This spring and summer of 2019, a friend of mine in the building trades told me a tale of a man on his crew of some thirty years, a half-Mestizo-Mexican, half-Irish-American bruiser, a veritable Ahab of knuckleheads challenging the sedentary, part-time, African American criminals of his neighborhood to rude street brawls as his savage ebony tart follows him around videoing his senseless combats, which he replays for his coworkers.

This man has done some few years in prison, was recently arrested and released for beating a street tough senseless with a chain and is destined to be shot or incarcerated or both, a physical specimen with nothing constructively destructive to sink his violent energies into.

He has been seen on film fist-fighting with three young bucks, knocking two senseless and chasing the other like a deranged superhero. He walks about the blighted urban zone he is homesteading in all a bristle, like some Viking berserker challenging Irish kerns to combat in the muddy lanes of Clontarf .

He has recently survived a knife fight with an ebon warrior on the streets of Baltimore, putting his overmatched foe to flight and has also beaten a man on his front porch for parking in his parking space—though he owns no car, imagined to be his territory, before the front door of the house he rents.

What has traditionally been the place of such a man?

There has always been a place for such a man, fighting under the command of smarter, more ruthlessly reserved men, in Arуan warbands in all of their manifestations, from Sumer, to Troy, to Rome and the heather haunts of Gaelic clansmen, down to Confederate troopers and todays Navy SEALs and military contractors. Special police units—increasingly federal—recruit and use men such as this to fights the neo-tribal wars of social control in the sputtering ruins of this dying civilization.

This man, Conquistador Jones, wages his own war of defiance according to some dimly expressed impulse, like the last warrior of the Alans or the Vandals, refusing to sell his spear to lingering Rome or the aspirational Germanic kings.

Has this savage street thug been ruined by Modernity, twisted into some mongrel strand of his forefathers who conquered entire worlds hitherto unknown before they set their foot on alien shores?

Or, might he be mindlessly expressing a rejection of Modernity, of the most refined domestication of the human soul, according to some primeval instinct—a feral soul raging against that which is devoted to rendering him both indistinct and extinct.

-James LaFond, Thursday, August 15, 2019, Galesburg, Illinois.