~H. Westchop

Oh dear reader, I worry for your safety and your mental health.  Much of the difficulty in fighting the darkness, in fighting the black wind which threatens to suffocate the light, is in the revealing of delicate and unfortunate truths, such as in my previous post.  It would be so easy to read of this world, to learn more of its inner workings and inconsistencies, to finally see the spiral of decadent decay, the wave rearing, curling, crashing, breaking and tearing us asunder…it would be so easy to stop fighting and give up hope, to let that wave sweep us from our feet because we believe that then the pain will stop, that the curse will lift, and we can just drift, drift in peace along the current…

But no! Never! Sadness reigns, but we fight!  And there is glory, romance, beauty in that! We all must remember that the darkness, the hate, the ugly and fearful; that will always exist and never end.  We will never be able to clear that wave, it will always threaten us and provide anxiety and torment, but the swim! the resistance, the digging of our feet in the sand with our teeth bared, salt water and sweat and blood dripping from our hair into the rising tide…that is worth something! The stubbornness to survive, to power your body through the wave, to swim and to tread as long as it takes, that defines success!

I will leave you with a villanelle by Dylan Thomas, one I often return to when the water seems too deep:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

~H. Westchop

There have been many days, dear reader, when I have felt the world has crushed my spirit. “A vague statement filled with overblown rhetoric” you may say with a loud sniff, and I would not blame you, yet I implore you to suspend your belief for but a brief moment and try and ignore how typical and overwrought my prose must sound.  Instead, bring yourself back to the times when the world has seemingly destroyed your will, whether through ill luck or doubt and regret.  There are those dark times in the middle of the night when you lie awake, eyes staring at some spot on the ceiling, and, in a vision, a failed moment or a poor choice you once made looms before your eyes and you curse aloud at the fool you once were, and your eyes brim with regret, and you clutch your covers, trembling with a mixture of rage and fear as well as a distinct feeling that the past is both gone and omnipresent, conditioning your life and your thoughts even now, to the point where you yourself as an independent entity don’t even exist.

I question if you, dear reader, oh tomfool in the dark, can possibly understand my words, yet I hope you do, because these regrets are the concern of this post and, in some ways, all my posts.  This concern stems from Malcolm Gladwell and his self-congratulatory exercise Outliers, the “story of success.”   Those floating moments, those days when the darkness has seemed to sink into every cranny of my being and I can do nothing but claw at the walls of my modern prison in frustrated anguish, occur because I still cling to an antiquated definition of success, a definition I believe Gladwell implicitly believes to be true (one of the great failures of his work is that he never properly defines “success” through words, instead only bringing forth examples as varied as Bill Gates to Jewish lawyers to entire Asian populations): success is built through the eyes of one’s peers.  In Gladwell, this manifests itself in both a general pop-cultural assumption (a lawyer or computer expert is automatically successful) or in some kind of measurement, almost always money (the exception being the Asians with their math test scores, although, as we saw with the IQ tests, testing does not lead to success in Gladwell’s mind (any confusion you may have over this definition is just a greater argument against the intellectual rigor of Gladwell’s work)).  These two manifestations are closely linked, as, in America, money is generally assumed to equal success. The ironically idiotic movie “Idiocracy” uses all of its lack of cleverness and blunt force trauma to drive this point home, all the while making the entirely nonsensical assumption that the rich are somehow smarter than the poor; I have met both groups in equal measure, and I can say with confidence that there are similar(ly small) numbers of those that see the light and similar(ly large) numbers of those filled with the dank stench of mental incompetence and overall lack of intelligence.  I will not dally with the witless barbarian in these matters, for if you believe that the rich are smarter than the poor I suggest (no, I command!) you leave this webpage and never return again.  I always remember that I try to shepherd the weak tomfool from intellectual decay, not the foaming savage who has had the misfortune to be born in some sweltering filthy hovel.

I have gotten away from the point, so let us assume in the manner of a thought experiment that Gladwell’s suppositions are true, that his definition of success relies more on whimsy chance and fate and less on pure talent or intelligence. I believe there is a clear metaphor here which can part the heady clouds that threaten to unravel my mind even at this moment: the effect of determinism on moral responsibility for action.  Quite simply, if everything we do is determined for us beforehand, we, by definition, have no control over our actions.  If we have no control, and my person were to commit some moral travesty, well, how could you hold me responsible?  I had no control; I was fated by the gods, or by science, whatever you wish, they accomplish the same thing.  There is no moral responsibility in a deterministic universe.  Similarly, if Gladwell’s success stories owe much of their success (again, Gladwell’s terms)  to chance and fate, then how can we consider them a success?  Perhaps they made some important choices, but more often then not they were lucky, and that luck translated into a series of slight advantages that built over time. There success is illusory; it was, as Gladwell put it, a “gift”!  Yes! And there we reach a problem with Gladwell’s definition of success, or any definition of success involving some external factor, including your peers.  A definition of success must be based on your choices.  And any “peers” are external factors outside of your control.  Perhaps you are a painter that has produced the most exquisite painting in the world,  but, for whatever reason, your work is not recognized.  Were you unsuccessful? What if your peers are all much worse than you? Or jealous? Or incompetent?  What if you were poor, and the painting was never seen?  What if it was burned in a fire?  Doesn’t it still matter? Aren’t you still a success!?  Wasn’t what you accomplished, as fleeting as it may be, still beautiful and heartfelt and meaningful!?? Wouldn’t it have mattered more, been better, than some painting by a lesser painter who, through his birth and luck, was internationally recognized?  What of the nurse who touches souls left and right with his or her soft words of encouragement and hope?  Who brings more happiness with a touch of kindness or smile than the mealy doctor with his hooked nose and pompous attitude who prolongs life with all of the arrogance and disrespect that only ego and fortune can furbish?  If she is not recognized, don’t her actions still matter?  

Remember as a younger pre-adolescent, arguing foolish philosophical concepts, some friend bringing up that hated topic: the tree that falls and the sound that no one hears.  Was there a sound?  Did it exist?  Infuriating, I know; simplistic, I know;  naive, ignorant, overblown, inconsequential, so you say.  But there are trees falling left and right, all around us, and no one hears, and I cry a sad song because they matter, goddamnit, I know somewhere they have to matter.

~potherbs

Okay, so imagine a tree.  This tree is a giant, but he was a grandiose tree.  I mean, for love and life, right?  For love and life.  Anyway, this tree, he is old.  Have you ever walked with the redwoods? I mean, go to Muir Woods.  John Muir, like an idol, right? I mean, just go there.  You’ll see things, you’ll realize, you are a speck! A speck! These trees, they are big, massive, with this kind of fibrous bark that you can just pull right off. It’s resistant to fire, you know?  It’s beautiful.  Nature, man…nature! Anyway, so you have this tree, and its a husk.  Now what do you do with it? The wimps out there, those broken fucking suburbanites…those assholes will hire some workers, hire some kind of illegal immigrants or something that will chop down the tree for them, that will use chainsaws and ropes.  This husk man…only chop down a husk, don’t chop down anything living, I don’t roll with anything living…I mean, just look at the husk.  Stare at it.  This was a tree, man.  A tree of wisdom.  But we gotta survive, right?  Nature, man…nature! So we chop down the tree…ourselves. We take an axe, and we chop it down.  We break up the wood, make a fire for the night.  Post our tent.  And we spend days just chopping up that wood.  I’ve got a saw, an old school back-and-forth, not one of those bullshit internal combustion engine dingdongs, a real saw where you use your muscles.  We post our tent, maybe get ready to start chopping up that wood for fires, breaking up the logs, making a fire to last through the night.  Find a rabbit trail, use some string I found dumpster diving and place it on the rabbit run, hoping to trip one of those suckers up.  Say we start chopping that wood up to make a little cabin.  Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own. Read it, cherish it, feel it.  It’s real! Anyway, we start putting this wood together.  We have some tools, gonna make some boards.  Lay down those boards.  Check the rabbit traps, nothing yet.  We’re hungry, it’s been about a week, but that’s okay, humans have always been hungry, I’m just being human now.  I wasn’t human before in the grungy apartment, drinking Nantucket Nectars (only 12% real fruit juice!), fixy biking to the white-collar job.  Linoleum! Ceiling lighting! My god! Where is the real world?  Where is the green?  Not that green, not money green, but LIFE green! The Life!  I mean, here I am, in a forest, chopped down a wisdom tree, hunting for rabbits and building a cabin! My god! It’s beautiful! The exultation, the wonder of it all, I feel connected to everything,  my muscles go weak and give away with the ecstasy and the forest seems to orbit around my mind. I want to hug every tree, tap every tree for sap and let it run through my veins! This is the dream! Let Mushroom Man and his bullshit see me now! I’m living the life! The Naturalist Life! The true life! I mean, I fucking chopped down a tree! And made logs! Hah! I made fucking logs!  Everything’s going black.

I woke up four weeks later in the hospital.  Apparently, I was dying from starvation and some couple hiking through the White Mountains found me passed out. Malnutrition led to some kind of coma? I’m not sure.  It was also extremely cold, so I think hypothermia was in the mix too. But when I woke up, with lighted machines beeping next to me, an IV pumping some strange chemical in my veins, my parents looking as if they were deciding between sobbing or hugging me or choking me to death, you know what I thought?

Nature, man…nature! My god (I don’t believe in God, but I say God sometimes, just putting it out there) that was real!  Tip your cap to the mother!  Mushroom man never chopped down a tree, and even if he did, he never almost starved out in the woods.  I nearly starved out there in the woods!  That’s way above organic, slow food, fixy bike, dumpster dive, any of that hipster shit, that’s the real ish, the numero uno, that was…that was Ginsberg.  Kerouac.  The Original! Man, love it. My beard is just curling up in pride right now.

Ole Westy is making me go through some introduction, but I think the above story should tell you all you need to know about me.  But, just to be careful, here it is: Hey, they call me potherbs.  I would say I think about the food I ate, eat and am going to eat for about seven to eight hours a day.  And that doesn’t include actual meal times.  I love to bike, urban explore, or just explore in general.  I used to have a chicken coop (they’re all dead now, but I tried to fletch some arrows), an SLR, and I eventually want to work in an organic farm.  That is, unless I move to Alaska, which is also in the works.  I love art, photography especially.  I’m an artist. Westchop’s Note: He is nothing of the sort. 

Things are moving fast, but just remember, nothing shines through the indelible love of my soul, or yours, and also remember to always think about what and how and when and where and why you eat.  All the questions.  Food! And Nature!

~H. Westchop

I have decidedly moved on from Gladwell and his banal drivel; someday I will address his exploitation of the western world’s currently abject terror of the mongrel races, but that will be another day, far from this one.  I can barely allow myself to even beset my bloodshot eyes on his horrid little white book, and, even for the dear reader, I refuse on all grounds to read another poorly-analyzed word.

The truth, dear reader, is that Gladwell’s idiosyncratic tabulations, the precis of his pontifications on the role of the rice paddy, the Asians’ relationship to math, his exaltations of their single-minded nature, their refusal to give in, to fight against the dying of the light, their beehive, their socialistic practices that even now make my heart beat harder in my chest, the blood surging as a current of rage, it all is part of a grander battle, the battle to end all battles, the intellectual crusade of the past 200 years,(from the death of Romanticism to the Victorian progress, to the dead thrush pecking at the hollowed Chestnut tree, an image in stark contrast to the nightingale of Keats) the war between the Humanities and the Sciences!

In this cursed country that I live in, Art is thought of as little more than some kind of local, neighborhood investment.  A museum is no different to a ballpark, to a city square, to a mall or shopping center.   Only market forces drive its creation, the rich elite and its donor-based tax subsidization,  these institutions which cater to these idiotic socialites.  There was once a cultural impetus in the humanities, in Art.  There was a time when Art stood for culture and pride! James Joyce wrote Ulysses to propel the Irish to and above the level of the British. He was competing with Shakespeare, with Homer and his Odyssey, with Oliver Wilde and his northern Irish sensibilities.  Of course, his works meant something to those intellectual elites who read him, but his success meant something to the common Irish people as well, to Dublin and all that inhabited that wondrous city.  It was a fight! That is the power it can claim.  W.E.B. Dubois once claimed “Art is Propaganda,” and he was right.  Dubois was afraid that the southerners that had enslaved the black populations for so long would try and define their culture for them and, in fact, were, from early poems written by whites about blacks, all the way to the 1930s and The Jazz Singer.  Black Face is reprehensible in this country precisely because of what it means for a white to attempt to define a black…through art! Through theatre, or dance, or music, or film, or poetry, or prose, through anything! Dubois knew that Art must be claimed by his culture, must be made its own.  Hence propaganda.

A blog post is never enough space for a protracted argument on what art means for society, so I merely want the dear reader to keep this attack, concerted attack, in mind.  The Analytics would have you believe that any axiological consideration, any statement of value, is near-useless; the logical positivists denigrate and slander ethics and aesthetics at every opportunity, instead espousing the virtues of a philosophy of science, of epistemology and, in their greatest sin, the philosophy of language.  In their attempts to decode language, to try and “clarify,” they seek to dissemble and destroy the beauty that can be derived from the written word.  Beauty is absent clarification, it is non-scientific, it is the antithesis to logic.  Poetry is ambiguity, it is the comparison created by puns, the absurd connections created by metaphor, the irony of a narrative turn.  ”Clarify.” I do not speak such a word, I spit it out as poison.  There is a delicate potential for beauty in every word we speak.  It can be arranged in such a way, its meter can be held, it can trip us up, or slow us down, or allow us to flow with a rhythm, or bring us to tears.  If we try and codify, reduce everything to an either/or, to a logical notation…where is the beauty in logical notation?  The world is grey, it is not black and white.  Our understanding is limited, and even science can never profess to allow us to “know” anything.  Every theory is waiting to be disproven, even the supposed untouchable Newton’s laws were proven wrong by Einstein.  Every law falls apart, and in the end, can we ever really know? Can we start from a beginning and move down the chain of time, from cause to cause to cause, to find us here?  Can we reconstruct ourselves through the laws of science? Is every experience I’ve had, every sadness and happiness I felt, explainable by this neuron firing here, a neuron that evolved from this animal, that was created because of this sun exploding, that exploded because of this law, and that law and here, and there, until we are at the beginning, and the gods are dead, and magic is dead, and everything, me, you him, her, art, life and love have all become nothing more than part of some grandiose equation, a variable, explainable, dismissable, meaningless in the “grand scheme.” The battle lines are drawn for me, as I refuse to believe such understanding is possible.  One side seeks, implicitly or explicitly, to define me completely and, in doing so, denature me, destroy me, render me as a machine, programmed and explainable.  Functional.  Simple.  A series of numbers.  I call this blog Rhapsodic Nonsense, because I refuse to accept anything but nonsense.  I worship nonsense and its impossibility, its stupidity, its unreasonableness.  I love it.  I sing a rhapsody.

~H. Westchop

While it seems simple to say, nothing is too simple for the common folk,the tomfools (a word I found, an I a word found, by chance, dear readers!), so I shall repeat a phrase that I have oft screamed at the top of my lungs, my fist shaking at the moon and the stars for denying me of any and all true love: Beware the Black Wind!  This phrase may mean nothing to you now, but, and please dear readers, give me a chance!  All will be understood in due time, and while you are necessarily in the Black (or the grey, if you will) at present, you will emerge into the calming light of day, and you will lounge with me amongst the world of forms, feasting on mongongo nuts while making love to some African goddess.

I digress (and I find my mind, among other things, commonly digresses toward African goddesses) but the larger point is that there is a finite time in this universe, and we must spend it doing wise.  Tomfoolish, yes? Of course not! I have not (to use a common turn of phrase (I sicken myself!) practiced what I preach, and now look at me, the state I am in, using common turns of phrases (which is itself a common turn of phrase!)! George Orwell is rolling in his grave (No! My Intellect Shattered! I cannot stop!)

The point! The point is that I have read a parable of pop analysis, a protracted argument lacking even a semblance of intellectual rigour, a liberal manifesto that stinks of New York sewage and racial conglomeration and concrete provincialism, a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers.  Reading this was a waste of time, but I shall proceed in the following paragraphs to disseminate and attempt to destroy this particular article of faith amongst the liberal elite, and connect its nefarious ideas with an overarching fear of the oriental in all his slanty-eyed glory.  Shall we begin?

The first half of the book is simply sensible bordering on banal.  Yes, in order to be successful in this world, one needs to be lucky and have lots of situations and circumstances go his way and to have people who love him pulling for him and helping him out and lending him money and setting up computer clubs.  Of course, Hiller posits, who thought otherwise?  Gladwell references the “autobiographies published every year by the billionaire/entrepreneur/rock star/celebrity” in which “the storyline is always the same: our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to the top” (18).  I’ve never thought that.  I rarely read autobiographies, because I am rarely interested in Michael Caine and/or Ted Kennedy  and his “Lion of the Senate,” but I can say with certainty I never thought that about any of those so-called success stories.  Outliers, as this Guardian article points out, is constantly trying to convince the reader that the reader believes every bespectacled charlatan or moppy-haired british musician “by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to the top.”  Anyone with a modicum of success in any endeavor knows that to be untrue, and anyone who does not have a modicum of success I care absolutely nothing about.  The point, dear readers, is there is nothing particularly innovative in saying that “what truly distinguishes their history is not their talent but their extraordinary opportunities” (55). Gladwell is only trying to trick the reader into believing he always preferred talent over opportunity, and instead should move to the Outliers position, to opportunity over talent.  Why make a preference?  Obviously, there would be no success for the Beatles if they had not been capable writers and musicians with some talent, and their wouldn’t have been any success if they didn’t have the chance to practice at Hamburg.  So each is required.  So instead we could revise such a statement on success to “history is distinguished by talent and opportunity.” Then we are much more in line with understanding success, without falling into the false dichotomy of trying to choose between one or the other.

“But Hiller,” you exclaim with a look of triumph, “Gladwell never chooses one or the other. He is simply trying to give luck and opportunity its proper due!”  And you would be right, if that were all Gladwell was trying to do.  Of course, this counter-point does nothing for the banality of the book, the obviousness of its points, but there is a deeper problem here.  Gladwell seemingly only gives opportunity its due, but then the 10,000 hour rule, the rice paddies and the slanty-eyed comes into play…and then the competing grains, the ideas that work against each other come into play.  Success is built on work ethic and the opportunity to apply your work ethic.  But  work ethic, practicing 10,000 hours, is not a skill! It is built on love, on drive, on blood, on soul, on artistry! The Beatles loved music.  Bill Gates loved programming.  What is success to this man?  Is it anything more than love for your art? The Beatles would have played without Hamburg.  Bill Gates would have programmed without his birth year, without his computer club. Does he measure success in name recognition?  In dollar value?  In platinum records or managing partners or math scores or IQ tests?  It is love! It is Art! And he rejects it as the spineless science writer that he once was, because the world is built on valuation and numbers and statistical models. He denigrates the individual, he rejects the phenomenon that I witness and my inherent reaction to them.  You can disassemble a life by pointing to individual events, to cause and effect, but the life, the individual, the soul becomes only puzzle pieces, stray events, floating in the wind.  There is something inherent in me, perhaps genes, perhaps soul, that leads me to write, and there is something inherent in The Beatles that led them to play.

A parable of pop-analysis, a manifesto on intellectual degradation, one of the black wind’s darkest agents seeking to unmake you, to snuff out the light you hold in your hands and make you seem smaller.  Success cannot be defined through recognition.  It can only be defined through love.

I will flesh out these points in greater exactitude on the morrow.  I will also address the post-colonial spirit inherent in Gladwell’s work, and the leftist roots this spirit is derived from.  On the morrow! A semblance of intelligence, please!

~H. Westchop

I am, as they say, bushwacked.  The perils of the modern world weigh on my shoulders like some insidious creature latched to my back, its horrifying proboscis slowly siphoning my soul and mind.  We live a reprehensible life in a series of Kafka-esque institutions concerned only with surface and vagueness, a mucilaginous stuff that clings to my every action to the point where I feel as if I am walking through a swamp. The dear reader will have observed my crippling nostalgia for a simpler time: I know, of course, that those colonial eras were filled with prejudice and racism, horrifying tragedies in which the noble savage was unfairly maligned and savagely beaten. I, Hiller M. Westchop, will readily admit this (breathless with surprise, oh reader?), yet that it is equally clear that that racism was a cost worth paying for the beauty, the sensual simplicity of Good and Evil, of White Man’s Burden, of glorious binary oppositions! A simpler world! Surely Eastwood would agree that as we learn more the world inexorably turns grey, both in issue and in spirit.  Stark Black and White, simplicity of mind, a feeling of security in place and position in moral space is all I wish for.  Surely, the colonial price was a bargain! For we all (you and I, dear reader, and the rest of the world) live in this godless swamp, this furious ocean that threatens to swallow us whole and drown us.  Our damned societies and their moral ambiguities are a torrent that will paralyze us to inaction. No! No No No! I will gladly stand on the shoulders of others in order to thrust my head above that water line, to breathe fresh air and to struggle against the darkness that will consume us all! Should we all die, should we all disappear into the uncaring grey, or should some sacrifice themselves for the good of the rest?  Of course, we who survive are living a lie, the grey will always dull, the men and women whose shoulders we stand on, who we subvert and colonize, will soon crumble beneath our feet and expose us to those elements, but at least a lucky few will live a majestic and guilt-free life!  Progress! Progress! I spit on progress!

As I mentioned before, there are new commentators coming on board (I am, as I said, bushwacked by the weight of it all!). They are all fools, and, of course, their writing style is deplorable in comparison to mine (no doubt in your mind, I’m sure) but they are, at the least, able-bodied and industrious.  The enigmatic “potherbs,” whose real name I do not know and do not particularly care to find out, will be the first to post.  I personally believe him to be a clay-brained miscreant, a misappropriated green-thumb, a vegetable, a purveyor of low-hanging fruit, but we are all beggars, and never choosers, so I desperately try to make something out of sour and rotten lemons.

~H. Westchop

When one returns to a personally meaningful obligation after a long hiatus, one cannot help but feel sheepish for their delay, for their procrastination, foolishness and utter lack of responsibility.  One begins to question their ability to undertake any intellectual enterprise with any success and, as the regrets and failures fly in the face of their accomplishments and the wasted time rushes forth through the annals of recollection, curses the world in which he was born, curses the warped genes that have produced this body and mind that cannot achieve, that will be doomed to the dull wasteland of mediocrity, to the feebleness of the play-it-safe, to the carpet-steamed hall of cubicles and office birthdays and status reports until…until…what have we left?  What is there left to live for?  All we want is an infantile death, cringing far from any other judgmental human being, covered in the mud.  From dust we came! No, my god no! Why do we live? Why? Why!?

This person is not I, dear readers.  The reasons for my seemingly inexcusable delay in postings are, in fact, quite excusable, and, furthermore, none of your damned business (I do not desire to appear antagonistic, dear Tomfool, but genuine truth and honest opinion takes precedence over your unprincipled and somewhat homosexual preponderance for sentiment and teary-eyed sniveling). Let us merely finalize this apparently necessary but entirely unimportant “apology” with a simple preposition that the roiling waves of ignorant masses spawning uncontrollably across this otherwise green and pleasant land can hopefully understand:  I was busy fighting those dark spirits, keeping “this little light of mine,” protecting the innocent and the virgin from the dragons at the edges of the map. Never doubt, dear friends, the dragons at the edges of the map.  That craven worm of savagery and barbarianism will riddle the strong heart of civilization with lethal holes if its desires are allowed to run free, and so we forever must fight this cruel demise, for that heart must always beat on, and the blood must always rush through the veins, powering the limbs, and the sword, that glorious sword, must never sleep, must never cease! Long live, my friends! Long live!

Note: The travails of blog posting have become progressively more tiresome as my life has moved forward, so I shall be assisted by some compatriots of mine skilled in writing of and fighting against, as it were, the same horrid demons which afflict me and, presumably, the dear reader. The postings will be swifter although I cannot promise, as much trust as I have in these men, that they will retain the same level of quality that only Hiller M. Westchop can properly provide.

~H. Westchop

I am a firm believer in Aristotelian notions of moderation, and so, after my long (but meaningful!) tirade on the reprehensible state of the male-male relationship, I find it only fair to reapply my critical lens to the inane hypocrisy of the second sex, a simplistic target that (unfortunately) must be dealt with.  Believe me, dear reader, I despise the feminist tradition, and would much rather not sully the pages of this chaste blog with the girlish fears of a Woolf (a woman who would have greatly benefited from an able-bodied sexual experience with an able-bodied man (I am furtively convinced her wondrous husband had an…inability (so to speak))), a De Beauvoir (who reviles her own sex with more hatred and venom than even I could possibly muster) or, god forbid, a Laura Mulvey (although I do find her attempts to create a new “feminist avant-garde film” (haha! how cute!) charming and unduly hilarious), but one must balance the scales and attack all groups with equal opportunity. After all, I would never forgive myself if a feminist image was allowed to cultivate (perhaps fester is the better word) within this webpage’s fragile confines.

“Oh, get to the point you damnable rambler” yells Tomfool, and he’s right (for once), one must get to the point quickly when writing a blog (I’m trying, dear reader, I’m trying!).  The point, oh Tomfool, is that I advocate the abject beating of women, and I have the venerable Marilyn Frye to thank for my formulation of this peculiarly and distinctly feminist position.  

In her essay simply titled “Oppression,” Miss Frye (or is it Mrs? How does one deal with a lesbianic in this regard?) comments on the “gallant gestures” of men, saying

“Their meaning is symbolic. The door-opening and similar services provided are services which really are needed by people who are for one reason or another incapacitated – unwell, burdened with parcels, etc. So the message is that women are incapable.…Finally, these gestures imitate the behavior of servants toward masters and thus mock women, who are in most respects the servants and caretakers of men. The message of the false helpfulness of male gallantry is female dependence, the invisibility or insignificance of women, and contempt for women.

I will merely point towards a phrase, and Comrade Frye can take it as she will: “I do not hit girls.” Have you, you inconsiderate dolt, ever uttered such a phrase? “I do not hit girls.” Of course you don’t, you putrid putrescence, because you are a radical anti-feminist! You “mock women,” the kind and acquiescent “servants” of men. Every anti-pugilistic thought in your sex-addled brain is an accusation! An accusation that women are infirm, unwell, incapable, invisible, insignificant, dependent, contemptible! Can’t you read the symbolism inherent in your refusal to beat a woman to a pulp?! To do anything less would be to treat her unequally!

I for one will do my part. I don’t see women as secondary objects (barely restrained laughter). I vow to viciously attack any woman that particularly earns my ire, just as I would a man. Similarly, I encourage you, dear (male) reader, to batter, pummel and bloody a woman at every available opportunity.  And you, dear (female) reader…take it like a man!