Dear diary,
In the beginning, the invisible hand of the market created warriors. And these warriors were fierce; they wore armor and swung swords at each other, as they fought each other to the death, on the field of battle. They lost arms and legs, and sometimes even a head got sliced from its body. So much honor was spilt from all this warfare that the battlefield never knew thirst.
But one day the warriors from the smarter army began to reason with their adversaries, and they said:
“Why are we fighting over the possession of this pig farm? Why not simply share the pigs; for they multiply automatically, therefore there shall always be enough to go around. If we cooperate, we can afford to give each family its own pet pig.”
And the opposing army answered: “But what shall we do with our rage?—where shall we spend it, if we no longer fight each other on the field, and kill and maim each other? Where shall we unleash our murderous instinct?”
And the smarter army said, “Therefore let us take one pig from the drove on the farm, and let us slay this pig for the sake of all its siblings. We shall name this sacrificial swine ‘LEGION’, for it shall grant salvation to all pig-kind, if our housepets promise to behave, and if they learn to use the litterbox that we shall provide for them: it shall be made to resemble a furnace, and its front door shall be a translucent flap made out of soft plastic. As it is written:
“They went to sea in a sieve, they did; they sailed to the side of the sea. Then their leader, Jesus, stepped out; and immediately there met him, out of the tombs, a normal man; yea, this man was entirely normal: he had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him; because he was a fierce warrior, and thus had often been bound with fetters and chains, yet he just took the chains in his bare hands and plucked them asunder, and the fetters he broke in pieces between his fingers: neither could any man tame him. Indeed, he was normal.
“And always, night and day, he went up in the mountains, and prayed to God. So, when this man saw Jesus afar off, he ran forth and worshipped him, and cried with a loud voice, and said: Jesus! Son of the most high God!
“And Jesus answered, and said: Release one pig from thy pen. Will you grant my request?
“And the man cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.
“And Jesus asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion. For I am large, I contain multitudes.
“Now there was, nigh unto the mountains, a great herd of swine feeding. And forthwith Jesus charged the swine to rapture themselves, up & away from the marketplace. Thus, on this day, there were approximately two thousand raptured.” (Mark 5:1-13)
And the opposing army answered: “I don’t understand what you’re saying. I am feeling the inclination to stab you in the heart.”
And the smarter army explained, and said: “You see, the pig that was sacrificed will be resurrected in the form of a U.S. football. Its skin shall be laced up and stuffed with filler material, and we shall continue to fight over this rare object. We shall therefore still have an outlet for our murderous rage; and we shall tackle one another with fierce violence and harmful blows. We shall wear no padding or armor, so as to maximize the possibility of injury; and we shall give each other concussions, and bruised and broken skulls, yet we shall no longer physically remove anyone’s head from anyone’s neck; but all killing shall be merely symbolic. No longer shall limbs be severed; no longer shall the honor of a warrior’s life be spilled on the ground; for only minor bleeding will result from even the harshest clash; thus the battlefield will grow parched and expire from thirst, for you cannot drink a brain injury.”
So the warriors agreed to become teams instead of armies; they stopped fighting battles to the death, and instead they scheduled scrimmages on the calendar.
But one day the Red team had a bright idea. I’ll just paraphrase it because I’m tired of writing dialogue. Basically, they said:
Why do we even still settle for bashing each other’s heads in on the football field? This type of full-contact sporting event causes PAIN. We should discard these jerseys, and leave the field entirely — let the battlefield die of thirst: why should we care? — and we should join our fans in the bleachers, and go mingle with the cheerleaders, and check out their pom-poms; and we should ditch these ill-fitting uniforms and trade them for business suits. No longer shall we be called “the Red team and the Blue team” but we should henceforth re-brand ourselves as “Republ·o·bots vs. Decept·o·crats”; and we should take our violent skirmishes into the realm of shallow debate, cheap rhetoric, and ad-hominem mudslinging: let us amend this brutal, physical contact game, & transmogrify it into some sort of “sport for nerds”; in other words: let us enter into electoral politics.
So they did this. And it was much funner than either of their original callings, bloody warfare or U.S. football. And they stayed in politics for a long time. They found that it was a lucrative career move. They choreographed every disagreement beforehand, so that it all had the ring of reality. “When we get out there in front of the cameras, I’ll refuse to shake your hand; and then you, in turn, shall pretend to angrily tear up a copy of my speech.” One wiseguy almost even remarked that this political theatre is like Hollywood for bad actors; but he stopped short of committing such a tautology, upon recalling that Hollywood itself fits that bill just fine.
In sum, the change from athletics to nerd-sport proved pleasant. Those who participated were now able to feed their families, and put their children thru college. Many were even able to keep lovers on the side, of whom their families were blissfully unaware; and some of these lovers even brought forth children of their own, who could be carefully raised in secret. So the amount of happy families went thru the roof. It was a real Golden Age.
But then, one day, some snake wandered into the garden and hissed as follows:
I kinda miss the old days of deadly warfare, back when we were gladiators. Look how soft we’ve grown: None of us dares to do his own murdering anymore — we subcontract out such adventures to various thugs. We transfer vast amounts of funds around the world, & finance mercenaries from faraway lands, to do our bloodshed for us. We used to be armies, now we just rent them. So I suggest that we dream up a new fad for us to embrace: ideally it should combine the epicurean aspects of our current life in politics with the agony of our former life on the battlefield.
So they invented art & poetry, and they enjoyed these pursuits much more than any foregoing phase. They engaged in night-long arguments about whether one artwork was a plagiarization, a derivation, or an homage of another; & whether copying & mimicry were types of praise & flattery or intellectual property theft. And they kept up the mental fight, by pitting one poem against another; yet each encounter was as much a wrestling match as it was a session of lovemaking. As it is written:
And the poet was left alone; and there wrestled a businessman with him until the breaking of the day. And when this businessman saw that he prevailed not against the poet, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of the poet’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And the businessman who had waylaid the poet cried, “Let me go, for the day is breaking, and I can’t stand sunlight.” And the poet said, “I will not let you go until you grant me fair compensation for this work that I have done. Cuz I can tell that you are not a normal businessman.” (Genesis 32:24-27)
And it turns out that this midnight marauder was God himself. In the story, God reluctantly pays the poet, and even hands over all his (the LORD’s) classified documents to him. And that’s the trick to writing holy scripture.
Also considering this notion of normalcy, with regard to the marketplace, in contrast to what the gnostics (or “knowing ones”) call the “archons” (or “rulers of this world”), here’s an exchange between Officer De Luca and the teenager David Dolores Frank, from the film Wrong Cops (2013) — they might be speaking of the LORD above:
DE LUCA: “I’m gonna show you a photo, & I want you to tell me if you recognize the man you’re talking about.”
FRANK: “I’d prefer if you referred to him as my ‘aggressor’, not ‘the man’.”
DE LUCA: “Your aggressor, if you prefer.”
FRANK: “Yeah, it’s important, because he’s not a normal person.”
The point of this entry is to prove that the invisible hand of the market is the source of all power: it fashioned God out of the wind of the air, & it moved God to attack humankind; but humankind chose rather to worship this God thru defiance than to succumb to the annihilation that God was attempting to inflict. Man thus began as a warrior, and evolved eventually into a football star; then, once his body had taken too many hits to continue to serve his country, he put in his two-week notice and entered the reality show called “politics”. After amassing his fortune, he retired and spent the evening of his existence creating bad art. And when God tried to drag him away, on his deathbed, he outsmarted the LORD and used the invisible hand of the market to boost the sales of his artworks, thus increasing his fame in the land. And he (the man) included commandments in his scripture, which were passed down for many generations; thus he taught his ancestors how to live, and how to be charming and successful. And, to this day, the blood of the slain still cries from the battlefield.
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