scattered individuals escaping poverty or persecution, becomes strong once the displaced population becomes large enough. Why else would they have been driven from their homeland in the first place? They employed the same strategy there, too: even their own culture they wanted to purify—remake or congeal. Failing in that—unable to either renovate their own traditions quickly enough or assimilate to changing regimes—they simply migrated somewhere else to achieve their goals. Unlike their fellow countrymen who decided to stay put and endure, refugees have a drive to non-adaptive survival: they do not suit themselves to circumstances, but alter circumstances to suit themselves, and if successful ultimately transform those around them. Theirs is the will to enculturate.
America’s strength and its curse is that it has always been the land of refugees. Whether this characteristic is a strength or a curse depends on the dominant type of refugee.
An Invasion of Greatness
The most penetrating analysis of American social life was written by a Frenchman. The most acclaimed twentieth-century American writer was a Russian. Our greatest logician was Austrian, our greatest physicist German.
Without just wars for America to fight, geography cannot donate its useful exiles to us. We are forced to turn to our own population for intellectual originality—a barren strategy, if not a dangerous one. After the steady flow of Grecian culture stopped, the Romans produced only a few dry moralists to oppose the loud virtues of the enfranchised barbarians.
If only we could plant tyrannies in the other developed nations, our influx of peacetime freeloaders might be outweighed by a band of refugees with scientific training in border-hopping. The Europeans could be the first to make an orderly research project out of illegal immigration: sending a control group of tortured Basques across first, dropping Finnish paraskiers onto mountaintops at regular intervals. Testing the reactions of east coast beach populations with a rising of nudes from the sea, wine-soaked Mademoiselles are interspersed with a placebo effect of castrati to gauge the rate of depopulation. After the invasion has been reliably reproduced, the published results might be exchanged for green cards.
Barring this, where will the great Americans of the twenty-first century come from? —The cosmos and the gutter. Above and below, but not parallel to us. Competing against aliens and rats, the last natives will lower their flags, don them as capes, and hunker down in their fallout shelters, too busy fending off abduction and plague to do anything worth remembering. With a xenophobia that scorns expatriation and a tobacco-chewing addiction that discourages evacuation aid, the Midwesterners will make their final stand—with the prize of “Greatest” jointly awarded to what experiments on their chosen few and swarms the rejects.
Aetoichthymachia
Predation is the condition of soaring; one cannot simply live off the view. In the next life when philosophers are eagles and businesspeople are fish—even then the fish will swarm the eagle and pull it under when it swoops down. If man’s nature seeped into animals the food chain would become a circle of absurd altercations, a burlesque worthy of a pseudo-Homer. Transmigration has not equalized oppression because there is no point—man needs no help in endangering himself.
Palpable Endearments
Socialists are callously insensitive to our attachment to objects—a bond far more incorruptible than that between people, the more so as it is removed from them. Trinkets associated with the body parts of dead mothers are talismans of sorrow and nostalgia, reminders that the flesh has seen happier days. Much preferred is an object that honors another object through facsimile in a chain of inert mater going back to the garbage of Eden. The first pair of underwear, botanical snugness of soiling and decomposition—a testament to the heritage of stains, the primogeniture of use-value.
A God for Everyone
god—first decapitalized, then degendered. The father no longer reigns alongside just one son, but shares a crowded throne with Muhammad, L. Ron Hubbard, and Joseph Smith’s joint-heirs of christ. Would that he had castrated himself sooner, or at least been formally usurped and thrown into a spacious dungeon.
The good comedian who never laughs at his own jokes, god is now finally able laugh at ours: an androgyne wrapped in the cloak of mother nature and raising the shield of paternity. Created to live outside ourselves, experiments of temporality, we take revenge by toggling our maker’s gender roles to reflect the needs of each stage of civilization. When small tribal populations with high mortality rates were the rule, a fertility goddess was called for; when expansion and conquest was paramount, an aggressor deity. das goddess having sowed the soil in blood and der god having dwindled native pagan populations through disease, a new transformation is now required to fit the age of equality: die deity, safely neutered by a definite article to make us all feel uniformly privileged.
The new myths: baby zeus playing with scented candles instead of lightning bolts, safeguarding his adolescent skirt-chasing with spermicide. As a result of his imposition of free choice on the erotic escapades of the olympians, the generations of heroes are omitted from the Ages of Man. Hopping from Arcadia to the Iron era, Homer’s jingoism is disregarded in favor of an abridged edition of Hesiod. By the time Virgil has nothing to write about and bowdlerization leaves no one avid for Ovid, the people are weary of polytheism and ready for something less hierarchical. Shaving his beard, plucking his eyebrows, applying black eyeliner, getting a pixie cut, donning a purple robe, a drag queen yahweh struts down main street at the head of the diversity parade, waving to the groupies. One does not pray, but claps to a new world order: “Thou shalt not segregate bathrooms,” “Thou shalt not take the name of humanity as a singular masculine pronoun.” Unrepentant men with type A personalities become doomed to an afterlife as Chihuahuas; traditional housewives with a closetful of mom jeans are punished as polyandrous phalaropes.
Absolute Philanthropy
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