"Dried Up, Tied, and Dead to the World"
Mr. Manson is a brilliant artist. He gets your attention with his arresting appearance, he retains it with his provocative and shocking lyrics and rhythms, and he forces his memory into your brain, whether you like him or not. Marilyn Manson is not going gently into that good night, and that is part of what fascinates me about him. He's not afraid to rip my face off to make his point. I like that in an artist. I need that shock treatment, that bitch-slap, to wake me from the coma that my life frequently becomes.
That coma has helped me inculcate a mask of bland, nonconfrontational assimilation. Thus, in conversation recently with a coworker, after some incendiary topic or another had arisen, I waved my hand dismissively as he closed his comments with the somewhat trite coda of, "No offense."
I looked over my glasses and him and enunciated clearly, "Not much offends me."
He paused dramatically, staring back at me.
"Oh," he said. "I doubt that."
His response caught me off guard. I work very hard to maintain a circumspect, even diplomatic exterior when responding to people's comments, foibles, gaffes, etc. It is a deft, long-honed act, and 99% of the population falls for it, every single time. Up until that moment, I'd had no reason to assume he had not fallen under the spell of that same guise, but clearly he was on to me.
And he's right; while I remain pretty magnanimous in the usual "offense" sense -- I care not one whit about profanity, or discussing tall tales out of school, or discussions of politics, or any other sensitive or personal tidbit, as well as other "usual suspects" in the Polite Society sense -- I am egregiously offended at the Human Condition. At the vast, ubiquitous propensity of homo sapiens to go to sleep in their lives. To squander the almost deific ability to reason, to question, to grow. To conscience willful ignorance. To exhibit willful ignorance. To lie. To pretend not to see things, or feel things, or care about things. To console themselves with fairy tales from cradle to coffin. To toe blindly the line.
So in a fundamental way, anything built on these constructs should, and does, also offend me. And it's a "recovering frailty" kind of intolerance, because I abhor reminders of such things in my own self. I am certain I'm sleep-walking through my own life more of the time than I want to be, and assuredly more than I'll quickly admit. I take my Stun Pill every morning so that I can go through the motions that are expected of me, play the roles that were set in place for me even before my father's sperm pierced my mother's egg: the expectations of family and culture, of gender, of age, of occupation, of geography, of job title, of relationship. Without that Pill, my veneer of decorum would have not just cracked but shattered long ago, which would have earned me a one-way ticket to a public institution for the depraved, no doubt. My Stun Pill allows to me Play the Game and exist in this Polite Society and go about the business of worshiping Profit and toeing that proverbial line. Go along. Get along. Go along. Get along. And inside seethes an outrageously offended demon, who screeches into my cranium in ways only I can hear. It's very much fingernails on the chalkboard of my mind. Is there nothing that will assuage her? She will someday drive me into the sleeves of a straight jacket.
It's not enough that I'm repulsed by my own species' tendencies and my roll call attendance to the same. No, my genteel veneer is challenged by other assaults, too. Below is an example:
"Wetend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of gettingsomething we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciatingwhat we do have."
- Frederick Keonig
I read this kind of platitude, and somewhere deep inside I begin to retch up my toenails. This pablum seems merely pandering, of the same class of drivel that drives people to resign themselves to a fate they feel they cannot control, when in fact they can, they could. It reeks of design by the same jokers who cooked up the creeds and dogmas enshrouding the nagging questions of "Where do we go when we die?" and "How did we get here?" It's yet another opiate for the masses, or so it seems in my world.
How is the child, who was indoctrinated to the Puritan Work Ethic at the earliest age, supposed to square the above admonishment with the Pursuit of the American Dream? With the definition of success and competence we are spoon fed from the get-go, like so many battery cells powering that vast matrix of society. Is the ultimate goal to make all of us schizophrenics, hearing voices that are not there, splitting into multiple personalities to cope with the competing programming? And we question the pervasiveness of pills for depression, for breakdowns in coping mechanisms? PLEASE. We do this to ourselves, and then we go back and ask for second helpings.
Stupid humans.
And how can such passivity make the world any better? If the world is evil at worst and unpleasant at best, and we have to "be the change we want to see in the world," and "it takes a village," and "there's no happiness if you aren't in service to another," and every other contrary admonishment to Koenig's fairy tale above, then how does that all synch up. Am I the only one who finds this circular logic?
Nietzsche said it was "a privilege to own oneself." It often appears I'm the only one that got that memo. It also appears I must be the spade I've been called. You're goddamned right I'm easily offended. Sometimes the act of drawing my own breath offends me so deeply I wish I could stop it by will alone.
