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A Love Letter for Michael Vick from Frank Booth
Walter A Davis White folks are all in a rush to racialize the Vick thing. How convenient. The connections we should be making thereby escape detection. The pervasive psychological violence and physical brutality of American society. Here is the ultimate pleasure, the true Lacanian jouissance. To torture a helpless creature because it enables you to feel the delight of your cruelty, your absolute freedom to project your inner world on an innocent victim. An inner world of hatred, rage, and violence that must be externalize lest you discover how foul you are. The innocence of the victim is the turn on. Injustice the proof that one is a lord of capitalism. Just as capitalism equals plundering the globe for excess profits, pleasure in capitalism equals venting one’s cruelty on the defenseless. (Yes, bright eyes, there was greed and brutality before capitalism: my point is that it takes inhumanity to its most extreme form.) So, Mike, ya got company. Out of the mouth of a moron like Stephon Marbury come words of wisdom. Blood sport is indeed our national pastime. And that’s where the connections must be made—for Vick’s pleasure is but one form of the abiding psychosis. (Dogfighting, by the way, is a 500 million dollar a year business with 40,000 participants.) Child beauty pageants—the sexualization of children by their parents so that those parents can act out their unmet narcissistic needs at the cost of doing permanent psychological damage to those children. And when kids don’t perform well in all the things we tell them they must excel at to succeed in “life” (i.e. capitalism) we do to them the same thing Vick did to those poor dogs—their decency being their death sentence. Spousal abuse—the act of turning the bitch who nags you into the dog groveling for mercy. (There is one solution to this problem: mandatory martial arts training for women from grade one. For this is the truth of all bullies. They are cowards. Whack them once and they cower.) Dubya and Company—a massive shit storm in Iraq as an attempt to protect the rage and panic over 9-11. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo—“not punishment, but sport” in the immortal words of Lindie England. The hunters doing their patriotic service by ridding the excess Deer population: the mighty hunter, a true primitive, full of courage, fixing a buck in the scope of a rifle powerful enough to fell an Elephant. Only connection: isn’t it ironic that Arthur Blank, owner of the Falcons, who founded Home Depot and squashed union efforts there was on safari in Africa when Vick was indicted. It’s what you feel in your pants as you pull the trigger that tells the true story. And of course the death penalty. All arguments against it will fail because there is one argument that those in favor of it refuse to admit. They like it because it makes them feel righteous and strong and cruel. (Or, to put this in the proper terms: the main reason we should oppose the death penalty is because of the damage it does to the souls of those who support it. And just so those of you who need to muddy yourself in the death penalty get your pleasure, the current Guv of Texas has topped Dubya’s record for executions and probably can’t contain the consternation is his pants as he counts down the hours until an innocent man, Kenneth Foster, will be put to death in Texas on August 30th.) “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” to quote Eliot from The Hollow Men. Well, Mike, here it is. Not crocodile tears about how remorseful you are or how you found Jesus in jail and so are washed in the blood of the dog. Here is what you have to do if you would redeem yourself. In that cell alone and in the night you must become the dogs you killed. You must feel your hands about their throats holding them down under the water as they thrash for life. You must become nothing but their suffering. Not the suffering of a dumb brute but the suffering of an innocent victim. Because there is one thing we all know about dogs and children and the victims of America’s global aggression. They become what we make them. You will never know something as open to love as a pup or a child. Nothing as deeply damaged by cruelty. But hark, there’s another solution where everybody wins. What Swift would call a modest proposal. Let’s save time and let mike resume his football career immediately, under two conditions. Half of all the money he makes on everything for the rest of his life must be donated to PETA. And he is forbidden to ever again be within 100 yards of any dog. And when the rage and hatred and cruelty seeks the other outlet he is banned from ever being within 100 yards of his wife, his children, an automobile (after DUI), etc. …until he is left with nothing but himself—and all the company he has among those who should be condemned to a similar solitary confinement. And while we’re chewing on that one let’s ask ourselves one last question. Where are the great black activist athletes to pick up the torch of Jackie Robinson and Jim Brown and Hank Aaron and Muhammad Ali? With apologies to Carlos Delgado and Ira Newble, they no longer exist because everything is historical and in capitalism that can only mean one thing. Even Republicans by gym shoes Michael Jordan said and the first luxury country club golf course Tiger Woods designs is in Dubai. Wanna see the tsunami wave of the future: check out the distribution of wealth in Dubai and the average annual salary of workers. And (apologies to Steve Nash, who is of course a Canadian) why are the white superstars like Manning and Brady and that moron Schilling such lovers of Bush? You see all our jocks are good houseboys now marching goosestep to the one tune—the pleasure found in cruelty, dehumanization and its need to crow. The winners must perforce taunt the losers. Capitalist competition after all is all about castrating someone. It’s often said that we can’t get our kids into organized athletics soon enough because that’s where they’ll learn to compete—and all the other life lessons that go with it. The beauty of football—and I speak as a lover of the game—is that it let’s us see a few truths for a few hours every weekend in the Fall. That is, if our hand is at our brow and not in our pants. But if you want athletics to cleanse you of the emotions that must be inculcate for capitalism to thrive, I must again recommend the martial arts. Not the way rednecks and others abuse them here, but in their original purity: that training whereby one cleanses oneself of fear and rage and the dominant Amerikan mentality: that of the playground bully who will make the whole world tremble under his boot. Yep, Mike, ya got company. Finally, my title. Who the hell is Frank Booth. Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, is the mad star of David Lynch’s great film Blue Velvet, about the underside of small town America. Among Booth’s finest lines is this: “You know what a love letter is?...It’s a bullet, fucker, a bullet straight for your heart. You get a love letter from me, you’re fucked forever.” Happiness is a warm gun. Recommend this article...
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Tags: Walter Davis Dogfighting Michael Vick Frank Booth
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