11/11/07 (Words for Richard Cohen)

11/11/07
When it couldn’t be more self-evident except to fools or Frenchmen, when a monkey could have painted it, when a monkey painted it but the art dealers swindled us, when there were no longer lies upon which to base one’s heaping calumny upon the numerous actors who it can be granted had not mastered the details although they had grasped the whole vision and its urgency as well, when they don’t deserve the abuse of the rabble, the abuse of habitual complainers and whiners and naysayers who are contesting that all’s right with the world just as the public intellectual crippled in his perch will never fail to do. Because the adversary will never cease, never will the adversarial cease his complaining that no one listens to him, never will no one listening to him cease to be adversarial from a deeply felt need, never in a million years in which time hominids could speak well-rounded and balanced silver sentences and dress in periwigs whereas at the beginning of that time-span they could bash the skulls of the macroceros with large rocks the stonemasons call dog-killers and grunt in monosyllables or make with their narrower mouths the onomatopoiea of babies about when they struggle upward from the crib, never since a visiting alien civilization explored the cooling globe before it congealed into gas and liquid and cells of heat within globes within whirlwinds, never since extraterrestrial storms on the calmer waters, never since the emergence of amphibious species resembling catfish or mud-skippers crawled upon a slime composed of algae and unspecified unicellular creatures possessed with the uncanny ability of inhabiting frozen wastelands of karst and glaciers or tropical swamps crowded with the sword-like blades of primitive sedges rooting far beneath the carboniferous tars upon which the wings of dragonflies struggle to no avail, never since the hardwood forests, uncut and crowded and the tops of trees cloud-like, but green not white clouds, with billows bunched like broccoli, a man-made hybrid of rabe and cauliflower courtesy of Mr. Broccoli who sired the producer of James Bonds films, but who sure wasn’t a member of the new adversarial class who grouse about their lack of power from their academic perches but who fail to breathe in the air of the hoi polloi, only for them the atmospheric nectar of those higher ivory tower attitudes: how powerless, complaining, like baboons from tree-tops, like hominids alienated from monkeys yapping from vines, exposing their big teeth from the tree-tops to ward off a defter adversary, the golden-crested monkeys happy with their continual and unspoiled prospects of cracking nuts and shellfish open, sometimes suspended from branches with their stave-shaped tails—what defter, more masterful instrument, whereas the hominids still struggle with the very digits of their hands, their slender, hairless, double-jointed hands: look, the hominids are complaining in the trees again. It rankles, the proportionality.

I’m a journalist maybe, but a sinner? I hate the sin but not the sinner, but for some, that’s not enough, and for far too long for my taste, I’ve shuttled between the cooling globe and the brooding upon the waters and the creatures isolated among their trees or their towers, but even the arthropod can complain about the sinuous appearance of the mollusc, or the baby bear about the kangaroo rat, and the latter about his truly marsupial counterpart the rat kangaroo, and how symmetrical the ecological niches producing such anomalies that must be stomped out with bovver boots.