The Brotherhood of Obnoxious Flavor

– An uncanny fragment –

[Fished from a garbage bin the Inland Secret Service had forgotten to search] >> German version

“From the deepest recesses of the past, odd pictures will occasionally arise, initiating a development in the present which points toward an unexpected future. Many a powerful dynasty has purposefully used this mechanism, employing ancient symbolics to ensure predominance throughout the millennia. A case in point is the tough clan of the Falcon Catchers, originally known as the Rock Smashers; but in coming down through the generations, the designation ‘Rock Smashers’ fell into disrepute. So now, they cast their vicious web over the Earth under the name of Falcon Catchers. In the light of a full moon, you will see their flying saucers float forth from the old home castle, at first escorted by a swarm of crazily shrieking bats – and suddenly, the shimmering vehicles will noiselessly zip southwards to their remote destination, a well-hidden eagle’s nest in the High Sierra. There they meet with the members of a fatal brotherhood: the Brotherhood of the Obnoxious Flavor, and the Falcon Catchers are seen as puppetmasters above all puppetmasters.

“It has been said that no one will stumble upon this group unless destined to it by nature. So it appears I must be part of it, because I literally stumbled into it. On my 42nd birthday, upon the threshold of my seventh seven-year life span, I snooped around Roman ruins and happened to fall through a well-camouflaged hole, into the ancient catacombs. Down in the bowels of the Earth as it were, I ran into the Brotherhood, and whoever runs into it, will be part of it. Such are the inexorable inner logics of the Brotherhood.

“We are the ones who concoct the barfing agent which is mixed into all elements of modern life. We are everywhere. We are in the drinking water, we pervade the air you breathe and the food on the shelves. We are not in there, but we have our fingers in it. In that sense, we pervade everything. We control and spoil the ingredients. We are in the movies, in radio and television. We are in the newspapers. We are the ones behind thousands of phenomena you may have been wondering about. We are disgusting. We screw up orthography, we trample upon the traditions, we abolish your Sunday and pursue you with beeping and radiating gadgets, all the way to the bathroom. We interrupt your lovemaking. We are the swinish Sloan who creep up your walls. Through cables and ether, we wind our ways onto your screens. We call ourselves by weird names: The Institute of the American Lust of Living, The Project for a Colossal New Millennium, Folk Kitchen of the Homeless, Glowing Grandmaster Grail of the Greek Gauleiter Zone, Cacophonic Symposium of Foreign Relations, Schlonkmeyer Foundation of Compassionate Medicine, Illuminated Lantern Lighters of the Highpowered Degree, Painting Hill Conference of the Global Schutzstaffel, Imperial Barf-Clot Nutcake of Applied Psychiatry. We are completely insane. We make you vomit. Got it?

“It is purely a matter of technical practicality. If it is doable, we shall do it: Because we are the Makers, or at least we successfully fancy ourselves to enjoy such heights. Just for the heck of it, if it was technically feasible, we’d even stoop down to manipulating the mites in your bedsheets.

“We always finance and arm both sides of the conflict. We always defame and praise both adversaries in any struggle. We lift them to heaven and fling them down to hell, we build and demolish, we are incomprehensibly devoted to self-contradictory garbage and always generate so much confusion that nobody knows whether they’re coming or going. We put your kids on drugs. Through decades of meticulous, insidious disinformation, we suggest to you the advent of a preposterous Superking. We construct high-powered electronic harping stations in polar regions, and nobody knows what for. We X-ray and interrogate, we tabulate and tatter your worthy opinion. We sniff through and slaver spittle upon your correspondence; we copy your e-mails and phone calls and store them in gargantuan security databases. We perfume your nose with synthetic sugar water, so you can’t smell us. We are happy that you can’t smell us, because you couldn’t possibly stand our smell. But nevertheless, our stench pervades your befuddled brain.

“We erect new sources of pornography and ensure total abundance of it, until your entrails have gone so sour that you’ll be gasping and choking. We cut your child allowance. We develop new virusses. We distribute dirty syringes. And over the decades, we orchestrate the gradual debasement and degeneration of your media content. We have the dolls dancing and dangling in front of your nose, and by inconspicuous increments, we aggravate violence and obscenity. We make you dependent. We make you addicted. We blunt your senses so you will need to heighten the tickle, and finally when the stream of your seed has degenerated from a joyful fountain to a painful rivulet, your ideals will no longer be a powerful wingbeat but merely a rotten creak, and in spite of all the experience of a lifetime, you’ll be like wax in our hands. We make sure that your love life will soon become a nuisance, so that all this happy procreation may come to an end, and one fine day, under our wise and selfish guidance, a much thinner population will enjoy the accumulated wealth of humanity.

“If you find this inconceivable, consider the fact that certain significance-loaded countries usually celebrate those who are least understood. He who rambles in incomprehensible terms, will find listeners. He will be honored and raised upon a pedestal. That’s because of the unreasonable assumption that rich unknowable lore is concealed behind all his incomprehensibility. It’s a crappy approach to wisdom which was inherited from Immanuel Kant, the old transcendental philosopher of the Great Unknowable.

“We are the conspiracy behind the conspiracies. We do not know whether we exist, but we are believers, you might say, and we act as if. We have an inkling that we exist, and we obey the instructions which come to us by way of flimsy allusion. Each individual member only knows as much as he needs to know; the remainder is left to his imagination. If this fails, there will be some nudging – quite tenderly so, but with unmistakable force in the offing. We are the way we are, and as we are, we do remain. We are the Invisible Empire. We flicker through your imagination. You will never be sure whether we are real; because we really don’t quite know either.

“Quite possibly, we are a mere figment of your desperate delirium in a spiritually and materially uncertain world. Possibly we exist no more than you suppose us to exist. Maybe you should stop supposing so much. You do not wish to know all this. The truth? ‘You can’t handle the truth,’ that’s our usual line. But all these things having been said, now they’ve been said. And somewhere within the autumnal fog of your tired mind, somewhere behind the veils of your most sluggish repressions, somewhere inside the awareness nirvana of remote-controlled sheep, and yet upon the solid floorboards of hell, our existence is assured – because as soon as you surmise that we exist, we begin to suck; from the power of your speculations, we drink the sorely needed lifeblood to continue our anemic existence. We are the modern vampires, and your feeble garlic just makes us roll on the floor with laughter. We are the swinish element in clean and well-ironed suits. As soon as you glance in our direction, we are hidden by the shadows of our ancient brown hoods. We cannot be rationalized out of existence, because we constantly feed the suspicion lest it grow tired, for we live on it; but we don’t allow the suspicion to strengthen to such a degree that it could hurt us.

“Thus, we dawdle along in pretended silliness. – And now, make sure you enjoy your burger.“

(The World Association of Conspiracy Psychopaths in Craptown, Ill., has awarded the finder of this outrageous self-accusation with the “Unprovability Medal 2004”. Accompanied by two combat dogs, he now lives a relatively secluded life on Niue Island.)

– Eckehard Junge, September 1^st, 2005

– English version, August 14^th, 2006

Author’s own translation: August 2006

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• German original version

Foto credits:

http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/library/libr0068.htm

libr0068, Treasures of the NOAA Library Collection

(NOAA = National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration)
Image of "the great Belly'ed Gnat or female Gnat."

In: "Micrographia, or, Some physiological descriptions of minute

bodies made by magnifying glasses....", by Robert Hooke. 1667.

Photographer: Archival Photograph by Mr. Sean Linehan, NOS, NGS