Don’t cry for me; I’m already dead.
Well, no, I can’t back that up. But while I might not be dead, many of my movements are.
You see, I, like you, came to Georgetown with the intention of overthrowing the administration with a cadre of well-trained, stealthy and loyal commandoes. By “loyal,” of course, I mean “brainwashed.” Now, commandoes don’t just appear out of thin air. And the most common method for developing brainwashed fighing teams, last time I checked, is to select individual members from a pre-brainwashed cult in some sort of elaborately-choreographed ritual. It’s important that the ritual feature spectacular?yet affordable?special effects that augment the aura of mystery around the cult leader, and it’s important that the ritual claims to be derived from some ancient tradition, like Sumerian or Carolingian, even if it was made up a week in advance. OK, easy enough so far?start a cult, fabricate traditions, train paramilitaries, take over university. Right.
If only it were that simple. I wish I had the luxury of worrying about things such as stocking up on dry ice and fireworks, censoring news broadcasts and bottling-up my bathwater and urine for retail. If only I had it that good. Well, I don’t. Why? Because I learned the hard way that before you start dealing with the nuts and bolts of running a cult of respectable size, before you arrive at the enviable “confiscating the possessions of your subjects” stage, there’s one thing that you need to possess in abundance: charisma.
I really don’t know how that one got by me. History is literally full of personalities who commanded the selfless loyalties of thousands of people simply because they were charismatic (see Colour, Living?”Cult of Personality”). Why did I think that I could get by without it?
This realization was a frustrating one that left me with the following problem: Can a man be charismatic and misanthropic at the same time? The answer happily dawned on me as an unequivocal “yes,” which quickly upgraded itself to a vehement “of course.” But hardly had the fire of spiteful victory over abstract concepts started to thaw my inertia before I realized that this wasn’t really the question that I wanted to ask in the first place. The question to which I really needed an answer was this one: How can a man with no innate charisma get some pre-packaged charisma fast? The answer to this was infinitely less satisfying than the other, as it arrived neither as quickly nor as clearly.
I realized that I needed to appropriate the charisma of other people who had proven theirs beyond a shadow of a doubt. Only by imitating exactly the words and practices of history’s most charismatic personalities could I ever hope to get to where I needed to be. I would imitate many over the years. And while I initially emerged from my failures undaunted and ready to tackle another personality-appropriation, I gradually grew closer to my current attitude. This, the story of my various movements, is a story of defeat.
I started with the most obvious: I would be like the most charismatic character that western civilization had ever known. I would be like Jesus Christ. The old “WWJD?” question assumed an unprecedented importance for me, as I found myself constantly searching for openings in conversations into which I could insert what little I knew about the man’s sayings. Most instances of this “proverb-placement” ended up being a little bit labored and, quite frankly, disturbing. (You: “Could you loan me a buck?” Me: “It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a wealthy man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”) But my efforts at reserving these tendencies for appropriate times turned into suppressing them so that they would explode at inappropriate (read: drunken) times. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone that I “baptized” with beer at any one of a series of parties during the spring semester of Y2K. I have less sympathy for those whom I “exorcised,” but that probably wasn’t especially comfortable, either. Clearly, it was time for something new.
The next few years saw me engaging in a number of movements, some more general than others, but all flawed fatally in one way or another. I tried the aloof intellectual (James Joyce sold about six pages of writing while he was alive), the minor deity (these guys weren’t so much charismatic as they were endowed with magical powers that I just didn’t have access to), the wise and grizzled old black man whose eyes had “seen too much” (not black, wise), the famous Japanese poet Basho (I’m only now penetrating the pitiful third level of Zen enlightenment) and V.I. Lenin (worked in theory, not practice).
I had just about had enough as last weekend began, but decided to give it a final go, just to try it out one final time. I’ve watched the Godfather movies quite a few times over the past week, and found myself drawn to the Michael Corleone character. “Is he charismatic,” I wondered, “or just a cool movie character?” So I tried it.
I uncovered the answer pretty fast: just a cool movie character. Don’t believe me? Try running this little test yourself: Grab a friend or stranger firmly on either side of the head, kiss him or her full on the lips and exclaim harshly, “You broke my heart, [Insert name here. If name is unavailable, just say “Fredo.”]! You broke my heart!” Repeat until you get the idea. It shouldn’t take long. You’ll give up, too.
And I’m not going to sit here and watch you acting all indignant and exasperated in a lame attempt to assert that you never had any such intentions. you wanted to do it, I wanted to do it, everybody wanted to do it. It’s not like anyone actually succeeded, so maybe its finally time that we were all just honest about it.
