"The Story of Jon Henry"

Jon Henry’s life was taken by no other than the war machine itself. They stood over his body holding their guns sincerely, with their expressions cold as ice. Faceless on the outside, inside they were laughing. They knew that with the elimination of Jon Henry they would secure their oppressive regime’s power. To insure that there would be no internal threat to the beautiful war machine George W. pulled the trigger himself. As George looked down beneath him he saw the death of freedom. As he stood over Jon he proclaimed himself as the land of the unfree’s Capital Lord. George knew that the threat of Jon Henry was far too great for the hierarchical hegemony that he was bringing the world under one feudal order. Jon Henry represented the free spirit that was in all people, he represented the work for freedom from the fate of being pawns of George’s mendacious war game. With Jon Henry now dead, George knew that freedom was now dead too, and that the world was now his board, the pieces, his to command. He looked at the Earth as it was his crystal ball, the images swirling around and taking shape as he saw fit. George felt the power of complete control as he applied his aesthetic vision to the world, his art, the spectacle of war.

George W. believed that by killing the man who’s destiny it was to fight the machine from within he would be safe at home in his world domination. What George didn’t know was that by meddling in the situation of the free spirit his spectacle of war would evolve into an epic. The dead Jon Henry has only gained a new poetic freedom. In life Jon was a symbol of the tendency of man and his praxis. It was Jon Henry’s work to fight the machine; it was his character. Now, in death, he will no longer have a status of productivity, he will be ascended into a negative poetic status. In stating that in his death he has ascended into a negative poetic status by no means explains that he is gaining martyrdom. It simply means that his life was pro-ductive and laborious while his death is simply poetic art that is the negation of productivity and life. Poetic freedom can not be life and therefore can not be productive and or productive for life. The nihilistic circle proclaims that for the freedom of art to be attained, it must first admit that it is nothing---it is dead.

The original John Henry was a legendary American hero who stood for the strong sense of praxis that the people carried with themselves in the past days. In those times to simply have work was all the freedom a person wanted. The work gave people the money that only rich kings and queens could previously acquire and brought a new bourgeois mass a sense of some comfort that was previously only royalty’s pleasure. People came from all over the world to participate in the spectacle of capital because they know that the spectacle was their work that would give them their life. This strong foundation of praxis was the glue that held together their lives, providing monetary gain for themselves and more leisure in which to partake. Then finally, thanks to the revelation of the Bush posse the spectacle of capital reveals its epitome. WAR is the ultimatum of capital. It is the result of an energized spectacle of money. In the name of cash, GodMoney is the fuel that will dive us into the ground. Gain is intertwined in the roots of the cancerous tree of America. And they call the mechanized vacuum of the wretched rich freedom? As the past becomes history and the new Jon Henry sees the object of the spectacle in front of him he knows that in order to be free he must fight against the assimilation. He must face the war spectacle and battle it to the death.

In both the new story of Jon Henry and the original the conclusion is the same. Both fought the machine in order to liberate man through work and maintain his place as the ruler of his own fate. The battle Jon fights with his life is the battle to hold onto praxis as life. The machine is a symbolic manifestation of a threat to praxis; a threat to life. Each story ends with Jon dying a death that gives an illusion of a battle that can still be fought, a battle that maintains its productivity after life in the legend of story. This battle that is fought in the poetic death can only be an illusion of a productivity for life. The act has a negative status and subtracts from the reality of the living. The poetic death is the infiltration of the subjective nihilistic nothing into the objective space. It is the awakening of time.

True freedom comes from within and is manifested through one’s own struggle to be free from one’s own self. I was an individual who searched for the monster, seeking the massive machine that represented the oppression of my life. I stood in front of the spectacular goliath because it was my destiny to fight it. Like the original John Henry, I came face to face with the monster, the machine that stood as a threat to my individual freedom.

During this end, a time of all times together at once, the old meet the new and the past meets the future. The old legend of John Henry is united with the new and together in their story of death a bridge will be formed that can bring the present into context. The past will be forgotten and the future will be a dream. All that will be left is the epic. A never-ending story of a struggle against the ghost in the shell, an aesthetic nihilism that is consuming the world bearing the Nothing Face.

Contact Jonathan Henry:
jonhenry@experimentalparty.org

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