My arm is in a sling. It was my turn to beat Mrs. Drew and in my excitement I pulled a muscle in my forearm. I should make more of an effort to control my emotions.
—Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight
Even in the 19th Century too many Europeans persisted in the belief that kings and queens and such were somehow some higher order of human. Floating still as a derelict on the waters of the continental consciousness the atavistic notion that there was something at least semi-divine about royal folk; that said humans literally lorded it over others because The Sky Lord had, for reasons that passeth understanding, ordained it that way.
Imagine the surprise, then, of young Hans Christian Andersen, when his mother took him out one day to see, live and in person, Frederick VI, King of Denmark, and occasionally of Norway. And, from his perch in the crowd, young Hans perceived that the royal fellow resembled more the man in the street, than the man in the moon.
"Oh!" Hans cried out. "He's nothing more than a human being!"
His mother, horrified, hushed him. "Have you," she hissed, "gone mad, child?"
Although this is not the rabbit hole down which I intend to go, it is worth noting that some people believe that Frederick was Hans' biological father. And this empurpled personage did express something of an unusual interest in the lad, paying, for instance, for part of the young man's education.
In any event, when in 1837 Andersen inscribed "The Emperor's New Clothes," he remembered this event—seeing the king as he was. In that tale, a couple of sharpies convince an emperor, wholly besotted with his personal apparel, that they possess a magic material from which they can weave a fine set of threads that will remain invisible "to everyone who was unfit for the office he held, or who was extraordinarily simple in character."
The emperor commands that these garments be prepared at once. And so they were.
Of course, in truth, no clothes existed at all. The rogue tailors pocketed the silk and gold they had requested for inclusion in the royal robes, and, when they announced their task completed, presented the emperor with precisely . . . nothing.
The emperor, presented with nothing, says to himself: "How is this? I can see nothing! This is indeed a terrible affair! Am I a simpleton, or am I unfit to be an Emperor? That would be the worst thing that could happen!" And so he effusively praises the miscreants for their magnificent work. As had his ministers and courtiers before him—likewise fearing that their perception of the non-existence of the emperor's new clothes signified some fault within themselves, rather than the Reality that the clothes did not exist at all.
And so the emperor proudly dons his new non-suit, and proceeds to parade, nude, before the people.
The people too had been apprised that their lord would be clad in clothes visible only to the worthy. And so, rather than comment on the spectacle of the royal one wandering naked before them, they gabble madly of non-Reality: "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!"
Till some anonymous little boy gives voice to the true: "But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" At which point the farce collapses. Except to the emperor and his minions: "The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold."
Andersen's story was at the printer, when he decided to change the ending. Originally, there was no boy. And the emperor passed through the whole of the people without a soul speaking the truth. All believed it wiser to remain silent.
The peculiar penchant of humans for believing that identifying something as Wrong is somehow worse than the Wrong itself, is everywhere manifest.
It was recently on display here at the Orange Place. When there appeared a Diary inscribed by a survivor of grievous childhood sexual abuse, who wasn't much moved to mourn the passing of Joe Paterno, erstwhile emperor, because Paterno chose to continue to fiddle about with boys brutalizing each other on a lawn over a ball, rather than acknowledge that his once and future lieutenant was off in the weeds engaging in child-rape and other sexual mayhem.
Umbrage, in the comments, and in feeder diaries, was repeatedly expressed, on such matters as the diarist's decision to employ the word "fuck," or to select the moment of Paterno's passing as a time to note that this emperor diddled with passing lanes and body blocks, while his charges were shoved into showers and criminally stripped of their clothes.
The Diary, in short was Rude. And the Rude, so went the complaint, trumped the Wrong.
In the comments to the original Diary, it was noted that parishioners of a Jesus preacher were similarly known to shriek and poke their eyes out when he would observe:
"I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said 'shit,' than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night."
The "shit," then, so much more Wrong than the starving, dead children.
Who, whenever they are invoked, deserve at least this benediction, from Richard Crashaw, inscribed back in the day when humans could still naively, touchingly, blind themselves that another, better world, exists after this one:
Go, smiling souls, your new-built cages break,
In heaven you’ll learn to sing, ere here to speak,
Nor let the milky fonts that bathe your thirst
Be your delay;
The place that calls you hence is, at the worst,
Milk all the way.
The dawn of the Obama administration brought forth the phenomenon of ceaseless howls of outrage directed at people with functioning cerebrums, all of whom observed racism in this country resurgent with the installation of a black man in the White House.
Any human not in a persistent vegetative state has seen that, as an example, the teabaggers were born and bred of, and depend upon as their very oxygen, racism.
That, as Jill Lepore put it in The Whites Of Their Eyes, this racism so inflames teabaggers and others of their ilk that "everything about Barack Obama and his administration [is] somehow alarming, as if his election had ripped a tear in the fabric of time."
An observation last week repeated by Lee Siegel, in a piece in the New York Times, explaining the appeal of Mitt Romney as the whitest motherfucker to run for president in living memory: "[W]hether he means to or not, Mr. Romney connects with a central evangelic fantasy: that the Barack Obama years, far from being the way forward, are in fact a historical aberration, a tear in the white space-time continuum."
And yet one can hear, for 12 hours every day, on the hate-radio programs that blanket more than 600 radio stations, which wave their fetid air into every household in this land, that voicing these correct perceptions of racism, are of several magnitudes Worse than the racism itself.
We went through something similar, some will recall, here on the Orange Place. Where, for months, for years, deafening lamentations sounded, garments were feverishly rended, at expressions of the correct perception that racism exists too on the left, and, yea verily, demonstrably on this very site.
That this was denied is, in a way, as touching, though exasperating, as those who would cling to Crashaw's 400-year-old delusion that starved-unto-death children go to a Heaven where there is "milk all the way." Rather than just . . . wink out. Forever.
That the emperor has new clothes: it's a dream, that dies hard.
As the Obama administration too consists of humans, it is not immune to this malady.
And so this week we have been subjected to the spectacle of former CIA agent John Kiriakou indicted for allegedly speaking to reporters, and/or criminal-defense attorneys, and/or other such miscreants, of "classified information," concerning the torture of the War on Terra prisoner Abu Zubaydah.
Though, so far as is known, no one involved in actually torturing Zubaydah, has been brought to account, at any level.
Here, the Obama administration subscribing to the notion that speaking of the Wrong, is greater than the Wrong itself.
As I wrote here, Abu Zubaydah is, to me, the ground zero, the original sin of the War on Terra. In addition to that piece, I have previously written about Zubaydah here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here. I imagine I'll be writing about him for so long as I write.
Though—it's curious—nobody really knows where he is. It is thought that he is in Guantanamo. But nobody really knows.
Though I know of one place he is. Every day. And that's in my head.
Abu Zubaydah was of the inheritance that Barack Obama received from George II. And that Zubaydah has not been released, is not being cared for, is still somewhere in the gulag of the War on Terra—this is, to me, Obama's "to kill a mockingbird" sin.
Because this is a man who is literally insane. Was known to be insane within days after he was apprehended. Was further known to be of no intelligence value whatsoever. As useful to the pursuit of the War on Terra as any grievously mentally ill man or woman picked up off any American street.
And yet he is still out there. In there. Somewhere.
For those who don't want to proceed past the squiggle, I'll leave you with this image.
American humans are very good at erecting war memorials. Someday, inevitably, some memorial will be erected, somewhere, in some fashion, to the War on Terra.
Heretofore, all such memorials have been static. They did not move. But here in the 21st Century, humans are so beyond that. They can build anything. And so this is what they should build, American humans, to commemorate their War on Terra. In three dimensions, and in constant movement. What they—you—have made of Abu Zubaydah. What he's out there, in there, somewhere doing. As this piece you read.
“He spent all of his time masturbating. Like a monkey in the zoo. He went at it so much, at some point he injured himself. They had to intervene. He didn’t care that they were watching him. He masturbated constantly. He wasn’t facing the camera, but it was rigged so there was no place for him not to be seen.
"He complained to the interrogator that he would never have the chance to feel a woman’s touch again, and lament that he would never have children. He freaked at one point, because there was blood in his ejaculate. He saved it for the doctors in a tissue, to show them in the morning.
"The doctor said not to worry."
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