Word Wars

About my freshman year of high school, and within the space of one month, I encountered two versions of the same song. The song, adapted from a speech made by Haile Selassie, was originally recorded by Bob Marley, and later covered by Sepultura. Anybody who is familiar with Bob Marley and Sepultura can imagine the musical differences, and they’re all there, but the most important difference between the two is in the lyrics. The Bob Marley version is, presumably, very close to the original speech, and presents the same philosophical argument; so we have verses such as the following:

Until the philosophy
That holds one race superior
And another inferior
Is finally and permanently
Discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war

This has a fairly clear message, one which all the later verses follow: war is a byproduct of man’s irrational hatred of other men, and without getting rid of that hatred there can be no way to address the problem of war. Towards the end of the song, Bob sings

War in the East
War in the West
War up North
War down South

This provides the chorus to the Sepultura song, and the structure of the song is built around the logic of a chorus. There is a spoken, or muttered, verse and a yelled chorus. Since the chorus is the highlight and focus of the song, the verses need to be, and are, shortened to a few words. As I recall, it doesn’t make it to ‘inferior’ in the first verse. The words are mangled and the argument loses its sense.

But this is not a bad thing. The Selassie/Marley version fixes a simple explanation to a complex reality, reducing it in an attempt to make a cogent argument against racism. It’s an attack on racism using the means of war, and in doing so it makes war a simple phenomenon, one which may be explained by a single cause. But the truth is more like the Sepultura song: the words don’t make sense. They can’t contain the reality because this reality stands tauntingly on the other side of the limits of language. Wars occur for many reasons; removing any single factor will not remove the possibility of the result.

George Carlin noted that, since the Germans in World War II, the United States, and the West in general, have bombed only non-whites. This is true; since the fall of the Third Reich we have bombed people with skin that comes in a variety of yellows and browns. An aerial photograph pile of the victims would appear as an abstract painting in a variety of earth tones.

But the motivation was not that these people were of a different skin color than those of the people planning these bombings. We would have rather bombed Russia than Vietnam, but, like a blue-collar worker who would like to fire nails into his boss’s brain stem but kicks his dog instead, we knew Russia would nuke if provoked, and had to bomb the slopes instead. The racial aspect was secondary; of utmost importance was a political and economic battle of wills.

But even this doesn’t provide the entire answer. An understanding of French Indochina, of the dissolution of empires in the wake of the World Wars, of the rejection by Woodrow Wilson of Ho Chi-Minh’s appeal to the right of self-determination Wilson was perfectly willing to apply to the white peoples of Eastern Europe but not the yellow peoples of Asia, of the entire Cold War, and so on. There’s a lot to know and even then it can’t be thought of as a simple equation such as the following:

The United State + The Soviet Union + The People’s Republic of China + rivalry + Woodrow Wilson + Dien Bien Phu + Green Berets … = war

Similarly, we wouldn’t give a damn about the Middle East if it weren’t for economics. Christians, and the US is a very Christian nation at times, claim that the supreme torture in hell is that of being absolutely ignored by God; for that reason, the most sophisticated expression of hatred of which a Christian is capable is pretending that the despised party does not exist. The absolute removal of all attention and solicitude from that person or persons. This is why such stupid quotidian tactics as the silent treatment are actually as effective as they’re expected to be, and also why the United States ignores the countries and peoples it really hates in a racist way. I should note now that Wilson didn’t actually reject Ho Chi-Minh’s appeal; he didn’t bother to listen to it.

War is a different matter. Violence is a way to express racism, but this doesn’t make racism an explanation for violence. The existence of brown people is not offensive enough in itself to start a war; that they have a commodity on which we’re dependant and are more resistant than we’d like to our attempts to acquire it is much more offensive. And if racism does a little to explain why our relationship with them is disharmonious, it does only a little. Truth is never as simple as the coiners of handy phrases and moving speeches would have you believe, and, whatever one’s intentions, bleaching the truth out of a situation in the interest of forceful simplicity is collaborating with the enemy.

We’re in the shaky hands of simple men capable of crafting a simple narrative which they repeat so often and so emphatically that its familiarity discourages critical analysis. It’s so familiar that it no longer matters if we believe it. The people who recognize these tactics and the awful ends to which they’re turned determine to set themselves in opposition, and believe that the best way to do so is to adopt identical tactics with a different end. This is a problem. Turning a sock inside out leaves you with just a sock.

It can be argued that people as a whole are so stupid that the only way to reach them with any message is to simplify it until they can understand. But there are a few problems with that: It’s easy to make people stupid by treating them as such, and this simplification to some posited lowest common denominator of stupidity makes whatever genuine argument or point there may have been into a platitude. Listen to a speech and wait through the drivel to hear the disconnected phrases targeted at sound-bites, kernels of corn floating in liquid diarrhea.

What we need are people capable of recognizing a complex situation as complex and of acting in accordance with that recognition. A group of anti-war idiots doing damage to the truth is little better than a group of pro-war idiots doing the same, in the same manner and for surprisingly similar ends, however attractive it might be to find somebody who can extricate us from this shit. That’s a noble enough goal, but there’s no end to bullshit wars by piling up fresh bullshit. Just take that sentence literally, hold the image of it in your mind, and you’ll see what I mean.

And that, dear reader, is what I leave you with for this week.

Peace Doesn't Sell... So Who's Fighting?

War is like Prince Charles: Hideously ugly, yet necessary only for reminding the majority of the population how lucky we are. In much the same way that I haven’t got enormous, flapping, poorly designed wings masquerading as ears, I can also count myself fortuitous not to be entrenched in a sandblasted Middle Eastern hell hole desperately dodging the latest shrapnel cumshot spewn forth from viciously oversexed landmines. I don’t have to witness my best friend being brutally raped by machine gun fire, nor do I have to endure sucking the cock of a 10lb tank shell and gallantly swallowing hard.

But that’s the very scenario faced by thousands of our troops each and every day, forced to whore themselves by jumped up pimps safe in their political citadels. Like generals sipping Sancerre from the shelter of their hilltop tents, they don’t see the horrors of war. They see entire divisions as markers on a map to disregard as if the next batch of chips to throw at the croupier in a whimsical game of blackjack. We lose a few? Plenty more where that came from, m’laddo. Want to try a different game? There’s always a new avenue of entertainment to be pillaged. The similarity to gambling doesn’t end there: gamblers more often than not lose. For every overcooked yarn of fleecing the bookmaker, there are a multitude of failures waiting on the flanks to scupper the party in a devastating pincer movement.

For every World War I – the underdog triumphing at odds of 3-1 – there is the unshakable stalemate of a Vietnam (nailed on for the score draw at evens before it even began). For every (once more) against-all-odds, Hun-repelling World War II there is the almighty shitburger of Iraq from which we all have to take a huge bite at odds of 33-1 against. For every woefully inadequate Boer war (no odds available due to the compiler getting a close up view of a spear during the battle of Spion Kop) there is the marvellously vitriolic 100 Years War. Fair enough, historians of the time wildly over-egged the length of this particularly titanic struggle, but can you imagine killing Frenchmen in a variety of barbaric ways over a sustained timeframe of decades? What glee! Quite clearly this no score draw was fixed by the English deliberately holding back and lumping on the draw at odds of 6-4. Well, what do you think funded the expansion of the Empire?

It’s all a game hinging on likelihoods to the bigwigs in Downing Street and Capitol Hill. It’s all about studying the odds and coming up with the best strategy that will maximise the return on initial outlay. Sometimes the return warrants an outlay no matter what the odds: laying £1 to win £5,000,000 at odds of 10,000,000-1 for instance, even though 50p would be a more realistic wager that reflects the odds, is always going to be taken because of the dwarfing payoff. But this is a simple state of affairs with just one variable by which to measure success. War consists of multiple variables that can each define victory or, more importantly, whether a return has been earned on the initial gambit.

Consider the recent Western business trip to Iraq: A huge initial outlay that doesn’t reasonably represent our chances of success, yet George Bush – ever the Mountie who always gets his man – has reeled in the winning ticket amid world-wide acknowledgement of a continuing debacle. It beggars belief how the award of obscene reconstruction contracts to US corporations and the capture of the Iraq’s oil trade can be seen as victory when our troops are dying every day in a land where chaos reigns supreme in a supposedly liberated land. Bush will never admit it, but he’s done his friends in the board rooms of some of America’s biggest corporations a huge favour that will eventually need fellating. He almost seems smug in knowing that his legacy will be forever regarded as the President who went after a wrongly accused nation believing it at least partly culpable for blasting the most effervescent symbol of American capitalist prosperity into a smouldering mound of rubble… and made them pay for it not only with their lives but with their money.

This is not a new phenomenon by any means. Humanity has been knocking seven shades of the brown stuff out of each other in order to gain power and wealth – or at least retain the power and wealth already amassed – for millennia now. Every once in a while there comes along a hysterical crackpot with motives other than these that conform to a personal ideal of how society should be – think Hitler – but generally we start wars out of avarice and/or a megalomaniacal need for power over others. The two are inextricably entwined: one can never have enough money and the more power one can exert, the more money one can demand, steal, extort and defraud from the enfeebled. It’s human nature. It’s why we all want to be promoted at work. It’s why one day I want to make tax partner and earn huge sacks of the green stuff. The difference is that I’m not prepared to kill in order to gain these things (unless the fools get in my way, of course) and certainly not prepared to go to war.

Yet in the midst of the violence, the cold-blooded murder, the 17 year olds returned to their mothers in closed caskets, there exists good in war. History is littered with colossal feats of defiance in the face of sickening depravity, the shear will to survive through courage, pride and an unwillingness to be subverted by malevolent foes. It’s heartening to know that some people can actually sit through an entire Justin Timberlake record in order to warn others of the horrors within, but there are people in war who exhibit the above qualities. The ferocious hand-to-hand defence of Russia by a frontline armed with nothing more than basic rifles and agricultural implements, the men who would rather be slaughtered on Spion Kop than surrender their post and loyalty to the crown, the heroic goliaths of the rag-tag band of British, American and Canadian brothers that stormed the beaches of northern France amid nothing short of barbarous opposition from Gerry. And then come the scientific breakthroughs such as atomic energy and radar and the medical innovations such as a non-whisky based anaesthetic (which no doubt comes in handy when listening to a Justin Timberlake record) although why any sane man would refuse whisky and opt for ether is beyond me.

So after all this, war actually isn’t like Prince Charles – it isn’t simply an amorphous mass of irredeemable hideousness. It’s more like the morbidly obese girl at the end of the bar – with tits that don’t protrude further than her immense waistline – making eyes at you while puckering her plush, luscious, perfectly rouged lips: one part can’t help but think how pleasurably advantageous it would be to have her latch on to your pink oboe and compose sweet music with those made-for-blowing lips; the other backs away in revulsion at the horror stood before you, in a state of incredulity that the thought was ever entertained.

Vom Kriege

You may or may not have noticed, but there's a war on and very likely there's going to be another quite shortly. I'm not talking about shitty wars that horrible little countries like Somalia and Eritrea have with each other - the real interesting stuff happens when the West mobilises, nationalises its industrial capacity and stuffs every coffin stuffer first into khakis and then into a coffin. In any case, war is always a contentious issue, and this group seems like it contains the same proportion of communofascists, anarcho-materialists, lunatics, kooks, counter-reformation reformers, fiends, hipsters, fellow travellers and soon-to-be heshen-covered anti-war jivesters as any other similarly sized sample group. The topic is therefore, "On War", the word limit is 1,200, and it comes due on Friday 21 April.

Hop to, soldats.

We're Too Jung for Our Own Good

Personality is a very broad notion. Essentially we’re all different – even twins – with no two people behaving in perfect unison or reacting to life’s obstacles in quite the same manner. So for now, let’s forget the types of personality and concentrate on the person behind the personality. Now I’m no Maslow, Jung or Freud but for me there are three types of person, comprising of the following:

1. Those that project a personality according to what they believe others consider fitting of them. The sort of person who’s objective in life is to correspond to how other people perceive them. You’re female and have blond hair? Act all dizzy and confused intermittently! Well, it’s what’s expected so why not?

2. Those that project the personality that they desperately feel that they were denied at birth. The sort of person who’s objective in life is to attempt to prove to themselves that they’re not an insipid sack of scrotal off cuts. Basically, any man who exfoliates in order to stoke the infernal blaze of narcissistic necessity.

3. Those that, quite frankly my dear, don’t give a damn either way. The sort of person who doesn’t care what others think; who doesn’t even care what they think of themselves.

Of course, the latter can – and almost certainly always will – be contained within the confines of the previous two, i.e. there are people who like to project that they don’t care for the thoughts of others and also those that like to kid themselves that they don’t care. Both scurrilous buggers, if you ask me.

Which one am I? The majority of people will instantly, and most of the time wrongly, put a tick next to box three but honestly, the first description suits me best. Due to my profession, the people I know expect me to have strong integrity, honesty and a degree of expertise. They expect me to be the sober, calming voice of our somewhat barbarous rabble. In their eyes I don’t make mistakes and the fact that I do is inconspicuously hidden from them, but there’s no harm in keeping up the pretence.

That’s the type of person I am in accordance with my earlier assertions, but is this my actual personality? I honestly don’t know – it’s hard to judge oneself on such matters without somehow being extricated from my own being. Preferably, this can be done one day without the need of hacksaws. Besides, the question is practically moot considering that the subject of personality is being saturated by the modern era’s fascination with labelling. In my day (quiet at the back, young pups) an unruly child was beaten with a ruler in school and then with a leather belt at home. Nowadays, they’re sent to a psychiatrist to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and sent on holidays to Italy. It’s not the child’s fault that he’s a little bastard; it’s the chemicals in his brain, y’see.

This mantra is carried on throughout contemporary society. Criminals don’t need punishment, they need rehabilitation. They need a better standard of living than many law-abiding citizens. They need a Playstation and a DVD player and they most certainly need to be let out at weekends. It’s conducive to “repairing” their personality, assimilating them among the normal. It makes them a better, more valuable member of humanity and before you know it they’re hot-stepping it up the ziggurat towards respectability and obedience. I tell you, they’re not as stupid as they appear these criminal types, because they’ve been taking the British penal system on a magical mystery tour for some years now.

ADHD and criminality are just two examples comprising the slither of psychosomatic iceberg that humankind seems destined to scrape its rusting hull against. There appears to be a gratuitous excuse for every major fault in personality. It’s no longer feasible to plainly admit that a person is flawed out of the simple reasoning that there can exist not one single perfect human being. Each and every deviance from the standard model must be categorised and explained. In this sense, psychologists have chosen the path of scientific rigour when I don’t feel that it can be applied so strictly within this specific field. As touched on by a previous writer, it’s like trying to fathom out the exact qualitative and quantitative behaviour of each and every atom in the universe – an impossible, impractical and unrealistic undertaking to say the least.

So why do they bother? A vain, arrogant man obsessed with the consumption of his own queef-fuelled ego was once just exactly that. Not to a psychologist, oh no. To a psychologist he’s a prime case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder or what is more commonly known as “My reason to stay in academia and avoid getting a proper job”.

To Comfort The Hated, And Hate The Comfortable.

       I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 

              madness, starving hysterical naked, 

       dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 

              looking for an angry fix, 

       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 

              connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- 

              ery of night, 

       who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 

              up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 

              cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 

              contemplating jazz, 

       who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 

              saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- 

              ment roofs illuminated, 

       who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes 

              hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 

              among the scholars of war, 

       who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 

              publishing obscene odes on the windows of the 

              skull, 

       who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- 

              ing their money in wastebaskets and listening 

              to the Terror through the wall, 

       who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 

              Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 

       who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 

              Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 

              torsos night after night 

****

I don’t particularly care for Ginsberg, but even with the nauseating overuse of this poem, it’s hard not to be impressed by the raw vitality of it. It’s a great ripping chunk of hairy, drug-fucked craziness, and it’s no wonder the children of the 60s adopted it (even though it wasn’t written about them). They didn’t know what they were looking for, and a lot of them were misguided woolly-headed ideologues, but damn it, they were looking anyway, and anyone who said they couldn’t melt their brains with peyote and fuck Hells Angels couldn’t stop them.

Ginsberg died in 1997, just soon enough to miss the horrors of reality television becoming memetic. Still, if he was still alive it probably would have finished him off.

Reality television is Howl in full retreat with its pants around its ankles, hopping away like Benny Hill. What could be more opposite to pressing the raw nerve of conscious experience as sitting at home watching the actions of other people? Television as fiction is often crass and unnecessary, but this attempt to create real drama is far more scary. Not even mushrooms can be fed their own waste – they need fresh shit. The 21^st century brain, apparently, does not.

Reality television is successful primarily because it is a comfort to the stupid. Everyone is special, everyone is examinable, everyone has inner motives that need to be plumbed. Paper-thin and product of selective editing it may be, but everyone has character – a hero, a villain, a misunderstood loner. They are special in their blandness, outrageous in their minor scandals, evil in their mild irritations, heroic in their fish-eyed goodwill.

This process could be read as a massive double entendre, but it is deadly serious. It doesn’t seem to reveal to people that their celluloid wet dreams are hollow, instead it affirms their belief that they are indeed someone extraordinary. Instant stardom, created through no virtue, and the total devaluation of character. Is there anything more profoundly depressing than a huge snaking clog of youth squealing for the camera, thousands of overgrown fetuses in denim, united in their quest to audition to be the next sensationally vapid media turd?

Are there any real minds any more?

And may we have a few more who are a bridge over mankind?

Please?

****

i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by torpor, well-fed, well-shod livestock,

dragging themselves through a concrete jungle looking for a spike to sit upon,

whose immovable glacial misery still waits to become itself, patiently crouching inevitable until “what is a star?” is drawn from their throats

whose endless middling comforts extend as far as to shame the soul, but not to damage

who bared their ruby starfruit and inner secrets to the Almighty’s Markets, the invisible hand latex-clad, lubed up, clinically examining the state of their union

who passed through universities as cellular automata, absorbing, processing, regurgitating, privy only to the very fringes of reason, trickling out venereal

who sit in await of the wagon-trains of circumstance

whose worst secrets are indiscretions, and whose indiscretions are the very meanness in sinning which cries out to the Lord

whose pockmarked shorts bear the paint stripes of a thousand fences and roads straddled

who bend backward in supplication before their Yahweh, and cannot bend forwards

whose fear is palpable, snarling, cornered, miserable, savage but defanged, vital but baseless

who dreamt while waking

and while sleeping

and everywhere in between

the unspeakable cunts

The Shapes of Things

If a man leaves any kind of imprint on this world or anything in it, it is through the force of his will, the strength of his particular personality. This is something that very few people actually have, whatever they may believe to the contrary, and it is something that has to be built through conscious mental effort. Think of the character in the Talking Heads song ‘Seen and Not Seen’ deciding on an ideal face and, through mental effort, compelling his own face into that shape, and you’ll have an idea where this is going.

People who study high-schoolers note that there are something like five to seven basic personality types that serve as molds for their raw mental putty - and the key word there is 'types.' Teenagers are young, therefore stupid and having little understanding of life or the world, and, in an attempt to be an individual as they’ve been instructed, build their identity on a handful of models, which they infrequently escape. It is so easy to remain in the shape in which one was cast. Most adults are still these models, QWERTY-type leftovers from an obsolete phase. These are boring people. If you meet a hundred people of the same type, you tend to have trouble realizing you’ve met more than one. If you have a friend stuck in one of these types, you can’t distinguish between his girlfriends. You can go through dozens of years, meeting new and different people, and not realize that you have for this reason. People with multiple personalities tend to have several of these types, each uninteresting in its own way though sheer logistics may have made the sum of them more interesting.

People who have become a type do little more than embrace the mold that contains them. They are the most perfect casts imaginable, ideally malleable up until the moment they have solidified into the rounded blobs they fell into when the options were few and the need to have shape naively strong. Sometimes their ideally-formed shapes are marred by contact with the people I'll discuss below; in this case, these people are generally called something like 'disciples.' They aren’t much more interesting.

If personality is anything, it is made from exceptions to these molds. The types are designed to be used for a time as scaffolding, and then, like scaffolding, discarded so that each person can be held together until such time as he is able to begin building up his own personality from the means available to him. Though these are never radically unfamiliar, each one is distinguishable from the others and from the original model; it's taken on its own shape. Eventually these unusual shapes can't help but do damage to their surroundings, the sharp edges scraping away at contours worn in by the repetition of the same handful of rounded shapes.

So we find among a morass of bands in the same genre, even one that is long-established, one or two that actually do something interesting. The rules of the genre aren’t broken, but rather run up against by the force of these jagged personalities until an interesting shape emerges. This shape is more or less the same as that of the personality. Now new people can take on this shape as a new mold, in which case a new genre, with its own rules, will probably eventually emerge, or ignore it, in which case the sound will always be associated with this group in particular.

Repeat this example for any art or important action you choose; the results will be the same. This is more or less what is meant when people say of somebody who is a genius in a particular field ‘If he had applied himself to any other field, he’d have achieved the same level of success.’ That particular statement is not true (different types of genius, even if they are equally great, are not interchangeable), but it is true that it was the force of the genius’s personality that made its mark on his work, and that a similar force would make a similar mark on another surface.

Stravinsky claimed to feel he was at his most creative when he was most constrained by rules; this is the meaning of that statement. An artist, here understood broadly as a creative agent, embosses whatever part of the world he takes on with his own shape. Much of his work is to decide the limits within he can have an impact, an incredibly difficult and important decision to make. If we define ourselves in bashing against and doing damage to the dissatisfying shape of the world we've been born into, there can be little more important than choosing the surfaces to bash against judiciously for maximum impact.

The Divine Excuse

Humans, we are meatbags all. Step outside your neurochemistry for a second and observe as we flap our meat across the surface of the world, controlled entirely by the organic but steely grip of a complicated chemical soup that dictates our every action and reaction to every other thing that flaps its meat across the hills, fields and wastes of the Earth. The notion of a soul is therefore a terrible joke – were it even to exist, the pure being that would emerge from our corpses would have little in common with who we consider ourselves to be. A good meal can change our mood, a stroke can change our personalities entirely and irrevocably. As our immortal souls fled our bodies, divested of the chemicals, it would not be “we” as we could possibly know it.

This kind of treatment of the universe is fine as an overview for a hard determinist scumbag such as myself. It is probably true that everything in the universe moves to the dictates of absolute physical laws, but such a view is near impossible to apply on any practical level. Put simply, the variables involved in calculating how physical laws apply to every atom in existence are so brain-buggeringly complex that such an outlook of the universe is rendered nearly useless. The same goes for personality. We are all meat, controlled by meat and meat-related compounds. But the complexity in the way these chemicals affect us and manifest themselves in personality and behaviour belies such a simple explanation and makes the topic infinitely more interesting.

Personality is used as an excuse for all kinds of rotten and stupid behaviour, as well as a way to predict the rotten and stupid behaviours of others. Angry personalities lash out, grumps are prickly grumble-bums, eternal optimists are insipid pricks. This standard view encourages us to see personality as a driving force behind behaviour as well as an immutable law. Personality becomes the divine excuse, a blank cheque for the committing of all kinds of idiocy. The “addictive personality” is a societal washout because he can’t help himself –the victim of his personality, pawn to the unchangeable law of behaviour imposed on him by another part of him. He appeals to determinism as he cries his freedom to the heavens at every other juncture. The man is free to drink himself into a stupor and wander into a primary school with his wang out, precisely up to and not including the point at which he is held to account for his behaviour.

Otherwise, because our personalities are supposedly unchangeable, we are swift to account our weaknesses as strengths. The man who visualises a grand plan but who is unable to commit any of it to details or actually lift a finger in working on it is accounted a “visionary” instead of a lazy oaf. The person who takes on all the workload and doesn’t lift a finger in their own interests is dubbed a “compassionate” personality instead of what they actually are, which is a weak-willed doormat. Humans who fit either of these examples, and many others beside, are not real people. Real people can plan and complete difficult works. They can be compassionate while looking out for their own reasonable interests. If you are not capable of doing such, you should strive to become capable. Using “personality” as a shield in this regard hobbles you. You allow yourself to become a part of a social machine that encourages the uselessness of its individual components in order to cobble them all the more closely and irrevocably together. You also become infinitely replaceable, so long as a spare part of the same type is available.

Personality is not, in fact, an excuse or any kind of limiting factor, so long as you don’t cave in to demands that it is. It is very easy to allow yourself to be pigeonholed. Companies will endeavour to label your personality into one of only a few basic types, and having done so will accommodate you so long as you adhere to the exact guidelines they have for the way those personalities should act. This makes it very easy and profitable to project yourself in a certain way and neglect most of the other aspects of being a complete, reasonable human. This also makes you what would be called, in the faux-psychological industry, as an infantile subhuman.

Far simpler, far more human, and far, far more difficult, would be to reject all labels on your personality, be whoever you are, and strive to behave in a reasonable manner to each individual stimulus in turn. Luckily the mental health system is so under funded these days, or this kind of behaviour might get you locked up in a lunatic asylum.

---

Women - Good Enough for Buk, Good Enough for Me

Last we spoke I wrote a bit about the importance of the scientific method, and felt remiss shortly after the article went up not to have stressed more clearly that the aptness of the scientific method for questions of science is matched by its inaptness for other questions. In other words, it’s important to be able to recognize when a tool is useful and when it is useless. This week’s subject renders both the scientific method and the analysis I usually adopt here useless, so I’ll have to attempt a more appropriate style.

Women are hard. It’s not impossible to have them ‘figured out’ – it’s quite easy – but any kind of general system you work out will be applicable, for the most part, to women who are either not worth your time, or worth connecting with in no way but genitally. As with anything else pleasurable or worthwhile, it is best to think of them in the specific. This poses a problem to the writer of a brief internet article on women.

I don’t want to give a description of a specific girl from my life or a discussion of my views on women in general, but rather a loose and running list of attributes I’d think would make up a certain type of woman, a case of which I’ve never encountered and that may exist entirely or primarily in my imagination. As should be clear by the article’s end, it doesn’t really matter if she exists in reality.

I’ll take the few words to note what will be evident shortly, that this is a girl I’d be interested in having a relationship with, not just some abstracted woman I’d like to meet one day, following the meeting by going home and crossing ‘Meet Woman of Type X’ off the list of things I want to do before I die. This is a woman I want to talk to, eat with, watch movies with, go to art galleries with, fuck, watch in the bathroom, shower with, drink cheap red wine and bourbon with, drive around town with her and occasionally stealing glances over at her, run drunkenly around 4 A.M. streets throwing beer bottles at cars with, dance to funky music with, argue with, occasionally hate, meet the relatives of, invent games with, be curt and hostile with when I’m in a bad mood, discuss the films we’ve seen together with, be slapped by, joke and bullshit with, slip into her body-warmed bed with after a three day bender, read Bukowski to because I feel like it, care enough for to ‘mother,’ become so frustrated I can’t make sentences with, become so used to sexually I stop noticing other girls for a month of so, get in very few fights over, trust with secrets, know most of the secrets and quirks and eccentricities of, show things I’d written to, run out on checks in shitty restaurants with, etc. In other words, a girl I’d date for a long enough period of time to entertain, and possibly believe the truth of, the idea that I loved her.

These are arranged in approximate order of importance.

She is beautiful. There are many things about women I find beautiful and I’m not too particular as to which is to be found here.

She’s not radically different politically. I’m not particularly ardent about politics, but in America today there are enough deep-running and odious idiocies that this has become very important.

She is no more sentimental than I am. Preferably less, as I can be too sentimental. It’s not hard to be unsentimental, but very hard to remain so over months of emotional engagement. I don’t object to strong and mercurial emotions, but I want to experience them with some purity.

She is either actively or passively, but in any case genuinely, interested in one or more of the modes of artistic expression that interest me. This covers a lot of ground, and any slice of it is fine. I don’t care so much if we like the same things so long as the dislikes are not radically opposed. Best would be if she could tell me things I don’t know about the things I like.

She can talk on my level. This is not a matter of education but of having a bullshit detector, which no school teaches. It is more a way of talking and thinking than any particular subject matter.

She can bullshit on my level. In other words she has a similar sense of humor and is adept at slipping into the same kind of meaningless humor I am. If conversation’s important, being able to take and maintain the thread of a joke, to run with it and stretch it out until it’s as big as it can get, is at least as important as anything else.

We’re compatible sexually. No shit, but this is important. It entails approaching sex with a new partner as a long exploration of the particulars of this body and its pleasures, with ‘explore’ as a very important notion. And it should work in practice.

She’s like Vera to Nabokov or Nora to Joyce. If you know the biographies of those men you’ll know what I mean. I’m not a Nabokov or a Joyce, but I want the same level of support and connection. A woman who’s dedicated to me should be an equal in this way; I don’t just want a sexual slave. Whether or not I want a sexual slave at all is an entirely different question regarding women.

She doesn’t blind herself to it when we’ve grown past each other. Most girls can tell when they’re no longer getting more out of a relationship than they’re putting in, so this is not to be considered as the same as that. It has less to do with self-interest than with knowing and accepting when something’s dead. Tricky.

All of this said, the ultimate truth in the matter is that women will have to be accepted and loved on the terms that exist, not the ones I’d like to see exist, and that I’ll have to accept the girl who comes to me. Honestly, with the knowledge that she’s real and flawed, occasionally overly emotional and idiotic, and not ideal, but losing nothing through that knowledge. As a man I have to realize how good it is to be with a woman. Therein lies the rub, and it’s a real bitch of a rub to get through to, as should be evinced by the fact that I focused this article on an opposite notion.

"Sure you married her, but I can make her cum"

This is very late. Sorry. It's been an absolute flaming 12-cylinder cunt of a week.

***

She’s a special kind of girl.

Without gushing stupidities, she quietly appreciates things you do for her. She says thank you, and means it.

She does not say “We have to talk”. We do not have to talk.

She does not use the word ‘relationship’. We have what we have.

She accepts the fact that I sleep with other women. She probably expects it. She just doesn’t want to be told about it if it’s recent.

Previous indiscretions and conquests are another story. She does not have strange emotional moods when told tales of past debaucheries. She accepts the fact that there have been women before her and will be after her. She does not suffer from that peculiar affliction, “mycockitis”, where 20 minutes after your meeting a woman asserts that your penis is now her property until circumstance or grace demand she hand it back, like a genital Hong Kong.

She accepts the fact that her friends want to fuck me. She simply tells them not to.

When I told her my Rule of C’s (“Cunts crave commitment, companionship and a chump to complain to”) she thought for a second and said she preferred chocolate, champagne and cock.

She is a product of a broken home, abused as a child by a mentally ill mother and a rape victim as a teenager. She has no family now, having disowned and abandoned them for sanity and safety’s sakes. She describes them as a “bunch of fucked up jackals”. Her history with men is one long tale of disappointment and AVOs.

That being said, she is not a victim. Things do not happen to her. She happens to things. She does not wear her past, or her heart, on her sleeve.

She does not have normal feminine emotions. That is to say, irritating, irrational and shallow. She’s perfectly normal all night, then wakes up at half-past six and LEAVES.

She does not like children. She does not want children.

Finally, and Lord of all, she has the most potent, unholy, raging, ceaseless appetite for sex I have ever encountered. I have met and slept with women who like and appreciate a good dicking. I have met and slept with women who are unashamedly horny little strumpets that target men like laser-guided fuckbombs until they get a taste of what lies beneath the denim.

But this is something else entirely.

She craves the tongue, finger and the rod, and if she could dilate enough would probably love the fist, the doorframe and washing machine with the same religious fervour.

Straight, she is rampantly horny. I have never seen her socially in my life without managing to take her home. I can’t resist the idea of the uncomplicated pick-up situation. I don’t have to talk her into it. There is no begging, pleading or even asking, even if she’s with another man. “I bet you could use half-a-dozen continuous orgasms right now” usually does the trick, and a heartbeat she flips off the smudge she’s talking to, goes into estrous and is probably going to molest me in the cab on the way home.

On drugs, she is just unstoppable. She has more orgasms than a Swedish bathhouse and the continual carnivalé of filth only manages to stop sometime in the early afternoon of the next day.

In these situations I lie back with my dick in tatters, thinking she couldn’t possibly want more than that...

...and I feel a small white hand clamp down across the base of my cock. Hard.

An uncomfortable thought occurs, one which has never occurred before. Is this woman is wearing me down? In these situations, I have to consciously remind myself that I am Dr. Cuntsworthy, and no-one wears me down without a note from teacher. The ensuing sex is equal parts savage tenderness and psychic revenge. Thankfully, being held by the neck and fucked brainless is squarely on this woman’s approved list.

“What do you do with normal men?” I will ask later, as I lie in a post-orgasmic dopamine-induced coma.

“Suffer”, she says, bluntly.

Only the most extensive and intense kind of fucking, the kind where I’m worried I’ll wake up next to a smiling corpse and the autopsy will find her cervix up in her brainstem, satisfies her enough to not want sex immediately afterwards. But give her ten minutes, and she can take it again, and more. Her vagina was spun by Eros out of Cupid’s tears, silk and tungsten wire. She is normally sensitive and receptive, but sexually indestructible.

For my birthday, I’m going to ask her to bring a friend. Or two. She probably will.

She is completely incompatible with my life at large. While we have mutual friends, most of the time spent together socially is awkward. I have nothing to say to her. She is willfully and penetratingly stupid, doesn’t understand words like “willfully” and “penetratingly”. Sentences with more than one vaguely complicated word in them are immediately dismissed as “nerd talk”. Her brain wanders off like an autistic six-year-old in a shopping mall. She is only moderately attractive. I would have never slept with her in the first place, except an acquaintance told her certain stories about me which led her to get me drunk and take serious advantage at the first possible opportunity. She has no interest in my intellectual life. She doesn’t know what a PhD is, and doesn’t care. She has no overarching ambitions, and merely does whatever comes next.

I have never met a purer example of the gorgeous, loveable, loathsome, frothing bastard of a contradiction that is woman. A woman who brings her own amyl nitrate and handcuffs, but can frustrate and infuriate me in seconds just by opening her mouth.

A long time ago, after I decided the world was a shallow, nasty place populated largely by blue-veined dicks, I realised this invalidated all the lovely homilies about how men and women relate to each other and the rules had to be re-conceived. Soulmates? Get stuffed. “The one”? The fuck. True love? Please. Don’t piss in my ear and tell me you’re an otorhinolaryngologist.

Mutual respect is the best we could hope for... and like herpes and codependency, it’s something Dr. Phil talks about which most of us just don’t possess. Hell, men and women don’t even like each other. Instead we have a kind of West Bank truce, an uneasy cease-fire punctuated with fitful violence, vicious recrimination and glorious amounts of mutual misunderstanding.

“All men are swine.”

Have you met them all, Ms. Dworkin?

“All women are sluts.”

You mean they seem to find everyone except you attractive, Mr. Bundy?

Armchair sociologists of the world, unite! Link pasty white arms and declare everything incompatible! People with these opinions seem to be for the most part male. Women have a bewitching tendency to repeat them, complain about how the gender wars are “so hard”... and then hang it all and become utterly infatuated at the drop of a belt buckle. At least they still have faith, and faith implies hope. The average man has no such conviction. To him, women are a species solely created to victimise him and his diminutive little pecker. Fortunately for the sake of civilised discourse, there’s a question to shut these slothful fuckers up:

“Why should a woman find you attractive?”

Insert choking on beer and frantic backpedaling here. I’m such a gender traitor.

But that’s who they have to deal with. Women are perpetually surprised to find decent behaviour in men. Their eyes roll back in perplexed shock if they reach orgasm. They are wary and confused if you listen to what they mean, even for a second. Any kind of serious attention turns them floatingly blissful. In short, they are unreasonably grateful if you aren’t a complete pig.

Everyone is incredibly fucked up about sex, men and women alike. Why is a subject for another day. I will confine myself to saying that sexologists, those smiling cretins who think this problem is soluble with orgasm seminars, are putting the cart before the horse. We don’t need to be taught to fuck, we need to be taught to stop being teenagers when we turn twenty. The giant neurotic nervousness that pervades the fumbling of a hundred thousand bra straps will not die easily.