Flushing the Douche(ca. 1999)

"To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which,
according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier,
is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to
parade its liberation from any scruple when social occasion
arises. Such laughter is a parody of humanism."

-------Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.




Let us imagine a bored man. A man addicted to the self serving chuckle
of a neutrality which disparages all others to exalt oneself. In this fence
sitting Inertopia he reigns. The belly laugh of cravenness is the flourish
announcing his presence. In an Age of Hyper-Consumption, where adjuration
is preached as the holiest of holies, such a man appears wise. Even those who
rankle at his ludicrousness cannot disavow the essence of his up-chuckled
cosmogony.

We can almost see him posturing as he says: "My destiny has been cast
among cocksure women.". A nervous laugh bursts up like the rising sun
after the shame dawns upon him. He calls this effacing. Just as the child
makes its egotism a life and death issue. Yes, folks, the Coup de Fou occurs
afterwards. It was all in jest. He trembles at the threshold of being meaningful.
So, with a straight face, he turns this crippling inability into something
beyond meaning. And then crowns himself with a diadem fashioned from fool's
gold.

Those who fail to accept this Chucklocracy lack, ipso facto, a sense of
humor. Many of us have Uncles who never forgive the brazen inhumanity of
those who do not laugh at their jokes. In this person such a grudge is distilled
into an Ontological Reproach. A sub specie aeterni call for the entire Cosmos
to lighten up and chuckle along! It's the best way to live! Yes! Being a fellow
chuckler suddenly becomes the summum bonum! The dull wit of a timorous,
bored, Paterfamilias becomes the pinnacle of human wisdom. And that, indeed,
is laughable.