A yes man
"So the Swedes are at it again," said a man with straw hair and a parallelogram for a nose, "voting for a number of different political parties, including one that the Guardian doesn't like. There have been articles, comments, pundits and Punditssons, all stalking around this obscure tragedy, peering into the flames, trying to understand. I know no Swedish, yet happen to understand perfectly, free of charge, because like the Swedes, I am a yes man."
"A yes man," he went on, lighting his moustache and waving away the proffered crumpet, "is a man who says yes while miserably dreaming the alluring no. A man for whom 'free choice' is an alibi rather than a motive, something you just invoke to get out of the fix of explaining. A man whose choices - because actually unfree, constrained to binary by a maritime git's bony legs round his neck - lead to diminished and dismal outcomes, the sort that garner distracted smirks, and the odd Irish penny, from glutinous headmistresses en route to important conferences. A man whose mediocrity is guaranteed by his practiced inauthenticity, and whose consolation is that the lifelong pain of giving in and up gives his fermented dissatisfaction a special solera."
" 'Misparented is perhaps the trouble,' the yes man may sometimes be heard to mutter. 'The parent charged of old with loving whom you are, unconditionally, had to become the one who loves what you do, conditionally, the latter role being as unfilled as the former is unfashionable. So our being, because unloved, remained unhatched, and our doing, unbreeched, perpetually done up in a frock in supplication of the elusive eleemosynary pat on the head, as a reward for saying the rightish thing and doing nothing at all.' " The straw haired man paused, stroking his missing testicle. "We are the Undescended: the El Greco saints, smug in our celestial conservatory, sneering down from the elevated splendour of our unrealised excelsis. It is not true that we are all called Svensson."
"In RuislipTown there was a maid - mark well what I do say," the straw man went on, between characterful wrinkles, sipping at his brake fluid. "I was desperate to get laid, so of course you make allowances. I think her name was Batchett. Yvonne Batchett. I babysat her opinions for three years, ending up with few scratches but multiple itches. By then the pattern was firmly established: you do as told, lest you become unpalatable. "Same to You, Dear", as Dendy Sadler would've had it. So of course you are rewarded with Same. You self-administer Same, yet when you shake the box labelled "Same" and Same dutifully tumbles out, you tremble with suppressed grief and rage."
"A yes man's yes is a Reichsmark of a yes, bankable certainly, but neither meant nor valuable, because issued from a made-up character. And the worst part, for him, is that he has no way of knowing what curt monosyllable of assent or dissent, or what modulated alternatives, might have issued from the unmanacled him, had he been given a life. Perhaps most of those yesses would have remained yesses, but felt ones. Perhaps they would have been noes. Perhaps he would have been elsewhere, and the request would never have been made. Perhaps he would have found there are other ways of behaving, neither cipher nor monster, unmentioned in the manuals. It is complicated to have been given someone else's life to live by accident, when your own is over there, at the edge of the settlement, encircled in a palisade, being baited with big sticks."
"Imagine permitting such a person. Imagine letting him be himself. Recoil in disgust at the peristaltically ranging larva, or maybe toast him on a skewer and enjoy a fleeting taste of chicken."
"A yes man," he went on, lighting his moustache and waving away the proffered crumpet, "is a man who says yes while miserably dreaming the alluring no. A man for whom 'free choice' is an alibi rather than a motive, something you just invoke to get out of the fix of explaining. A man whose choices - because actually unfree, constrained to binary by a maritime git's bony legs round his neck - lead to diminished and dismal outcomes, the sort that garner distracted smirks, and the odd Irish penny, from glutinous headmistresses en route to important conferences. A man whose mediocrity is guaranteed by his practiced inauthenticity, and whose consolation is that the lifelong pain of giving in and up gives his fermented dissatisfaction a special solera."
" 'Misparented is perhaps the trouble,' the yes man may sometimes be heard to mutter. 'The parent charged of old with loving whom you are, unconditionally, had to become the one who loves what you do, conditionally, the latter role being as unfilled as the former is unfashionable. So our being, because unloved, remained unhatched, and our doing, unbreeched, perpetually done up in a frock in supplication of the elusive eleemosynary pat on the head, as a reward for saying the rightish thing and doing nothing at all.' " The straw haired man paused, stroking his missing testicle. "We are the Undescended: the El Greco saints, smug in our celestial conservatory, sneering down from the elevated splendour of our unrealised excelsis. It is not true that we are all called Svensson."
"In RuislipTown there was a maid - mark well what I do say," the straw man went on, between characterful wrinkles, sipping at his brake fluid. "I was desperate to get laid, so of course you make allowances. I think her name was Batchett. Yvonne Batchett. I babysat her opinions for three years, ending up with few scratches but multiple itches. By then the pattern was firmly established: you do as told, lest you become unpalatable. "Same to You, Dear", as Dendy Sadler would've had it. So of course you are rewarded with Same. You self-administer Same, yet when you shake the box labelled "Same" and Same dutifully tumbles out, you tremble with suppressed grief and rage."
"A yes man's yes is a Reichsmark of a yes, bankable certainly, but neither meant nor valuable, because issued from a made-up character. And the worst part, for him, is that he has no way of knowing what curt monosyllable of assent or dissent, or what modulated alternatives, might have issued from the unmanacled him, had he been given a life. Perhaps most of those yesses would have remained yesses, but felt ones. Perhaps they would have been noes. Perhaps he would have been elsewhere, and the request would never have been made. Perhaps he would have found there are other ways of behaving, neither cipher nor monster, unmentioned in the manuals. It is complicated to have been given someone else's life to live by accident, when your own is over there, at the edge of the settlement, encircled in a palisade, being baited with big sticks."
"Imagine permitting such a person. Imagine letting him be himself. Recoil in disgust at the peristaltically ranging larva, or maybe toast him on a skewer and enjoy a fleeting taste of chicken."
Comments
Post a Comment