Ezekiel

Ezekiel goes to see Pulp Fiction

I assure you, I am Ezekiel. Yes, I have seen Pulp Fiction. I will tell you about it.  It was the fall of nineteen ninety-four, three years after the Cold War.  Those days, not much need for my kind of pessimism; so, when I heard the movie used words from my prophecy I was exultant, took myself out to the flicks.

I would guess at least one of you here can mimic some of the scene.  Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta stroll into the apartment of Brad, a nervous young man who’s double-crossed the gangland boss. Jackson raises his revolver, renders Ezekiel twenty-five, seventeen, then lays down vengeance.

Afterwards, I sat in a diner, rigid and speechless.  It wasn’t just that scene, I hated the whole movie: the casual brutality, the needless obscenity, the drugged-up stupidity, the sexuality.  I looked one way, then the other.  On the next table I saw the white shirts and black suits of Samuel P Huntingdon and Francis Fukuyama, two acclaimed academics of the moment.

Fukuyama, sipping a strawberry milkshake, posited that Jackson’s resolution at the finality of the movie to fulfil Ezekiel’s prophecy of the finder of lost children, was a metaphor for the role of the United States in the triumph of liberal democracy.

I clapped my hands, stamped my foot, leaned over and shouted, “I never uttered that garbage about the finder of lost children!  It’s an accretion, made up by a producer to ascribe some grandeur, to elicit your fascination for two gunmen chatting about hamburgers on their way to murder, extortion and vice!”.

Samuel P Huntingdon must have recognised me, because he put down his flavoured coke and spoke senatorially, “Mister, the stuff about the burgers, it’s irony – marker of our civilization, a cultural shibboleth that unites us with our allies.”

The Spirit of the Lord came down upon me: I leapt up onto the red Formica table, ripped out what remained of my hair, pointed my finger at everyone in the diner and screamed, “See how my hair is scattered? One day your children will all be scattered!”.

That got me an involuntary commitment to a psychiatric institution on the grounds of perceptual abnormalities (I would call them visions) delusional grandiosity (well, I am a holy prophet), and violent and violently sexual thoughts.  These days, when I open the Bible and read what I wrote, I can understand that last concern (misogyny in chapters sixteen and twenty-three, for example), but listen to this:

my country had been conquered by the world’s first superpower; I had witnessed all the horrors of war, you should not need me to remind you what those are; then, transported to a foreign land, I’d been made to kneel before gods that were not my gods and to sip on a culture that I found ridiculous; of course I had dark thoughts.

Last week, thirty years later, I watched Pulp Fiction again, in my apartment on a personal computer. Now that I’ve lived in Babylon so long, swallowed so many anti-psychotics, I can laugh at the humour: Harvey Weinstein was one of the producers.

I was told by the people in the hospital, that I may not actually be Ezekiel, just someone who’s anxious about changes in world power and his own potency.  I hope we can keep our rule of law, freedom of speech and democracy; but re-open Brad’s apartment door and those dry bones crash to the floor, shot through with sarcasm, left to rot, the gunmen long gone with a briefcase of what? Money they’ll give to a gangland boss.  If we can speak the truth bravely, we can make those dry bones live, even in a valley of fear.  The news will be on in under and hour, so I think we should all go home now.  That’s probably a good idea.

2023