Don't RESPECT me, please!

If you were unfortunate enough to meet a stalwart, towering hulk of a glabrous higher primate in the streets – call him a burly, bald man – and were pummeled to within a nano-length of your life, relieved of the least of your worldly possessions, then got summarily dispatched onto the afterlife subway, from which you luckily alight in that uncanny frenzy of tenacity with which the living cling to life, only to wake from a dazed stupor days later and find yourself confined to the beeping, tense atmosphere of a hospital room – tragedy would have struck.

If, upon subsequent recovery, you proceeded to seek out this felon and adorned his stout, stem-like neck with a propitiatory laurel; and, extending a feeble hand, placed your right forelimb at the mercy of the humanoid colossus’ vice-like paw in a gesture of civilized handshaking – thinking this to buy you future goodwill from the architect of your past woes – your actions would best be described as misguided, if not plainly cretinous.

The most fitting rejoinder of gratitude to the friendly overtures of so kindly a lout would be something in the region of a tightly clenched, barbed garrote about the larynx.

Consider two instances;

ONE:

Comely maiden falls, happily, into deep hole dug by wily, but indubitably charming lad. 

Some have gone so far as calling this strange mishap, love.

The diabolical fellow contrives to secure a thin, circular section of shiny metal which – upon altering the configuration of one hinge-joint coupling his lower limb, to assume a deceptively contrite posture  he slips, gingerly, upon a timidly extended fleshed-phalange on unfortunate maiden’s hand.

Maiden, smiling shyly, accepts young-man’s marriage proposal.

Is it not intriguing how the precious metal used to make ceremonial rings literally leaves behind a deep ditch in its extraction from the earth, only to serve in ensnaring unsuspecting folk in life-long commitments that turn out deeper than depthless abysses?

A few years down the rough and bumpy nuptial lane, and because both lad and lass are wayfarers mud-spattered, parch-throated and wearied – the once sweet fellow takes to drink to drown his sorrows, only to end up drowning in the drink, merely returning home on occasion to enforce an insatiable need for silence by beating the voice out of any living-thing capable of sound.

Ex-maiden, after several years of suffering untold abuse to her person, chooses to quit marriage and, bundling up cheap jewelry and starving children in a single heap, storms out in protest.

Maiden-emeritus, if she possesses a modicum of schooling or has been unlucky enough to be contaminated by the toothless gender-emancipation doctrine, becomes bitter feminist, henceforth deploring all male members of the species as worthless at every podium opportunity that comes her way.

She, however, returns occasionally to her (marital) home to have civilized, rational conversations with the offending male, and demand alimony.

Interestingly, these closed-door reunions often culminate in placating acts of conjugal dutifulness.

Bitter feminist returns to activist role on Monday morning, pretending that the weekend’s episode was merely incidental, perhaps even non-consensual.

This hypocritical, two-faced persona becomes her perpetual modus operandi.

The refreshingly original comic and provocateur, George Carlin, has contextualized this spurious, genderized-reactionarism brilliantly;

‘  ... what alternative have feminists got to the housewifely default of  ‘pumping out a unit’ every nine months? 
Is it pointless careerism? 
Putting on a man-tailored suit with shoulder-pads and imitating all the worst behavior of men? 
Is this the noblest thing women can think of? 
To take a job in a criminal corporation that’s poisoning the environment and robbing customers out of their money? Is this the worthiest thing they can do? 
No sir!
All that these middle-class feminist pretenders are interested in  is their own reproductive freedom [grabs crotch] and their pocket books! 


***


In the event, withal, that said victim lacks the pretentious sophistication of elitist schooling, she flees to neighbor’s homestead and becomes second (or umpteenth) wife.

As second wife, she bides her time and, snatching opportunity when it peeps, waylays drunken oaf of an ex-husband as he returns from drinking spree one moonless night, planting well-honed hatchet into his empty, oblong skull.

She doesn’t call herself a feminist. 

She doesn’t condemn all men, or make declarations and threats she cannot follow through.

She knows not how feminism is spelled, let alone what it means.

Ah – but she does want her respect, and if ever it wobbles unforthcoming, she simply ups and takes it.

Her new husband knows better than to mishandle her, though she may be a tenth wife, for while none sighted her on that night of dispensing natural justice, reputation is more persistent than a swarm of evicted bees – and hers precedes her by leagues.

She swears no sulking oaths denying her sexuality, nor does she try to ‘play man’ by taking fellow women to wife and strutting about all day with a plastic, leather-strapped phallus belted to her waist.

She, intuitively and owing perhaps to her freedom from the mar of erudition, understands that respect will not be given her merely because she’s male, in the same way it’s not been denied her on account of her femaleness.

She comprehends that respect follows power, not identity  and while the latter oft masquerades as the prior  the two hardly ever coincide.

She jealously guards her own dignity, ceasing it whenever it proves elusive – by the ears, collar or ball-sac, whichever proves handiest.



TWO:

Society One invades societies Two and Three.

It rapes, reaves and ravages both, over several centuries.

One sunny morning, with the benefit of miraculous hindsight, Society One precipitously grants freedom to her luckless victims, upon which the ageing past is buried minus state-honors, and a bouncing future is born amid much fanfare, trumpet-blasts and a pastiche of smiles – thin, pink-lipped foreign ones, married to wide thick native grins.

The senescent nonagenarian of history succumbs to the versatile newborn of posterity.

The two ex-colonies, each a new and young co-parent of this bouncing baby girl (boy?) called independence – however, go about their maternal duties differently.

***


Ex-colony One hits the ground running, plunging headlong into the chilly waters of international cooperation and globalism.

She takes on the invader’s language as an official medium, models her constitution and guiding documents after those of probed and proven Western models, and defines civilization and progress in a tongue she barely understands.

Her leaders and strong-men preach the rhetoric of Pan-somethingism or Afro-nothingism, making prolix speeches at UN and AU assemblies, and writing vacuous newspaper columns about the need for racial dignity and continental autonomy.

They constantly make much ado about how refined and distilled they’ve become, strutting about in imported ornaments and robing – in stark contrast of course, with the glaring privations of their own people.

Her small-folk and citizenry become dumpsites for all manner of material and cultural rubbish extruded from the bowels of the invader.

Her educated men, the social and economic elite, wear heavily-textiled suits and sweat profusely in the glare of the tropical sun as their sons drive around in poison-puffing metallic conveyances imported en-masse, in vain bids to project images of post-colonial civility.

 Their wives and daughters clamor after the beauty-bar of crimson-complexioned lips, blanched skins, and strand-like hair in a grotesque mimicking of the female-invaders’ anatomical disposition.

Society Two, essentially and very conveniently – forgets her history – recalling the past and its goings-on only when its leaders seek to sour-grape or blame their incompetence on the failings of imperialism.

Very ironically though, its people are always demanding to be respected, despite being no more than empty shells lacking culture and a unique sense-of-self, constantly parroting and imitating the technology, philosophy, theology and mannerisms of the invader.

Its Diaspora community is to be found marching on the streets of Western cities chanting how ‘Black lives matter!’

It is an open-secret that these people will match for centuries and even millennia, but never shall earn a scintilla of respect.

For who would respect a people whose Presidents and Prime-Ministers wear imported underwear?
A society whose children aspire toward speaking foreign tongues as hallmarks of refinement and learning?


***



Ex-colony Two, for her part, takes a markedly different and notably lonely path.

She holds an acute awareness, and deep but silent grudge regarding the wrongs done her during the long night of occupation, making no attempt to gloss over this ugly past.

She doesn’t advertise her discontent on the global stage by throwing tantrums in the form of torn-speeches or withdrawal from Criminal Courts, but acts with quiet decisiveness.

Her leadership makes no grand and flowery speeches about these erstwhile evils, or concerning the nation’s assumed role in the new global order – yet the culture of her new dispensation and post-colonial milieu emphasizes remembrance.

Her national priorities and the policies framed to achieve them, are steeped in the churning waters of painful memory.

She knows all too well the capacity of stronger and older states to exploit weaker and younger ones, so she doesn’t involve herself mindlessly in internationalist squabbles or collectivist pseudo-cooperation.

She focuses on building her own internal economy, premised on producing raw materials for her industry, however humble, and consuming the products of her factories, however basic.

She skills her young people to the relevance to her domestic needs, and ignores – nay, rejects attempts to conform her human resource to the ideals of a global slave-predicated corporatocracy.

She speaks her own peoples’ language, and insists that her scientists and scholars translate all forms of foreign knowledge into local equivalents – mathematical notation, philosophical theory, chemistry etc – so that her people can access them via an indigenous portal. 

Society Three operates what essentially amounts to a Closed-Country Policy, only transacting with the world when it suits her, and strictly on terms that are her own.

Her Diaspora, in-spite of leaving her shores for the glowing promises of the West in relative poverty, has established itself in this foreign place as business moguls, highly skilled craftsmen and scientific minds.

And despite the same odds of discrimination and marginalization being stacked against them – they, unlike Society Two’s Diaspora, do not coil into a yoyo of victimhood and blame their travails on a Thug Culture theyve both embraced and glorified  – but rather employ solidarity and an inward-looking self-interest to build self-reliant economic islands in these strange and unwelcoming marshlands.

In the same time since the regaining of their autonomies   Society Three has become a factory of the world and exports food and rocket-components to both One and Two.

Two, to be fair to it, seems to be making rather many steps forward. 

But they are all in the wrong direction, and it makes even more backward.

Society Three doesn’t demand respect, or notice, or continually clamor to be recognized as members of the human family.

They recognize themselves as members of their own family.

Anyone wishing to be part of them can join them, not condescend to invite them to join him or her.

They don’t yearn to be accepted, but rather do the accepting, if any accepting requires to be done.

They simply respect themselves, and are content with that.

History has taught them that the only respect which matters in life, is the one a man accords himself.

All other forms [of respect] may well be nonexistent, or may well be overly abundant  and this would never make a difference.


























Comments

  1. "A yoyo of victimhood." I need this on a T shirt.
    This is a very well written entertaining think piece on the search/claim for autonomy on a global, continental, national down to a personal level.

    One question though; What solution would you suggest in the midst of gross human abuse or marginalization? Do you recommend the law of Hammurabi as in the allegory above?
    Is there room for diplomacy, for instance talks, negotiation or do you consider that to be irrelevant.

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    Replies
    1. Glad it was worth your moments, Anne.

      I think the concept of 'evenning scores' would only be advisable in the event that one can get away with revenge done in the dead of night, or that an overarching legal framework allows the victim to strike-back and be sure of protection.

      Both seem implausible under modern-day's reigning injustice.

      I feel what Cuba and China and (even!) North-Korea have been able to do over the years, may well be the only road Third-World societies can take or tread with purpose.

      Thanks again. :-)

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