by Roman McClay
To kill that man is a moral act , Jack thought, and it mattered not if nobody or everybody agreed with him; it was still true. Truth required no vouchsafing , he reasoned, it required nobody to understand it or sanction it. It is true, alone, and Jack saw it there like a monument, a beacon of what man should aspire to. He liked killing, and this he had to think about, to understand if it was a flaw or not. He realized it was an indication of its worth, of its rightness; as it imbued him with a feeling of meaning, unlike the feeling of maudlin anxiety that attended the act of leaving someone immoral -and thus dangerous- alive, which gave him -and gave anyone in charge of protecting anything of value- a sick feeling of failure.
And yet, Jack thought, modern society let rapists and liars and shitheads of all kinds off with a warning, and time served, and with a court date illegal aliens never even arrive at; and for this, modern society deserves to die . Showing mercy to a predatory animal that will return to kill you and your comrades is no moral act; it’s not kindness, it’s weakness and thus immoral; you are placing your own precious feelings above what is right. It was like the way modern men refuse to drink tap water, as if their bodies are too good for the mésalliance of mixing tawdry city-water and their own pristine bowels.
He had seen it, over and over, grown men refusing tap water, or non-organic food, or vegans refusing to eat eggs for christsake . They were foppish and silly, not real men at all. These men refuse to work hard or try things dangerous for fear of scars, or permanent damage, as if life was too precious to live it. Just like these fucking wines , he thought, they are too expensive to drink !
They go bad because each owner pays 10 then 20 then 30 thousand for a case and nobody can afford to drink it. It’s risible, and demonic and wrong . Life is to be lived, and it’s precisely because men like he could come and take it from you at any moment, for reasons you -the doltish and insouciant- will never understand, for you do not see life in moral terms, it’s all personal choices, man, and live and let live, man, and free love, bro and that stupid shit.
That crap is the consequence of democracy, Jack thought, the excesses built right into the systems that allow great wealth to accumulate, wealth made by the brains and balls of great men, and then to allow everyone to have a say in what is allowed to be done with that wealth, that talent, that grandeur . Everyone, he thought angrily, gets a say, no matter how worthless and useless and immoral and greedy and sociopathic they are . Corruption is inevitable in democracies. Man first becomes weak then immoral; and thus anything that weakens man is to be seen as immoral; this is basic Cartesian logic , he thought. Man, to remain strong and moral, is to be harnessed and made to pull a heavy load; this is what gives his life meaning, not pampering his body -inside and out- and looking as pretty as some young girl.
Jack wanted to destroy all that vitiated men, all that turned them into dandies and faggots and Eloi and , he stopped himself mid-rant and reset his allostatic system to reduce epinephrine and testosterone slightly. He cooled. He saw the cases floating in air and was overcome with a feeling that he must, that he had to manually load them; all this standing around is bullshit , he thought. He was being a hypocrite, he thought.
The last of the crates were being loaded now and he hopped up in the truck and began taking cases from the bots and hand stacking them for the final run. He sent the bots back to the vineyard to make sure all the data was collected and gave them the key-code to begin the burn now. He was never going to not be him; that much he knew. He knew there were arguments for leniency, he knew they could even be fashioned to make sense. But they were wrong, and that was the hammer upon the anvil of society’s bullshit. One must as Goethe said, conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the hammer or the anvil . And fuck Orwell, and his bullshit about the anvil breaking the hammer, we have more hammers for your anvils, fucker , Jack said to himself. And, even if it the anvil does break the hammer, that doesn’t make the anvil right!
I’d take the massive chest of Goethe , Jack boomed in his head as he jammed cases on cases in the 2,698 cubic foot box; I’d take it over the caved spine of Orwell . Their moral difference lied in their musculature and bearing; Jack judged men as he judged all animals: by their mien. Orwell went against his prejudices, he overcame them, they say. And they think this is moral effort! He wasted his energies on that nonsense when he should have built himself into someone strong, Jack One thought, for his people . Jack adored his books, and he -Orwell- was right on colonialism, fascism and communism; a hat-trick few can claim such rectitude on.
But, a man’s prejudices are his , and he should work with them as he works with his brothers and tribe mates and -if he is lucky to have a good woman- his wife; he doesn’t abandon them, he thought, for some effete principle he knows is a lie; multiculturalism is a lie; each to their own kind is the law of the jungle. When, Jack said in his head as he stacked cases on cases, his head itself a dojo of the most martial of dialectical thoughts, the lower animals look out for the best interests of wolf, the lion, the osprey, then I’ll advocate the apex predator become ecumenical too. When the deer brings a meal to the wolf as it sleeps and leaves it at its hearth then I’ll soften up a tad. But until then, we fight, tribe against tribe, man against man, one man against all mankind.
Orwell traded in his prejudices like he’d trade in his comrades! Man must be loyal to himself, and his prejudices are there for a reason. But of course, he thought, most idiotic people knew nothing about parasitic load and religious bifurcation, nor about the jealousy of white rats literally saving the life of their unborn fetus compared to the liberal rat failing to protect its young . Prejudices are just like our desiderata for food and water and caution among strangers and loyalty to one’s ideals, and Jack was committed to his, just as he was committed to his fellow Jacks and to Blax and to anyone else that joined up and fought alongside them.
You think your enemies are not committed to their prejudices? he asked to the cases, the bots, the inside of this metal box. The white man is hated by every tribe on the planet, the mongrels and feminazis openly call for our heads, and yet we are to unilaterally disarm? These vermin now lecturing us on who we can be, who we must love, who we cannot love, Jack thought as his heart raced and pumped hot blood to the outposts of his hands, feet; his hair stood up on end with small electrical charges at the tip of their spears.
Fuck that, he thought, it is immoral to pull shit like that, and anyone who recommends it is like those who advocate for suicide or quitting or say shit like, “ that ain’t my job, man.” The more weakness the world preached the more intransigent he would get, he would meet each complaint of the anvil with another ordering strike of the hammer, he would never yield, nor give in; if he did who would protect the remnants of the last decent people on earth? Those men, women and children out there right now being preyed upon by illegal aliens and niggers and predatory cops and businessmen, the offal of the earth are picking the bones of the last decent people, and we are told to be nice and friendly and tolerant by liberals with no knowledge, he thought, no moral vison at all. It’s the most disgusting collection of immorality and Satanic infamy, and yet it goes by the name of peace, love and democracy. He spit in the box as he shooed away bots to grab more OWC himself.
Satan always has the best sounding names , Jack thought as he bent at the knees to pick up four cases, he has no compunction about lying to gain foothold in the mind with his nice sounding words; as Baldwin said, when fascism comes to America it will be called anti-fascism. Those Antifa fucks were going to suffer, this would be one of his first missions when Blax gave them carte blanche . And every stupid fucking celebrity that had preached that hate was born of ignorance and learned not bequeathed at birth was going to learn some biology and evolutionary psychology just before he put a .45 in their filthy mouths.
Hate is natural, and it is useful, and it is right, just as love is. To love one’s own people, one’s own tribe, one’s own history and culture and genome was the most na
tural thing on the planet, when every race did it except whites, he thought, oh, then it was Nazi shit. “Well, fuck that,” he said aloud.
Weakness has become a virtue among those with no capacity to see right and wrong at all. Next, we’ll be taking coins for the jukebox from the deaf, and economic advice from the bankrupt. What next, are the crows to peck the eagles ? Jack said and slammed the last case into place and jumped down from the truck and strode to the cab as the gravel below him crunched under his weight.
He thought of Themistocles and his desire to include all men of his race in the gene pool of the marital forces to defend Hellenism and not just the rich as was de rigueur up until then. The Greeks were more desperate for and showed unity in response to his identarian call; the Persians under Xerxes fractured as they got father from home and had become a pastiche of ethnicities and cultures that could not cohere and suffered a deserved defeat at Salamis due to these phenomena that Jack noticed and attached moral weight to.
The fire in the vineyard was lit; as he strode from the rear to the prow of the truck .
Jack One hopped up in the truck and started it up, allowing the diesel to warm and rattle in place. He smiled, thought of the torque of diesel, its durability too. It was the superior engine , he asserted, and yet it was no good as an accelerant, he had had to douse the Château itself with gasoline so that the vineyard conflagration would set the building itself on fire. He thought of the colors and garish stupidity of the edifice as a kind of Crème Brule now and decided to stop and pick up some eclairs on the way. And he then put the transmission in 1st and thought he might not sleep at all until they were way out to sea. And -he thought as the albedo of the vineyard flames turned half his face an orange and livid white, as the starboard side was slate grey and mars black in the dark cab- that was just fine with him.
IV. 2036 e.v.
From the 2-meter-deep beach of brown sand just past the treed-border of the château, Jacques Latour lowered in a crouch and scanned the water of the Gironde estuary. He, with back to the vineyard, 20 meters away, looked for boats and imagined dolphins leaping in the air and arcing like silver slag off the anvil from the hammer of the night. He smiled at this fancy.
There was a light on the other side, that blinked in slow pulses; and some buildings and homes had soft amber glows as well, but the images from the drones that traveled up and down the waterway and the Route de la Riviere showed no RFIDs. Those frequencies that signaled police -or anyone with scanners at all- were quiet; and so he imagined the water table instead. A Police unit 20 kilometers to the south was all it picked up and it was driving further south away from the Château , and Jack dismissed it as quickly as the drone did.
He’d picked up a few marl gravel stones, the size of half his palm, and colored like watercolors or pastels mired with soil; they felt like eggs in his pocket, and he walked carefully with them. He walked back through the thicket of trees that bordered the vineyard and pushed on ahead to l’enclos to feel the brambled gnarls of the vines and wrap his palms around their thick base. He pulled and they did not budge; their roots traveled down three meters in places. He scanned the soil with his PGC and stored an x-ray taken by two bots he had commandeered from the loading crew and imagined he would sit up at nights in some gauzy future and just watch the soil and permeable gravel and clay and marl and limestone layer betwixt and between the roots and tendrils of these noble vines.
These 47 hectares of l’enclos surrounded the château like a Praetorian guard of soldiers. The vines bursting their grapeskins like the burst heart of hunted whales, standing upright as they sleep in waterways. From Roman soldiers to cetaceans he watched as the vineyards morphed from one thing he admired to the next in legions, in pods, in the malice of bears as he thought he saw black bear from home in his mind sleep under the marl.
Whales, he then thought, can sound down to 5-miles on one breath and never show their mouths or redden their face. He imagined the sperm whales now, all like liths, stood up 20 meters high all around la Château and he smiled as the water -in this inner image- leaked out from their blowholes and from under their fins with their hand bones covered like mittens with skin; they had abandoned the right to manipulate the world some time back when they were mammals on land.
They think whales were like hippos; he thought, and he thought maybe man would give up his right to manipulate too one day; sew up flesh and epidermal layers over the parts of mind that turn ideas and things over and over in this head full of brine. But, he doubted it, although some men thought to abandon the crass and tawdry business of business, he said to himself as the DXsF-3 ran the length of the 97 hectares of the property and stood at the north west corner waiting for his protocol release; for his permission, his sanction, to burn it.
Men, he was thinking of, who could make more and more money, who were built for it, but abandon such low-born aims, and leaving pennies on the ground looked up to the stars instead. He felt Blax was one of these men, a great man, in the Stoic or Buddhist sense, a man who could kill 100 things but chose to kill just one; abandoning the storing up of riches now, on earth, and instead planning for heaven. Blax might not even like such loose talk, Jack thought, all that was an embarrassing surfeit of compliments, he’d likely say.
But, Jack knew his -Blax’s- heart: he wanted recognized for the things he did not do as much as for what he did. He had forgone personal revenge, that was first, and he had said no to more pussy than he had accepted, not an easy thing to do as a man who had it thrown at him in quantity and quality and had a robust libido to boot. And he had left how much money on the table? millions by even a conservative accounting. He had refused to negotiate harder; he worried more about the terroir of the relationship than the mere volume of sugar-content, the sweetness, of any one deal. What’s 10%? he’d say, compared to your partner feeling he is worth just as much as you?
He’d allow a 50/50 split in lieu of arguing for a 55/45 deal based on the feelings of his partner to be. He just thought like that, Blax did; and that partner would still rip him off, Jack laughed with chagrin more than bitterness into the Latour night and then felt embarrassed that he had laughed at all. But it was true, Blax gave and gave so magnanimously, refusing to argue over nickels, and nobody ever noticed. Nobody ever took that for generosity, even though he would do 70-80% of the work and brought as much capital and 100% of the IP. But it did not matter, his generosity was seen as weakness by low men who had read Sun-Tzu once and thought they were clever .
He could have saved so much money and energy and love, but he spent it on all around him. He was generous and hated the tawdriness of money . It made people low , he had told them all a story of a man who on New Year’s Eve had argued over the price of the NYE menu of a restaurant Blax had picked out for the employees and partners of his firm. It was a grand evening and so, who cared if it was $200 a head ? But this man had pitched a minor fit, which had no effect on the cost, only the mood of the evening. That man had ruined that $1200 meal with one sentence of ingratitude and cheapness. Blax made us understand, Jack remembered, that if the money meant that much to him, to this chuckle-head, he ought not have paid at all; but to merely bitch, that was the mark of a low-born man ; a man who begrudged life itself for its cost, taking no notice of the free bounty that lay out before all of us.
Jack Three had took that in -more than the others- he thought now, he hated cheapness too; there was something ungrateful about it. Imagine complaining about money, when all of life was -as Blax had said- so abundant, and all around. Its free lunches were ubiquitous , he thought. Look at all this, and any part of it is yours if you breathe the air free and can learn from libraries, drink in each element via the skin and eyes and rub the soil that took millions of years to exists, right between your fingers, he thought as he rubbed the ovum of rocks in his pockets. We don’t see all we get for free, we just see the bill for the 1% that we have, that we get, but that we must actually pay for .
Jack Three had heard Jack recal
l that Blax’s friend Chen had an argument against money too, but from a different angle .
Chen had said that money does not capture the true value of anything, for all the pollution and disease and entropy to man and earth, that too should be part of the cost of bringing that product to market. But it is lost, it is uncaptured in the price because the company never pays for any of that shit; neither does the customer. The costs are offloaded to the periphery, like garbage on a barge sent to Haiti or a cancer patient denied surgery and dying. Money didn’t calculate these wages lost due to illness, or death, nor the cost of the anti-depressant pills their wife goes on to deal with the loss, the price of the bullets used when the son vows revenge. Shit , Jack thought, and the meaningless loss of losing a husband to a disease he got from a product and a society unfit to care for him; because to care for him would have cost too much . The son without a father now, with increased chance of crime and even suicide, murder, Jack thought, well, all that costs somebody, something; but none of it reflected in the $9.99 of the widget sold and bought and sold again .
It’s hard, Jack thought, when you look too closely, to enjoy anything without knowing the cost to bring it to you . Sure, most people can ignore it, but not Jack; he seemed to calculate the cost of it all. And this is why he had the least problem with what they were doing of them all. He revered the vineyards and the vines themselves; he even respected the owners and workers and townsfolk most. But, everyone must pay a price for all this; we already get too much for free, even me , Jack Latour de jur , he said to himself as he gave himself that rhyming nom de guerre with a rhetorical flare and jangled the rocks in his pockets alongside the ideas in his head.
He stood on the elevated enclos , a full 16.1 meters above the river. He stood and breathed free air, free in every way, and held it, and watched his CO2 levels rise and then be attenuated by his PGC; and he smiled. The cost of oxygen just went down too , he thought, now we need half as much as before, how cheap is that? He stared out at the Petit Batailley and the Palus of marshland that ran off into the night like a girl running away from home until she can no longer see the lights of Château .
