Guns aren't lawful. Nooses give. Gas smells awful. Might as well live.

Vignettes On Anger

***

Reticence

There is no place in the world quite as lonely as a shopping mall and there is nothing quite as distressing as the people in it. Chasms yawn between my notepad and the next table. The nearest distended white face is hundreds of yards away across the aisle. The features are blurred together from here. Chins invade cheeks, tits declare war on each other and start spreading across the chest, guts declare “Westward ho!” and charge forward ascendant under polyester. Legs flop like errant tentacles, carrying forward amorphous glassy-eye’d sacks which gently bump around in consumption lockstep.

These people are not even greks (pr. grk: prole, plebeian, scum; exclusively derogatory) – greks are cavemen, apes hooting and laughing around a fire. For all their shortcomings, Greks are alive, even vital at times. Yes, they are throwbacks to an earlier era before things like evolution and hygiene became popular and they bring literally nothing to the figurative table. Yes, I have spent substantial portions of time trying to escape their influence. Yes, I would rather boil myself than have a conversation with most of them.

But for their glaring flaws, at least they are whole animals. These people are not. These are cellular automata in a resource redistribution matrix. They are worker bees, or termites, or flywheels and gears. I feel unpleasant in their machine, a meated interloper caught in the clicketty-clack of an unfamiliar mechanism. It reminds me far too well that truth I might seek is their truth, bought and paid for by their world.

Their world, damnit. I walk their streets, dodge their cars and pavement crawlers, work in their industries, buy their food, unwillingly dip my toes in their culture, search through their women looking for one I don’t want to skin and gut, and sitting here in their huge plastic doll’s house I feel the pain that they don’t, the great rolling expanse of pure unadulterated vacancy. Can this space be filled? Is there some kind of eminently sensible process of maturity that I have missed, which will let me see this whole business as something other than an abomination against everything worthwhile?

Can I ever forgive the vast majority of the Earth’s broken, stupid, horrible, mean, petty, wretched biomass?

***

Harmony

Few books offer significant insights into the human mind. Many books try too hard to do so and end up being moderately bad in the process as the effort to produce something original often overtakes the effort to produce something good. An average book will manage a few new or interesting ideas around an uninspired central thesis. A select few offer the kind of searing truth that is immediately recognisable and requires you to sit down immediately and think about it for a while, as it ploughs through the corridors of your mind, slamming doors open.

To that end, read and re-read Arendt’s The Banality of Evil.

With my massively reductionist hat on, this book is about the trials of Eichmann at Nuremberg. Arendt was initially puzzled by the fact that the man was essentially an actuary of genocide. A component of a big Jew-killin’ machine, he never considered the actions outside of the end of his desk. He was just glad that he got to sign papers and didn’t have to smell the gas and fear himself. His evil, his palpable hatred that the world was waiting to see, was entirely absent. His monstrosity was not in his wild emotions, but in his lack of them. He did not do evil for evil’s sake, rather evil for accountancy’s sake.

And that was the really scary part. The last sentence of the book is the first mention of the phrase it immediately popularised – the banality of evil. It turns out to be nothing special, acts done by ordinary people with extraordinary justifications, with all the concomitant emotional involvement of putting on a hat.

Somehow Stalin’s snaggletooth’d Red Army shanking peasants in the neck, Genghis Khan’s hordes blasting arrows through ancient Chinese, monstrous acts of savagery and torture by African warlords and visions of wild-eyed terrorists in Baghdad streets seem more acceptable than the clinical precision and order implied by the construction and systematic usage of a dedicated human extermination facility.

It is much easier to believe that the former are aberrations, brutish sub-humans duped by power, ideology or religion. But a modernist genocide reminds us very rudely that the amoral is a human faculty like any other and people are perfectly willing to dive hips-deep into cruelty with the appropriate validation, and no amount of Beanie Babies can change this.

Hate is a small emotion. It swings fists, throws words, flings feelings. Petulance swollen, grown large. It does not usually move countries or give armies the order to advance. Perhaps it can be harnessed or directed en masse, controlled to some degree, but it is essentially a private matter. In the abstract, it’s merely cute. Overused. Somewhat tired. A word that plays outs its possibilities with incorrect usage and the absence of a substantial target.

Obedience and stupidity, especially together, are far more dangerous... and far more common.

***

Resolution

I always liked to write angry, and about anger.

I want the words to some flying off the screen, cranked-up pixels swinging billhooks and broken whiskey bottles, burning through into the retina, hacking their way into the brain and chewing sides off the cortex.

I want to feel the reader sharply draw breath as the reflection on the words makes them sneer and stamp across their face kicking hobnails about them, sinking cheeks, shattering cheekbones, crushing septum.

I want the page to snarl and spit, for the paper to grow teeth, for the ink to bubble and turn poisonous, for the book to snap its own spine and hurl the pieces like a javelin.

I want to be able to translate how much our collective meat experiment should mean to you, morons, livers of the unexamined life, bottom-feeders. I want to teach you how to feel and why you should learn to justify your chemistry. I want to twist your rubber smiling mask into a rictus of fear, hook your eyes open and feed your brain with images of new moon haunts and the wraiths of nightmare.

I want to jam the fork you use to backfill your maw into a mains socket, rub broken glass across the inside of your empty skull and pour boiling lead on your feet to get them moving.

I am the Doctor, and I freestyle blowtorch discourse hoping to hit a mode of expression that will stun you rigid under your blankets and make you cry for the Mummykins that doesn’t love you.

Bury your face in her skirt, you halfwits, you nematodes! Show me when I’ve cut you so I can throw sulphur and bile in the wound. Show me where you hurt so I can jab the bruise. Show me your secrets so I can jam them back into you.

I want to burn out the impurities and clean you, and I want to rend you down into lard and remould you a grand homunculus, and I want you to realise that beaten and defeated is far better than the dirty, empty marionette show your tired fingers command. You are jerking strings with no puppet, you fucking brute.