by Steven Snell
We need a new god, a new story.
Not one sent out to reduce the clamor of a predecessor. Not to cast blame and project right. Not sat in any structure or housed in any text. Just a humane one. One that does not preach, only listens. Not of miracles, but of everyday life. Not of man, but not of woman. No gender. Not biased, not pure. Like the ocean, a mountain, or forest, a prairie landscape. Like sleeping in or getting up early. A city or a satellite town. A tree or a bush. A blade of grass, a marsh, a dessert. A story that can perambulate from coast to coast to coast to –. A story without name for a name constructs, and in this story ___ will have to deconstruct all previously established norms and regulations. ___ will have to be a new galvanizing force to hold together the discursive frays of life coming apart at the seams. Rid doctrines. Rid -isms. But ___ can never be comprehended, for to resolve only encourages hoarding and harboring. ___ must be free from the sickness of humanity that acts on a manifesto or doesn’t act at all or isn’t willing to learn how to swim to the other shore, back and forth, back and forth. If one just stops kicking, one sees the beauty of floating with the rising and sinking tide. Like this tea, or this toro, or the song on the restaurant’s radio ___ is embedded in everyone of us. Around me, around here, around you.
The waitress comes by.
“All done?”
I nod my head.
I purse my lips and stare vacantly at a plate of sushi a chef is preparing and the authentic smiling waitress returns and puts the bill before me. I give her my credit card and she leaves and returns. I sign the bill and take one last sip of tea and wait for the climax of Fingal’s Weeping coming from the radio. I stand and cross the restaurant and push open each set of doors and enter the street, the doors closing behind me during the rolling finale.
20.
Jacob bends down and opens the fridge and takes out a carton of skim milk and stands and pours the milk into a metal beaker. He sets down the beaker and grinds two shots of espresso beans and puts the portafilter into the machine and places a cup beneath it and pushes the On button. He puts the steaming wand in the beaker of milk and turns that on. The espresso begins to drip. He looks into the beaker and continues, “Multiculturalism is a spectacle.” He sets the beaker on the machine as it steams. He turns and opens the display case and takes a set of tongs from off the counter and pulls out a double chocolate muffin and puts it on a white plate and passes it to the girl standing at the till waiting to pay. He turns back to me.
“It’s a mandate or a community composition, but it’s a façade, a shiny veneer well marketed but poorly manufactured. It works great in theory but difficult to implement.”
Jacob finishes making the girl’s drink.
“A coffee and a muffin, two fifty, love.”
The girl smiles, gives Jacob $3 and sits down at a table within hearing distance.
Jacob leans on the counter and slides my coffee away from his elbow.
“Everyone I have ever known, all those faces I recognize here in Calgary, live in parallel in Cambridge.”
“Come again?”
“Multiculturalism.”
“What about it?”
“That’s what I’m saying … Christ, Shawn, let me dumb it down for you.”
“Please.”
He leans his hip against the counter and puts his hands in his jeans pockets.
I arrived and Jacob started telling me about Cambridge. About the coffee shop he’d go to daily for studying and writing. His “flat was a ghetto and the library was stiflingly quiet.” He said the coffee shop was the best place to experience other cultures but wouldn’t use the word multicultural to describe Cambridge.”
“So multiculturalism …?” I ask.
“Is a spectacle, right. Just like how capitalism as a force of manufacturing doesn’t really create goods but rather objects – concepts, emotional triggers to simulate the economy. Their value is a fetish, a brand, an image you buy to place you within a consumer demographic. You don’t buy a hammer. You buy a brand of hammer. How do you find any real meaning in that?”
“Wait, are we sill talking about multiculturalism?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes, it’s like this: multiculturalism also comes off an assembly-line.”
“… Elaborate.”
“Darwinian theory of evolution is predicated on a hypothesis of natural selection – infinite variability of traits, yes?
“What happened to the assembly-line analogy?”
“Fuck linearity.”
“Got it.”
“Darwinism, Shawn, says that distinguishable physical characteristics are of infinite variation.”
“I think I get that.”
He taps his middle finger on the granite to emphasize his next thought. “But on a long enough trajectory physical characteristics in fact become indistinguishable. There’s, visually speaking, only so nuanced physical variations can be.”
“An ear can only look so complex.”
“Exactly. An ear is an ear is an ear. Brown or black, pointed or round. With billions of ears variations can only be so distinct. A classmate of mine from China told me that when he first went to the UK to learn Engrish all white people looked the same. I replied saying that his racism is okay because it matches our Western stereotype of Chinese people.”
“Racist times two.”
“No, two racists comments cancel each other out.”
“Right.”
“See, I look at ants and think they all look the same. An alien from a light year away would likely think we all look the same. You have to embed yourself in something to really appreciate details. Specialization exposes subtleties. Look at a billion bodies and see how much difference you spot.”
“An anthropologist would see more than me.” I pick up my coffee.
“Right. She knows the culture. But here’s my point: Darwinism requires this: the eventual elimination of noticeable physical differences.”
“Darwinism flattens out our distinctiveness.”
“Exactly. To believe in Darwinism is to support physical banality.”
I laugh.
“Now to the contrary,” Jacob adds, “Creationism, divine intervention, God worship, embraces specialness and singularity. Everyone is a unique product of God’s creation.”
“I like it!”
“Look, Darwin is not the only harbinger of mediocrity. Just look at capitalism and dress codes. Instead of state commissioned regalia to ensure Marxist or Socialist equality, capitalism encourages us to believe that we’re all different in the economic miracle which cycles and inflates and crashes and births forward to stimulate our purses. … Wait, shit, where was I?”
“Capitalism and dress codes, or fetish value. I don’t know. It’s sometimes hard to keep track.”
The smiling girl is now looking at Jacob between pages flipped in her magazine.
“Ah. Right, Capitalism. Right. … Through its dress code, capitalism conducts fashion trends, clothing for men and women is dictated by what natural selection requires of us every day. But instead of species extinction there’s out-of-date fashion – like shoulder pads for women and triple pleated pants for men. Like bangs and acid wash and dark eyeliner and skinny jeans and –”
“So if we believe in Creationism, we can be truly special?”
“Exactly. But let’s go back to multiculturalism as a spectacle.”
“Do as you need to do.”
“Wait, I need a coffee – a beverage we consume to celebrate our global imperialism and slavery under economic expansion. Just like tea, a nationally consumed beverage that represents the West’s empire. Britain never grew tea leaves.”
“We kicked some serious non-White ass.”
“And White too.”
“True true.”
Jacob pours himself a mug and sits on the counter beside the espresso machine and turns to face me.
“Just wait for climate chaos, or change or warming or wha
tever we’re calling it these days. In Britain, one will be able to grow sugar and coffee and grapes for wine. Maybe climate catastrophe will end Britain’s need for its resources empire; it’ll be self-sufficient. See, climate warming benefits everybody!”
“And people who live in coastal areas will become better swimmers!” I laugh.
“And peoples’ lungs will adapt to live in smog clogged cities, making them more efficient, stronger, but of course that’s just straight up evolution towards mediocrity. … Food, fashion, East meets West, West meets East – there’s an amalgam of artifacts but not of cultures. Cambridge’s brilliance is the eclectic array of ethnicities and cultures, but there’s little mixing, from what I recall or wrote while I was there.”
I shrug. “Perhaps it’s for safety or comfort, cultures not mixing.”
“How does that change the narrative of multiculturalism? Being a linguistically ignorant Canadian, I don’t know – maybe it’s I who couldn’t break into other cultures because I’m a tool for only ever learning English. Such a wanker …” He shakes his head. “Anyway, if there was any sort of cultural mosaic, it was just that – a mosaic, no mixing – nor, albeit horrific in nomenclature, the cultural melting pot where groups fight for voices through both democratic and violent measures. Not to mention that multiculturalism is slow to react to marginalized voices. There’s a sort of embedded cultural imperialism there. If the marginal threaten to destabilize the majority, it becomes a beast and blows away those dissenting voices to smithereens, figuratively and literally, even inside its own borders.”
“The right to bear arms.”
“From armed militias, if you’re south of here, yup. Cultural and social imperialism inside and outside nation-state borders.”
“But not through ammunitions here.”
“Only sometimes – the War Measures Act, for example. Here in the West we’re rather ruled by propaganda and spectacle – consumerism, fetishism, not tanks and machine guns. The only tank quelling the revolution is next season’s boat-neck merino wool pullover and cars with nine cup-holders and mobile phones with games and an app for women to track the cycle of their period. I fucking love superfluous shit! Consume into indifference! Be a goat in the herd. Multiculturalism is just a nice way for wealthy people to have locally grown produce and homemade jewelry without the burden of going to some faraway place like, say Vegas to experience global geographies.”
“Multiculturalism is having access to exotic spices and foods.”
“I like that,” Jacob adds.
“Perhaps it takes a few life cycles to reduce the ethnic and cultural polarization?”
“Maybe, but the children of landed immigrants tend to imagine going back to their parent’s homeland.”
“And how are all of those children reduced from unique cultural and ethnic attributes.”
“Consumerism?
“Reduced to the dominant culture through generational assimilation.”
“Blandness.”
“Exactly. On this trajectory, on a long enough time line, there’ll be one large, homogeneous culture battling out within the pool of sameness in attempts to reassert uniqueness. Good thing Jesus walks with me.”
“Kanye West?”
“My god has first strike capability.”
“Your god is a vagina!”
“That too,” Jacob adds.
The magazine flipping girl laughs and covers her mouth in a gesture as though she just got caught eavesdropping.
Jacob looks and smiles a laugh at the girl and turns back to me.
“See? Generalized mediocrity, we’re condemned to it. Large-scale manufacturing increases homogenization and sameness. You think access to the global market place adds an eclectic array of new and novel goods to our life repertoire? No. Globalization is for profit margins, by and large. Instead of local, it’s plastic. Instead of artisan it’s carmine. And as goods become more and more banal, as a result of this manufacturing process, advertising must take the baton of exceptionality. The product isn’t unique, so the voices that sell it must be; hence the trillion – T, as in trillion – dollar marketing budget in America. Sprite lied – image is everything; thirst is just a natural cyclical human occurrence.”
“Those lying bastards.”
“Absofuckinglutely.”
“But some cars get you laid more than others.”
“And some girls are as deep as a puddle that worms wither around in after a rain shower.”
“And those girls are at the whim of their penis-car-owning boyfriends.”
“And those girls will likely get cum’d on by their cubby boyfriends who want to take naked photographs of her and post the pictures and videos on the web. There’s probably research out there trying to explain that phenomenon.” Jacob lifts his coffee mug and holds it to his chest.
I shake my head.
“Oh it gets worse.”
“I wouldn’t expect less,” I say.
“As market penetration expands, cities too become homogenized. And not just land for the production and manufacturing of globally bound goods but housing estates, gated communities, mixed-use communities, holiday areas and home game arenas. Houses are mass produced in design and material and colour palates to maximize profit margins for developers – and the titled-up shit-banal house only made viable through marketing, creates that universal dream of home ownership! That quaint little home of yours, the one of hodgepodge architectural styles is to be everything, to cater to everyone’s tastes, and yet so universal it’s offensive!”
“The power of dreaming.”
“That’s what capitalism is built on, dreaming. Your own personal tastes for your unique and special home. Your dream with pre-select colour palates; pre-select floor plans; pre-select vinyl or stucco siding.”
Jacob looks at the girl. Her magazine is folded over her lap. She looks at him. Jacob says hi. She smiles, says hi back and breaks off a piece of muffin and puts it in her mouth.
Jacob continues, “Because of such banality we revert to inside the house and escape in TV. Reality shows manufactured to select people out of their devoid of meaning lives and make their homes, wardrobes, cars, friendships, pets, breasts, ass and face less mediocre. And here’s the problem with Creationism –”
“Are you bringing back natural selection?”
“No, no. See, the breasts and cocks made by god are often misshaped or too small and thus need overhauling by mortal physicians.”
“Well, God never said we were perfect.”
“Oh I’m sure some birds think double D breasts are pretty perfect.”
“Yes, but they’ll just eventually find fault in some other body part.”
“True story. The producers of TV are the new gods. But TV, like globalization, only promotes shallow, superficial difference. We can’t be unique when everyone is projected to be unique. It’s almost collusion, really.”
“Hand in glove.”
“The hand that feeds you,” Jacob adds. “So, having once bought goods for use-value – buying something because of its utility – we went through sign-value – the buying of goods for not what they physically are or do but what they represent – what social category the buying of logo-inundated rubbish places a person in. Ford versus BMW; Gap versus Armani. One has more buttons than the other? I don’t know. Both get you to the same place. Both clothe you. One is made by impoverished slaves, the other, well, economic ones.”
“Funny. Even sweatpants have logos on them.”
“It’s amazing that a type of clothing first brought into production in penal colonies to create a group ethic of conformity becomes your casual Friday look.”
“That’s why some prison mates roll one cuff: to stand out. And now, one logo a barcode for inmate monitoring, another logo a code for your consumer demographic, university marketing, your comfy grocery shopping wear.”
“Exactly, Shawn! A brand on your ass, like a cow!” Jacob looks up to the left. “I wonder if plastic surgeon
s put their signature or company ID on breasts implants or cock extensions?”
The smiling girl laughs.
I ask, “Does sleeping with a patient count?”
“If the doctor finishes off with a call to action or catchy jingle, maybe – or gives a discount on the next surgery.”
“Or a facial.”
We laugh.
“Plastic surgeon branding. Beautiful! Ephemeral products like that are the best ones. It’s then easier to supplant them with next season’s everyone in khakis or hello I’m a PC and you’re a Mac.”
The girl stands, puts her magazine in her handbag and sets her plate and mug on the counter. Jacob says thanks and see you again soon. The girl says she has to run somewhere but will return. Jacob says next coffee is on me. Girl returns a bright smile.
Jacob takes the plate and mug from the counter and opens the dishwasher and puts them inside. He closes the door and leans back against the counter and says, “Then the death of sign-value. It’s no longer about marketing and the social value of a commodity. Fetish-value is the new dictatorship. Products have to be designed now to get us off, figuratively and literally, hyper-stimulation. And this ejaculate has to be bigger and better than your neighbour or classmate or colleague or d-bag at the club. And this is the new brand competition: which product can fuck you harder and longer and better than the competing brand. Being gang fucked by your car is the only way to drive. You should want to daisy chain your dinnerware. A toothpaste that makes your teeth brighter makes you more cock-sucking worthy. Who you become as a consumer is the new tantric sex without the fear of STDs or having to call the person the next day.”
“Or getting cum in your eye.”
“Or in your bum! Fetish-value is non-homogenization. As one fetish fascination value wears off – like shaved-bare vaginas and cocks – there will be the next fetish like the post-pubescent look. Shaving and waxing will be replaced by growing a big bushy vag. Primping and fluffing your pubes will be the only way to live. The bigger and hairier the bush the better – the more fuckable, the more value you have in society. You.will.be.the.most.popular.person.ever. … Until bush goes out of style and you’re no longer fuck-worthy. Maybe smelly balls will be hot next season.”