Ripley, Alumnus of Woolloomooloo

"I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library

Line up to the mind cemetery now

What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'

They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em"

 

Rage Against the Machine - Bulls On Parade

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"It does NOT follow that because a good many of the intellectuals belong to the 97 per cent of the broke--that plenty of actors and teachers and nurses and musicians don't get any better paid than stage hands or electricians, therefore their interests are the same. It isn't what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your class--whether you prefer bigger funeral services or more books. I'm tired of apologizing for not having a dirty neck!"

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

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"Could you please explain to me why you do not take tea?"

"Take tea," Jillian sneered. "That's exactly why. You 'take tea.' There's a ritual. Etiquette. It's stupid." She sat forward and pointed to the steaming teapot. "It's a beverage. Hot dirty water in a cup. You pick it up and drink it.

[...]

But I thought your side didn't care about Royalty. Vinny said titles and stuff didn't matter to you guys as much as getting the mission done."
Instead of beckoning the serving Doll, Don King leaned very far forward, reached an uncomfortable and rude distance across the table, and picked up the teapot. With deliberate carelessness, he sloshed tea into his cup, spilling and dripping all over the white lace. As Jillian watched him, he banged down the pot and picked up the fine china cup in his whole fist. He raised it up high, spilling more of it.
"To hot dirty water in a cup!" he shouted loudly. Bunny sort of snapped out of her reverie and leaned away from Don King on the couch, looking slightly alarmed. He put the cup to his mouth and gulped it down, spilling some down his cheeks and onto his shirt. Then he held up the half-empty cup again and bellowed, "To etiquette!"
He hurled the cup backhand, hard, and without a glance at where it might land. It struck a column and shattered against a marble mantle. Jillian stood up sharply.
"What was that!" she demanded.
Don King shrugged. "Me not carin' about Royalty." He wiped his dripping face with his sleeve, exaggerating the slovenliness of the gesture. "Ugly, ain't it? Siddown.

[...]

Just as a mouse cannot choose to be a wolf, a wolf can't live like a mouse. You are so clearly a Royal that it pains me to see how you act. You cannot forever deny the way the Titans made you."

"How?" Jillian challenged. "How am I 'clearly a Royal?'"

"Hundreds of little ways. You act rudely on purpose, but rudeness shocks you."

 

Erfworld, Book 1, Epilogue pp. 20-21

(or, substitute that "Superman's always Superman" speech given by the villain from Kill Bill (what was his name again?))

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I've not bothered watching Rachel Maddow in well over a decade (damn, how much hair dye and collagen is the old girl absorbing on a weekly basis now?*) but that show is where I acquired my taste for longwinded, awkwardly obtuse segues. I also greatly appreciated her not adopting some down-home folksy demeanor to placate the average consumer. Though I can only assume it a universal feature of media marketing, any objective observer must be struck by the frequency with which American celebrities in particular must reinforce their "average Joe" credentials and affect monosyllabic vocabularies. MSNBC's insistence on urbane (there's that word again) middlebrow stars mixing cocktails instead of chugging beer was, in that context, a real breath of fresh air a couple decades ago.

 

I bring this up now because the conjunction of the World Cup and America's big 250 has flooded channels with one transparently dishonest auto da fe after another. Well-read adults with nary a trace of drool on their chins clapping like toddlers in adulation of braindead jocks' high-kicking exploits and waving flags as fake as the plastic one propped up on the moon. As if TV presenters' usual pretense of caring about baseball and American football wasn't bad enough. (Was I ever meant to believe John Oliver watches wrestling? Please.) But, to reverse that train of thought, if watching some Ivy League starched shirt pretend he's jizzing at the mere thought of the next NASCAR race is awkward enough, try selling copies of The Canterbury Tales at a hot dog eating contest.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, Netflix continues its gradual campaign to improve its brand image beyond zombie flicks and sex comedies. A couple of years ago this came in the form of Ripley, previously adapted in glitzier Hollywood fashion as The Talented Mr. Ripley from the story by the same name, which I've never read and will not be addressing. The newer version's an aggressively old school affair, black-and-white, light on effects and camera footwork and heavy on the location shots, characters and acting. It's... excellent, really, and I say that as a SciFi fan rarely bothering with crime dramas. Among its more memorable aspects: the subtlety of the protagonist's portrayal. Despite his repeated successes, Ripley is clever but by no means a superintelligent criminal mastermind, nor the most adept confidence artist. Many times his pathetic desperation, his mental instability, his obvious lack of any coherent grand design, shine through his otherwise sociopathically blank disinterest in anything but climbing over others.

 

The more comedic such moments concern his stumbling attempts to pass as classy. More than a matter of knowing the proper protocol, his intrinsic suspiciousness, over-eagerness, shiftiness, all betray the degenerate gutter rat he really is and always will be underneath all his pretense.** All but the most naive sense something off about the guy. You can hear a similar artificiality in real life in the stilted pretense of respectful speech adopted by cops, all the sirring and the vee-hickle and other polysyllabic posturing so alien to the average flatfoot's mouth that he'd sound more natural reading microwave instructions.

 

It brings my mind around to junior high. For a couple of years I had been gradually drifting farther from my classmates' reliance on slang*** and mindless beat-fillers like "like" but not until 8th grade did I make a conscious decision to avoid the word "cool" - and you'll notice I generally still do, aside from the occasional very pointed interjection. Reliance on terminology expressing no quality of its object, animal calls reflecting only in-group belonging, is not just pointless but open vandalism disrupting thought. Clarity matters. Expressiveness matters. To some.

 

This would have come shortly before Bulls On Parade started rocking the airwaves, and I have to wonder if those Ragers have ever or will ever admit that it was their very own audience that removed the books. "The public stopped reading of its own accord" a savvier observer predicted forty years earlier. As I reached high school, another of those thought-terminating cliches began circling pop culture, one that should still sound familiar: "dead white men." A mighty coalition of the Malcolm-X-worshipping inner city blacks championed by Rage Against the Machine, of feminists, of New Agers and comfortably suburban Asian kids giving teenage rebellion a tentative chance before settling into a lifetime of filial piety, joined by every white kid rebelling against nothing more substantive than homework, all decreed they had nothing to learn from "dead white men" because by the sin of whiteness or of maleness or their most inexcusable deadness, such speakers could not possibly have said anything of relevance to our modern breed. Who needs existentialism, the Bill of Rights and nuclear physics when you can run an entire society on Maya Angelou quotes? Oh, wait, she's dead now...

 

I'm not merely trying to point out the continuation of such rhetoric into the present-day circus of identity politics, but to convey the decline was a long time coming. Certainly since before my own generation. What should have been a break with the authoritarianism of the past, with militarism, with religious brainwashing, with wage slavery, became a myriad piddling dictatorships courting corporate sponsorship and enforcing their own rigid hierarchies of sex or skin color and straining to erase all culture beyond their insipid slogans. Modern revolutionaries have long revealed themselves as not Gavroches but Defarges, driven not by pluck and benevolence but a rudderless animalistic aggression redirected to targets of opportunity "like the flame of a blowlamp" to quote another dead white man. Their intersection with education and intelligentsia has left a wasteland in their wake, a locust swarm of grievance studies departments and diversity consultants and feminist math curricula gleefully completing the work of right wing defunding and religious pressure in destroying both universities and lower education.

 

Both supposedly opposing sides are eager enough to fabricate their own history. The old gilded revisionism painting tidy images of heroic settlers sweeping across an empty American continent scattering a few unworthy savages and kindly giving a home to African extracts was ridiculous in its own right, sure. But what's the point of replacing it with a farcical monster story in which the only crimes in history are those of Europeans and men are descended from apes but women are descended from heaven and drag queens first landed on the moon in Malinese spaceships? Or whatever the fuck they're cooking up next. There is no more honesty in limiting thought to declarations that George Washington Was A Slaveowner than in claiming the Civil War was about "states' rights" and leaving it at that.

 

There you have the horseshoe effect of the tyranny of the majority, whether expressed in pledges of allegiance to god and country or to believe women and yaass queen. Regardless of whether they facetiously claim to support tradition or minority rights, unions or free enterprise, the real enemy of the rabble is always logic, truth and above all intellect. Because, much like honest Tom, they can't fake nobler faculties. And we live by the mind. Mental incompetence poisons everything.

 

You can despise the foppish antiquated claims to noble pursuits, deny any inherent superiority of theater or opera over animation or video games, yet still must acknowledge the nobility of superior plays or games. Are they more original, complex, incisive, challenging, provocative? You can deny any inherent superiority of a particular race but have no place denying the nobler achievements of representatives of that race. Are they more honest or insightful? You can deny whatever authority professors might have once derived by social rank, but not the regal manifestation of expertise in a particular field. To do so is suicide. Such expertise upholds your entire existence, from the most mundane material goods around you to the leashing of hired thugs from killing you for sport.

Your betters will not share your worse interests. It's funny, football wasn't my favorite thing growing up, but I used to like it well enough. Maybe it's because I had a child's tastes, but maybe it's also because matches used to have their results printed in newspapers or be reported play-by-play over the radio. Less pressure to entertain the lizard brain. A match from the '80s or before was a more sedate, well-considered, polite affair. The more widely and constantly they got televised, the more yokels the sport needed to please all at once, the more it shifted toward faster, more violent gameplay approaching the lowest common denominator of a monkey brawl, ignoring more and more risky or injurious plays and outright cheating which would once have gotten players thrown off the field or off a team, in the interest not of the contest itself but of a limbic payoff for the customers. Your excitement bores me.

 

And what is academe, after all, but in the words of another one of those dead white men "a modern school where football is taught" - ?

 

A spectator sport. Buy a ticket and yell some slogans.

 

 

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* Just goes to show wolves can be catty too. Still, is it too much to ask that at least our lesbians age gracefully? Or do all roads lead to Sunset Boulevard?

** Okay, let's say the word we're all thinking at this point: Trump. But I did not want to further derail a long post.

*** Thankfully "dude" was more of a Bart Simpson catchphrase at the time. Thanks for nothing, it didn't stay that way.