Wednesday, July 8, 2009

A Capulet and Montague World History

I borrowed a copy of Romeo and Juliet from a German friend over here and after the first few pages got to start feeling pretty down on the nature of Men. (Women, you are excluded from the following tirade.)
The first pages of the classic are spoken by a couple Capulet’s about the possibilities of fighting the Montague’s’ to the death and taking their women for sexual pleasure, no doubt meant as some toilet humor for the groundlings but also a real statement about our history: Pillage and Rape, brawn and the undoing of brassieres, conquest on the battle field and the bed. The true depth of the 'sophisticated' male mind.
Our synopses are instinctually programmed to fire easily in the directions of aggression and sexual satisfaction, (this rather blunt fact having engendered more than a few harsh words from the fairer sex when used as justification to some of my more base behavior); and the world today, shaped by millions of childish minds that favor conquest to mediation, who ban ideas, and bomb Parthenon’s, reflect that a certain type of man has been in charge.
Very rarely in any age do the men who have the charisma to take or be given leadership also possess the patience and humility necessary to admit wrong. The history of males in power is a pissing contest of who’s God is better, who can talk the loudest, and who can brandish the biggest army and the most deadly weapons. Even most of these ‘Leaders’ attempts at diplomacy come off as a verbal War of Words.
The fertile ability to reason is more often found in those men who do not possess the urge or even the ability to captivate an audience with fist shaking and seek power, because with their talent of perspective, they see the folly of a charging Viking clan intent on the plunder and rape of an otherwise innocent village because of shear proximity.
Perhaps these men, much more fit to lead a peaceful world, are just too feminine.
The most complex machinery on the planet, the human brain, possessesing the ability to reason and express versatile perspective has been shut out of Leadership in all but a small number of cultures in Its History. Other possible Fifth Century Athens’s of Earth have been stomped out by peoples and ‘leaders’ with banner of “Fight and Fuck, Fend off Foe’s and Fondle Fraus for Fun!” No more than a group of chimps raiding a neighboring clan and cannibalizing a victim, the thoughtless minds of our ‘Chieftains and Presidents and Priests’ have proved all too unable to swim against the instinctually violent current of our animal instincts, and throughout Time have merely repeated cycles of violence and mob mentality, executing and exterminating ‘radical’ individual thought at every chance.
And the Montague’s and Capulet’s provide a literary paradigm to this cycle as they perpetuate an ancient feud, of most-likely-forgotten-origin, with pre-programmed thoughts, words, and actions. Like a white race enslaving a darker one because of ‘facts’ both Biblical (cursed offspring of Ham) and viewable (Look at them eat that watermelon!) the fact of the other family’s evil is accepted and implemented without question. They wear symbols of House on their clothes not unlike a Nazi armband, they are quick to thoughtless action like a child who has dropped his ice cream cone, and never do they exhort their individual minds to action.
The Capulet’s and the Montague’s express all too well the fatuous nature of ‘Man’s Elite’, the ruling class of peoples and immature minds that mark our history with War and Rape, and brashness over subtlety in the endless game of ‘me greater than you’.

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