The Prefiguration of a Secular Confectionist
Stuff to Kvetch About, Act II, Scene II
Anthony Giddens started all of this madness with his “ridiculous” theory concerning the “structuration” of society, a theory of agency and structure where both end up getting subsumed as the building of bureaucratic, academic or sociological structures overtake their very reason for existence. Well, he didn’t exactly say that, but it doesn’t take engaging a laborious Hermeneutic Spiral to see how human agency collides with bureaucratic structure to produce internecine to destructive constructs within every social organization over time.
It must be that the seeds of outcome are all contained in the Prefiguration (pre-configuration) of the agencies and structures available at the outset. Like the structures of hidden fractals buried deep within the general human picture of some desired outcome, over time those hidden “fractalines” begin to overlay even the originally desired outcome in, “as above, so below,” fashion, making projects like the Catholic Church into the pathetic, morbid structures that they were a part of at the very outset of their quickening. Beginning with the personal dishonesty of the progenitors and proceeding to the most insane peccadilloes of some finite generation X of the structurated cycle’s progeny, the end was present at the beginning, if you looked at that beginning under a microscope. Effects are known by their prior Cause. Or, to put it into a holiday context, “you can’t put a pecan pie in the oven and expect to get back a pumpkin pie in time for Thanksgiving Dinner.”
And so I resign my commission as a confirmed Catholic and, instead, embrace every religion that offers free candy and baked goods as a part of its holiday rituals. I am, and will always be, a Secular Confectionist. Let’s at least embrace peace long enough to get the candied yams and the pies out of the oven and cooled before we fire up the family calliopes of dysfunction, broken taboos, no-talk rules and coping mechanisms involving alcohol and other esoteric exotica.
Yes, it would have been nice if Ward and June Cleaver were our true paragons of holiday virtue, but, in my case, there was never an episode of the “Beave” where Ward took a fresh change of clothes to June at the local grin-bin. America has never been prepared to deal with the rubbish it produces as a result of its structurated activities. Hell, we can’t even get half the population to lift the lid before they urinate, much less hit where they aim. But we can spin yarns of imagination, odes to what could be, hymns of harmonic euphonia, if only you dumb fuckers would just do things MY way. “My,” as used here, is a variable where, in participatory fashion, we each place our name in possessive form.
The last project I did in my graduate studies curriculum — no, it was not a thesis — was an article describing my hermeneutic examination of two of the landing pages on the Internet that I found most pertinent to the machinations I saw occurring in the mediascape around me: Stormfront.org and some “patriot” website concerned with undocumented immigration across the southern border of the US. I dug and twisted, I pulled from Professor Phillip Wander’s work on the “excluded third” for assistance. My creative writing professor from way back in my freshman year of my first attempt at a university education shared his doctorate thesis with me on 19th Century Utopian societies. He examined them all in significant detail. I was all of nineteen and he saw something in me besides a companion for a cheap cup of coffee, something about a wrong being done to him in his endless pursuit of a legitimate full-professorship. I saw a drunk intellectual trying really hard to avoid having to take responsibility for how far down the practice of self-pity was taking him, blissfully unaware that we see nothing but ourselves reflected back to us by the world at large. Yes, with each iteration I saw that high, fly ball coming down from what seemed like the stratosphere.
And then it hit me.
We all think utopia is possible for people just like ourselves. It is all these people we would rather exclude from consideration who keep messing things up for the rest of us. Kind of like what seagulls do to seals over the free food available from tourists along the wharf, or what humans do to whales with their goddamned gill nets. We are all constantly interacting with each other and, after decades of struggle, we learn to get along with the people we go to church with on Sundays; but then these foreigners show up and complicate, confound or lay bare our rules for beingness that we pretty much thought were all that and a bag of corn chips. They break our rules and mess things up. We cannot make a living in the same old ways, we cannot survive, much less thrive, because, suddenly, we have Life, itself, demanding that we let go of our old ways of seeing things and embrace something less certain. Nevermind that we are engaging in a gigantic waste of time right in the middle of our two known certainties, birth and death, with our endless whining and self pitying pathos about the good old days being “stolen” from us.
William F. Buckley wailing against Gore Vidal’s trust of liberal democracy comes to mind.
“Turning the other cheek,” isn’t about pacifically taking it in the shorts every time Life throws us a curve ball. The seal can drown the seagull and steal the catch back from the beak of a dead bird. The whale, a more intelligent creature by far, can seek assistance from the very species that manufactured the painful entrapment that has threatened its existence, freeing it to swim and eat for many more decades to come. All that, “turning the other cheek,” has ever meant was that in times of desperate conflict, you can choose to change your point of view. You can learn new facts of your existence and enlarge your own life by letting more truths in to enliven your experience. Or, you can do what the dinosaurs did and live for hundreds of millions of years on the largesse of whomever or whatever floated that gigantic satellite we call, “the Moon,” into orbit around our planet, keeping us safe from most of the dangerous interstellar objects that hurtle themselves through space and time. And it might work well for you until, one day, your lizard-like complacency and longing for the non-existent, “good ol’ days,” meets with the truth of the matter and you become the fuel that some other species chokes itself to death with. Guess you showed, “them:” the whomever was in line behind you ready to take your place and reap the benefits of what your dead carcasses sowed for them.
And so it is as it has become.
Of course, if our ancestors were either dishonest with themselves or intentionally trying to mislead their fellow humans, we will not be able to identify the cause of our current befuddlement and associate those effects to some prior cause. We can, however, identify causes and effects in our own lives and come to some pointed conclusions about who might have been lying, why and when, as we slog through a bog of murky effluent. Our reflections and examinations might offer us nothing in terms of how to navigate through a world of raw sewage, but they might well offer us a few pointers on how to stop creating the same problems we find ourselves in, going forward.
At the current rate of our revelations, we will all be dead, but the heartiest among us will understand why before they, too, will face extinction.
Americans love the cotton-candy truths uttered by Mark Twain in his heyday, forgetting the inconvenient truths of his perspectives on American involvement in the Spanish Civil War, especially in the Phillipines. We quickly forget about causes and effects and embrace, “might versus right,” through some of the most absurd syllogisms uttered by homo sapiens adults, relegating the pursuit of truth to some “academic” exercise of “analysis-paralysis”; choosing, instead, a pursuit of some form of practicality that makes the ignorance of time-worn truths acceptable in polite company. Politics over reason happens all the time in elementary school yards across America, and the obsessive-compulsive embrace of conservative politics in America finds its intellectual bedfellow right there and nowhere else. Yes, it is possible to be an intellectual and be a conservative, but it is not possible to also be an honest pursuer of truth as Buckley evidenced in his steadfast embrace of what truth tells us was a fictional character spun up by Romans in their zeal to conquer Palestine. I can empathize and applaud his steadfast sentiments as a recovering Catholic; however, I cannot label his insistence on the primacy of religious dogma as a life-long relationship with the, “honest truth.”
Perhaps the hardest truth I have yet to fully learn in my new found tradition of involvement with secular confectionism is that the flour and sugar at its very foundation are enemies to my good health and a long and vital life.
