2.
Anciently, we choose not to see the animal we are: birthed in blood and pain, living in
risk and disease, dying in dementia and agony. Daily we defecate and urinate. Unwashed, we
stink. Unbreathing, we quickly stink and decay.
3.
Washed, clothed and closeted, we maintain a pseudo-rationalist illusion, buffered and
bolstered constantly by the shared illusions of others and by the tireless servant of all
illusion, television.
4.
We reward those drudges who must live and work beyond the illusion either with money
(physicians, morticians) or power (police). A poor bargain for them who must daily see and
smell the reality behind the scrim on which we project our fake-thoughtful dream, called
"life".
5.
Ever guileful, the world has many tricks to break through our fragile fog-laced realm,
pain of course being the most common. What a mere hangnail can do to serious and
purposeful human behaviors, not to mention a toothache, nor other wracking experiences
which in our times of bliss we’d rather not remember.
6.
What we work most strongly at not remembering is the absolute, intractable, inevitable,
constant impermanence of, well, everything. Including, of course, us. Sic transit, etc.
How we strive to keep our imminent vanishing at arm’s length (actually, far, far
beyond arm’s length), as well as the vanishing of those people and things around us
whom and which we care about.
7.
A second problem, compounding the virtuosic juggling-act difficulty in
keeping our illusory balls of permanence in the air, is the niggling fact that everything
can also vanish from within. We can lose our minds The human potential for craziness,
which manifests at any time, requires massive fortifications of culture, science,
religion, law, where we can hide for long periods, blindered to our endemic madness.
8.
What we call history, in a most clear-eyed sense, is the record of us in flight from the
intrusive realities of impermanence and insanity. We keep fleeing and they keep intruding,
often at the most inopportune moments.
9.
Through all the recurring messes of history, Rule One remains: Don’t
remind us of reality.
10.
Satirists walk a fine line, perversely intent on nonetheless reminding us of both our
insanity and our impermanence, but cleverly figuring out ways to do it that seem
entertaining and witty. (To some degree we’re all embarrassed about and ashamed of
our hypocrisy.) Well-crafted satire is subversion at its best: an attractive, distracting
surface beneath which armies of determined termites chomp away at the fragile structure of
society and its lame fairy tales called history.
11.
Others, more desperate and less clever than satirists, resort to blunter
illusion-shattering methods. Name your tyrant, or your violent ideology, and there’s
your example.
12.
History is littered with, indeed is the very record of, such in-your-face
attention-getting tricks and tirades and tantrums, some small, some large, generally
ill-planned and worse-timed, and pulled off with about as much smarts as we might have
expected once from our vanished Neanderthal brethren.
13.
In that sorry pantheon of blunderbuss behavior, the attack on the World Trade Center is
perhaps the greatest miscalculation by any group of would-be illusion-shatterers.
14.
Yes, they got our attention. Yes, they killed a lot of people immersed in
what they believed was deadly, misguided illusion. And they even managed to do it in such
a way that the (for them) best part—the collapse of the towers—was on live,
global television.
15.
What a triumph. Which is, apparently, how the doers still see it.
16.
What they fail (and failed) to realize was the ancient, deep, deep human
determination NOT to face the foundation--vastly more powerful than any ideology—of
human behavior: our desire to not think of how crazy people sometimes are, and how
everything, everything ultimately vanishes.
17.
Yet there it was, in our global faces, on global television: massive,
fiery, spectacular reminders of 1) the insanity of which humans are capable, and 2) the
impermanence of everything.
18.
Boom, boom. A few minutes of burning, and each soaring structure vanishes in thirty
seconds.
19.
Gone. What stood so high suddenly stands no more and will not stand again.
20.
Reminding us indelibly and traumatically of precisely that which we spend our lives trying
not to be reminded of.
Some strategic triumph, guys.
21.
Whatever anger we may have felt re "evil" or re attacks on our
"freedoms" or our "democratic way of life" was nothing compared to the
unspoken and unspeakable fear that 9-11 aroused in us as we were forced, in living color,
to look at the most vivid and horrifying possible images of human insanity and human
impermanence.
22.
Whatever religious or political or cultural message may have been the
intent, it was wholly submerged in a tsunami of trauma so large that it, for a moment,
wiped away all human pretense to rationality and lasting grandeur. Far worse than the
frightening images of that terrible day were the implied images of greater insanity,
vaster vanishings yet to come.
23.
The doers of that ill-conceived deed would do well to go back to the books
and study their Swift, who managed a wholly subversive tale so well that it is to this day
still read to children (!) even.
24.
Gulliver remains a triumph, a model hypocrisy-dissection for all
illusion-shatterers to emulate.
25.
Only in privacy did Swift allow himself free rein. There, alone, isolated, he perpetrated
his own acts of unbridled cultural terrorism. Only there away from the crowd and its
frightened, flighty attentions, did he try to speak of reality.
26.
Satirists-in-training should consider carefully the private lines Swift wrote in a poem
called "The Lady’s Dressing Room." Two servants steal into milady’s
chambers when she is absent and catalog what they see, in great aromatic detail, from the
stained and smelly clothes to the filthy handkerchiefs and clotted cleansing cloths of her
vanity.
Finally one servant, apparently secretly smitten by his absent msistresses charms,
turns his attention to milady’s most intimate device where daily she voids. Here, in
privacy, writing for himself and for such of us after him who might seek out such stuff,
Swift holds nothing back. The servant enters the bathroom and:
He lifts the lid, there needs no more:
He
smelt it all the time before.
As
from within Pandora's box,
When
Epimetheus oped the locks,
A
sudden universal crew
Of
humane evils upwards flew,
He
still was comforted to find
That
Hope at last remained behind;
So
Strephon lifting up the lid
To
view what in the chest was hid,
The
vapours flew from out the vent.
But
Strephon cautious never meant
The
bottom of the pan to grope
And
foul his hands in search of Hope.
O
never may such vile machine
Be
once in Celia's chamber seen!
O may
she better learn to keep
"Those secrets of the hoary deep"!
As
mutton cutlets, prime of meat,
Which, though with art you salt and beat
As
laws of cookery require
And
toast them at the clearest fire,
If
from adown the hopeful chops
The
fat upon the cinder drops,
To
stinking smoke it turns the flame
Poisoning the flesh from whence it came;
And
up exhales a greasy stench
For
which you curse the careless wench;
So
things which must not be exprest,
When
plumpt into the reeking chest,
Send
up an excremental smell
To
taint the parts from whence they fell,
The
petticoats and gown perfume,
Which
waft a stink round every room.
Thus
finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous fits,
Oh!
Celia, Celia, Celia shits!
END
For more, much more along these lines,
take a look at Norman O. Brown's
