I was reading up on
some of my favourite bands and songwriters while listening to Siamese Dream
by Smashing Pumpkins. As the album came to a serene close, I was finishing the
article on Rob Thomas. I’d read fans rave about his upbringing and lifestyle,
but I wouldn’t believe it until I saw it on Wikipedia; so much for ethos. I
know I told you that the first Matchbox 20 album is one of my top five.
Recently I’ve had to defend this against the perceived accusation (to my mind)
of its heteronormative themes. The truth is that it was simply a very personal
album by an extremely passionate Aquarian man. Yet it was not long thereafter
that he met the woman who would be his wife of twenty years. She inspired the
song “Smooth”, amidst many others. You have heard these; I can guarantee you
this. Growing up on the Lower East Coast, it would have been inevitable.
One peculiarly
Aquarian thing that Rob said, which I recall having read some time recently,
was this:
“Each of us has a
short ride on this earth and as long as we stay in our lane, and don't affect
someone else's ride, we should be allowed to drive as we see fit.”
It’s ironic, isn’t
it?
He said this in
defense of same-sex marriage. And he pretty much summed up your cult.
By “cult”, I don’t
mean in the sense of what I followed after my girlfriend broke up with me. I
mean it as something which is not “culture” YET. Something which has to sit out,
ferment like a fungus, and then turn to cheese. Which is what most of Rob’s
songs sound like to his harshest critics.
This is the theme in
my work at present: that any relationship between any two people, whether it is
professional or personal, or both or even neither, renders lanes of
independence utterly impossible. Everything you do, with anyone, effects
multiple people, ultimately Everyone, in the grand sense, I think, in ways that
you cannot imagine. Yet, despite the inexplicability of such developments, far
greater is therefore the burden which must fall upon us in how we treat others.
Yet this cannot be accounted for by merely trends in fashion, by controls put
on behavior, or by sheer emotion.
Now: the Pride
Movement aspires to preserve its goals by employing Liberal Individualism. What
it does, as I see expressed by your own example, is that it promotes emotivism
in the privatization of Public Life. It attempts to erect tunnels in which individuals
might pursue “their own lanes”, though this is in fact a Tunnel of Love, admitting
only two consensual pairings at once.
What it achieves by
this is negative. It leaves nothing by which to decide which pairings one OUGHT
to enter into. It yields too much to emotion, condemning emotion to an
expression which only Reason can refine. And it puts all of this in place of
what is called “Ethics”.
This is what you
made clear to me when you suggested that I was never the more qualified
partner, either to you or to Alanna, nor the dozens of other women who caught
my attention over the last ten years. It is also what you imply when you employ
“entitlement” not as synonymous with “virtue” or “standing” but rather in the
clinical, amoral sense of a personal feelings which others are at liberty (and
all too often encouraged) to disregard.
And let me be quite
clear:
That change is
nothing to be Proud of.
It is regressive,
plainly and simply.
All progress comes
not causally out of the Past, the domain of emotional conditioning, but rather
it is pulled towards the Future, the domain of imperative action and moral
teleology. These terms, if they appear abstract, are in fact far more rooted in
both common sense and physical evidence than the relatively recent advent of
post-structural theory which informs Pride.
To your mind, you
are living in your lane, accompanied by only those who willingly would stand
beside you, with whom you would just as willingly cohort, yet this mere
confluence of wills is but the product of a gamble.
How?
And also:
WHY?
In my opinion, this
sort of life is the most reprehensible.
I cannot stand for
it, and neither can I stand beside it passively.
It’s not just that I
have a personal investment in proving otherwise.
It is that you have
irreparably harmed me and my interests according to it.
You cannot abandon
me to such a fate.
One way or another,
I will restore moral order to my life. And I hope to do so to your own as well.
Power is all that has been left for me. You left it up to chance.
Yet I can do so in a
manner which is both dignified and subtle. I simply wish to shatter your
illusions of my own perceived obscurity. I’m well aware that you see through
me. Yet I doubt that you see me, for you’re too busy looking past what I present.
All lives are
interconnected. Liberal individualism cannot excuse us. Its direct result is a hell
worse than Fascism: a state wherein arbitration and emotion alone decide
policy, and emotion itself is decided by the consent of others, hence informed
only by majoritarian mobs of unconscientious people answering only to
themselves.
I have shown you but
a glimpse of the effect that this has upon a disenfranchised heterosexual mind.
You can offer me no security in such a paradigm, and you know this to be true.
You only offer my oppressors excuses to carry out their narcissistic enterprises,
often to their own demise. You only let them blame the victim, for I never knew
how to pursue my own ends by their means. The pursuit of your inclusion leads
to my exclusion. All my narcissism and psychosis has been an attempt to adapt
to these monsters.
For that, I forgive
you.
[({Dm.A.A.)}]
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