If you take a chimpanzee and put him in a soldier costume, what do you have? Monkey in a soldier suit? Think again, Sir. You got yourself a willing supporter of your cause!
Why do I bring this up? Partly to tickle your fancy (teehee, monkeys) and partly to make a very good point but I’ll come back to this in a moment.
Walking home from work today I saw a fat man sitting in a bus shelter reading a Rob Grant novel. Haha, what a nerd I said to myself. What book am I reading? Only Steppenwolf. I win. Idiot.
The later half of the thought was pure comedy to amuse myself but the initial Haha, what a nerd was a genuine response the portly visual stimulus.
This is far worse than any regular value judgment though, because I myself travel around on busses and I have in fact read everything by Rob Grant. So it’s a self-loathing value judgment. In a way, it’s more honest because I know what it’s like to be a dufus but at the same time it seems oddly hypocritical to be having a go at other dufi (albeit privately in my head and now in this top secret diary).
A bit further along on my journey, I got stuck behind two elderly Asian ladies. They were extremely slow moving and walked side by side so as to take up the width of the entire pavement. Unable to sidestep them due to a wall being on one side and a row of parked cars on the other, I had to fart along at their speed until we sluggishly reached the end of the street, a frustrated tripartite Hydra.
Get a move on, you old biddies I telepathically roasted them before feeling slightly ashamed of myself. But it was the follow up thought that was the most neurotic. I noticed that I had first thought of them as “biddies” rather than make any internal reference to their ethnicity. This, sir, means I am genuinely unracist. Score.
But this is stupid! Being unracist isn’t anything to be proud of. It should be the moral standard. It’s like those irritating people who declare their liberalism in MySpace profiles by putting ‘fascism’ and ‘bigots’ into their ‘dislikes’ column. Well, obviously. Then again, they put Fair Trade icons on food packets if the company behind the product successfully made the effort to not economically rape a small African community. Maybe someone should take the effort to print up some ‘unracist’ teeshirts for people like me.
But nonetheless, it was a value judgment. Followed by some thoughts about the value judgments I didn’t make. What is going on in my head?
Going for a tidy hat trick in the wrong thoughts stakes, a third one occurred after a twentysomething sped by on a skateboard. He was longhaired and wearing teeshirt.
Scruffy Sod I said to myself. This was the one that shocked me the most! I look like this guy most of the time! I wear teeshirts and have long hair – hair longer than this chap’s in fact. Just because I was wearing a suit when I bumped into this fellow doesn’t mean I’m any better than him.
But there we have it. I was wearing a suit.This was the cause of all my evil [unracist] bigotry.
I was the monkey soldier.
Remember the experiment where Zimbardo dressed a bunch of students up as zookeepers and monkeys? It wasn’t long before the “Keepers” were covered in poop flung by the “Chimps”.
As Papa Kurt himself tells us, we are who we pretend to be so we must be careful who we pretend to be.
As an aside, is it “Monkey Soldier” or “Soldier Monkey”?