"The Headless Children"
Thrust in the rat-pit of middle-school, my sing-song mother didn't really tell me "what to expect", only that it would be "hard". And there I stood on that landing the first day, the hallway outside of the principal's office on the main floor where kids were gabbing excitedly in a frenzy "of desperate belonging", horse laughs, and where details were lost in the commerce of a chaotic mass. Not even the adults could tally it all, and wandered around with a sweep of tuned-out blindness that presented a void of confidence, a window of rotten, self-conscious thoughts from yours truly.
Even then, I figured out that nothing "quite added up" in this jungle.
Later that morning they parked all we 6th graders in the shadowed auditorium. . . . . the Paladium of public speaking that required a courage most of us didn't have in our pinched, awkward lives. . . . . Why, there was the audio/visual club; a far-off, hopeful proposition that was not for lowly 12 year-old's of our station. Elder boys and girls would be existentially bound to group projects with little license and far less freedom as the instructors lumbered around fatly.
Yes, there was "the tap dance" of counterfeit inducements-- of good little "collaborators" who went along with the hat & cane of drama class, who would just as soon be left lynched from the rafters under the judgmental gaze of the testy mob, who in turn "trouble-makers" would be plucked from by the administration "and cremated".
The pathos. . . . . yes, of dissected frogs, cotton swabs, hollering redneck coaches, and a geek in glasses perking up uncertainly at a flung hail of spitballs like the bombardment of "the innocents", the bleat of the meek, and valor's compromise.
Ultimately, which is why I've come to find it "so funny" when the average feller rants & raves about "liberal Hollywood" or other such things. . . . .
On the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, the mysterious and ever-elusive Johnny Depp was nailed down in one spot, and quoted by journalists overseas (-- in FRANCE, of all places) to say that "America was like a big, dumb puppy that likes to jump up on people". The right-wing jean-jacket and steak n' potatos crowd hollered in rage and changed the name of a common side order to "Freedom Fries", but I found myself exploding with mirth. It was as if this postmodern icon was attempting to frame geopolitical events in the context of a European children's film from 1959 "but had stepped on his dick" and had to back-pedal with a frenzy of lost composure.
Whatever the legdermain and camera tricks and liberal Hollywood entertainment values and hollow-eyed poses that superficially bedeck this place, leaving us under the onus of peer pressure-- it is the money and guns and scowls that truly run this country and pick "the puppy" up by the nape of the neck and put it out in the backyard, if not ignoring it completely as it yaps with all the soft-hearted, baby-faced countenance of an emotionally-wounded adolescent "and just about as effective" until the coach snarls at you to "sit down!" before going back to grading papers.
As Mark Twain once famously wrote: "we have the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the freedom to use neither". . . . . which is how this stuff usually works out "with the downward drag of the crowd" when no one rises from the trench. When the legend of St. Valentine was just that. . . . . a legend. . . . . and how he would have died alone and broken in his cell (dearwinona.com). How "bloodbaths" are the way of the world, and to attempt to convince yourself otherwise is to set yourself up for a messier, uglier "dunking".
You had Blackie Lawless, the shock-rocker from W.A.S.P. . . . . an alley cat of a New Yorker whose eyes would widen if a kid, a young guitar player, asked to go with him on tour. The restless gypsy, a veteran of stray L.A. glitz and felines in heat wavin' their tails in hotel rooms of coke mirrors with a clump of stage acrobats who passed as "musicians", and the old tiger-- alley cat, black-maned puma, whatever-- would break out into a mortified, self-effacing grin and shake his head, "no, No, NO!!!" with a quick melt in his cold, shut-off countenance and tell the lil' son of 'a gun "to stay in school" and "if your life needs correction, then don't follow in my direction".
Maybe I oughtta tug on the sleeve of 'Lars.
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"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!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
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