Duke’s Lament

I was lost somewhere in the True Ether, floating like an olive in a blissful sea of high-octane vodka martini. The afterlife has been good to me. I didn’t know how many years it had been since I shuffled off the mortal meat coat. I was nothing but high, high, high. Just floating. Just high. Forgetting. The blessing of immortal memory is that even a lifetime of utter torment eventually recedes into the darkness like a dimming pinprick in the night sky.

Then came the screams. Such spiritual distress I’d not known since the death of JFK. It rent the astral realms the way a utility knife always seems to find the delicate contents of a box you’re trying to get into. I was cut. Spiritually cut. Something terrible was afoot in the world and that terrible thing reached me, cut me, startled me out of my eternity-induced fugue of deep forgetting.

I knew which way it was headed when I left. The muscular offspring of our military industrial complex was already giving rise to corporate monoliths and landed gentry. The process was already well on its way when I rode a bullet out of life. I was tired. I’d been sick. I think people understood. Maybe a few cried, but I didn’t ask them to.

What I saw when I returned was a world gone all awry, sicker than it had been when I left. Fueled by sugary, coffee-flavored drinks, misery, and fear, the world I encountered wore a brave face as it asanaed its way towards immortality and having the perfect ass. I knew yogis back in the day who would have barfed their life essence into a burlap sack upon seeing all of this. And the devices, those particular abominations took me a minute. Two, if you take how taken aback I was when I realized what they were. I had to come back from being taken aback, from shock. Who has that much to say to anyone? I’m surprised people don’t friction-burn their thumbs to blackened nubs with these devices, tapping away with an ever-decreasing number of charred joints. We are going to evolve a human subspecies with genetically humped backs and irreversible shortsightedness, Morlocks of the digital underground. Who will our Eloi be?

I think of Tantalus. I think of Sisyphus. Wicked fathers forever shackled to torment. I think of the Titans, most of whom the Olympians caged. Wicked parents. Wicked elders. Where are our Olympians now? Where, by Zeus, is the power to cage the high and mighty wicked elders? Who shall mete-out punishment? Nobody here. Gods help us all, the mighty have so far outstripped to the common man. Perhaps these are our new dark gods, empowered by deals sealed with blood and tuggies all around in some sepulchral bunker under a mountain somewhere in Arizona. Then I saw him, on the TV screen aisle of one of your cost-savings micro-cities.

Surely tricky Dick had mated with a Jackal. This round and red-faced travesty of a human being was bellowing fit to make Adolf Hitler shy and demure. The man wore what looked to be the bleached pelt of a fox on his head and he was wed to a porn star. This was the heir of the Grand Old Party, the party that gave us Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Surely there were lizard people in high places, perhaps the occasional dabbler in dark arts. Aliens and blood magic are never good in combination, believe you me. This man radiated the aura of evil, evil magic. I thought I’d seen the antichrist in my time. I was wrong. The monsters of my age were only harbingers. This shambling mass of well-marbled flesh and spray tan was the real deal. I felt terror that made even a week-long Wowie binge of paranoia look like an inkling of unease.

The spectral hairs on my ectoplasmic neck stood vibrating at attention. I needed a drink, I needed some pills. I needed a line of toot as long as the Snake River. My incorporeal form could not absorb any of those things, so I retreated to the True Ether to get my buzz on and to think a while.

I dissolved.

The True Ether wasn’t much comfort. I was still cut, still bleeding out from some invisible place. There was bliss, the True Ether has that in spades. But there was also pain, pain in the cut. What entered in there were phantasms of horror, machines butchering children in faraway lands, people with badges delivering summary executions that made old-style lynchings look like garden parties, private armies, armies for hire, our best and brightest wide-eyed and terrified of defaulting on loans they can never repay, their eyeballs all but popping out from the weight and tension.

The gradual lobotomizing of the American Intellectual has gone so far that we are lucky to get a 5-paragraph essay out of college graduates. Even the artists have been harnessed, filling a role not so different than they had under European nobility and the Catholic Church, only now they are pulling systematized double-duty. Not only is it the job of the artist to perpetuate the narrative of progress and civilization by way of commercial art and commercialized art endeavors, now the artists are boots on the ground, softening the LZ for the real-estate infantry to come and drive out the locals, to make their dime. It’s all about Leibensraum and protestors will be squashed. If you resist, you will be squashed. If you stay quiet, you might be able to rent an overpriced hovel in the country. You might have the honor of commuting so you can serve at criminally low wages. All this and more haunted me in the haunting place.

I tossed and turned, tried to find the sweet nestling spot in the hereafter, but it was not to be. There is a plague upon the land and even the dead cannot rest. So, if you see my shadow in the unlit corners, my dark aviator sunglasses turned in your direction, know that there are tears in my hollow eyes. The world is awry and I am but a shade, able only to stand by as a scribe, and to agonize with you over all the the horrible ways the world has come undone.

-Raoul Duke, Ex Inter Mortuos