My apologies to Mr. Wilde for stealing his idea I didn’t mean to do it I swear

Dear diary,

I knew that I loved the essay by Oscar Wilde “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” because I’d read it a couple times with total awe, but since I hadn’t read it again recently (my former readings were more than a few years ago), I didn’t realize just how much that that text had become my blood-knowledge. Now I’ve been reading it again currently (slowly, aloud with my sweetheart), and thus getting so freshly inspired that I can’t but cry out — I even must make a guilt-ridden confession:

I know for a certainty that I unintentionally plagiarized at least one assertion that Wilde makes; for when I came to his line

The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible

I recognized that I’d written something nearly identical, not long ago, in this very journal. My crime occurred just above the fold, in what happened to be my 2019 September 11th entry, titled “One text to the next”. And now I fear that, since I carp frequently against capitalism, I perhaps have plagiarized Wilde’s words all throughout my scripture, the aforesaid passage probably more times than this single offence I recalled; and who knows how much of a debt I owe to the rest of his essay. So I am starting out this day’s revelation by giving a grand bow to Wilde, with a specific mention of that particular essay, and apologizing for my shameless and constant aping. Forgive me! for I know not what I do.

But although I wish I could call all my ideas 100% MINE (original, never derivative), it’s not from a feeling of duty or reverence to the law or general morality that makes me offer the above admission. Plagiarism is a crime only according to capitalism: a crime of private intellectual property; whereas the less robotic, social inclination of humankind is to share freely. So it’s interesting that this dilemma concerns an essay whose main topic is socialism. One might even suspect that I planned this theft, for the sake of saying what I’m now saying. But I only want to stress that it’s satanic pride that makes me spotlight my error, my lack: for I see it as a lack of genius rather than an offense against righteousness, that I cannot call certain thots my own. If we’re all one, every thot belongs to ourself anyway.

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I only wanted to write a short entry today; I could even have ended it at the star above and titled it simply “My apologies to Mr. Wilde for stealing his idea I didn’t mean to do it I swear”, but I’ll write a little more just to see if I can ruin this composition.

Between that last paragraph and this one, I walked outside to extinguish our house’s exterior torches, which we keep burning all night to mark the way for hungry criminals who might be desirous of robbing our goods or perhaps even slaying our bads (by goods I mean our physical possessions; and by bads I mean our bodies, which are mortal), and, while doing so, I looked across the street and noticed a stationary automobile with its lights on. There was smoke coming out of its exhaust pipe, and it was parked in the driveway of a house, so I assume the car was warming up. I saw the same sight yesterday, when I went out to snuff the same torches — both days I chanced to do this chore around the same time: ten minutes before seven o’clock. So, for two days in a row, this same automobile was seen by Yours Truly to be idling in the same driveway at the same early hour. Here is what I conclude:

This car is owned by a soul who rents her person out to a retail corporation daily in exchange for banknotes. She (the person in the car — I hesitate to identify her positively as the vehicle’s owner, for perhaps she only rents it), I say, she has signed a contract agreeing to begin her work shift at seven in the morning on at least Wednesday and Thursday. Now here’s what I think about these facts:

I don’t like the concept of wages. I don’t like the concept of shifts. I wonder why this person must begin laboring at seven — a godawful hour that not even the sun in heaven dares recognize — and I’m guessing that she works till three in the afternoon, cuz that’s eight hours; but the reality is that she likely works from seven to FIVE AT NIGHT, since that would make ten hours total, as the 8-hour shift has become a faded dream. People in the olden days would whine about their shift being “Nine to Five”. And that does suck. And they’d continue their whine and add that this shift repeats for five out of every seven weekdays. And that sux too. But time marches on, and now we have many improvements to our work schedules: Instead of nine to five, it’s seven to five; and instead of five days per week, it’s at least six.

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I’m also watching a documentary about the machine gun. I’m only about halfway thru it, but I’ll tell you the thots it sparked in me so far:

In the beginning, people fought using their fists. Then metals were invented, and people created ploughshares, to farm with. (A ploughshare is the main cutting blade of a plow, behind the coulter. The coulter is the part of a seed drill that makes the furrow for the seed.) Then the people learned how to beat their ploughshares into swords.

So, to review, people first fought with their fists, and then people learned to fight with swords. Now the difference between a fist and a sword, in battle, is that a fist will hurt when it makes contact with your eye, whereas a sword will pluck your eye right out. You’ll enter heaven maimed instead of ascending into hell with perfect vision.

Now from fists to swords we proceed to invent the firearm, which shoots out bullets.

Then, just as when people learned how to beat their ploughshares into swords, people also learned how to apply the techniques of automation to the seed-planting process. Similarly, they learned to automate their firearms, so instead of a machine automatically planting seeds in the ground, we built a machine that automatically shoots bullets thru the air. This was christened “the machine gun”.

Now think of how a battle looks when two people face each other and punch, just with their regular arms (NOT firearms but flesharms): it looks like a boxing match, and the LORD God flies down in his heavenly cloud-throne to break up the skirmish. But now think of how a SWORDFIGHT appears on earth: two women swing metal blades at each other, until God appears and stands between them naked. Then when the gun was created, the sacrament of the duel was born along with it: two people would pace away from each other about six paces, whereon they’d suddenly spin round and pull their respective triggers; and each would miss the other. Then they’d shake hands and go home. Their honor remained intact, back in the days; God would not need to fly down and waste his time telling his children to shut up, stop fighting. Even when a whole army of fools with guns would face another whole army of gun-toting fools, they’d just stand about six feet away from each other, in two single-file lines, shoulder to shoulder, one side against the other, the Red Team versus the Gray Team, and shoot till their chambers were empty. Then they’d shake hands and go play volleyball. Nobody ever hit his foeman. God would not need to budge from his place in the clouds; he could continue watching the pay-per-view boxing match on cable television. Those were the days. But then the machine gun was invented, and instead of being able to stand close enough to see the eyes of your enemy, both teams had to duck down under trenches, and place their guns up above the trenches (overhead, on the ground), and aim blindly, just hoping that their automatic stream of deadly bullets would hit SOMETHING. You’d be praying that at least a bird or a cute little beaver just climbing up out of the nearby pond would get obliterated. And there’s no way that God’s going to step between the trenches and try to break up THIS new fight. Between the trenches of a machine-gun battle is called “No Man’s Land.” The only place to go from this stalemate of skirmish is to mount machine guns on airborne planes. Then eventually invent small kites or “drones” that you can control remotely from the comfort of your computer room, so that you don’t even need to risk the life of a single patriotic mercenary, but you can still kill the other team’s civilians. And God himself is dead. That’s real progress. That’s what we call respectable warfare. It’s honor to the max: We sincerely thank you for your service.

Two burly cavemen slapping each other with fists: that was war in the olden days. A classroom of teenagers wanking video-game joysticks to cause widespread terror: that’s present-day war. Much holier, I agree. And, in-between, we got to watch our ploughshares be beaten into weapons, and electricity was pumped thru the blades to make them into a laser sabers, or “paintbrushes of light”, and our good neighbor Obi-Wan Kenobi swordfought the nobleman Darth J. Vader, in the documentary Star Wars, back in 1977, on the day I was born.