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June 24, 1998
Volume 14: Pick a Window, You're Leaving
Date: Sun, 21 Jun 1998 00:41:17 +0200
From: Kevlar (kevlar@dds.nl)
To: "G.Turkington" (G.Turkington@Queens-Belfast.AC.UK)
Subject: not fanmail
Dear Sir,
With regards to the comment you made to Aunty
[sic] Dynamite (see
below) on behalf of the Dutch nation, I
convey to you this message:
Spin on it, Xenophobic freak.
Hope this ruins your day,
Regards,
Ruud Lubbers, The Netherlands.
Auntie Dynamite
Hypercube
Industries
June 24th, 1998
Dear Mr. Lubbers,
I would like to express my outrage at your
sentiments. I am shocked and dismayed that you
chose to vent your spleen on the savvy and
charming Citizen Turkington without a moment's
thought for my feelings.
An average of once a fortnight, for the last six
months, I have done my utmost to transmit the
most atonal bile I had stockpiled. I have not
once gotten hate mail. Much less mail inviting me
to engage in potentially obscene acts appropriate
to one of my genetic makeup.
I hope you will reconsider your insensitivity in
future.
Your humble servant,
Auntie
Dynamite
I suppose it's easy to pretend you, yes, you, gentle reader, aren't one of those I'm railing against. But you are, and so am I. Every damn day of our lives we engage in degenerate and stupid and callous acts that brutalize the only person that we have to wake up with every day.
I'm talking about the self-sabotages that we do every time we put stuff above sanity. We tell ourselves that we "have no choice" when the reality is that we prefer to go on as we are and want a convenient fiction to back up our decisions.
Prefer? Now Auntie, that's a harsh word, isn't it. What about people who prefer to put braces on their kids and pay their mortgage?
Sure, that's a preference, and depending on your particular motivation set, probably a valid reason to make what decisions you do. You prefer to choke the drug testing because you want the job that pays more than you want to be singled out, more than you want to spend the time and money to take it to court and see just what the Justices will have to say. Avoiding being targeted is a powerful evolutionary mechanism and most won't fault you for bowing to it.
But I will. We've sunk our claws into this ball of mud by dint of will, and now that we've gotten comfortable, we're doing our best to forget our savage forebears. We're so paranoid and oversensitive that we let institutions with the moral sense of two year olds run roughshod over us when what they need is a good spanking.
But I won't get into my views on spanking unless you're Uncle Demon.
"Which institutions are those, Auntie?" I ask with an idiot smile.
All of them. Schools. Government. Organized religion. Pornography. Communism. Capitalism. Socialism. Environmentalism. Technocracy. "Netizenism". Feminism. Goths. Grunge. Yuppies. "Alternative" anything.
Wait, wait, wait. I'm not saying any of these things is all bad. You put whatever clothes on your body that you need or want to wear, to suit your environment and to suit your tastes. But do you take such care of your mind, the only thing that sets you above your housepets?
Let's check the labels in my closet. Most of them say iconoclast but some of them don't. Those over there say eroticism and pornography, but I only wear those with Uncle Demon's physical or theoretical person. This little number says feminist -- I like the design but not the fit so I wear it rarely. A little more socialism denim than capitalism silk and no communism sackcloth. What's this? Patriotism? Oh, a few, because I'm Canadian and have the traditional intolerance of America. And so on.
My wardrobe contains as few straitjackets as possible because I consider them undignified. Check yours. When was the last time you defended the political party you were registered under simply because you felt you should? Insulted a man for holding the door open for you because you feared he was being sexist? Proclaimed that your country was better than, than, than? Let's get a bit grayer. When was the last time you didn't say something you did believe, for fear of being controversial, insulting, a target? Or most insiduous of all: fear that you were wrong and would be humiliated for it?
In short, when was the last time you ate everything that was put in front of you, even though you weren't that hungry? Today?
I do it, and I'm willing to lay money that you do. I have my needs and agendas same as everyone else. The difference between me and you is that I don't mistake my clothes for my skin*. Some of these garters might snap pretty tight against my thighs, but I take them off when I bathe. Or when there's somebody that makes me care about their skin more than I care about their clothes.
*(If we don't differ in this way, good. There's some hope for humanity after all.)
But to refute all that, I'll cite a conversation I had ten minutes ago, where someone quoted to me, "You make choices on a moment to moment basis that often you're not even aware you have."
I sat up in my chair. I was excited. I said, "What's that from?"
My friend said, "You, over the phone, last night."
I said, "Shit, make me buy my own propaganda."
Posted by cd at June 24, 1998 12:28 AM
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