rev. weal milked the poor with aplomb. a possessed and mellifluous voice is a huge asset if your vocation is exploitation. it opens doors and legs, slays the goliaths of the academy and press in their clunking monotones. businesspeople everywhere become copper wraiths, brought low by god's unmitigated substance. god is the great cloak that covers the body of darkness. wear him, and be glad.
the assembly’s adherents were drawn from the sectors of society you avoid. tinkerers and travelling knife sharpeners, part-time condom factory janitors, charlatans of lamb, failed rollercoaster mechanics, roasted chestnut salesmen, basement hairstylists and illegal seamstresses, purveyors of used metal, underground traders in exotic amphibians, maladroits of every description, those innumerably expelled, warty inebriated sluts, men of single syllables and grease, middle-aged hamburger flippers, merchants of herbs who can’t spell broccoli, worm gatherers, substitute fish gutters, laborers in the artificial id industry. the ones upon whom you build your privileges.
decline your next dinner party invitation and instead invite these outcasts to your home for lipton’s tea and beer and singing.
a night to remember. love to write about.
being from the middle classes and schooled roughly in the classics, i often didn’t have a lot to say.
praise jesus.
praise.
not a bad day.
praise jesus.
but it was something, and when you’re young it doesn’t take much to feel connected.
i ate their otherness like those given to exotic dishes feed on pigs’ feet and bull balls. couldn’t make them in my kitchen … but, damn, what a restaurant. call me a vendor of mystery or call me a vulture of crass. i don’t care. it’s what i do. i’m a journalist of institutions and this is my tale.
society erects its glassy hierarchies of dignity on the basement of brute power and the rape of mines. respectability’s a charm that’s purchased in the market of praise for a pound of soul. don’t misunderstand me. i don’t wish to denigrate the presidents and ennoble the outcasts. i wish simply to denigrate us all. the outcasts are slimy roaches who’d pinch your mother for a fuck. the presidents are garbage rats, who’d pinch your family for a mansion in grand cayman.
jesus was the ingredient that allowed my singing siblings to steal power from those who stole theirs. dignity was a trade, and you used whatever names you could to survive. you could do worse than jesus. you could do peter drucker. you could do taylor swift. you could do daffy duck. jesus at least was unreal and freakish. bottomless as the pacific and just as cool.
they could have fought directly, of course. gone in combat face-to-face with the directors of wall street. but they were too smart for this. the only way to fight the powerful is to negate their power with an equal or superior foundation. jesus is the only worthy match for mammon in the world’s vicious ring. they’ve been boxing for two millennia now; maybe mammon’s winning, but the assembly shows it’s not yet a knockout.
and if you say the doctrine of prosperity, rev. weal’s $800 shoes, crack the foundations of jesus, you’re right. every foundation has its cracks. it needs them, because every structure needs to fall. so mammon has cracks in its foundations; you see it in the ennui in the skyscraper elevator eyes, the desperation when the phones are silent. ah, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. i was there too, at the center of mammon … the bank … it’s just around the corner.
i know what you’re thinking about all this assembly business. a cult … all the trappings of a cult. charismatic and unquestioned leader, the absence of respectable citizens such as yourself, a clear distinction between members and non-members, psychological and financial exploitation, a culture that’s manipulative, communal, totalistic, and authoritarian. behavioral, informational, intellectual, and emotional control. the scholars have defined cult - established its boxed parameters - in their authoritative and critical taxonomies. what else do you need?
oh. i need life.
you haven’t been listening, my enculturated siblings. the point of my journal, its sting and laughter, is that life’s a cult and all its subdivisions esoteric branches. one person’s cult is another’s family. my group’s orthodox, yours insane. you claim the assembly of the true disciples of christ is a cult and your bank is not. wait, friends. i told you - the bank’s the next chapter. you claim it’s a cult and your family’s not. your family is my next book. call rev. weal an uneducated buffoon. call sister gooch a manipulative dominatrix. and go to sleep on the pillow of your definitions. dream thick stories of your virtue. i have lived too many truths. i have seen the world’s definitions dance and blur and collapse in the stupor of their variegated and doomed romance. i have loved the ascetic, the slut, the faithful, the ceo and the bum. falstaff, lear, cleopatra, cordelia, caliban, prospero, desdemona - each is wholly right and wholly flawed. i have loved the beauty of weal’s wily words, of sister gooch’s omnipotent fat. i have known that each contains the truth and each truth is solitary and irreconcilable. that the only truth is all these truths thrown into a cauldron so large the world would be but a tiny pea bobbing somewhere in its immensity, your beliefs and life a mite among a billion billion mites living in that pea. this the loneliness below our avalanche of words. this the darkness at the heart of our structures. this the truth below your life of lies. but this my creed, this my tears.
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