Part III: The Celt

[This is part three in a six-part series. If you haven't read the previous parts, I suggest that you go back to November 9 and start at the beginning, as each part builds on the next.]

Does everyone have this thing that lives inside of them, this thing that gets riled up when they are pushed too far, a thing that finally rears up and says, “No. I will not take this.” I’m assuming that everyone does. We probably explain it away as adrenaline or the instinct to flee or fight when faced with danger. 

However, I feel like, for me, this thing is not a mere instinct. It has a personality. It lies dormant most of the time and has often let me deal with risk on my own, when I would very much like for it to be present. It decides on its own when to come and help me and when to sleep.

I call it The Celt. As a matter of fact, I should admit that I call him The Celt, because there has never been any doubt in my mind that he is male. He is an ancient Irish Celt that courses through my blood, an echo of a long-forgotten ancestor. He is wild, he is almost nonverbal, he doesn’t have any use for the niceties of modern life. If he walked on his own through my usual day, he would leave a swath of destroyed electronics, twisted machinery, and injured people behind him. He is really a fairly unpleasant fellow: squinting suspiciously at everyone, dark hair hanging in near dreadlocks across his broad forehead. He carries a number of large weapons whose purpose is clearly to kill, not to just stop, his attackers, and I can tell from long acquaintance with him that he uses these weapons offensively as often as he does defensively. He smells bad. I doubt he’s ever immersed himself in water for any purpose other than ambush. He is generally in a foul humor, and it’s best to just leave him alone. Which I do.

But I have this one great advantage with him. He lives inside me, so my survival is of prime importance to him. In that sense, he is quite solicitous toward me. He is kind of like the big dogs that live around me on the farm. As far as I can tell, they are unaware of or apathetic toward my presence. But if a visitor–-it wouldn’t even have to be a stranger-–seemed to be poised to harm me, those dogs would go for that person’s jugular. The dogs don’t love me; they are simply bound to me by some sense of family that I do not understand. The farm dogs would even defend me to their deaths. I have no doubt about this. The Celt is one of those dogs; our bond is blood, even if we are separated by centuries. He may not love me in the way that we think about love. But he would die for me.

There are two kinds of people that The Celt hates more than any others: bullies and bureaucrats. And when I get pushed around by either one, The Celt boils to the surface with a speed that frightens me. His eyes turn to slits, his nostrils flare, he hefts his axe with his right hand, bouncing its haft in his left hand, feeling its weight, rubbing the sharp edge with his thumb in delicious anticipation of the mayhem he is about to loose upon these weak, puling moderns who had the gall to offend his family, his blood. He stands between me and my enemy, ready to do whatever it takes to protect me.

Whatever happens next usually becomes one in a long list in the book titled, Not Some of My Prouder Moments. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate The Celt’s efforts on my behalf. I really do. But there aren’t many ancient Celts left. They don’t understand guns and Tasers. They really don’t “get” lawyers and courts and the American judicial system. They know only their own narrowly defined limits of right and wrong. They know Justice, but the nuances embodied in the realm of Law escape them. One cannot pound a lawyer right at the crown of his skull with the rather considerable end of the haft of one’s rough iron sword, rendering the man dead or comatose, without immediate consequences.

Bureaucrats are just bullies in white collars or slightly rumpled uniforms who wield rules and procedure instead of guns or maces. Merciless longtime “civil servants” at the DMV are not swayed by my plight, even if this is my 18th visit and I took a number three hours ago. They have nothing invested in serving me. If they skip me, there will still be plenty of other cattle to call. And when it’s break time or quitting time, they will clack down their “Closed: see next bureaucrat” sign and leave, with absolutely no mercy for the despondent faces of the beleaguered masses huddled at their counters. I can tell that they take a certain kind of glee in this—schadenfreude, I guess, knowing that we may have many advantages over them, but this, this one thing, they have over us. The DMV is their world and they rule it with iron fists. They are bullies. But they have the law on their side, and if The Celt shows his temper in their domain, you will spend what seems like an eternity in DMV purgatory. Worse, if The Celt goes berserk when dealing with bureaucrats, you–the physical body that houses him–will pay dire consequences. So, I must keep The Celt at bay, even if it takes sedatives, when I am in the presence of bureaucrats. 

But, now, the other sort of bullies: common thugs, mean kids, what have you. Bullies understand The Celt. Bullies know the world from which The Celt comes. They understand the forces that made him. Bullies–-who are really just armed cowards--quake in the presence of The Celt, leaving a pool of urine around the Air Jordans that they stole off their last victim. I have found that The Celt is a quite useful presence when faced with bullies, because bullies fear and respect living, breathing, barely-contained violence that is informed by conscience rather than greed or power. They believe and live by the maxim that might makes right, but what they don’t understand is that when Right has might, less-pure motives such as their own fall away, and they had better head for the hills.