A Call To Arms
March 8th, 2008This is the Great American Scream, this is the sound of one million disenchanted voices waking from their fairytale slumber to see the devastation laid before them, the havoc and destruction wrought upon us by our fathers and our mothers and their fathers and mothers and each successive preceding generation — back to ancient times when the first woman alive plucked knowledge of right and wrong from the Kabalistic concept they call the Tree of Life, shortly before Manifest Destiny was decreed and Eden was paved over to make way for a Wal*Mart Superstore and a McDonalds, so no one knew what right or wrong was anymore, ever, anyhow.
This is the agony of separation, imaginary friends behind bars like the common thought criminals they are and the real kind virtually imaginary; this is the sound of grandma’s funeral or a dead pet or unrequited love combusting in the ashes of the WTC towers like your own private Hiroshima and that of an entire generation; this is the girl crying out beneath her lover’s expert hands as he manipulates her, contorts her with pleasure and anguish in ways she did not think possible until now; this is the pulse, the breath, the heartbeat, the collective sob, the universal gasp for air underwater; this is the voice that is better seen and not heard; this is ecstasy in anarchy, order in chaos and chaos in order; this is the What Would Jesus Do and Follow the Rules collapsing beneath the colossal weight of their own bullshit; this is a rape victim sentenced to 200 lashes for speaking up about it, this is 70ยข to a man’s dollar, this is fuck-me heels and miniskirts and lipstick and upraised arms with hairy pits brandishing smoldering bras in defiance of the natural order; this is the raised middle finger, the turned back, the Fuck You mingled with ecstatic cries of Fuck Me; this is suicide bombers and Jessica Lynch and Tim McVeigh and Malcolm X; this is the vacant lot of the American Dream, and it has been condemned, boarded up, demolished; this is We Don’t Need No Education remixed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; this is Yeats’ dream of WWIII slouching towards Iraq to be born; this is the thousand eyes of Moloch screaming without mouths, without words, and they are our eyes; this is the children of privilege being marched down the assembly line, realizing that the guillotine gleaming red with the life of every AIDs-infected starving Ethiopian child is still sharp and polished and hungry; this is a divorced single mother whose blood could stop cold in her veins and who could not pay a doctor to keep her from dying, while Congress issues orders to keep a woman who cannot drink or chew or swallow or move with no brain activity alive just in case, while a man’s teeth rot inside his face because nobody cares what happens to you if you don’t have a perfect white Hollywood smile, you might as well crawl into a ditch if you can’t find room at the inn or the shelter, you might as well die.
This is our battle cry: this is our voices strained silently to the breaking point, and this is what we shout and sob and whisper and scream and say… The radical idea that rules are made to be broken, that this world is fucked so why follow the directions that stranded us here, anyway?; that love is real and religion is not, that sex and drugs and rock-&-roll might just be good for you, that right and wrong are not absolute but that people still can and should be moral; that we are all the same and that none of us are, that we are all unique individuals with the capacity for independent critical thought and we are all the product of our genetics, our gender, our sex, our upbringing, our culture, our education, our income, the skin we are in; that pleasure can be pain and pain can be pleasure, that we can starve for art — though who wants to? — and let our lover beat us blue if that’s what gets us wobbly in the knees and makes us soak through the sheets, or not if we are not masochists; that beauty and truth are the only things worth living for and what is beautiful and true is never the same for any two people and we will never understand why but we must acknowledge that this is so; that we have the right to be hurt, to be cry out, to say “enough”, to say “stop”, and nobody can tell us we are not in pain as if they know better than we do what we feel; that we have a right to our bodies, to love them, to have them unmutilated, to have the tools to keep them healthy and to enjoy them and to live well; that we have a right to our minds, to think what we want instead of what other people tell us, to feed our brains instead of engaging them in mindless tasks and staring at mindless television to keep them quiet, that we have the right to learn, to grow; that we have a right to create, to bring forth life and art in even the direst of circumstances because that is when the ability to generate something beautiful and new is needed the most.
This is the poets and the artists and the dreamers writing: Enough! No More! This is us turning our backs on the road to hell, paved by our teachers and parents and grandparents and we all know with what, with you’ll never make a living that way, with don’t quit your day job, with nobody makes money as a writer, with study something useful, with I just want to see you be happy and successful, with you’ll be miserable, why would you want to do that?, after all, Hemmingway shot himself — well, he was fucking Hemmingway, he can do whatever he wants and call it art, as if kissing a bullet makes that life any less synonymous with Great American Novel, as if Van Gogh should not have painted because he lobbed off his own ear, as if Nietzsche should not have contributed to the Western canon because he had syphilis, as if Wilde and Shakespeare should not have penned such enduring theatrical works because they were rumored to be perverts, as if Alice Sheldon was any less than a man for not being one and as if her painful and quick shooting star of a career was any less impressive for terminating in a suicide pact with a man she loved, as if Plath should not have been a poet if all she would describe was her depression, as if Frida should not have painted through her pain, as if a life without art no matter how it ended or was lived could be called a life at all.
This is the renegades and the radicals screaming: Enough! This is us breaking down barriers and questioning everyone and everything, this is us distrusting the world but trusting each other, this is the end of stereotypes and assumptions; this is a dangerous world with no frame of reference except for ourselves, a postmodern conundrum, a postwar delusion, a skeptical universe where nothing can be said to be what it appears and no one word has the same definition from any person’s mouth and, though we can guess, and try to define and explain, we will still never really understand any other person’s lived experience because we are not them. This is rejecting all available options as not good enough, all politicians and systems of belief as equally inadequate on the essential level, all outside advice as inapplicable, misguided, inappropriate, flawed. This is the end of binaries, of good and evil, male and female, right and wrong, black and white, us and them, the rejection of dichotomy and paradox and theory in exchange for pragmatism and real-world experience and tolerance.
This is the scientists and prophets decreeing: Enough! This is knowledge without an agenda, this is attempted and feigned objectivity in the computer age, this is the big bang and evolution and God coexisting the way they always have and always will with no need to prove that one or the other is necessarily more or less true, as if a greater being could not engineer human evolution and as if it is not inconceivable that a greater being did not; this is to the end of IQ tests and intellectual elitism and the systemic systematic devaluation of certain voices and the promotion of other, luckier, whiter, richer, more male voices instead. This is the promotion of a science of tolerance and love, an economic model of shared responsibility and shared support, an industry that puts people over profits and a spirituality that disregards violent prophets for human harmony; this is no longer poisoning our children and the weak, the needy, no longer torturing our livestock for the sadistic thrill at the expense of human health and humanity itself, no longer killing the earth and sky as if we could thrive without them and as if the earth is not part of us and we are not a part of nature. This is the realization that other realities are possible and that this world is fluid, changeable, that there can be worlds other than this and futures radically different from our past.
This is those in the halls of power desperately trying to take whatever is within reach, because they are, have always been, will always be, quaking in their boots, tossing in their sleep, rolling in their graves. They remember Marx and Che and Alice Paul. They are still living the Cold War and the Communist Manifesto and the Monroe Doctrine and emancipation, civil rights, women’s lib. Their days are numbered by life itself and not even money can buy them the immortality they need to properly enjoy all that they have. They hear us; our dying screams echo in their ears, our cries wail along the edges of their walls like the shriek of wind, our shouts shake the foundations of their fortress because it is built by us, upon us, made out of our flesh and blood and bones and tears and sweat and they know, but do not want us to realize, that we could topple it with a simple collective effort. This is the end of an epoch, the death of an era. They hear it, and they know: this is the Great American Scream.
