Rasenbank Am Elterngrab

-Rasenbank am Elterngrab

So I was sitting in my English teacher’s class one day, listening to him prattle on about successors to the legacy of chauvinism. I’ll be blunt. The guy is a nice fellow, but his philosophical convictions irritate me. My eyes strolled with unparalleled ease from the diagram; ‘twas cyclical in both form and logical suppositions. I etherized my mind and started slicing the peripheral grey matter with a scalpel, revealing the black and white of a string of words that I recount to the best of my ability:

I. Thesis

I had been a faithful Christian for many years, and I felt compelled to visit the point of origin from whence my Savior had come where I would now begin my work as a missionary. I felt the need to escape a culture so steeped in a post-modern fog-of-war and other such sophism with its end results of sexual debauchery and encouragement of deviance. If there is one thing that I am grateful to the post-modern movement for, it is the dissolution of the Communist movement by promoting flat taxes, privatization of education et cetera as “modern,” and thus desirable to all “modern” countries. While post-modernism, the enemy of my enemy, remains an enemy, it becomes easier to tolerate such an enemy’s presence. It did my dirty work; it ended the Cold War. See? Even storm troopers can cogitate on a political economy. I ordered my ticket online to board a Boeing, and so I wasn’t very pleased to find picketers surrounding the foyer of the airport, protesting their piddlingly low wages. Fortunately, many liberals nowadays feel compelled to give special attention to these unionists, consistently falling on their heads in doing so. I respect men like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh, but they often don’t have the foresight to make the analogical connection between political struggles raised by senate liberals and the rust on underwater bridge supports. Given, the process of generating rust corrodes some of the metal, but in doing so, the support upon which the bridge was built remains intact and protected against further corrosion. If the supports are to remain intact, then rust is to remain intact! Give the leftists their pacifiers. I was in line behind a man who had three lighters, who was told that he could only carry two onboard. I remembered fondly a certain propagandistic documentary, whose moral was that Bush is a conspirator, Arabs control us all, senators are bad, et cetera. It’s amazing to see how many liberals think that a non-attractive man will be listened to so much; furthermore, how much liberals count their victories in superficialities is surprising to any casual observer. The Republican senators need to be more responsible; tokenism for economic “lefties” is the same as tokenism for women, minorities, non-Christians and homosexuals, the lattermost of which shall soon be amalgamated properly anyway. A parched woman will let herself be raped for water. Back in the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam and his wife nothing but abundance. Wives belonged to husbands, the rule of the father prevailed, and production hit an all- time high. Then, Eve got it in her head to act independently, and modernity was born. Ever since, it has been my righteous God decimating these hedonists wherever they appeared. God threw Satan into the depths of Hell, smashed the Tower of Babel, rent Sodom and Gomorrah asunder, and allowed the disobedient tribes whose cultures intermingled with the pagans to be taken by their enemies, and still these free thinkers deign to fight against shimmering morality. It is amazing how well the graces of God have blessed our Christians with a love of money so great that our beliefs have become so ubiquitous; self-undoing liberals stand naked at the gates to their centers of distribution, no longer able to resist the wrath of God, but given the brand-name Ark of the Covenant for their troubles. They still can’t see beyond smoke and mirrors, and so they ask us to make “radical,” reality-disrupting films that convince them that they already do. Run, God be thanked, that all believers believe that they shall receive mansions in the sky upon their deaths; the sooner that people realize that materialism does not end in the grave, the quicker they will be willing to work to death so that they may be guaranteed their glorious factory and bungalow in the sky. My friends, ‘tis my final sermon; I have come to fight for the Conservative God in an Ecumenical world, just as my Pope has demanded of me. Don’t hate me. I do this for my own sake; my beliefs take precedence over my beliefs in a market economy, I am not an anarcho-capitalist. Simultaneously, I have to preach to heathens in the only way I know will work. It pains me that I have to be a salesman for God, but it is equally pleasuring that I can do God’s work as such. Rows A through D are disembarking; God bless America, to whomever I would peddle it to, and pray for my soul, that I might not fall prey to the act of peddling.

II. Antithesis

Konnichi wa! Atashi wa Aikane Sakura iru. Douzo yoroshiku. Oh! Pardon me- I was not aware that I was speaking to a gaijin as such. Let me restart, then: Hello! I’m Sakura Aikane, and it’s nice to meet you. I attend Meguro Gakuen Girls’ Junior & Senior High School in the city of Tokyo. At home, I live only with my mother; she is a strong woman, and since my father left when I was five, she has had to keep both herself and me fed. I love her very much; she has been able to give me little, but has taught me much. Oka-san’s name is Namida Aikane. She has provided for me as best as she could, packing my lunch every morning and little else, paying the bills with whatever money she can scrounge together. Every Nichiyoubi, the first day of the week, we visit Sekiguchi Catholic Church, center of the Tokiensis Archdiocese. Faithful Christians in a place with such a poor economic climate isn’t desirable, but our faith in God pulls us both through, and somehow we get by. Oka-san works as an accountant for the Archdiocese, making a pittance in pay. Her friends mock her behind her back on a regular basis for her choice of such a poor paying career; they don’t know that I listen, though I do. Why do they care so much about money? They do not mock her beliefs, however; doing so would be rude, and it is the duty of all citizens of a modern world to respect other viewpoints, or so I am told. I cannot agree with a statement like that, and my teachers say that I am naïve; only the supportive words of Oka-san give me strength. The Ecumenical movement is still an infant one, and sometimes I have trouble dealing with it. The best outfit in my wardrobe is my uniform for school, and Oka-san’s best dress isn’t much better. To some extent, I am blessed; my friends from school who are both rich and poor choose to wear their uniforms outside of the classroom. I have read that in other parts of the world, people think that girls wearing more expensive clothes are prettier. I cannot understand this; on the other hand, I have never experienced much money at all, so maybe I’m the one missing out. I don’t know. If there’s one thing I tolerate Japan for, though, it’s how much women have lived comparatively within the openness of men and boys alike who are envious of my friends and me. I do not approve of being in an unGodly society that looks my way if ever I bend over, but as my priest tells me, all human beings who give into their urges become animalistic and lose their dignity. Unfortunately, he also says that dignity is a pretty cheap commodity nowadays. It seems to me as if society is becoming more and more random, but also stricter in ways that frighten me. While American consumption of drugs and sexual sins skyrocket, President Bush retains his position of family values; in Japan, there are no family values to speak of. It’s not a good time for true believers, and the only way to hold onto an amulet of goodness and morality is to dive headfirst into a pool that is society which would cause it to dissolve anyway. I don’t want to give it up. What I suppose I’m trying to say is that the things that Oka-san taught me just don’t make sense to society as a whole anymore, and that makes me sad. Oka-san believed in equality, although it would seem that our nation which once valued the Bushido has since been following the western nations towards disaster. “Beliefs without a hefty price tag have become un-modern, and morality has been edited and laminated into a small pamphlet that can be posted on the lounge room of a Dobson factory,” said an angry Oka-san at supper last night. I sit here writing my story with a Hello Kitty pen, knowing that for every day I choose to live more monastically, the further cloistered I will become. I can no longer ignore the concessions that my beliefs have been forced to go through, and all that I have left is a hope that the craziness and amorality has been forcing Oka-san and me to go through will end soon.

III. Synthesis

Hegel once said, “Suppositions can still live in-themselves, but no longer for- themselves.” I think I myself am starting to realize what he meant in earnest, and how much I’ve done to further this cause. Let me begin by saying that I’m sorry. Right now, I stare at my English teacher, a proud man who wears flannel, goes to Mass every Sunday, and has a belt buckle with a cowboy embossed on it; this man teaches the archetypes, encouraging self-reliance and tainted with a tradition of supporting members of nobility, while glorifying a liberal meritocracy, which itself is the upper-class’ illusion, fabricated by the same modernist movement that would rend his archetypes asunder. I myself write this story of so-called rebellion with a synthesis that continues the status quo while listening to Japanese pop music and progressive rock, avatars of a postmodern fracas that is restrained only by how production and consumption would alter it, while wearing a cross from a religious retreat. I espouse liberal policies, and have purposefully and acerbically labeled myself a rebel on multiple occasions, undoing any work I would be doing to actually be a rebel by allowing myself to be labeled as such. Paradoxes may or may not be the truth of this world; regardless, I have become too addicted to substance to live a life of my own virtues. I personally am so adhered to materialism that I made the connection of materialism and all that is material, leading myself to spew out Matrix dialogues on the existence of reality; only now am I able to repent my ways, and only now do I know the gravity of the history that I so vehemently denied. I am a servant of want; I am a superstitious man; I am a member of the servile masses, lying dormant; and I am steeped in the old tradition, intent letting the dust collect and the prize go neglected. I am not alone in this. The majority of our society has been heading in this direction for a long time. That is why we have finally begun to destroy the family structure in earnest; indeed, that is why we few who are appreciative of tradition enough to attend the funeral collectively now stand at our parents’ graves.