Minister Faust (14 page)

“All right, everyone. You’ve completed your answers,” I said. “Now it’s time to destroy your icons.”

Iconoclasm Means “I Can”

T
he F*O*O*Jsters stammered and sputtered with outrage, demanding to know why I would ask them to put such effort into their artwork if it existed only to be smashed. After reminding them that nothing real lasts, I told them one of my favorite Zen stories.

A monk had been walking through the jungle for several weeks on his way to a grand pagoda, when he encountered the Ganges. Where he found himself, the river was too deep and too wide to cross by walking or swimming, so he wandered downriver for half a day or more in search of a narrower, shallower point. The river grew only deeper and wider, and throughout his search, his unease grew that each step was taking him farther from his destination, which he could see above the canopy in the sunset, glittering golden atop a mountain.

The monk finally realized that his only means across was to build a raft. Never having done so, he worked past sundown experimenting with construction methods and then spent the entire night lashing together logs with vines, weaving a sail with fronds, and fashioning an oar.

When morning came, the monk tentatively ventured upon the river, not knowing whether he’d drown or be eaten by piranhas and crocodiles. But to his amazement he reached the other side of the Ganges in less than an hour, his unsurpassable barrier conquered easily.

Alighting upon the shore, he surveyed his work with pride. But he couldn’t imagine abandoning the craft of his craft. So he gathered vines, hoisted his heavy raft upon his back, and trudged through the jungle and up the mountain toward his pagoda.

“Why did the monk haul his raft with him?” I asked.

“Because he was obviously intending to sell the vehicle after he left the goddamned monastery. Or trade up, at least.”

“Becoss he vanted neizer to litter nor to vaste.”

“Cuz he had hisseff a nice lil ol boat, an he probably wannid to take er out fishin when he was done monkin for the day.”

“Because he didn’t want anyone to, like, rip it off?”

“Because he was too blind, too self-delighted, or too afraid,” said Kareem, “to accept that something useful had become a burden.”

“Precisely, Kareem.”

A small smile—not insincere—crawled onto the X-Man’s lips, and I saw him then as he once must have been: the smartest student in the class. I tried to imagine him at a time before his awesome bitterness, when that smile would have been broader and more frequent, but it was difficult to picture.

And yet, despite myself in that moment, I found myself liking Philip Kareem Edgerton, and the impish twist of his lips suggested the feeling was slowly, surprisingly, becoming mutual.

“And the same is true of your icons,” I continued, building from Kareem’s solution to my wisdom-riddle, “not the artifices you’ve constructed this afternoon, but the ones that hold hegemony over your hearts and mastery over your minds.

“Especially during this id-crisis that’s crippling your work environment, it’s critical for each of you to examine how you are exploiting your ideals and your idols to excuse yourself of your own dysfunctional behavior.”

The F*O*O*Jsters’ arms were crossed, their faces dour. Except for Kareem’s. Perhaps he chose to believe I wasn’t including him in my description. Or perhaps it was something else entirely.

“Consider this, you men and women whom the world calls ‘heroes.’ By maintaining an icon, you are permanently placing yourself below someone or something which you consider to hold greater wisdom or intrinsic merit than you do. Icons, therefore, are ‘virtual parents’ situated inside your psyches,
indefinitely infantilizing you.

“If you want to terminate your internal id-loops and deactivate your interpersonal dysfunction, you need to escape your Icon Traps. And doing so is as simple as proving to yourself that you need no more false idols in your life. Ultimately idols can only fall down and crush you. You need to start to take care of yourselves, and not be dependent on others or hold unrealistic opinions of your ‘elders.’ So go ahead. Smash your external icon. To do so isn’t blasphemy. It’s to be born again.”

All five F*O*O*Jsters stood motionless, confused if not still upset.

“Like, does this even ap
ply
to me?” asked Syndi. “I mean, like, I’m obviously not in this icon-thingy like them, right?”

All but Wally rolled their eyes. “No, Syndi, not exactly like the rest of them—”

“Good, cuz I wanna keep mine.”

“Wellsir, if she’s keepin hers, ma’am-doctor, c’n I keep mine?”

“It’s made of ice, you clod. You’re familiar with melting?”

“I c’n keep it frosted, Festy.”

“Bickering, my friends,” I said, “is a self-constructed off-ramp from the freeway to mental health.”

“Fine,” grunted the Flying Squirrel. “If the only way to escape the Sisyphean nightmare of this ‘therapy trap’ and Miss Brain’s meningococcal metaphors is to do as she said, let’s be done with this rubbish and get the Sam Hill out of here. I don’t have time for this hog-sputum—I’ve a eulogy to write for tomorrow.”

And with that, Mr. Piltdown ripped his bristol board Hawk King icon into two large pieces, then four medium ones, and then decreasingly into a flurry of Hawk confetti. “You see? Painless. Done. Because it’s meaningless anyway, Miss Brain.”

An earsplitting
CRACK
forced our gaze upon Iron Lass. Micro-Aesgard lay in rubble at her feet, her iron hand still in chop-pose before her and
ringing-inging-ing
like a temple gong.

“It is done, Frau Doktor. Unt now, O unexpected cosmic bounty, I’m breassing sanctified air viss ze clean lunks of a mentally liberated purson. Oh, I feel so much freer unt better unt more joyful. Vunderbar. You truly are a miracle vurker, ja. Now can I go?”

“Doc, if it’s all the same with you,” said Wally, “can I let mine melt? Don’t seem right to mush down m’daddy.”

“Wally, you won’t be ‘mushing down’ either your father or your love of him, because your father isn’t controlling your life. Only your idealization of him is.”

“So can I, then?”

“No, Wally.”

Hanging his head, his shoulders fallen, Wally looked like an intensely guilty gigantic child. He pulled up his dress shirt and lowered his trousers an inch, exposing his navel.

There was a blinding flash, and suddenly everyone’s hair was drooping from the steam saturating the room. Although visibility was nearly nil through the ice-fog, Wally’s icon-father was no more.

I found my next charge in the fog while Wally tucked in his shirt.

“Syndi?”

She pouted. She stamped.

When I insisted, she dropped her arms as if they weighed tons, then started ripping the materials off her mannequin.

I found Kareem in his misted workbay, his back turned to me.

“Khaibtu kher,”
he whispered.

With a sound like sifting sand, the X-Man’s shining black idol fuzzed into black and silver smoke, faded to shadow, and was gone.

I touched Kareem’s arm. He jerked away, still averting his face. I softly asked him the meaning of his magic words.

“ ‘Shadows…shadows fall,’ ” he sniffed, before reaching a palm to his eye.

What will it mean for your life, and your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?

Omnipotent Man:
“What’s the point anymore?”

Flying Squirrel:
“The King would’ve wanted us to build a New Age.”

Iron Lass:
“Götterdämmerung is the end of the
gods,
too. We’re there.”

How will you face knowing that you will never exceed, or even equal, the accomplishments of your predecessors?

X-Man:
“We have no choice…but to become our own kings.”

Power Grrrl:
“Who are
they
to be equal to?”

Icomposting: Enrich Your Mental Soil

I
ronically, the very people who are icons to millions are often the most icon-worshiping of all. In many cases, such idolization was the impetus for young heroes to challenge death on a daily basis. For hyperhominids, idolization led to emulation, emulation to overidentification, and overidentification with an elder “superior,” paradoxically, to infantilization.

No matter your intentions, when you wrap your superego inside the tunic of your icon, you’re not wearing a cape. You’re wearing a diaper.

Believing in anyone more than you believe in yourself causes you to suspend your own judgment, which leads to counter-self-actualization, or self-deactivation. And while Power Grrrl’s exaltation of herself is certainly the cause (and effect) of many of her problems, that very exaltation frees her from the maleficent manhandling of the Icon Trap.

Most important, no one—and therefore no idol—is perfect. Inevitably you will discover your idol’s imperfections. And when your idol falls, its final act will be to crush you.

Iconsciousness: Time to Take Off Your Diaper

A
dulthood means taking care of yourself, not psychic dependence on others or clutching on to unrealistic opinions of our elders. It’s time to unchain yourself from your mentor. And while you might think that your idol is made of gold, it’s really just made of garbage.

It’s time to toss your idol into the composter. It might stink for a while, but at least it’s transmuting into something useful…and fit to walk on.

But if you don’t dispense with your empty idol, in all likelihood you’ll be setting yourself up for the very chaos you are about to witness among the F*O*O*J.

It’s Ironic That Funerals Are Sad

F
unerals and superheroism are a natural combination.
Each involves uniforms, oaths of allegiance, declarations of virtues, and connection to superhuman power under circumstances of high drama frequently performed to theme music.

But despite these abundant affiliations, hyperhominids are notoriously psychemotionally mismatched with the requirements of funereal deportment. Consider the following cases:

• The pustulent eruption of grief from Tempest and Pyromanny at the laying to rest of Lady Liberty was a popped pimple on the face of the 1945 funeral scene, resulting in no less than a flash flood and an instant inferno (which thankfully cancelled out each other without loss of life—but not before transforming the contents of a nearby grocery market into a giant stew whose lingering aroma kept neighborhood animals in a frenzy for months).

• The 1973 service for Doctor Patho saw the evacuation of forty square city blocks after her sidekick Dea Coli wept tears of pure anthrax, which a sobbing Cumulus Maximus accidentally dispersed into the atmosphere.

• Hyperhominid funerals have produced freezings, mutations, growth of vestigial organs, virgin births, impotence, chimpotence, shrimpotence, spontaneous macrophagocytosis, and interdimensional neuroflatulence.

As we saw in the previous chapter, because you as a hyperhominid believe in the myth of your own invulnerability, facing death is even more difficult for you than it is for “mere mortals.” Therefore no experience—outside of death itself—is more traumatic (and dramatic) for you than the funeral. And that is because facing funerals means discarding our idols and becoming, for the first time, independent.

And, fundamentally, more alone.

MONDAY, JULY 3, 8:00 A.M.

D
espite the grief-stricken plans that the Pathetic Fallacy announced in
The Los Ditkos Sentinel-Spectator,
the weather at the sunrise funeral of Hawk King on Sunhawk Island could have dazzled a pharaoh. The disk of the sun glorified the horizon like a divine disco ball, drizzling gold along the eastern face of the distant Tachyon Tower, while the sky above us melted from orange to azure like a child’s crayons left on a hot stove.

Media outlets from FOX and ABC to Mutant TV and CAPES had been camped outside the wall of the Blue Pyramid complex since the previous night, drinking from the stream of primary-colored celebrities marching into the grounds since the dawn.

That day’s costumes were the rarely glimpsed dress uniforms and dress tunics reserved for funerals, replete with gold brocade, left-breast mission tags, ceremonial wands and scepters, gilded armor, and formal capes. Traditional bagpipes, taiko drums, and throat-singers intoned the eschatological atmosphere amid the silent witness of obelisks, the giant Ka-Sentinels, and the radiance of the Blue Pyramid. Everything combined to say that we were truly at the end of an era, the exit of an epoch, the egress of an age.