Taking "mutant" back

I missed boingboing.

They didn’t go anywhere – the popular blog is still going strong. I did. I still got the RSS feed on my palm, and my reader… but I stopped looking at it on a regular basis. Other, more “important” things started crowding into my time.

And without realizing it, those “important” things kept sapping at me.

Being a happy mutant – as the boingers espouse, and as I read way back when in the Happy Mutant Handbook – is fulfilling Marx through a capitalist framework. They’re all working. Working hard, in fact. They aren’t afraid of work, and espouse an ethos that prefers – celebrates, even – working it out for yourself instead of buying a ready-made solution. They are not alienated from their work at all. They are working freely, of their own choosing, in things that both let them survive *and* fulfill them personally.

I had gotten away from that.

There’s been flashes – meeting Ms. Kontis, for example – but it’d slipped away from me for a little while. Our American culture does not celebrate happy mutants – it desires to crush them. Freaks, weirdos, and geeks are all marginalized.

In a sense, that’s good. . I would hate to see the mutants be corrupted and influenced by the “mainstream” world. But it makes it hard to remember, to persevere in the face of the great grey of modern mediocrity and conformity.

The angsty teenage cry of wanting to be non-conformist is a rallying cry against the alienation our society forces onto us, the way we pigeonhole others… and ourselves. We mock those angsty teenagers, because otherwise we would have to admit that they are right. We are complicit, both as oppressors and oppressed.

It’s up to us to find other happy mutants, and celebrate our time with them. To let the grey and pink normality wash over and across us, while we tread water unaffected, a singing naughty pirate penguin sea chanty delightfully off-key.

Preferably with a spray-painted two-seater Segway.

3 thoughts on “Taking "mutant" back

  1. I wanted the Hello Kitty Segway. 🙁 I have a pink bike though 🙂 I forwent the Hello Kitty tires 🙁 But I am still looking for a nice weather proof Hello Kitty sticker 🙂

    Just saying.

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