The secular religion of the Commander offered the son (and the daughter) of man a choice between becoming a leader in the System or becoming a mere follower of it.
There was also a third choice, but it was false–only a crusty gag; to wit:
‘Lead, follow, or … get the hell out of the way!’ (of the System and Its priorities).
Most among us chose the Leadership path, as obviously more rewarding. Some followed, for a time, and then veered into the lead to varying degrees for varying segments of the life journey …
In practical terms I myself Followed–not without surliness, and most definitely with the intention that following was only a means to an end.
The end was the promised land of Valhalla, of permanent and enduring Helloutta, The Way.
With firm politeness I turned down every chance I was offered to join the Leadership.
I followed the follower’s end until it was finally and truly a dead one. (The System grew up around me even in the remotest places I’d deliberately chosen, until nowhere could be found an option any more to be anything but a good submissive follower or a bold leader fully embracing the System in all its satanic glories.)
In the stasis that resulted I became obsessed all over again with refining and defining what it meant to grasp the joke option with seriousness, with tracing the exact location and boundaries of the hell-out, of the Way.
Hell-out is also helot, from the Greek halonai: “taken captive, conquered, imprisoned, enslaved”, or maybe at best reduced to a kind of spartan serf.
But I would argue that a better word for it is lumpenprole, which the man who coined the term said meant “the rabble, poorest of the working class,” and “who make (he further sniffed) no contribution to the workers’ cause”.
Partly this is because I see the dedicated Followers, and most of the Leaders too, as the real slaves. The house negroes on the plantation called the System. And while Karl Marx (and maybe you too) would violently disagree with me about that, I have Malcolm X on my side, so I say:
Whatever, Mr. Manifesto.
I consciously choose not to be defined as a ‘Worker’.
Thanks anyway.
But enough about me.
I’ve been selfish just like daddy was.
This is a letter to you. For you.
***
The System did not work for the first father, for my father. He did not work for the System.
The System worked very well though, for the second father, for your father, and he worked for It, too.
Thus did It advantage him; much did It profit him;
Thus did it become a self-fulfilling Philosophy, for (almost) a whole family of children.
Amen.
I am my father’s first and only legitimate son, the only one to bear both his names, and though we all were, each and every one, accursed of his seed, I alone still bear that curse.
When I die, it dies with me. I am the last.
Because you were saved.
Redeemed.
In the blood of the Commander and the blood shed of his System, and by his self-fulfilling Philosophy that transcended all Jehovahs and the divine right of all usurping mortal kings.
Brothers. Sisters. Countrymen.
Lend me your ears.
Brutus says that Caesar was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honorable man.
(Now then let it work
Mischief, run thee
underfoot; take thou
whatever course thou wilt.)
***
Those for whom the System works–those whom It advantages–are bent by It to see It favorably, and to wave away any discussion of Its potential faults, and even (perhaps especially) suggestions about Its fundamental unfairness and immorality. Even Its evil.
The more the System sees fit to reward people, in terms of economics and creature comforts, the more likely it is that those same rewarded people will be happy with, praise, and defend the System regardless of its failings. (“Common pleasures to walk abroad and recreate yourselves”, in the further oratory of Mark Antony.)
The more likely they will be, to fly Old Glory from their porches on the Fourth.
And to believe against the evidence of their own senses that this is still a democracy, and thus believe their vote somehow still matters.
The lesser the rewards, the more the dissatisfaction and discontent.
Fewer and fewer people are becoming less and less advantaged, regardless of how slavishly devoted they are to the System and trying to become leaders of It, or followers within It.
At the same time, the gap between the rewarded and the unrewarded is growing ever more vast.
Forty hours a week at average wages no longer buys you a roof and a pot to piss in, in most cities and states. You need to be rewarded more amply than is common, just to survive. And gods be praised–you have been. You have a house, and it is a nice one, doubtless well-deserved.
Meanwhile: Wealth of Top 1% SOARS To $44 TRILLION (for comparison, the GDP of the entire US is 25 trillion). The top ten percent own 67% of all wealth.
And if an honest parent cannot feed their kids, well, that’s just a damn shame. They should have studied harder, or been born luckier.
This is what best explains Trump.
It’s not that the People are stupid, lazy, toothless, incestuous, deplorable, and dumb, out there in the red states, even if there may be a grain of truth in these propagandist stereotypes that have been relentlessly beaten into your head in a thousand ways usually too subtle to notice.
It is that, on the one hand, that they are simply not finding a way to attain the kind of rewards they’ve been led to expect for selling their labor and souls to Moloch the Lord of the System … and on the other hand, the kindly facade of the Empire has steadily and relentlessly crumbled away.
“The american People are starting to feel the pain“, the same pain that their owners have endlessly inflicted on the rest of the world behind their backs for their entire lives in the name of security, democracy, and hegemony.
It is the pain of the People, inflicted by the System, that will lead to the Orange Man’s second term seven months from now.
We know now, what the System has been doing all over the world for decades, mostly to poor, brown, and powerless people in order to amass ‘our’ wealth and make possible ‘our’ god-granted standard of living. (And the hicks want their cut just like we demand ours.)
We know now, that It lies–they lie, those leaders of leaders–as a matter of habit.
We know now, that the System murders without apology or even conscience when it suits the interests of the System to do so. That we are owned by psychopaths.
We know now, that the rulers of the System, ‘our’ rulers, are all of them ugly stupid hypocritical Massas or house slaves, and sometimes we might even feel a twinge of guilt for sharing in that very hypocrisy.
This knowing can’t be reversed into unknowing no matter how hard we try.
So even the most blessed of us fly our dirigibles in a thick fog of cognitive dissonance, every endless day and every long night, a shuddering vortex of a very civilized madness with no way out. It gets hotter and hotter, but we ain’t seen nothing yet.
We buy pretty things. We try to steer to the pretty places and float up the cliff faces.
What pain of it our brains can’t handle goes into our feet or our lungs or our eyes, and then right back into our brains anyway like an addictive spike shoved deep in the medulla, a prisoner’s shiv that we personally crafted and sharpened with love.
***
Falling on a termite.
Kill the headlights and put it in neutral.
Yo bring it on down.
For this one day.