Dear diary,
Why is jail better than freedom? Because when you’re free, you choose your own adventure, and your choice always leads to total isolation; whereas, if the state’s armed thugs throw you in a cage, you meet many new people, including (but not limited to): the clerk who checks you in and notes down your belongings; the guard who sprays you with a hose to wash you; and of course your cellmates, who all have opinions and stories to share.
Now when you seize control of three or four major countries, you then proceed on to conquer the rest of the world, or else die trying. Either that, or you decide that every successful land-grab is pretty much the same (the vanquishing of each new town is merely a repeat of the last town-smashing victory), thus rendering the feat of world-domination just as boring as washing dishes; and so you retire and move to a hallowed place inside of a mountain.
How do you claim a universe as your own? You enter a universe, commit your mayhem: you steal goods, you steal beings; then you move to the next universe. Rename the universe after yourself. Boom: job is done.
That last sentence (“Boom: job is done.”) is a direct quote of Officer Duke, from the film Wrong Cops (2013). It’s from the scene where he tells Officer Sunshine how to dispose of the guy that he (Duke) accidentally shot. But only the last sentence of mine is Duke’s, not the rest of the paragraph – all that stuff about conquering worlds is my own.
I’m trying to answer the question: Why did God decide to retire into a mountainside, instead of living with his people. My gut tells me that he got tired of scooping up nations. But (and I’ve said this before) I think God’s lonely; I think he regrets his decision, but he doesn’t know how to reverse his course. To stand up and leave the cave or the bush that’s on fire, or wherever it is that you’ve chosen to make your home, would be easy as pie; but admitting that you were mistaken in your judgment — that’s the hard part. How does the perfect creator of all that exists, the one who will judge every soul on the day the world ends, admit to an error? Is it even possible for DOOM to apologize?
So we have these laws and a constitution. I’m talking about the U.S., which is where I’m holed up. It strikes me as funny that so much of our rule book comes from Great Britain. Apparently our forefathers strove with all their might to break themselves free of that tyrannical domain, and then the moment they gained sovereignty, the first thing they did is reinstate the oppressions that had oppressed them: the law of the land.
It’s like, someone’s whipping you, so you rise up, strike the whipper and seize his whip; then you turn back around and proceed to whip yourself even harder, while muttering “I can perform this task more efficiently myself.”
My point is that I think maybe we should have gotten rid of all laws. We should only have one single law, or rather not a law but a state of mind: no matter what happens, we should follow the principle: Any act that shows compassion for living creatures is permissible; and any act that appears otherwise should be avoided.
Do you really think that this would work?
Immediately after typing the above question mark, I forced myself to re-read Chapter 7 of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. That’s where Paul talks about the law. For those of you who are just tuning in to this diary of mine, I should repeat that I do not believe in God, no: I hate God; tho I love the King James Bible because it seems to me like a crazy collection of texts, some sublime some stupid, that sum to the grand total DADA, which is better or worse than nada. So in the first two verses Paul says
Know ye not, brethren, how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he lives? For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he lives; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.
This reminds me: today is my boss’s anniversary. He’s been married to his wife for eighteen years now. Or nineteen or twenty, I forget. Normally I would go work for him today (I’m writing this trash on Saturday morning), but he sent me a text on Wednesday, saying (here I pick up my phone and navigate its menus so that I can quote his text message verbatim):
Sorry, forgot to mention, can’t get together Sat. it’s Jessie and my anniversary, so I will hang with her that day.
By “hang” he does not mean that they’ll die on a cross together, to prove their love for each other. He means that they’ll just chill and watch shows on Netflix. (For those of you who are fortunate enough to inhabit a time so far in the future that you have forgotten what hell was like, “Netflix Inc. is an American media-services provider headquartered in Los Gatos, California.”)
So what is marriage? It’s a way for a man to own a woman as property. It used to be that a caveman would club a woman upon the head, to knock the woman unconscious (no woman would ever consciously marry a male human); then drag the woman back to his hole in the hillside (hence his name “Mountain God”, which means “dweller in bush on Sinai”), after which they’d wed and live happily ever after.
In verse 3, Paul says:
So then if, while her husband is alive, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.
Let’s translate these terms to illuminate the American Revolution:
IF, while the U.S.’s husband Great Britain is still king of the hill, the U.S. tries to sleep between Canada and Mexico, two fine bedfellows, THEN the U.S. shall be considered a steamy temptress: In this case, the U.S. should be stoned to death by Good Christian Soldiers, who are the only people sinless enough to cast judgment. HOWEVER, IF the U.S.’s husband Great Britain can be chased off the top of the hill and relegated to live in a bush near its lower extremities, THEN the U.S. can go to bed with whoever it wants, even Israel and Saudi Arabia. But let Australia always remain her bondmaid.
I’ve always wondered how slavery worked. I use past-tense (worked rather than works), not because slavery is eradicated—God forbid!—but only because we don’t see huge boats of slaves constantly arriving and departing, offering for public sale their living cargo, at least here in North America, as was the scene back in the days when the market was truly free and not all shackled with pesky regulations such as “Thou shalt not vend humans.” (I’m glad that our current Prez Mr. Trump is abolishing as many of these annoying regulations as possible; he’s doing the Lord’s work.) So I always wondered how it happened that people got turned into products to be exchanged for money, instead of treated with dignity and respect, as at present; because now we’ve advanced to the point where humans are not sold outright but merely rented as wage laborers.
Whenever one of us postmodern souls researches her family tree, she’s always afraid the thing will be populated with slave-owners. This would be bad, because it would make yourself, the descendent of these slave-owners, feel that any wealth you currently enjoy is but the result of unjust practices. You’d question your own worth; you’d maybe feel so guilty about your ill-gotten privilege that you’d wish to give away all your belongings, to right this wrong. But would giving away one toga, one canoe, one pair of wooden slippers, and one gift card for Avacado Avenue, make up for the torture and death of nine million Hyperboreans? And how would you even find the right people to give to? Did the folks that your forefathers worked to death have a chance to bear children? If so, you could locate their kids and bequeath them your treasure. But what if these children are found to have married the offspring of slave-owners? Then you’d be righting your wrong by committing further improprieties.
I say, give your stuff to them anyway. They’ve been eyeing that canoe for years now. They’ll make good use of it.
But I really wanted to ask: What country did your slaves get stolen from? I assume they got lassoed and dragged off, as opposed to choosing the likes of you to be their life coach, cuz people don’t board slave ships willingly, two by two: One must threaten to flood their planet first.
But what’s the deal; do you seriously trick them with fake promises? or do you take them at knife-point right out of their native mansions? or do you set up some bogus laws and then jail them when they break them?
Here’s what I suggest: Set up a debt trap. Make the interest rate mathematically impossible to escape from. That’s what I meant when I said “Flood ’em, universally.” Then, when they can’t pay anymore, go charge into their mansion holding your two tablets of law, and exclaim really loudly that these laws were written by the finger of God, and say further “I have no choice but to send your soul to Hell, friend.” You don’t even need to use a weapon, if you have a convincing set of laws. You can just hire a thug to carry weapons in your stead. By reinvesting your profits, you can eventually acquire a number of such thugs. These thugs are called “muscle”. And this is how you yourself can technically remain spotless, while at the same time violating your own code of ethics: If someone’s giving you trouble, you just turn and wink at Luca Brasi, and he’ll understand intuitively your unspoken command: Head over to the realm of the Hyperboreans and steal a discrete percentage of their population. (“Luca Brasi is the mafia boss Vito Corleone’s personal enforcer in The Godfather, a 1972 American crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola.”) So this way you can plausibly deny having orchestrated singlehandedly the entire North American slave trade.
I just wanna return to Paul’s Roman epistle, before we all head to the ladies’ room for Archduchesses. [Section 1918–1919 of Ellmann’s James Joyce bio reports that while Joyce’s friend Weiss was joining him in sampling a white Swiss wine called Fendant de Sion, “he lifted the half-emptied glass, held it against the window like a test tube, & asked Weiss, ‘What does this remind you of?’ Weiss looked at Joyce & at the pale golden liquid & replied, ‘Orina.’ ‘Si,’ said Joyce laughing, ‘ma di un’arciduchessa’ (‘Yes, but an archduchess’s’). From now on the wine was known as the Archduchess.”] In verse 14, Paul says:
We know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.
The Apostle here is referring to peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude: a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. (“Legally,” the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service’s website assures us, “peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867.”) For Paul was a peon, who got shipped to the U.S.A. because he could not pay his mafia bill. It was a very spiritual law, in those ancient times. Today’s law is more amenable to corporate influence; that’s why you never hear about any banks or multinationals going belly-up, let alone intergalactic deities. And C.E.O.s are rarely seen behind bars.
Think about it: Do animals want to be in the zoo?
What if God came down from outer space in his flying saucer and beamed you up into heaven, against your will? Wouldn’t you be scared? Why can’t God persuade us to go with him WILLINGLY? Why this constant need for subterfuge? If the boat is really the best place to swim, then why do you have to lure me with worms on hooks? or holy sacred nets? Simply invite me, with a hand-delivered card written in my native tongue, to jump in and join your party: I’ll splash right up out of the sea and very happily breathe your air. It’s better than this water, I’ve heard — even the water of archduchesses.
Peter says to his buddies, “I go a fishing for men” (that is: slavehunting). They say unto him, “We also go with thee.”
They went forth, and entered into a slaver ship; but that night they caught nothing.
Then when the morning was come, CHRIST THE LORD stood on the shore: but the disciples knew not that it was their savior CHRIST THE LORD.
Obviously I’m quoting the King James Bible’s translation of the Gospel According to John (ch. 21); but here I want to mix in a little dialogue from the Wrong Cops screenplay, which was written by Quentin Dupiuex, because it’s my favorite film, and it perfectly matches the tenor of St. John’s narrative.
So, like I said, the disciples crouched, ready for action, in their slaver ship, all night long, and yet they caught no salable items.
Then, early next morn, lo: CHRIST THE LORD appears in full glory, shouting: “G’day mates! Ye having any luck, fishing for men? How many do we have this time?”
And they say, “There’s been a little problem. It’s not the usual.”
“What do you mean?” says CHRIST.
“Look, for centuries now, we’ve been fishing for men. But we can’t acquire actual humans anymore. Nobody believes in our gospel. I think they figured out how our trap works. It’s over. We didn’t catch a single man last night.”
And they hand CHRIST THE LORD a plain regular fish that they found floating on the surface. And CHRIST says:
“Wait a minute. You want me to spread God’s word using THIS?” [Here he wags the carcass in St. Peter’s face.] “You can’t be serious.”
“Why not?” say the disciples. “It’s kind of the same. It’s the same idea. You can put it in your cargo bay like a slave: it’s basically the same.”
“It’s disgusting to touch,” says CHRIST. “As an emblem, it stinks! Are you trying to ruin my brand?—fucking fish!?”
“We can’t help it, Duke” [here, Peter is referring to Jesus by the royal title Duke]; “I’m telling you, we can’t fish for men anymore. They’re just too smart.”
Here CHIRST kicks the sand: “Shit!” And he continues to kick and yell: “Fucking! …piece of! …shit! FUCK.”
And his disciples answer him, “Matthew chapter five verse thirty-five tells us ‘Do not swear. Not at all. Neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear while clutching thy wig, saying “Shit, fucking piece of shit, fuck,” because thou canst not make one hair white or black on thy godhead by so doing. Instead, let your communication be, “I will prosecute the bankers and bail out Main Street” OR CONTRARIWISE “I’ll give the bankers a pass and bail out Wall Street” — but don’t promise hope & change, then turn your back on the People when you get into office. No more public vs. private positions. Curb the doublespeak; let your yes mean yes & your no mean no: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil’.”
& Jesus ignored the foregoing & answered them instead: “Hey. I thought we were going to do some fishing-for-men. Don’t tell me we all came out here to the shoreline just to preach sermons. Why are you throwing my own words back in my face? I never ran for office as a Democrat; not in the U.S., anyway. I only visited America because Joseph Smith asked me to, as a favor. It helped him out with a book he was writing. (Remind me to check its sales position.) But what do I look like to you, a sucker? a groveling puppet, in need of campaign donors? This toga I’m wearing was a hand-me-down that I received from a passing Samaritan. A bad Samaritan, from the look of it. He said to me, ‘You appear to be poor; therefore, here, take this treasure chest.’ And he was right: I don’t have cash to burn like the rest of these evangelists. So I opened the chest and found this nice toga inside, made of the softest raiment. (Behold, they that wear soft clothing are usually found in modern churches: but now even I got one!) On my honor, I did not purchase this outfit with legalized bribe money. But now that you got me on the ropes, tell me seriously: Why did we agree to meet out here this morning?”
And they answered, “You said: Meet me at the beach and I will show you how to attract more followers online.”
And CHRIST said, “Online... ah yes, reeling in humans like fish on line... thats right! now I remember; you wanted me to read to you a section of my pamphlet: Tips and Tactics of Proselytizing. OK. Here’s the secret of a successful economy: Just cast the net on the right side of the ship (not the left side, mark me), and ye shall find that certain animals actually DESIRE to live inside your zoo.”
So the disciples, after having caught nothing all last night, did therefore shrug and return to the ship and cast again: and now they were not able to draw up the net, on account of the great mass of sufferers therewithin. (And every one was clothed in a yellow vest, to show solidarity with the Yellow Vest Movement in France of 2018.) Therefore that disciple whom CHRIST THE LORD loved most (I’m referring to me myself, John, the author of this gospel — not Bryan Ray the blogging plagiarist) I say, that disciple whom GOD loved the very most turns and says to Peter, “Ah! I recognize this bloke now! (I didn’t recognize him before.) It is Jesus of Nazareth!”
Now when Simon Peter heard that it was CHRIST THE LORD there in the half-flesh among them, he put his slaver’s coat back on, (for, till now, he dad been fishing in the nude,) and did cast himself in the sea.
And other believers rowed up alongside them, in a little canoe that they had inherited; and they beheld with admiration the disciples’ net: for it was nigh to bursting with fresh meat, ready to sell.
As soon then as they were come to America, the Land of the Free, they encountered a marketplace, and displayed their catch thereon, and were fairly compensated for their labors.
Jesus saith unto them now (quoting part 7 of Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric”), “Lo! A man’s body at auction! Before the war I often went to the slave-mart and watched the sales there. I even helped the auctioneer, for the sloven did not half know his business: ‘Gentlemen’ I’d say, ‘look on this wonder: Whatever the bids of the bidders, they cannot be high enough for it!’ And at a certain point, when it looked like I had a buyer on the hook, I’d turn up the head — (this is called the hard sell) — I’d say ‘LOOK at this head: inside is the all-baffling brain!! In it and below it are the makings of heroes. Hey, give ear now and listen to my sales pitch: for this is the most important part. How do you know who shall come from the offspring of HIS offspring through the centuries? And in parentheses I’d add: Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?’ OK, now I return from my flashback and address you directly, my disciples: Bring me the souls which ye have now caught. I want to scrutinize them.”
So Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land full of great new converts, an hundred and fifty and three: and for all there were so many, yet was not the net broken.
CHRIST says unto them, “Come; follow me. This nation must reach its goal of full employment.”
And none of the disciples durst ask him, “Who art thou, and what social system dost thou recommend?” knowing that he was God, and God is a believer in the free market and thus in slavery.
(John 21:3-12)
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