Supermensch

When I first read the word Supermensch, I thought Freud was, once again, venerating males; he was. But that's okay: nearly everyone before (like) 1960 or so did. It doesn't phase me anymore: people are sheep, for the most part. But in German, man is herr or herren in the plural. Mensch is more like human being; give it a go on Babelfish, which translates the entire phrase Supermensch as "superhuman being." The compound noun (adjective, and adverb) superhuman and the noun (or verb) being. I like the concept.

I've always wanted to be a Supermensch, and considering that to be "human" requires very little -- all those fucktards swinging around the isles at Wal-Mart at 70 mph are humans; the gorillas whose bumper stickers read "Marriage = Man + Woman" (which I thought equaled transgendered), they're human -- I'm pretty sure I'm already one. All hail the Supermensch.

We got the Logo channel added to our cable package, and let me comment positively: seeing those Queers on TV all day everyday has made my whole life happier. A commercial starring Rosie. A Gay comedy sketch hour (think Saturday Night Live, only all queer, no rules). Documentaries about Gay stuff. I may just turn into a Queer philosopher. It's all fucking fascinating. I'm so proud of the Gays.

Next week, they're doing a special on Ginsberg... who I can no longer think of without intertextually aligning him to Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, and Jack Kerouac. Maybe this new guy, Charles Berstein, will be added to that list. I certainly hope so. If Walt were here now... O America.

And then that ape-faced Bush -- whose mere visage makes my stomach lurch into acidic, acerbic rage -- who is so obtuse, he calls our economic condition a slow down (when perhaps what he's really seeing slow down is America's flow of currency in the global marketplace). He makes me want to fucking vomit. And he turns what good there is in America -- and there is much -- into his playthings, America into his own LOST island, and himself into a Widmore who is willing to break the rules to further his own agenda. Widmore, though, looks more like Cheney. :)

Ah, purging.

Then She Found Me

Just now, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed Colin Firth about his new movie Then She Found Me, opening this week in theaters. The conversation quickly dwindled into talk about Firth's penis; I tuned in to the conversation as Firth was talking about his penis, and how some aforementioned film or other performance allowed him to expose it -- larger than life -- in renowned cities worldwide. He even stacked it up against the Eiffel Tower, but then decided against that bold a gesture, a British one at that. Jon Stewart, of course, quickly deconstructed the phallic thread of the writer's remarks, remaking them into the classic "limp penis" joke, told in the voice of a 12-year-old boy for emasculating emphasis. The writer tried to defend himself by asserting his own penis as the empirical, world-renowned phallus, but Stewart again derailed the conversation into a comedic parody of the phallus, which, when uncrowned, is merely a wobbly dong or a wet noodle. The phallus, as Susan Bordo would have it, is only the phallus when we're in awe of it, and we're not in awe of most real penises (only those that resemble the phallus in size); we're in awe of the the manly man, the cock, the strong and always ready mythical man that most men never live up to. His penis -- not Everyman's -- is the phallus.

In essence, when the writer asserted his phallic power, Stewart deflated it with comedy, the fastest, most effective way to convert the authoritative, dominate phallus into a tiny wee-wee, weak, flaccid, and completely unusable except to produce waste. What started as a friendly conversation between the two powerful men became a power struggle.

Notice, though, in all of this that Stewart never claims the phallus that he strips from the writer. Why? My guess is, Stewart aspires to claim a different phallus because he's pitted against different competitors in another arena. Stewart's currency is comedy. And he who has the most of that fits Comedy Central's ideal masculinity (or femininity, in other cases). Stewart is, after all, so rich in the masculine currency of comedy that Comedy Central recognized their eggs were all in one basket and turned local currency into global currency: because comedy equals success, Stewart's show produced a spin-off, which is, in this arena, basically like Stewart's brilliance springing from it's own intellect a brain-child (Stephen Colbert's The Colbert Report). In Stewart's particular microcosm, he's earned enough in that one funny, phallus-shattering comment to continue competing for his own phallus at Comedy Central, a name that begs to be interpreted as a euphemism for comedy's marketplace.

I'm sounding like a broken Marxist record.

Someone should notify the local State apparatus... apparatus... apparatus...

Philosapho of Me

If we imagine the individual human as the locus of all meaning and authority, then from hir springs agency, and from within that agency s/he asserts itself. One organizing method or mechanism of this agency is, of course, temporality, but also gender, which s/he, from birth, is urged to associate to h/is genitals: if the agent displays a penis, he is masculine; if the agent displays no penis, she is female, and can, in light of the appearance of the male’s genitals, assume hers has been castrated, and she therefore lacks. Equipped, therefore, with agency and a penis, the male who is acculturated into Western ideology will become a man. A female who is acculturated into Western ideology will believe herself less than man: woman. She will see the phallic male and, according to the rules of Western ideology, she will know that the only way to truly gain the phallus is to become the mother of a son, whose penis she can acculturate to Western ideology and thereby gain the phallus to amend the lack (she never had). This complex game of “gain the phallus” works, of course, to man’s favor, because he can enjoy sexual intercourse with women (and men), but the added bonus of fucking a woman is that the women sometimes produces offspring that carry man’s impeccable (if he does say so himself) genes and, likely, his way of thinking about life. The female aspires to mother a boy child, and so she entertains whatever he does in order to have one, but she also receives pleasure from fucking, which is an instantly gratifying way to gain the phallus, if only temporarily. Persons choosing to step outside of the game of Western Ideology will no longer wish to gain the phallus, because the phallus exists only in simulacrum, an engorged, always-throbbing penis, superhuman (supermensch) in its performance strength and endurance and capable of producing offspring. Those persons outside of Western ideology participate in life by an entirely different set of rules, rules which sometimes overlap those of the Western world but often do not. Part of being in the “queer” zone outside of Western ideology is enjoying the freedom to express agency outside of gender. This expression can take the (per)form(ance) of anything the agent wishes or it can choose no(t to per)form.