CAKE POLICE

"I know some of your friends, girls and boys alike, said Socrates, who walk around night and day with earbuds stuck in their narrow ear canals so as to funnel the hypnotic racket of their beloved songs into them. In the process, I admit, they deaden the angry impulse in themselves that constitutes the second instance of the Subject. They're like iron softened by a fire of melody, and in this way, from the unsociable wolves they were, they end up being like angora rabbits: fluffy, soft, civilized... But if they keep on diluting their lives in an ambient soundtrack, which is of course extremely melodious, the very principle of courage will eventually disappear and the Subject within them will lose all its tension, so that when war breaks out or when they have to confront harsh repression, they'll be, as Homer says about Menelaus, no more than 'feeble warriors.'"