Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“This divide has devastated the progressive movement. And this decay has allowed a new form of leadership to take the reigns — not just in terms of unions, but in terms of the people, or, if you want to sound like Jack Reed, the masses.

“Don't you think it interesting that the growth of the Evangelical movement, which really took off in the seventies, coincided with the fallout of the sixties, the decline of the labor movement, and the exponential growth of the lumpenproletariat , or, if you want to just call it what it is in English, the criminal and fascist class? A vast ocean of surplus humanity. Fuck, man, Huey P. Long stepped off the soapbox and found himself a motherfucking pulpit.

“Now, I don't have the typical hatred for religion that most think I do. I can understand why people are religious. I can understand why they have faith. However, I have a real fucking problem when people tell me that they’re Christian because they believe Jesus had some good ideas. Seneca had some great ideas, too, but you don't see people worshiping him and referring to him as the Son of God.

“That's what's paramount in Christianity. You are a Christian if and only if you believe that Jesus was not a prophet, but the physical manifestation of God in man.” He pauses. “Well, Patrick may disagree. Apparently, there were some Gnostic sects who didn't think this way, so I guess the premise isn't entirely sound. Still, the point I'm trying to make is that this belief is not hereditary. It requires real faith, and faith is not passed down. This is why Jesus said he came to divide people, brother against brother, sister against sister…or whatever he said, I don’t really remember. Look, the point is that being a good person is not good enough to get into heaven, according to the New Testament. You need more. You need faith. For example, the wafers and the wine — these are not metaphors for Christ's body and blood, provided you’re Catholic, of course. For them…are you Catholic?

“I’m not really anything.”

“Okay, well, for Catholics the wine and the wafer are both the living tissues of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. But you don't often meet people who believe this — even Catholics. They cannot completely abandon themselves to faith — or cannibalism for that matter. It's simply too much; too contrary to the material world they have come to know and accept. Consequently, they're going to be left to suffer with the rest of us heathens after the rapture — that five- or six-generation-old idea.

“Look, everyone looks for an explanation as to why life isn't perfect. Some say that it is perfect, but that we are too self-absorbed to acknowledge it. If we had the perspective of God, then we would understand this. This is not Panglossian; it is more oriental in nature, even if such beliefs do have occidental precedents. To sum it up: the world is a vale of tears. Those who abide by this basic outlook on life are probably the happiest of the bunch; they accept that life necessitates suffering even if this is an implicitly nihilistic stance to take, and, as a result, they don’t become enraged and forlorn when bad things happen to good people.

“Then there are those who play the blame game. Some blame the devil, which, to me, implies that the devil is more powerful than God. Whatever. Then there are those who say that the problem is the church. And then there are those who say it's the System, or the Man, or the Patriarchy. There are those who say it's the Plutes. It's the Gays, or the Poor, or the Feminists, or the Blacks, or the Latinos. It's the Democrats. It's the Republicans.” He pauses. “The truth, though, is simple: it's humans.

“Most humans cannot be satisfied with their lot in life. Isn't that what the story of Eden is all about? Because we are conscious of possibility, we are capable of imagining a better world than the one in which we reside. The fruit is just the final straw, the symbolic divorce between man's acceptance of nature and man's wish to control nature, which, through a long string of consequents, ends with man's desire to remove God and Fate from the mix. Those who truly have faith try to deny this faculty, this faculty that led to the Fall. So, too, do they try to deny the mind the ability to foster spite over the way the world is versus the way they want it to be. They put their life in God's hands, so the speak. But, as I have said, most of us can't do this. We want someone to hate. We actively fucking seek it. And when a true demagogue comes along, he knows that the easiest way to recruit people is by tapping into this vast pool of hatred and focusing it on one group of people or one individual person. Isn't that what Hitler did? He came across a population ready to hate, provided an easy scapegoat in the Jews, manufactured a form of nationalism based upon a bastardized version of Hegelian and Nietzschean philosophies, and then proceeded to establish an economic system that utilized the Keynesian principal of deficit spending in order to both increase the quality of life for Aryans, who consequently acquiesced to the new regime, and to bulk up an army that had been eviscerated by the Treaty of Versailles. And, if you ask me, Fascism, as an economic system, is defined more by the marriage of executive power — Hitler, Franco, Mussolini — with powerful international corporations — particularly the arms industry and the American banking industry. This is why the term Islamo-fascist doesn't make any fucking sense: Virtually no Islamic country has a serious industrial sector in their economy, let alone the capacity to manufacture munitions for a large standing army — they import most of their weapons either from us or from the Russians.

I have no idea where he's going with this.

“We're always looking for something or someone to blame, for someone to hate. That's maybe the only place where black people have it easy. We can always blame white people. We can always blame history. Are we wrong? No. History has dealt us a fucked up hand. And that history follows us. Every fucking day. But you can't understand that. You can only understand that you can't understand. I can empathize, though. I have no idea what it's like to be a woman. And I know sometimes I forget this. So I can see how white people can forget their privileges from time to time because I sometimes forget my privileges as a man. I can empathize. I know that I cannot have a feminist perspective; I can only be a man seeing the world through a feminist lens. In order to fully understand what it is to be a woman, I would have to be a woman. And I'm not. Even if I hooked my brain up to the brain of a woman, I would still only be able to interpret her perception via my own. The only way to get around this would be to eliminate myself, but this just leads to a paradox: If I can only understand another by dissolving myself, then I cannot be said to experience anything.”

He pauses. He almost smiles. “I'm guessing you thought I'd hate white people, huh?”

“Well, I had no idea you were black until I came here.”

“Were you surprised?”

“Kind of.”

“Why?”

[Imbroglio: See Above]

“People typically mention it.”

“But they don't mention skin color when a person's white. It's the default, the normal, right?”

I stutter.

“Look, man, I don't think you're racist,” he laughs glacially. “But you have to understand, your basic orientation to the world is. You just don't realize it. I do. I can't help but not.” He pauses. “This is something that all black people have to live with. It's infuriating when I see that you don't realize it, but I can't completely blame you. Like I said: I'm sometimes oblivious to the privileges of being a man.”

He reaches over to the table to grab Scooter's cigarettes. “You want one?” he asks.