I can already guess what might be going through your mind as you read the title of this modest article: « this is yet another purposefully offensive title created for the sole purpose of inducing cheap thrills in the monotone lives of potential readers, insuring through the process a secured amount of sales due to it’s scandalous content that will surely quench the thirst of the public for the outrageous and the crass, as well as the negative reviews of most critics. »
Quite frankly, if it is indeed what you think,
I would feel obliged to compliment you on your very organized, well-developed
and eloquent trail of thought. As a
matter of fact, I do find a deliciously guilty pleasure in upsetting the easily
threatened minds, and playing with as many social conventions as I can to
bother the status quo.
However,
this title, even though made to pick your interest, was not written solely by
amusement or with the will to shock, and I would like to invite you to bear
with me just a bit longer so I can explain my conduct in the redaction of this
paper and the reasons for using such drastic symbols.
A few week
ago, the world has been the witnessed of yet another incident that made it stop
it’s impeccable continuity as a well oiled machine, to question it’s existence
and purpose to it’s core.
On January 7th 2015, at 11:30 am in
Paris local time, two masked gunmen armed with assault rifles and other
weapons forced their way into the offices of a famous yet marginalized satirical
newspaper.The two individuals fired up
to 50 shots, living 12 lifeless bodies in their path and injured 12 other, the
last of which was a national police officer who tried to stop the two fire
cracker fanatics in their merry march of destruction.
Needless to say, the
two gun enthusiasts responsible for living a trail of blood and gore in their
path, didn’t just happen to strut around the wonderful city of love and decided,
in the spark of the moment, to enter a random building, and start sharing their
adoration for fire arms with every single soul they encountered, distributing
bullets like care bears would give out hugs.
The actions of these trigger maniacs were
premeditated. They were trained, they were precise and they succeeded in
putting their point across.
By now, thanks to the
wonderful prowess of your Homo sapiens’ brain working at full capacity, you
might have guessed what incident I am referring to.
Your natural knack for deduction might have also
helped you realize that I did not give out the name of the newspaper touched by
this tragedy.
The reason for this grotesque omission is simply that
writing its name in a mediocre article such as this one would not have much
weight against the thousands of times it has been posted on social media and news
flashes, accepted as a symbol of freedom and support on a worldwide scale,
appearing as everybody’s profile picture, computer background and even on the
gigantic screens of Time Square.
My first reaction as a
Frenchman who has been living and studying in Canada for the past five years
has been, much like all of my fellow freedom fighters, to follow my irrational
gut feeling and my pointless sense of patriotism by sharing the hopeful slogan
publically on my own page, and protest for our right to have freedom of speech,
even though the lack of freedom and opportunities was the reason I had fled
France in the first place.
I even went to the extent of posting a message of
support to the families of the victims and to “my” country. It was, after all,
the proper thing to do.
I had fulfilled my part
as a proud but clueless member of this old and dying country, clinging in a
desperate attempt of survival to it’s already lost ideals.
Of course murders are an ugly thing, especially when
they are taken hostage by the media and the press, showing the atrocities at
every possible turn, playing the recorded footage of the attacks in loops under
the fear that somebody could forget them.
But after a while, this incident made the pink mass of
sludge I call “ my brain” react in unexpected ways.
The whole matter had a
strong smell of déjà-vu, as if the reactions to this event were not completely
isolated. The tsunami in Phuket in 2004 that I have had the bitter opportunity
to contemplate in person on the field, the attack of the World Trade Center, they
all had something in common; they brought every human soul around the world to
adopt erratic behaviours, express incoherent reactions and to slowly lose the
mask it had been wearing for a second skin since the beginning of time.
It wasn’t much the
situations themselves, but the aftermath that came with them, the butterfly
effect bringing the apparently normal folks of our good green earth to go
completely berserk. We just needed to wait, sit down with our popcorn, and enjoy
the grotesque march of the people, showing how profoundly touched they were,
thinking that their contradictory opinions mattered, and let them eat each
other alive. And boy it was magnificent.
Before rushing and
writing something irrelevant on the tragic incident like many others did, I
needed to breathe it all in, feel the catastrophe and study the animals.
I tried to see what were the utterances, the terms
that continuously came back, what made people angry and sad, and most of all,
what specifics made them talk out of their asses. You might have noticed that
not once the word “religion” as appeared in this article until now. I had not
seen the relevance of using it before the media made me the courtesy of
bombarding me with it and transformed my head into a Hiroshima-esque
no man’s land.
It kept coming back in
my thoughts, and suddenly many words seemed to connect to each other; religion,
enemy, truth, tragedy, peace, fight, all of them linking on top of each other
like the foundations of a crumbling building, showing me the house of cards
that is our society.
At this point, the concept of “assholes” finally made
sense. In times of distress, humanity makes use of its’ most trustworthy
defense mechanism which I like to call “find an enemy, find a martyr, and get
what you want”. Call it religion, call it laws or rules, call it rights, no
matter the name you give it, it will always be an excuse for the most powerful
human to get what he/she wants.
Now, like the current
President of the United States would say, let me be clear. By my statement I am
not saying that this specific case wasn’t led by a religious vendetta,
involving people ready to kill to find retribution for the offense made against
their beliefs. I am trying to go over
the futile reason for the action, focusing on the result and the real plan
behind it all.
This incident allowed
the rest of the world to have a piece of the action, allowing us to blame
somebody for our past grudges, win a political campaign, win an argument, or
simply have something to watch, to talk about or to do not to get bored. Let’s
face it, there is nothing more entertaining than disagreeing with somebody,
blow of some steam by fighting the ideals of others by shoving our own beliefs
in their throats just for the satisfaction of showing them who put on their big
boy pants.
Imagine if John Lennon
finally had his dream come true, if everybody agreed upon a set of values, a
belief system for the benefit of all and a way of life fit for everyone? We
would be bored out of our minds now wouldn’t we?
This is where the Era
of the Assholes begins; so let me explain why I firmly believe that this term
is the only fitting one for every single biped living or dead all through history,
and why we all belong into this classification.
To highlight this idea, I will call upon the wonderful
analogy created by the master of humour Louis C.K. and his theory of the “of
course but maybe”. To take one of his
most fitting examples for how much of an asshole everybody is, and please take
it with a pinch of salt to give it some taste as it is after all very dry humour:
“Of course slavery is one of the most terrible things that has ever happened to
humanity as a whole. A person using other people for their personal goals is
abject. But maybe, without it, we wouldn’t have all the wonderful human
creations that we all boast ourselves to have, such as the pyramids. How were
they made? We just threw human misery and death at them until they were completed.”
And even though it was an awful thing to do, people still today find reasons to
justify this atrocity.
Now using the logic of
this example, Of course killing good working citizens because they disrespected
your beliefs is an outrageous act to commit. But maybe, the writers and
cartoonists of the newspaper, known for their abrasive humour and shock
treatment of everything related to religion, knew perfectly well what they were
getting into, and what happened to them, even though despicable, was a tiny bit
their fault.
The argument works in the other way too.
Of course we all have
the right to defend our beliefs either it is to protect our religion or our
freedom of speech. But maybe if one of your daily tasks is to kill people just
because they disagree with you, you kind of deserve to be turned in ridicule.
The only truth this incident made me realize is that,
no matter where we are standing, it’s never really a question about right and
wrong, of good or bad, it’s all about our own personal gain.
So please let us all
accept the fact that everybody is an asshole, acting to fulfill his/her own
little pleasures in life and ready to use any excuse to achieve this goal, possessing
the talent to justify his/her actions in the process just to feel good about
it.
No matter if you kill people for your religion, if you
are paid to put everyone else in ridicule through comedy, if you enslaved an
entire nation, took their land, parked them in reservations like animals and
call yourself the land of the free (Yes I’m pointing the finger at you
America), if you stole your neighbours newspaper because his dog doesn’t stop
barking at night, if you had sex with your best friend’s girlfriend as a pay
back for him not helping you move in your frat house, or if you call on all of
your family members on your deathbed and use the weight of your coming doom to
tell everyone how much they sucked and should feel ashamed for ruining your
life, in the end we are all assholes.
By : Francis Auclair
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