THE AMPHITHEATER OF HATE

The Left’s crusade against Musk unfolds with that peculiar fury that history has taught us to expect – the same fever that has always driven the crowd to bare its teeth at those who dare to rise above it

There is something grotesque in this digital amphitheater we’ve made, where each morning the crowds gather with their sharpened pixels and megaphyte stones. One can almost see them, their faces illuminated by the cold glow of screens in Brussels, in London, in Washington – all united in their peculiar ritual of hating a man who launches steel dreams into the heavens.

How perfectly it mirrors Bukowski’s warning about those who would “improve” others while lunging at the throat of improvement itself!

They share clean energy memes while cursing the man who helped make electric cars desirable, tweet about humanity’s future while scorning someone building paths to other worlds.

The irony hangs in the virtual air like the smell of burning that preceded so many scenes we have witnessed through the years – that same human impulse to destroy what rises above the crowd’s accepted height. Though instead of broken bricks and smoke, we have hashtags and trending topics, the underlying mechanism remains unchanged: the crowd, eternal in its genius for tearing down what it claims to want built.

Today we see the digital performance of ancient human impulses. Bukowski’s prophetic verses from decades ago cut through the noise with surgical precision. His poem strips bare this machinery of mass hatred, as relevant now in our connected age as it was when he first committed his warning to paper.

THE GENIUS OF THE CROWD

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

/ Charles Bukowski

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