Rejection: the Red Badge of Resistance

Revised excerpt from the “Introduction” to Leftovers 

Rejection: the Red Badge of Resistance

For those of us with character (êthos), there is an event that recurs in our lives. It is what Nietzsche calls ones greatest weight (The Gay Science, Aphorism 341). For me, it is rejection. I was baptized with rejection when my mother cried that she wanted a girl when I was born. She told me she shouted to the doctor, “Put him back. Put him Back.” Dr. Gabbert slapped her across the face and slapped me across my ass and said, “Emma, you have a beautiful boy.”

Those of us with character can’t escape our recurring event. It emerges from our subconscious and plays with us in dreams. It is a battle between the self-subconscious and the community collective conscious. Which one wins determines our progress. Those with strong wills triumph; those weaker get hooked on drugs, shoplift, or die early when their bodies just surrender. No matter what we do, we cannot prevent the eternal recurrence of this event. My event is rejection and I embrace it. I know of another person who told me that their recurring event is people coming back to them and saying, “You know you were right.” It must be quite a burden to be always right. I have learned to love rejection like a horse learns to love the whip. Horses feel euphoric when they run; and when they are near exhaustion and feel their rider's whip they climax.

God's mistake. Born outside of nature after God's pit stop visit and his great escape. An anomaly. Quirky. The world would have preferred a muffled heartbeat at birth or a cut cord to bleed me out. A boy I was not meant to be. What an inconvenient shouldn't be. And if I would have been born of a different uncle, I would have been much more manly, much more army and navy, a three chord country ballad rather than Bernstein Gershwin symphony combined orchestral. Too complicated but just as White but still a second to the first born child; an after thought for my father's side.

I always thought there was something wrong with me. Something I said. Something I did. A slip of the tongue. Speaking out of turn. That's why my extended family, my blood, aunts and uncles, cousins, don't associate with me. I thought. That must be why they don't want me. My fault. But really deep down inside they only think they're better. It's really that simple. If they thought they had something to gain by associating with me then I wouldn't be able to get rid of them. They would be up my ass 24/7. But, let's not over-complicate as Marcus Aurelius would say. Things are what they are; and God bless you if you can change them. This goes to show that rejection might have many causes. Nonetheless, rejection still seems to find me like when your number is skipped over when you're waiting for lunch meat at the grocery store deli. You say to yourself, "Don't take it personal."

I have been plagued by rejection since birth. I wait for it. I know it’s on its way. It hides in the hedgerow with white eyes. It always surprises me when it finds me and I limp away like a wounded animal howling, cursing the earth and myself. It corners me and I resist. Perhaps, it comes in a letter, a phone call, an email, or in the first meeting with your new boss. “You weren't my first pick for this job. I just wanted to let you know.” It comes every time I write something. It's the self-inflicted wound when I ask someone to read something I've written or “I left a copy of my new book on the front porch for you,” and it's still there after a month. Oh, how I love it!

I love rejection even more than I loved my father's beatings. My father beat me and our dogs but I never saw him beat my mother or my sister. I found it curious watching my father beat our dogs because of the strange way he had to balance himself as he came down with his left arm on the dog. My father had a shorter right arm than left arm. He beat our dogs with wooden clothes hangers. As he came down with the wooden hanger in his left hand, his little right arm would raise up to his chest. The dogs would yelp after the first two or three blows and then curl up resigning themselves to the beating. How noble of the dog, I thought. As they were beaten their tongues would be out of their closed mouths just a tiny bit; the same way they looked when they were corny; the same way they looked when they rode your leg. Their eyes did not move. All of this acceptance of suffering for an equivalence of a meal. The dogs weren't suffering. It was what was required of them to eat. Both the dogs and I didn't feel rejected when we were beaten. We felt fully accepted by an other. The dogs took their beating for food and I took mine for love. The dog knew as long as he was beaten he would eat; I knew as long as I was beaten I had a home for they would never dare release me.

Maybe, rejection comes with a knock on the door in a special delivery or in a policeman’s question. Maybe it comes when a neighbor shouts, “Nobody likes you! Why don't you move!” You answer back, "That's why I'm here. You got it right. Thank you." I wouldn’t want to prevent it. It is the event that defines who I am. A rejection. One of the love-less rejected. As long as I am rejected, I am winning my battle against the world. I am a better Christian. If rejection is the world's only weapon, I could be a greater conqueror of men than Alexander and a greater builder of temples than Solomon.

Some say this recurring event is the consequence of our drive to procreate and continue the race, human race that is; that somehow we pass this event on in our chromosomes. I have a strand that cries out for rejection like a friend of mine has a strand to conquer women. My wife calls him a real pícaro, Spanish for womanizing rogue. Some say it is the consequence of our need to create ourselves as metaphorical beings symbolized in the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, or the friends we make. For me there are places that draw me like a magnet; places where I know that if I go there, I will be rejected. This is why I say, it is not who we are that is important but where we are. 

I live in Coatesville, a place of rejection. When most were moving out, I was moving back. Others say it is a consequence of our desire to manipulate, control, and persuade through the power of our will. It could even be a place to guard against ourselves; to dull our strongest idiosyncrasies. I say it is a consequence of our desire for freedom and the more we have the more we are rejected because people are afraid of freedom. The better of us are less afraid. The greatest servants of mankind are those who liberate us from the fear of death. Those who are free of the fear of death are no longer hypothetical people; they are real people.

What joy to be free from responsibility and free from the bonds that tie us to things and other people; free from demands, duty, and the onus of choosing sides in the battle of good and evil. Free from the recurrence of the event. We can only be free of it if we embrace it and make it part of our existence like a pollutant in a river. We swim in the water but never open our eyes or our mouths for fear it sicken us.

We fear our freedom because it is a pursuit of nothingness. We slide into our armor reluctant warriors. We find our freedom when the event no longer haunts us; when it loses our scent and no longer stalks us or tracks our footprint; when it stops waiting for us to go with it even after we have told it over and over again to go away that we aren’t interested. We avoid it. Our metabolism slows and we experience erectile dysfunction. We take vitamins, eat dirt extracting the red ore from between our teeth. Deny it but it is there all the time parked in our driveway taking our space and reminding us that our windows are insecure. Our freedom. It sneaks inside like a draft in winter. It is the reason for living with death. It is the reason why we embrace ourselves at night in fear that in the morning we vaporize and awake.

Can a recurring event occur on a grander scale? Is there such a thing as eternal recurrence on a global scale? Nietzsche would say yes. Nietzsche claims the eternal recurrence of the small man, the mediocre man. In America there is the eternal recurrence of the racial man. First there was the rejection of the native American until he was destroyed. Then, we were permitted to praise him with cigar store indians; and then once he gained his freedom, the black man, and then he gained stature by making him into a concrete jockey with a lantern; and now in postmodern America, the White Man. In what image do we make him? 

Yes, America's eternal recurrence, America's haunting event, is the continual invention of the racial man. There is no place for White male progressives of the Boomer Generation in today's postmodern, identity based politique. Ask Chris Matthews. Not only in education but in all areas, Boomer White male progressives who have helped lay the foundation of contemporary progressivism through their years of unrewarded, unselfish, and ridiculed work in the areas of critical pedagogy, socialist economics, multiculturalism, and ethnocentrism are party crashers; uninvited, rejected. To even ask for an invitation displaces an other whose voice must be heard over theirs. To come to the party would mean that somebody's piece of cake will be smaller or somebody's folding chair will be taken. Today they need to be more careful about where they go because it no longer matters who they are. We don't need to hear his voice anymore. We reject it.

Rejection is the extraordinary man's red badge of resistance. If we aren't being rejected, we are being accepted. That's where the danger is...in acceptance. It lulls us into mediocrity. It catches us napping in the afternoon with no defense when awakened by home invaders.