I haven’t posted here in a long time. Well, I refuse to apologize for it.
Just got back from the U-Bookstore. I had to go and buy that Marx anthology for Mackin’s class…again. To my shame, on my way out I walked right past the old woman selling Real Change at the back door. Yes, that’s right, carrying a collection of the writings of the godfather of scientific communism, which I had bought for the second time in six months, I averted my eyes from the homeless woman selling the contemporary progeny of Marx’s thought… Hmmm. I’ll write it off as one of many inevitable “contradictions” of American corporate consumer capitalism.
Hurray for alliteration.
Would you all like to know something I’ve never told anyone? Ever? Not friends, not girlfriends, not family, not even therapists? Alrighty then. I thought you might.
I wrote a play in high school. End of junior year, beginning of that summer, and finished it up at the beginning of my senior year. Yes, it was only a first draft. Yes, naïve politics crept into it. And yes, like all the products of adolescent creativity, it was really only a confessional.
The plot was pretty simple – and I insist that this was completed before the first Sayid episode of Lost was produced. We have a secret police agent working for a depraved regime in a country that’s going to be invaded by a superpower soon (remember, I’m writing this in 2003). Though the government’s days are numbered, he still has a job to do – finding, interrogating, torturing, and killing dissidents and rebels. The man hasn’t lost his soul per se, he just leaves it at home, inventing complex moral rationalizations of his work that go something like this – “I work for an evil man. I do evil things. But my evil permits good to exist, etc., etc., etc.”
So one day, investigating a bombing, he comes across a familiar face among the rebels he arrests – wouldn’t you know it, his first (unrequited) love. As it becomes clear she has the information he needs, it also becomes clear she represents his opportunity to abandon his pseudo-philosophical nonsense and save his own soul. The tension builds as he orders his cronies to torture her and comes to a head when it’s time to kill her: “Jonathan… please… don’t…” is her last woeful plea, and his last wasted chance. He stands anguished and silent for a moment, then orders her to her death.
The only decent part of the whole thing is the last line, delivered by the protagonist in one of his philosophical monologues: “…and humanity will be what it’s always been – a dog gnawing forever at the heels of deliverance, never slowing down to let it pass, never running faster.”
The line has two points. The first is fairly clear. We’re faced unavoidably with choices that are stark and obvious – one will make our lives better, the other will make our lives worse – and with remarkable frequency we choose the latter for no real reason at all. The second is more nuanced and…oooh…ironic. In his last little speech, this guy is doing what he always does, insulating himself from the moral weight of his choices by extrapolating a general rule about mankind, making his very real decision to kill a loved one into an abstraction, an algorithm, a tragic but inevitable law of existence.
What’s the point of all this, you may ask? I’m really not trying to tout an accomplishment. I don’t like this thing very much.
The point: because I wake up thinking I’m Jonathan Holbrooke more than I like to think about. I did this morning. It’s okay, though. I’m changing, finally.
Also because “Axiomatic Christophometry” is a retarded blog and I wanted to get it off this page.
Today’s Musical Insight (Repentant Bastard Edition):
“I don’t want to the world to see me, ‘cause I don’t think that they’d understand – when everything’s made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am.”
