Term used to characterize an oppressive majority, set of standards, or other oppressive mainstream institution.
The term was coined by writers Robert Anton
Wilson and Robert Shea in 1975 through the persona of Markoff Chaney, a
midget struggling to understand and destroy
society's oppressive managerial hierarchy in one of the books of the duo's "Illuminatus! Trilogy."
The relevant passage of the term's context is as follows:
---
The
Midget, whose
name was Markoff Chaney, was no relative of the famous Chaneys of Hollywood, but
people did keep making jokes about that. It was
bad enough to be, by the standards of the gigantic and stupid majority, a freak; how much worse to be so named as to remind these big oversized clods of the cinema's two most famous portrayers of monstro-freaks; by the time the Midget was fifteen, he had built up a detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed (he hated that word) the relative misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin and even Robert Putney Drake. Revenge, for sure, he would have. He would have revenge...
Damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the
square, the average, the whole measurable world that pronounced him a bizarre
random factor. Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul he declared war on the "statutory ape," on law and order, on predictability, on negative entropy. He would be a
random factor in every equation; from this day forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the Midget versus the Digits....
---
(n.) "For well over a year, those black kids fought the statutory ape, but to no avail--they ended up getting convicted for crimes they didn't commit."
(adv.) "I
got rejected by the
NBA again. Apparently geriatrics are automatically disqualified. It's statutory ape, I
tell you."
