Patriotism,
Lies, & 8 A.M Coffee:
Tales of a Young Republican
"Hatchet-Boy" & "True Believer"
I
was a very repressed young man. To speak in candid metaphor, I had been
emotionally ass-raped back in high school and had gone "a little bit crazy"
like a prisoner carving fearsome tattoos onto his body and engaging in Odinistic
rituals so he would be prepared for the next encounter with his fellow inmates.
To make up for my "loss of face" in this age of decadence and "The Simpsons" and "Monty Python" and "Gangsta
Rap" I became an ultra-conservative glaring outward in order to pick up the slack and leave my
smarting ass unexposed in the hooting cell block of life full of cretins sapping
away at "National Greatness" with their goofy, retarded antics
as they danced around in their chairs like foul, singing Sesame Street
characters in need of decapitation. But inadvertently, I
became an hilarious caricature of the very establishment I meant to
join as a repudiation of everyone and everything I secretly feared like racing
terror. Kids dismissed me as some
kind of screwball blowhard who never seemed to have any luck with women. I would
have to say their assessment was accurate as I held my head in my hands like
Lyndon Johnson sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, underscoring his
reputation's impotence like "a big, pitiful giant" in a lake of
fools.
And there I was in high school, raving on against dope and "moral
permissiveness" with one set of morality "for morons" while taking in an eyeful of nudity pictures or worse on the
internet like a closet drunk. a hypocritical blow-hard, or even a holy-rollin' Baptist who drives 50 miles out of town to
buy his liquor "so he isn't seen by the neighbors". I would profess my adherence to William Bennett's "Book of
Virtues" and Judeo-Christian morality yet grit my teeth and thrash my head up
and down to "Slayer" with its demonic Nazi imagery just to be
outrageous.
What I could not seem to understand, was that there were really people out there whose horizons were "that limited" and to them, this stuff was not a joke as they wandered around like cloud-eyed zombies. Fellow students would once again dismiss me as "a screwball" and move on like grazing cattle as I waved my finger in the air like the Ayatollah on laughing gas. Of course, if I had the credibility of armed followers-- I would have had my detractors thrown into a fetid Iranian dungeon, left to scratch toward the thinnest shaft of sunlight and fresh breeze in a soiled loincloth.
One
of my most obnoxious things I dreamed up was "The Hangman of Prague"-- ripped off
from a stray line in a Slayer song about a Nazi war criminal. I had the image of a big wrestler type--
George "The Animal" Steele, maybe-- a ghastly gargoyle of a man
with an excess of body hair and a black hood manning the gallows and swinging
law-breaking peasants off into eternity with the spring of the trap-door in
front of a sallow-faced crowd of simple townsfolk under the gray skies of
Eastern Europe. Why, I wanted to take on the attributes of this dreaded
executioner at my high school, a feared and mysterious character who students avoid when he
strutted down the hall, holding up a noose to make the teenagers scatter like
children.
Yes, an ultra-conservative. . . . . the hammer of the state. . . . . as sure and inevitable and undeniable as the spring of a trap-door dealing squarely with those who would threaten the stern status-quo. Infallible as "the Divine Right of Kings". Iconic as "The 7th Seal" when the protagonist plays chess with "The Grim Reaper" by the fjords to determine his destiny. Instinctually "right" as the Metallica "Monsters of Rock" concert footage from Russia as stolid Soviet military looked on and swung clubs at concert-goers in a flurry of state suppression while the band played "Harvester of Sorrow", a grim dance of stark 20th century social conscience-- akin to the reaper of authoritarianism that cuts down the masses like stalks of wheat across the frozen Eurasian plain and the young man who turns his face to the pale lemon of a sun, pondering fate.
Metallica-- "Harvester of Sorrow"-- Moscow '91
Pretty heady stuff, for a fat twerp who couldn't get a date on Friday night. . . . . and hid behind rock piles of emotional and intellectual complexity "inside the hall of The Mountain King". "Mountain of bullshit" probably would have been more like it, but rob not this boy king his hall of glory as he stares into a swirling cauldron of eternity and contemplates the ages. . . . . probably a flushing toilet. The more wretched I'd get-- the more laughed at and alone-- the more extreme I would become like fascistic sulleness.
With the flag flying behind
me, I could be a very dangerous man. But the joke was that I was essentially harmless, that
all of this bullshit was really a mask for sexual frustration-- a very
gnarled, eccentric means to "become a man" that just "wasn't working".
A cultural pessimist, I might as well have been reading Oswald Spengler's
"The Decline of the West"-- a grim post World War I tome-- that predicted that
we were all doomed, and were living in the winter of our demise. Here was a
stiff professor who never went out, but would retire alone to his study and
drink laudnaum-- his sole conceit-- whirling around with his monocle to see if
he was being watched, and slowly sip. Incidentally, he never had sex. Some
people are born twisted. Other people get twisted.
I worshipped power and the South American
generals who ran their tin-pot countries just to be outrageous. I could imagine
myself, a ham-faced Yankee with a flat-top and a flannel shirt defecting down
there to offer my services to round up the writers, artists, poets, and intellectuals
for "disappearance's sake".
The general, patting his fingers on the desk, would ask what I had to bring to the table.
"The fact that I'm a true believer".
Needless to say, he'd probably get me a job sweeping up the steps at the palace. Standing there at the window laughing at this menial fool, about to snap his fingers to have me killed on a whim, he'd keel over with a heart attack from eating too many endangered condor eggs.
But anything. . . . . anything, because
I lusted for power, to be close to power, to be with "the in-crowd" that did important things, and to topple the weak, sheep-like liberals that tolerated this filth and install a proper and just Republican to the Presidency, free from the clutches of the feminists, the minorities, the gays, the young, the cripples, the nattering New Agers, and the Weimar misfits. To install a strong white male unhindered by political-correctness, flowery sensitivity, and a nagging asterisk (*) of social concern, just like I yearned to be in my struggle to balance repression with assertiveness as a formerly browbeaten teenager who jumped too quickly when told to because he was uncertain. Yes, to raise a rock and crush in the heads of the pesky "Starbucks crowd", that was my ambition in life.
I was also very intellectually
pompous, mostly with the aim of lifting myself out of the pathetic slime I lived
in. Grades became a means to an end by which you could separate yourself from
"the rabble" noodling around uselessly. The sole purpose of academia--
in my mind, at least-- was making others look stupid. Yes, as one all but dipped a quill
pen in an ink pot and scribbled away as if this scholarly duty was of any
meaningful import, a fixed constellation in the stars.
And wouldn't it upset me, when there was a shrimpy whiz kid in my school with an I.Q. in the 180's who got a perfect 1600 on his S.A.T's, a 4.9 grade-point average, and early admission into Harvard. He made me look shabby!
In miffed neurotic fantasies, I halfway considered sneaking up behind him, muffling his mouth, putting a sack over his head, and beating him senseless with a baseball bat to give him traumatic brain injury to bring him down to a level playing field with the rest of us.
That's how crazy I was.
And it was all a rather grand conceit as I damned "the inferior" to perdition with extreme prejudice, watching criminals pursued like an animal down by the waterfront by iron-jawed G-men in pork-pie hats brandishing revolvers with all the light of "Lady Justice" and the 1930's Hayes Motion Picture Code of Uprightness and Decency, which also required that the fugitive be gunned down in his tracks. Yes, as the film segues into a judge's rapping gavel and the robed, "old clam" of a magistrate sternly lecturing that "CRIME DOES NOT PAY".
Remember boys and girls, BAD FOLK GO TO HELL.
That
was the essential message I got walking out of Dwaine Esper's 1938 exploitation shocker,
"Marihuana: Weed With Roots in Hell" that lit up the screen in a
haze of smoke, the reedy flutes of despair, and then redeemed itself with brave, patriotic
music of how this film was made with the cooperation of law enforcement to bring
"this menace" to heel, "under heel"-- if not "the iron heel" of
puritanical morality. Unfortunately, 60 or 70 years later there are
still some of us out there-- mostly the hokey and confused-- who take the movie
as "a legitimate statement" and yet can't explain some things. The
nudity, for instance. Or the hastily-scripted plot-line. Or the overall
sordidness wrapped in a thin veneer of righteousness that would crack peanut
shells with P.T. Barnum and elbow each other, counting the receipts from the
gawkers who paid at the gate.
But tits n' ass n' violence played up to "red meat" concerns, as certain as Steven Segal snapping the limbs of Jamaican VooDoo cocaine lords and having premarital sex with mouthy broads he met while smoking in a bar with his black partner, "the good Negro" with whom we want to identify to assuage our more blatant racist tendencies that would be shaking hands with P.W. Botha in Aparthied South Africa. It's all "unspoken", yet very carefully stage-managed by the producers.
Rhetoric, entertainment, spectacle. . . . . as the conservative movement kept me pumped with its stream of articles and presentations and huffing, righteous indignation.
And all of this madness came to a somewhat tragic, yet hilarious head off on
a multi-state
Washington D.C. school trip with kids from all over the country when I took off
on an unscripted "wild-cat" direction and suggested
that anyone who was guilty of three drug offenses
The whole "macho act"
was means of overcompensation as a means for "feeling a bit too much", for
having a piteous countenance of J.D. Salinger "who didn't look like a
winner" with the slick, explosive spread of cheerleaders and Superbowl Victories and "Big Money" leveraged
buy-outs on Wall Street in one jagged, adrenaline surge like a
caffeine/sugar/ nicotine fix. . . . . a line of cocaine going up each nostril as you
toasted the Japanese, looted the Third World, and turned the former "Great
Soviet Bear" into your bitch like G. Gordon Liddy getting into a knife
fight down a dark alley. I could hardly pass myself off as Bud Selig, the commissioner of Major League Baseball slapping backs in
the sky boxes but a very quirky misfit "who couldn't pull a power-play" to save
his life. He was not athletic, he was not business-minded, he was not
socially-skilled, all he had was his writer's imagination that he was mostly
"too lazy" to use as it befuddled his actions "on the outside"
with titanic distortions of comic book reality as everything whirled around
crazier and crazier.
As I look back into what that whole trip descended to, I recall "the broken window theory of crime". Once one slight in a neighborhood is tolerated and isn't quickly addressed-- the issue just left to languish there, gaping and obvious-- then it shows that it's indeed O.K. to let standards drop altogether. A building with one broken window will soon have all its windows broken out, if "the perimeter is not maintained" and integrity upheld. This applies equally in principle to social relations. A corollary to this, is "don't provoke what you can't back up".
And what a mess I was in, a Rush Limbaugh apprentice radically overextended,
trading in "Rambo" zingers and "Dirty Harry" clenchers even though he was slowly
and surely losing all his battles, with no volume control to drown out the
crowd's boos with the slide of a dial, like SSgt Barry Sadler singing irrelevant
patriotic fight songs there in his uniform and being pelted with rotten
vegetables.
What you notice about all "talking heads", is that such bloviators get very panicked when people don't truck in their sense of propriety. Especially 'ole Rush, whose face would turn white at live public tapings when the host would walk right up to him and "puncture his bubble" with a pointed comment as a young, hip audience spoke in a unified cry of derisive laughter.
The conservatives were on the wrong side of history with the sense of decadence in the air, a feeling of easy coasting that did not particularly want to heed the call of repression and order, much less be chased around by "The Hangman of Prague" for a good belly-laugh as the anger turned on their ineffective oppressors, hurling bricks. Nature keeps her books, and the trap-door springs even for "the hang-man". . . . . bringing his hands up to his neck and grimacing back & forth in his black hood and chain-mail. Shamed, forces in Vietnam would withdraw at some kind of attempt at "Peace with Honor" when everyone knew it was just a face-saving measure.
Shamelessly, the leaders would continue to "fire up" the true believers who were too dense to understand what has transpired. And that's about the sum of how Washington worked, as it slowly dawned on myself where a fellow like me would fit into the scheme of things as I made a bigger and bigger fool out of myself. Ever the right-wing creep, I even brought along a Bible for Senator John Ashcroft to sign. He wasn't in, and we were introduced to two colorless young conservatives whose claim to fame was slashing taxes and eroding environmental regulations, not mooning customers at Starbucks. They had all the mojo of an undercooked pancake. I needed this like I needed a megachurch in my backyard and went home.
The wisdom and maturity of a libertarian philosophy, whether "lite" or heavy, is to "step back" and "have enough distance" not to get involved "with the filthy, stinking mobs" shrieking on with the reigning madness of the day, and that oftentimes those who claim to be "the most reasonable" and "most level-headed" as they appeal "to reason" and "science" and New York Times "expert opinion" are part of that same damnable mob.
And if I were to give an explanation for what I seen and heard, I would say that each generation has less "character" because life turns into less of a struggle-- which is prone to make the youth rotten & spoiled-- and to be young and conservative is to accept the heaviness of struggle with none of the lightness of liberty. A cynical writer named Sam Francis once pointed out that in politics, there's "the 'evil' party then the 'stupid' party". And if fate hadn't intervened, there I would be kneeling at the hooves of the chief Satan towering over we putrid little goblins in wicked allegiance like petty sycophants because we didn't know any better, bobbing our heads up and down into darkness and shit and brimstone for the price of the soul we never had.
And even I'm not that
much of a
true believer. . . . .
*******************
"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2009 by Insufferable Industries
Drop "The Bard" a line at