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The diaTribe Vault
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The business where Parker worked consisted of four long double alleys filled up with brightly colored boxes. On the window and by the front door and back counter and at the end of each alley were big cardboard cutouts, larger-than-life photographs of larger-than-life Modern Heroes. The Heroes were once only human beings, mostly white human beings, who were born with (or had bought) attractive faces or strong jaws or large breasts or disciplined chest muscles. The Heroes were all made in a factory on the other side of the country, and Their opinions and lifestyles were made desirable to human beings like Parker by loud noises spewed out by the factory. The noises were called "Commercials." When Parker would go to work, human beings would come in to the business and give him money. Money was made in another factory. In exchange for money, the human beings would be allowed to take home little black cartridges. Inside their houses, these human beings would put the little black cartridges into the guts of very complicated machines, which could create very believable illusions. The Modern Heroes were always doing vile and perfect things in the illusions, and the human beings who watched the illusions would smile, or laugh, or cry, or get very angry, depending on the personal effect each illusion fathered in them. Meanwhile, in very large houses and jets and bars, the Modern Heroes, Their collective imagination spent by illusion-making, were finding more and more bizarre ways to create Their own illusions. Many of Them would kill, or destroy, or die too soon. The human beings who came in to Parker's store never saw this as stupid. It always seemed romantic to them, because they had to believe that somebody somewhere could have a romantic life. All of the little black cartridges were artfully designed collages of motion and music and talking. There was very little printed word on any of the collages, usually only at the beginnings and endings, where the factory would make lists of all the Modern Heroes, human beings and other machinery involved in making the illusion. After years of this, even these little bits of reading material at the beginnings and endings got boring, and the human beings would push buttons on their complicated machinery to make the reading material scroll by very fast, so they wouldn't have to be bothered with reading at all. After a few more years, schoolteachers even began showing the illusions to their students instead of forcing them to actually read a book for a book report. Sometimes, the human beings would get so excited about the Modern Heroes thrashing out Their illusions that they would steal the brightly colored boxes from the shelves, which didn't even have little black cartridges in them. Then the human beings would get home and discover that they had not stolen any illusions. All they had were empty pretty boxes. And lo, the Modern Heroes became highly successful in all types of absurdly unrelated arenas. Reporters would ask Them for Their opinions on world problems or politics or capital punishment or legal precedent or environmental control or the separation of church and state. They were invited to the President's house for dinner. They had streets named for Them in large and small towns. Newspapers spent many dollars and much time trying to discover if the Modern Heroes were having sex, or why not, or how often, and with whom, and how it was, and what They wore before and after, and just exactly what the estate gardener was doing with the lady of the house, behind the house, after dark. See, when Parker was alive, apparently nothing was more telling about a human being's cosmic nature than the extent of control held over them by sex. This was an honest mistake. "Zen" sounds a lot like "Sin." The illusions that Parker swapped for money had been around a lot longer than Parker, or any of his friends, had been around. The factory, therefore, had to create a brand new vocabulary to let the human beings know what kinds of illusion they were about to wish they were in. As a side note, the factory's considerate attempts to free the human beings from the burden of literacy had created, as that last sentence shows, more acceptable places that a participle could dangle...in. The new vocabulary used words normally associated with destruction and violence, and taught the human beings to get excited by the prospects. So, a very desirable illusion might be called "explosive," "dynamite," or a "blockbuster" or a "big smash hit." And they called movies made before Parker was born "classics," which meant they were only in black-and-white, which meant the Heroes had to depend on clever, witty dialogue instead of expensive special-effects, which meant they deserved the appellation "classics," which meant that no one would ever remotely consider watching them. "Special-effects" was the factory's new vocabulary word for the habit of showing young children the best possible way to shear off a human being's limbs and destroy a bedroom or an airport at the same time. This was another example of the complete linguistic control usurped, over time, by the factory -- like describing death in "living color." Parker often observed a desert of shifting moral sands in the human beings who came in to his store. So many times, concerned mothers would ask Parker to recommend an illusion to show to their impressionable children. The mothers were concerned about the moral content and impact of the illusion. The standard plea was, "Violence is okay, so long as there's no sex in it." Hmm...Kill them, just don't sleep with them... Parker seemed to be the only one to notice these and other bitter paradoxes (paradocti?) in his store...words or phrases that just didn't seem to go together. At first glance, they seemed okay, but when he thought about it...Science Fiction?...A Good War Movie?...Light Drama? Yes, and there were some, uh...hmm...well, dumb remarks. Oh yea.
The human beings who came in to Parker's store began to believe that the Modern Heroes were real, and that Their lives were real, and that their own lives were the illusions. A whole generation, or two, of voting and non-voting human beings began to doubt the significance of their own existence, since the Modern Heroes had such attractive story-lines within Their own lives. And a series of trends began to develop, revolving around the idea that all good human beings must smell just so, think just so, talk just so, act just so, perform sex just so, so and so and so on. ...Sure did... Legends, children, like pyramids, are built up one brick at a time. And, like pyramids, no human being is really sure how they arrived, or why, or how many innocents were used up in the process. Remember that bricks are placed once, then glued into that place, then generally ignored. Human beings, looking at pyramids, say, "What a lovely pyramid!" It is a rare and often outcast human being who sees and says, "What a lovely brick!" Only once is a brick ever used, to make a pyramid, or a bridge, or a wall. Choose your heroes wisely. |
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