One of the new additions to Spanner Chapter 3 for Revision 4 is this declaration midway between a love scene and a political provocation and tying the two together:
Love is a terrorist; fornication, homosexuality, ephebophilia, consensual incest, and nonwhite sex are unforgivable acts of sexual treason against the holy American Race, mercilessly punished by the State…
In an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia or an absolute oligarchy like China, the statement “love is a terrorist” is almost literally true, since intense love brutally assaults all boundaries. This is what André Breton, “pope” of Surrealism, meant by l’amour fou, “mad love”. Naturally, all the love scenes in Chapters 1 through 3 are distinctly transgressive, involving lesbian incest or miscegenation with jailbait. The assumption is that social order requires strict state control over procreation, so that romantic love ends up being discouraged or banned outright lest it lead to social disorder or even worse, e.g. legalized sodomy. Come Chapter 9, Shira and her forbidden love Leila, crossing caste and race lines and in contemptuous defiance of God and Country, come together in a romantic and erotic collision so violent it threatens to destroy the Conservative Revolutionary dictatorship over the “traitorous” liberal state of Cascadia. For Leila the prodigal princess and the female lover of lower class and inferior race she gives herself to, teenage lesbian interracial romance is a deliberate act of terrorism against a social order they both find impossible to survive in.
And of course since I depict acts of sexual terrorism in the form of rogue cops screwing schoolgirl prostitutes and mother-daughter couples living in outlaw marriages, the Author himself is committing the related act of throwing mind bombs containing live mind viruses engineered to blow minds. For did not John Ralston Saul in his essay Voltaire’s Bastards enjoin the novelist to become an “emotional terrorist” turning novels into bombs as our predecessors presumably did before us? And is that not the very spirit of Rock ’N’ Roll, surviving the death of the music itself? As Ozzy Osbourne once said when he got fined after a riot at one of his shows: “Eighty thousand dollars – rock ’n’ roll!”
The final Revision 4 name for Chapter 3 is: “Rock Is Dead”. Considering Shira’s act of stealing a backstage kiss from pop princess Minty Fresh (Part 2, “Stalking Minty Fresh”), the presence of the Band With No Name, the chapter-ending bombing of a Patriot Country concert, and of course lotsa yuri, the name is supposed to be ironic:
Elsewhere in the city, somewhere, anywhere, drumsticks pound out an apocalypse, guitars scream and roar, feedback wails, a maniac swings a microphone around and howls, crowds of defiant Rockers continue the noise when the music finally comes to an end, instruments and voices united to shout down the news coming from the official media echo chamber that rock is dead.
And so now that my busy Memorial Day weekend is over, I’ll start rewriting the last four sections of Chapter 3 so I can finish its Final Revision. Meanwhile, skipping one chapter, I find myself writing a completely new and different Interlude 3 called “One Nation Under Copyright, All Rights Reserved”. And so it continues…
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