Civilization and its diss
Welcome to Trouble Sells, 2005 edition. I recognize that mid-January is not a very ambitious point from which to start the new year. However, when we last left our story, my bar was closing on New Year’s Eve. I really can’t face that all over again. The wounds are too recent. I will get back to it in due time. I will chronicle the heartbreak, the angry girls I used to sleep with, the complacent girls I used to sleep with, the fear of running out of liquor, and the deep bathos of our situation. That it happened on the turn of the year is all the more chilling. Imagine if it was this way for all Americans. “Well, the ball has dropped, honey. Help the kids pack up their things before the wrecking crew destroys our home.”
I know that in Trouble Sells, 2004 edition, I rarely talked about my actual life, concentrating mostly on high-minded analyses of our doomed race. Now that George Plimpton, always our champion, is dead, I resolve to get back to more drunk girls etc. But before I can do that, an important foundational step is to explain the origin of civilization itself. I am also going to straight-up diss it.
We humans lived before civilization, let’s not forget that. Were things acceptable then? They were to the people who were around. Perhaps they would not be so to us. Are things acceptable now? Absolutely — to the complacent, things are always acceptable. QED.
If life was okay in prehistoric times, why did we begin our inexorable march toward civilization, and beyond? I think this can be explained the same way we can explain more recent history, from Alexander’s conquest of the known world to the American, French, and Russian revolutions to the election of 2004. It is an important concept in my discussion so it will get its own paragraph:
Private agendas masquerading as popular good.
In prehistoric days, as we all know, people sat around the campfire and told lies. During the day, men would wander around the woods, supposedly looking for dinner, while women would stay back at the camp foraging for berries, beating skins with rocks, stripping bark off twigs, banging rocks into smaller rocks, wrapping skins around twigs, preventing the children from being eaten by lions, and generally keeping house as it was then known. Can you see where I’m going with this?
Already we had a bifurcation in the human experience. While men roamed around without supervision, women had to do a lot of hard work. I’m not sure how that happened. The anthropologists say that women, having borne children, were most likely to stick around in one place to take care of them. But it could have easily gone the other way, where after the arduous process of birth it was the man’s turn for a while. It’s sort of like the person whose parents smoked therefore they also smoke, versus the person whose parents smoked so they are disgusted by smoking. It could have gone either way, but there it is. Perhaps it was the women’s idea; they didn’t want to go out where they’d have to fight predators, etc. They figured, let him do it, and I’ll wrestle with these twigs.
But as the toils of homelife grew, with the addition of new technology such as clothing, washing, etc., women began to realize that men were still doing the same shit but they were juggling more and more rocks and skins in more complex combinations.
So they invented civilization! All it took was planting a few seeds in the ground, and they were off. Civilization has been the relentless, though perhaps glacially slow, equalization in the expectations of what men and women can and should do. Along the way, women somehow got technology to advance enough so that, one by one and by degrees, all the drudgeries of the home disappeared: no more going down to the river to wash clothes, no more standing around the fire all day to cook food. But while men’s technology changed, men still had to go out all day to use it, no longer in the woods but in the fields, at the factory, at the office. Women eventually had to follow them out, since they couldn’t just laze about when machines or servants were already running the home.
(That’s the one thing I don’t understand about their plan: why did women paint themselves into the corner of having to work for a living in order to keep up their civilization habit? I suppose just because the grass is always greener: they wanted to run around in the Serengeti too, even if they hadn’t lived there for five million years and the closest they could hope for was the veldt of Omaha.)
All of this benefited women more than it did men. Men were still working, same as ever. Women alone had transformed their lives through the introduction of all the civilized concepts. I think that’s pretty unfair. Now, I would not recommend a return to the old ways. Five million years is a long time, and we all bear the marks of the changes, unfair or not. What I think is that we need to acknowledge the injustice and make certain allowances. For example:
Women want equality in the workplace. From now on, let them have supreme authority there. After millions of years, it is time for men to retire from work altogether. They have earned their gold watch.
Women want equality in politics. From now on, let them have supreme authority there. Let them try to sort it all out. Men were only half-hearted about it anyway, and good riddance to the settlers in the West Bank.
Women want equality in sex. From now on, let them have supreme authority there. They can try to figure out how lesbianism is meant to work while all men can become heroin addicts, which is way better and cheaper besides.
Some time ago Leonard Cohen suggested that women should rule the world, since that’s what women wanted to do, and men should stick to being artists, since that’s what Leonard Cohen wanted to do. Count me in.
In 2005, I am going to let the bitches do all the work. I wish you and yours a complacent, civilized new year.
by Jack, January 16, 2005 5:12 PM | More from Foundational Issues | More from The Damned Human Race | More from Women
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Ouch...
Jack, while women may well be to blame for the creation of civilization, we can't be held responsible, as a legal matter for non-forseeable consequences such as Prohibition, and the subsequent repeal of, the Ukranian election, and/or bars that actually keep the floors clean. If you're going to give women all the power, that includes the power to use men as means to an end of cleaning up the unforseen results.
I'm not pursuing any liability that women no doubt ought to be responsible for. There are no lawsuits pending or under consideration. I'm willing to let bygones be bygones. I just won't stand for any more trouble. From now on you're on your own.