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good god and the supposedly good god being a fraud - evil cross-dressed in a brass halo. There's a lot to it. There's something like that going on in the real world of political and social classes, where power is usually inherited and can be risen to only by those stupid or cunning enough to go along with the crooked game being played, while honest potential leaders must accept suppression or, against all odds, take up arms. I've got a note buried in my heap of "Notes to No- where" about the necessity of at least ceremonial stupidity in "high" places, which credits some bigshots with the low cunning and purely political determination it takes to just continuously pretend to be popularly stupid for ceremonial purposes. But I don't really think city hall and capitol hill pols, their courtiers, the embedded rich or even their em- bedded bards are often faking their regressiveness. The topside definitely stinks of a kind of evil behind its mask - not just religious in nature (only the brass god's minions care much about that) - but anti-intellectual, counter- ethical, and philosophically inept. Good realistic writers have always been onto this reverse negative reality. Realistic literature disguised as fiction is rife with reliable blue-collar heroes, gutter saints, and even low-life losers, lunatics, and crooks who are better than the puritans who despise them. There's a whole genre of gin drinking, wise cracking p.i.'s fired from the police force, endowed by their creators with convincing contempt for the establishment cops. The masters of noir regularly tease their readers' suppressed rebelliousness with barely masked offers of hope that the supposedly bad anti-heroes will get away with their crimes against the supposedly good establishment. And, in some of the very best books, they do. I relate better to Wolf Larson, Ahab, and Merseault than to Robin Hood, but there's catharsis for me in even a fairy tale revolution that defies the cloudy throne to mete out fictitious reverse justice that real world media and politicians would ceremonially deplore. Of course, in the real world, the supposed under- side doesn't always or even often fit any good devil role, though you can't tell about people whose worth has been wrung out of them or who think they have to cover it up in a world that won't stand for any smart talk. But sometimes even anti-heroes escape from the bookshelves and earn real underside acclaim. The officially unrecognized idolization of The Great Randy, Jello Biafra, Fidel Castro, and now Hugo Chavez are dramatic examples. But it's only logical, or reverse logical that the best examples - the real elite among good devils - have to be more completely unknown (like me, of course), because, while it's only bullshit religious morality that's reversed in the Satanic mass, it's a whole reversed value system I'm talking about, and the grasp as well as the granting of worth, recognition, and influence are among the the concepts mirror-reversed. |
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