Night of the Gottadoer

A bright, young, all-Empirican frat boy takes a position where I work. He confides in me, tells me that he’s waiting for another, higher-paying job to pan out. Within a month, the other position pans out and he quits. The boss’s reaction is, “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

I think, Now that’s an equivocal, vapid thing to say.

Then I think again. While expressions like “c’est la vie” or “shit happens” write everything off to arbitrary occurrence and futility, the gotta-do saying has an obligatory smack. It’s tough. It carries a sense of duty. Duty to whom? Why, to oneself, of course: you gotta do what you gotta do. It’s a write-off to self-interest. Hence the tone of empathy in my boss’s voice.

So the gottadoer moves on and another individual takes his place—a four-hundred-pounder who has dandruff in her eyebrows and smells like a yak in heat. The boss says, “This one’s gonna stay—I mean, who the hell else’ll take her?” The presumption is that any gotta-do ambitions on the part of this fast-food pus bomb will fail by her sheer repulsiveness.

However, she soon confides in me: “I’m lookin’ out for number one,” she says.

True to her word, within three months she masters the given responsibilities and assumes new ones. Then she negotiates a fifteen-percent raise. She says to me, “Jan, you’re honest. Me? I’m gettin’ mine now, ’cause they gonna screw me anyhow.” I’m not sure who “they” are, but I follow her logic.

She starts taking days off, logging 3-hour chat sessions, leaving early, snarfing things out of oil-stained bags that smell like deep-fried foot fungus. I know something has to give, but I don’t know what. Then the fatal day arrives. My boss tells me in the utmost confidence, of course, that he fired her for ordering thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise on the company credit card and having it delivered to her home. He displays his deep hurt—it amounts to a betrayal of trust, he says. His eyes get watery. But all I can say is, “Gotta do what you gotta do.”

Now I no longer have a job. Now I wish I’d never heard the expression. The gottadoers are everywhere—like those zombies in Night of the Living Dead, feeding on the flesh of the living to stay animated. Politicians dismantling public institutions to deliver profits to corporate lobbies, butchers selling chuck tenders as filet mignons at $23 a pound, writers holding contests with $1,000 prizes and $20 entry fees, Tycocrats, WorldCommandants, Enronators… Empirica is full of these gottadoers, number-oners, careerist bugaboos with show dogs, SUVs and strap-on superiorities. It’s as if a life of selfish predation and opportunism were no longer a choice, but a condition.

The gotta-do imperative manifests at every class stratum. At the lowest end of the gottadoer food chain are the criminal gottadoers, largely identified by the fact they’ve fallen into the jaws of the behemoth. The number of this species have quadrupled in the last two decades, or since incarceration has become a national-defense concern (social stability) and an economic lever (reduced unemployment rolls). Our rapacious Empire now incarcerates roughly 500 out of every 100,000 of its population. Only a month ago it was the last industrialized nation to execute minors. It is now one of the last to execute people at all. But its astringent ideology of tough love and self-reliance hasn’t dissuaded the criminal gottadoer in the least. On the contrary, this abject and futureless spawn defies such Puritanical laws in good conscience. Where laws are repressive and hypocritical, toughness and self-reliance are lawless. While wealthy, educated gottadoers purchase the protection and benefit of Enlightenment humanist law, poor, uneducated gottadoers fall under the sword of brutal Hebraic law. With every lobbied legislation come a multitude of defiant infractors.

Recently I sat on a grand jury and reviewed over thirty criminal cases a day for two days. Most of these crimes—everything from shoplifting to murder—were committed out of passion, insanity, greed, stupidity and addiction. The criminal gottadoer as one who rationally pursues an appetite (e.g., Hannibal Lector) is mostly Hollywood pap. The vast majority of these gottadoers were poor and uneducated. Most were arrested for acts that were only personally harmful—dope smoking, vagrancy, pill popping, prostitution, etc. They tended to suffer from a lack of savoir faire and a cultural mode that branded them as unsuitable for work—a surmountable condition not to be confused with congenital stupidity. Empirica’s immediate solution? Let them work it out in the trees, then incarcerate. And for the long term? Make sure that prison construction remains in inverse proportion to school construction, with prison construction on the increase. Make sure that Empirica remains the most incarcerating and least educating industrialized nation on earth.

Whenever I return from a stay abroad, I am struck by the prevalence of criminal culture at the middle-class stratum of our ghetto Empire. This cultural of criminality has generated a species of gottadoer who, while not necessarily poor, imitates the manner of the criminal: he’s the toughie gottadoer. Posing a physical threat, this duncical model of self-reliance secures his safety by inspiring fear. It’s hard not to be awed by his cocksure strutting, strong-silent flexing, canine growling and muscular inflammation. Take our own Emperor for instance. Note the simian lapse into pugnaciousness when, bereft of reason, he senses that he’s failing to persuade. Note the threatening posture and view of the world as a threatening place. Note the constant evocation of doom, followed by the toughie posturing and rhetoric that make career housewives feel safe and secure. See him swinging his scrotum round the campfire and peering vigilantly into the darkness. His every initiative is accompanied by a threat. During his most recent propaganda campaign to reform Social Security (and, it goes without saying, reward the rich and punish the poor), he pro-nounced to his fella Empiricans that the Arch Evildoer had just called him on his evildoer hot-line (1-800-INFIDEL):

“Just this morning the Arch Evildoer told me that he plans a major attack against freedom. Why? Because he doesn’t like freedom. No. Nuh-uh. [Five-second pause, vigilant gaze into the void.] But the lovers of freedom around the world know that freedom has a voice in Empirica and that the enemies of freedom want to kill the lovers of freedom. Why? Because freedom haters hate the Empirican way of life. And the lovers of freedom won’t stand for it. No. Nuh-uh. [Five-second pause, vigilant gaze into the void.] Because freedom lovers are free. Because they know that where freedom is free, liberty is free. They know that freedom will freely conquer those who wish that freedom wasn’t free. That is why I ask you to be alert, be watchful and be fearful at every moment. For freedom, in order to be free, must be freely pro-tected. Yeh. Uh-huh. [Five-second pause, vigilant gaze into the void.] That’s why I was elected Emperor. Yeh. To pro-tect your freedom from the enemies of freedom and to…uh…uh…freely exercise the freedom to…uh…uh…do that.”

So you see, even our mighty Emperor is a toughie gottadoer—tough against the enemies of freedom, tough against the haters of the “Empirican way of life.” The ultimate goal of all this toughness is anybody’s guess. But who cares? The posture is there—the tough, regular guy out to kick some ass. True, he has waged the most useless and costly war in Empirican history. True, his war and tax cuts have strapped Empirica with the biggest debt in history. True, he has inspired enough irrational fear in his citizens to unite them against an abstraction. True, his way of spreading freedom, bizarre Old Testament sermonizing, irrational moral clout, extreme rendition and island torture camps look more like the Inquisition than anything democratic.

But, like our tough, regular Emperor, tough, regular Empiricans couldn’t give a damn what the word freedom might really mean. They’d rather let the intellectuals and artists in the halls of the Academy sort that out. The real world belongs to tough, regular gottadoers of the middle classes, the white-collar boys who “keep it real” by saying things like “Yo, bee-ach! Whassup, yo? Goin’ to the staff meeting, yo?” They all have their tattoos. A Mara Salvatrucha Trece (MS-13 gang member) wears his like a badge of honor, so why not Eddie Bauer and Suzy Chapstick? They’re not completely unfamiliar with the dark side, the counterculture, those hepster criminals who do all sorts of wacky things like loiter in parking lots and urinate against walls.

Rock-n-roll, free love and Harley Davidsons are rather quaint these days. In a two-minute Sin City session you can bang a whore, steal a car, score drugs and splatter scores of oblivious pedestrians. The best TV show in decades, The Sopranos, is essentially an episodic tale of the criminal Everyman. Today, antiestablishment culture, the most advanced culture, is criminal culture (as it was in the era of noir films and literature). And criminals, broadly defined, are those who serve selfish ends to the detriment of others—who gotta do what they gotta do. Jeffrey Domer, for instance, had to lobotomize people to turn them into sex slaves—acts of extreme, masturbatory self-indulgence.

It is a poor center of man’s actions, himself.

—Francis Bacon, “On Wisdom for a Man’s Self”

Most criminals, no matter how irrational, have rationales. Now that Empirica has invaded a foreign country to secure its oil reserves under the pretext of spreading “freedom and democracy,” killed hundreds of thousands of foreigners under the pretext of preserving its “way of life,” deprived its citizens of health care under the pretext of protecting them from “big government,” chiseled another generation out of a decent education under the pretext of enforcing “standards,” delivered from taxation and regulation the corporate magnates who bankrolled its popularity contests, and imprisoned one out of every two hundred of its citizens, two questions remain: Did it really have to? And will history think so?

Jan DiVincenzo

© Copyright 2005, Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.

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