Now then, a little Intertextual Comparison

Finally, calling the Apple Hotline, I've figured out how to write in French.  I'll be going back over this thing, as I remember where I laid-in French quotes and observations, putting the accents and even the diphthongs where they belong.  But now, as I promised...

No doubt Jack Fritscher is right:  "Corporations"--the same ones who even now are storing up smallpox, anthrax, and polio viruses in gleeful anticipation of those days (not too far in the future) when vaccinations and innoculations will have lapsed, and there will be no immunity among the general populace against them--Corporations like the United States' Military/Industrial complex (the CIA/FBI/NSA/ATF/DEA, etc.) created the AIDS virus and set it loose in east Africa.  Yes, because they are evil, and, because they are evil, they hate those most who do not fear them; but still, why?  Well, what you must understand first about these monsters of iniquity, world devourers, torturers, murderers, makers of (preferably innocent) victims, is that they are moralists; they believe that the evil they do is necessary and, ultimately, good.  Just stop for a moment and ponder the ruminations of Heinrich Himmler on learning what the Final Solution was to be, and what part he was to play in it (Could he do it? Would he be strong enough?).  Or consider the "scientific curiosity" aroused in Giles de Retz on reading the accounts in Suetonius and Tacitus of the torture of children.  Or think of the pride and satisfaction of George Bush Senior in "riding herd" on the Argentine, Brazilian, Uruguayan, and Central American torturers in the U.S. Army School of the Americas when it was in Panama. Or the simple delight in pain, as pain, evinced in George Bush Junior's essay on the branding with coat hangers practiced in Skull and Bones fraternity initiations.  And think of G. Gordon Liddy's holding his wrist over a candle till it blistered, and saying to the appalled and probably still mystified Timothy Leary, "What you don't understand is that we're serious."  What Liddy didn't say--partly because he thought it too obvious to need saying, and partly because saying it would have betrayed too much about himself and his cause--was that the reason he hated Leary and all he stood for was that Leary wasn't serious.  

Moralists, in the sense that Heinrich Himmler, Giles de Retz, the Georges Bush, and (for the purposes of this essay/blog) Reynold Price (blog 11/28/'07) and Charles Baudelaire are moralists, are those who believe, on the one hand, that certain actions and certain attitudes of persons other than themselves--like sex and the appreciation of beauty--are in themselves moral or immoral, by whatever arbitrary standard they (our conscientious moralists) adhere to; whereas, on the other hand, their own actions are never to be judged of as good or ill, but as whether or not they further that standard of morality to which they adhere.   The obscene, scarcely concealed gloating of Larry Kramer and Reynold Price over the horror of the AIDS epidemic, and their palpable joy at having their own impotence, effeminacy and personal unattractiveness vindicated, are retrospective moralism at its ugliest and most untruthful. Still, AIDS did happen, probably not by accident, and the reasons (in the minds of its inventors) for its invention and introduction into the tribal world of Africa, and thus into the hedonistic world of male homosexuality probably had some resemblance to Reynold Price's envious and spiteful characterization of gay male sexual practices.  

Better, however, and truer, is Baudelaire's explanation.  Baudelaire, fundamentally heterosexual, understands what the pining homosexual envy of Kramer and Price will not permit them to acknowledge, that the basic impulse of male homosexuality is esthetic; that the attraction between two (or more) men is, on both (or all) their parts, that of those who worship beauty, and is as different as night from day, from the beauty/power disequilibrium of male/female attraction [no wonder heterosexuals find rôle-playing so enjoyable--and useful!].   And, as Baudelaire realizes (though he may not realize that male homosexuaity is what he's talking about), "the [hidden] mechanisms that govern [the world's] movement...a healthy, industrious way of life...the pure joys of honest activity...the useful, the true, the good, all that is really lovable...his mother, his nanny, his wife...these things will be unknown to him...He will despise and debase [them]."  And you have only to substitute "women" and "conventional heterosexuality" for the words "the true" and "just" in the following paragraph for its deep meaning to emerge:  "The immoderate pleasure he takes in form [Latin forma = beauty = being in shape] will drive him to monstrous and unprecedented excesses.  Swallowed up by this ferocious passion for the beautiful and the bizarre, the pretty and the picturesque--for the gradations are many--the notions of the true and just will disappear.  The frenetic passion for art [esthetic, gay sex] is a cancer that eats up everything else; and since the drastic absence of the true and just is tantamount to the absence of art [power-based, heterosexual sex], man in his entirety will disappear...."  There is always this privileging of la Bête et la Bêtise femelle with heterosexual men, at least those of Baudelaire's romantic, sexist, and conventional stripe; always this insistence that women are basically--and always, somehow, mysteriously--what's true and real in the world; honest, commonsensical, and, by implication, of infinitely greater worth than "mere esthetic" value.  By which they mean:  They'd fuck a mud fence, if it had a cunt in it.