Intellectual
Integrity
I’ve known far too many people
who’ve been a certain kind
of shitty human
(Homo sapiens being a species
predisposed to shittiness
in myriad ways),
the ones who try,
and succeed too often,
to pass off confidence as competence
and substitute guesswork and bluffing
for knowledge and understanding –
aggressively.
You’ve probably
known people like that.
Maybe you’re one of them,
and don’t think that’s shitty at all.
Free Speech and the Gurgler
To Hell with censoring
offensive language and hate speech.
To Hell with denying dickheads
any platform at all.
To Hell with censorship in all
its forms.
Let the only fetters to freedom
of expression
be laws against incitement to
violence, defamation,
false advertising, and fraud,
laws permitting the use of
provocation
as a defence in cases of simple
assault
(‘Them’s fightin’ words!’),
and, voluntarily, kindness.
But …
I’ve come, in my old age,
to understand what I imagine
might be behind
some social-justice warriors’
craving for censoring
people who advocate various
forms of shittiness.
Unlike the promulgators of the
Enlightenment,
they seem to assume that most
people are shitty –
something that I won’t dispute
–
and given a free choice between
shittiness
and intelligently reasoned
decency
they’re likely to flock to the
shitty ideas
en masse.
We’ve evolved with capabilities
beyond our capabilities,
with too wide a range of mental
aptitudes among us,
so the widespread revulsion
toward corporate capitalism
and the misuse of state power
having reached beyond the
intellectual elite
into the consciousness of
people sorely oppressed
has brought outrage into minds
unreceptive
to the intellectual niceties of
Enlightenment values.
I’m receptive to them, though,
and censorship frosts my balls,
but it’s beyond my power to turn the tide of evolution
and prevent my species from destroying itself.
Confession
I once struck a woman.
I was eighteen,
unattractively drunk, of
course,
unskilled with managing testosterone
rushes,
insecure, clueless,
devoid of self-esteem and
social skills
(I still have those two flaws),
and under the influence
of my acculturation.
We were at a large party;
she was my date,
although I’d just met her,
and she was dancing close
with someone else.
I slapped her,
weakly.
As soon as I did it
I felt instant guilt and
regret,
which I still feel
unpleasantly often
fifty-four years later.
As soon as I did it
she told me to get away from
her
and stay away from her,
and I did.
We encountered each other again
in a professional situation
about twenty-two years later
and half a world away.
Neither of us mentioned
anything,
but her eyes told me she
remembered.
I wonder if my eyes did the
same.
Our
Short-Term Future
The human species, it seems to me,
is deep in the throes of a bad case
of Ozymandias syndrome,
with no sense of proportion
when it comes to
either time or importance.
The eugeneodontida, for one small example,
patrolled the Devonian-period seas
for more than 155 million years;
Homo sapiens have been around
for fewer than two million,
and I don’t think we’ve evolved
to survive all that much longer,
since we have developed
with a genetically embedded
penchant for shittiness,
along with a self-destructive streak
and the capacity
to use it.
All those trees I’ve planted all my life
have provided me with enjoyment
just by planting them,
and maybe some will flourish
when no people are left
to enjoy them,
and will do their flourishing
without self-reflection
or delusions of lasting legacies,
as did the eugeneodontida.
Unhappy Internal Health
The country with some of the
unhealthiest
social, political, economic,
and cultural systems in the world,
the USA
is one whose institutions of
violent coercion are obese,
but whose institutions of
justice are anorexic.
Getting
To Know You
I read people poorly
and my judgements
in regard to the character
of those people I meet
more often than not
turn out to be
inaccurate.
Now, my overall opinion
of people in general,
y’know, as a species,
tends to be extraordinarily low,
yet I usually form too high
a first opinion
of those individuals
whom I get to know
superficially,
but of course
I usually discover,
in time,
that I’m mistaken,
thereby reinforcing
my negative assessment
of the phenomenon of
the human race.
Yearning for Kudos
To the best of my memory,
I’ve never spoken or written
the word ‘yearn’
or any form of it
in an effort to communicate
with anyone,
other than mentioning it in the
abstract
without context,
as I just did here.
Since I first heard it as a
child
it’s seemed to me to be
corny and affected,
if not downright unnatural.
It still does,
partly because I first heard it
in the lyrics of
corny and affected
pre-rock & roll popular
songs,
and partly because
to my trauma-damaged mind
the whole concept of yearning
for someone or something
seemed to me then
and seems to me now
to be silly and overblown.
I’ve never been comfortable
with the word ‘kudos’, either,
for some reason;
I’m even uncertain
about how to pronounce it,
since I don’t go around
pronouncing it.
Gypsies and Indians
The Gypsy Fair had come to Claudelands Park
encircling their caravans and
house buses –
right where the local
Somali-Kiwis usually
play pick-a-side soccer
football –
looking like pioneers in old
Western movies
when the Indians attacked,
using tactics seen only in cinema.
This time, on a footpath
outside the circled wagons,
the Indians were a
medium-elderly couple,
the woman with a bindi between
her eyes,
plus my dog, and me.
They both asked me, in their
subcontinental lilt,
if those were gypsies,
and I told them that no,
they’re not Romani,
but they try to live like them.
The woman asked me if they sell
things,
I told them, ‘Well, they try
to’,
and they both laughed.
Then the man asked me if they
lived in their vehicles,
as the real gypsies do,
and I said that they did,
then he asked if they go to
another city next,
and I confirmed this.
The man seemed to like this
thought,
and looked as if he were
considering
running away to join the
gypsies himself,
breaking out from his
set-in-concrete life,
but his wife steered him away.
Romance has its limits.
Imperatives
You can’t be thin-skinned.
You must respect other people’s religions.
You have to keep up with the latest digital technology.
You should only do what you love.
You can’t lose your enthusiasm.
You must always have self-belief.
You have to believe in something!
You should look people in the eye.
You should always face your fears.
You shouldn’t ever eat margarine.
You shouldn’t
ever eat butter.
Well, why can’t I?
Why do I have to?
Why must I?,
Why should I?
Why shouldn’t I?
Or else what?
In order to achieve what?
Who says so?
Why should I pay them heed?
What’s their
angle?
Imperatives without context,
without qualifiers,
without clear indication of why they’re imperative,
seem to pour
out of a certain type of people.
Whether I shalt not or otherwise,
I wouldn’t covet my neighbour’s ass, anyhow,
but I’d understand it if my neighbour coveted mine.
Male Art
The curator explained
how a certain woman artist
had described her work
as a reaction against minimalism,
which she called
Male Art.
Now, I can sorta see the connection,
politically if not artistically,
as minimalist paintings often appear
on the walls of the headquarters
of predatory, male-dominated corporations –
guilt by association, and all that –
but I fail to understand how
this makes the paintings themselves –
which, incidentally, tend to leave moi,
a confessed male,
generally unmoved but not repelled –
innately
gendered.
I would associate the idea of Male Art
with blurry representations
of staunch and manly stockmen on horseback
wearing oilskins and leather hats,
and smoking rollies in the rain;
or of lushly coloured paintings
of dissolute Restoration roués
carousing licentiously with buxom libertine wenches
in thickly furnished bordello parlours,
their attire in debauched disarray,
or maybe a couple of muscular mates
making shirtless
goo-goo eyes at each other,
but then, my imagination is limited.
Wild Breakfast Animals
They returned from the
breakfast buffet
put on by the conference
organisers
and ensconced themselves at a
table to tuck in.
The bald man with the fleshy
face smirked,
pointed vaguely at his table
partner’s
bowl of muesli with berries and
melon balls
and said,
‘What kind of breakfast is
that?
Are you a monkey? Or a rabbit?’
The olive-skinned fruit-lover
smiled,
then gestured toward baldie’s
eggs with bacon, sausage, and
ham and said,
‘That’s me; then you must be a
hyena,
scavenging meat from animals
that somebody else has killed,
as you do.’
