Bootlickers
A short fictional account.
Alonzo was three months into his 10 year sentence. He was starting to understand how things worked and was getting along. But the evenings were hard for him. Being trapped in a cell with his roommate gave him anxiety.
His roommate’s energy radiated from his captured body as he jittered and jumped his way back and forth across the front of the room with his face jutted outward toward the metal bars. Back and forth the man moved in a constant jumpy pacing which made Alonzo nervous.
“I’m in here because I’m not a bootlicker and I never will be,” Bohm said to him one evening.
Alonzo made a noise to indicate that he was listening to be polite but did not engage Bohm directly. He knew that in these times when Bohm felt like talking it was important to be attentive without engaging him directly for Bohm was a man of great passion and deep trauma and the tenuous grip he kept on his sanity required an audience at a distance or else things would go poorly for him for several nights in a row.
“You see, we all can see there’s something wrong with rich people. They aren’t like the rest of us. They were built wrong. They don’t have the right parts in their brains or their soul or whatever it is. A lot of them are pure psychopaths, sadistic monsters who have grown out of every pleasure there is to have on this earth and lust for truly evil experiences as a way to try to feel something. But the rest of them, even if they aren’t the kind that chain little kids up and rape them and whip them, they aren’t really human beings in a lot of ways. They don’t have the right feelings, they don’t care, for example, when they see an old woman get run over by a truck. Ninety nine percent of us would care, and we would be upset and try to help. Rich people know this and they know they must pretend. So when the old woman gets run over by the truck they will force themselves to run over and look on and they can pretend to be horrified. But they aren’t. Not in their hearts. In their hearts they are rotten, which is basically the only way to become very rich in our society. You have to have a rotten heart.”
“Interesting,” Alonzo ventured tentatively. It was always difficult to tell if a word or two would do damage to Bohm and his incessant pacing.
“That’s not interesting at all!” Bohm erupted. He turned and stopped and stared at Alonzo laying on his bed. His back to the cage bars he was filled with a fury and Alonzo could tell he was working hard to keep control of himself. Alonzo stayed silent and held his breath. He wasn’t scared of Bohm, for although they had not had serious physical violence, they had grappled briefly one time over something silly. Alonzo found that he could very easily subdue Bohm. He was no match physically.
However it was the sudden evaporation of Bohm’s grip on reality that would stir him to a night or two of unbearable insanity and this was what Alonzo feared most. The guards would do nothing as Bohm howled incessantly through the night. This kept Alonzo and the rest of the block up all night and tensions would be high for the next several days. Too many men in too tight a space, Alonzo worked hard to keep Bohm just on this side of insanity.
“That’s just a plain fact,” Bohm said getting himself under control. He turned to the cage and resumed his herky-jerky pacing.
“The interesting thing is where does this come from? Where does our society get its structure? Why does being rich and powerful in our society require a rotten heart and a hateful mind? You see this is what philosophers over the years have spent their entire lives figuring. And there are only two answers. You can say that the rotten dominate society because of an inherent characteristic in human beings themselves, or you can say that the early formulations of society were rotten and we have not yet figured out a way to overcome them and so the villainous, treacherous power elite maintains these social structures to keep themselves and their rotten hearts in power.”
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At this point Bohm stopped and looked at Alonzo pointedly.
Alonzo held his breath and put on his best look of questioning curiosity and he nodded his head a little as though weighing the two suggestions.
“Yes,” Bohm said, “It’s not so easy to decide is it?” He turned back to his pacing and silently Alonzo let his breath back out.
“You see on the one hand if it is human nature that is a very pessimistic view but we are off the hook. There is nothing we can do, the rich and powerful have always been remarkably evil people, they will always be remarkably evil people and eventually them or their terrible offspring will blow up the planet and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s in our DNA to be pieces of shit. Every human being has it in themselves to be terrible, and so the rich are no different than any of us. All humans have a rotten heart! Very pessimistic but at the same time freeing. Why worry about it when it is inevitable and there’s nothing that can be done? We can’t overcome our D-N-A!
“But on the other hand, if all of this,” Bohm said sweeping his hand and raking it lightly on the bars, suggesting the entire prison but intending to include everything across the earth, “If all of this is just the dragging detritus of the very first social contract, if all of this is the result of human beings clinging to their early shitty ideas like the backwards and broken traditional religions, like mutant concept of the free market and capitalism, that all of this is because we have failed as a species to overcome our earliest tries at guessing what the universe was about, then we have hope but with hope comes the responsibility to try to make things better.”
Bohm stood and stared for several minutes. He stood quietly for so long that Alonzo, laying as he was on the top bunk began to doze and felt his eyes close heavily. He wasn’t sure if he’d been asleep or even worse snoring when Bohm started up again.
“And that would give us a path. Kill off the old religions. Kill off the old ideas of economy. Which isn’t easy, mind you, because they are necessary to create the conditions for those with a rotten heart to maintain power. But kill them off and we could free mankind from the shackles and corruption and cancerous lethargy which has been our only birthright for generations. Kill off the nasty old concepts and create new forms of organization. I used to believe in this. But I have come to see that this is impossible. The reason Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Hindu and Buddhist cultures have survived for this long is because the serpents among us murder those who oppose them, murder them and their children, crush any sense of rebellion and when they do the rest of humanity hides in cowardice and allows the worst among us, the most evil among us to maintain their positions of great power and privilege. These religions are important because they make the rest of us, the believers of the nonsense, complicit in the crimes of society. Afraid of death, we accept the gift of the myth of everlasting life which is merely a trojan horse carrying inside of it the most important seeds of narcissism, cowardice and selfishness. All of which is required for our society to maintain its order.
“You are saved, religion tells the believer, because there is a powerful god in the sky who cares about you more than he cares about the other people on earth. In fact, he cares about you more than anything in the known universe, which is a ridiculous idea but very powerful especially for those who are indoctrinated early. You can be less afraid of death, religion tells the believer, but in order to be less afraid you have to take on some of the rottenness in your heart. You don’t have to be as rotten as your priests and your rulers, but you must accept a piece of the rottenness and thus become complicit with them in their crimes.
“And if we could only kill this religion,” Bohm said distantly, slowing his pace. “If we could get rid of these insane religions which drive so much evil in the world, it seems like…” He trailed off again and stood silently.
“But you can’t,” Bohm said suddenly. “We can’t. You see, at some point you come to understand that if we live in a society where beautiful people who help others and give their lives in service are forced into poverty and their lives disregarded while treacherous ugly people take power and take money for doing almost nothing of value and then hire PR teams to make them up with, cover them with glittering hypocrisy so that they wear the obvious veneer of beauty, and if the masses accept this, they see the veneer and say to themselves ‘obviously that is not their true soul but I am too afraid and too selfish to give it enough consideration,’ then the problem is not society, but instead it is humanity itself. And there is nothing we can do to save them.”
Alonzo was finding it increasingly difficult to stay awake through this lecture and his right eye fought against Alonzo himself and forced itself closed against his will. His left eye remained somewhat more subservient but was also threatening revolt.
Bohm looked at Alonzo surreptitiously and noticed this, but it did not send him into a frenzy. Instead he found it rather sympathetic and realized he must finish his big thought before he lost his audience entirely.
“The cowardice and the selfishness of man, which has plagued him as it plagues all animals on this earth, is not something against which you can wage a successful war just as you cannot win against the rotation of the earth on its axis or against the waves crashing against the coast. You see, in a thousand years from now, society will be just as it is, carried along by the best among us who will be constantly trampled on by the worst among us, the nastiest fraction of a percent taking all of the wealth and all of the power and using the best among us as though they are gears in a useless toy. That is not an error in the formulation of society, that is human nature which has created these rules and one cannot fight the immutable laws of human nature. The last resolution we have is not whether we can fight to change society, but whether we can fight to have respect for ourselves and the lives we lead. Ah yes! I was trying to tell you about being a bootlicker when I got off track…”
Alonzo heard these last words as though in a dream for indeed he had fallen into a deep and heavy sleep.
