A Whacko Solstice to All !

What’s it take to be a real whacko? What the hell is an authentic whacko?

The dictionary says that it’s “a person expressing delight and/or enjoyment.” Although interestingly (and strangely), simply removing the “h” from this word makes quite a difference, since the dictionary also says a wacko is “a crazy person.”

This odd duality of meaning seems to be a key interpretive junction about personal, expressive legitimacy within the potentially quite awkward or dangerous context of contemporary social / political reality.

To be a whacko, one is either delighted and filled with joy, . . . or a rabid lunatic, . . . perhaps both, . . . yet possessing credibility, or not (?) .

Such madness (if we’re lucky) compels us all, within an authentic spirit of joy.

Yet, in the ongoing post-modern contexts of generally pronounced yet unexplicated, underclass stigmatizations, social repressions, marketable conformitization (a newly coined word), intimidation and regimentation, . . . the term “whacko” has usually assumed gigantically pejorative dimensions (slanted toward the “crazy person” sort of status).

As diverse lifestyles become reduced to only ornaments within a zero-sum game of predatory, social Darwinism; and when social elitism, commercial contrivance and media manipulation heats and pulsates the molten-lava landscape of modern culture, the double-edged notion of a whacko / wacko provides a street-smart, ironic, revealing and aromatic sense of some deep and perverse, political imbalance, a semantical gambit which Orwell slyly suggested was so very crucial for achieving ultimate social control, for best maintaining a necessarily intimate, psychological advantage within the design of a truly successful, plutocratic police state.

Now, doesn’t that smell better?

Wouldn’t you like your own “whackos” cooked to order : fried over-hard, finely chopped (diced) and swimming in a steaming tureen of mock, red-neck gravy?

Then, such a delicacy is likely ladled like bright pools of hot, putrid oppossum piss, onto a bed of pale pasta, ringed with red and white radishes, and served on a blue-plate special?

See, smells pretty good, eh?

Re-warm it in your cranked-up, motor-vehicle crock-pot, while you shop ‘til you drop. Guzzle it down with relish, it’ll be a real belly-warmer and non-stop snooze-ticket.

What’s a genuine whacko to do? Can a true whacko really escape such grilling and ladling?

Are whackos happy and joyous, maybe crazy sometimes or all the time, or else just high-spirited folks in some ways, while carrying some serious (unconformist, even ethical) concerns?

Countless concentration camps have been crammed to the brim with whackos, persons somehow abandoning their thrill or caution of cultural obedience, caught in the . . . reality . . . of their identity, and then suddenly slamming into barricades of social brutality or cultural banality. Was such demise a voluntary course, or simply destined by swirling contexts of style of scythe?

Sometimes, happier fates have befallen whackos.

Perhaps, some of your best friends are whackos.

And irony still survives as the prime spice of post-modernism.

Even in Arcata (supposedly a rather whacko community), it’s still possible to be a real whacko; perhaps even to so survive as such. Thanks to the gods for such fortune. And may Odysseus and Penelope be pleased.

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