Mobs

    In my post, The God Gene, I wrote that there is a specific gene, a Darwinian adaptation, that predisposes members of our species to believe in non-existent entities called Gods. I also ventured that the God Gene was a key factor in mankind’s penchant for banding into competing packs under the banner of one religion or another.
    Over the ages, the implications of the God Gene have been a mixed bag. Clearly, it has played a vital role in man’s domination of the natural world. Unfortunately, it has also had the side effect of inspiring devotees of one imaginary being to spend their lives working to convert or dominate devotees of differing imaginary beings through such time-honored stratagems as pillage, rape, war, starvation, enslavement, and mass murder.
    I also noted that I was one of a small number of mutants who lacked the God Gene.
                                                                *   *   *
    Lately, I’ve discovered another serious chromosomal deficit in my makeup...Apparently I not only lack a God Gene, but I do not have a Mob Gene either.
    The Mob Gene, for those who may not be hip to its existence, is the DNA unit responsible for so much good-natured group fun over the centuries ─ from ancient Rome’s Fickle Crowd (Mobile Vulgus from which the word Mob derives) and Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde to the street mobs of the French Revolution to our own Salem Witch Trials to the Nuremberg rallies of Nazi Germany to the mud fields of Woodstock to the siege of the U.S. embassy in Teheran to the television-deprived blacks of Watts-riot fame to Britain’s recent redistribution of electronic goods via smashed store windows.
    But, as is so often the case in this exciting, facebook-enhanced, iPhone-driven, twitterized world of ours, it is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA that has proudly pioneered the way to a dramatic new form of Mob ─ The Mob Without a Cause!
    Participants in the Occupy Whatever The Fuck You Happen To Think Of movement that are currently rooting like swine in their self-created filth in urban centers throughout the planet point out that they are both VERY ANGRY and VERY IDEALISTIC.
    Well shit, I’m VERY ANGRY too. I was born angry and the older I get the angrier I get. In fact I think I’m angrier than any of them there Occupy Whatever fuckers. And what’s more I’m so god-awful idealistic I can barely spit. But you don’t see me camping out in front of Peterborough Town Hall with a bunch of fellow geriatric cases, smoking crack cocaine, chanting slogans about Hitler and Mao, and crapping into the marigold containers.
    Hell No! 
    When I’m pissed off (which is always), I just barge into my wife’s room after dinner and start venting some of my pent-up hatred. And when she kicks me out (as she will) because she’s engrossed in a 550-pound tumor or Rosie O’Donnell flapping her sagging tits on OWN and is sick of my bitching anyway, I just go outside and run in circles around the big white pine tree until I turn into a pool of butter.
    One thing about the Mob Gene, however, distinguishes it from the God Gene...unlike the God Gene, other members of the animal kingdom also possess the Mob Gene, most famously lemmings, sheep, and cows.
    All it takes is one activist Border Collie to get the herd moving from its lush pastureland (or parents’ basement) to the slaughterhouse (or New York City financial district). A few nips on a few leg tendons, some strategic barks of command (with or without loudspeaker), and the flock gallops off to its appointed destination, there to bleat and defecate until the authorities arrive with hoses, pepper spray, and a New York Times reporter.
    All-in-all a well-wrought mob makes a beautiful spectacle...and even more beautiful is the exultation stirred in the breasts and testicles of its participants.
    In what other venue than a mob can a human being so completely shed the onerous shackles of civilization and enjoy the red hot freedom of anonymity? Where else can one’s every action, no matter how destructive, unsanitary, or mindless, be legitimatized by simply immersing oneself in an all-concealing mass of fellow ovines, bovines, and assholes?
    A mob confers invisibility, you see, which is the greatest freedom of all. And along with invisibility comes liberation ─ liberation from responsibility... liberation from accountability... liberation from rational thought.
    Embedded in the bosom of the mob, encouraged by its roars and chants, obedient only to the will of its sheepdog master, the mob member can at long last indulge in all those long-denied, wonderful, half-forgotten animal pleasures of childhood ─ hatred, vandalism, theft, taunting, arson, rock-throwing, bigotry, tantrums, threats, irrational whining, pointless demands.
    What then is the hapless non-mob participant to do as the mob luxuriates in its primeval joys of intellectual atavism, physical filth, legal immunity, and the right to commit random violence?
    Here’s my take on it for what it’s worth:

Suppose it’s St Patrick’s Day and you run into a rolling mob of drunken Irishmen. You have two options ─ get out of the way or get shoved into the gutter.

    There ain’t nothing else in the refrigerator, friends.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

 

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