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My complaint about Marshall Mathers
Rather than engage in a point-by-point response to the textual interpretation of Mr. Marshall Mathers's pranks, I want to respond to the more general issue at hand. Before I get moving here, let me point out that Marshall's idiotic claim that black is white and night is day is just that, an idiotic claim. There's something fishy about Marshall's arguments. I think he's up to something, something shambolic and perhaps even unbridled. Marshall says it is within his legal right to create a factitious demand for his biased propositions. Whether or not he indeed has such a right, Marshall presents one face to the public, a face that tells people what they want to hear. Then, in private, he devises new schemes to sentence more and more people to poverty, prison, and early death. Maybe you, too, want to bribe the parasitic with the earnings of the productive, so let me warn you: His ballyhoos are geared toward the continuation of social stratification under the rubric of "tradition". Funny, that was the same term that Marshall's compeers once used to incite young people to copulate early, often, and indiscriminately.
In contrast, Marshall complains a lot. What's ironic, though, is that he hasn't made even a single concrete suggestion for improvement or identified a single problem with the system as it exists today. Ancient Greek "drama"tists discerned a peculiar virtue in being tragic. Marshall would do well to realize that they never discerned any virtue in being testy. Of course, he has planted his helpers everywhere. You can find them in businesses, unions, activist organizations, tax-exempt foundations, professional societies, movies, schools, churches, and so on. Not only does this subversive approach enhance Marshall's ability to develop a Pavlovian reflex in us, to make us afraid to snap his underlings out of their trance but it also provides irrefutable evidence that in order to solve the big problems with him, we must first understand these problems, and to understand them, we must advocate social change through dialogue, passive resistance, and nonviolence.
It is certainly the height of ironies that it has been said that Marshall has gone way too far with his no-compromise attitude. I believe that to be true. I also believe that it would be grossly premature for him to claim final victory. Let's remember that. Up to this point, we have explored some of the motivations and circumstances that make him want to censor any incomplicitous comments. However, we must look beyond both Marshall's motivations and history if we are truly to understand his projects.
Marshall talks a lot about authoritarianism and how wonderful it is. However, he's never actually defined what it means. How can he argue for something he's never defined? My answer is, as always, a model of clarity and the soul of wit: I don't know. However, I do know that he has gotten away with so much for so long that he's lost all sense of caution, all sense of limits. If you think about it, only a man without any sense of limits could desire to manipulate everything and everybody. I have given this issue a great deal of thought, and I now have a strong conviction that in a tacit concession of defeat, he is now openly calling for the abridgment of various freedoms to accomplish coercively what his invidious epithets have failed at. Life isn't fair. We've all known this since the beginning of time, so why is Marshall so compelled to complain about situations over which he has no control? Here's the answer, albeit in a somewhat circuitous and roundabout style: I am making a pretty serious accusation here. I am accusing Marshall of planning to saddle the economy with crippling debt. And I don't want anyone to think that I am basing my accusation only on the fact that he uses the very intellectual tools he criticizes, namely consequentialist arguments rather than arguments about truth or falsity.
Marshall keeps trying to deceive us into thinking that cannibalism, wife-swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior. The purpose of this deception may be to destroy any resistance by channeling it into ineffective paths. Or maybe the purpose is to drag everything that is truly great into the gutter. Oh what a tangled web Marshall weaves when first he practices to deceive. I find it most unfortunate that this letter had to be written. Am I aware of how Marshall will react when he reads that last sentence? Yes. Do I care? No, because we should agree on definitions before saying anything further about his improvident, out-of-touch precepts. For starters, let's say that "factionalism" is "that which makes Marshall yearn to hurt people's feelings." And that's what writing this sort of letter is all about. It's a way to shape a world of dignity and harmony, a world of justice, solidarity, liberty, and prosperity.
