TRUTH IN FASHION ("Either you like the coat or you don't!")

There was a man once called me a liar. He seemed like a nice enough guy. We were having a pleasant enough conversation. He was a musician. Pretty good musician. I’d just been watching him play his music. We’d met before, though we’d never really talked. But tonight he seemed to be in the mood. I could see it in his eyes. I’d had a couple of beers, he was drinking water, didn’t drink alcohol, I can respect that. We were talking about good and bad, not good and evil, just good and bad. What we liked, what we didn’t like, music, TV, movies, art in general. And how even if we didn’t like something it didn’t necessarily mean that it was bad, just not something we personally would choose to pursue any further without outside guidance and conviction. But so long as we recognized there was an authentic human intelligence at work, a mind and a heart struggling to express and compose its’ experiential truth and not just fucking with our head… If they were fucking with anybody’s head it was their own head, I can appreciate that. So long as it wasn’t some hack derivative effectiveness manipulating me to dive into somebody else’s grave cause there were a lot of other popular corpses down there! I can smell mere commercialism a whole cemetery away. The truth may be a many-headed monster, but I need to feel there’s a few sincere decapitations going on.

I think it was at this point he called me a liar. “But you’re a liar! You make things up. You’re a story-teller, a professional story-teller. A fabricator.” “Well”, I responded, “for a start nobody is paying me to fabricate anything, if I’m lying I’m lying for lying’s sake, in which case the question becomes am I a good liar or a bad liar!???” In which case good and bad become one really fucked-up many-headed monster just out to confuse everybody.. But I realized he wasn’t being nasty, not so much insulting me as speaking his own truth, that to him I was just another monstrously talking-head whose only discourse was propogating fictions at the expense of the one un-conflicting fact : that Jesus died to save us from our sins! And if I can’t accept this as a fact I’ll spend the rest of my life muddled-up. Significantly, at that moment I became very aware of the silver cross dangling round his neck, and I had this sinking feeling the conversation had just taken a turn for the worse. He’d turned me round a corner I wasn’t sure I wanted to go after a few beers, not much in the mood for any gospel truths. The dialogue was about to get very lopsided, me scrabbling around trying to find my own words for everything, him reciting somebody else’s chapter-and-verse. No longer from the horse’s mouth, from the horse’s mouthpiece. I hadn’t realized his music was a testament to his Christianity.

But he was a nice guy. To just shut the conversation down now might be a testament to my own closed-mindedness. “I mean, what if you turned up at the gates of Paradise and jesus was there, bloodied stigmata and all, one-hundred-percent proof, ready to welcome you into heaven with open arms! The only thing he can't forgive, lack of faith. Could you still deny the truth when you’re staring it right in the face?” “But wouldn’t I have to fabricate a face to suit the occasion, or is it one face fits all? All the colors of the rainbow blended into one un-blinding light?” “why do you need to keep scrabbling around in your own words when the game is already over? accept the gift that’s already been given!” “Shouldn’t I want to give a gift back, if I’m a house-guest, exchange gifts? Even if it’s the same gift, at least I’ve bothered to re-wrap it in my own paper..?” “You’re not the Son of God!” “Well, maybe I am, brother!” He gazed at me in precedented disbelief, this poor bugger flailing around with no vowels left and too many consonants to make sense of anything! “Aren’t we all just laundering up our own fabrications, opting for the detergent most likely to soften the blow of the final rinse?”

For some curious reason known only to my mental fabrications and the mysteries of a high-school education, I was reminded of this scene from “Brave New World”, assigned reading at school when I was a teenager, Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future, in which soul-searching had gone out with artistic discourse and upward mobility, and religion had been reduced to a once-a-weekly “ Twelve become One Solidarity” scene. Every Wednesday night various groups of non-moronic disciples would gather for an un-soporific drug-induced soma love-fest! “He is coming!! I I hear His feet on the steps!!! He is coming!!!!” Not jesus, Henty Ford. Not henry Fonda, Henry Ford, the new messiah. Anno domini, AD, switched to AF, After Ford, the Year of Our Ford! The Model T! Chop the top bit off the cross, replace the L with an F, a whole new spiritual history of humanit born again, as soon as the first hooter went off and the time-clock was set in motion. Conveyor-belted cloning, test-tube babies and pre-programmed casting. It takes a global laboratory to raise a globally un-questioning identity : “I am you and you are me and we are all together!” It all gets mixed up when you’re a teenager : Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, John lennon, Little Richard, Arthur Scargill, Billy Graham… Everyone belongs to everyone! And if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with! Promiscuity is the brave new world order of the day. fashionable women would walk around with these haut-couture prophylactic bandeleros wrapped around their hips, ready for pneumatic action should any man’s need arise! It was the females pleasure to pleasure the males, and nobody gave a rat’s ass about next morning consequences, sex, drugs and conga-lines!! The roll world without any rocky impediments of sustained personal relationships, which would undermine community. “Community, Identity, Stability!” Only a generalized ecstasy allowed. “Mother” and “Father” definitely dirty words. Everybody knows exactly who they are and what they are meant to be doing. If you’re a “moron” you clean up the sewage, if you’re not a “moron” you can spend your days happily flying around in helicopters and playing Crazy golf! When you’re not drug-induced ha-cha-cha-ing around raising halleluias to herald Henry’s coming, or penning soporific jingles and other mediating mind-bombs to promote, propogate, propagandize this brave new paradise and keep any creeping selves from exploding out of their inner over-caste!

We have learned to love our servitude! Full employment. Don’t like it, hey, you wouldn’t be here in the first place, you would have been drowned in the test-tube, deprived of oxygen, you’d never know you were never born, I mean, what would be the point? You’d just be confusing everybody else. And confusion is unhappiness, a recipe for chaos. You want order we’ll give you order, you want peace we’ll give you peace, you want harmony we’ll give you a harmony : a harmoniously hierarchical uniformity! When is a hierarchy not a hierarchy? When nobody thinks it’s a hierarchy! Cause I’m just as happy cleaning up the sewage as you are flying around in helicopters and playing Crazy Golf, or making sure I’m cleaning up the sewage right, or coming up with better ways so I can clean up the sewage even further to the right, so it doesn’t interfere with anybody penning soporific jingles or Henry taking the time out every Wednesday night to come up those stairs and tell us “what a damned good job you’re doing, chaps, keep it up!!” Validate our existence and reassure us that after we’re cremated the gases from our corpses will be put to very good use, powering the conveyor-belts! “Cause we’re not savages, we’re scientist, we’re not breeders! You want to see what some savage breeders look like, you go on safari to one of our savage reservations. If you want to see what nature had in store for you, aging, wrinkles, bad eyesight, no teeth, sagging flesh, bloatedly helpless flatulence and incontinence, all-around disgusting distastefulness… Is that really what you want?”

Another disturbingly vivid memory of the Brave New world, all these test-tube kids, barely off the bunsen-burner, institutionalized, government-encouraged adult-sanctioned to join in sex-play. If you didn’t want to join in, you could finish up in the corner wearing a dunce-cap. We need to get ‘em pneumatically warmed up and unquestioningly receptive to sexual overtures from any adult who feels the need arise. And if they’ve stopped feeling the need arise, undoubtedly euthenized by now, lost their vitality, what would be their point? Meanwhile they need to know there’s an abundance of underage flesh to happily play around with. pedophilia went out with the horse-and-buggery! Along with monogamy, matrimony, motherhood, family-ties and nosegays! (Google “nosegays”?) Nature has become the plaything of the Brave New World. If it doesn’t provide pleasure or at least distraction, to be avoided at all costs. Synthesized into savage-reservations. From a very early age those test-tube kids conditioned through electric shock-treatment with a lifelong dread of fresh flowers! And books…Sacreigious waste of time! You’re thinking too much, you have to try not to think too much….

I don’t thin I ever finished the Brave new World, I seem to remember halfway through I decided I’d got the general gist and moved on to an abridged version of “Moby Dick”. But I have no memory of it being proposed as anything but science-fiction, something that could pop up on your A-level exams, and if you don’t want to get marked down as a moron you need to learn a couple of good quotations, character-names and general gist. But lately it seems to be popping up all over the place not as a work of fiction but as an insider’s informed insight into an agenda already underway in 1931 : eugenics, behavioral modification, mind-control, systematically initiated wars and the development of a technological prowess that would blow any naturally instinctive non-divisive un-conquering mind-set into mediated oblivion! The hidden hands at work organizing the chaos to justify a new world order! Delivering us a single-channel pre-programmed wavelength reality, possibly pioneered by the BBC, Sanity Incorporated, where all the really civilized people live! To probe any deeper would be madness. I mean, we all know there’s a secret intelligence at work, secret meetings in back-rooms, secret research and experiments in underground laboratories, in space, at the North and South Pole, the bottom of the ocean, we just have to trust that nothing bad is going on, nobody is plotting to blow up the Houses of Parliament…As soon as we start accepting the miraculous as the mundane and the inhuman as collateral damage…It’s a brave if not that new fact that many morons account themselves very fortunate to know exactly where they stand in this world, what they need to do to thrive or survive at all.. And if you want to get bumped about a bit in your little box, you can always tune into Howard stern or some late-night controversial political chat-show. Or the alternative media on-line, where anybody can (for the moment anyway) say whatever they like, whatever they think about anything, posit undocumented opinion or documented - if equally mediated - proof of anything and everything : the earth is flat! No it isn’t! Yes, it is! No, it isn’t! Ask any quantum physicist, it’s an illusion, a hologram, it’s not even there! Give me three score years and ten I can probably prove it! And the proof is in the pudding, the pudding’s in the over, the oven’s in the kitchen, the kitchen’s in the house, .the house is in the city, the city’s in the world and the world is in the universe! And the universe…Well, the universe is in the universe, doesn’t have to prove a thing! But you’re not in the universe, you’re in the pudding. But you’re not the whole pudding, you don’t get to choose your ingredients, did you make the pudding? Did you build the over, the kitchen, the house, the city, the country, the world? You’ve got your little piece of cake, just eat it!! Leave everything else to the expert chefs. is it cake or pudding?

Of course you could become a stand-up comedian and help everybody just laugh it off! Do you know how many comedians went mad, alcoholic or manic-depressive as soon as they stopped settling for cheap laughs?????