Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “You can say morality or culture is relative and no one is morally superior or better or higher than another, that we are all equal -perpetrator and victim alike- but if you act that way, people are going to get their feelings hurt, and when they do, they are going to exact retribution. You can mistreat 100 people and 99 will eat it, and that 100th fella might eat it for 44 of 45 years, but eventually, he will make a monster of himself and wreck the whole damn world. The inmate is a black swan event.

  “See, it ain’t misfortune that is the problem. It ain’t crop failures or disease that is destroying people. Just like it ain’t food or sex that is the problem, giving people disease. It’s the germs, the bacteria and viruses -invisible to man for millennia- inside some food and some sex that infects, that kills.

  “Well, it’s malevolence, MO -and as you can now see from the data- it’s malevolence that has an epidemiological effect on the brain. The inmate’s brain was transformed into a revenge machine, based not on bad things happening, but based upon bad people doing bad things to him over and over and getting away with it. People he loved, and who hated him in return. Imagine your own family, friends, lovers, all hating you while you love them.

  “That is no different than a germ theory of disease. When you are betrayed that much, you become sick, and your brain builds structures to fight back just like the immune system.

  “And nothing is more brutal on the enemy than the immune system, MO. Nothing. The immune system has no moral compunction at all. Total war. Think of auto-immune diseases, the immune system will attack itself it’s so ruthless.

  “Now, if it’s just one guy who is this damaged, he will kill a dozen, or maybe if you’re highly competent and good at your job, you’ll get, 46 deaths like Lyndon accomplished; but if that guy gets an army, he can become the next Stalin or Hitler or Curtis Lemay and do quite a bit of damage.

  “So, if people have any interest in a sane and peaceful world -and look, maybe they don’t, maybe people want a few monsters running around- but if they do not, if they want to be safe and secure, then they need to not pretend that morality is relative, merely some app, some arbitrary thing in an abstract world, some game theory, some prisoner’s dilemma, some evolutionary, fitness greater than truth nonsense, and they need to realize that they cannot operate with this belief that you can treat people however you can get away with in the short term.

  “See, all this rationality and math and left-hemisphere bullshit is going to miss the point, MO. Because real people have real feelings, and betrayal is like the black fucking plague to their heart and their brain; and both disease and cure will rot the whole society and leave it in tatters.

  “And everyone thinks it’s a short-term burn, they think they got away with it, I’m sure Jeanne Pinsolf thinks her stealing Lyndon’s car has no consequences while she runs her million-dollar business, and the inmate’s brother’s wife thinks she can insult a rex of the jungle without so much as receiving a scratch back, and Sarah Smith thinks because she’s safe now, as we speak, that she got away with her perfidy and betrayal and lies. But the long-term is closer than you think bucko,” Isaiah said as he saw more ivy had fallen to the ground.

  “So,” MO said, “that’s all rational -the brain data checks out- your theory is actionable. It has a coefficient of around .72, from the data collected so far.”

  “Yeah, but MO, Lyndon told 1,001 people -people who all claimed to love him- he told each of them all this and they didn’t hear it one time; they mocked him, laughed in his face. Information has no impact on people. They need to feel it,” Isaiah said and raised his left hand over his heart and tapped it a few times.

  “Well, how do you propose to do that?”

  Isaiah just smiled and then that turned into a laugh.

  27. like other Men you say

  You really want to hurt someone? Punish them when they do something good

  University of Toronto lecture 2016 [Peterson, Jordan B]

  All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But, you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post

  The Eternal Revolution [Chesterton, GK]

  Me lava, dispersant gouvernail et grappin

  (and swept away my rudder and anchor)

  Le Bateau Ivre [Rimbaud, Arthur]

  I. 2017 e.v.

  He stood there, amongst his belongings -so much left behind- and gathered up only what was most valuable or personal or irreplaceable, and that which could fit within his car. He thought of coyote bones first, and books of which there were only a few copies around.

  What an indignity , he thought, to be put out of his own apartment, that he paid for; put out by some 19-year-old girl . But he had agreed, after making sinister threats upon her idiotic brother; and a deal was a deal. He had told himself, as she had prepared to call the cops, that he should just let it go, ignore the cosmic insult to his worth, and agree to calm down, ignore her brother’s insults -and hers- and just move out to his land.

  He ought just build a walled garden on his own , he surmised; he ought build it and thus move toward it over new lengths of time. He thought of time, time too short to measure, like the particles and anti-particles that physicists said had finally fucked up and stuck around too long that one time 13 or 14 billion years ago. He thought of that time, and how it all began with that; that one dyad, that singular and permanent chiral handshake, brothers at odds, the ravens that flew away from and with the world.

  He almost wondered what kind of man would build such a universe; he nearly thought right then of God.

  Build a paradise, paradisal, in the ancient sense, he thought, and take the time to regroup, re-vivify and think of what to do. Walk first steps, first tracks, he thought, walk where evil does not yet exist and think of what to do. His body hurt in a way that made him want to tip over, upside-down, let the head fall away from the body now; let the neck expand instead of compress. It was always there, and he did not think then, but later he would, that the evil, the twin brother, the hand offered in mock, the anti-particle lived in each thing no matter how far the grey raven flew from the vector of the black, and that his pain, his corporeal pain was not merely reminder, or evidence of evil, but was evil itself and that without it then there would be no good to lament.

  This is a point hard to say, harder to hear, almost impossible to get: evil is necessary, for it is part of the math of the world.

  Man calls it evil for the same reason God does: it stands inside us and strangles the parts of us that feel anything at all, and this -this- needs a name. Pain is a being, an arch-angel, an angel with desires. Pain is the echo of war drums after the moot, canon from an elevated position, payment for things done in service of reshaping the world.

  Pain deforms the soul, the way metal folds, the way concrete heaves when the grounds freeze, the way threads turn to the right , he thought. “Pain is with me for good goddamn reason,” he said to buoy himself, to rebuke his lamenting, his whining, his refusal to take it as evidence of good, of God.

  How, he then asked, would anyone feel such heartbreak at the loss of a perfect girl unless he had had that little girl for time too short to measure at all? Was not his pain evidence of every great thing he’d ever done? He smiled as this came upon him, he smiled as his teeth now began to hurt and the smile halted in its tracks, its predator detection circuit engaged. But the thing -the place- on the somatosensory map that engendered that grin kept on increasing even as the body refused to follow along. On the map a grin was drawn in the trees; in the forest. In the mind he smiled without limitation.

  His body recalled her tears and the eyes built memory of each drop with a note to each one, a note that said they were ersatz, the mer
e leaking of a machine that had suffered a scrape, a bang, a mere knock, a nick, from the world.

  She stared at him, lachrymose, ah , not a total stoic , he had thought. But he refused entry to this observation; he was re-committed to his anger now. It was a ballistic motion engaged. His anger was so complete that his tenderness was held under by the hydrostatic pressure of his hydraulic bile. He noticed her softness but gave it no addition to his equation. He banished all but his own anger; his own hatred of all. The zero overwhelmed, his phi was two to one.

  “You had a powerful man, and powerful men must be made to feel powerful. You cannot make them feel weak; but that is exactly what you did,” he had said.

  “I’m sorry,” she had replied with pain but zero comprehension of what he meant, she never knew what he meant, he spoke in riddles, she thought; of that she was certain. He spoke black atoms in absence of even the vacuum of space. He wrote zeros in dark chalk on the back of blackboards, he erased things as rubrics, before he had filled them with any ideas at all. He had hidden the shards of the vessels and doused the light from candles already blown over by the wind.

  He was like a dream, where a talking beast composed sonnets and cyphers for you to figure out before you wake up; because, she accepted, upon waking it would all fall away . She lived in that place with him; this big beautiful man, her bodyguard and lover and what she had always dreamed of as a father since she was 6-years-old. Why was he so damaged, and so full of hate? she asked herself, just to her head; not yet her heart. Her heart beat fast like the young’s do. Her heart broke just on its shell as the asp writhed inside and opened one eye in the dark.

  He was instantly a man she wanted; and she had no idea why he thought she had no love for him, the more she fell for him the more he rose over her and pointed out the distance between them, she surmised. It seemed a trick -on her- played by some demon to give her a man who could not see her offerings, not hear her poetry, a man that could never feel her love. She cried and hurt and didn’t understand anything at all in the world. She wondered how Cain’s sacrifice had offended God; in what way, and how she might improve the rise of the smoke, the nature of what ought be given up.

  “Yeah, you don’t even know what you’re apologizing for,” he had said. “Your brother -your brother of all people- talks down to me, rebukes, rejects my offer of friendship after all I’ve done. When I was 21, I would,” he paused, restarting, “if a man like me had offered partnership and friendship I would have jumped at the chance; the wisdom, the working capital, the subject matter expertise, and the physicality to handle any threat, the honor to never betray or chisel. Jesus, and that kid -your brother- he just looks down his nose at me as says, naw, I got this, with my Winnie the Poo shoes and baby face and total lack of a clue!”

  He had let that indictment fill the apartment and the hall; the door propped open by a wooden, isosceles sliver from a 2009 Coup de Foudre OWC he had smashed in pique weeks earlier; after drinking one bottle of wine.

  “I mean, it’s enough to make a cat laugh,” he said with venom gathering in the corners of his mouth.

  She just stood and stared and then said, “some people just don’t want to do business with you.”

  It was said as all evil things are: with logic and reason and dispassionate prose. It was even true. The trick of the Devil is to use as much truth as he can get away with while still breaking hearts with almost no malice. The devil was so smart, he worked evil like art. Man, he was smooth.

  She said it with such contempt and insouciance that it was like a sword hidden, a dagger in the sleeve plunged into your gut before you even knew it was a striking move; you thought it might be the offer of a friendly hand -for you had looked to the eyes and not looked for the palm- but then the full length of the rapier, in the full sentence completed, there it was in your softest parts. It was a war to the knife, a knife to the hilt and then she smirked -matching the twist, the quarter twist of the tang- and the ratio of the lips matched the analogia of the blade.

  “Jesus,” he said and walked forward as if toward her, then turned instead and exited the door. The box for the half bottle of South African wine -the wine Mandela had drunk upon his release- the box for the 1992 Constantine, fell upon the hallway floor. He heard it, knew what it was and didn’t even bother to look back. He was never coming back to any of this, he thought, this type of life . How did people put up with such humiliations day after day, insults by women and weak males, by the people that in ancient days would have to -be compelled to- show respect to a man like him ? he asked each atom of air and each photon of light. Each thing hummed; but no answer was given to him.

  It wasn’t like he was at home playing video games refusing to be a man. He owned businesses, he had plenty of resources, he had land -and a plan- and cognition to match; he was conscientious, had a work ethic like no one does these days; he worked days and nights each and every 24hrs. He was obsessed with being a productive member of society, he had offered her marriage, he was no player or shallow man. He had committed in toto. He had everything to offer her and yet, he ruminated, she had been suspicious. He was 100% sincere and yet she was dubious.

  He too took inventory of his offerings like Cain .

  He offered her any life she wanted, he’d only asked that she show him some courtesy and let him have the space, to retreat to his land, build them a home and write down his thoughts of the catastrophe of what had happened 13 out of 12 fucking times. He had asked merely for some distance between him and the madness of society so he could think. He was 44 and had been ripped off for the 12 th goddamn time and was about to snap , he felt. He needed some space, the thing America offered uniquely. And was he not an American ? he asked.

  Who else would just move on so consistently, after being betrayed by business partners -and paramours and putative friends- so many times? Who else would not tell a soul? And then for her to say, some people just don’t want to do business with you, as if it was he that was the problem; as if he was the one who ripped people off or didn’t work hard or was lazy or incompetent. My God, he thought, she had no idea how inverted her logic -how inverted the moral logic- was; she had no idea how insulting she was . None of them knew. And yet he knew until he wrote it all down even he would have no idea of the sundries in this storeroom.

  He was not like other men, he had risen above the din. He had command of five separate things; when most men would have sullenly taken just one. And yet, she was right, these weak and corrupt men didn’t want to do business with him ; her brother had tried to rip him off for 4,500 bucks and when Lyndon called him out as a scoundrel and betrayer he -the brother- had taken offense. This was America now: the man points at the moon, and the idiot looks at the finger .

  Andy had claimed that it was just business and that he -Andy- deserved the lion’s share of the communal loot; even though they had an agreement that said it was to be split evenly. This 21-year-old dork; skinny and naïve and arrogant -and ignorant to an extreme- this boy with his neotenous face and body was talking down to Lyndon; telling him he -Andy- did more work on this deal and deserved the $4500 to Lyndon’s mere $750. It was beyond an insult it was sign of greed and the grifter’s soul; and since Lyndon was a man of honor -and thus, said what was in his heart- Lyndon had told him exactly what he thought of this betrayal and greed and perfidy.

  Of course, Andy -this man-child- took offense as all bastards do when you call them out on their shit and he had canceled the deal. And his sister, Alexandra, the love of Lyndon’s life had taken his side, her brother’s side, he recalled with grief and outrage and incredulity at it all. And that was it for him. He felt that as a deadly wound that a man sees open up; a deadly wound God stays Death’s hand over with a grim look. It was the last deadly wound he would take without a return.

  How could he behave so nobly, so magnanimously -as he had always paid for dinner for her brothers and included them in every deal he made, made sure Andy made money on any deal, made sure he made enough-
how could a man like that turn around and rip Lyndon off? How could he do it without shame? he wondered. Ah, shame , he thought again and saw it was a foreign thing to modern man, modern man had no shame. Shame was not on the periodic table in the chemistry of modern men.

  How could a sister, a woman Lyndon had lavished praise and love and attention upon, bought her everything she wanted, he remembered, it was shoes she seemed to favor, he bought her tons of shoes; he took her to fancy restaurants and ordered Champagne, and the waiters had served them because they were too scared to card her despite her being underage. So, there they sat, he 43 and her at a mere 18, drinking Dom Pérignon and watching the street below Ocean on Market and 15 th .

  And -most importantly- he had bore his soul to her; never hidden his most vulnerable parts; he had given her his insides, his viscera and asked only that she tread lightly on all that he had exposed. It had never occurred to him that it was this vulnerability of his, this willingness to share his true thoughts and feelings and visceral prose that would make her -and everyone- hate him; not respect him, as he had stupidly assumed. It was this viscera that was used against him, it was the thing rebuked and despised. Modern men turn from the guts.

  And yet, he thought, she rebuked his love, turned her perfect nose up to him; it was the final insult he’d let this world get away with unreturned, he said now to himself as the line of demarcation, as the future approached.

  He’d allow her to escape his violent plans. But that was it , he vowed. She was the last person he’d offer clemency to. She was so beautiful and sweet and angelic, he couldn’t help but think, so despite her betrayal she would get this one final reprieve from the vengeance he had now become. “ The rest will pay for this,” he now said aloud. From incipient feeling, to thought in the brain, to word in the mouth and out into the world, he had -in a few seconds- built his Task at each level of brain, in three of four ontological domains.