Hecuba M. Sneath

Having understood the process by which the people had been elected, I had long stood my ground. I would have given no quarter, I would have not flinched, I would not have stepped aside. Readers of the Ark, transcribers of the Infidels, methodologists of Unity, behold yourselves, I had exclaimed. And all, like wooly lovers, had bowed their necks, their heads hanging low near the ground where the trampled grass had once grown. Truly, my at times pilfered run down the cinder path had been stupendous, my knees scarred here and there from my having tripped and healed later on. Still, I could proclaim quite loudly: My votes had been cast for you and for you and for you. Ah, though my chiasmatic cynicism rang like silent bells in the stars, I had successfully enslaved the bright lights of their imagined moments of universal fame household by household by household, like starving potato eaters crumpled around a tabletop too poor to really think on their own beyond the next starvation-sized portion of comestibles, heaps and heaps and heaps of them well-deceived into the sodden belief that they themselves would become earls, dukes, princes, queens, and kings.

Dangerous People In A Land Of Unquenchable Beauty

It was sort of interesting how the old boy kept coming up in our discussions over time. He was like the reverse of a Hans Castop, an average man around whom the world’s most important novel was written and built. But our boy was an average man around whom nothing would be built and all would eventually fall into irrevocable ruin. He was the archetypal Untermensch who, lacking any ability to imagine the man or the hero he wishes to be, unable to realize himself that way, can only ‘become’ himself through the ready-made scaffolding and rules that are designed for the ascension of all such petty and petty-minded bureaucrats and technocrats lacking human imagination. He was unable, for example, as my friend once said to me about himself, “to just play the hand I was dealt until I can bluff myself into a better one.” To do that is the dream itself, with all its constituent (and congruent) elements and exigencies ready at the mark. But these others who wander about society, they are quite dangerous in their mediocrity and essential nameless identities. And in government, school systems, all sorts of public and quasi-public institutions, they stand a-plenty as knee-jerk enforcers that can deliver harmful impact upon their true betters, unless such persons (maybe like us) drew lines in the sand and refused to comply with their silliness, or simply walked away from the malarky altogether. It’s that shifty, Cassius-like very lack of human identity, personhood, or any heartfelt ideals that make such men and women potentially powerful and potentially fearsome.