what it is to be a temp

So as i said, my Fundamentalist Xian Chemist friend the Viking visited and claimed that America went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that George Bush (”an intelligent man”) is bringing peace and democracy to post-war Iraq, that the Israeli state is benign and treats the Palestinians fairly, that Guantanamo Bay is a humane kind of holiday camp, that Al Gore tried to fiddle the votes and was found out by George Bush (who won fairly), and that any contrasting evidence is “conspiracy theory bollocks.”

i refuted him thus:

Elberry: You mashed potato-eating imperialist lackey -

Viking: I hate mashed potato.

Elberry: Stinking liar! You were caught, pal, in public, scoffing mashed potato from a huge bowl! You tried to make children watch you!

Viking: This is not strictly true.

Elberry: Would you have sex with George Bush?

Viking [recoils and makes strange noises]: What!

Elberry: Ah, that’s it, isn’t it.

Viking: I categorically deny having ever had sexual intercourse with George Bush.

Elberry: Now it comes out, oh yes, it’s all making sense now. You’ve had his children. i spit on you.

Viking: Hippy motherfucker. I will crush your skull with my bare hands. Then i will enchain your womenfolk and use them for my pleasure.

Elberry: i don’t have any womenfolk.

Viking: Then I will do it to your dog.

Elberry: He’s not my dog. He’s my landlady’s dog.

Viking: Then I will do it your corpse.

As the night continued, punctuated by Laphroiag and various films (Oldboy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset), i realised that we weren’t really debating, more circling round each other. Every assertion of mine - e.g. that America obviously went to war to steal Iraq’s oil - was met with a flat “that is a lie” or “prove it”. It was interesting to have a long talk with an intelligent man who believes the official Pentagon version of reality, and has no financial or other commitment to that lie.

But i think there is an emotional commitment, that as Nietzsche observed, our cognitive nets only catch what we’re emotionally rigged for. The Viking naturally respects authority, and while - from reading the Gospels one would expect a Christian to despise worldly authority - he seems to see presidents, judges, prime ministers, as God’s chosen intermediaries here on Earth. Or rather, he sees Western authorities as good and well-meaning.

i peered curiously at the man. Let me lay it down for you: he’s nearly 7 feet tall, albino, very skinny, with a huge Moses beard and long girlish hair. His face is set in a permanent Calvinist scowl. Squinting at him, and poking him with a boot, i realised that he lives in a world that is safe, well-regulated, where authorities are benign, intelligent and transparent. His parents - though both are strange - strike me as well-meaning and intelligent; as far as i’m aware he’s always been academically gifted, and he’s been rewarded with a string of first-class grades and will no doubt soon be earning many times my pittance. Having studied Chemistry, his odd personality does not disqualify him from employment, as it would had he studied English. From inside his head, society is basically fair, things are well-ordered, nothing is concealed, bad people come to bad ends, and good people are happy and successful. He doesn’t like films or books where the heroes don’t win and get the girl.

Life has been otherwise with Elberry.

Elberry like Christ has been spat on and despised, beaten and crucified. He has spent a symbolic three years in the Hell of temping. But soon he will arise and divide humanity into the sheep and the goats. The sheep he will cast into the Hell prepared for the Devil and his angels. The goats he will lead into Paradise where 72 MILF await each temp.

The mass of available data on any one event - let alone something like JFK’s assassination or 9/11 or the Iraq war - is so various, conflicting, qualified, that one can effectively pick & choose ‘evidence’ according to one’s emotional preference. This isn’t to say there’s no truth, but that i think most people (maybe all) aren’t interested in the truth: they’re interested in finding a pattern that fits their disposition. i had thought only an out-and-out liar or lunatic would claim that America went to war in order to spread democracy and goodwill; but here’s a man with a PhD in Chemistry seriously arguing just such a position.

Kierkegaard wrote something on the lines of: “People accept that 2000 years ago the State could execute an innocent and noble man; ‘but oh no, we’re not like that now’. They accept that it happened 1,500 years ago, 1000 years ago, 500 years ago, 100 years ago; but they won’t believe that their society, their State, would ever act unjustly, or evilly.”

He wrote that in about the 1840s in Denmark. Move on a few decades and people accept that as long ago was, say, 1840, the State would act unjustly for its own ends; that it might have done so 100 years ago, perhaps 50 years ago - but not now.

The fundamental difference in this, between people like The Viking and people like me is that he feels he lives in a safe, fair place, where everything is orderly and above board, and good is rewarded, bad punished. For myself, i feel profoundily ill at ease in the world of human society. i see it as The Matrix, a lie, a system rigged to punish original thought and integrity, and to reward stupidity and servility. My whole life’s experience has led me here; whether that qualifies me to see clearly, or merely explains why i’m wrong, i myself cannot judge. We all think we’re right, of course.

My parents were ill-meaning buffoons. My first memory of school is, age about 5, being run into by a girl in the playground; we both fell down, she started crying; a teacher came over, pointed at me and shouted accusingly, “I saw what you did!” And so on. At every stage of education, my teachers have largely been dysfunctional morons. i did badly at school, my brain not really waking up till i was 19. i found university to be largely a self-serving system of bullshit, in which patronising lifers stifled any real thought or learning, encouraging servility either in the overt form of Literary Theory or, slightly more subtly, giving bad marks to anything that deviated too far from the official line. The exceptions had either been sacked or relegated to tiny offices and treated like scum.

i’ve been unemployed for two years, and temped - mainly at minimum wage data entry - for another three. i’ve been rejected for about 250 jobs.

Looking at myself from the outside, how could such a temp not distrust authority? 95% of the ‘authority figures’ i’ve met were fakes. i’m not enough of a Gnostic to hate the physical world; but the world of human society seems almost purposefully designed as a prison. Religions like Christianity and Buddhism acknowledge the rottenness of what St John the Evangelist calls ‘the world’. They posit another reality - outside of the Matrix - and encourage dissent, sedition, rebellion. As Christ said (John 15. 18-19):

If the world hates you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own; but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.

It isn’t coincidence that so many great writers were Jewish or homosexual or in some way pariahs; nor is it coincidence that the Nobel Prize is seen as a death sentence to creativity: to be acknowledged & honoured by the world is almost inevitably to fail one’s task: to be inspired by the spirit beyond the world; to be true and not false, not a creature of ‘the world’; to be a spiritual temp.

It is by no means impossible, but it is indeed very hard to maintain any connection to truth while wearing the world’s favour. To be true is to be in the world but not of it, dissident, restless, rejected, a temp. Those writers who survived fame (e.g. T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Thomas Mann) were driven by a restlessness beyond the desire for applause.

That is what it is to be a temp: to be restless, impatient of worldly honours, unshaven, carrying some kind of cosh, doing as little work as possible, stealing office supplies, unable and unwilling to bow before The Man; non serviam.