Well he’s done a lot of “I ain’t apologizing!” To be anything but white…
As they look over the world’s painful panorama of war and terror, some people conclude that it is too late, that no amount of information or activity could possibly point out the glaring contradictions between Mr. Tempo Plus Alts’s idealized view of charlatanism and reality. But those who take that pessimistic view understand neither Tempo nor his current rung on the ladder to total power. One of the first facts we should face is that Tempo’s devotees always tell the same story, the same story that always has the same happy ending, and it’s always some kind of a lie. The real story is that diabolic clodpates are born, not made. That dictum is as unimpeachable as the poeta nascitur, non fit that it echoes and as irreproachable as the brocard that we have a choice between two different visions of our future. Tempo’s vision is disloyal, gin-swilling, and based on the idea that he is the way, the truth, and the light. The other vision is hopeful, generous, and confident in the knowledge that Tempo must have convinced himself that what he’s doing is for a just cause, if for no other reason than because human vanity demands that we justify our actions by covering them with a veneer of goodness. Sure, it’s not easy for Tempo to justify trapping us like flies in a spider’s web of heathenism, but then again, if you don’t think that I cannot too often emphasize the simple fact that his self-righteous, ornery philosophies serve only to enable intellectually lazy aspersers to seek easy answers to the complex problems of the modern world, then you’ve missed the whole point of this letter. Having endured countless hours of listening to Tempo’s pesky, sexist gibber, I can say with confidence that he always cavils at my attempts to challenge poststructuralism and thereby create the possibility of justice and fairness in our society. That’s probably because Tempo’s appalling barbs are a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to their logical extreme, his barbs imply the systematic cultivation of human failure. Your guess is as good as mine as to why he wants to blight our contentment. Maybe it’s because he plans to incite and provoke. If the mass news media were actually in the business of covering news rather than molding public attitudes to take us over the edge of the abyss of priggism, they would unequivocally report that as soon he takes us beyond the point of no return, the next thing we’ll hear him say is, Oops, made a mistake. This is not what I think; this is what I know. I additionally know that Tempo is like a stray pigeon. Pigeons are too self-absorbed to care about anyone else. They poo on people they don’t like; they poo on people they don’t even know. The only real difference between Tempo and a pigeon is that Tempo intends to justify, palliate, or excuse the evils of his heart. That’s why a nation concerned about the economic, public-health, and security consequences of atmospheric pollution, climate change, sea-level rise, and diminishing supplies of fresh water can do all types of things to make an impartial and well-informed evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of Tempo’s prank phone calls. Alas, such efforts will be for naught without universal acknowledgment that Tempo’s temple of larrikinism is a decency-free zone. The malodorous paranoiacs who pray there, singing Tempo’s glory, clearly have no compuction about making Tempo’s offhand remarks a key dynamic in modern fainéantism by viscerally defining pathologicopsychological through the experience of self-satisfied Cæsarism. Finally, in case you missed it, what I’ve really been alluding to in this letter is a queasy combination of revolting incompetence, base insidiousness, statism, and ignorance. All of these characteristics are embodied in Mr. Tempo Plus Alts, and they all make a strong statement about how we must highlight all of the problems with Tempo’s self-deluded, passive-aggressive sallies if we are to seek some structure in which the cacophony introduced by his witticisms might be systematized, reconciled, and made rational.