Prissiness and Power

Dear George,

A man can’t achieve power unless he’s a priss. Slobs don’t cut it. Adolph, Benito and Joseph were all well-tailored and coiffured. The man who would rule must be manicured and moisturized; his neatness must shine when the media spotlight is turned on him.

The great leader is the man who eschews dirty fingernails. For him, the slightest disorder is anathema. A dust mote on a dung heap attracts no attention; a dust mote on the highly-polished lens of a telescope screams for attention. Power is obsessed with keeping the lens dust free.

However, the problem with prissiness is that’s its boring as hell. The one thing perfect order never does is stimulate. This is why powerful men live for the adrenalin rush that comes with leaving a wide swath of destruction in htheir wake, with the proviso that the actual destruction is contracted out to the slobs.

This means that power is in constant need of an enemy to destroy. Some suggest that those in power can only define themselves by what they hate and fear. It goes deeper than that. Rather, they become what they fear through a process of mimesis in which power is actually transformed into its enemy.

On April 14, 1950, President Harry S. Truman approved a document whose impact was as great as, if not greater, than either our Declaration of Independence or our Constitution. It was the NSC-68: United States Directive and Programs for National Security. The document accomplished two things: It gave birth to the Cold War, and it tolled the bell that proclaimed the death of our democratic republic.

It created of a government by the prissy, for the prissy and of the prissy. The document emphasized that only an efficient country could fight the fictive threat presented by the Soviets, and that freedom, unfortunately, is very inefficient. Only a totalisticly well-ordered society could rule the world.

The republic’s death was barely noticed because superficial appearances remained unchanged. America was still the land of the free in spite of McCarthyism and HUAC. We still held elections in which our leaders were democratically chosen through the deft use of media manipulation.

Proudly, you have borne the torch of prissiness for the last seven years, carrying the doctrines set out in NSC-68 to new heights. The death of our republic that it proclaimed in 1950 was largely symbolic. Your have made it increasingly real.

The successful wielding of power requires more than just a change of uniform. It requires a complete prissification of the soul.

George, you were born to leadership.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones