The Kind of Irony You Can't Write

One of the brilliant things about academia is how stupid it really is.


By the very name, academia, I can tell you that, other than through the drab capitalist ways that one often lives these days, it doesn't put bread on the table. It's unnecessary and pointless and amounts, most days, to a bunch of old white men yelling at each other and on the other days to their spittle drying on the walls of the ivory tower.

Or something like that.

As a writer, I have to say that I've never been particularly interested in the completely factual. I see faction as fiction bleeding into reality, rather than the more logical definition of reality putting on the stylish clothes of the novel. As a blogger, I've been useless: writing shitty poems or long meandering posts and not bothering to edit them enough. Hell, I'm still not even sure what the fuck a hipster is.

So this is not pulling the race or gender or sex or Marxist card, it's just building an aesthetic. Imagine words like bricks building a house in your brain. The way that Ron Silliman unpacks terms is not to explain them but to make them useless. Sentences, in a poem like ketjak, are characters, are old friends over for tea, and all you are going to do is have the same small talk conversations and absolutely nothing important is going to happen.

Because really, all the important things in life are just pissing contests and you can't seriously argue they should exist. The oil industry needs to fucking stop controlling the world. But is this important? No, because the people in charge of the world will be dead before there's a serious issue. And as much as your parents might love you, they seriously can't give a flying fuck either way. Can't, not won't. It isn't possible.

So, anyway, I like to say random crude things about the dominant group because I hate hierarchies of all sorts. I'm sort of like V, the destructive one, except not cool, abused, or fictional. It isn't going to matter how much we lower discriminatory practices. We still discriminate. And that's not tolerable.

Thomas Jefferson is the perfect example of the American: someone with brilliant, beautiful ideas who was just a downright rotten person. I'm not going to say that I'm a better man than Abraham Lincoln, but I will say that everyone who lived through the nineteenth century without getting lynched nauseates me a little bit, as I'm sure I would to myself were I just another goddamn ignorant slave owner.

My father looks for himself in politicians. He uses elections as mirrors. And I guess I do the same. It's funny that politics would then show us to be such different individuals.

And now the point I wanted to make in the beginning, but felt I had to warm my fingers up for: the term transition in political anthropology or political science or political whateverthefuckyouwanttocallit means both the transition to socialism and the transition from socialism to capitalism. At the same time, mind you.

Unpack that.

And as for the offended, I spit in your eye. And then apologize.