[Previously on The March: What a way to go! Take oneself out in a series of fell swoops, or by the combined power of a million cuts and nicks, all while trying pretending to be of aid when all they’re doing is causing harm, making things worse, and generally acting like the thoroughly groomed pieces of shit they are.]
It’s happening as we speak, all around us, in the midst of tables we once deemed friendly but which have gradually turned toxic, deleterious, afflicted with disease and degeneration, weak spines and slime for blood. A swamp mindset, spreading its festering ways.
One bad seed is all it takes. One rotten glossy fruit in our fresh fruit basket. Pop goes the larva and the apple of your eye along with all things wonderful fall prey to the infection, eaten away by the worms incubating inside the rotten substrate, the compromised specimens extending their tentacles. Our safe spaces breached, ruined. The lingering malaise spreads, a malaise that seeks to make everyone sick in order to perpetuate itself. All around us, in the midst of gatherings we once deemed supportive and welcoming, it happens everywhere, all on the backdrop of a world in turmoil, a world of business as usual, steeped in liberal failure combined with conservative failure and high-handedness and righteousness ever-present, ham-fisted, going mad with power and dogma, overcome by greedy, needy, filthy mechanisms working overtime to suck dry the bones of the world.
This is the reality we are faced with today. We suffer the company of rot, our once glossy fresh fruits now falling prey to humidity and worms.
All of this is taking place as we speak, all around us, the afflicted looking to take us for a ride, playing us for fools, pissing on our parade while pretending everything’s fine, no worries, everything’s cool, dandy, they’re not going for a cash-grab, a swindle, no siree! Everything’s AAA-OK, they reiterate, thinking they’re getting away with murder, and that’s OK. Let them believe what they believe. It befits the story, suits us fine; let things roll the way the afflicted and diseased want them to roll, let the pieces move and fall where they may, all on the backdrop of a narrative all too good not to let unfold in its supercilious glory, an opera containing all the tragicomedies of the human condition, our summits and falls, everything in motion, in play as we speak, all around us, all so reminiscent of one of the most popular stories of all time, Star Wars, the greatest space opera in history, the template of which serves as an inspiration for things to come in the not too distant future.
So do all the events currently taking place on and around our tables: remind us of the course life has taken, the embattled paradigm we’re currently obliged to deal with.
This is the harsh reality of our day and age, an age ripe with compromised values, weakened by the baleful and lustful among us, the idiot-savants, the mindlessly predatory and impairing, the oh so treacherous and cancerous and all-too destructive, whose actions (or lack thereof) encapsulate the times we live in, the oh so unfortunate turn of events so fervently championed by them.
They have risen to the surface, these agents of disease, greedy and proud, taking bite after bite out of the world, but in doing so they have also inserted themselves in the line of fire — our fire.
I’m loving this turn of events, this grueling, inevitable development concerning our current sources of malaise.
Hold on tight, fellow wronged and dispossessed, fellow disillusioned men and women of today! There’s loads of stuff to come in the future. So many surprises. So many gifts finally finding their way home. So many chickens coming home to roost. The greed will meet its match, get what’s coming to it.
The process is well underway. I, one of its harbingers, am already active, taking the tentacles out, surrender them to the flames, like the clothing of those who died from cholera in Venice. Like their diseased corpses, tossed in the flames so that they may not infect and destroy others.
But today I’m taking a much-needed break, a working-break, of course — the work never ends, not when battling the foul elements of life — focusing on something that has been coming a long time. I’m finally and with great joy going to meditate on Episode III and its ‘origins’ story, namely the rise of Darth Vader, and all that came with it: the fall of the Republic, the rise of the Empire, the beginning of a long galactic war that led to the defeat of the Empire and the restoration of common sense, all stemming from a single act: the torture and death of Shmi Skywalker, Mother and Life Giver. The defining moment in Star Wars history, when everything came together.
Such an avoidable state of affairs, it was. An unnecessary tragedy. If only the Tusken Raiders hadn’t sought to violate the inviolable. If only they weren’t mindless and dreadful, cantankerous and filthy-minded creatures of desolation, their ways not so insufferable and poisonous. Had it not been for these shitty Raiders and everyone who enabled them, and suffered them, and resembled them in any way, form or mandate — had it not been for the foul forces that allowed the Tusken Raiders to Tusken-Raid their way through the world, inflicting their disgusting damage on the innocent people of the world, Shmi in particular — the dark side of the Force would not have arisen.
But these Tusken Raiders had to have their way with innocent Shmi because that’s what they did, and they killed her after making her suffer, and the rest, as they say, is history.
And here, dear Victor, as I sign off, is the instance when this history started, the moment the March came to life.
Yours, always,
Xavier.