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I recall my early years sometimes, like the time my mother pounded on the bedroom door, yelling: "Dag, what are you doing in there? Do you hear me? What are you doing? Are you looking at the Monkey/Ward catalog again?" And I'd say, "No, mother," in a shuddering whimper kind of voice, overcome within the confines of my room by fantastic passions and lurid early teen dreams. "I'm going to report you to your father," she yell. He'd come home, take me out back and give me the chat I always dreaded. "Son, why don't you try to get a girlfriend? You're a nerd like all you loser friends, but can't you even try? Do you have to send all your time in your room with that? I can't believe you're my kid."
I'd go back to my room as quickly and discretely as I could, and I'd hear them talking in the next room: "I don't understand it. How can he do that day after day? It's unnatural for a boy his age. And it's not even English."
Actually it is. Coup d'Etat.
I love the following Amazon.com review. Normally I'd think the name below is a pseudonym, but after having recently encountered Ceramic Anneal from Pakistan, nothing's too weird for me to accept, even that I would stay indoors to read a book like that rather than bomb at getting a date. Uh huh.
Coleman Fuel: WARNING: This book is not in the class of typical, vague strategy compendiums that business gurus and self-help seekers can read in hope of finding some inner meaning to help them find their "way." Coup d'Etat is merely a book on overthrowing government structures with the intention of deterring unpopular regimes from the quest for dominion. Accurate in strategic principles, this book could be very dangerous or totally useless in the wrong hands. If you are one of the rare ones out there who actually reads strategy books with the intention of war, then this work is definitely required reading. Study it as a guidebook, and go overthrow a facist regime in a third world country (for fun and profit), or die a horribly violent death while trying. It's up to you, but my guess is that most people who read this will end up infamous, dead, or writing stupid reviews for it saying how well it can be used as a metaphor for human life.
Edward Luttwack, author of Coup d'Etat, is a serious fellow, as is his subject above. Not now, of course of course of course, but maybe later and maybe elsewhere in the world we might maybe want to know a few things about this and that in a serious way. In a relative way.
Yeah, I was probably adopted. My so-called parents flipped out thinking I was reading homosexual erotica when they discovered The Prince under my mattress. Honestly, I tried, even humor, like the time I told them that I'd been in jail overnight. "I told the judge: 'Yes, your Honor, I confess I killed my parents, but have mercy! I'm an orphan'."
I'm sure they'd heard that joke before. Not even a smile.
2 comments:
So, will you be putting theory into practice anytime soon?
I go out of my way as a rule, one of those things that just begs to be broken, to honor the legal system, a system as we have collectively made it by rational consensus for over a thousand years or so by practice and trial and correction. Were I a younger man I might well be tempted to pursue the delights of world history's jurisprudence. I'm not so young that I have that luxury anymore. I am, I see by my life's record, a law-abiding man, if one looks at rational, positive, codified law. I don't go out overthrowing lawful governments just because I might be so inclined by temperament. And there's the rubber as it hits the road:
I obey our positive and rational codified law as a system over-all, and I expect in return our system to honor its commitments to us all in its traditional senses. In America I am a Constitutionalist plain and simple. So long as our nation is ruled under the principle of our Constitution, with ammenedments legitimately made under those standing principles, I'm fine with it all even if I object and suffer from them personally. Any radical change in our system, that's too far for me. I don't see it happening as yet. I suspect I wouldn't live so long as to see such a thing. Thus, I am a law-abiding citizen, of sorts.
Other nations? (Spit.) I have no loyalty to any of them beyond prudence and common decency, though there are any who question my charms. If, for example, the government of the Netherlands were to outlaw free speech, in the case of Geert Wilders, and not allow for a change of government that would allow for a correction of such a fundamental injustice, then I would see the government as illegitimate, as an enemy of the people. But how far is that a realistic problem? I tired to addressit at least briefly two posts down at "The Psychopath and the Gunslinger." Obviously I'm deeply concerned by the drift into totalitarianism I see across Europe. With demographic changes in Europe, we might well see a "democratic" shift to sharia implementation, making it superficially legitimate among the population as it would then be; but I could, might even do so, argue that an alien and non-traditional population imposing on grandfathers is not legitimate. In such a case I would argue for "founders' privilege" and come out strongly for a nativist militancy of shocking proportions. Racism Not at all. My concern isn't for nativism on the basis of race, as one can see from such past pithy posts as "Let's invade Sweden." Nor am I sentimental in looking at primitives generally as worthy of anything but colonialism by Modernist filibusters; see most of what this blog is about. My concern is for the universal implementation of Modernity, regardless of who and how, even if that means coups d'etat by ruthless and greedy land pirates. Especially filibusters, for who else but they would care to risk life and freedom for a chance to be filthy rich and unimaginably powerful while doing some small good in return?
Yes, I have some bloody visions of beheading the current King of France so I can take over some of the better wine-growing regions of the nation; but that's just me for now. More realistically, one can see Africans from, for example, Mokoko, Nigeria or oppressed dhimmi Hindus from nearly all of India finding the sense of a coup d'etat study and allying themselves with like-minded Iranians intent on a restoration of state Zoroastrianism in a neo-Persian empire. Foreigners on the march in step with the locals for the sake of crushing the fascist theocracy? Only if there's lots of money in it and a place to live and work afterward for permanent.
Yes, I do look for the "Che" of our time moving on the Muslim fascisms of the world. I call it a "Phase Change." There even exists a legitimate "Phase Change" symbol from electrical diagrams to sport on the flag.
Meanwhile I sit in the semi-darkness trying to formulate the true thesis that will launch a thousand rocket propelled grenades at the local presidential palace.
Here, though, and in any legitimately elected and representative government's nation, I am Mr. Law and Order.
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