THE BREAD WE GET MUST BE OUR FREEDOM: A GRITTY MANIFESTO
How a mascot means more, memes better, and fights harder — simply by existing
On the verge of harvest season an unblinking chaos god bursts forth, dangling from the ceiling, brandishing a t-shirt cannon, bright as the setting sun and confounding, repellant even, to the unprepared. In this ecocidal age it is no accident that a giant corporate entity has disturbed the meditations of an ancient ochre. As much as imperialists attempt to cripple nature, tame weather, and brutalize sacred lands, they cannot suppress the ineluctible spirit of the earth itself. Gritty is here, for Gritty has always been here.
The National Hockey League posits Gritty’s narrative as that of a pet that obediently follows its future owner home, happily subsisting on Zamboni shavings and dollar hot dogs. It is more accurate to describe Gritty as the shape-shifting flock of swallows that roosts in the home of whomever has burned their nesting grounds. It is no cute thing that displaced humans are often forced to melt snow because they lack plumbing or access to fresh water, and can only afford only the cheapest of reject foodstuffs. This we recognize immediately as the collective voice of those displaced by predatory landlords, gentrification, and colonization. This is why Gritty.
Every sports fan, at their core, is a type of communist: if you are enough for the team you are the team. Their loss is your loss. The function of the mascot is energy transfer: express frustration, channel spirit, activate the assembled multitudes. A mascot is useful, purposeful, absurd, ready to absorb and refract the dynamism contained within a space. Gritty, as metaphoric embodiment of the triumph of the working class, instantaneously compels the recognition of labor as a form of energy.
Sport collectivism at its purest exists in defiance of capitalism. The endless financial excavations of the public pocket by the sports-industrial complex — exorbitant food prices, extortion in the form of ticket sales and affiliated merchandising — largely serve team owners and corporate stadium landlords, not the warriors who have lived and died in service of the sublimation of the individual for the sake of team. Witness the punishment of professional sports figures who take a stand against injustice. Capitalism suppresses the truest form of sport, mocking the phenomenon of the collective as mere distraction and folly in order to diffuse the potential of thousands united in singular purpose.
It is no accident that Gritty should emerge via the medium of hockey. Pure gnarl, hockey is blood and speed in ways rarely experienced through any other North American professional sport. Hockey is sticks and blades and ice, constantly in motion, freezing cold and echoing. It is energy at 30+ miles per hour. Trickster hooligan and literary tough, hockey is the righteous vengeance of a united front. Ice is transformation, an elemental cousin to anthropomorphic entities like the Golem of Prague and The Thing, who are in turn physical manifestations of protection and guardianship. What could be more hockey than Ben Grimm, the padded clay goalie of the Fantastic Four, pronouncing “Its clobberin’ time!” What could be grittier than a creature crafted from inanimate muds in service of the greater good?
The very embodiment of unity, Gritty is a They. If Gritty appears to be male it is because Gritty’s manifestation has been controlled by the patriarchy to deliver an illusion of palatable neutrality in the form of the masculine, a famous trick that does great disservice to all involved. Gritty is a simultaneity and therefore devoid of gender, defying categorization. This is the true face of orgasm, orbs agog, tongue lolling. Their eyes look at everything at once, pupils skating wildly out of control in mindless open-mouthed joy. And what is focus but part of the narrative of capitalist success — the myth of a single minded individual with his eyes on the prize. The favoring of ambition over altruism and cosmic selflessness. Confounding vision as a linear experience and thereby challenging authoritarian definitions of success, Godhead-mascot Gritty decentralizes the male gaze. Gritty’s genderlessness advocates for radical pleasure available to all. The chaos-magic of orgasm brings one into the present, face to face with creation (and thus destruction) to know the unknowable, channeling us closer into being more present and alive.
An ethos of pleasure such as Gritty’s flies in the face of the Proud Boys’ refusal to masturbate as a function of moral purity. Fascism thrives off the frustrated orgone of youth, repressed and entombed by the patriarchy, existing in suppression and misdirection. As an earth elemental, Gritty cannot help but exist as an undefinable accumulator of orgone, a beneficial container of free, unregulated sexual energies that are beholden to none. Fascism aligns itself as the arbiter of measured responses and control (in the guise of self-control), calling out any opposition as irrational, emotional, unreasonable. What could be more irrational, more emotional, than the expression of pure pleasure and enjoyment in the face of unhospitable environs?
It is time to admit that nerd culture is guilty of indulging in the worst aspects of its mien: isolationism, abnegation of responsibility, nationalism and otherwise indolent and selfish pursuits utterly lacking in regard to a common purpose outside self-aggrandization. Worship of digital spaces leads to the pollution of rivers, the hoarding of capital, and the objectification of the citizenry, allowing for trauma transference on a global scale. Capitalism, patriarchy, colonization, xenophobia, white supremacy, genocide: these systems are pain. It is easy to create pain in a stranger to ease one’s own pain, and indulgence in this senseless cycle generates only brief analgesic and zero solution. This morass of open wounds and othering of one’s own problems nurtures a type of quicksand, a sinking feeling which destabilizes in order to exploit weakness.
Pepe (as of 2018) is the ultimate fascistic creation: a corruption of true art through the redirection of frustrated patriarchy. Right before the sands of obscurity closed overhead, someone grabbed the image of a sweet dumb frog naïf idly commenting “Feels good, man” and fed it into a machine fueled by rejection/ dejection/distance, only half-thinking while they did it. Handed off and deformed in service of mass-appeal memes, Pepe was saddled with spiritual significance of the sort normally ascribed to evangelism and its attendant hypocrisies.
Pepe, in this distortion, is a false god because his initial replication is based in falsehood: it doesn’t always feel good, man. Philosophically, “feels good, man” is removed from context and thus one step away from “this is fine” (room on fire). Whereas Gritty is born out of work and danger and cold and struggle and selfless assistance in the face of authoritarianism. Manifesting energy for the collective is struggle, and not necessarily about feeling good all the time. Taking everybody’s energy and rallying it. Acknowledging that one is no longer a helpless child subject to the whims of society, wishing things can or should go your way, absent of self-reflection yet loaded with ego. This is the infant vulnerability that fascism exploits — our reptilian need for things to go precisely our own selfish and self-serving way.
The rise of Pepe memes referred to a universally self-indulgent atmosphere of I Want, I Don’t Care, I’m At A Distance. Reason has been hijacked and employed in the service of racism and white supremacy: separating families, imprisoning the innocent, implicitly (and explicitly) sanctioning murder. One might even argue reason has been distorted in the service of capitalism since the age of exploration, when complex societies around the globe were wiped out by disease and memorialized as savages. There is no reasoning with this power play; it stems from a fundamental flaw. Logic and rationalism have failed culture, paving the path to war, and now the only way out is to embrace the wilderness of the subconscious. In this place, Gritty is immediately acknowledged as Pepe’s opposition, terrifying those who would wish for the ease of equivocation and the status quo. This is the landscape of the Gritty meme, where humanity is struggling to eradicate fascism through surrealism, through sex, through the tools of the chaos guardians.
Pepe, in his original form, existed as a type of id, living in a perpetual infancy with his hapless half-animal friends. His whole existence, before and after the perversion of his image in the name of fascism, is as digital shadow; a frog unable to leap into physicality, he can never place two skates on the ground. Pepe is a smokescreen, a vapor. Gritty, born of the earth itself, three dimensional, challenges and expands the foundation of community in the name of solidarity. They are a vector not of xenophobia but of the collective acceptance of all. Whereas Pepe has been controlled in order to represent control, Gritty is fully-formed, a nothing into a something, representing the same type of unbounded vibration that smashes walls and rebuilds from the ground up. Because dismantling the narcotic tentacles of capitalism and patriarchy happens out in the freezing cold.
Gritty is forces which thrive in unforgiving landscapes, crafting and sustaining an existence out of sheer undeniable life force. A winter god knows that in order for there to be life, there must be death. There must be Death. Death is birth, a gateway to new life and to know that and embrace that is to know one of the great and fearsome mysteries. Death is not an end but a door to a new beginning and only by making ourselves vulnerable and resting in discomfort can we align closer to the true spirit of the cosmos. To face without fear a lack of permanence and to say in the face of not knowing I will still strive for what is beyond my knowing, beyond my zones of comfort, at the outskirts of my ego.
Furthermore, Gritty is not just resisting. Gritty is revolting. Resistance is a type of ownership and another type of wall — still trying to hold on, still claiming a territory, still attempting to assert a primacy. We see that this type of response does not serve those who have never been given a stake to claim in a white supremacist capitalist system. Gritty is spring summer winter fall, revolution that generates and smashes and revives. Not merely a girding of armaments to sequester oneself and one’s assets but a riotous pushing back. For what claim can resistance take if the ground upon which it is enacted has been stolen, abused, destroyed by capitalism, given to one on the terms of the industrialists and colonizers. From the corpse emerges the mushroom, the tree, the future. The public immediately recognized this in Gritty, recoiling at first glance in active (acts of) repulsion. Change is messy and unattractive — but we all know that arbiters such as “attractive” are foisted upon the people as placeholders for the trappings of capitalism, to infest the cultural peoplehood with false competitions that distract from the true enemy.
The time is upon us. The old memes, modes, and monuments do not serve us and must be retired. New gods have arrived, and they are orange.