Suckers unite!

It occurred to me in the hour before cock crow – which in the 12^th arrondissement is around 4 a.m. – that the whole corrupt train of our present social arrangements can be summed up by the value placed on “suck” – viz., this sucks, he you or they suck, it sucks. As we all know, this means that “it” is a disaster, he she or it is a cretin, and that low quality is the name of this game, if you want to play it. But, as Adam placidly – or, sometimes, fiercely – sucked on my little finger, giving us a respite from his desire to try out his new lungs (in top shape! And what volume for a seven pound five ounce boy!), I realize that this is all wrong, backwards, and senseless. It sucks should me, it is heaven. Real communism, utopia, the singularity and nirvana can all be summed up by, it sucks. We long, we little monkeys, not for nothingness, but for the attaching interface of lips and tongue, ahold of something. And yet – sucking is not eating or breathing,  it is not processing something. Amateurs think that sucking has a physiological use  wholly satisfied by breastfeeding, but an hour or two or three with a newborn will show these folks the error of their ways – sucking is needed for breastfeeding, but it is desired in itself, and continues after breastfeeding palls. Sucking is pure superfluity, pure luxury, pure excess. It is beyond something, and it disdains nothing.

Of course, any sophisticated 12 year old can tell you it sucks alludes to something genital and nasty. However, like many of the malformed views of 12 year olds (cool is cool! you are either in the in crowd or you are nobody!), this isn’t really sophisticated at all. Alas, the views of sophisticated 12 year olds rock and rule our world, become our norms, and lead, as I said above,paragraph one, sentence one, I believe, to the catastrophic decline of our society. What the 12 year old is in flight from is the surge, the primitive surge of sucking in which we are all one, a common humanity of suckers. Having gone through housetraining, school and hierarchy, the fact that we come from sucking seems too dreamlike, too nightmarish a truth. And yet there it is. We come from sucking. We all share sucking.

And this lead me – perhaps unwisely, since I have spent much of the last 48 hours catching very little sleep in a chair designed by the Marquis de Sade in a hospital room – to my revelation. The society I want to fight for exists in the shadow of the slogan: I suck, and I want to suck even more! Or, to expand beyond the trivially egotistic: it sucks, and I have never heard a more glorious truth! Only a solidarity among suckers will change the momentum of our decline. I am of the sucker’s party, and proud of it!