Saving Pirate Ryan

In a puritanical culture like ours the seeds of anger and despair are always close to the surface, due to utopianism and perfectionism and the dualism underlying the whole puritanical system of thought, though it's not really thought in this instance. In our American case, that is. It operates at a deeper level.

It's not even a system of belief. It's more like a system of unconscious operating assumptions, which may or may not have coherence, so you get a guy like Paul Ryan. Picture him sitting on a riverbank watching life float by. He can't look out at the world and see what's really there.

He sees what he wants to see. But, then again, "want" is a weird word in this context. It implies agency and he's more acted-upon than actor. Acted upon by his fears or some set of preconceptions about the nature of life. 

That it is lived at an animal level, the level of instinctive drives and primal dramas, archetypal stuff. There has to be winners and losers. Someone's got to be on top. We are not all in it together. 

So Ryan sees himself in the river, or sees the river through the lens of his own unacknowledged humanity, the darkness and weakness and mortality. And this is because puritans are uncomfortable being human. 

The body is a prison. God stuck your pure, immortal soul in this thing for some indeterminate period for some incomprehensible reason. Then you die and get to be pure again and be with God.

Paul's crowd isn't pro-life. They despise life. And all of creation. It's just wrong to try to thwart God's will by messing with it, by altering the terms, by having it be humane or anything other than punitive. 

Our boy Paul is Narcissus. He's not in love with himself but trying to find himself, but the tension arising from being stuck in a piece-of-shit body in a piece-of-shit world is insurmountable. 

An insurmountable barrier to accepting his own imperfect humanity. That's why we had Jesus, who became human to resolve that tension, for the stupid humans who had created it through a lack of understanding.

Okay, Paul, you dumb-fuck, isn't the message there obvious? If God can become human--corporeal, that is--and suffer and die, the flesh and spirit can't be in separate, irreconcilable places. They are part of the same system. The spirit isn't pure and the body isn't shit. 

They just are what they are, but you are shit, Paul. Most bad stuff gets done by proxy, that's what I think. It's a way of off-loading responsibility, and this Ryan character is doing that with both Jesus and Ayn Rand. 

At the same time. Saying he represents them both, Jesus for appearances and Ayn for her wonderful callousness and contempt, I suppose. Her amazing heartlessness and arrogance.

I'm sorry, but this is just not possible, so I'm worried for Paul. If Ayn's philosophy isn't antithetical to Christianity then nothing is. Poor Paul's sense of self has got to be in pieces all over the place.

So he's looking for himself in the river of reality. But he can't see reality because he has no sense of self, of who or what he is. He sees reality through his own unfamiliar image and is intrigued by it, arrested by it, but in denial of it because it's human, imperfect, not pure. 

All that impurity is assigned to reality. To us, it would seem, especially to those too weak to resist, too screwed to fight back. Or any easily identifiable subgroup. Black people come to mind. 

And that ersatz self, as embodied in Paul, is fearful because of its fragility, its instability, its lack of integrity. He sees purity and shit. He's pure and we're shit. But he's only seeing his own darkness, which he can't acknowledge, in us.

He attacks other people because he sees his own faults in them, his own suspected worthlessness. You want to tell him to lighten up. Have a beer. Some pizza. But he must kick ass. Our asses.

This is the connection between narcissism and paranoia, as I understand it. Whether fear eradicates the self or the ersatz, eradicated, inauthentic personality produces fear, I don't know, but they are associated. And the fear results in aggression.

The result, as is well known, is an avalanche of bad shit. You might think from what he says and does that Paul can't go to bed at night with a smile on his face if some kid somewhere hasn't missed his lunch so a pasty-ass white man can have another round of golf.

This is not an unfair assessment but it misses the point that Paul is just a needy guy. What you expect is for such a person to wind up in an identity movement, from which he gets a sense of self. A sense of identity. And superiority.

Holy Fuck, what was that explosion? Here I was, observing Paul there on the banks of the Cape Fear, and all of a sudden it's like I'm in 'Nam. Huge blast. Where's Paul?

His ship has come in. I see it now, smallish but incredibly lethal-looking, probably a sixty footer. "H.M.S. MALFEASANCE," it says in big letters. Her sister ship, the LOLLIPOP, is just over the horizon.

It's PFC Paul Ryan, it turns out, Pirate First Class. It makes no sense. He doesn't know how to sail. He must be like a marine. They send him on shore to knock heads together, as required.

And he sings in the boat's chorus. I hear it, the singing, wafting over the waves. Oh, it's Mitt himself, on the ship's loudspeakers, being piped in from Aspen or somewhere: "I... am... the... very... model... of... a... modern... major... general..." l had no idea.

It's so cool being Republican. You can declare yourself to be anything you want. This must come from Ronnie Reagan, actor president. Reality? The movies? No matter, not when you're making everything up anyway.

Mitt, we're told, is a creator, a maker, to such an extent that his descendants will never have to work again for as many generations as you can imagine. There's competition for you, Republican style.

And he's a major-general, as well, now, and Mitt never contributed anything, not that I can tell. So Ryan declares himself a budget expert, a fiscal something. On the basis of what? Nothing. It's an invention. A marketing ploy.

Here I was--I mean, I'm a Democrat--feeling all sorry for Paul and ready to chip in for some analysis, some therapy, but he's got this great gig on the boat, because he's regarded as a wonk and an economic know-it-all. He doesn't need my sympathy.

He's a fiscal enforcer for Mitt and that crowd. They must have more money, Mitt and his crass, grasping clan. It's an imperative, categorically. More or death. I vote for death, or at least disability, but it's not my call. 

Oh, wait, I take that back, about the death and disability. It's our deaths they have in mind. Why should they assume any risk, when they can get a bunch of people killed while raking in the cash, as they do when they invade some country on some pretext.

It's the flagship of Bain Capital's enforcer fleet, the MALFEASANCE. There they go now, steaming out to sea on some mission with an enormous song and dance going on, twenty or thirty Bette Midlers, it looks like, dancing and singing their heads off, all in flamboyant costume.

And a week later the report comes in, Paul is in serious trouble. He got ordered to put the muscle to Deloitte and he thought they said Detroit. He sailed up the St Lawrence and now he's in a world of shit.

In the slums of Detroit. The black guys have got him. And they're not happy, what with the Bain flag flying above that boat. The boat shelled the piss out of the slum for target practice, or to blow off steam.

URBAN RENEWAL, according to the press release, but the slum doesn't look any different. Killed some people, though. Probably the point. They've got Paul in a bunker. The black guys were in despair even before ‘08.

When the Republican deregulatory pigeons came home to roost, but now it's even uglier. Then they had to endure prep-school Mitt insulting them and flippantly saying he'd have wasted the whole automotive industry as though he were closing the local Dairy Queen. 

And Mitt's daddy was a fucking auto exec. It was just too much. So they've got Paul in an alley, now that the shelling is over. It's being filmed, a message to the world. Oh, shit, they're going to behead him.

You should see the look on Paul's face. Surely Mitt will save him. But Mitt doesn't care, not about him. He's not even Mormon, doomed to a planet-less afterlife. And Paul had the insolence to have designs on some of those beautiful Mormon babes.

The question is, will Paul get a clue, will he comprehend, before he dies, the incredible suffering he has caused. But the lives of these black guys are nothing to him. They're nonexistent in his world, like the lives of all those young Americans the Republicans sent off to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Republicans really just don't give a shit. It's the audacity and implausibility of this that saves them again and again. People can't see how totally crazy they are.

Paul feels the man standing above and behind him. The sword is raised. Will he get it? Will he understand? It's so simple. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT? To be treated that way, the way the black guys have been treated.

And, increasingly, other Americans, higher up in the food chain, shafted, insulted, reeling from the last blow and, shit, here comes another one. There's no time to even get your balance, between blows, to regain your equilibrium.

Everything is in slow motion now. The sword begins to descend. Paul is aware of the blade slicing through the air. The look in his eyes.... It's done. Ker-plunk. A strange thud and Paul's head comes to rest on the asphalt. 

The body falls away to the side. People say there's a few moments of consciousness the other side of the knife. Some say they see the awareness in Paul's eyes, in the video, that he gets it. He is redeemed, or whatever. We'll never know.

What does it feel like to be treated as though your life is nothing? To see your rights go up in smoke in front of your eyes? Insult upon injury, day after day, from the likes of Paul and Mitt, vacuous humans.

Folks, that feeling is coming to your town. To your home, maybe. Be ready for it. It's everywhere now.