So. Kafka. You know you’ve been wanting to see the 1991 Jeremy Irons film of that same name. Maybe even in conjunction with all that other binge-watching you’ve been up to lately. Just admit it. Climbing the walls, not knowing what else to do. And you have some vague or not so vague sense of who Herr Franz was. You know—just admit it now—that he was the literary prophet of his generation. In “In the Penal Colony,” for instance, which he imagined and told and articulated way before all those innumerable atrocities of the 20th century and beyond.
Now, when I say “prophet” it is not meant merely in the sense of some kind of soothsayer or whatnot. Did K. foresee what was to befall humanity in the darkest parts of the previous century? Not necessarily, except that perhaps he had a few profound insights into human nature, including some of the most extreme possibilities.
No, when I use the term prophet, it also connotes a person who is intensely observant and critical of what he, in this case, and also his fellow human beings are up to all the time. A critic.
Self-delusion. Self-aggrandizement. Self-promotion. And not really knowing thyself. And let’s not neglect this era’s cardinal sin, self-dealing; the rest of us can just go to hell.
But I have digressed, Your Honor. Guilty as charged.
This piece is about a tale, a short soundbite by our beloved K. It’s actually a rough translation, reduxed, maybe a paraphrase, or perhaps some kind of riff on a very short story by said author.
Without further ado, here it is, but you must above all read it, I insist, with a straight face:
Der Kaiser
There was once a man who dared doubt that that orange-combover caviar-vodka puppet with no clothes was actually the Chosen One. Nevertheless, he did deign to admit, if only to himself, and strictly in private at that, that this selfsame Divine architect of the all-powerful MAGA hat industry might have been somehow tied to royalty, that the Diety Himself may have whispered blessings of birdsong into his ears and his twin tablet-grasping thumbs (how could any of that ever be in doubt?), yet this other man, the one we started with, he somehow still had had some kind of problem with the whole picture. What he somehow could not wrap his head around, it had to do with how it could have ever come to pass that mere mortals could have been so Blessed with such intervention, such supremely Divine Stupidity, the likes of which had never been seen before or ever after and certainly never after that. That was the talk in many of the local watering holes, whether he liked it or not, or even wished to hear any more of same.
Now,here we digress slightly if not more than slightly from the original.
There’s this thing, this ritual, that Herr Combover participates in. It’s called the KGB, a.k.a. the Kaiser’s Great Bleaching. Not originally, as herein described, was it as such part of the Chosen One’s job description, yet it was back in the day in a prior form done on a somewhat daily basis, mostly with cartoonish illustrations and PowerPoints and not too many big words. But then, not too much later on, it was, it became, it was made manifest to Him and to Him Alone as a truly Divine Revelation, that all the ills of the land which He lorded over could be managed by just a splash of disinfectant between cheek and gum. And then, as ordained by his many Royal underlings, his Supremely Royal very very best approval ratings, they were certainly destined to soar to heights as yet unimagined or unimaginable by anyone at all.
If only He could have his loyal minions right there right in His Divine Company, doting on His Every, Very Very Divine Excellent Word! Then He could spread His Merciless Wrath on all those countless non-Believers!
But, we digress too much.
What happened with that mere mortal who deigned to doubt, well, it was all but a ripple in the sewer system.
After all, when the cardboard head (please follow the preceding link if you like poetry and humor!) spits from its shitface directly upon the Heimat, how can that possibly be anything other than the return of a bizarre obsequious fealty right back to the bowels of its sender?
Here, in case you were curious, is a (my) translation of the Kafka piece from the original German, based largely on Google translate results:
The Emperor
A man doubted the Emperor’s divine ancestry; he claimed that the Emperor was rightly our Supreme Lord, and he did not doubt the Emperor’s divine mission, which was somehow clearly self-evident to him; he only doubted the Divine Descent itself. Of course, that didn’t cause much of a stir; when the surf drops drops of water on the land, it doesn’t interfere with the eternal waves of the sea; rather, it is caused by it.
Have a laugh or two, it’s on me! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk! But don’t forget to stay tuned to DrBobOpEd! Stay safe!