Flasheart
by Nancy Millstone Jennings
When I was in high school, we had an assembly with a motivational speaker. We filed into the old, unheated auditorium and sat in the (rather comfortable actually) chairs while an ex-athlete--let's call him Spencer Traceback--talked to us about the evils of drugs.
That Christmas, my friend Chey had given me a Black Adder tape--trust me, these connect soon. I loved it and watched it repeatedly. The best scene was the last scene in the episode called "Bells" in which Black Adder, played by Rowen Atkinson a.k.a. Mr. Bean, is about to get married to a girl who used to be his boy (long story).
His best man arrives: Lord Flasheart, "the best kisser, the best dancer, the best fighter, the best everything," and immediately begins spewing manly-man lines like "Hey nursie, like the beard! Gives me something to HANG onto! Woof!" (again, long story) He then kisses the bride ("She's got a tongue like an electric eel and likes the taste of a man's tonsils!") and makes off with her in a dress, but that's not important. What is important is how Flash looked. Basically, he was a big, tall, manly man, muscular and barrel-chested, with long, curly blonde hair and a blonde mustache.
So I'm sitting there in the auditorium and I must admit, I'm not paying much attention. Like a good little geek, I'm reading my history book, hunched down in my seat. The guys going on about how he was a really good football player or something in high school, he liked to get drunk, got recruited for college with hookers and cars and stuff, got into cocaine, got married (I think I drifted off for a while and missed a crucial transition), was doing coke while his son was born, ruined his life, and pulled himself out of the gutter, and became a motivational speaker, which I guess was an improvement. Id be more interested if the plot wasnt so predictable and the details so movie-of-the-week. Reality can be so boring sometimes.
In the middle of this (around the marriage part, I think) I actually bothered to pry my eyes away from the history book and see what the guy looked like. At first it didnt really hit me, but after I watched him for a few minutes, it was plain as the filling in a Twinkie: big, tall, manly, muscular, with curly blonde hair and a blonde mustache. Spencer Traceback, the ex-druggie ex-athlete and motivational speaker, was Lord Flasheart.
I giggled. Its not one of my prettier habits, but I cant help it. I giggled, sniggered, chuckled, guffawed, snorted. As he was talking about selling his kids toys for coke all I could hear him saying was "Nursie! I live it firm and fruity!" As he told us about being high and beating his little boy, I imagined him responding to the question "Where have you been?" with "Where havent I been? Unh!" It was horrible and wrong, I know, but I couldnt help myself. My neighbors seemed to be getting annoyed, so I covered my mouth and tried not to spray snot on the pimple-streaked necks of the jocks sitting in front of me.
After he reached the vaguely uplifting denouement of his personal story, he shifted gears a bit, to the real, hardcore, full-bore motivational speaker section of the presentation. Drugs, he told us, were only a substitute for him: a substitute for his nonexistent self-esteem. You must first love yourself, he said, and to wit you should give yourself a hug. "Like this," he demonstrated, crossing his arms over his chest in the traditional dead-body pose. I giggled (quel suprise, no?) but did it. Then he went further.
We can't just love ourselves. That's the start, but there's more. Drugs are a result of peer pressure. So we have to learn to be nice to each other. We have to realize our own inescapable interconnectedness. And to do that, he'd like us all to stand up and hold hands.
Well. I was not happy with this. As a matter of fact, I had been getting madder and madder throughout the speech (which is here conveniently summarized, but which actually went on for quite a bit longer). My other geek friends, being the idealistic types, were right there at the front of the auditorium, holding hands. And soon everyone was up. Everyone. Except me. I steadfastly refused. My neighbors looked at me accusingly, but I just slunk lower in my comfortable seat and tried not to entertain Bruce Lee fantasies of beating the living hell out of everyone in the room.
Why? Three reasons:
1) The obvious one: it's all bullshit. No one in that room believed it. Hell, I didn't believe it either, nor did I want it to happen. I didn't want to be interconnected with these fuckwads. Some I didn't even want to be downwind of.
2) Everyone getting up and holding hands was pointless. There's no way it could counteract the 10 years of systematic repression we had undergone. It isn't even a fucking start. It does nothing at all besides make us all feel good about ourselves for a brief instant and allowing us to pretend we have some sort of mutual understanding when there's still the same hostility and hatred underneath.
3) Simply because everyone else was doing it was a good reason for me to sit. It's a very rare idea that I think everyone should agree with, even if I myself do. If Lord Flasheart had come up to me and asked me why I wasn't standing, I'd have given him an earful and remained sitting (and giggled).
I like to think that there are a lot of other geeks out there like me--geeks who take joy in disrupting things just to disrupt them. Some might call this destructive, but I think it's the saving grace of society. Without opposition, there would be no free will, and if there's no free will--no democracy (or less of one than we have now, I suppose).
Certainly the trickster geek is a familiar figure in society. The dadaists spring to mind first, but there are many examples: Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, William Ginsberg, Orson Welles (i.e. War of the Worlds), Negativland, etc. Anarchy and subversion is a geek tradition. There are a number of things wrong with the world, after all, and if we're not running it, then we have the perspective necessary to point out the flaws. Of course, ideally this is done humorously, so as to minimize conflict, but this is hardly a necessary condition.
We're outsiders; it's our responsibility to oppose the mainstream. Our job is to giggle at the Lord Flashearts, to ignore the cliched platitudes, and to remain steadfastly sitting when all around us people are standing--and to voice our reasons for doing so, as I have here today.