Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
3.13
The Right to Be Angry
by Travis Hedge Coke
The opening of the first issue of The Invisibles is ElFayed telling stories to King Mob. He is making jokes; critiquing the world and its players.
The final lines of The Invisibles are ElFayed’s words, quoted by Jack Frost.
Find your wisdom and voice your truth.
In revolutionary circles, it is de rigueur to choose who can be angry, or whose anger will be tolerated, and for whom it is prohibited. In this, these circles differ little to none from conservative spheres. Do not get angry, get active, as if anger never spurs action. Do not be loud or obtrusive, just go vote in a booth quietly by yourself in private shut up shut up shut up you.
We are accustomed to the permitted rage of the straight white man, in anglophone cultures. When a movie like Falling Down satirizes their rage and shows how sad and unhelpful it is, that it disguises a bigot and a bully, general audiences and careful critics will argue that such satirization is incidental or unintended.
Die Hard is Falling Down with prefixed justification. Hakim Bey was sometimes Peter Lamborn Wilson.
We like that, too; when we are so wise to see what an author, singer, preacher or parent does not, in our view, see, of their own work or words.
Does that follow?
There are multiple systemic and individual reasons for these drives towards limiting who is permitted anger, to who is permitted perception. In many of the cases, anger and perception go hand in hand. Despite best efforts, someone who lives and operates in a privileged position may have difficulty recognizing that their perception is incorrect or their perception is limited. Without being contradictory – except in seeming – a disenfranchised person’s perceptions may run parallel by distinct to someone privileged, or they may run in a vastly different direction. Contrary and contradictory are not the same.
One way we see group efforts to dissuade the un-permitted from anger or perception, to disqualify their right to, or ability with either perception or anger, is to compare the affected or perceived grievance of someone in privilege to the affected or perceived grievance of someone whom society is actively working against. The argument that the Ku Klux Klan is the same as the Black Panther Party or that Nazi armies are the same as a trans kid walking into the school restroom knowing they risk being beat up or worse.
You sometimes are not let not be an alluringly foreign Bond girl by well-meaning white men. Sometimes, it is all objectification, under guise of admiring.
Does that follow?
Tsai Chin on things James Bond said to her character: “It wouldn’t pass muster now, thank God. Then, Asian women were especially stereotyped.”
The first cry of the racist who does not believe they are racist is, “I am not racist.”
The second, is, “Well, you see how they act! That’s why!”
In The Invisibles, a character like Mason Lang, a billionaire, and the Marquise de Sade, a royal, will always be suspect, but King Mob tells us how shallow he is, characters critique him constantly, while as audience, we tend to be fine overlooking that he is monied, that he is a straight-seeming, fit white man with an English accent , in favor of seeing his arc into enlightenment and betterment in isolation. The decrying of Boy or Jolly Roger for not making the leaps he makes, when he finally makes them, that they are vengeance-driven or angry and he is flippant and just kind of annoyed when he kills people, has to ignore both the actual chronologies, and that Boy and Roger – a Black woman sometimes exoticized by her own white friends, and a white lesbian who grew up poor and abused – occupy very different cultural space than King Mob, a millionaire with apparently cool parents and an ethnicity which connotes, for many, education, intelligence, and capacity.
Does that follow?
Why can’t we tell wealthy white people not to worry? Not to get upset?
Whiteness is provisional. I think racists know this and rather than let on, they attempt to anchor it with racism.
Mason Lang, like an unseen cat or the black rectangle, is in our interpretation.
No one really stops and says, “What has King Mob got to be angry about?” the way many do with Boy, with Roger, even with Jack Frost, whose anger is also largely unfounded, foundering, and a front. King Mob is shallow. It is mostly a front. Just not all of it. Sometimes there is a scream of fffuuuuuck! behind the scream of fffuuuuuuck!
ElFayed has his own thing at the Invisible College. Cells with more than one Black member exist and they all seem to be doing their own thing very distinct from what Mob’s group do.
King Mob and Sir Miles probably see a lot in each other, in the way of, what they could be if they had just taken a little bit of a different turn. Much more than Mob sees himself in Jack Frost, or Miles sees himself in Jack, which is Jack can forgive both of them but they hold Jack as the boy king.
Is King Mob, “dirty white”? Is Helga pure white enough for pure white America?
When Helga is flippant and talks shit, audiences frequently criticize and infantilize her, but she is being flippant and talking shit, possibly, because as an intellectual and artistic young woman, she is dismissed already. She is infantilized already. Every critic, armchair or professional, who complains she should have been remaindered to the role of Six’s girlfriend, is only proving why her activities are empowered and revolutionary.
Boy thinks Roger is only interested in her because she believes she is a lesbian, but Boy is her cell’s fist-fighter, and Boy fits the Baby/Bambi/Bumper/Bobby.
If Roger dies angry or if Roger nearly-dies angry, and then continues to live angry, good. Her anger is owed to her. She can be pissed off. This world, her own nation, even some of her own allies, will kill her. They will make effort to kill her. They might kill her by not even caring enough not to.
The powers behind the the powers in the United States have abused, cheated, and murdered Boy’s family. She can be angry.
I do not doubt that Six’s judaism affects his anger, nor does one need to be Jewish or any of the traditional enemies of Naziism to hold it in stark and articulate disdain. But, what do I know? Six seems a compassionate, upright guy. Maybe he just hates Nazis.
No one really stops to reckon with ElFayed’s ethnicity or his life’s trajectory to a politic he holds in whatever now he is in. ElFayed may not.
The same librarian who reintroduced The Invisibles to me, the time it stuck – all times being, as they are – gifted me a copy of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, among other books, including a set of heavy catalogues of American publications. That Carroll is now somewhen over one hundred years old, its check-out stamps and penciled annotations decorating it with a timeline through several eras of Native boarding school experience. The mandated. The child laborers. The elective. The traditional. The dead. The murdered. The ghosts. The curious.
What does that mean?
The Invisibles’ letter columns gave space for Grant Morrison to talk of Islam as paternalistic and suggest Black men in America shy away from practices or faiths which empower women.
Lucky us, that Morrison, like any of us, both has not to believe in what they say, ever, and can, ever, change their mind.
What does that mean?
All of us learn to take wisdom from bigoted sources. Never all of us learning which sources are bigoted and what is wisdom. A bigot can be right twice a day, but that includes us. Two rights do not make all methods to get there approved.
How Jolly Roger has this kind of alien skull on her white t-shirt. And, then, she does not.
Piracy and the pirate flag excite children, bandit and hero may mean the same, because there is freedom perceived in theft, in having nothing but taking anything. Something about the master judge. We are often born angry, crying and bemused, but we learn, after, to be angry. The clay stream. The hypocrite. The hypercritical. They all come from actor. A newborn’s anger is not a child’s, an adult’s, an elder’s, a cloud or a mountain’s.
What does that mean?
*******
Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
Do the Right Thing
a movie
American Mary
a movie
Car Wash
a movie
Bruiser
a movie
