Hannah my hero! She gives me hope. The incoherent hypotheses of demon possession, depression and anxiety are red herrings, attempts to understand a disparate mind in frameworks of brutal misogyny, labels guaranteed to create an Inferior Other barely subsisting outside the rigid, puritanical constraints of authoritarian power. The idea of equally valuable, neurodivergent brains in a society where only neurotypical binary persons are recognized, the breeding ground of fake news and false dichotomies...this is a revolutionary concept, liberating and awesome, a Gnostic Christsophia up there shining to the nth power! Deserving of another tattoo, as soon as I can figure out the Pythagorean implications. I remain eternally grateful that not all cultures on this planet follow the mad drumbeat of US identity politics, that relentless need to announce one's livelong daily frogginess to an admiring bog, to paraphrase the great Emily. In this Gilead, the colonized have taken over the colony, born again in the freshly mowed grass roots of evangelical Midwesternism, exported to the (suddenly) heathen Old World by newly minted missionary absolutists. I used to think that US evangelical culture was a bubble, a small subculture within the larger mess of the Wild, Wild West. It's not. Mainstream US culture is evangelical culture writ large. Exclusivist and judgmental, mean and miserly, the powerful passing the buck to the impoverished at every turn: I hit you, you fall down, I punish you for falling down, for being a living reminder of my dysfunctional Self. I need you to feed my illness, sustain my vampire's lust for eternal life, to fulfill the prophecy of subduing all that walks and breathes in that complex unruly world beyond my childhood garden, where your sin can only be justified by the rusty chains I use to choke the spirit out of your body. I am the Decider: God's bony finger has designated Me to rule over your bleeding, breeding flesh. So thank you Hannah for busting through the hypocrisy and vileness of this patriarchal insanity, for daring to chip into the time-honored marble of manly Davids and lop off the crumbling protrusions, soak the bastards in shame, expose the pretense of kingly garments to the pure light of day. For getting up naked off that melancholy brocade couch and climbing up onto a grey-green cubist cliff looking askance and akimbo, for illuminating those sly angles for us. But you're right. Anger is not the answer. And it's not very funny, either. Well, some of it is funny (do laugh at the funny parts!).
18 AUGUST 2018