Philosophy of Collective Ignorance

Saying nothing, yet leaving nothing unsaid, the bullshit fuzzy logic that can be spoken of is not the enduring bullshit, which is why the timeless wit and wisdom of Socrates are right at home in our Rainbow Warrior poetry. Archaeological evidence suggests that it was isolated tribes, living in the southern mountains of China, who first popularized the genre known as “Oneness Poetry”, by devising an ingenious system of knots in ropes and marks on turtle shells, allowing them to share more of their favorite jokes and riddles with nearby friends, relatives, and neighbors they seldom got to see as often as they’d like. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the mountains these tribes lived in were so steep even the goats complained, and the only way they could possibly have been more isolated, was if they had lived at the north pole. But, that was long, long, ago in the time before time, at the very dawn of agriculture, almost six thousand years before Stone Hinge was erected. Long before graffiti ever became a serious problem, or even before the first recognizable outhouse or toilet, the Chinese were already developing the rudiments of written language, and you might think they were a pretty smart people, but you’d be surprised just how long it took them to figure out, that you don’t really need the turtle shells and rope, and any damned fool can just scratch a few marks in the dirt with a stick!

After that though, their Oneness Poetry took off like wildfire and, soon enough, people were scratching jokes and riddles in the dirt around every crapper in China. Over the next five thousand years, the industrious buggers refined their unique brand of tribal potty humor into a fine art and science, culminating first in the more family oriented potty humor oracle, known as the “I-Ching”, or “Book of Changes” and, many thousands of years later still, the crowning achievement of Oneness Poetry and potty humor, the “Tao Te Ching”, or “Way of Ignorant Virtue!” Which is often described as requiring half an hour to read, and a lifetime to comprehend, with many to this very day, still debating whether it is actually the deepest philosophical well on the planet, or the deepest pile of manure ever conceived by man. Of course, that makes the Tao Te Ching the perfect bathroom companion, but whatever your personal taste in reading material and literature, a version of that little book went on to become the most popular comic book sold in Asia! Some 350 million people worship the original text as sacred and the author, Lao Tzu (gray haired child), as a God, while billions more read it upon occasion but, I have to say, not being religious myself, I really have to admire a religion with a sense of humor about itself in this Mad, Mad, Mad, World!

Around the same time that the Tao Te Ching was first published in China, on the other side of the planet, Socrates of Athens had inherited his own tribal tradition, but his was an oral tradition, that never did translate well into a written one. Tribal traditions were as common as dirt back then, even in famous cities like Athens, but the wealthy establishment eventually got sick and tired of his less refined jokes, and executed him in a kangaroo court trial for making them all look like complete idiots in public, and for daring to teach peasants how to use jokes to avoid being exploited. Socrates became the first modern day martyr for standup comedians and politicians everywhere who, to this very day, still ritualistically beg their respective drunk patrons and constituents not to lynch them. Some might assume I’m exaggerating the importance of one drunk native, cracking jokes in bars for free drinks, but one of the first things Adolf Hitler did in office, was to make it illegal to crack jokes about the Nazi party and, of course, then he sent the lynch mobs around to all the bars to hang all the natives, and anyone else who might even think about cracking a joke he didn’t like!

Quite a few are surprised to learn that essential barroom jokes, comic books, democratic institutions, and a major world religion like Taoism, all evolved out of tribal potty humor jokes older than monuments and that, instead of Lao Tzu, millions of idiots like myself (who don’t necessarily hang out in bars) have been working on the sequel to the Tao Te Ching for the last 2,500 years, but its all true! They say that our bullshit fuzzy logic can take on a life of its own, and that the most interesting things grow out of manure, while our Rainbow Warrior poetry uses an impressive amount of fertilizer by anyone’s standards, to span both eastern and western traditions. Nobody could find Lao Tzu in any of the library bathrooms they checked, to see if he wanted to write the sequel, but there are a lot of stubborn idiots out there just like me, who can never get enough of this particular bullshit. However, if anybody does find Lao Tzu bumbling down some lonesome road less traveled, tell him we’d appreciate all the help we can get but, thankfully, its impossible to screw up Oneness Poetry!

Oh, you can play around with the words all you want, but what everybody looks for in our poetry is the mathematics, or symmetry, and billions of idiots worldwide usually recognize right away what works best and what doesn’t, because the mathematics just don’t lie. Which is also why anyone of any age can make significant contributions to the genre at any time, because mathematics, nursery rhymes, and cussing are all fun educational activities for the whole family, that can inspire anyone at any age. Kids often know what’s important to learn, and the poem, “Shit Happens” is my personal favorite, which is actually the very first potty mouth nursery rhyme ever taught to me by other children, who all agreed, that particular poem is somehow magical, and portended our futures. Being only five years old, I had no possible way of comprehending, just how much truly ugly lowbrow slapstick it would involve, enough to repeatedly turn your brain into Lime Jell-O or a multidimensional multifractal pretzel, that would make any yoga master turn around, and walk in the other direction.

Our poems express our collective ignorance in every way imaginable and imply that 42 really is as good an explanation as any other for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. They are what I call my No-Class, No-Style, No-Brainer Philosophy of Collective Ignorance!