The Myth of Human Civility

 The cameraman gave the signal and Barry gave himself a quick pat down, straightening his tie as he did so. Two talking heads scuffed their heels in the wings on either side of the stage waiting to be called up. 

“Welcome back to Barry Ring Live. Tonight’s guests are a lawyer, snitch, human version of a pampered poodle and all-around professional narc; and a gruff, on-edge mettle man made of gristle.”

To Barry’s right Lance Strawman sat bolt upright, tall and gangly, prim and proper like he had a stick shoved up his ass in his tweed jacket and Steve Urkel glasses, feet slipped in 180 thread-count socks stuffed into penny loafers; and to the host’s left: Joe Mouthpiece in jean shorts, sandals, deep wrinkled plain white T and with the grizzled appearance of Tommy Chong if he’d spent time knee-deep in shit with a guerilla cadre.

Barry Ring eyes Joe Mouthpiece first:

“Mister Mouthpiece, you’ve amassed millions of views with your mad-dog rants and have even been accused of inciting more than a few riots – so, please, as a square – put me in my place.”

“You’re not a square - this under-nourished dollar-bin William Buckley is a square.”

“Excuse me, are we really starting with that?”

“This just warm-up. You’ve licked so many boots they should name a shoe polish after you.”

Barry, smirking, pivots to Lance: “The first pot-shots have been fired. The nation waits with bated breath as the essence of white with multiple sclerosis here mounts what will surely be the snarkiest bitch-slap since Churchill mooned Hitler across the English channel.”

Lance got this are-the-lights-on-too-bright look and Joe starts verbally wailin’ on him:

“Hey, I gotta axe you man, straight-up: what’s the difference between you and the dope peddlers you lock up?”

“Excuse me?”

“The way I sees it, a prosecutor serves the same role in society as a drug dealer: both your paychecks literally depend on someone getting fucked over.”

“Oh and what would you know about society, you’re a fifty-year-old edge-lord cosplaying as one of the Merry Pranksters, thinkin’ “This’ll stick it to Nixon’s ashes.””

“Nothin’. I know absolutely nothin’ about society an’ I prefer to keep it that way.”

“So, what, you live up in the woods by yourself like Kaczynski did when he was going through his Walden phase?”

“No, I live in a air-conditioned trailer with a flat-screen an’ a solar panel on the roof.”

“See? You bitch about society but still buy the latest iPhone-”

“The iPhone is a mark of civilization, not society.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Civilization is how modern the technology, how advanced an understanding of the world around your ass, how many Tolstoys and Hemingways you got in print, how effective your treatments – it’s the measure of where you are on the line between caveman and cosmonaut. Society is simply how you interact and dick each other over.”

“Don’t give me any of your new-age revisionism – you talk about having the cake and eating it too-”

“Civilization is the cake. Society is more like the pink frilly frosting around the edge of the cake. You can have cake without the pink frosty petals around the top. Put it like this – what does cordiality with my neighbor got to do with the advent of self-driving electric cars? What does teaching everyone to snitch on everyone got to do with cranking up satellite speeds? What’s gentrifying Alphabet City gotta do with planting life on Mars? Hm? Who gave us penicillin? It sure wasn’t no lawyer. Who gave us the alternating current? It sure as hell wasn’t a pig. It wasn’t no preacher who performed the first organ transplant. On the other hand, it was a convicted murderer who revolutionized the recording industry by inventing the wall of sound. To drive the point home, here’s one of my favorite stories:

When the Catholic Church made it illegal to dissect human corpses, Leonardo Da Vinci hired out body snatchers to break into boneyards and exhume the recently deceased and haul’em back to Leonardo’s workshop so he could cut’em open and do all those detailed sketches of the human anatomy. Now imagine if he were caught and caged before he could put that ink to paper? Do you know how many decades that would’ve sent medicine back? One man can make a difference, and in this case he had to spit in the face of society for the good of civilization. And don’t forget, it was all your prim, proper puritans who carried out the inquisition and the witch trials. It was the snappy dressed goose-stepping German patriot, in accord with his country’s laws, that gassed the and euthenized the undesirables. And that’s the thing – that’s always the thing – you see Sam Little’s staggering body count displayed on screen and you’re instantly ready to give up not only your autonomy, but the people’s autonomy en mass to the first ass-beating fascist in the name of “safety”. Hell, you let them take it further still, and all the while you’re patting yourself on the back for being “well-adjusted”. Your solution to the Ted Bundy’s of the world is to adopt the methods of Mengele. You’re so terrified of the lady killer next door being an actual lady killer that you’ll go with anything that promises to curb that, even when it doesn’t. For every Bundy you send to the chair, or string up or drown in his own bile, there’s another one that’s never caught.” 

“So now your defending Ted Bundy?”

Mouthpiece rolls his eyes and gives this dense piece of wood the finger-

“No matter how bad, there’s always worse, and it’s that ‘always worse’ that people put in charge. Consider this: Bundy killed somewhere in the ballpark of 33 women, and even then he dispatched them relatively quickly, though of course far from painlessly – Josef Mengele, the state-approved head physician of Birkenau, killed hundreds if not literally thousands of people in person, frequently mutilating and injecting and melon-balling their eyes out after sticking a needle into said eyeball and injecting dye into it. My favorite one is when Mengele sewed two people together and watched them slowly die of gangrene. It took three days. And after all that, this ecstatic state official was never caught.”

“I’m not following – what does Mengele have to do with anything?”

“Merely a symbol of state-sponsored atrocity. The method we currently overwhelmingly prefer to deal with our undesirables is lifted straight from the Reich – the first use of lethal injection was to euthanize crippled and mentally impaired children during Aktion T4. Now I’m not sayin’ I’m one a these hippie types – I recognize that some are too pathologically dangerous to live, which is why I say give’em a bullet to the head like the commies did, or toss’em from a helicopter like Pinochet did to the commies – but when you’re final solution is The Final Solution, what’s it fucking matter what the excuse? Public safety or racial purity? Whether it’s under the banner of revenge or the Reich?”      

Here Mouthpiece loses his train of thought and Ring takes the opportunity to interject and cut to commercial. When they come back, Strawman struggles to say something; Mouthpiece changes gears:

“We need to let go of this asinine mentality that everyone needs to be beholden to everyone else just by the one-dimensional fact that you are all the same species and for no other reason beyond that.”

“You sound like a hard-core Ayn Randroid preaching megalomania as something other than vice.”

“It’s megalomania to think you’re better than everyone else in the world, to convince yourself you alone are the prime specimen of your ilk. But it is not egomaniacal if you acknowledge that you are better than at least a few creatures that share your form. So long as you acknowledge that likewise there’s also people better than you whom you do not get to expect to get fucked in your name. What I’m sayin’ is: we need to prioritize, not communize: there are times to take revenge and times to let it go.”

“What, like we should be letting murderers go now?”

“Selection is the key driving force of progress. Is it not natural selection that’s molded our species up to this point in history?”

Strawman wriggles uncomfortably and gives a begrudging nod. 

“The law needs to be pragmatic, not ideological. If all your laws are based on ideology, then what you have is another religion.”

Barry chuckles and pulls out a prop from under the desk. He plops a buckle-hat on his head and mimicking a puritan:

“Well we need to enforce our notion of ethics on the populace.”

“I always found it odd that should two creatures be of different physical form, people have no problem considering one superior to the other. If you see a wolf tearing apart a rabbit, you shrug your shoulder and say, that’s the natural order. Can’t allow ourselves to fuck with that. But when those two creatures share the same shape, like say two apes wearing Detroit Sucks T-shirts, that’s somehow different. For some inexplicable psychological reason, when there’s no physical distinguishment that somehow means there’s no distinguishment of content.”

Barry picks up the silence left more by Strawman than Mouthpiece and prods:

“This brings me to something you’ve said a lot: calling on everyone in the country, everyone of skilled labour or intellectual fields, those in cutting-edge professions or hotly sought after individuals – you’ve called on these people to, to – I hate to sound like Lance here and dismiss you as another yapping Randroid-”

“Go ahead. I’m used to it. No, no, I encourage it. I always found it hilarious that the patron saint of the American right is a bloody immigrant from a red country.”

Lance huffs:

“An immigrant fleeing a communist state.”

“And an immigrant who would’ve spat in your face, called you a tool and bit your conformity-seeking head off harder than she would’ve one of those beard-stroking hipsters peddling chairman Mao.”

Barry taps his forefinger on the tabletop:      

“Where was – you’ve gone so far, mainly to laughable results, as to call on these people to quit – to quit their work, their jobs, their efforts until this country draws a legal distinction between them and the rest of us bozos down here at the bottom.”

“You know why communism failed? Why it proved unsustainable? Because if everyone makes the same, no matter how much skill or work they put in, that destroys any incentive to do better, right? You don’ think the same applies in a social context? What’s the point of striving to be Einstein when the law will dispose of you without a second thought to pettily, blindly revenge, say, a crackwhore? Seriously, I’m asking in earnest and I expect an answer – why strive to be distinguished when the law doesn’t allow for distinguishment? We need to make exceptions for the exceptional-”

“Exceptions for the exceptional? What are you, twelve?”

“The law needs to be fair, not equal.”

“The difference being-?”

“Equality is making believe everyone is the same when they’re not, fairness is acknowledging that they’re not.”

“We need to have some common order, some-”

On the left side of the panel, the prissy dickhead who himself is one long needle-dick lowered his gaze down to his folded hands, eyes half-closed and failing a stuttered rebuttal, bit the pill:

“Yeah. Ok. You may have points, but you don’t have a coherent picture-”

“You’re side-stepping.”

“...Fuckit. This is me waving the flag. But as asinine as it may sound, I still purport Hammurabi’s – not even dime-store but cave-wall – decree of like-for-like-”

“How do you pluck out a healthy eyeball to revenge a blind one? Just because they’re the same shape how does that translate to them being of equal vision? What more self-destructive notion can a species adopt than a call to sacrifice the living for the dead, the young for the old, the quick for the slow, the exotic for the mundane and talented for the parasitic?”

“You’ve already made your point. Ok?

...Maybe we should say fuck Hammurabi. Maybe the law should favor who is valid, not who is merely the victim.”

Mouthpiece, leaning back in his swivel, hands folded in his lap, gives Strawman a small nod.

“Victim apotheosizing is way more corrosive than victim blaming.”

“Yeah, maybe. This is me waving the flag, a small flag, and...

What else can I say but...death to the myth of human civility?”