The Once and Future Child

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group 28 May 2015.

Dan Gilbert

Returning back to Arthur as representation of the children of the world for a moment, I see Arthur as the perfect foil for Farthington. As is perhaps the point.

On one hand, we have Farthington who is a sum of humanity, in a sense. However, he seems to represent the waste of abundance. Having no content of his own, his identity is constructed externally through his reposting, retweeting, and recycling. He's turning other people's intellectual commodities into garbage disguised as a commodity. While he's done no work of his own, he gets all of the worldly gain. Sounds like a lot of people I know.

On the other hand, we have Arthur. Similar to Farthington, Arthur too is merely a sum of all that is around him.  However, he seems to represent the abundance of waste.  Perhaps, as with all children, Arthur is even more moldable and bendable than Farthington. The difference between the two men is that Farthington externalizes the world around him with closed eyes while Arthur internalizes this world with the wide-eyes of a child.

I guess this makes him Arthur White: The Once and Future Child.

Just as Gilbert and other anti-democratic bullies want to exploit the children, Gilbert has plans to exploit Arthur whom he views as small, unimportant, and vulnerable. To Gilbert, Arthur has a purity that must be taken advantage of; he has a trust of fellow man that must be manipulated. So, of course, it only makes sense that the savage sisters, with their fierce motherly instincts, take Arthur in and protect him as though their own child. Seeing no threat in such a small and gentle being, Gilbert's doubt in Arthur is the catalyst for the crumbling of his empire.

Too bad for him. So it goes, Don Gilbert.

Or perhaps in exiting the inner-world and immersing himself once again into the outer-world, Arthur chalks his vision up to a hallucinatory side-effect of some pills some doctor makes him take to make him less crazy. Or, better yet, in telling his vision to his brother and Farthington, they force him to undergo more ECT. Though he sometimes has dreamlike flashbacks of his visit to this inner-world, the majority of his time there is shocked from his brain.

So it goes, Arthur White.