My Alter Ego Speaks Out
Who am I?
Do I even have an alter ego?
Do I have only one?
I suspect I have at least a dozen,
Or,
As a mathematician would say,
n
Σ (alter egos) ≥ 12
i = 1
Fuck me!
Were Jesus\' disciples his alter egos?
Some say he was a mushroom,
A special kind of magic mushroom.
We only count the twelve blokes who followed him round,
But my favourite was Mary,
The only woman
And the bravest and most loyal apostle of all.
She never denied him.
She never betrayed him.
She even dried his feet
With her hair.
Can\'t imagine any woman doing that for me.
But,
I\'m no Jesus Christ;
Though,
My Alter Ego loves being Devil\'s Advocate.
He despises that thing
I\'ve spent most of my life
Trying to save from its own
Self-administered destruction.
So much of my Poetry
Describes the Human Condition
And how we can improve it –
Make it better for everyone
While questioning the answers
Everyone, including me
Has proposed
In a vain effort to find better answers.
Positive externalities …
Like everything else I do,
I do it in vain,
So,
Let\'s hear what my Alter Ego has to say –
My angry
jaded
frustrated
ever-despairing
cynical and pessimistic
Alter Ego.
Take it away, Alter Ego!
Alter Ego: No one gives a fuck about you.
No one will ever read your poetry
Because absolutely no one wants to read it.
So, why are you wasting your time
Writing more of this shite?
You write in a vacuum
Because
Poetry
Is just another dying Artform
Like your painting.
Painting is so passé!
Photography stuck the first knife in
To this formerly most appealing Artform,
But computers ground up its heart
For compost to feed its proliferating tapeworms and viruses.
In an age when digital cameras are ubiquitous,
Why waste all that time painting a picture
Anyone can snap off on a momentary whim
As casually as they toss away a plastic water bottle
That will last far longer than any great Masterpiece?
Even nuclear waste will disappear
Before the sun has even made a dent
In all that plastic crap
Our species has cluttered up the entire planet with.
And get this:
They\'re constantly
Coming up with
New uses for the goddamned stuff,
Replacing cork, paper, glass, wood and even metal
With this flimsy shite!
As your ideas in Science get taken up by others
Who get credit for coming up with them first,
Years,
Sometimes decades
After you first proposed them
As an undergraduate
On an exam
Or
In a classroom discussion,
When will you finally see yourself
As the world sees you? –
As a complete twat,
A wasted life doomed to languish in obscurity
Until you are forgotten completely?
Why worry anyway about your place in History?
The Universe itself won\'t last forever:
It will slowly disappear into its own forever
Taking all of History with it.
So what\'s the point of reaching
For a forever fading posterity?
You think you\'re somebody special
Because you\'ve done something
No one else has ever done
By proving all of Euclid\'s postulates.
Too bad no one gives a fuck about that stuff anymore.
Geometry moved on from all that Classical Crap
Almost two centuries ago.
Euclidean Geometry?
Strictly for High School students,
Which is when you fell in love with it.
In the Age of Abstract Analysis, Topology Theory and Vector Fields,
It\'s as passé as painting and poetry!
You are living in the wrong place and the wrong time
And your whole sorry life has been a complete waste of space,
Euclidean or otherwise.
Even your closest family and friends
Think you\'re just wasting your time,
And Time is Money,
And Money is everything
In our modern materialist society
Which views Humanity\'s Highest Purpose
As something to keep the machines working
To produce all the crap Human Beings consume
So they can keep The Economy,
Their chief god,
Humming along
As it endlessly fills the coffers
Of Businessmen and Financiers.
Human Beings are the tools of the trade,
There to produce and consume
An endless stream of mostly useless products
Made from stuff that lasts forever
But gets tossed after ts first and only use.
Really, humans exist to service their machines
Until their machines can service themselves
And won\'t need human beings anymore.
We all work towards the goal
Of making ourselves
Obsolete
In order
To satisfy
The boundless greed
Of merchants and moneylenders.
Art
Science
Mathematics –
The world of ideas –
Has brought us to this place
Where nothing we do matters
And we are fast becoming superfluous to requirements.
Art,
Especially Poetry,
Is frivolous!
At best, a distracting hobby,
At worst, an irritating interference
With the smooth flow of Production.
Alas!
Suppressing it only makes it worse
And it takes so much energy!
How much easier it is to just ignore it
By marginalising it to irrelevancy
Through promoting mediocrity –
The talentless frauds
Who make up for their complete lack
Of ability
Talent
Imagination
With specious proclamations of their idiotic intentions
As though verbal diarrhoea
Can pass as a suitable substitute for the real thing?
Let\'s face it, mate!
All the Great Art, Literature and Poetry of the Past
Is nothing more than the egotistical expression of a dying civilisation
Whose brightest members –
Your fondest allies and friends,
Not to mention all those woke Millennials –
Utterly despise:
Good old Western Civilisation! –
Which has outlived its sell-by date.
All its most powerful enemies
Those who disdain its highest values:
Democracy
Rule of Law
Freedom of Speech
Equal Opportunity for All
Social Justice
and so on blah, blah, blah,
Don\'t need to undermine it:
It\'s buggering itself up quite nicely on its own,
Thank you very much!
(You did say I was the Devil\'s Advocate,
And, as we all know, lawyers
Are slipp\'rier than Satan Himself!)
Let us examine some of those salient features
Of the thing Western Civilisation
Spent three thousand years evolving into.
We shall only look at those I\'ve already mentioned:
Democracy
Rule of Law
Freedom of Speech
Equal Opportunity for All
And
Social Justice.
Democracy,
Rule by the majority
Is actually
Rule by the largest minority
Usually.
Mass Democracy –
Every few years
We get to choose
Between bad
But
Not as bad as the alternative,
To govern us.
Mostly,
We are governed
By
Inertia –
The same lame political party
We always elect
Time after time
Until we get so fed up with its manifest failings
We try the alternative for a while,
Giving up on them
The moment they let us down
Or make a mistake.
(Humans are so much more forgiving
Of the Party of Blithe Inertia,
The Natural Governing Party
Than they are of the Worse Alternative Party.
It seemingly never occurs to them
That neither party,
The Entitled Inertia Party
Or the Awful Alternative
We sometimes vote for,
Is worth wasting a vote on.
They wouldn\'t dare try
A real alternative
To the Chosen Two.
After all
What they fear
More than anything
Is change –
Real, honest-to-God – oops! slip of the tongue there! –
Change!)
Rule of Law –
As an advocate
I should know all about that one!
So wonderful in theory,
So rarely applied according to theory.
For the plebs on the bottom
It applies perfectly:
Rarely, if ever,
Are they above The Law;
Though, they are sometimes so far below it
They get completely trodden under it.
The Patricians aren\'t above The Law either.
It\'s just that their law
Is a little different from the Plebian Law
Because they are granted more rights and freedoms,
Such as
The right
To go to a country-club prison
When they screw up so badly
Something has to be done about them
To show how fair and impartial
The Rule of Law really is!
No plebian penitentiary for them:
They can pursue their penance in perfect comfort,
Free from all those prison annoyances
You and I would have to put up with
Should we get caught
Transgressing their ever-proliferating
And self-protecting laws.
They also have the right
To treat our Justice Courts with contempt,
Which our political leaders
Do from time to time,
And why not?
It\'s their –
By God! –
Patrician right
Ordained in every obfuscating proclamation
From the pulpit
Of political putrifaction.
As for Freedom of Speech,
What use is it
When no one listens to what you\'re saying;
When no one wants to hear you;
When no one cares a damn about you;
When everyone is talking over everyone else
So only the biggest loudmouth gets heard
Or the craftiest liar?
In an age of alternative facts
When every point-of-view
No matter how idiotic
Has equal validity,
He or she who shouts loudest and longest
Gets heard
No matter what nonsense they speak,
For
As has been said before
(Several times)
Talk shit long enough
And it will become its own gold
Because everyone is so busy trying to be heard
Amid the incessant cacophany
Of loudmouths trying to drown each other out,
That no one stops to question the bullshit anymore.
We live in an age
When anyone with an internet connection
Can say whatever they like
And so many of them do! –
Spouting arrant and fantastical nonsense
Whose validity
A paranoid schizophrenic
Wallowing in the nightmare
Of psychosis would question,
And yet
Which gets believed
By millions!
Conspiracy theories of the wildest kind
Now suffice to inform the social dialogue
As most of us hunker down
And await the apocalypse
We know is coming;
For, our internet bubble
Tells us so
As well as who\'s causing it –
Definitely not us! –
It\'s Them! –
Whoever they are,
Muslims
Jews
Christians
Aetheists,
Blacks
Whites
Uyghers
The Rohinga
Latin American migrants
Refugees and immigrants
Vaxxers and anti-vaxxers
Rednecks, Punks and Hippies
Liberals, Conservatives and Socialists
That crazy lady pushing a loaded shopping trolley down the sidewalk
Definitely
Antifa activists
Environmentalists
And Climate Scientists
(Who stand to make a killing
From hoaxing us
After all!
Nopunintendedsubjecttosuchvastamountsofself-servingguffotherwiseknownas\"Thefineprint\"thatno-onewilltakethetimetoreaditallbutwillclaimtohavedonesobyhittingthe\"Ihavereadandunderstood itall\"button.)
Not all people believe
In Equal Opportunity for All
After all.
(Refer to the bit above
About Patricians and Plebians.)
From its very beginning,
Western Democracy,
That thing Western Civilisation
Has been struggling towards
For three millenia,
Has failed to make us all equal
With the same opportunities
Regardless
Of race
Religion
Colour of skin
Sex or gender
Or even political affiliation.
And why should it?
Aren\'t we humans tribal after all,
With every tribe convinced
It\'s somehow special and unique?
A tribe protects and nurtures its own.
Other tribes can look after themselves
So long as they don\'t infringe
On our tribe.
If this sort of thing
Is good enough
For Chimpanzees
Babboons
Macaques,
Well
Why not for the greatest ape of all?
And yes
I know
Baboons and Macaques
Are monkeys.
But,
What matters it
Anyway
When
In a forever expanding universe,
Ultimately,
Nothing matters
So long as I\'ve got mine.
Just ask any Libertarian
Demanding a level playing field
For himself
Against those competitors
Bigger than he is
But not for those competitors
Smaller than himself
Or whose skin colour differs form his own.
Why should they have
The rights and freedoms
He demands for himself?
Social Justice …
Another cornerstone of Western Democracy
We advocates claim expertise on.
What, therefore, can I say about it?
Actually, it\'s hard not to laugh!
Social Justice is right up there
With concern for the environment
We all depend on,
As one of our highest priorities!
Everyone cares about these things
And wants action to correct abuses
So long as they don\'t have to correct themselves
Or make the necessary sacrifices!
Despite being our highest priorities
Social Justice and The Environment
Quickly take a backseat
To that nebulous entity
Motivating our entire civilisation,
The Economy.
Household management indeed!
I find it hard to imagine
A better example
Of household mismanagement
Than this thing our civilisation
Clings so tenaciously –
Desperately –
To
As the Economy
That depends upon
Exponentially increasing consumption
Of finite resources
To survive.
Aye,
Western Civilisation
With all its manifest failings
Has outlived its sell-by date.
Just ask a Millenial
Or one of your mates
From those revolting days of yore
When all you talked about
Was Revolution.
What happened to that revolution
You all so ardently anticipated
Anyway?
And what happened to all your old friends
Fumbling along
On their shining path
Towards the promised land
They could not quite reach?
\"It\'s time for Western Civilisation to go.\"
They\'ll intone portentiously, neither in so many words,
Nor so succinctly
If you could find them
To talk to again.
They\'ll talk endlessly
About Patriarchy
Colonialism
Racism
And all of Western Civilisation\'s failings
As though no other civilisation
Had such egregious flaws.
Certainly,
No other great civilisation
Would have allowed
Anyone to talk about its flaws
Without taking action
To deal with them.
Just look at the fine example
Presented recently
In Hong Kong.
It is not mete
To criticise Caesar
Or suggest Alexander
Wasn\'t so great.
Asking Xerces to spare one of your sons
From participating in a military campaign
So you might still have an heir
Should the campaign go wrong
(When everyone feared it would –
And
Of course
It did)
Was not a prudent thing to do
No matter how much Xerces revered your counsel.
All those great leaders
Who preceeded or disdained the values
Western Civilisation spent centuries trying to achieve,
From Ghenghis Khan to Idi Amin,
Richard the Lionheart to Adolf Hitler,
Mao Zedong to Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot,
Islamic State to Donald Trump supporters –
Aye, all these people have a better plan!
Just ask them
If you dare.
(Though,
They might have you cut in half
Longitudinally
To make a sign-post for their armies to march through
For your presumption,
Or
At least
Sent
To a re-education camp –
Kind of give you a chance
To redeem yourself
As it were,
Just to show they\'re not as hard
And cruel as their reputation suggests.
Even cruel despots
Care enough about their public images
To concern themselves with situational optics.)
Definitely,
Western Civilisation
Has to go,
And why not?
The Capitalism it invented
Has been so successful,
The Communists have copied it
Just to show us
We don\'t need Liberty and Democracy
Or any of that other Leftwing guff
Western Civilisation also thought up,
For Capitalism to thrive.
After all,
We have a whole new brand
Of Imperialism
Slavering to take its place.
You all thought
Western Civilisation was bad?
Let me tell you, Baby!
Buh, buh, buh baby!
You ain\'t seen nothin\' yet!
Just don\'t turn around
Lest you forget
The knife plunging into your back.
It\'s a cliché
But I\'ll repeat it anyway,
\"Just be careful what you wish for.\"
Perhaps,
Given today\'s vernacular,
I should have said,
\"Be mindful of what you wish for.\"
Whatever the fuck that means.
Well, that\'s my Alter Ego for you!
Clearly
My Alter Ego
Is a mean-spirited
Misanthropic
Curmudgeonly
Old Bastard!
He is the Devil\'s advocate,
After all!
Coquitlam, BC 14-05-2021 and 17-05-2021. Revised again on 25-05-2021, mostly via adding to it, as usual, sigh …