Bored Violence

A life of bored prosperity is such a numbing existence that only violence can make it feel alive. The days of the prosperous are ordered before them like footsteps dried in concrete as they follow the same tread day in and day out, their life reduced to pure routine even down to the bead length of toothpaste they put on their brush.

Perfect order and perfect predictability yield the boredom that is a prerequisite for violence. Boredom gives a depth to violence that passion is incapable of giving. It is the grit that gives violence its purchase. So sublime is its stimulation that violence quickly becomes a habit.

To the children of a bored prosperity all violence is virtual like the choreographed fistfight in the Hollywood western. This suits the children of prosperity because they can remain unsplattered in their sanitary bubbles while setting into motion the policies that slaughter. Cries of agony and death never reach their ears; blood never splatters over their wingtips. And they revel in their toughness and see themselves realists though the world they occupy is one of pure fantasy: the fantasy of their immortality and the fantasy of their infinite power.

The violence born of boredom has stamina because it is violence filtered through the turgid language of policy, the pain it creates muffled by the nasal intonations of its spokesmen. Barbarity filtered through policy perpetuates itself because the justification for barbarity is constantly shifting and changing—old targets fade, new ones come into focus. The only constant is an enemy, a threat. Words are the sponges that wipe away barbarity’s gore and leave in their wake a shining monument to man’s triumph over tyranny—words sung, words spoken, words of glory; mundane words that sooth and uplift.

The proles sit with pods firmly in their ears, glazed and content to slowly die as boredom’s hand closes around them lowering them into a anesthetized indifference until the Blood of the Lamb dribbles over their foreheads and they are awake and alive, ready to cheer the slaughter, waving their colors proudly to the fetish boom of clusters spiting shards of steel through flesh and clothing. How it stimulates; how alive a man feels as the ground shakes beneath his feet and he glories in his master’s strength, his life now one of meaning and purpose.