Drawing by Darwin Leon
IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO REVOLT
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
I WOKE UP ONE MORNING shortly after my return to Hawaii from a frantic life in New York City, thinking that in twenty years, more or less, I will be an old man or dead, so perhaps the time is meet to compose a scathing attack on the System I have always hated yet conformed to in my struggle to survive.
Perhaps it is finally time to make an open declaration of war and to wage it from my desk, I thought, just as old men behind desks send children to die in battle. But my war would not be against a defined alien enemy in order to keep Peace at home. It would be against the System itself, which keeps Peace whether foreign or domestic by means of fear and intimidation, and which calls the tragic result "freedom."
AS IF there were a definite, comprehensible System to rebel against! Sociology tries to creatively define one, but winds up with its own tyrannical nonsense as it squeezes complications and complexities into boxes only to have Jack pop out again and say "You Fools!" But never mind that, for we, often unwittingly, live AS-IF lives. Hence AS IF must be good enough for the time being while the search for Truth, notwithstanding religious dogmatism, proceeds along infinite detours.
In any case, in order to make an effective assault on the System, I would have to confront the Conspiracy behind it. That is, AS IF there is a Conspiracy. Surely there must be a Conspiracy incorporating the whole globe. And there must be a Mussolini Fraternity ruling the Chain of Being from the top down while propaganda convinces the slaves building the pyramid that the whole vain monument is a democracy, or at least a democratic republic.
We can see the same sort of hypocritical irony in our everyday corporations whose operations are somewhat more obvious. A corporation articulates diverse interests by preventing the free expression of those interests. It is foolish, then, to claim that a corporation is democratic or that it is self-governing. The corporation is ruled by its authorities who aim at unity of authority. Of course, the members or servants of a corporation are always somewhat disassociated from it: they will to some small extent pursue their self-interests. However, they will regularly obey the commands of the corporate authorities and will submit to the judgment of the corporate umpires no matter how arbitrary and unjust those orders and judgments might be.
As a matter of fact and habit, the servants of a corporation resign personal responsibility and therefore their individual wills at the well-guarded corporate doors which are, as many employees know only too well, the gates to private hells. Yes, servants can resign from one corporation and enter another. However, today corporations are for all practical purposes alike as they strive for the aggrandizement and material freedom of a few people who are interrelated by their elite status, interlocking interests, and family ties. When the private lives of this power elite are examined, we find, with a few glorious exceptions, lives no less brutish, although more publicly sophisticated in the derogatory sense, than the thugs who led the gangs of old.
In exchange for the freedom of responsibility, for the freedom of self-creation, a corporate servant has the so-called freedom of irresponsibility as far as the general society is concerned. He has the pseudo-freedom of being submerged in a corporate AS IF, in a delusion of grandeur, which really makes the person into just another nothing, another instrument of the corporate Conspiracy. Obviously, being irresponsible for the higher ethical ideals of civilization is not freedom at all: it is slavery; if for a paycheck, it is wage-slavery. A genuine human existence is determined by the exercise of self-will. If that will is reduced to blind obedience to authority, whether the obedience is to corporate authorities operating in the name of the System or authorities operating in the name of God, then that existence is null and void.
Those are the considerations I entertained before I dragged myself out of bed that morning, determined to compose a scathing attack on the System and the Conspirators running it. It may not surprise you to know that I had recently resigned from a corporation and turned down a great offer from another one, a foreign corporation which promised me I would never have to pay taxes anywhere again because of its special relation to the leaders of the foreign government; provided, of course, that I remained obediently on board. I cursed my bitter self for turning that offer down, for if I had accepted it I would be set for life at this point instead on the verge of homelessness. I walked away from security because I thought I was an ethical man. In retrospect, the fact of the matter is this: I had been so severely maimed by corporate life that I feared corporations in general. In the old sense of manly virtue, I had become a moral cripple, a casualty of the corporate Conspiracy.
Is not the whole world coming under the umbrella of an insidious and secret corporation? Yes, I thought on that recent disturbing morning, I must launch an attack. It did occur to me THEY would have me shot, hopefully without warning in an instantly fatal spot, just before my savings runs out. Little did I know that THEY do not shoot a mouse that roars: the corporate poltroons simply set out poisonous obstacles that result in a rather slow and painful death. Very seldom do THEY send a man out with a gun.
I reconsidered after a second cup of coffee; it is too late for my frontal assault on the System, even if I could do some good by slowing it down a bit. I had my big chance in the Sixties to do some damage. I was a rebel then, believe it or not. That is before I sold out and went to work for the corporations. Liberty was my youthful ideal and I had a plan to realize it. I would learn French and move to Paris, the old seat of the real Revolution rather than a continuation of aristocracy under another name. I would become a chain-smoking, alcohol-sodden, drug-dazed, sexually perverted, surrealistic avant-garde existentialist. I would defy every system along with every systematic statement I ever made. I would throw everything I read away, right after I read it; I would write volumes about freedom, quoting no authority. I would be possessed by the consolations of madness, and die without even knowing it. Thousands upon thousands of people would attend my funeral, people who had never read a word I had written, or if they had, barely understood anything I had said. Finally, my grave would be desecrated and my bones somehow mingled with those of Rousseau and Voltaire.
Yes, yes, what a beautiful dream I had as a rebellious youth! What a great Ideal, that vision of Liberty I opposed to the reality of the infamous 'Man' the 'Pigs' the 'System'! If only I had acted accordingly to realize my dream instead of living a walking death in the very System I despised.
I openly despised the SYSTEM back then, whatever IT was, just because I was there at the time, somehow born to rebel, and somehow given good contrasts to my sorry and violent circumstances, great examples such as: Marxists, Nihilists, Hippies, Black Power People, namely all those Activists who gave a damn and who were willing do something about the System.
Well, never mind. I was not the only one who sold out. I just sold out early. When I heard Nixon talking like an ordinary Mob boss, I did not even bother to say ' I told you so.' Things have not changed that much, and it seems even worse might rise to the top very soon.
Despite my cynicism, I did wake up with regrets on that aforementioned morning. I examined myself in the inner mirror I have been given to talk to. Just look at me now, I said to my alter ego. Having never visited France, who would shed a tear for me if I died now? Oh, what a glorious protest I would have personalized! It's just too late to make much of a difference now.
Nevertheless, I shall not let my regrets stop me from taking a few potshots at the System from time to time, even though resistance to the ORG is futile. Any life and even Life itself might be futile in its end, but Life is dead set against any end as far as I am concerned. Hence there is always, even where only a little life remains, some time for revolt. Indeed, now that I think of it, Life IS: Revolt. At the very least, revolt IS the life of the revolutionary artist. That artist must always revolt against the Mob and its Elite, against every System tending to Global Uniformity, that ugly Army of Death and Destruction commanded by the Living Dead from their luxurious bunkers overlooking the sewage.
That horrendous Army of Death and Destruction guided by its generals and their spurious Glittering Generalities would make the Living Body called Man into a putrefying corpse, its wondrous diversity reduced to its constituent materials, to the dead statistical dust even now choking the voice of Liberty.
Therefore I revolt.
-XYX-
1999 Honolulu
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