Learning to listen to each other

No image today; this is just a page from the notebook that I’m using to help with my proofreading & typesetting chores, as I turn this e-journal into a series of physical volumes.

(FUN FACT: it is the backside of the right half of 03-July-2020.)

Dear diary,

What do gangsters want? Are gangsters people, like you and me, or are they their own species of thing? Is it disqualifying for a gangster to have a worldview? — I mean: Must all gangsters remain averse to sharing the values of...

Actually, I don’t quite know what I mean.

Let’s say that we wander into a cave at the side of a mountain and discover a gang of gangsters inside. They draw their guns & shove us into their jail: a sizable pit at the back of the cave. – Why? What’s the fuss? Isn’t at least one of these gangsters interested in our philosophy? Don’t they have the slightest curiosity whether we intruders (who are now their captives) might possess a perspective worth contemplating? For, if you try to see the world thru another’s eyes, you might improve your own contribution to gangsterism.

So we’re in a pit. We’re fucked. We got eight gangsters with firearms pacing the cave, arguing about what to do with us. — I now whisper to you, my co-detainee, in a raspy voice, accusatorily:

“Why did we come to this mountain!? Why did you suggest that we spend our morning exploring!? We should have been cautious and exhibited prudence when we saw the void and the darkness at the mountainside beckoning us! We never should have followed our fancy! Dauntlessness was our downfall!”

Meanwhile, one of the gangsters is standing near enough that we can hear his private thots — he is thinking to himself: Why am I here? What’s with the gun? Where’s the threat? Lo, I possess nice clothes, a fine house, two automobiles, a chicken who lays grade-A eggs; also I’m blessed with a Puritan wife, and we have two strong, healthy sons, and a daughter on the way — why do I need to brandish a firearm and hang out in this cold, damp cave with six ne’er-do-wells and our gangster kingpin Jay? These two fools who wandered into our hideout here, our headquarters — they didn’t know what they were doing: they mean us no harm. One’s a blogger and the other’s his reader. At least that’s what they claim; and I believe them. They’re gentle folk from the village yonder — they were only exploring. Why did we throw them in this den, our makeshift jail? I don’t care what we do with the blogger, but that reader is beautiful. That reader is pure potential. She could be anybody. Her hair is gorgeous because it represents the future’s bounty. I should help her escape.

“A penny for your thots,” sez one of the gangsters while approaching our soliloquist.

& the gangster whose mind we were reading above now answers his colleague aloud:

“I was just wondering: What’s our angle here? Are we trying to build a new country so that we can offer a stable life to its population, in hopes of furthering art and culture? Or are we just in it for the caesars? Cuz if it’s only caesars we’re after, I’m sorta starting to doubt whether I wanna stick around. – I got a family out east (I mean far out), and we all believe in the best parts of the big three religions. So there’s a lot of things that you and I, as gangsters, are required to do, which feel like they might be clashing with my belief-system.”

“You believe in morality?”

“Well, not exactly — you make it sound so stupid, on account of the way you intone that word when you speak it. What I’m talking about is something respectable. If you were in my head, you’d see that I hold a convincing set of principles. Like a ‘code of the street’. — As a gangster, surely you can understand that. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say: there are street-codes & street-codes; and I’m finding that the doctrine of my softer life is starting to look like the better path to travel: it’s beginning to make the code of my hard gangster life look less appealing. And time marches on; so every moment I spend here with you and our gang in this cave is a moment that I’m not spending with my kids and Puritan wife. Also: I understand our jailing of the blogger; but why’d we throw the reader into the pit? I fear that future historians will frown upon us.”

Now the kingpin, Jay, steps into the half-light and interjects his own opinion, joining the dialogue of his two fellow gangsters and addressing them directly:

“Tom. Fred. Listen to me. I’m the kingpin of this outfit, thus I have the final word. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away. Now it sounds like Fred here is going soft. You even said so yourself: you said, ‘I’m thinking of abandoning the hard life for the wimpy life, as criminal gangsterism is looking less attractive than suburban existence. Big home with two cars, and a chicken in the pot. Nice wife & kids, yadda yadda.’ So let me remind you, you can’t just stand up & leave your commitment to the agency, as if it’s a movie theater. No: once you step foot in this cave and fill out an application to enter our gang, and get hired as an employee of Jay’s Crime Cult, you’re in this for LIFE. As Peggy Dodd sez to Freddie Quell in The Master (2012): ‘This is something you do for a billion years or not at all.’ Do I make myself clear? One does not simply tender one’s resignation to the Gangster Union, then announce one’s new career-path unexpectedly on television in an interview with that anchorwoman whose name I forget — the one with nice legs.”

“They all have nice legs,” sez Tom; “that’s why they’re chosen to read the news and do softball interviews either in a chair with no table (for a table would block our view of their legs), or else a glass table so that their legs remain visible.”

“Tom, put a sock in it or I swear I’ll blow your brains out.” Jay cocks his gun for emphasis. “I didn’t get elected kingpin just to hear my own underlings correct my opinions about yellow journalism. I’m no bumpkin; I went to college: I’m well aware that the yellow press is the gold standard amongst gangsters... — Ah jeez, now where was I? You made me lose my train of thot. I was making a good point about something...”

“You were just about to tell us the reason that you chose to enter the profession of gangsterism, and what the purpose of gangster life is — whether it has any goal beyond simply piling up loot.” Sez my voice from the pit below. (By “my voice”, I mean the voice of the author.)

Jay looks perturbed. “Is that blogger blogging about me again, on his website?”

Fred places his hand on Jay’s epaulette, “Easy, lord. He’s charmingly clueless about how evil we are.”

Kingpin Jay exhales and calms down. “No, you’re right. And so is he,” Jay gestures with his gun toward the pit. “I was indeed just about to reveal my deepest thots on this system of gangsterism. So let me proceed. I myself am not only in it for the money. I mostly want POWER.”

“But aren’t money and power essentially the same thing,” Tom can’t help blurting.

“Tom, I warned you,” sez Jay; then he shoots him in the face. Tom falls to the floor of the cave; & blood pools beneath him rapidly. Jay nudges the corpse with his boot until it falls over into the pit. “Don’t eat him, you two,” kingpin Jay addresses us, his prisoners: “I’ll fix you a proper meal soon – for I’m sorta interested in seeing what type of lies you end up spinning about this present episode, Blog Boy. Therefore I’m treating you nice until I find out that you blew it again. (After which it’ll be the same old song that you & I’ve been rehearsing for millennia.) And I share with Fred here a weakness for readers; so you’re in luck, Toots. But it’s only cuz you hold the future in your hands. If I could find a way to steal the future from you, you’d be dead. — Hmm... darn, now I lost my place in the tirade...”

“You were just about to—” begins my voice from the pit.

“Shut it. I remember now,” sez Jay; then he fires his gun in my direction; but the bullet misses me, hits the wall, and ricochets noisily around the cave for a surprising length of time. “I like the money, but I like the power even more. And the difference, Fucko,” Jay addresses this insult to the corpse in the pit, “is that money is a subclass of power and not the other way around. Money’s just pieces of paper, or metal coins, or tiny numbers on a computer screen. It’s all so tedious. Whereas POWER, on the other hand, is being able to simply look at someone a certain way, and they know just what you’re desiring them to do — so they go out and persuade an army of locals to perform a coup in some South American paradise; then appoint a puppet leader ‘for the interim’ who is controllable by remote. That’s far more satisfying than possessing mere riches. For the illegal acquisition of riches requires arduous labor — first you must lug two satchels of gold ingots out of a bank; then heft them onto the back of your poor donkey; then traipse on foot thru the desert until you arrive at your getaway cave; and then banter about the meaning of life interminably with your cohort and a couple naive prisoners, who happened to trespass into your lair.”

“Jesus! you almost convince me,” remarks my voice from the pit below, “that the power of gangsterism is superior to the fame that is guaranteed from being a world-class essayist. But, seriously, until now, I assumed that both Christ and Caesar will always be bested by whoever writes their gospel, even if she names herself Anonymous; since the latter controls neither power nor money but rather the forces, the mental currents, which predetermine the trajectories of money and power; thus Caesar may own the material riches and governance of his own day, while Christ owns the spirit of the age, but the gospel’s scribe owns the upshot of all these things, plus the things themselves & more! In short, if Caesar & Christ produce a child together, this heir will belong essentially to the gospelist, since everything that child will learn of its parents (and from its parents) is filtered thru the scribal fancy.”

“I thot you said that I convinced you otherwise,” sez kingpin Jay. “Am I neither Caesar nor Christ, then?”

“No,” my voice answers from the pit (and we hear some lions grumbling in the background now); “you’re both Caesar AND Christ — and I’m your lovechild as well as your future spouse: I’m your sacrificial lamb.”

“Now I know you’re pulling my chain.”

“Ha! ya got me: I’m joking — I was just making sure that you were paying attention. Nah, you’re definitely not an emperor or a gadfly but rather a kingpin of gangsters. So you’re neither Christ nor Caesar; instead you belong with Cassius and Brutus, who have the honor of sharing two thirds of the mouths of Satan in Hell’s frozen center, according to Dante: yes, forgoing the show’s star-position & opting to vacate the limelight, you’re part of a conspiracy that wields the power of assassination — if the power is earthly, you take it via violence; if the power is spiritual, you take it via reason (so-called). It’s like the boringest form of lying...”

Kingpin Jay awakes:

“Watch it, punk,” he cocks his gun; “you’re skating thin ice—”

“Peace, be still,” prays my voice from the pit (as we hear the lions eating the remains of Tom); “I was just getting to the good part. It’s only a truth, to admit that your form of lying is dull — I don’t mean to insult you; I’m just being accurate. Forgive me for that. Now listen. The reason I’m almost willing to say that the gangster lifestyle trumps my own is that your report about taking over countries with a combination of private deceptions is far from unappealing. Who wouldn’t want their own South American paradise, controllable by remote? It beats non-monetized daily blogging.”

Here, kingpin Jay chuckles. “Throw this kid a chicken wing. I’m warming up to him.”

One of the gangsters opens the bucket labeled “Seasoned Wings” & tosses me a crispy fried paragon, which I share with the reader.

*

Having eaten, we feel sleepy (perhaps the food was drugged); so I motion to the reader to lean closer, and I rasp in her ear:

“I’m too tired to conclude this adventure. Let me take a nap, while you rescue us from all the lions down here & the gangsters who have imprisoned us.”

The reader smiles & draws her hand over my face to close my eyes.

I curl up and fall asleep in a corner of the pit, like a lazy kitten. Now the reader gathers all her gorgeous hair into her soft, lovely hands, and binds it into a ponytail (while she does this, the audience notices that her forearms are also attractive); then she calmly paces over to the lions & crouches down & addresses them in a kind voice. We cannot hear exactly what she sez, but the lions seem to understand: they take a break from gnawing the corpse & position themselves shoulder-to-shoulder in a line, allowing the reader to stand upon the collective surface of their backs and climb out of the pit:

The reader approaches the nearest gangster and takes his machine gun. It is an AK-47 (a type of assault rifle originally manufactured in the Soviet Union). The reader uses this weapon to mow down all the selfish gangsters, but her bullets do not hit any of the compassionate gangsters — at least that’s what the subtitles explain during this spellbinding scene, which is probably the best scene in the whole blog-post.

Then she exits the cave, marching in front of the group of surviving gangsters. Once outside in the sunlight, she teaches the remainder of the gangsters how to reinflate the ghosts of their fallen friends. So they go back into the cave and breathe the spirit of life back into their slain comrades, and they all reanimate. Then they join their former colleagues in this Fresh Quest, along with the reader who is their New Leader and the True Savior.

So the final shot shows the reader guiding kingpin Jay and the other gangsters who never died, along with all the gangsters who chose to resurrect, unto a cottage in the woods of the Midwest United States. And the USA has turned good now, so there’s no cause for alarm: it’s not a trap: the future is different: everything’s better: you can relax. The reader arranges the gangsters neatly in two rows before the front porch, where the cottage’s owner is sitting — & altho the tag that hangs from his collar reads “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, we plainly recognize that the actor playing this role is Falkor, the luck-dragon from The Neverending Story (1984)!