"I shake my head in weary dread
when I sense a superior beside me."

Supremacy carries the certain scent of some internal sense of its own inferiority. Lording over another seems to leave the lorder looking a lot less lofty. Feeling special doesn't seem to be anything special, we've all experienced it, but that sense of being special serves like a museum piece, meant to be exclusively displayed on interior walls. Taking it outside disqualifies in ways nobody can convincingly say without appearing a contender as superior scold. It demonstrates a disagreeable neediness in the proclaimed possessor, a separation between heart and soul we all know signals a moldy mushiness within. It hardly seems to matter where the realm of superiority lies. Holier than thou seems more than slightly similar to smarter, richer, handsomer, and cliquier. Effeteness sleeps in its own lonely backstreet.

The effete sometimes gang up. Whether at a decrepit chop shop or a prestigious country club, the crew behaves the same. Sequestered from encountering the more common, they engineer a positive feedback world which rarely deigns to question its own convictions, however poisonous and divisive. Heads swell with that which reliably cometh before any fall while the social climbing ensues, for even within this hybrid hospice, tops emerge to hector the more lowly. Class seems to recognize no boundaries or limits for what could possibly inhibit anyone so self-evidently superior? Masters of a minuscule universe endlessly mugging for imagined paparazzi.

They conspire against the rest as if only they had passed the challenging qualification test. It hardly matters who those others really are, for they can't matter if the superior are to maintain their lofty-in-their-own-eyes position in what passes for their decidedly sub-society. They speak for those they imagine voiceless because they can't understand that more common dialect. They seek restoration of mythical good old days, days when men were men or days when kings were kings, when Christians fought for Christendom without encumbering themselves with the teaching of any Christ. They install some equivalent of golden toilets, thrones which they firmly believe render their own shit odorless, then peer down from their emperor's new bathrooms at those who must shit the old-fashioned way, as if a common humanity renders those considerably less than fully human.

God spawned jealous children, green-eyed zero-sum true believers impatient with waiting for their inheritance, secretly wishing their father would die and bequeath them the crown and throne. As if in previews, they parade with regal airs, whether wielding tiki torches or titanium ten irons, they hear the same cadence encouraging them on. Onward Superior Soldiers, marching as if to war, … Such righteousness. Such self-confidence to insist upon saving the rest of us from ourselves without even asking us if we were interested in being saved, or if we felt we needed to be. Salvation should never come by torchlight. It cannot be purchased with targeted campaign contributions or rowdy public demonstrations. They fight so hard because there's so very little to be gained by winning. The self-selected superiors never seem to understand how little their victories regain.

I'm proudly comprised of the NuthinSpecial stuff,
blood, sweat, and bones.
I dwell on a definitely imperfect plain
and call this place my home.
I wish for no-one to be better than I
and to be no better than anyone else alive.
I shake my head in weary dread
when I sense a superior beside me.

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NuthinSpecial, #PureSchmaltz