Allow me a moment to
emerge from my acid bath of
cynicism
and survey the checkered
battlefield
before you cannibalize the
white knight at play
for being a man of
ulterior motives
while your opponent mocks him
as a turncoat to his own
sex.
The poor piece meant only
good intentions
but now he is sacrificed for the sake of a
stalemate
and a chuckle
as both sides disdain him,
seeing compromise of any kind
as weakness
or subterfuge
or sabotage;
the much reviled
“Nice Guy”
being an emphatic
enemy sympathizer
in a war with
Man on one side
and Woman on the other,
playing the same game
since time immemorial,
never stopping and never
winning
because if one side wins
and the other side loses
then both sides lose
as the Red Queen stumbles
and finally falls.
It does not matter if they switch
sides
(or “genders”)
or seats during this
Chess match—
neither chair is an absolute
throne.
Woman’s pawns will betray
in hopes of becoming the next
Yas Queen,
and Man’s pawns will betray
in hopes of
pwning other pawns
and laying the
Queen
behind the King’s back,
and the naive White Knights
run afoul of the
militant thought police
on both sides because
there is no such thing as
friendly fire
among radical feminists
and men’s right activists
as they lob firebombs
in online forums and
article comments
and the social media sniping
that is the Mad Max tribal wasteland
of the internet;
everyone, including children,
can be victims of the
IEDs
known as
identity politics.
And sooner or later
an extinction comes
brought about by the
unblinking, unthinking
brinkmanship
as the two sides play a game
within a game,
dividing their own forces further
and so succumbing to the greatest strategy of
“The Powers That Be”
as they sit back and watch
Man and Woman
purge their chess pieces
in pursuit of ideological purity,
forever divided, and thus
easily conquered; meanwhile
the quintessential
“Nice Guy”
becomes a “nice” guy
only in the anachronistic sense,
“nice” meaning to
“not know”, to be
ignorant
as in he is ignorant of the
mire into which he unwittingly drives his
noble steed headlong
to save
no one whatsoever
from the clutches of human
complexity
and identity politics,
his sacrificial crusade nothing more than
an honorable mention in the
Darwin Awards
as both sides laugh
and I submerge back into my
acid bath.