf obliged to stick to a
traditional bourgeois diurnal schedule, at least from Monday to Friday, I
relish an early-arriving evening as an attendant of something I am looking
forward to doing, namely, going home; and while I certainly do not enjoy an
early-arriving morning eo ipso, I
appreciate it as a means to a necessary if undesirable end: I appreciate it inasmuch
as it helps my alarm clock wake me into doing something that I am not looking forward to doing, namely,
going to work. This mention of an early-arriving
morning as a salutary stimulus brings me to the second and more specific of my
reasons for resenting W.’s extension of DST.
My apartment faces due west and has no windows facing in any other
direction; consequently, at home I do not benefit from direct sunlight qua
alarm clock-MSG even when the day is longest, at the summer solstice of late
June; and I do not benefit from the absence of direct sunlight qua harbinger of
recreation even when the day is shortest, at the winter solstice of late
December, and for the overwhelming preponderance of the year, namely from about
early February through early November—i.e., the entire nine-month period in
which days are not much shorter than average—I am compelled to have more or
less direct sunlight streamed onto my person from slightly past midday to
sundown, and it is always in the hour immediately preceding sundown that direct
sunlight becomes optically and thermally most oppressive. And so, by extending daylight saving time by three
weeks, George W. Bush effectively added a minimum of six hours’ (i.e., one
hour- per-weekend day times three) misery to the present writer’s domestic
life—this on top of the at-minimum fifteen hours of extra-domestic misery
occasioned by the calendrical augmentation of the aforementioned unwelcome
daylight Heimkehr on weekdays. Anyway, who, or how, when the present writer
belatedly discovered the W.-mandated DST extension, he was for the first time
in his life more than figuratively galvanized enough to protest a politically
induced change. He was unprecedentedly
biologically up and ready to take to the streets in a more than figurative
sense in support of a retrenchment of DST to its 1986-established
first-Sunday-in-April starting point.
But when he canvassed those persons whom he had formerly regarded as his
virtual politikanschauungicshe
clones, he discovered to his horror, consternation, and indeed outrage, that
they were no such persons, that, indeed, they positively welcomed the extension
inasmuch as it gave them more time to
unwind, take a load off, relax, throw yet another shrimp on the Barbie, enjoy
some extra quality experiences with the nippers, etc., then fluttered their
accursed flip-flops (remember: this was in Baltimore
not Ocean City [whence did anybody
get the idea that it is remotely acceptable to wear flip-flops anywhere but at
the beach?]) in a chorus of W.-fellating pedal applause. And so from then onwards the present writer
was obliged to nurse his W.-resenting rage in silence. To the present writer’s mind, the extension
of Daylight Saving Time was by far the Bush administration’s most egregious
violation of civil liberties and overreaching of executive authority; to the
present writer’s mind, the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay detention center
and the invasion of Iraq were mere playful pinches of the American body
politic’s bottom by comparison. And yet this
extension receives not a single frame of opprobrium in either Oliver Stone’s
cinematic anti-hagiography of the president himself or Adam McKay’s cinematic
hatchet job on his deputy, Dick Cheney, which just goes to reaffirm the
writer’s abovementioned sense that the world in toto has become a gigantic
Douglas Robertson-ignoring engine. But
never mind that engine for the moment, for I adduced this example of the extension
of DST not qua exhibit in proof of the world’s indifference to Douglas
Robertson but rather qua example of the sort of polity-wide everyday
life-affecting change that has so far not typified Mr. Putin’s exercises of
executive authority. If one happens to
be gay, one may very well be outraged at Mr. Putin’s limitations on (or of) expressions
of gay identity, but as most Russians—like most people in general—happen not to
be gay, these restrictions are never going to touch off a revolution. The same, mutatis
mutandis, goes for Mr. Putin’s control of the so-called State media and the
attendant Putinization of the national television news broadcasts. “Now hold on there just a second, buster-cum-pardner-cum
pilgrim,” the robotic zombie cowboy DGR interjects, “Even supposin’ (and Ford
or Bezos perish the supposition!) that the faintest ghost of an infringement of
the liberties of our gay brothers, sisters, theysters, zhesters, autl al., does
not axiomatically constitute a non-oral mortal blow to the liberties of each
and every person on the planet regardless of his aut al.’s sexual orientation
(or lack thereof), you can hardly reasonably claim that Mr. Putin’s
infringement of the freedom of the press is of the same character as his
infringement of gay rights, inasmuch as the chief if not sole beneficiary of
freedom of the press is manifestly not some political or demographic niche but
rather the public as a whole.” To the contrary, I can reasonably claim that
the two Putinian infringements in question are of exactly the same character, inasmuch as the principal if not sole
beneficiary of freedom of the press manifestly is and always has been not the
public as a whole but a specific political-cum-demographic niche that is even
more piddling than the gay so-called community–viz., that class-cum-set of
persons who style themselves journalists. You heard me aright robotic zombie cowboy
DGR: the very purpose, telos, and raison d’être of journalism, whence
axiomatically of all demands for freedom of the press, is to stoke the sense of
self-importance of journalists. If truth
be frankly and candidly told, the general public of no polity has actually ever
given a tinker’s toss about the news, and if truth be even more frankly and
candidly told, each and every non-journalist in every polity since the
aforementioned dawn of the pseudo-métier in ca. 1700, has yearned for the news in every available format and
medium simply to go away for good, to
perform the biologically impossible act.
Who but the most loutish, the most thick-bellied, of hyperoccidentals,
has ever looked with any emotion more flattering than medium-grade contempt
upon the stereotypical journalist with his perennially sweaty armpits, his
perennially unbuttoned top shirt button-cum-loosened necktie, his incessant
unreserved and unexcused farting, his unabashed retailing of histoires du cul, his unregenerately inefficient
hunt-and-peck typewriting non-method, his recourse to some dumbed-down
abridgment of Merriam Webster for the correct spelling of the likes of ceiling and freest, or the correct placement or omission of the apostrophe in
or from it(’)s? (Of course it will be objected by the robotic
zombie cowboy DGR that my description of the stereotypical journalist is
unmistakably masculine, and therefore hopelessly anachronistic; to this
objection I will irrefragably point out that the sexual diversification of
journalism has simply afforded stupid and ill-mannered women a more publicly prominent
forum for the indulgence of their stupidity and boorishness than they formerly
enjoyed in the hospital ward or the grade-school classroom.) In short, who of
any intelligence in the hyperoccident has ever regarded a journalist by default
as anything but a person of exceptionally low genius whose presence in the
world is a blight on the latter’s existence?
And the answer to the preceding question presumably being No one, who of any intelligence in the
hyperoccident cannot fairly yearn to be resident in a polity such as the
present Russian Republic wherein the chief organ of journalism, in being known
to be a directly and immediately governed mouthpiece of the State, is openly
discreditable from the outset? In this
connection I am reminded of that never-famous but by no means halbweltgeistig-ly marginal 1988 song “Lies”
by the American (and more specifically Milwaukeean) folk-punk power trio The
Violent Femmes (yet another set of old-school bienpensant persons who would presumably be at daggers drawn with
me on every contention made in this essay, but never mind that), wherein the
lyricist ruefully itemizes two duplicitous verbal constructs, a poem by a “very
famous poet” and the sermon of a television preacher, whose rhetorical
slickness has very nearly managed to hoodwink him into believing patent
untruths, and then goes on to concede that “he never had this problem,” the
problem of sorting truth from falsehood, in taking in the pronouncements of “of
nobody [i.e., anybody] in the government” inasmuch as “I guess I always figured
they’d never mean what they meant [i.e., actually mean what they purported to
mean {the formal oxymoronity of the conjecture is obviously an homage to Yogi
Berra}].” Ultimately and conclusively, the
song implies that the entire field of discourse in the hyperoccident is (or at
least then was) uniformly pervaded by a tendency towards hucksterism, towards
(in the lyricist’s own words) “mixing up the truth with something funny.” It implies subsidiarily that the average
hyperoccidental has always sagaciously expected the persons governing him aut
al. to be hucksters by default and is to be blamed merely for not extending his
aut al.’s application of this sagaciousness beyond the ambit of government, for
not assuming that non-governmental entities are just as strongly inclined as
governmental ones to lie to him aut al.
While by no means setting a low premium on truth, and indeed implicitly
setting the highest premium on it in virtue of explicitly treating of the topic
of lies polemically, the song implies that one should not fetishize any entity ici bas qua promulgator of veridical
pronouncements. I adduce the song here
principally because qua production of a perennial topper of what were then
called the College Radio Charts (this
because they ranked songs, bands, and albums according to the criterion of the
amount of airplay they had received on radio stations owned by American
colleges and universities and prevailingly staffed by American college and
university students) it cannot but give a fairly reliable picture of the
meta-epistemological lie of the hyperoccidental bienpensant land just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and
consequently highlights the seismically dramatic transformations of that
land-lie that have taken place in the intervening thirty-plus years. To be sure, the song indicates, back then as
now, the spokespeople of organized religion, and specifically of the Christian
religion, came in for harsh meta-epistemological criticism chez les bienpensants. But
this mistrust of the truth-claims of ecclesiastical authority was counterpoised
by an equally keen mistrust of the truth-claims of its secular counterpart, the
purveyor of au courant so-called high
culture, the famous (and presumably still living because otherwise great) poet. But the least trusted entity of all back then
chez les bienpensants was the
government. Fast-forward, as they say,
to 2019, and chez les bienpensants it
is only the first of the three entities, the spokesperson of organized
Christian religion, that is still regarded as a huckster. The poet is of course now required to be
revered as epistemologically infallible because he, she, aut al. is a
practitioner of one of the so-called fine arts, and the fine arts now no longer
have any other function in the hyperoccident than celebrating bienpensant values. And the U.S. federal government, to each and
every extent that it dissociates itself from the current chief of its executive
branch, is likewise required to be revered as epistemologically infallible
because from a bienpensant point of
view the current chief of that executive branch can do no right, or rather, unwrongness. Most conspicuously in contrast to the olden
days, the U.S. military now commands unqualified meta-epistemological adulation
from the American bienpensanterie,
inasmuch as it happens generally to be at loggerheads with Mr. Trump. If Mr. Trump happens to be in favor of a
diminution of American military presence in a given country, any general of any
branch of the armed forces can now recommend the smart-carpet-bombing of each
and every orphanage and hospital in that country and he (or she? [one assumes
there are no transgender generals yet])
will be applauded by each and every bienpensant
for his (or her?) supposed sage counsel solely on the ostensible grounds that
he (or she?) is a professional soldier and hence a sort of expert, because of course in bienpensant
eyes expertise of any sort now counts as a warrant of epistemological
infallibility, because of course Mr. Trump happens to be the antithesis of an
expert. Never mind the question of the
intrinsic justice or prudence of the proposed military action. Of course many if not most of these bienpensant tank-humpers were more than
figuratively begging to be water-cannoned for their opposition to George W.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq back in ’03.
Anyhow, Russocentrically speaking, the upshot of everything I’ve been
saying and resaying since the sentence beginning “Mr. Putin is held to be
incorrigibly abominable…” is that I just wish—and doubtless wish in vain—that
in the light of its manifest own inability to distinguish the contours of its
own fundament qua supposed fundament of democracy from those of the average
hole in the ground even in the historical very-short term, the hyperoccidental bienpensanterie would comport itself
towards the present-day forestering of the Russian political game park with a
tad or smidge more humility, with a
tad or smidge less disdain or horror for or at the shifts, feints, grabs, and
subterfuges resorted to by Mr. Putin and the lack of resistance thereto by the
Russian masses. If the loathsome,
pestiferous, garlic-reeking bienpensant
pseudo-elite (who are in reality but a mob
of only slightly demographically smaller proportions than their malpensant heartlandian rivals) had
clung to a single genuine principle for ten years in succession, they might
indeed—albeit only might indeed—be
entitled to claim the moral high ground vis-à-vis the likes of Mr. Putin. Moreover, it seems to me vis-à-vis their
current championship of supposed progressive forces in present-day Russia that
they would do well preemptively to sop up an egg or ten bound by default for
their faces by reflecting on the recent-to-current state of States wherein
persons and factions who could do no wrong in bienpensant eyes under former, openly autocratic, political
dispensations eventually assumed full political hegemony by democratic means—notably
the current state-of the-States of Myanmar and South Africa. Such a course of reflection would teach them
that a polity wherein the government oppresses the people directly is not
necessarily to be rejected in favor of one in which it smugly acquiesces in the
people’s oppression of one another, and that in practice democrats are no less
prone to be kleptocrats than the autocrats who are their supposed political
antitheses. In any case, even in the
unlikely event that Mr. Putin does manage to annul the Russian constitution and
acquire executive power in theoretical perpetuity, his actual hold on that
power is destined to be much shorter, and indeed likely to be not much longer
than the run of a moderately successful pre-millennial American sitcom,
inasmuch as he is very near to completing his seventh decade as a biological
entity. Oh, yes, my formerly evoked
sexagenarian or septuagenarian friend, I well remember that WE’RE ALL LIVING
LONGER NOW!!!!!!, but although I concede to you that chief executives of State
as old as you are slightly more common than they were thirty or forty years
ago, you must concede to me that even an octogenarian chief executive of State
is still a comparative rarity, and that the world’s sole even-remote approach
to a nonagenarian chief executive of State, Queen Elizabeth, has been
delegating her extra-domestic duties to her sexagenarian-to-septuagenarian
eldest son for several years. In the
light of these demographic tendencies, I give Mr. Putin another butcher’s-dozen
years max—in other words, I am conjecturing that he is substantially closer to
the end of his national-gubernatorial political life than to its
beginning. In the meantime, of course,
he may appoint a successor hand-picked to act as a mini-Putin until the cows of
human history come home, but then one must remember that Mr. Putin was himself
hand-picked to act as a mini-Yeltsin until those selfsame cows came home, and
we are now well aware of the utter invisibility of this bovine homecoming to
the most powerful meta-historical telescope ever since the moment, some
nineteen years ago, when Mr. Putin showed himself to be a cow of decidedly
different markings than Mr. Yeltsin’s. Alternatively,
and more likely-ly, after Mr. Putin’s disparation
no later than 2032, the helm of the Russian State will pass into the hands of
the current bienpensant opposition,
or, rather, into the hands of some grotesque metastasis thereof, in which case
on the legislative plane the political landscape will doubtless become
receptive to every manner of queerdom
(doubtless including by then not only species-queerdom
but kingdom-queerdom [i.e., not only
outwardly human-seeming persons self-identifying as, say, snow-geese or wombats but also outwardly human-seeming
persons self-identifying [and quite justly, indeed, at least vis-à-vis their
intellectual capabilities!] as plants, fungi, bacteria, slime-molds, etc. [or,
rather, by then, et al.]), while at the same time, and in reaction to this queerification,
the pseudo-national insurgencies
within Russia will become ever-more stroppily belligerent and militantly
secessionist along increasingly fine-grainedly exclusionary lines. I recall that immediately after Russia’s
annexation of Crimea from (the) Ukraine back in 2014 a certain rarissima avis of an at-least-would-be
farsighted pundit conjectured that inasmuch as a substantial minority of the
population of Crimea did not regard themselves either as Russians or as Ukrainians
but rather as Ta(r)tars, it was only a matter of a fairly-to-very small time
until the Crimean Ta(r)tars secured the establishment of a Ta(r)taristan encompassing not only a substantial minority of
Crimea but also a veritable archipelago
of hundreds if not thousands of bits of southern Russia in which self-identified
Ta(r)tars outnumbered self-identified non-Ta(r)tars by a factor of more than
1.00000000000000001 to 1. That the
securing of such a monstrous abortion of a polity has not so far taken place is
presumably entirely owing to the ever-cooling but never-quite-dying afterglow
of the glory accrued to all non-Ukrainian Crimeans by the annexation, an
afterglow which presumably is in turn owing to Mr. Putin’s perduring authority
as an anti-Ukrainian chief executive.
Once this authority is gone—i.e., and in more general terms, once the
Russian chief executive is not by default seen as a would-be restorer of the
Soviet or even pre-Soviet status quo ante–there is no telling how many
abominably picayune yet insatiably self-important self-styled nations-cum-polities
will emerge from the excremental ruins of the long-since-worm-devoured Russian
political woodwork and successfully demand to be recognized as independent
States. Doubtless every village and
municipal precinct in the Russian Republican with a majority of non-native
Russian speakers will then successfully transform itself into a micro-Quebec
insisting on its distinctness from the polity-wide linguistic majority while
self-servingly declining to be annexed by or indeed be officially affiliated
with its linguistic mother country in any way apart from qua mendicant recipient
of monetary handouts. But even to
speculate about Russia’s long-term future qua political entity an sich seems vicariously self-indulgent
and navel-gazing when one considers Russia’s short-term future qua geopolitical
agent, a S-TF principally conditioned by Mr. Putin’s admittedly short-standing
but for all that seemingly firm military alliance with what used to be called
(and IHOP ob multas causas should
still be called) Red China. To be sure,
the alliance makes absolutely no sense when contemplated in any register or
from any angle. The Russians have little
or nothing to offer the Chinese, and the Chinese, while having much to offer
the Russians, are unquestionably better served by actually presenting that
selfsame much to bigger players like the United States or to significantly smaller
players, notably several African polities, who bid fair to serve China as
client States. To be sure, China would
find it inestimably beneficial to have Russia’s colossal military materiel at
its disposal, but only on unconditional terms, and the idea of Mr. Putin (or
any subsequent Russian leader)’s handing over the keys of Russia’s nuclear
arsenal, air force, naval fleet, etc. to Mr. Xi (or any subsequent Chinese
leader) is so manifestly laughable as to oust the aviation of pigs from its
post as top-ranking metaphorical vehicle of well-nigh-impossible improbability. To be sure, Mr. Putin’s presumably utterly
cynical effort to ground the alliance in a common Weltanschauung, in some supposed pan-Asian antidemocratic
political worldview, is scarcely less laughable. Regardless of the admittedly formidable
extent to which present-day Russia’s political landscape is anti-democratic, at
bottom Russia is mired in the same meta-political quagmire in which each and
every other polity within the geographical space that used to be called Christendom
now likewise finds itself mired—the quagmire of the intrinsically
meta-democratic question of the extent and frequency to and with which the
populace’s—a.k.a. the people’s—voice
must be heard and heeded by its or their appointed or arrogated proxies in the
ship of State. China is mired in no such
quagmire and indeed never has been and further-indeed may very likely never be
mired therein because for at least as many headache-inducingly umpteen
god-awful millennia as China has existed in some form or other, human life has been
almost literally—and in some epochs probably quite literally—cheaper than dirt there, and so the
notion of a Chinese people, Volk, or narod in the pan-occidental sense has
never emerged there [yesyeyesyesyeysyesyeysyes, zombie cowboy DGR, I know that
the official English name of the present non-Formosan Chinese polity is the People’s Republic of China, but mere
mechanical mimesis of a word in the name of an entity is no proof that that
entity instantiates the thing denoted by that word, as is eloquently attested
by the resounding failure of Miller Lite to displace Veuve Clicquot as the
preferred vehicle of New Year’s toasts and ship-christenings], and failing (apologies
for the repetition of fail) the
miraculous supervention of some sort of nature or human-invented plague that
affects only whichever strain of the human genome is most prevalent on the
Chinse mainland, it never will emerge
there, inasmuch as the very notion of a people [as against the notion of a nation, which is more nearly quite a
different thing than political theorists, bienpensant
or otherwise, have yet imagined] can emerge only in conditions of demographic
scarcity, in conditions wherein even the cheapest human life has an effectively
registrable value [and to be fair to the god-awful Chinese, pan-occidental
society has been t(r)ending towards the opposite demo-econo-graphic state of
affairs, one wherein human life is cheaper than dirt, for the past two-thirds
of a millennium—i.e., since the end of the so-called Black Death in the
late-mid fourteenth century]. China’s
sole geopolitical aim is global hegemony in the fullest and deepest sense; as
the smug and unchallenged bearer of the oldest national brand-name in human
history, that of the Middle Kingdom,
it views itself as the rightful ruler of humankind in toto; unlike, say, Nazi Germany, it has no need to rationalize
its geopolitical ambitions by fabricating a factitious national genealogy linking
itself to past empires, and now that it has attained pride of place in the
geopolitical economy it has absolutely no need of a collateral myth justifying
its alliance with Russia on grounds consubstantial with those via which Nazi
Germany justified its military alliance with Japan—viz., that the Japanese were
their yellow Aryan cousins. In short, the whole notion of a pan-Asian
geopolitical worldview emanates entirely from Russia and will inevitably die
with the ineluctable third stirrings (for in the recent diplomatic tussles with
Japan and the U.S. over the South China Sea we have already witnessed the first
and second stirrings thereof) of the realization of China’s geopolitical
ambitions in military terms. The
Chinese, like Hamlet’s royal ape, are keeping the Russians in their jaw for
swallowing in advance of their prospective engulfment of the rest of the world. (Whether this engulfment bids fair to succeed
is quite needless to say the topic of a separate and very probably even longer
and even more hate crime act-prosecutable essay. So far the cheeriest prognosis I have managed
to glean on this matter comes from a Punjabi Indian friend of mine, who has
laughingly opined: “Of course they’ll have to adjust to us. They’ve got no choice: they’re Chinese!”—by which he presumably means
that we non-Chinese are so much more like each other than like them that
together we effectively constitute an unassailably solid demographic majority.) Mr. Putin is if not quite doubtless then at
least very much quite likely aware of all this, but by now he really has no
practicable choice other than to keep the ruse of a Sino-Russian alliance going
as long as possible, because the only thing about Russia that anyone in the
hyperoccident any longer respects in any register is its prowess in military
espionage, and the only major power who stands even metonymically to benefit by
association with such prowess, even in the short term, is China. (Not that China actually needs Russia as a partner in espionage, for it is doing quite well
on its own in that department, thank you.)
Obviously nothing could be more desirable vis-à-vis the hyperoccident’s
material interests than for it to woo Mr. Putin away from China, but nothing is
ultimately less likely than such a wooing because the hyperoccident has yet to
commit itself even half-heartedly to the cause of Sinophobia qua
resistance-campaign against the Chinese qua would-be world-dominators (as
opposed to mere umpteenth geopolitical exponent of anti-democratic principles) and
because by now the hyperoccident has little or nothing to offer Russia materially
speaking even if Russia were to stoop to being a mere junior partner rather
than insisting on being regarded as a major power in its own autonomous right. As a net supplier of petroleum and natural
gas it has no need of either of these from any exogenous supplier, and while it
is certainly burgeoning in the hyperoccident’s darling economic sector, that of
so-called information technology, opportunities for commercial cooperation with
it in that sector are scarce, in the light of the conceivably warranted
assumption that the entire Russian electronic-informational infrastructure is
fundamentally and irreversibly geared towards the undermining of its
hyperoccidental counterpart. But let
there be no word mincing-occasioned mistake about this: while Mr Putin’s
obdurate and ineluctable refusal to extract his fingertips from the
hindquarters of the Chinese is undoubtedly an error and a sin from every point
of view but that of Russia’s very short-term geopolitical interest, while Mr.
Putin is undoubtedly very foolish and vicious even to dream, however
inefficaciously, of souping up his anti-hyperoccidental machinations with
Chinese aid, it is the hyperoccident and not Mr. Putin that is principally and
ultimately to blame for this refusal-cum-reverie, inasmuch as it was the
hyperoccident that generated the conditions that led to Mr. Putin’s national-political
efflorescence, first qua preserver of the residual glory of the U.S.S.R. and
then qua gadfly of the hyperoccident qua turbo-powered engine of Russophobia in
incessant action. Ardently though one
hates to drop the other H-bomb into
any discussion of current political realities, it is impossible not to remark some
uncannily nearly exact parallels between the gormlessness with which the
hyperoccident of ca. 1991 to 2011 engendered and nurtured today’s virally
virulent Putin and the gormlesssness with which the World War I allies
engendered and facilitated the rise of Hitler. Here I again have occasion to quote George
Kennan, this time from his 1961 conspectus Russia
and the West under Lenin and Stalin:
In 1917, the Western powers, in their
determination to inflict total defeat on a Germany far less dangerous to them
than that of Hitler, had pressed so unwisely for the continuation of Russia’s
help that they had consigned her to the arms of the Communists. Now, in
1939, they were paying the price for this folly.
In 1917, they had cultivated an image of the
German Kaiser that was indistinguishable from the reality of the future Hitler.
Now they had a real Hitler before them.
In 1917, they convinced themselves that
Russia’s help was essential to their victory, though this was not really true.
Now, they had a situation in which Russia’s help was indeed essential;
but the Russia they needed was not there.
You see in this example what happens when
people make policy on the basis of exaggerated fears and prejudices.
Those dangers they conjure up in their own imagination eventually take on
flesh and rise to assail them—or if not them, then their children. And
they waste, in their overanxiety before the fancied perils of the present, the
assets they will need for the real ones of the future.
On reflection this passage shews that what I just described as a
succession of parallels would better be described as a contrapuntal texture
partaking of both parallels and antiphonal complements, with a complement
getting the first pair of melodic lines in.
The situation alluded to in the first paragraph is that of the last year
of the First World War, which coincided almost exactly with the first year of post-Tsarist
Russia’s existence. At this point the
Western alliance—which in by now including the United States was almost exactly
geographically consubstantial with the present hyperoccident minus Germany—conceived
of the German State as the absolute and ultimate embodiment of despotism and
tyranny, and took Russia’s opposition to this despotism-cum-tyranny for granted
and expected Russia to contribute to its quelling financial-cum-military hand
over financial-cum-military fist, even though Russia’s own system of government
had been manifestly far more despotic and tyrannical than Germany’s when it
entered the war on the Western side, and even though it had begun to fashion
that system into a democratic one at the very moment its commitment to the
alliance had begun to falter. By
complementary antiphonal contrast, in 1991, the hyperoccident conceived of the
just-deceased U.S.S.R. as the absolute and ultimate embodiment of despotism and
tyranny, and took Russia’s and the other bits of the former U.S.S.R.’s
opposition to this despotism-cum-tyranny for granted and expected them to
contribute financial (albeit not military)-hand over financial-fist to the
quelling of the very memory of that despotism-cum-tyranny simply because these post-Soviet polities had begun to fashion that
system into a democratic one. The
salient parallels between the two cases, the 1917 one and the 1991-2011 one, are
the hyperoccident’s nurturing of a pet project, and its taking for granted of
Russia’s willingness to contribute thereunto. Essentially it is a single pet project in both
cases, a pet project centering on political-cum-economic liberalization, with
there being but an admittedly far from trivial shift in emphasis during the
intervening three-to-four-and-a-half-score years: back in 1917, emphasis was
placed on the political register of the project, on the need for universal
suffrage, elected legislatures, etc.; in 1991-2011, emphasis was placed on the
economic register, on the need for free markets, incentives to entrepreneurship,
etc. But from the point of view of the mandatorily
prospective implementers of the project, the upshot of the two cases was
exactly identically superlatively cheeky and read as follows: within five minutes ago at latest, you must
become exactly like us entirely under your own power and entirely at your own
expense, however few of you may be receptive to the transformation or the
attendant pecuniary outlay. The
salient difference is the concetratedness in 1991-2011 of the project on a
single polity, on Russia, a concentratedness that by all rights ought to elicit
a credit of indulgence to the present Russian system of life, albeit not
necessarily to Mr. Putin specifically, inasmuch as, however undemocratic things
may be in present-day Russia, they are by no means or by a long chalk as
undemocratic as they were in Nazi Germany.
In short, while Russia from 1991 to 2011 deserved a second Marshall Plan,
to the admittedly debatable extent to which it had to be made au courant with hyperoccidental
so-called developments in any register, it was then effectively delivered and
administered a second Treaty of Versailles, a prescription to hawk itself into
terminal debt (for whence else were the gap-stopping tens of trillions of
rubles to come at the Dee of an Haitch ?)
for the sake of becoming at best a sort of economically glorified Italy, a sort
of which, according to a writer generally none too sympathetic to Mr. Putin, it
has long since not only effectively but exactly become under Mr. Putin’s
helmsmanship, which observation leads me to my final bit of remonstration with
the bienpensant gulag-incarceration-worthy
mobility—viz., that to the formidable extent that Russia has managed to drag
itself or be dragged into this mobility’s version of the twenty-first century,
they, this mobility, owe this achievement largely if not entirely to Mr. Putin
and accordingly by all rights should fellate him on all fours. For proof of the formidability of the extent
one need look no further, afield, askance, or a-pitch than BBC Radio 4’s
coverage of last year i.e., (2018)’s World Cup, coverage which, despite that
network’s unregenerate Russophobic slant, as instanced by its loud-pedaling of
the UK’s boycotting of official participation in the event-collection during
its run-up, contained not a single titter of dissatisfaction from a single
hyperoccidental, either immediately via a vox pops, or indirectly via a report
on any sort of so-called incident, coverage which indeed attested unreservedly
to the uniform warmth and pleasantness of the welcome and sojourn received and
enjoyed by hyperoccidental spectators to a man, woman, et al.; coverage that
contrasted most favorably, for all that network’s unregenerately favorable bias
towards any Hisapanophone or Lusophone cranny of the globe, with its coverage
of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, which made the entire
event-collection sound like a veritable Mickey Mouse circus minus the Disney
sponsorship, with stadia signally left half-empty during traditionally
stadium-packing fixtures for lack of reliable transportation thereunto. In the light of this glaring recent
meta-sportivic longcoming of Russia vis-à-vis a polity purportedly as
hyperoccidental as one can get, and that, indeed, ought by many if not all
rights to be regarded as the most hyperocidental polity of all, barring the
United States of America, ought not the hyperoccidental bienpensant mobility to vouchsafe Mr. Putin at least a
geometrically infinitesimal tipping of their respective Lenin-caps? Not that the present writer is even capable,
let alone inclined (figurative overtones of this participle overdetermined,
natch), to join them in such a Lenin cap-tipping, inasmuch as in the first
place the headgear he sports in his mind’s hattery is either a top-hat or a
tricorn—i.e., a chapeau bespeaking contempt
for the masses, bienpensant or
otherwise, rather than solidarity with them; and in the second, he has no
interest in being up to date in any register and if he had his druthers would
roll back the clock of supposed progress far beyond 2011 or indeed 1991 or
indeed 1917 or indeed 1789—all the way back, indeed, to the hyperoccidental
pre-French revolutionary epoch.
Accordingly, from the present writer’s point of view the entire history of Russia from the
beginning of the twentieth century onwards has been a lamentable farce,
inasmuch as it has brought Russia qua last great bastion of pan-occidental pre-industrial
conservatism ever closer to the hyperoccidental anti-ideal of a pseudo-society
awash in increasingly shoddy industrially generated trash. To be sure, within the confines of the
present essay, he has expressed a nostalgic yearning to dwell in the U.S.S.R.,
but the U.S.S.R. would at best have afforded him a mere pis aller of an Umwelt,
inasmuch as the libidos of his fellow Soviet citizens would have been vectored
towards the same trashy anti-ideals as those of their hyperoccidental
counterparts. Accordingly further, the
present writer effectively has nothing to hope for from today’s Russia. To be sure, he admires its government’s
reactionary stance on sexual ethics, but of what account is this stance by
comparison with the Russian narod’s trend-humping
stance towards informational-technological gadgetry? The hyperoccidental bienpensanterie now recoil from Russia like a vampire from a cross
on account of its supposed political paleolithicity, but of what account is
this recoiling to the present writer, given that even the most officially
politically reactionary of present-day Russians would be as keenly inclined as
his aut al.’s hyperoccidental counterpart to desecrate the present writer’s
corpse by forcing it to cup a so-called smart phone to its worm-eaten remnant
of an ear with its worm eaten remnant of a hand, or to upload an endless succession
of Instagram photos of its coffin-interior via its other hand-remnant? When you (and, yes, I am addressing you
specifically, zombie cowboy DGR) cum right down to or into it, in the final
analysis, when shove is saluted by push, etc., present-day Russia is as little
a country for the potty-trained, let alone for old men, as the present-day
United States. And such ultimately and
incontrovertibly being the case, the present writer is strongly inclined to
send the whole kit and caboodle of this gallimaufry of a present-day world,
hyper-occidental, pan-occidental, hypo-occidental,
sub-cum-trans-cum-super-Saharan, o****ntal, etc, packing to Coventry—nay (horrible enim vero dictu), to Detroit! He has lately become apprised of this
inclination thanks to his changing disposition towards a phenomenon of
hyperlocal provenance, viz. the civil defense sirens of Baltimore City. He first heard one of these sirens going off within
a few weeks of his removal to the city back in August of 1994, and it would
probably be no exaggeration to say that this off-going more than figuratively
scared the bejesus out of him (he writes merely probably merely because he is not quite sure what a bejesus or its
precise locus or function in the human organism or psyche is, not because he
wishes by any means to underrate the negative intensity of the experience in
question), and with what he flatters himself is a good pair of reasons, namely,
1), that unlike perhaps the majority of his seniors and not improbably the
majority of his juniors, he first heard—or, which then came to the same thing,
first remembered hearing—the almost unsurpassably distinctive timbre of such a
siren not via some WWII flick set during the so-called Blitz but rather via The Day After (q.v.), in the seconds
leading immediately up to the detonation of the first Kansas City-leveling thermonuclear
incendiary, such that the sound of such a siren was virtually Pavlovianly bound
to elicit not a Linklaterian smirk from his upper unpaired sphincter but rather
a Munchian howl from his lower one, and b) it happened to be blaring not, as in
The Day After, from some claxon or
tocsin presumably sited several miles away but rather from one presumably sited
a mere few-dozen meters from his dwelling space-cum-point of audition (i.e.,
the Homewood Apartments, at 31st and Charles Streets. A sort of audiomnemonic trigonometry deployed
after multiple auditions of this same siren from various audition points and
operating concurrently with bargain-basement powers of deduction has since
enabled him to establish the precise housing of the claxon or tocsin in
question as the eastern-more of the so-called physical plants of the Homewood
Campus of the University that Cannot be Named, a building sited just north of
the intersection of Charles Street with Art Museum Drive.) In the light of
these two reasons, his immediate impulse on this first audition was to deliver
a succession of passionate smooches to the abovementioned lower sphincter, but inasmuch
as he continued to exist as a non-ethereal being in the minutes and hours following
the sounding of the siren, he concluded that this sounding must have been the issue-cum-instantiation
of some sort of false alarm; and inasmuch as in his subsequent weeks, months,
and years as a Baltimorean, he came to hear such non Armageddon-inaugurating
soundings of the civil defense sirens in various parts of the city, he came in
turn to conclude that these soundings were generally instantiations (and merely
instantiations) of a testing of the city’s civil defense warning system. (Why such testing was being carried out in
Baltimore and had never, to the best of the present writer’s recollection, been
carried out in his native city of Tampa, was and remains a mystery to him,
especially in the light of the immediate propinquity of a strategically significant
U.S. Air Force Base [i.e., MacDill Air Force Base, the site of something called
United States Central Command, which for reasons inscrutable to the present
writer’s admittedly eighth-assed researches, has served as the control center
of most if not all of the U.S.’s abominable-cum-deplorable interventions in the
Middle East from the 1991 Gulf War onwards] to Tampa’s city center.) Eventually, on beginning to work an orthodox
office schedule in the late 1990s, and consequently being obliged to be at
certain places in the city center at certain times of day with a quasi-Kantian
degree of consistency and regularity, he realized that the tests were carried
out with a corresponding degree of consistency and regularity, that they always
occurred at about one in the afternoon on Monday. And with this realization, all but the last
soupçon of a trace of his former lower sphincter-dilating Pavlovian horror at
the sound of the sirens vanished—not, to be sure, that he simply took it for
granted that that sound portended no danger whatsoever; especially not after
the Great Howard Street Tunnel Fire of Wednesday,
July 18, 2001, at whose start, according to a friend of his who then likewise
worked in the city center and happened to be outdoors at the time, the sirens
were activated in earnest. But once he
had verified through a mental spot-check that the day in question was a Monday
and the time in question was within chronographic groping distance of 13:00, he
would complacently return to the nursing of his cigarette, or, from June 2008,
when he quit(ed) smoking, onwards, to doing whatever he tended to be doing in
lieu of smoking when he happened to be outdoors on or of an early weekday
afternoon. What that whatever tended to be is now very much a
mystery to him; this very probably because the routinized testing of the sirens
evidently ceased too shortly after the aforementioned smoking-cessation to
establish a Pavlovian connection of the spot-checking with this other activity;
indeed, the very most recent siren-testing that the present writer can recall
occurred on Columbus Day of either 2008 or 2009, i.e., within either five or
seventeen months of that smoking-cessation (my inability to pin the event down
to a specific year is indeed horrifying, but the deterioration of chronological
precision with advancing age even chez
a person as hell-bent on chronological precision as the present writer
constitutes a topic, or nexus of topics, of at least one separate essay). Columbus Day is of course a government
holiday, and as the writer was then (as is now) both an employee of a
government agency and a resident of the Tri-Zip Code Area, the same T-ZCA in
which the Homewood Campus’s physical plant is sited, and happened to be hoofing
it to his liquor store or off-licence of second resort via the campus of the
University that Cannot Be Named during the early afternoon of that particular Columbus
Day, he has been treated to the privilege of hearing the testing for the (at
least as yet) last time via the same claxon or tocsin as the one via which he
was treated to his first audition thereof nearly a quarter-century ago. For perhaps as many as a quarter-dozen years
after this most recent audition, he would hear certain sounds that he fancied were
emanating from one of the sirens, but that always turned out to be emanating
from something else—the up-sucking mechanism of some industrial hoovering
operation, say, or the engine of a particularly noisy distant motorcycle (you
[i.e., not any sort of DGR but a mere second-person placeholder] see, since
2003 he had been resident in his present apartment at the intersection of
University Parkway and St. Paul Street, a hundred or so decimeters farther from
the physical plant than back in 1994, such that he had tended to find himself
sited at a site from which even when the siren had sounded, he had not
immediately identified its sound as that of itself). At first, during perhaps the first third or
two-fifths of those quarter-dozen years, and especially on non-early Monday
afternoons thereof, his discovery that the siren-like noise had a non-sirenic
source invariably came as a decided relief to him; but for the remaining
two-thirds or two-fifths thereof, he somehow felt slightly disappointed thereupon; and when, after those circa quarter-dozen
years had elapsed, he ceased to mistake any sort of sound, however sirenic, for
a civil defense siren, he began to find himself somehow slightly missing the siren-soundings, and over
circa the past half-decade this slight missing has grown into a full-fledged Sehnsucht, a hankering or yearning. This transformation, and indeed, revolution,
in present writer’s somatic disposition towards the sirens is evidently merely
shadowing or registering a parallel revolution in his affective disposition to
the world en bloc, insgesamt, in toto. To be sure, the
present writer has never felt exactly at
home in the world he was born into, but way back in 1994, he still felt
closely enough attached to that world to wish to see it preserved rather than
destroyed, and to be wholeheartedly dismayed and alarmed by the prospect of its
destruction. In part, this attachment
was of course merely a manifestation of the selfishness of youth: as a younker with his whole life, or at least nearly
the whole of that life’s adult portion, ahead
of him, he wished for the world to survive qua medium for the unfurling of
that life. But there was a bit more to
it than that—namely a general sense that the world was finally, to some small
but encouraging extent, beginning to fall in(to) line with his expectations of
it, for not only was the Cold War long over, but the White House was finally
occupied by a Democrat, by a member of the party that had heroically resisted
Joseph McCarthy’s Russophobic Red-baiting and Ronald Reagan’s demonization of
the Soviet Union as an evil empire
and that accordingly could presumably be trusted to transform the U.S.’s mere
non-enmity with Russia into a full-fledged friendship; the party that,
moreover, was a proud standard-bearer of book-learning, the arts, and all other
things highbrow and hifalutin, in contrast to the Republican Party, whose
membership seemed to care about nothing but guns, sports, and pigs (the last
both qua agricultural commodities and qua prospective co-coitionists, natch). To be sure, even by then, there were sub-factions
of the officially styled American left whose comportment put him off (though he
never would have confided this off-putment even to the pages of his
lock-clasped diary, let alone to the bosom, whether organic or prosthetic, of
another person); notably the gay activist faction (I do not know if it even
styled itself LGB by then), with its
boorish outing of celebrities and endless
gluttonous carping about heteronormativity,
under which opprobrious heading the gays appeared to subsume each and every
last physical molecule in the U.S. that did not personally welcome and
accommodate them as a de facto majority.
But he regarded such sub-factions as almost beyond the fringe in a non-Bennett,
Cooke, Moore, and Miller-referring sense, and attributed their admittedly
strong presence in his own lifeworld to this lifeworld’s centering on the
academic humanities since his matriculation as an undergraduate in 1990; for
after all, people were constantly bandying about all sorts of nutty ideas in
the academic humanities, whose precincts, unlike those of the academic natural
sciences were classically (at least within the Anglosphere) regarded not as a testing
ground or la-bore-a-tree for ideas destined
to be implemented in the world at large but rather as a padded room for the
containment of ideas destined to go nowhere; and even within the academic
humanities the notion of non-binariness or gender-fluidity, a notion whose
championing and indeed ramrodding up the collective anus of the American
electorate, has become one of the main planks, if not the principal plank, of
the Democratic Party, was regarded with a condescending, marijuana
pipe-setting-aside, smile. Of course,
the present writer of 1994 was greatly mistaken in his complacency about the
prospective fortunes of the alternative-lifestyle lobby, a complacency perhaps
engendered by a failure to give due consideration to the long-established obligatory
Anglospheric fraternization of the academic humanities with the academic social
sciences, and of the academic social sciences in turn with the academic natural
sciences, a veritable conveyor belt of cubital frottage thanks to whose nearly
friction-free efficiency once a certain notion has been established as a
metaphysical entertainability it is an easy transition {as easy, indeed, as the
transition from cisgenderism to transgenderism to gender-queerism according to
current bienpensant received opinion}
to its adoption as an anthropological, sociological, or psychological reality,
and thence to its adoption as a supposed biological reality, whence it
ineluctably, and most significantly, demonically metamorphoses into a political-cum-
administrative reality. By the very-late
twenty-oughties, the micro-micro-epoch of the civil defense siren-soundings’
apparent cessation, the present writer had longish since abandoned all hope in
the world even qua grudging gnawed-bare bone-flinging humorer, let alone obliging
fellator, of his expectations. Since the
very early late 1990s the Democrats and the Republicans alike had been unremittingly
treating Russia like the ghost of a dog turd in all the ways specified and
enumerated far above. By then, the
cultural wing of the Democratic Party (by-then abscessed-pigeonholeable as the combined
producership-cum-listenership of National Public Radio) had turned out to be
dedicated champions of the abysmally sub-subcultural pseudo-productions shat
out by the post-ca. 1970 hyperoccidental pseudo-peasantry (a pseudo-peasantry who—or,
rather, which—for all its factitiousness, looked, sounded, and smelled as
unregenerately noisome as its genuine counterpart in the so-called Middle Ages
had purportedly looked, etc.), and to respect earlier super-excremental
productions only to the extent to which they could be distorted, however
implausibly, into typologies of that post-ca. 1970 hyperoccidental
pseudo-peasantry. By then, the
alternative lifestyle lobby’s hyperoccidental political-cum-administrative
victory was all but a done deal, as they say, and the present writer’s Lebenswelt-cum-Alltag seemed to have deteriorated into a sort of waterlogged sub
bog-standard loo roll of uncooperativeness thanks to all the organic
perversions of consumer capitalism specified and enumerated even farther above. For all that formidably demoralizing that, the present writer fondly
continued to cherish fond hopes of establishing some sort of world apart from
the sub-asinine official world, of establishing and maintaining
social-cum-intersubjective ties with people who did not receive the bienpensant idee reçues as idee reçues, who admired, respected,
dreamt about, yearned for, loftier things than a sort of remorselessly
ineluctable and predictable expansion of
the circumference of the Americans with Disabilities Act towards the end of
encompassing ever-more marginal and contemptible frontiers of wantonness and
imbecility under its protective skirts.
But by the early 20-teens, the beginning of the half-decade mentioned,
he had given up any hope of establishing such a world apart. By then, he had come to resign himself to
being an irredeemable social pariah and an unregenerate cultural
cemetery-haunter (a type that is by no means to be confused with a cultural necrophile), inasmuch as all his
person-to-person attempts to state his weltansichtig
case in even semi-frankness and semi-candor, whether in writing or viva voce,
had been met with, at best, a chicken-livered pretense of sympathy founded on the
old “I sort of understand where
you’re coming from, on account of all the ultra-right-wing brainwashing I was
subjected to on account of my dad’s being the sergeant-at-arms of the John
Birch Society” soft-shoe routine. More
typically they had been met with disgusted counter-rants leading in turn to
irreparable social ruptures, and occasionally they had even been met with
threats to his person. The entirety of
this wave of antipathy, he must emphasize, had all along been composed of the
sentiments of people whom he had come to regard as among those nearest and
dearest to him, such that his bouleversant
thereby like the puniest of bonsai trees by the mightiest of tsunamis, or a
mere inch-high Strolling Bowling-pin by the most expertly thrown
sixteen-pounder, could not but greatly diminish his hopes of retaining, let
alone strengthening, his ties to the empirical world of the present. To the feeblest extent that he has since
retained the most tenuous of ties thereunto, this retention has entailed his
keeping his lips sealed shut with a hermetic exactness well beyond the dreams
of Belinda Carlisle or Borge
Madsen; it has entailed his listening to an interminable and ever-renewing
stream of what he cannot prevail upon himself not to regard as utter bilge in a
silence that he can by no means or shift redeem by describing it as merely good-natured or indulgent inasmuch as it is invariably obliged to make the most
desperate shift or means to seem to be downright affirmative and encouraging of
the continuation and indeed augmentation of the bilge-stream; such that he
cannot but despise himself for
dwelling in such a silence. But dwell
therein he must ineluctably continue to do if he wishes to continue dwelling
anywhere—or, at any rate, what effectively comes to the same thing for a man (sic on the scandalous gendering of the
noun) of his age and financial wherewithal, anywhere in the present
hyperoccident—inasmuch as his notion of how the world ought to be run is so
scandalously reactionary that there is perhaps even more than figuratively no
room for it on the present hyperoccidental political spectrum. By present hyperoccidental meta-political standards
he could only be described as a fascist,
inasmuch as he believes that restrictions on human beings’ liberty of action
are often a very good thing regardless of whether indulgence in or of such
liberty bids fair to eventuate in physical or psychic harm to others or to the agent
himself, that indeed it is not even necessarily the actions most likely to be
most deleterious to human well-being that are in direst need of legal and
administrative curbs (whence his decisive difference from the whingers about
Global Warming, high-calorie pizzas, and the lack of minimum prices for
alcohol, every last man, woman, et al. Jack, Jill, and Pat of whom is a
dedicated champion of and ardent propagandist for the sexual eyechart [i.e., L/GBT/QFEZ/RAUPM etc.] set). He believes that human beings must be got and
kept in the habit of not doing what they want to be doing most of the time—this, first, and not necessarily more, because recent-to-ancient
human history hath shewn (to him if to no living body else) that even
sub-bargain basement, sub-bog standard world-maintenance exacts no less costly
a price than the average human individual’s spending the majority of his aut
al.’s time doing things that he aut al. would rather not be doing; and second,
and not necessarily less, because recent-to-ancient human history hath likewise
shewn that the failure of the average human individual to be got and kept in
such a habit does not so much eventuate as soonuate in his aut al.’s
degeneration into a creature that, however ecstatically self-contented it may
be, cannot but arouse a more than figuratively gastric revulsion in others who
have not suffered (or, perhaps rather, enjoyed)
the same degeneration. To be sure, in
principle it is possible to get people to do things they don’t wish to do via incentives, via the application of the
proverbial carrot rather than the proverbial stick, via the psychological
mechanism of deferred gratification, but in practice incentives on their own do
not suffice to inculcate the requisite degree of personal industriousness—this for
the eye-burstingly obvious if scandalous reason that once a person has begun to
nibble at a carrot he aut al. will be loath to leave off doing so and will
indeed be more and more inclined to wish to turn his aut al.’s entire existence
into a carrot-eating festival, and when finally compelled to return to his aut
al.’s place of labor, to sulk in idleness over the absence of carrots in the present rather than to work sedulously towards the acquisition of
carrots in the future. (This is why capitalism would be disastrously
evil even if it really did work on its producer side in the far-above debunked
manner—even if, that is, each and every person involved in the production of a
ballpoint pen or a tube of toothpaste really could look forward to a bonus or
pay rise by making that product the best damn ballpoint pen or tube of
toothpaste in the world.) And so in
practice the stick must be applied judiciously, which in practice means rather
more harshly than mercifully, via penalties that prima vista seem disproportionately severe, given that (as
ancient-to-recent history hath shewn) when an offense is punished lightly—say,
through small fines—people will tend to commit it freely and simply budget for the
penalty as insouciantly they do for their yearly outlay on loo rolls, ballpoint
pens, or toothpaste. If the present
writer had to distill his political-philosophical credo down to a slogan, that
slogan would probably in all seriousness be a certain one propounded in
manifest jest by Steve Martin in his stand-up act back in the 1970s—viz., The death penalty for parking violations!, were
it not for the counterfact that of course in the present writer’s preferred
version of the world there would be few if any parking-spaces and few if any
motorcars to park in them because, as specified far above and inferable from
the very near above, the human individual does not deserve the power of self-governed high-speed transportation and cannot be trusted to employ that power
responsibly. And even as he types the
present words, the present writer cannot forbear (from) shuddering in
anticipation of the misery and terror that he will have to suffer at the
manually actuated wheels of the overwhelmingly mentally defective and
overweeningly bloodthirsty automotively aurigational mobility within the next
few hours simply as part of the price that must be paid for getting by from day to day
in any sort of fashion as a pedestrian in virtually every Enn and Cee of the present hyperoccident; a shudder at the reflection that for
example (and but one example among dozens) even as a permission-to-walk signal brazenly
invites him to stride confidently forward like a kilted Highlander going
uninhibitedly commando, he will once again
be compelled to squeeze his knees hobble skirt wearer-esquely between the
bumpers of two cars well to the fore of and, blocking, respectively, the
pedestrian crosswalk that he must traverse
on his way to work, knowing even as he always does that at that moment there will
be no entity in the world that the driver of the rearmore of those two cars will
loathe, resent, or despise more ardently than the present writer on account of
the latter’s obnoxious, incomprehensibly ESA protected rat-like insistence on blocking
his (i.e., the rearermore driver’s) potentially otherwise speed of light
exceeding-dash to the next green stoplight (for the foremore car may indeed be
afforded a way-paving such dash by the traffic flow at any picosecond, and
certainly well before the rat-like creature has cleared his [i.e., the rearmore
driver’s] front-left fender), and dreading even as he (i.e., the present
writer) always undoubtedly warrantedly does that this will be the day on which that rearmore driver throws immediate
self-interest to the wind and mutters to him-aut al.-self, “Fuck it. As in fifth-century Ireland, as in
thirteenth-century Hamelin, somebody’s
got to take a decisive, example-setting stand against such vermin” and
immediately thereupon floors it, as they say, into the aforementioned foremore
car’s rear bumper, leaving the sub-patellan portion of the present writer’s body
at least momentarily standing proudly independently erect like a pair of riding
boots while at the same time sending the super-patellan portion thereof flying
into the rear window of the foremore car, thanks to which catapultion that
portion will with any luck be spared the agonies of bleeding to death by an
instantaneously fatal cranial concussion.
But even all this meta-pedestrian degradation might ultimately be
redeemed, might ultimately prove to be worth something, were it succeeded, once
temporarily surmounted, by some less phenomenally abhorrent state of affairs. But alas,no: no sooner has he arrived at his
destination, or at any rate, some place at or in which his basic corporeal
integrity is not threatened by a car, than he is brought face-to-arse with some
statelet of affairs that is in its own
ever-so-charmingly infungible way as abhorrent as the prospect of automotive
annihilation. I should make it clear
here that when I describe such a statelet-of-affairs as infungible I would by no means be understood as invoking any
version of nominalism; I would by no means wish such a statelet to be
understood as a unique, one-of-a-kind event or entity, like, say, an unhappy encounter
with a single animal organism—some reptile, amphibian, or insect—whose like one
has never seen before but which one instantly discovers to be poisonous; for, indeed,
to the contrary, these statelets consist prevailingly and perhaps even entirely,
of events or entities that are prima
vista exact carbon copies (or scans
or clones or what have you) of earlier
events and entities; such that their infungibility consists, first if not
necessarily foremore, in their distinctness from other classes of affair-statelets
in in that they are demoralizing in peculiarly shitty sort of way (as against
the unpeculiarly unshitty sort of way in which one may be demoralized by, for
example, being kept in solitary confinement [not that the present writer’s
plight does not effectively amount to such confinement in numerous respects]),
and second if not necessarily rearmore in the greater depth and nuancedness of shittiness
that they acquire with each of their respective iterations. So, for instance when the present writer was
first accosted by the expression moving
forward a scant fortmonth ago at the least recent, he was entirely
disgusted by it in the grammatical
register, disgusted by it qua expression intrinsically dependent on that ancient
grammarian’s bugbear, a dangling or unattached participle, disgusted by it, in
other words, as slipshod shorthand for such more grammatically punctilious but seemingly
semantically identical constructions as “As we move forward.” In such a register this moving forward was admittedly abhorrent to the present writer,
inasmuch as he has always been unashamed to close ranks with the ancient English
grammarians in regarding the unattached or dangling participle as among the
gravest of solecisms, and each and every new generally accepted instance of it
as a severe blow to the forces of linguistic probity (and consequently to the
forces of probity insgesamt). But as with
the passage of very little time (a phrase that itself is probably damned to
replacement by moving forward) he
heard moving forward employed in more
and more specific linguistic contexts, he realized that in pegging it as a
solecism he had merely touched the tip of the MF-comprising shitberg. For
in these contexts—whose specific empirical specifications the present writer
dares not specify—MF was
unquestionably being employed as both a crypto-Whiggism and a crypto-buck
passer, towards the fulfillment of which loathsome twin capacities its
grammatical unacceptability was patently instrumental. With the pee of tee he discovered that MF was actually being used in contexts
wherein one would have formerly mainly employed the expressions from now on or in (the) future—both of which expressions convey an entirely
neutral, and indeed almost Doris Day-esquely fatalistic attitude toward l’avenir eo ipso. Whereas before one
would have written , say, “From now on
[or in (the) future], please dot
every eye and cross every tee on your 21-B-stroke-6 form,” and thereby first
and foreomore merely conveyed a sense that eye-dotting and tee-crossing were
things that had to be done now and would continue to have to be done for some
time, and thereby secondmore made no bones either about the fact that one was
effectively inculcating an administrative holding
pattern or the fact that it was the addressee’s and not the addresser’s
duty to maintain that holding pattern to the extent that such maintenance
entailed punctilious eye-dotting and tee-crossing on 21-B-stroke-6 forms; nowadays
one writes moving forward and thereby
implies that progress is an intrinsically good thing, that simply following the
established rules will result in the achievement of that progress, and
that—thanks to an uncircumventable grammatical ambiguity occasioned by the abovementioned
grammatical solecism—any failure to dot every eye and cross every tee on the
part of the addressee is to be shared 50/50 with the addresser in some sort of
assassination-pact-like fashion. But
perhaps the present writer’s discovery of this more diabolical version of MF is owing less to his own
slow-wittedness than to the bacteriologically rapid evolution of the
connotative implications of the expression in the greater Anglosphere; such, at
any rate, he conjecturally infers from the more palpable transformation of the
connotative fortunes of another god-awful presenteme that he recalls having
first heard at about the same as moving
forward, viz. the metaphor to throw
somebody under the bus (a metaphor
whose vehicle {in exactly two senses, natch} he confesses to admiring on
account of its acknowledgment of the formidable homicidal capabilities of the
automobile, although if he had his druthers, the bus would be replaced by a
so-called smart car by way of inculcating the vital lesson that even the smallest
of automobiles is more than figuratively a deadly weapon}). On first hearing it he concluded that it had
acceded to the position formerly (and perhaps still residually) occupied by to throw somebody to the wolves—viz., that of a signifier of a sudden act of
abandonment virtually guaranteed to lead speedily to the termination of the
abandonee’s career at a given organization or in a given line of work; thus,
according to this acceptation of the phrase, one might throw somebody under the bus by exposing a finance officer’s
embezzlement of tens of thousands of dollars in company funds or an admissions
officer’s reception of tens of thousands of dollars in parental bribes. But over the ensuing months he started
hearing to throw under the bus employed
as a referent to less dramatic and deleterious betrayals—to a one-off
misattribution of an off-the-record statement on a matter of sub-minor
significance, and even to the CC-ing of the recipient’s supervisor in an email
requesting the performance of some routine task, a CC-ing that in the event of
the non-performance of the requested task would at worst have eventuated in a
casual, sloe-ginnishly slowly good-natured query of “So how ’bout that routine
task you were asked to perform in that there email?” from the aforementioned
supervisor. At the exact turn of the
millennium, an author with a long-established reputation of kicking with the
pricks of the Weltgeist—for
celebrating free love in the late 1960s, bashing material acquisitiveness in
the late 1980s, and so forth—published a collection of essays called the War Against Cliché. Having never so much as glanced inside the
book, the present writer cannot say whether it is any damn(ed) good or not, let
alone whether or not it practices the linguistic jihad it affects to embody,
but neither of these epistemological lacunae is of any moment in the light of
the sheer, cussed quaintness of the
aura its title has acquired in less than twenty years. At the end of the second decade of the
twenty-first century, any would-be sane-cum-decent person should be so far from
warring against clichés as positively to cherish
them qua repositories of linguistic stability, qua idioms vis-à-vis which you at least always know where you stand. At the
end of the day that is this decade, any would-be sane-cum-decent person must
leave no stone unturned and strike while the iron is hot in taking up arms in the admittedly
undoubtedly hopeless war against the god-awful ever-mutating moronic neologism, lest he, she, aut
al., perish by quasi-legal fiat courtesy of a dossier of misused or
misunderstood twerks, big-ups, wokes, shades, zhuzh-ups, man-spreadings, and a zillion other appallingly uninventive turns
of speech that haven’t been thought up yet but that will become mandatory and
seemingly un-devaluable linguistic currency within the next se’enmonth (if we
are so unfortunate as to make it that far).
The present writer is certainly no admirer of Theresa May except perhaps
on the couturial plane (whereupon he can indeed appreciate her striking of a
near-perfect balance between ostentation and restraint for a woman of her age,
personal unprepossessiveness, and political position); and qua the sort of
person he has obtruded himself most prominently as in the present essay, viz. a
Russophile, he has quite a sound motive even for despising her qua official author and deliverer of perhaps the most
vituperatively anti-Russian piece of rhetoric to have emanated from the
hyperoccident since Ronald Reagan’s abovementioned designation of the Soviet
Union as an “Evil Empire,” viz., her “We know what you’re up to” speech of 2017,
but he cannot help not only feeling sorry for her qua fellow subject (in the
philosophical not political sense, natch [and in any case, Britons have been citizens rather than subjects since the year of the “Evil
Empire” speech]) but also, and more materially, feeling alarmed and disgusted
at the formidable extent to which her admittedly otherwise perhaps condign
diminution in political clout has been actuated by her entirely creditable ignorance
of the linguistic trash of the present microepoch. When, during a recent (recent as of the
present writing, April 2, 2019) prime minister’s question time, the arch
description of her Brexit deal as friends
with benefits (whether the description came from a supporter or an opponent
of the deal escapes the present writer’s memory and is in any case of no moment
inasmuch as Mrs. May’s failure to get
woke to the linguistic Zeitschengeistchen
is decried even by her closest cronies) elicited nothing from her but a nervous
titter betraying her unawareness of the phrase’s meta-sexual context, a much
larger proportion of the House than the majority needed to vote down the deal erupted
into peals of laughter; and even more recently, MPs amused themselves exactly after
the infantilely loutish fashion of schoolchildren teasing a foreign exchange
student by successfully wheedling her into to saying simples, an argoteme that really ought to hang itself in shame for
being homonymic with the plural of a by no means entirely superannuated word
meaning a herbal ingredient of a medicine. The present writer had encountered simples in its argotic guise for the
first time not much more than a score of months earlier, in a radio comedy
sketch show sketch that made it plain that simples
was something that was being said with an evidently non-medical denotation quite
a lot thenadays but did not shed so much as a chinklet of light on what that denotation
was. For a score of ensuing months the
present writer resisted the ignobly masochistic impulse to track down that denotation,
knowing as he virtually did that it would be so ineffably sub-asinine as to
deal a by no means trivial non-remunerative blow to his already dangerously
plague-compromised mental hygiene. And
shawnuff, when the PM’s simples-actuated
playground degradation finally precipitated his Man with the Golden Arm or Trainspotting-esque shattering of the interwebbial barrier separating
him from a knowledge of simples’
current semantic essence, he was both horrified and unsurprised to discover
that simples was merely a gratuitous
and more infantile synonym of the already super-execrable It’s a no-brainer, or what amounted to the same shitty thing via a
different route, of the pan-Anglospherically semantically transparent (albeit
admittedly oh so arduously arse-shiftingly multisyllabic) What could be simpler?. But
in inveighing against specifically linguistic trash as I have been doing for
the past several hundred words I am risking the conveyance of the dangerous misimpression
that I am merely the umpteen-thousandth English usage-curmudgeon to come down the pike or pipeline (what a
lovely cliché-and-a-quarter that is!) since Sir Ernest Gowers, the
misimpression that it is exclusively or at least principally linguistic abuse
that puts me off my lunch with the present world when I am beyond immediate
flattening distance of an automobile. To
be sure, many if not quite most of my my pet(s) bêtes noires of the immediate
present have a linguistic component, but my aversion even to these is generally
not exhausted by their linguistic dysfunction(ality). On linguistic grounds I deplore man-spreading as an idiom because, like
almost all other argotemes of the past three-quarters of a century, it conveys
by default to the general user of the language a sense or image that does not
even remotely resemble the purportedly intended one—in this specific case, the
idiom suggests (and I defy anyone who dispassionately tortures his aut al.’s
linguistic palate with the phrase for a second or two to produce an alternative
resultant construction) an action habitually engaged in at soirées hosted and
attended by cannibals—viz., the application to a canapé of a dollop of a pâtè
with a human-flesh base. Obviously, to
the admittedly highly debatable extent to which an argoteme of any sort is
needed to denote the phenomenon in question, it should draw attention
specifically to the spreading, or more precisely, the splaying, of a pair of male knees or legs—male spread-eagling down under is an at least semantically
serviceable alternative; I personally would prefer something that injected a
bit of evocativeness into the idiom by in some fashion bringing in the
above-referenced hobble skirt, altho’ I confess that the best coinage along
those lines that I have so far managed to produce, masculine hypohobskirtedness, is far too much of a mouthful at its
very best. But wie gesagt, it is not
simply or even necessarily mainly the inaccuracy or slovenliness of the
linguistic formulation that is in point here for the present writer; and in
this specific case, as in the cases of man-flu
and man-cave, it is the idiom’s axiomatic stigmatization of the phenomenon in
question as a specifically, intrinsically, and pandemically masculine one that
mainly exasperates him. The idiom
suggests that whenever seated every man Yakov of a man on earth will spread his
legs as far apart as possible by default, and can be persuaded to keep them
together only by virtually incessant cane-raps to his nether-knuckles, and that
every seated woman Yillova of a woman on earth reflexively keeps her knees
demurely-cum-hermetically clasped together, when in point of manifestly
empirical fact observable by any regular user of any form of public transit
administered by any sort of agency in the panoccident, the habit of man-spreading is most prevalent in men of
the god-awful lumpen proletariat, only very slightly less prevalent in women of
the G-ALP, and only distantly thirdmost prevalent in men of more respectable social
strata. (The present writer has yet to
witness a woman of a more respectable social stratum man-spreading, but in the
light of the Brazilian [!] pepper tree-like spreading [!] of the shamelessly
revelatory yoga pants [q.v. almost
immediately below] qua de facto lower garment of middle and upper-class women,
the day whereon he spectates on such an abominable spectacle [yesyeyesyesyes,
zombie cowboy DGR, not entirely
unwillingly, but what of that? Just
because I relish the smell of hot pizza it does not follow that I would be
prevailingly grateful to have that aroma air-cannoned into my nostrils] cannot
be long in the offing.) And of course
the present writer is if anything even more revolted by the behavior in
question than are the formulators-cum-propagandists of the man-spreading idiom themselves, whence his super-main exasperation at the ineluctable inference that precious
psychic and perhaps by now even financial energies are being squandered on
combatting so-called man-spreading on the wrong front, that unisex-lumpen-prole-spread-eagling-down-under
enjoys no currency whatsoever qua elicitor of poker or parasol-brandishing. Enfin,
my beef with man-spreading is not laxissimo
sensu a purely linguistic one. Then
there are idioms of the immediate present that I deplore because they are not
only imprecise but insufficiently pejorative.
Yoga pants ought by all rights,
stricto sensu, to denote whatever
waist-to-ankle garment is customarily worn by persons of either autc. sex
during, and only during, the wearisomely over-inculcated practice of the
physical fitness regimen known as yoga. By
all rights, stricto sensu, yoga pants
should only be donned immediately before a yoga session and always doffed
immediately thereafter. Perhaps at some
point in the history of yoga or of pants YP
did indeed denote such a garment. The
present writer, being a proud near-total ignoramus of the history of yoga and a
shamefaced semi-ignoramus of the history of pants, cannot say if YP ever did do that. All he, the present writer, knows, is that
it, yoga pants, now denotes a waist-to-ankle
garment worn exclusively by women—whether cis
women exclusively or trans women as well, he cannot say, as he is a proud
total ignoramus of the state of the art in artificial labia—in public settings patently
having no pertinence whatsoever to yoga, and publicly worn indeed by women of
all ages and social strata in such numbers that he cannot imagine more than a
tiny fraction of its wearers have ever been within spitting distance of a yoga
studio; a garment that in his admittedly immediately (albeit admittedly not
entirely reluctantly) blushingly averted eyes is virtually indistinguishable
from a pair of what he would have very recently (i.e., as recently as the
mid-20-teens) described by default as black
pantyhose, a garment that he had (and indeed still has) always expected to
be semi-to-mostly concealed by a skirt or the lower part of a dress, even when
worn by the most shamelessly self-touting prostitute. Such being the case, the only decent and
truthful meta-linguistic course would seem to be to retro-christen these Yoga
pants black pantyhose and to
acknowledge that it has lately become acceptable for women to wear black
pantyhose without the occlusion of the vulva and buttocks afforded by a skirt
or dress. To be sure, the present writer
vehemently objects to this normalization of vulval-cum-buttockial display eo ipso, and to be sure, this objection
is bound to elicit from the zombie cowboy DGR the counter-objection Why, if it were up to you, you worthless
embodiment of the patriarchy [sic {i.e., inasmuch as the present writer has
neither spouse nor progeny}], hyperoccidental
women would still [sic] be required
to wear burkas 24/7, 7/52, just like in the Middle Ages [sic], and this counter-objection, while far
from fair, is nevertheless grounded in a certain irrefragable form of logic . It is indeed ultimately impossible to specify
exactly how much of the body should be concealed for civic (or civil) order’s
sake, and the subsistence—note I write subsistence
and not, say, prosperity –of civic
(or civil) order despite the unrelenting uphiking of the hemlines of both (sic)
sexes since the very early twentieth century suggests that business as usual might
continue to be transacted even in a state of complete and universal nudity. But if a substantial relaxation of couturial
standards is to be accepted as normal—and the popularization of so-called Yoga
pants seems to the present writer’s eyes etc. (!) to constitute the most
substantial such relaxation in his lifetime—it ought to be frankly acknowledged
as a relaxation and not euphemized as a continuation of existing couturial
standards. The devisers of the miniskirt
did not make any bones about wanting to make many a boner with their invention;
they did not call it a tennis floor-grazer.
The wearing of a miniskirt in itself indisputably
constituted an act of coquetry, in that it invited a degree of general
masculine ocular attention that it intended to gratify in tactile terms only
highly selectively. Coquetry in itself
is indisputably a vice and by no means among the most minor ones according to
the present writer’s lights (remember, zombie cowboy DGR, in the present
writer, you are dealing with an unregenerate cis-male in favor of the death penalty for parking violations),
but also perhaps one whose indulgence is unavoidable by anyone of either etc.
sex in any pseudo-society dans nous jours
et, peut-être, toujours seeking a somatically bearable co-coitionist, by
anyone determined not to be celibate and yet equally determined not to be on
the receiving end of the succession of (let us not mince words or gloss over
semantic asperities here) rapes that
any coitional arrangement—whether it be styled a marriage, a relationship, a
civil partnership, etc.—is centered on by
default. In order for Suzy or Bob
Average (not to be confused with Plain Jane or Blane [for plain—and I seem to have to remind someone of this more often than
I enjoy or even tolerate warm dinners–is a euphemism for ugly, not a synonym for
average-looking]) to distinguish herself from her or his fellow-Suzy or Bob
Averages in the eyes of Prince Charming or Cinderella it is perhaps necessary for
her to invite and endure the overtures of every Quasimodo or Margaret Peel
(N.B., I write overtures, not
assaults) and corollarily necessary to invite and endure the envious sniping of
every Margaret Peel or Quasimodo, to put up with, for example, overhearing the
muu-muu’d old bag in the maisonette next door saying of her literally just
behind her back, “Did you see Suzy walking by one of them there new mini-skirts just now? I tell you, that girl’s no better than she
should be.” It may be necessary for her
to put up with these inconveniences but it is also most certainly entirely fair to expect her to put up with them,
inasmuch as no-one enjoys the right to a desirable co-coitionist and everyone
enjoys the option of avoiding serial rape by opting out of the athletic institution
of coition altogether. Historically, as
in the case of mini-skirt, the semantic
precision of the nomenclature of cosmetic and couturial instruments of coquetry
has kept in place a kind of ethical force-field, wherein or whereby the desires
and demands of both the coquette and of her or his Umwelt—the people with whom she or he is regularly in propinquity
in the course of his or her Alltag
[look it up, for HRH JHC’s sake!]—are met to a partial extent. With the advent of yoga pants, this force-field has been completely neutralized
entirely in the coquette’s favor. With
the advent of yoga pants, perhaps the
most radical sartorial unveiling in modern pan-occidental history (i.e.,
inasmuch as even the naughtily betighted gentlemen of the Italian Renaissance
had the decency to conceal their L&Ps [rhyming slang of some sort for c**k-and-b**ls terminating in Lea and Perrins, natch] behind that
frontal coin-purse known as a codpiece)
is expected to be greeted with a(n) universal yawn, and every non-Yoga bepanted
beholder of a Yoga-bepanted person to behave like a sort of mute antitype of
the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” to refrain from ever hinting that he
aut al. is aware that this person is all but naked from the waist down; as such
an expectation cannot be met in a pseudo or post-society in which near-total
nudism is not an official norm, the beholder must be prepared to take on the
chin (or some more sensitive body-part) the full uncensored brunt of the
yoga-bepantee’s libido, whether negative or positive, and depending on which of
the above-described figures he aut al. embodies in relation to that
libido. If the coquette regards him aut
al. as a Quasimodo or Margaret Peel qua prospective suitor, he aut al. must be
prepared, at minimum, for an ejaculation of What
the hell are you looking at, creep? and perhaps on average for an eyeful of
pepper spray. If she regards him aut al.
as a Quasimodo or Margaret Peel qua envier he or she must be prepared at
minimum for an ejaculation of Like you
wouldn’t flaunt it too, if you had it, bitch! and an eyeful of sputum. And if she regards him as a Prince Charming
or Cinderella, he aut al. must be prepared to treat her as if she were the
belle of a ball bedizened in all her- genital-occluding finery—to ask ever-so-bashfully
with eyes pointedly averted from her own gaze (and pointedly not averted from her Australian
aperture) for the privilege of kissing mademoiselle’s hand etc.—on extremely
acute pain of receiving an ejaculation of Well
I never! and a knee in the groin. So,
to say the least, ob multas causas, I
have strong reservations about man-spreading,
yoga pants and th’ilk, about the hyper-recent
proliferation of quasi-officialized misnomers.
But really my chief present megabeeves are with present phenomena that
lamentably lack a verbal label altogether for the presumptive reason that
everybody but the present writer simply regards them as being, like the present
writer in one of his preceding alimentary capacities (q.v.), part of the furniture of the present world, or,
rather, whatever the present literal furniture of the world—its aggregation of
chairs, tables, etc.—would actually be if it functioned properly and durably. The present writer thinks, for example, of
the seemingly panoccidentally universal (or at least more-than-seemingly
pan-Eastern Seabordial [for he admits to having witnessed this in both Maryland
and Florida, if nowhere else]) habit (or at least in some cases, a
manifestation of a phenomenon whose social perniciousness I have adumbrated in
“Against Linguistic Diversity”—viz., an affectation become habit ) of sneezing or coughing into the crook of one of
one’s arms rather than into the palm of one of one’s hands (incidental query:
does the choice of which arm or hand depend on whether one is left-handed or
right-handed, and if so, in which direction?).
The present writer is well aware that this habit has been promulgated
and inculcated by the highest medical, para-medical, and meta-medical authorities
(although exactly when and by which medical authorities now escapes him) as the
latest-but-umpteen of the umpteen- thousand personal cum public-hygienic
commandments, but about the august provenance of this
promulgation-cum-inculcation the present writer gives not a tinker’s toss, not
only because the highest medical etc. authorities change their opinions as
often as a Kansan weatherschlong changes direction and thereby make a perpetual
mockery of their own deontological remit, but also, and mainly, because like
most other promulgations-cum-inculcations issuing from our barbarian rulers, it
mandates the supplanting of a well-established and eminently practical decorous
practice by an egregiously indecorous and impractical one. To be sure, the present writer fully
comprehends the meta-hygienic rationale behind the promulgation-cum-inculcation
of into-the-crook-of-the-arm sneezing-cum-coughing—viz., that inasmuch as
infectious animalcules are hyper-readily spread by hand-to-hand contact, the
propagation of such animalcules can be substantially reduced by alienating the human
hand as efficaciously as possible from the human body’s most productive engines
of such animalcules barring (perhaps) the human anus—viz., the human nose and
mouth; but he is singularly unimpressed by into-the-crook-of-the-arm
sneezing-cum-coughing as a medium of such alienation, inasmuch as he is aware
of a well-established medium thereof that is not only more decorous but also at
least as efficacious—viz., sneezing or coughing into a handheld handkerchief or
Kleenex ([sic] on the absence of a trademark marker) and then washing one’s own
hands before locking either of them with either of those of another human
being. Of course, the maintenance of
this manner of stirnutation-cum-exscreation requires a modicum of discipline, a modicum that is easily
attainable by the average five-year-old and that the present writer was indeed
forced to attain as a five-year-old a scant generation-and-a-half ago, but our
barbarian rulers, being well-nigh- clairvoyantly mindful of the well-nigh-inscrutable
fact that at least a whopping .08% of the present hyperoccidental human
population consists of under-five-year-olds, five-year-olds of less than
average tractability or mental acuity, and five-plus-year-olds of less
tractability or mental acuity than the average five-year-old, have come up with
sneezing-cum-coughing into the crook of the arm as a medium of germ
spreading-prevention that is proof against the public-hygienic inadequacies of at
least a whopping 80% of that ≥.08% (as for the remaining probably
by-no-means-unwhopping ≤20%, a percentage presumably consisting mainly of
newborns, toddlers, and hydrocephalics, one presumes some sort of both
incredibly expensive and incredibly marginal improvement on the gas mask or
S&M-hood is being developed to neutralize them qua potential Public Health
Enemies No. ≤7,000). Our Barbarian
Rulers forbid that per annum a few thousand more people come down with a cold,
or a few hundred more contract influenza, or even a sub-literal handful more die
of that malady, as a consequence of a modus sternutandi-cum-exscreandi
that happens to make the quotidian
existences of the vast swarm of healthy and productive living humans much more
than marginally more comfortable! Far,
far better, according to Their well-nigh-clairvoyant lights, that every last person
in that swarm should go through each and every one of his aut al.’s Alltags burdened with a shirtsleeve
accumulating an ever-thickening crust of snot, phlegm, and spittle! But of course an ever-crescent majority of
hyperoccidentals are all too happy to shoulder, or, rather arm-crook, that
burden, as it dovetails, or, rather, arm-crooks, all too smoothly with their
own unregenerately unrepentant desire to void freely from each and every
orifice the very microsecond the reflex or impulse to do so arises. Indeed, the normativization of sneezing and
coughing into the crook of the arm is but one of thousands of instances of the
overall pan-hyperoccidental normativization of the vice of valetudinarianism, the vice of placing one’s own immediate somatic
well-being above all other goods, a vice that Dr. Johnson long ago recognized
as an underminer of the very microfiber of civilized social existence: “I do not
know,” quoth Dr. J., “a more disagreeable character than a valetudinarian, who
thinks he may do any thing that is for his ease, and indulges himself in the
grossest freedoms: Sir, he brings himself to the state of a hog in a stye.” (A
smaller but by no means trivial part of the impetus towards valetudinarianism
on both sides, both from on high and from down below [i.e., from down the
gullet and up the arse], may be owing to a desperate yearning to keep up to
speed, or rather, yield down to laxity and torpor, with our imminent masters,
our Barbarian Rulers’ sub-barbarian successors, the god-awful Chinese [q.v.],
to our hopeless attempt to curry favor with these successors like the lamb with
the butcher by mimicking their viscerally revolting habit of urinating,
expectorating, voiding snot, and even [in the case of their god-awful bairns] defecating in public and onto or into
the nearest surface or cavity to-relevant organ, a habit that their god-awful
increase in affluence has by all—and I almost really do mean all—accounts done absolutely nothing to curb, as is altogether unsurprising, inasmuch
as panoccidental history hath conclusively shewn in the fleapit constituted by
Norbert Elias’s teeth that there is nothing intrinsically civilizing about an
augmentation of material wealth.) But of
course nowadays it is not only in the meta-somatic register that
hyperoccidentals behave like hogs, as witnessed by their basic, general
meta-verbal comportment towards each other, their mode of entering into,
engaging in, and exiting from interlocution with one another in propinquity to
third etc. parties who have no stake or interest in their conversation. Prima
vista it might be thought that here I am merely flogging the by-now not
only dead but sterilely stuffed horse of public mobile phone conversations, but
I am in fact flogging a thrivingly live horse which, although it indeed
probably never would have even been foaled in the absence of the bad habits
nurtured by the mobile phone, has no intrinsic connection with that engine and
will doubtless survive its supersession—viz., the practice of conversing in the
flesh with an interlocutor who is separated from oneself by the fleshly persons
of other human individuals or an expanse of air ample enough to accommodate
more than several such fleshly persons. And I am not just talking here, as they
say, about a brief exchange of
salutational salvos; I am talking, rather, about a veritable mutual cannonade of
small talk generally segueing into a further MC of what would be termed big talk were big not a de facto denoter of grandeur as well as of empty tumdity
(irritatingly enough, the idiom to talk
big conveys the full burden of semantic fatuity that its sub-idiomatic nominal
complement sadly lacks), all carried out in utter heedlessness of the readily
inferrable likelihood that the ejaculation of each and every word thereof is scattering
potentially lethal shrapnel into the meta-intersubjective goodwill of every non-participating
would-be decent person within earshot—i.e., that it is not merely distracting such
a person from his aut al.’s proverbial mental tabulation of that evening’s grocery
list, but additionally and much more gravely tending to undermine his aut al.’s
faith in the worthwhileness of interlocution tout court. If, such
a person will inevitably tend to reflect as he aut al. resignedly sets aside
the just-mentioned mental grocery list, Persons
Aumpteenthousand and Bumpteenthousand [so nominated
because by now our would-be-decent person can recall having umpteen-thousand-minus-one
such interchanges foisted upon his ears] care
so little about whether the words they are nominally addressing exclusively to
each other are heard and understood more clearly by each other than by persons
to whom they are not addressed, is it not altogether probable that
interlocutionary utterances are never (or at least never any longer) more-than-nominally
addressed to anybody, that what passes
for conversation nowadays is merely a sort of obbligato recitative or feeble mimicry of the formulae of conversation absorbed via, I
dunno, or, rather, don’t know,
fleetingly-cum-anciently viewed reruns of say, “Perry Mason” or “The Andy
Griffith Show,” or, indeed, “Amos ’n’ Andy”? (The zombie cowboy DGR will doubtless—nay,
undoubtedly—pounce over that last item in the catalogue, that reference to the most
notorious supposed radiophonic-cum-televisual instance of cosmetically abetted
minstrelsy west of The Black and White
Minstrel Show, as proof that what I am objecting to is a phenomenon evinced
exclusively by A*****n-A******ns and therefore thoroughly unobjectionable and
indeed eminently fellatable qua manifestation of some l’ecrivain present-qua-M. Blanqui [a.k.a., Wh*t*y] ne saura jamais quoi, whereas
en point de fait I included A’n’A
merely qua televisual bearer of the old formal formulae of conversation, a
capacity in which I believe it, along with all its televisual
contemporaries-cum-congeners, must now principally be regarded, however many umpteen-thousand
malapropisms-qua-supposed-r***al shibboleths may have been forced into its
cast’s respective mouths.) The
demoralization induced by this phenomenon—the phenomenon of non-telephonic long-distance interlocution
(a clunkily verbose formulation, to be sure, yet for all that an immeasurably
more graceful and enlightening one than the likes of any of the man-prefixed neologisms, for all their
terseness)—is comparable in force and analogous content to that induced by the
phenomenon that used to be called a public
display of affection (a term whose recent apparent disappearance from the Anglophone
vernacular is somewhat mystifying, although the present writer conjectures that
this disappearance has little or nothing to do with any diminution in the
prevalence of the phenomenon denoted by it and much or everything to do with
the usurpation of its popular quasi-acronymic abbreviation, PDA, by the so-called personal digital
assistant round about the turn of the millennium, a usurpation which, like many
a political usurpation, precluded the restoration of the usurped title even
after the disparation of the usurper
[which in this case occurred in ca.
2012, owing to the personal digital assistant-displacing quasi-universalization
of the so-called smart phone], owing to the latter’s skunking of the title
during the interregnum); like that phenomenon, it elicits from the bystander
the temptation to ejaculate, Get a room,
for HRH JHC’s sake! not on account of its publicity eo ipso but because that publicity undermines the claims of the
genre of interpersonality it instantiates to be regarded by default as an
expression-cum-embodiment of intersubjective intimacy. But whereas whilom-called public displays of
affection were and remain largely confined on the displaying end to teenagers
and unregenerate lumpen proles (this, the present writer conjectures, not
because more upmarket demographic strata have failed to acquire the requisite
shamelessness, but because they have concurrently become more reserved about
engaging in any potentially legally actionable activity in the presence of
witnesses), non-telephonic long-distance interlocution can routinely and
horrifyingly be observed chez person-pairs hailing from each and every demographic
bloc, and each and every lifewalk in the socioeconomic gamut or spectrum. And of course non-telephonic long-distance
interlocution is but one of megascads of formerly ultra-downmarket habitus-emes
to have spread upwards into the very socioeconomic stratosphere in recent
half-decades. One thinks, for instance,
of the manifest refusal of 97.876% of men to wear a necktie when appearing in
front of a television camera or an assembly of spectators-cum-listeners, even
if some inabrogable antient protocol requires every last man in the audience to
be attired in white tie-and-tails; a refusal that at least a good 49.999992% of
those men combine with an insistence on refraining from wearing any sort of
undershirt, be it the most low-collared and coarsely reticulated string vest,
and unbuttoning the overshirt down almost to nipple-disclosing depths. At its most decorous, this practice
transforms every man who practices it into a virtual sartorial clone of that
god-awfully insufferably smug Iranian president from about a decade ago whose
name I not only can’t be arsed but can’t even be enabled to G****e, as my
recollection of it amounts to nothing presumably more orthographically
propinquitous than a washing machine rinse-cycle-esque succession of a
half-dozen or so ems and jays terminating in a Midwestern-American John; at this practice’s most typical it
transforms the practitioner into an unregenerately downmarket greaser or guido of the sort rightfully and eloquently disparaged by that
wonderfully upmarket WASP senator in The
otherwise god-awful Godfather II (a
film of which in my to-say-the-least heterodox view this selfsame senator
constitutes the hero and moral center).
Of course the zombie-cowboy DGR will introjectvely demur here that
fashion is always changing, that to oppose changes in fashion is invariably as
hopeless as to oppose the incoming tide like that medieval king of Norway
(sic), that in any case the necktie in particular is a sartorial accessory of
relatively recent invention, etc. To
these demurrals I shall to my mind conclusively counter-demur that while
fashion is indeed always ineluctably, Canute-proofedly changing, it is never
merely arbitrarily or capriciously changing, that like every other constituent
of the Weltgeist, it is subject to a
certain logic and mediated by the exigencies of that logic, and that the ever-crescent
vanishing of the necktie from the male oratorical neck is incontrovertible
evidence of the further progress of the logic of slovenliness (or regression of
the logic of spiffiness) in the first two decades of the second millennium. To be sure, the necktie qua mandatory feature
of the masculine sartorial ensemble is a relatively recent invention, having
been introduced into the mainstream of pan-occidental men’s fashion (supposedly
from Croatia, as tradition doubtless falsely has it) in about the year 1660. But theretofore the gentlemen who then more
than figuratively took the necktie to their bosoms had not been lounging about
open-collaredly in shirts surmounted by completely unbuttoned sport-jackets or
blazers; no: theretofore they had been sitting stiffly upright in shirts
covered from the collar downwards by doublets—essentially
extremely posh-fabricked business jackets buttoned all the way up to [sorry, would-be-spanner-in-the-works-throwing
adducers of the Nehru jacket or Mao tunic] the chin. The advent of the necktie coincided with
Charles II’s enforced supersession of the doublet by the suit coat-cum-vest (or
-waistcoat), a supersession that left a good square quarter-metre of thereunto
invisible shirt-frontage exposed—and beneath this shirt-frontage nothing was to
be seen or otherwise sensually apprehended than the bare masculine breast. Thus, to the underratedly formidable extent that
the bare masculine breast had to be concealed from view, touch, etc., some
garmenteme or other had to be substituted for the absent square quarter-meter
of doubletage. Whence the emplacement of
the cravat or necktie, and whence the deplorablility of the recent off-casting of
that garment, an off-casting which has unprecedentedly exposed the naked
masculine gorge to general public spectation and thereby fatally derogated from
the public masculine orator’s formerly unchallengeable aura of authority and
dignity. If the discarding of the
necktie had been offset by some authority-cum-dignity-recuperating sartorial measure
(as, for example, the discarding of wigs was gradually offset by the
marginalization of such gaudy suit-hues as scarlet and saffron in the early
decades of the nineteenth century and the discarding of the waistcoat by
mandatory suit-jacket-up-buttoning in the middle decades of the twentieth), the
zombie cowboy DGR’s meta-couturial relativism would not necessarily be entirely
ill-founded, but as it has not been so offset, quasi-universal masculine public
tielessness cannot but quasi-universally give the impression that male orators
have generally forsaken all title to be taken seriously as earnest and
knowledgeable espousers of whatever cause they are undertaking to promote, that
they have just rolled into the studio or auditorium only minutes after rolling
out of bed after a hard night of so-called clubbing and throwing on whatever garments
happened to be hanging nearest to hand in the closet or wardrobe, and from this
slovenliness it will be an easy and doubtless ineluctable transition to such men’s
showing up without even having thrown anything
on, to their appearing at the podium attired in nothing but an antient hole-ridden
band-tour T-shirt and so-called tighty-whities brimming over with pubic hair
and scrotal skin. This masculine
couturial trend might conceivably be bearable were women—nice women, that is, the only women that matter in any respect whatsoever—still
fulfilling their hitherto on-countable remit to keep up the tone on the
couturial front and thereby setting a good example for the men, but of course
even they are letting themselves go on this front in innumerable utterly
abominable ways. So-called yoga
pants-wearing is almost undoubtedly the most abominable of these ways eis ipsis, but as I have already stated,
at this point in the argument we are dealing explicitly and specifically with unnamed phenomena, and yoga
pants-wearing, in virtue of being yoked to a neologism, viz. yoga pants, at least leaves open
(naturally the present writer averts his eyes at the breach [!] of gallantry
intrinsic to the phrasal verb leave open)
the practicable possibility of a challenge in the form of some
even-more-neologistic christening of some less revealing alternative
waist-to-toe covering garment—e.g., tai
chi slacks; whereas these other, nearly-as-reprehensible practices, in
virtue of being as-yet-(and therefore presumably always)-unnamed, admit of no
practicable alternatives. What is one to
do about, for example, the unnamed by-now-utterly-routine phenomenon of
nominally nice women being shod—or, rather, pseudo-shod or half-shod—in
so-called flip-flops in locales as remote from the beach in tone, brute
material constitution, and geographical distance as Baltimore City, even in the
deadest, frostbite-inducing dead of winter?
The present writer flatters himself that he is in a position to hold
forth on this topick with super- (or is it rather sub-?) Mixalotian bottom in having been born and raised in a part
of the U.S.—namely west-central Florida—that especially prides itself on its
love of the beach and its treasuring of even the most picayune, pissant
folkways that cling or cleave most closely thereunto or thereinto; for he
cannot recall having at any point during his residence in that part—a residence
that lasted from 1972 to 1994, and hence came to an end well to the fore of the
end of the previous millennium—beheld any nice
person pseudo-shod or half-shod in flip-flops at any site from which the
Gulf of Mexico was not in immediate view.
To the best of his recollection, each and every such flip flop pseudo
shod or half-shod hominid he beheld at such a site (typically a 7-11 or Circle K at which he or his parents had been obliged to stop for
refueling [for Florida has never been a right
to full-service state]) during that residence was a combination of
wider-than-tall, unregenerately stroppy, visibly intoxicated, and either
ignorant or wantonly heedless of irregular past participles. And of course it was no accident that such a
hominid of all hominids favored the flip-flop as an article of footwear,
inasmuch as a flip-flop requires next to no effort to slip on and even less
effort to slip off—indeed, unless it is particularly ergonomically well-matched
with the foot it has been obliged to accommodate (a decided unlikelihood given
that the notion of a bespoke or handmade flip-flop is a virtual
oxymoron), its wearer will have beau, as the French say, to avoid losing it
in the course of an ordinary leisurely flâneur’s-paced
walk, a consideration that leads one to wonder why one would ever even dream of
wearing flip-flops in any setting in which losing one’s footwear was more
nearly to be regretted than welcomed—in other words, effectively, in any
setting but at the beach—and further to the no-less-apodictic conclusion that
those who favor flip-flops hors de la
plage are unregenerate morons in
whichever sense—whether popular, clinical, or otherwise—is most pejorative; and
furthermorely to the no-less-apodictic conclusion that, inasmuch as the
genuinely (as opposed to proverbially) overwhelming majority of formerly nice
people are all too fain to wear flip-flops hors
de la page, are all too fain to place their feet within immediate danger of
a nasty and incapacitating cut—not to mention
a potentially gangrene, tetanus, or STD-inducing injury—we genuinely
underwhelming minority of genuinely nice,
properly shod, hyperoccidentals are surrounded by morons in that selfsame super-pejorative sense. And indeed, in
extrapolating-cum-interpolating-from this conclusion, we may infer that all the tendencies inveighed against in
the above butcher’s-thousand-or-so sentences effectively amount to the
ever-crescent and seemingly ineluctable ascendancy of the stupid over the
clever—i.e., in Hegelian parlance, of Ungeist
over Geist—chez the hyperoccident. Such being the self-evident case, and the
only alternative destiny for the hyperoccident of the hominids of the present
(I will not besmirch the word humanity
by associating it however loosely with such abortional creatures as have
usurped its title par ici) being
their assimilation to the spiritual-cum-intellectual regime of sub-stupidity (Untergeist) instantiated by the
god-awful Chinese, inasmuch as the rump of the occident by now effectively comprised
exclusively by the Russians has conjoined its fortunes LS&B, HL&S, with
the latter, and inasmuch as the remainder of the hominid-inhabited world,
meaning essentially Africa, Latin America, and the Indian subcontinent, however
promising certain Geist-affirming trends
therein may be, bids extremely foul to get its s**t together any-sufficiently-China-thwarting-time
soon, the only morally significant conclusion that a nice person can reach regarding the present human race (here I am
obliged to revert to one of the god-awful hu-words
for fear of playing into the intellectually-opposable-thumb-bereft quasi-hands
of the bonobo-f**kers) is that it must be utterly
destroyed. And such a conclusion
having been reached by, inter alia (?), the present writer, the present writer
cannot but absolutely yearn for the old
once-familiar and still fondly and precisely remembered elephantine
crescendo-cum-diminuendo of the sounding of a civil defense tocsin—not at all,
to be sure, qua potential Proustian resuscitator of temps perdu (for what do or does temps perdu matter in a world wherein it or they are generally
shamelessly commandeered as either toilet paper or the raw stuff of
present-fellating papier-mâché dummies?), but rather qua harbinger of the
immediate realization of his most ardent and dearly cherished hope.
THE END