tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323488612023-11-16T05:39:01.860-08:00Litgeek RamblesEssays, mainly, generally about cultural ideas, with some left wing politics.The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.comBlogger199125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-61074068012293891082015-03-08T10:22:00.000-07:002015-03-08T10:22:34.465-07:00Sunday Morning Service: Jeremiah and the Value of Not Being AnsweredI used to try to be upbeat and witty every time out, here. Then I went dark. Still, I like to avoid the personal, even if I am changing the rules. For example, I'm not going to talk about how our latest college president disappeared one weekend and why this good result was for a bad cause. That sort of thing would really get eyeballs, but it would be the kiss of death (or the second base of death, or maybe even the going-all-the-way of death). I also try not to go into purely religious stuff.<br />
<br />
Well, nuts to that. You've been warned.<br />
<br />
I will confess, first: I knew Gerard Manley Hopkins's "<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173669" target="_blank">Thou Art Indeed Just Lord</a>" before I knew the lament in Jeremiah that Hopkins is referring to. If you can read his sonnet, understand it, and not feel a sharp nail in your heart, you're stern, grim, and possibly psychopathic:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Disappointment all I endeavour end? </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.</div>
</blockquote>
I've written about the sonnet before, and here, so I won't belabor the faithful or task the fickle. His reference is to Jeremiah 12.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1 You will be in the right, O LORD, when I lay charges against you; but let me put my case to you. Why does the way of the guilty prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?<br />
2 You plant them, and they take root; they grow and bring forth fruit; you are near in their mouths yet far from their hearts.<br />
3 But you, O LORD, know me; You see me and test me -- my heart is with you. Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and set them apart for the day of slaughter.
<br />
4 How long will the land mourn, and the grass of every field wither? For the wickedness of those who live in it the animals and the birds are swept away, and because people said, "He is blind to our ways."<br />
5 If you have raced with foot-runners and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? And if in a safe land you fall down, how will you fare in the thickets of the Jordan?<br />
6 For even your kinsfolk and your own family, even they have dealt treacherously with you; they are in full cry after you; do not believe them, though they speak friendly words to you.
</blockquote>
It's strange, isn't it? Any reader can figure out that there are divisions. Like a sonnet, we can see pieces. Lines 1-4 seem like a completely different thing from 5-6. In fact, 1-2 is the charge, 3-4 is a call for justice, and then 5-6 are . . . different. The first part is the question of theocidy -- why is sin allowed to continue, and why do the evil prosper? The context of the twelfth chapter is that Jeremiah has discovered that there is a plot to kill him.<br />
<br />
Lines five and six are God's answer. We're often thrown off in reading Psalms and the major prophets by the shifts in voice, because ancient Hebrew did not have quotation marks or use our conventions in signaling speaker shifts. God's answer to Jeremiah is, essentially, "If you're ready to give up now, just wait for the challenges coming up! You have no idea what injustice is."<br />
<br />
Everyone who has read the Bible notices that Jeremiah's first lament is like Job's. <i>Job</i> is the master class in both theocidy and perseverance. However, Job is global and cosmic. Job asks about suffering, whereas Jeremiah asks, as the psalmist does, about the very specific problem of frustration, hopelessness, and fruitlessness in the midst of the prosperity of the wicked. Jeremiah, unlike many of the psalms, can see that there are two systems of "good" at work, that there is the "good" of wealth and plenty, and there is the good of God's will. As the wicked run riot, there is an evil and a greater evil, for not only does the pious man suffer, but the world is degraded and brutified by being under the control of evil men. He appeals to the judgment for the good of the land and the man.<br />
<br />
It is the most specific formulation of the question of why the wicked prosper, and Jeremiah is calling for a hastening of the Day of the Lord. He would, therefore, seem to demand a specific answer.<br />
<br />
God's answer is specific. However, Jeremiah has enough knowledge of the cosmic and human scales of justice to invoke the dual outrage, but not enough to actually locate his own place in those scales. Nor does he understand more than his own heart, ultimately, at a particular time. God answers with the specifics that Jeremiah is really moved by. Jeremiah is afraid and outraged by a plot, and God tells him that this is but the first hurdle. In Jeremiah's own biography, this grievous moment will only be a moment, and this danger will be, comparatively, an inconvenience.<br />
<br />
The big question gets answered in that way. It is the same way that Job is answered. God does not translate His justice into human terms for a human, who is always a component part of that justice, to understand, but, instead, refers outward. For Job, God referred to eternity and creation, to the world itself. For Jeremiah, it is his life and the history of the men plotting against him.<br />
<br />
The lack of an answer is the answer, but not in the way that silence is an answer. The answer is not "ineffability," nor is it merely, "suffer and learn," but rather an answer that points outward, always outward, beyond the person asking and the powers of language to contain. Job must gain, lose, and gain and bless the Lord for the blessing to mean as fully as it does, because the context is the meaning of "The Lord has given. The Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." Only outward, beyond the encapsulation of the phrase, is there meaning for the phrase.<br />
<br />
For Jeremiah, the answer will come not from questioning, but from the campaign of his whole life -- the race with horses and the thickets of Jordan -- which will both moot the complaint and make Jeremiah one of the answers to the question.<br />
<br />
I couldn't think of any pictures for this one.The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-68362133010503549952015-02-04T16:47:00.000-08:002015-02-04T16:47:35.580-08:00Sale of the CenturyThe challenge of historicism post Hegel is not diagnosing ghosts for the metaphors by which they organized their lives or elaborating upon the tropes that kept them from seeing the plain truth before them, nor is it in diagnosing the dead's schizophrenia and condemning their certitude that phantoms were real. Explaining to one another that they were all infected and limned by the absurd "seven races of man" and exploring the narrative of such a belief is not frightening. No. What the anxiety of historicism is the awareness it commands of us that we ourselves are hooded by a metaphor we speak so often that we no longer hear it and the dire likelihood that many things we know to be obviously true, even clear states of physical being, are just as much phantasms as the "murderer's brow ridge."<br />
<br />
Once we learn about Hegel's idea of history as an ineffable force, we're confronted with a paradox and a panic. The paradox is that, if history is determining and no person is ever free of history, then how was or is anyone ever able to come to the realization that history is a determining force? It would have to be the historical moment of Hegel that made it necessary and fitting for Hegelianism to occur, because there is no room for "genius" to be effective. The panic is that the student of history as much as the subjects of historical narratives is being controlled by the historical moment.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
In the 1970's American intellectuals devised the notion of "paradigms" and "paradigm shifts." Around the same time, Michel Foucault wrote about the "episteme." Both are related, if not genealogically descended, from Hegelian historical determinism. In both cases, every generation or epoch of humanity organizes not merely what it knows, but what it <i>can know</i> along specific framing metaphors. It may be "father/family" that acts as a prefiguring metaphor in an age -- showing up in everything from discourse about the king/nation to church/flock to landlord/tenant to market regulations -- or it may be "inviolability of the body." Regardless, the who world of speakers and thinker is captured before it even emerges by a pattern of perception, processing and speaking. Political and economic power flows through these figures, but human knowledge itself moves only when "revolutions" occur in these frames.<br />
<br />
We can reaffirm this anxiety, if we ever start to calm down or feel hopeful, by resorting to Marxism or remembering the painful lessons of Wittgenstein. According to the former, super-structure is only ever a reflection of base conditions. Marx never quite got around to writing a book about art, but the <i>Marxists</i> have hardly been able to shut up. Let's just say that what exists in language is not anything so coarse as Immanuel Goldstein's NewSpeak from <i>1984</i>, nor is knowledge and artistic expression controlled by the capitalist directly, but what we can know and say and ask is at least engaged in a project of social and economic control. It gets that way coincidentally, and not because someone at Goldman-Sachs declares it, but ideas that spread do so because they are going through expensive media that is funded by investors, and "successful" persons are emulated, so individual, class-conscious, and free expression is at long odds.<br />
<br />
Wittgenstein simply casts a doubt on the status of interrogation. He does not make knowledge less likely, but he points out so clearly that our words control our thoughts that he makes any honest person a skeptic about even asking questions.<br />
<br />
No one wants to hear that he or she is a fool, and no one prospers by talking about the emperor's nakedness. However, I'm about to suggest that something "obvious" is actually artificial and mercantile.<br />
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I have dealt with being a religious intellectual for a long time. As I have gotten older, I have recognized that the dormitory conversation about "is too!" "is not!" in regard to God never grows up, because every year a new group comes into the dorm room. Therefore, I try not to get involved with naive arguments on the subject. People who argue their passions instead of their reason are impossible to reason with, so, since my religion forbids my slapping them, I really don't have much to say.<br />
<br />
However, I was drawn on the subject too recently. I get annoyed by the "Stupid people are religious" line. I can have 20+ years of college education, and the other person can have a high school degree, but that person is much "smarter" and "knows" more because he (or she) does not believe in God. After all, he is following the course of Reason and Science. Only people who don't know anything believe in a "magic sky father."<br />
<br />
What I said there caused enormous hurt. I said, "You bought your atheism from the store, and it was on sale, cheap." I pointed out that all of his argument was a script written for him and a discourse of power, that he had swallowed a cultural narrative that had been invented. He had not discovered it, had not bravely achieved courageous individualism against the repressive hoards, and he had not surmounted some vast intellectual height. He had gone along with a cliche.<br />
<br />
That is what I'd like to discuss, perhaps in my next, since this is already long and has big words. Atheism is an invented concept. It is a cultural moment that has a history and functions in history. Like most of the poisonous metaphors that limit perception, it tells a lie about itself. Like most of the successful cultural adhesions of the last century, it serves capital.<br />
<br />
<br />The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-18104111923962714792015-01-24T06:50:00.000-08:002015-01-24T09:06:09.953-08:00Falling from Small Heights<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
"Man is, and was always, a
block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to
think and consider." -- Thomas Carlyle, <i>Sartor
Resartus</i></div>
</blockquote>
As part of an "assessment instrument," I've been reading sample essays from Oh-ficially scored sources. See, our students read four very short arguments responding to a common prompt and then write their own argument about which is the best case. We free ourselves of subjectivity by using nationally certified sources. Our old essays are now too well known by the students, and we need new ones for the exit assessments anyway, so that means reading this year's samples. The old set responded to "As people rely more and more on technology, their capacity for problem solving and creativity will surely diminish." The responses were quite different from one another in approach, and the best was different from the middle one in thought as well as expression.<br />
<br />
This year, all the prompts are business related. The best one, for our purposes, was, "For the leadership of the future, it is imperative that children be trained in the values of cooperation rather than competition." The responses, graded by the Official services from six to one, all agree with the prompt, and the differences between them are differences of compliance with written English. The "six" has complex sentences, and the "one" has sentence fragments.<br />
<br />
They are all dumb. In fact, the "six" would have gotten only a B from me, because even it had the "Leaders will need to be encouraged in their school" object/subject number confusion (unless all "leaders" go to the same school). <i>Not one</i> of the responses was analytical. Not one questioned the dichotomy of the prompt. Heck, the "five" essay began with one of those, "The dictionary defines competition as..." gambits that is only supposed to be used if a person intends to redefine a term.<br />
<br />
Consider this my answer, and my protest to the stupids that this Official voice wanted to offer people going to its test prep site.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
"Skepticism (is) the virtuous mean
between two vices: absolute knowledge and absolute ignorance."
-- Odo Marquard, "Skeptics: A Speech of Thanks," in <i>In Defense of the Accidental</i></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
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<br />
"Competition" and "cooperation" are actions incomplete in their own. They both require objects, company, friends and enemies. One competes or cooperates <i>with</i>. These are neither values that can be taught in the abstract, nor are they transactions that can be consistently enforced without teaching a social setting that mandates the activity.<br />
<br />
The submerged assumption in the writing prompt is that "<a href="http://antidotezine.com/2014/03/20/an-assault-on-the-mind-education-and-culture-under-neoliberalism/" target="_blank">MBA culture</a>" has harmed America. Well, that's hard to argue, but it's also important to follow. "CEO America" looks at quarterly profits, does not know or care what the core business is, and is pleased to fire all of the labor force and eliminate all the goods being made by the company, because those are debts. The resulting "profit" will increase the stock price, which will increase the CEO compensation, and the trading of the stock will increase the company value, which will increase its price on being bought, which will ensure the board a good package on the merger. Thus, all of those making decisions will make enormous profits. The things being made will cease, but. . . that's not the business of the CEO. The CEO and board's duty is to shareholders, not to "consumers" or "labor."<br />
<br />
Obviously, the effects of stock traded corporations are evil. Obviously, CEO's are bad for business and bad for the larger economy. Obviously, market funds are bad for the nation. Even their positive effect on stimulating start-ups is cancelled by their decapitation of those same businesses when they begin to produce, and especially when they <i>manufacture</i>. The specific evil is a system we have developed of <b>captial pitted against commodities</b>. When capital moves and "innovates" and "is made" without any relationship commodities, then there is a separate industry of "wealth workers" who set themselves in <i>opposition</i> to those who work in everything else, because their fundamental task is to shake capital free from any attachment to any person. (If you don't think we are post-capitalist in this manner, I'll see you in comments.)<br />
<br />
By nature, humans are cooperative. By nature, humans are competitive. By nature, humans compete against themselves preferentially over other people, and we do not need studies to establish this.<br />
<br />
Look around you at lunch. How many people are playing <i>Candy Crush</i> or played <i>Tetris</i>? How many people are playing video games solo? When they play in networks, do they play against one another, or do they play with each other in teams? In general, people play against fixed goals and against their own performances, seeking to be perfect at things. It is why they go to the gym and shoot hoops or lift weights.<br />
<br />
At work, how often are you asked for help? How often do you ask for help? The point is that people are competitive, but not hostile, and they are cooperative, but not sycophantic. Indeed, we do need to battle the damage done by the naive assumption that "capitalism" is Darwinism and the even deeper lie that Darwin's "survival of the fittest" meant survival of the biggest, toughest, or strongest -- "fitness" means toward the environment, and strong, mean, nasty critters are not very adaptable. We have to fight the fascist theme that "America" is about individuals fighting it out without any help against one another for a triumph.<br />
<br />
More, though, we need to understand that we are under assault by a post-capitalist economic theory that is disloyal, immoral, and corrosive of all values and value.<br />
<br />The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-9795476133007169972015-01-19T10:26:00.000-08:002015-01-19T11:48:40.915-08:00A Consideration of "Nigger Lover" for MLK DayI am not afraid of words. I am afraid of meanings of words.<br />
<br />
In the 1990's, my students at UNC Chapel Hill were encouraged not to refer to all persons bereft of a Y-chromosome as "girls." The result was that I got numerous sentences like the following, "The females would like for fraternities to go away, but this is because some females are unable to get dates and are jealous." The <i>boys</i> who wrote for me managed to use the word "female" (not woman/women, because the Anglo-Saxon plural confused them) and intend things at least as venomous and ignorant as any man ever had when he referred to his co-workers as "the girls." At the same time, the fact that these boys knew that they were not supposed to write "girls" meant that they were aware that there was <i>something</i> going on, that they were conscious to some degree, even if this consciousness only resulted in reactionary knuckle dragging and chin drooling self regard in the short term.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
"Shall we expect some
transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a
blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined,
with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their
military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by
force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge,
in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of
danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring
up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot,
we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen,
we must live through all time, or die by suicide." -- Abraham
Lincoln, "The Lyceum Address" 1838</div>
</blockquote>
I recently ran into the word "nigger lover" for the first time in decades. As you might imagine, I don't spend any time in the "Comments" at FoxNews.com, where, I gather, the term is somewhat alive. I will be discreet with the context because the context isn't actually <i>very</i> important: a high-up individual in a college was accused of having used the term. Students were extremely upset. In what follows, I will not say "N-word," and I won't say "n***." I consider "nigger" to be profanity. Just as I would not capriciously type "shit," so I would not capriciously type this word, but, just as I would not laboriously invoke and avoid the word, so I will not here. This post is <i>about</i> the meaning of the word, and therefore about the word itself.<br />
<br />
First, do I believe that the college official used the term? No, not particularly. It's a bizarre term. It's a term that depends upon a <i>biographical</i> rather than geographical context, and I am pretty sure that it doesn't fit.<br />
<br />
Here's the thing, though: what is the insult involved? Let's think through this term.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is a picture of EVERYTHING</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
If you were called a "nigger lover," as I was in 1968, would you be insulted? Would you even understand the charge? The term is much, much worse than "nigger," because it is an inescapable indictment of the speaker. It does not mean "inter-racial lover." It means, to its speaker, "traitor to the white race" and "person giving advantages to the unworthy and hateful villains, Blacks." The person who uses the word affirms two things:<br />
<ol>
<li>The speaker believes in skin color race. This person believes that persons descended from formerly enslaved persons, or simply persons derived from African stock by more than two generations, are <i>naturally</i> different from all other persons. This difference is a matter of innate competition as well as an entrenched and immutable superiority/inferiority. The person who uses the word believes that a child born with dark skin is already, before its first word, inferior, inimical, and alien to the speaker him or herself.</li>
<li>The speaker believes that everyone else agrees with her or him. The person who calls someone a "nigger-lover" is assuming an audience, a geography, a region wherein race is not merely understood, but where the assumptions of inequality and enmity are accepted. The person who uses the word believes that history and biography can only be understood as the enactment of a race war.</li>
</ol>
It's shocking. The idea that a person might get upset with another person and reach for an insulting epithet is understandable. It's not acceptable, but it is understandable. The stressed out and angry office worker might refer to another as a Pollack or Dago or Spic in a moment of rage. The rage is the problem more than the word, and this is largely because the <i>audience and community that believes in and accepts</i> such terms as truths is not merely gone, but historical. That's not true for "faggot" or "nigger": there are huge populations that still hold the hostility.<br />
<br />
I said that I had been called one in 1968. I was a little kid living in Savannah, Georgia, and the subject was Martin Luther King. It was becoming acceptable for white people to like King. My mother did. My father didn't, but he was generally not political. On my street, though, the kids were pretty clear: if you supported King, you were a nigger lover. (They didn't know what they were repeating or what it meant.) I was only six years old, but I remember being deeply, <b>deeply</b> puzzled by the charge.<br />
<br />
What the heck did they mean? Of course I was a "nigger lover." Aren't we supposed to love all people? Isn't that what Jesus said? Aren't we supposed to love our neighbors?<br />
<br />
The next year, we moved to Atlanta, then on to New Jersey, where I was accused of being a slave holder, because I was from Georgia, and then we came back to Atlanta. I didn't hear the word actually used again until last week.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Mr. Nickles: "There must be</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Thousands! Whats that got to do with
it?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Thousands -- not with camels either:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Millions and Millions of mankind</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Slaughtered, and for what? For
thinking!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For walking round the world in the
wrong</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sleeping the wrong night wrong city --</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
London, Dresden, Hiroshima.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There never could have been so many</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Suffered more for less. But where do</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I come in?" -- Archibald MacLeish,
<i>J.B.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> Prolog</span></div>
</blockquote>
Today, we have MLK Day, and we also have more overt racism than I have seen since my childhood. While we, the good guys, were triumphant during the 1980's, the bad guys were simmering and bubbling beneath closed pot lids, and they were spreading. The craziest idea of the anti-civil rights era -- the idea of races coming from the book of <i>Genesis</i> and there being a Christian race -- spread among the unmonitored, unlettered, uncontrollable right wing fundamentalist church networks -- reactionary racism riding reactionary religion.<br />
<br />
I have heard, with my own ears, children seriously informing me that white people came from Adam and Eve, but Black people came from monkeys. That kind of gibberish was, in my day, hard to find if you were <i>looking</i> for it. Today, it walks up to you with a blonde ponytail and an ad for a Father/Daughter dance, with coupons for Chik-Fil-A.<br />
<br />
The person who said that the college official said "nigger lover" was probably employing rumor as one of the last tools of the powerless in a situation that feels arbitrary, but I wouldn't want to judge. I do know, though, that the cultural milieu, the set of assumptions necessary, for using the word don't exist for the official. They don't exist at the college.<br />
<br />
What frightens me more than any foul term is that the culture surrounding me is such that people are using that term, thinking that term, and believing that term's world again.The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-15885543067208460312014-12-25T13:03:00.000-08:002014-12-25T13:03:25.965-08:00Why You Think the Internet Stinks NowI have been active
on the Internet since 1990. In those days, we had Usenet at the
university and moderated private bulletin board systems (FidoNet)
for amateur fun. This makes me four Internet generations ago, if we assume that an Internet generation is about five years, rather than twenty-five.<br />
<br />
Indulge with me in nostalgia. Before the FCC decided to sell bandwidth to the .com
top level domain, the Internet was a place of low or no graphics,
where users were almost exclusively .edu accounts (with a few .sys,
.mil, and .gov), and most accounts were a first initial and last name
(mine being misspelled by the IT people at my U, so I had anonymity even then). HTML sites were
usually navigated by <a href="http://lynx.isc.org/" target="_blank">Lynx</a> or one of the other text-only Unix based
clients. Since the entire endeavor was text on slow dial up
connections or fast connections on computers with monochrome
displays, it was an empire of words subordinated to either a group's
activity (e.g. rec.bicycle) or a group's academic research.
University and government workers created massive amounts of free
information, and the early HTML systems were ways to link information
infinitely. People spoke of beginning with an interesting note
in the newspaper, clicking on an odd term, following to a strange
fact, seeing a strange name, and spending hours “surfing” from
site to site, but all of this was via reading.<br />
<br />
When America Online
and CompuServe opened their closed systems to the Internet, everything changed. There were floods of new users who
reflected average America. While many snobs thought that “killed”
the Internet, it was, instead, the underlying decision to
<i>commercialize</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the Internet,
combined with </span><span style="font-style: normal;">hypertext, that
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">turned the Internet into
today's creature of clicks and “eyeballs.</span><br />
<br />
By
1996, and certainly by 2001, most “Internet” users only knew the
world wide web, <span style="font-style: normal;">not Usenet,
not discussion</span><span style="font-style: normal;">. The world
wide web itself “was” a series of commercially profitable sites,
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">with the last of the .edu
created purchased (e.g. <a href="http://bartleby.com/">Bartleby.com</a>, created by Columbia University
library </span><span style="font-style: normal;">to make all of its
Columbia UP reference works available for free</span><span style="font-style: normal;">,
was sold, then resold) </span><span style="font-style: normal;">or
forgotten</span><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">U</span><span style="font-style: normal;">niversity
server </span><span style="font-style: normal;">site</span><span style="font-style: normal;">s
provid</span><span style="font-style: normal;">ing</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
information </span><span style="font-style: normal;">became gradually</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
invisible </span><span style="font-style: normal;">to average users
because </span><span style="font-style: normal;">they went
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">unadvertised</span><span style="font-style: normal;">,
and “the web” was no longer a place where persons “surfed” on
an adventure of information. Certainly by the time the "tech bubble" burst, each website invested in <b>keeping </b>visitors on sites, in sites, and <i>preventing
</i>outside linkages. Websites became more pictographic, with
an increase in sensationalism, </span><span style="font-style: normal;">as
the same pressures that turned superabundant newspapers in 1900 into the Yellow Press created </span><span style="font-style: normal;">increasingly narrow and vertical forms of discourse (“vertical” refers to
information that is recursive
and closed, in this case). What had been peer </span><span style="font-style: normal;">groups
in </span><span style="font-style: normal;">conversation bec</span><span style="font-style: normal;">a</span><span style="font-style: normal;">me
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">interest groups engaged in </span><span style="font-style: normal;">a
tailored retail experience. </span><br />
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<br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: normal;">“Friendster” and “MySpace” were non-profit simulacra of the older Internet. They
succeeded, to the degree they did, by offering like-minded culture</span><span style="font-style: normal;">s</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
and subcultures. (There have been other
simulations since, including Reddit.)</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
However, when
their host/software
companies offered stock, they
were purchased by media corporations
that, as early as 1998, had been imagining an
Internet/cable
vehicle whereby visitors would be captive, ordering television shows,
movies, books, radio, and the rest on an a la carte basis by the Internet. '</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: normal;">Neither
the websites nor the delivery technologies were in place for such
visions to be realized. (This
vision, and its failure, was paradoxically
critical to the collapse of
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/17/business/enron-s-collapse-the-dot-com-initiative-exploring-a-deal-to-offer-sex-videos.html" target="_blank">Enron</a>. The Amazon Kindle/Fire
is getting very close to its
realization today, according to critics. If they can "own the pipeline" and the store and the production, then the consumer choice is finally completely eliminated -- or "business uncertainty is minimized," if you prefer.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"> I'm no <a href="http://eff.org/" target="_blank">Electronic Frontier Foundation</a> warrior or <a href="http://www.fsf.org/" target="_blank">GNU</a> freak. I haven't the money to be the first or the skills to be the second. I did join Wikipedia in 2003, though. My frustrations with it were that it was not dedicated to a common project of construction as much as it was a "community." My criticisms of capital in technology are not propelled by idealism or ideology. They are directed solely at an analysis of the deterioration of academic freedom and investigation because of a capitalized web.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-style: normal;">One thing I've noticed is that a genuine analysis of technology cannot be found under the title of "technology" writing. For about ten years, I noticed that the writing about computer technology, in particular, fell into one of two camps. Either a new device or program was the Swiss Army Knife of Heaven -- able to turn every student into a buddha and genius -- or the next device or program will free the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenrir" target="_blank">Fenris</a> wolf and extinguish the sun for once and all. "Tech" writers are either reviewers or advocates. Sometimes, even worse, they're salesmen.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-style: normal;">Look, capitalized websites serve capital. I get it. That's just and right. But non-capitalized websites are now all but invisible, especially since Facebook learned from MyFace's failure and AOL's persistence and began to fold in a whole universe of outside websites into its "you're still on Facebook" experience. Regular people are beginning, just beginning, to realize one of the more cynical web "memes": If you're not paying for the product, then you <b>are</b> the product.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-style: normal;">All of the commercial Internet is riding on public infrastructure. Ask AT&T how it feels about cable companies getting access to "their" infrastructure. Well, how should we feel, then, about commercialized Internet services working against the public's interests or the nation's constitution? EU investigators found out that a person who creates a Facebook account and immediately deletes it generations <i>twenty thousand pages of data that Facebook does not delete</i>. That, after all, is their data.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-style: normal;">Windows 8.1 is roping all its users into Xbox Live accounts and beaming geo-location to Microsoft. Apple does that with iTunes. This is without even talking about a smart phone. Any person who owns such a thing is foolish, in my opinion (as a phone, it's a phone, but as a computer, is it equal to a laptop? as an mp3 player is it equal to even a Walkman? doesn't it offer imitations of a dozen functions but at inferior performance, and all with the solitary advantage of fitting in a pocket?). I'm sure you have already read that the new iPhone made news for <b>not</b> including a backdoor into user encrypted data for NSA and FBI. </span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
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</div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Going onto Google is a losing proposition. It geolocates the browser. After a few searches, Google begins to tailor results to "customize the web experience." It predicts the sorts of results this user wants. It discounts, for example, "old" web pages -- so if you're looking for a news story from 2004, you won't find it, because Google simply doesn't want that to show up, because "normal people" don't search for old information. A few more searches, and the results are "customized more." </span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-style: normal;">Google's search is used by Bing, by the way. Facebook will tailor search results and "help" the user extensively as well. </span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-style: normal;">Doesn't that scare you? Don't you see why that's the end of the world?</span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-style: normal;">The limitations are being made, in the case of Amazon, Facebook, and others, on the basis of likely purchases, not what one wishes. In the case of Google, it's made on the basis of what you have been interested in before. In other words, these merchants are making decisions about the sorts of questions you can ask, and answers you can get, on the basis of likely sales, likely happiness, not answers, not knowledge, not growth.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-style: normal;">As an academic, I have to have open searches, because the Internet has consumed the library. Once that library has then become a public library with card catalogs assembled by advertisers, whole floors of the stacks go missing. The only answer to it is yet more capital outlays in the form of JSTOR and EBSCO subscription services. </span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-style: normal;">Meanwhile, the Facebooking of conversation has pushed conversation into <i>interest groups</i>, where like meet like, the agreed hear from the confirmed. That is guaranteed to be sterile or frenetic.</span>The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-60393723715198092052014-12-22T19:52:00.000-08:002014-12-22T19:52:25.002-08:00Let's change the rulesMy only real rule, and it's about me and for me, so I don't have to justify it before any tribunal, is that I won't talk about myself on this blog. I'm fully aware that there is no other subject, if we trace the matter analytically through hoop after hoop, but you can take your hoop and put it in your nose. The simple fact is that I don't like me. I don't find me interesting. More, I loathe "bloggers" who write about the miracle of their daily lives. While these verminous scourges are less common these days, when I began here, they had not yet found their Facebook selfy Reddit Instagram Pintrest nirvana.<br />
<br />
I recognize that I have an audience of perhaps two, thinking optimistically. I have made this so.<br />
<br />
I want to change the rules a little. I want to talk about the vitreous that blocks me, even if it isn't universal. For example, anyone who reads all of this blog gets the impression that it is written by someone with clinical depression. That makes it nothing special. My last (look down) commented on the fact that this is just how things are, and talking about it might be profoundly useless. However, today I decided to make a play list for my funeral. I didn't do that because I'm planning on hastening the pale visitor's conquest, but because I've gotten a couple of cancers. That's no big deal, except that I'm paid so little that some months mean hunger (really), and our insurance just pushed the deductible from $3,000 to $5,000. I just, in essence, got a $5,000 pay cut.<br />
<br />
The IRS has chased me around and taken this month's paycheck. The reason is that my mother borrowed against a life insurance policy of mine some fourteen years ago. The insurance company made sure that the premiums would never go to repay the loan, and therefore the policy would die. When it did, the company reported that I had gotten $5,000 in "income." I, of course, had gotten not a cent. My mother had. She's dead. I don't blame the taxmen. I blame the insurance industry that wants old life insurance policies to die, because they're too cheap. Nevertheless, I owed $1,000 on the "profit" I had made when the policy died. I barely get $1,000 a month, so I wasn't exactly able to pay them from my excess funds.<br />
<br />
There's good news, though. If I owed $10,000 or more, there is a "Fresh Start Initiative" to take care of me to renegotiate! But owing $1000? Well, hell, boy, everyone can afford to pay that!<br />
<br />
I've been working at a job for 10 years where I am making $5,000 less per year than the starting pay for my position.<br />
<br />
Still, money is not something I think about until I have to. I hate money. I hate the people who allow money to carry value. It is, after all, the most abstracted and irrational unit in the world. It is unconnected to morality in the extreme. It is unconnected to work nearly as far. The construction worker works much more than the stock trader, but the stock trader makes an obscenity of ejaculating money, while the construction worker makes a wage and destroys his body while listening to Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boors.<br />
<br />
My college president thought it would be a good idea if all of us provided our Facebook profiles to him for a new intranet (that would be linked to the school's Facebook page. . . I'll let you figure that one out). We were also supposed to explain our conversion experiences. When did we realize that Jesus was Lord? What book or preacher was most important to us?<br />
<br />
"Consider the lilies of the field. They spin not, nor do they weave...."<br />
<br />
I do not do Facebook. I never will. I have Reasons. I put "<a href="http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/christmas_webcam" target="_blank">A Poor Man's House</a>" by Patty Griffin on my funeral play list. My first song is "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16o-o-Trl88" target="_blank">On the Nickel,</a>" because it says, "If you chew tobacco, and never comb your hair," which sets out two of my conditionals.<br />
<br />
I took a long time, but I finally came up with a response to the president's request. He wanted to know, so I decided I should tell him. I wrote two documents. I'll share them here, I guess. Maybe I won't. One is the actual story of how I <i>lost my faith</i> thanks to the evangelical movement and its emphasis on altar calls. I came back to it later and discovered a quiet, certain, faith. I never, in the document, point out the problems with the theology and polity that this college president and his new trustees embrace. I only tell the truth. Then I turned in a second document and explained why Facebook and all of the commercialized web is the destruction of academic inquiry.<br />
<br />
This second one is boring as a sand pudding. I will post it here.<br />
<br />
The point is that we once had a volunteer Internet, where discussion was organized by joint projects or activities. We exchanged that for <i>interest groups</i> and consumer subsets under Facebook or one of the others -- all designed as being conversation under the power of sale.<br />
<br />
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I will offer one of my blogs of Ideas next.<br />
<br />
I remember the t-shirt from 1991: "The Internet's Full: Go Away!" That was a response to the "AOLamers." I thought the snobs were wrong then, and I was right, but I thought the Internet <i>had</i> been destroyed then, and I was right about that, too. In 1993-4, I thought the invasion of graphics into websites was the problem. I was feeling a symptom. The truth is that the decision to sell bandwidth to .com meant that, at best, the "real" Internet of Usenet days would exist only in an underpopulated, unadvertised, esoteric bubble, but "the web" would become a midway of freakshows, where the marks are the exhibits.<br />
<br />The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-61814348714670265142014-10-10T11:42:00.000-07:002014-10-10T11:42:02.080-07:00Therapeutics and Cures<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things
that it were better my mother had not borne me. Iam very proud,
revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have
thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act
them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and
earth? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a
nunnery. -- <i>Hamlet</i> III i</blockquote>
<i>Hamlet</i> is a great play for grumbling. It has the best condemnations of life one could hope to find. Hamlet, the character, is a peevish young man, but Shakespeare was a middle aged man who had license to write a peevish young man. It's the perfect combination.<br />
<br />
"You know, I just can't stand myself/ And it takes a whole lot of medicine/ For me to pretend that I'm somebody else," Randy Newman wrote, in "Guilty," and the song (on "Good Old Boys") hit a common vein for muddled up men. From guys in foam trucker hats to bicultural intellectuals with delivery marijuana in Manhattan to stifled men hurling insults and encomiums at ESPN, the sense of self-loathing may be the most common sense, the only commonsense, in the American man.<br />
<br />
I suppose there are men who like themselves. I think I've met some who, standing in a flood light and a room of mirrors, puff their chests out and say, "That's what I'm talking about!" However, I'm not talking about the water bugs who can live on a soap bubble. If those men don't make up for their lack of self-loathing in outright hatred from everyone they know, then I, at least, will hold them odious.<br />
<br />
We begin in fantasy. We start as princes to be, quarterbacks and inventors of indispensable goods that will benefit humanity. We dally in plans that give us joy because of their fundamental justice: every plan is an affirmation of our potential, our uniqueness, our power. We even put plans into action and make achievements. However, we are not the jet pilots, the commandos, the secret agents, the wizards and rock stars we knew we could be, if reality honored -- if reality only <i>allowed</i> us to enact our plans.<br />
<br />
Sartre said that Hell is other people, and the adolescent's fantasies fail to take into account other people, except as objects. Young men's plans fail to take into account unfairness as a founding principle of society. Each individual relationship is as fair as the two persons make it, and there is goodness beyond description to be found, but lurking behind the immediate, always present beyond the personal, is a force like entropy -- a force of profit, of grasping, of protecting power and subjugating the masses, and this force asserts itself like a flood against the leaky boat of the personal and the social.<br />
<br />
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Thoughtful people talk about The Combine or The System or late capitalism (although we're really in a post-capitalist state, to my way of thinking, as capital has divorced itself entirely from commodity and produces rents without reference to any commodity exchange). The less thoughtful people talk about The Government or immigrants or nepotism or loss of traditional values. All of the young men who had their plans and put their plans into action and found themselves anxious at the end of every month, or deciding which bill to be late on, know that something isn't right. All of them know that they have failed, and they know, accurately I'd say, that they never really had a chance.<br />
<br />
Anger turned inward is depression. Yeah, well, depression is also realism.<br />
<br />
Some of the most capable, beautiful people I have known have been crippled by depression. It never mattered what they could <i>do</i>. It only mattered how far they failed themselves, and they had failed themselves pretty deeply.<br />
<br />
It occurs to me at this date, far too late a date, that we are a strange, crazed people. We are trying to "treat" depression. We are not trying to treat the fact that inflation is occurring (all food products are shrinking and staying the same price -- as if there were only a few manufacturers and they colluded to raise prices by shrinking portions. . . but such a thing could never <i>really</i> happen, could it?) but not showing up in an inflation rate, that surplus labor has meant increasing profits and no increase in employment, that tax rates for the top go down, while the taxes on the bottom go up. . . but I'm only speaking of money, because money is bothering me, personally. We have no frontiers, no new societies for humans to forge their identities anew, so our old accumulations of cultural power have begun to rot and invite violence. We have turned our nation into the value system of the MBA, and the MBA's value system is anti-humanistic and anti-human (as well as irrational).<br />
<br />
There is no cure for depression. There is no point in asking for this or that thing, this or that process of chemistry, to intervene. Depression is not, after all, abnormal. It is legitimate, and it comes from never becoming persons. It is despair, in the Kierkegaardian sense, but it carries with it its own ever-shifting demands. Unlike Kierkegaard's notion of despair, where one must live in the eternal present and engage the self in full awareness of the religious obligation, this is a compass with fixed legs: as the self gets more engaged, its expectation of what it requires to be fully alive moves farther along, and the gap is an acute sadness.<br />
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That, I suspect, is a prospect of living.<br />
<br />The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-71805126767514281002014-08-17T12:54:00.000-07:002014-08-17T12:54:53.919-07:00Strippers, Cops, and a War with DrugsI have known more prostitutes than police, more police than strippers. I have had conversations with strippers when they were off the clock, but I'm not an expert on what they do or why they do it. By the way, the number for the first two professions I mentioned is two and one. The difference is that I knew the detective was a detective the entire time I was an acquaintance of his, but I only knew one of the prostitutes had been a prostitute. The other was working, and I didn't know about it.<br />
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There are many, many documentaries by and about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq42knOLmQc" target="_blank">strippers</a>. The most interesting facet of their profession is the labor exploitation. The psychological exploitation isn't something the women seem to cite very often, but the labor conditions would have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Gompers" target="_blank">Samuel Gompers</a> calling out his guys. Watch any documentary on the job, and you'll come to the conclusion that the women are stolen from, subjected to poor conditions, and encouraged to spend all of the money they make on dangerous surgeries.<br />
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As for prostitutes, the subject is endlessly complicated from a labor point of view. Even the issue of trafficking turns out to be complex, as the numbers of women enacting a "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0300140/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Lilya 4-Ever</a>" scenario are probably low. (Even one is too high a number.) However, again, the women face <i>economic</i> exploitation that leaves them constantly having to work more to obtain the big payday they can see just over the horizon.<br />
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For a while, Salon.com was a cutting edge left wing political site. Then it became a click-bait site, where every article was written by Tracy Clark-Flory. "Ten Things about 'Divergent' that Related to My Lesbianism" and "Sex Toys and Me" and "Gender Equality and My Girlfriend" and on and on and on -- every piece was, "And how this totes relates to me! I'm amazingly hip! I like sex. With girls!" Now, Salon is trying to be a left wing political site with writers again, although designed as if every person on the Internet were either blind or color blind and viewing things on a 3" screen. (Don't get me wrong, "Miracle Pasta Recipe as a Hipster Lesbian" articles still run every day.)<br />
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All along, Salon has had a "sex positive" feminism. (That means, for people who like to reduce long arguments to clickable bylines, that it is a feminism that embraces sexual pleasure as a right and believes that it is good to discuss desire and set out sexual norms that avoid shame.) They ran, back in 2003 or so, a series from a Washington call girl. They also ran a story from a woman who was a prostitute in Cuba for a while. Both women attested to the same thing: the body takes over, and there is a bit of pleasure that's simply due to wiring, and they <a href="http://www.searchmedica.com/xml-resource.html?c=id&ss=defLink&p=Funnelback&rid=http%3A%2F%2Fubm-search01.squiz.co.uk%2Fsearch%2Fcache.cgi%3Fcollection%3Dpubmed-updates%26doc%3D4%252F23173716.xml%26off%3D0%26len%3D-1%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fubm-search01.squiz.co.uk%252Fpublic%252Fpubmed%252F23173716.xml&t=pubmed" target="_blank">lost intimacy</a>. "Intimacy," according to biochemists, is oxytocin. According to everyone else, it is a bond and closeness that follows a sexual encounter that is often the best part. Sex workers stop having that, and they report difficulties in achieving it with their mates, if they are married.<br />
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Sex work is not supposed to leave women an emotional wreck. I beg to disagree, but my sample size was small, and I do not wish it larger. It is enough, as far as I am concerned, to think that, at best, the women can count on "not awful" and then pay the price of a divorce from emotional connections.<br />
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There is a movie available on Netflix that I cannot hiss enough. It's called "Whore's Glory" in English, and it's only accidentally good. The German film maker gets credited for sympathy for the women, but I saw none. I saw, instead, a voyeuristic impulse that controlled the film so that the narrative simply <i>had</i> to lead to some on-campus intercourse. While the documentarian was chasing down the most degraded red light districts in the world, he let the prostitutes themselves talk about whatever they talked about, and the extremely young girls in India made a case against their dehumanization that is utterly shattering. For the most part, though, the women talk about how little money they're making, gossip about each other, and talk about Johns. Their attitudes toward men is as commercial, affectionless, and dry as it could possibly be.<br />
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A stripper in a documentary talked about how she came to see her breasts as an ATM. She would shake them around, and pull money out. Every man she saw on the street, she said, she thought of in terms of whether he would tip well or not. She had stopped dating, because she was convinced that every man she met went to strip clubs and was as bad as the customers who gave her tips, and whom she despised, every night. The prostitutes in "Whore's Glory" spoke of men either in idealistic terms -- the man who would be different, who would protect her, who would give her money -- or in terms of a cully.<br />
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Strippers can get tax deductions for their breast augmentation surgery. Silicone is the real <a href="http://how-to-strip.com/blog/the-truth-about-breast-augmentation-the-recovery-and-life-after" target="_blank">drug of choice</a> for the industry. Sex workers, despite what <a href="http://www.talkingdrugs.org/drug-use-and-sex-work-what-is-the-real-link-between-them" target="_blank">apologists</a> say, have a <a href="http://www.ihra.net/files/2013/11/20/Sex_work_report_%C6%924_WEB.pdf" target="_blank">correlative</a> link with narcotic use.<br />
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To sex workers, people look like Johns or unicorns. To strippers, men look like suckers to be played. To cops. . . .<br />
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The NYCPD detective I knew was a great guy. However, he told me himself that he had had to learn to look at the world a new way. The world inside the force looked like a war against scumbags -- that's you and me -- and victims -- also you and me -- and people trying to keep them from doing their job -- also you and me. When you see bad people and hear lies all day, you expect every stranger to be a liar. When you live and die by the idea that, like the military, you're not "fighting for" an abstraction, but for the guy next to you, the loyalty you build means that <i>of course</i> the witness is lying about the other cop doing something bad.<br />
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I find it rather easy to believe that a policeman shot an unarmed Black man to death in the middle of Ferguson, MO. I would believe he did it for the young man failing to <i>obey</i>. I know that the grounds for shooting for police have shifted since 2006, that police can now shoot if they <b>believe</b> they are in danger. No longer do they actually have to have their lives <i>actually</i> in danger; they only need to think so. Since Ferguson PD beat another Black man and then charged him for destruction of police property f<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/15/1321904/-Ferguson-police-beat-a-man-and-then-charged-him-with-destruction-of-property-for-bloody-uniforms" target="_blank">or <i>bleeding on their stuff</i>,</a> I absolutely believe that these cops -- whose county superiors later arrested an alderman for "failing to obey" -- would kill because they weren't being obeyed.<br />
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The police have a natural psychological bias. See crummy people all day, and you'll start thinking all people are crummy. See violent people all day, and you'll assume everyone's violent.<br />
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The problem is that the police only get to enforce <i>laws</i>, and they have to tolerate annoying citizens. If they can't do their jobs without releasing information, without being protested, without freedom of assembly, then <b>they can't do their jobs at all.</b> Police who "must" get MRAPP's and Strykers and automatic weapons and LDAP's aren't police: they're paramilitaries.<br />
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The recruiting for police makes it seem like a W A R on crime. The SWAT gear and military surplus allows all of the police to go out with JSOC styled garb and point rifles at empty-handed protestors. It allows the police to say that the crowd are "f*cking animals." It seals the assumption (that the public is criminal -- an entire prison population waiting for booking) with the rituals of conquest (not occupation).<br />
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The old "war on drugs" gave us the legal abuses that glaze these affronts. The "no-knock warrant," which is now served by SWAT teams, comes from the drug war. The roving wire tap comes from the drug war. The invention of SWAT itself comes from the drug war. However, all the heavy weaponry in local cops' hands comes from the 9/11 freakout. Someone thought that it was a great idea to put military junk in Wayback, Arkansas so that it could deter the Islamic invaders. Marry the "no knock" warrant and the SWAT with that stuff, and you've got Ferguson, almost.<br />
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If strippers need breast augmentations <i>ad infinitum</i> and sex workers look for central nervous system depressants, then what of the Valiant Watchmen on the Wall? It's possible to see the behaviors that we've seen across America in the last five years without a widespread drug problem among the police, but, as long as we're making SNAP recipients pee in a cup, making school teachers pee in a cup, making parolees pee in a cup, why not ask the local police to be screened for <i>anabolic steroids</i> and testosterone supplements? It's only fair. We do, after all, want to arrest any law breakers.The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-34029080565492244382014-08-08T11:15:00.000-07:002014-08-08T11:15:22.569-07:00Miss ElaineyTo clarify what is below, the point is really simple. I refer to McLuhan a lot, but that's because he asks us to ignore the novelty of a piece of technology and to focus instead on what it <i>does</i>. What it does, he says, is inevitably a replacement for something already being done, an extension of one of the human senses or capabilities, the recall of a forgotten technology, and the reversal of its initial extension and replacement. I grok that two of these are hard to buy.<br />
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Just focus on the first thing: every piece of technology replaces something already underway. Humans come to a piece of technology with the same brain they've always had. What's more, technologies create their own social norms. Remember CB radio, good buddy? Hashtag memory. The individual technology creates a <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20166719?uid=3739616&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104041419811" target="_blank">fetish</a> in both the "neutral" anthropological sense and the more potent <a href="http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/assets/files/society/pdfs/schulz2011.pdf" target="_blank">Marxist</a> sense. McLuhan's <i>The Mechanical Bride</i> talks about how a new technology presents anesthesia ("New!" "Labor saving miracle" "Lose Weight without Trying!") and seduction by borrowing from art. He had in mind the yearly parade of automobiles and dishwashers. Imagine if he had seen the explosion of articles praising the "revolutionary design" and "aesthetic" of the Apple iFad.<br />
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If we can ignore the borrowed clothes of technology and suspend the anesthetic claims, we can ask, "What does this do <i>by other means</i>?" In other words, if you want design, go to 90th and Park Ave. in New York. The labor saving claim is true, but it's a <i>compensation</i> for changing the way we do things, the way we organize labor, and the expectations we have. Allowing it to be more than that is to be seduced.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia7RQ92TwreqFSBy0S3aJ-jFyZYfhrLxhBqwo9Y_OeZbkuUQeoe8KT5PfNj62cKl07RDWGvXZQWJYyFwuCz3pm1bBDHQp-KJvhc481V5M0Ew-OCQIgioEj7nP7yxsvZbl1k5Fi/s1600/1941-unemployed-steelworker-Shorpy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia7RQ92TwreqFSBy0S3aJ-jFyZYfhrLxhBqwo9Y_OeZbkuUQeoe8KT5PfNj62cKl07RDWGvXZQWJYyFwuCz3pm1bBDHQp-KJvhc481V5M0Ew-OCQIgioEj7nP7yxsvZbl1k5Fi/s1600/1941-unemployed-steelworker-Shorpy.jpg" height="297" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From <a href="http://www.shorpy.com/" target="_blank">Shorpy</a></td></tr>
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With me so far?<br />
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Ok, the fetish of a piece of technology grows more and more essential as that technology is social. Therefore, a single user piece of technology such as the hoe will hardly have any fetish to it. There won't be "a right way to hoe," and there most especially won't be a "right way to get ready to hoe." On the other hand, driving a buggy or a car has an enormous fetish: adjust the music, fasten the seat belt, adjust the seat, set rules for "calling shotgun," and then going out to engage in heavily codified driving behavior.<br />
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A <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/generation-like/" target="_blank">great deal of money and advertising effort</a> has gone into making YouTube ubiquitous. Many dollar bills are betting that the future consists of every citizen of the planet watching and computing on a telephone. The new Windows 8.1 looks like a Kindergarten cut-out board book with its big icons (perfect for a phone screen) and reduction of text to a series of enigmatic gestures of hostility (e.g. "The Store").<br />
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"Video," as understood by persons born after 1995, is a free audio/visual experience found "on the web." It is anti-artistic, in that it is a product intended for consumption and repetition, but not consideration. Video requires response -- an up or down thumb or a forwarding to a friend -- but, if you understand the dichotomy of pornography and art, it is on the pornographic side. (Briefly: pornography is taken, devoured, and <i>used up</i> by its viewer, and it is good to the degree that it is <i>useful</i> in producing an effect. The pornographic is consumed in the viewing and therefore cannot teach lessons or provoke thought, because those are inimical to the pure sensationalism of pornography. The artistic refuses to be understood. It cannot be contained by the viewer and elicits mood rather than provokes it.) Video is flash paper.<br />
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If a teacher uses a video presentation or a video presence in a remote class, then the medium's fetish works against the purpose of the class. The medium (video) eliminates a set of uses and imposes a set of interpretive mandates.<br />
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All online teaching runs head-on into the fetish and unintended reiterations of the technologies we use. What I call "the big text box" runs into a problem, too. Again, forget the claims of saving labor for the time being and bracket any questions of "ease of use" or "design," because those are all claims astride or beside the critical questions of, "What is this, outside of the classroom" and "What is the fetish already in place?"<br />
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The Professor gets a big window. In the left pane is a list of the names with online/off status indicators, and below that is a dialog box for the students to "speak." The professor's right pane splits into one box for slides and another for web pages or documents brought up on the fly. The professor then types:<br />
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The Licensing Act of 1736 indirectly led to the success</div>
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of the English novel and the creation of Shakespeare as</div>
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"the greatest playwright in English." After Walpole's Commons</div>
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passed the Licensing Act, London audiences distrusted</div>
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any plays that <i>did</i> get to the stage, because such plays</div>
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felt like propaganda. Furthermore, playwrights couldn't</div>
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get plays passed by the censors. However, they <i>could</i> make</div>
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some money by publishing their play ideas as novels.That's</div>
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just what Henry Fielding did.</div>
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There is a slide up there saying, "*John Gay's <i>Polly</i> *Henry Fielding **Haymarket Theatre **Pasquin *Repertoire theaters with Shakespeare *Puppets!" However, to the shock of the true believer in online classes, student Chad interrupts with "When was Shakespeare born?" Addison takes advantage of a pause while the professor waits for students to catch up to type, "The syllabus didn't say that the first test was going to be part of our final grade. I don't think it's far."</div>
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What's happening is that the fetish of the Big Text Box is the online forum or the web comment thread. It's different from "watching a video," but it has a primitive social structure that repeats itself with depressing regularity. The rules lawyer, the "but you haven't done your job because you haven't <i>convinced</i> me that Jane Austen wasn't a lesbian" writer, the "you <i>have to</i> be nice to me; it's in the rules" special sunbeam, and, of course, the troll (the individual who goes to a place he (or she, I suppose) most hates to try to 'tell them off' or just make 'them' unhappy) -- each is standard issue in comments threads. </div>
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In an online class, students have every reason to avoid "web comment" behavior, but they have every reason to avoid classroom disruption in in-person classes, too. For students feeling frustrated or afraid, or for students who are just plain unhappy, "exposing this BS for what it is" seems worthwhile. When an online class uses the BTB, students know the personae they must adopt.</div>
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An Hoff Othat</div>
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Illinois Republican Bobby Schilling was formerly in the House of Representatives, and he wants his old job back. For one thing, he needs the money. He's only making $100,000.00 a year, and he made $174,000.00 while in Congress. He <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/08/1319901/-Former-Republican-congressman-makes-six-figures-says-he-lives-paycheck-to-paycheck" target="_blank">can't manage on his current salary</a>: </div>
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". . .the folks that are living paycheck-to-paycheck, which is most Americans, including myself, is that, you know, this [an imaginary tax to fund the ACA] is not something that you want to be putting out when you've got a kid that wants to play sports or you want to take a trip for vacation. Instead, you've got to funnel your money over to Obamacare, which is something you might never have to use." </div>
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Let us bask in the glow of the 5 watt light bulb glowing before his lenses<br />
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So, health insurance is terrible, because it might mean not taking a trip for vacation -- which is a decision we paycheck-to-paycheck people often grapple with -- just where we want to go for our vacations, whether we should fly or drive, and whether we should try the Virgin Islands this year or stick to Martha's Vineyard. Why, health insurance could even cost as much as. . . as a kid playing soccer. Well! In that case, the choice is easy: little Maradona needs spikes. (It's possible that Bob there could be thinking of a <i>daughter</i> and an actually expensive sport, like gymnastics or tennis, but we've got to remember that he's living paycheck to paycheck, so he has to be thinking of an inexpensive sport.)<br />
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I want to point out something in Bob's favor, here. I believe him when he says he's broke. This is because of my lesser known law ("Geogre's Law" is on the Internets, but I've got more than one of 'em): <b>Debt rises to income.</b> Also, <i>all people live on $18,000 a year.</i><br />
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Bob has no money. Bob makes a lot of money. Bob probably has nice stuff, including a nice car payment and a nice mortgage payment to make. Given his party affiliation, he probably has a tuition payment or two to make as well. He no doubt has dues and greens fees that he has to pay. He spends more per mile with his vehicle than I do, for example, because he would have a "nice" car, which means a heavy car, which means fewer miles to gallon. If he makes more money, he will likely get a private plane. No matter what, until he runs out of <i>desires</i>, the debts will chase his income, leaving him with a set amount with which to buy food, drinks, golfing magazines, pay-per-view sports, and Toblerones in hotels. That figure used to be $15,000, but I'm sure that it is now at least $18,000.<br />
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<i>There!</i> Two posts in one. Some pretty pictures, though.<br />
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<br /><br />The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-91869029358086757042014-08-01T10:57:00.000-07:002014-08-01T11:57:49.940-07:00The Valley of the UncanThis pun is available for adaptation, by the way ("The ICANNy Valley," e.g.).<br />
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The time is drawing near when I will be asked to consider technology and instruction again. I have never stopped thinking about it, of course, but once upon a time I was payed to be aware of the issues, even if no one actually wanted to <i>hear</i> what I had to say. (I blame myself. I probably didn't say it very clearly.) Now, though, I'm going to be caught between the cruising speed icebergs of capital and capitalized tech purchases and will need to explain why education, instruction, and the latest purchase aren't always aligned.<br />
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I got a new laptop, and for once, I'm current in software. I'm indistinguishable from consumer class, and it only took thirty years to get there. This means that there is a video camera built into the lid of the laptop, and both the NSA and Microsoft can turn it on at any time without my knowledge. Fortunately, there is a high tech defense against this. For a fee, I can relate the specs to you on the wireless network enabled BLACKTAAPE (TM) (Pat pending). By getting the properly designed, wholly chemical free and Y2K compliant BLACKTAAPE, you can place this device in front of the lens of the camera and be certain that no one is seeing anything you don't want to show.<br />
<br />
Anyway, even if you don't keep up with college education, you know that the trend is for online classes. This trend is driven by consumer impulses and a flood of G.I. benefits, an exponential growth of for-profit colleges, and, most of all, colleges and universities seeking ways of gaining revenues by reducing labor costs and facilities expenditures. Sometimes, schools try to own the online classes teachers create, claiming that the professors surrendered their intellectual property and copyrights by using college/university computers. Even when that's not the case, the colleges frequently pay less for online classes and demand more.<br />
<br />
In general, they are exceptionally unpopular among faculty. (Yes, commenter: <b>you</b> love them. That's great. I don't hate them. I'm talking about the general feeling.) Faculty generally figure out that exploitation is in the offing.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJPyeIzOCkKtLzqEMaGkFTBqpCK72P0p6YG-UI9GjqHz81h2he_2i70hMVCDJ4G3b9hlrY1k2VCFhq0oTiu08vJhLcxZLpp2z8X37BIh2U609-OyNCMadoUXc-N5Y354N0iAsZ/s1600/c+BG+fogflower2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJPyeIzOCkKtLzqEMaGkFTBqpCK72P0p6YG-UI9GjqHz81h2he_2i70hMVCDJ4G3b9hlrY1k2VCFhq0oTiu08vJhLcxZLpp2z8X37BIh2U609-OyNCMadoUXc-N5Y354N0iAsZ/s1600/c+BG+fogflower2.jpg" height="240" width="320" />I</a></div>
I want to talk about one small subsection of the phenomenon, though, and that's the technology of the online classroom.<br />
<br />
Assume a class size of 15. Assume the class will involve laying out background information and process instruction. In fact, let's go ahead and stipulate a mid-point class, like "Survey of British Literature 2: 1750 - 1945." To teach a class like that, there will be<br />
<ul>
<li>Historical background, genre background, biographical background, thematic background for major authors; construction of either a thematic narrative or an historical narrative to unite the material selected into an arc that will allow the students to frame the things they read.</li>
<li>Discussion with students of individual works to encourage close reading and strengthen student close reading skills; class investigations of longer works so that the students get to pioneer the exploration and discover when a reading has and lacks support.</li>
<li>Explanation of "how to write on literature." A survey class is structured as a first step in a major, so one needs to teach students how to write about literature with an awareness of critical perspectives; students need to know how to read criticism without being adversarial or slavish.</li>
</ul>
Now, ignore for a moment what technology you must use. What technology would you <i>choose to use</i> for these tasks -- provided that "in seat class time" is not allowed?<br />
<br />
No very good teacher is ever one-way about teaching. Giving background is close to one-way information flow, as <b>the information in the background</b> goes in one direction. However, the delivery, in person, is two-way. In a physical classroom, lecturers watch students, listen to whispers and groans, make personal asides to punctuate the depth of the information, slow down when students get behind, etc. However, this, and only this, can be replaced with a set of web pages or a video. Students can "watch a You Tube" of the professor and get an 80% experience, perhaps.<br />
<br />
The third thing -- "how to write the paper" and "how to take the test" -- seems as if it is just as susceptible to one-way, static replication, but it is not. Even in highly selective schools, where students have relatively uniform backgrounds, a class of fifteen students will have ten different misapprehensions about how to approach writing about literature. This is inevitable, <i>because the task is at the heart of the college major</i>. In other words, students will be uniformly heterogeneous because they're not college majors. A single talk or web page on "how to write a literature paper" that addresses the misapprehensions of students will either be a work of inexplicable genius or unreproducible luck.<br />
<br />
It's the second bullet point that's the hell.<br />
<br />
Should I be on video, with fifteen small thumbnails of the students, to "meet" with my class? Is that better than a large chat window?<br />
<br />
There is an irony here, because video contact is worse at reproducing the classroom than a flat text window. It is <i>worse</i> for my students, and much worse for me, to have video and video to recreate the in-person classroom than to have no pictorial representation at all in favor of text windows.<br />
<br />
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Think about what happens when you speak to a conference room. Think about what the people around the table are doing. The non-verbal communication is much greater than the verbal communication, and people will inaudibly negotiate a mood and behavior. This is why one class can be "mean" and another "sweet" -- with the same material presented by the same teacher, the students themselves will negotiate a mood among themselves without even knowing it, and this collective voice will hold until disturbed. This social harmonizing prevents the most egregious behaviors. (It also intimidates some students and prevents their asking for help.)<br />
<br />
When fifteen students are fifteen picture-in-pictures, they are fifteen individuals -- fifteen television sets. They don't negotiate with one another, and each is engaged in the social behavior of "watching video."<br />
<br />
<b>You</b> may think "video connection is allowing me to connect to my students," but each student has a history of viewing "video" on a laptop or desktop computer. There are conventions for YouTube and the others that overwrites the actual use made of the video link. "Watching video" is a fundamentally solitary behavior that is subject to the egoism of consumerism. "Watching video" comes with a "like" or "dislike" button, has a comments field, and invites "snark" or forwarding to Facebook. These conventions are <i>everywhere</i> except the online class, so the students, at best, experience contradictory signals from the media. More likely, each of the fifteen students conceives of herself as a solo entity and the professor as disembodied, if not a commodity, and the commodity experience (i.e. monetized routine found in advertising and placed in journalism) of "watching video" acts as interference against the perception of the professor as a teacher.<br />
<br />
The instructor for his or her part, will see fifteen separate, distracting behaviors across the screen. There will not be the corporate behavior one gets in person.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, if students engage a large text box, the experience pre-dating the activity is "writing a text" or "reading." This is an individual experience as well, but it is what McLuhan called a "cool medium." The cool medium of reading/writing allows or forces analytical thinking. While the video presentation should replicate "conversation," the technology by which it is arriving has already etched out a set of expectation that instead dominate the intended effect.<br />
<br />
Thus, it seems, just as it becomes more <i>possible</i> to have a video link with a class, it is less and less useful -- more and more counterproductive, in fact -- to do so, because the ubiquity of YouTube, Vine, Vimeo, and the rest automatically carry methods of interpretation in the very act of appearing by video.<br />
<br />The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-65412266787699462922014-07-21T10:54:00.001-07:002014-07-21T10:54:56.434-07:00More simple stuffIt appears now that <a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/07/raising-minimum-wage-creates-more-jobs.html" target="_blank">raising the minimum wage increases employment</a>. This is directly opposite of the "small bakery" micro-analogy that conservatives appeal to and everyday voters imagine.<br />
<br />
I offered students "Raising the minimum wage will/will not raise prices or lower employment." I warned my students in advance that, no matter what they thought, no matter what "common sense" told them, if they did what I required them to do and accessed <i>scholarly</i> reviews, they would find virtually no support for the "will" position. I warned them that academic economists saw the issue as complex, with various effects.<br />
<br />
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Of about 22 papers that chose the topic, two chose "will not." The rest chose "will," and they either used no scholarly evidence (a consensus) -- opting instead for Hurtage Foundation and Kato Foundation papers that wouldn't fool anyone and newspapers -- or used websites. All of the "will" people, though -- every last one of them -- informed me of the Iron Clad Rule of Capitalism.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If you have someone make you pay your employees more all of a sudden, then you have to make that money up. You either have to increase the prices or fire an employee. Suppose you ran a bakery...</blockquote>
<br />
That little canard was inescapable. I read it and read it and read it.<br />
The problem is that this mythical bakery didn't exist in Adam Smith's day, and it sure doesn't exist in 2014. The bakery they imagine is a zero sum, and that's typical of a childhood imagination. Actual bakeries, and we'll drop the bakery as soon as possible, pay for their materials, their labor, their advertising, their insurance, their licensure, their utilities, and then <i>charge extra</i>. The cost of the cupcake is not zero sum. The bakery is costs + profit = price.<br />
<br />
Profits, in most small businesses, grow and get shared with the employees, or else they go toward growth. The owner gets richer, sure, but the small business doesn't keep very many workers at minimum wage. As it grows, it rewards its employees.<br />
<br />
Who pays minimum wage? 1. Restaurants, 2. "big box" retail. There was a study of a local environment that showed inflation when there was a minimum wage increase, but it was of Chicago, when it mandated waiters and waitresses getting minimum wage. The restaurant business hadn't be set up to handle that, and so it did have a bulge in prices. Otherwise, true minimum wage (non-tipped) tends to show up in fast food.<br />
<br />
Mike's Manufacturing doesn't keep a large part of his staff at minimum wage. McDonald's does. Papa John's demands it.<br />
<br />
So, aside from some businesses with high turn over and manual labor, who holds the bag? Mal-Wart and McWendy King. The problem with worrying over their labor costs is that the true nature of capitalism is that non-publicly traded companies have the duty, as Henry Ford said, "To make the highest quality possible for the lowest price possible <i>while paying the highest wages possible</i>." Once a corporation is publicly traded, though, its board's duty is to gain profit at all costs, and reducing labor is the easiest way to achieve an illusion of profit. No board can voluntarily increase labor costs (pay) without facing an investor law suit or loss of stock value.<br />
<br />
$ = Labor + Materials + Rent on capital + Profit<br />
<br />
In low unemployment, employers are forced to increase wages. In a recession or depression, employers have no market force compelling an increase in wage. Furthermore, publicly traded corporations are compelled to increase profits. Since the Great Recession began, corporations, most especially including those that page minimum wage, have increased their profits. McDonald's has turned a huge profit, and Wal-Mart continues to be the most affluent non-oil or drug business one can imagine, but neither may pay employees more without being sued. Neither is compelled to pay more. The balance of the integers in the formula of capitalist price are out of whack. P > L, and it keeps going up.<br />
<br />
The companies can't break the cycle.<br />
<br />
There is a need for government (the external regulatory authority) to act as a guarantor of the continuing function of capitalism. I.e. it has to negate the impulse of boards of directors in order to make <i>some</i> of the vastly increased profit go to labor.<br />
<br />
"If someone says you have to pay your people more, where is that going to come from," students would ask. It would come from PROFITS, of course. If you are one of the main industries paying minimum wage as a large component of your labor, you have been growing in profit and passing none of it down.<br />
<br />The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-74850117883551493532014-07-14T09:34:00.000-07:002014-07-14T09:34:57.880-07:00Advice for the Love ShornNo. . . I spelled it right.<br />
<br />
I have some experience with being the one left behind at the end of a love affair. The love lorn are, you know. . . lorn. "Lorn" is from Middle English, "<a href="http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/" target="_blank">leosan</a>" (i.e. "lose"). It's the past participle, and you know it most often with its prepositional friend "for," as in "forlorn." Since the love lorn are those who are without love, that's everybody. The love <a href="http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?size=First+100&type=headword&q1=sheren&rgxp=constrained" target="_blank">shorn</a>, though, are the ones who were not expecting anything, even though they should have been.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8c58AF-4gWAliH3Fa9XsPkBaB4TCHhL9a95TuaujuRr68dKc7vvdFyPT7cT5Y2yiIIAvCsJ28A1xM1FwVz1JeVngchqqhflSLQUxgzbN40HXo8V4BKLwPknt_JewRLWTVTxg5/s1600/Bee+Bomb+1-22-00.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8c58AF-4gWAliH3Fa9XsPkBaB4TCHhL9a95TuaujuRr68dKc7vvdFyPT7cT5Y2yiIIAvCsJ28A1xM1FwVz1JeVngchqqhflSLQUxgzbN40HXo8V4BKLwPknt_JewRLWTVTxg5/s1600/Bee+Bomb+1-22-00.jpg" height="211" width="320" /></a></div>
If you are a normal, functioning human being, then when your boy/girl friend (or wife/husband) says, "It's over" -- with or without the "I'm seeing someone else" (I rather think the people who don't announce the breakup until they're in the arms of someone else are cowards; they need that other person to be a shield or an insult that will make the breakup "stick," or they aren't going to break up until they know they can "do better" (even though, of course, they never will do better than YOU)), then you won't take it lying down. No: you'll pace back and forth, throw yourself at the wall and door, and then demand that she or he tell you <i><b>WHY</b></i> it's ending.<br />
<br />
You poor sap.<br />
<br />
Think about what you're asking for. You're asking for a set of reasons for an emotional state. Second, you're not going to listen to anything the other person says, because your question is corrupt. You don't want to know why he is dumping you. You don't want to know why she feels that things are working out. Even if your former lover were possessed of <a href="http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/eurydice/eurydicemyth.html" target="_blank">Orphic</a> clarity, even if the beloved could <i>say</i> why love has gone, it wouldn't mean anything to you.<br />
<br />
What you <i>really</i> want is a list of reasons why <b>you</b> would break up with you, why <b>you</b> would end the relationship. You're asking to be convinced to not love the other person in the same way that she doesn't love you.<br />
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She says you're taking her for granted. You say that you're not. She says that you show no affection, and you say that real love means not having to do that.<br />
<br />
Parse this, or its inverse (you want all her time), and what you see is that she's saying, "I feel," and you're saying, "I think" or "That feeling isn't justified." The argument only confirms the premise (the real premise: "This relationship is over") because it's taking place. What's worse is that no one can beat another person into loving.<br />
<br />
This isn't a very <i>deep</i> insight I'm offering, is it? It's obvious that no one can argue another person, much less <i>threaten</i> another person, into liking him or her. Nor is it possible to accept the kind of damage being dumped brings without protest. All in all, it doesn't help to know the fruitlessness of arguing. What the love shorn needs and wants is to be validated, to be worthy or worthier.<br />
<br />
This really basic dynamic works on humans from their early to their late years. In fact, I know of an <i>institution</i> that, having been rejected, has resorted to argument. It's hard to sue the country club into making you a member; if you win, you won't want to go. <br />
<table style="width: 100%px;"><tbody>
<tr><td>Þæs ofereode,</td><td> </td></tr>
<tr><td><br /></td><td>þisses swa mæg.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
With <a href="http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=text&id=Deor" target="_blank">respect</a>, of course.<br />
The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-43040400995484059152014-06-27T20:13:00.002-07:002014-06-28T17:12:58.932-07:00What May Not Be SaidI am living in a world more full of words that cannot be said than words that may.<br />
<br />
I avoided Facebook, and I'm still not there. In fact, I won't go on any comment system, whether it's Google or Facebook or anything else, that points at, much less lists, my legal name. This is for multiple reasons:<br />
1. I am boring as a subject.<br />
2. I am boring as a suspect.<br />
3. I do not believe academic freedom exists, because professors, instructors, and teachers are just corporate employees in an MBA's conception of capital now, and research only exists when it produces capital in a way susceptible to corporate monopoly.<br />
4. I have seen what the Internet offers in the form of "fans" and "intense" personalities, and that should be enough to earn Mark Zuckerberg a circle 9A in Hell.<br />
<br />
I can't even obliquely <i>refer</i> to what has happened in my life.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
"Suile, and mare thanne we cunnen
saein, we tholeden xix wintre for ure sinnes." -- Peterborough Chronicle, Second Continuation</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<blockquote>
"... there are so many fools
placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he who cannot
restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight will be too often
quarrelling with the disposal of things to relish that share which is
allotted to himself." -- -- Henry Mackenzie, <i>The Man of
Feeling</i></blockquote>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
". . . quotations start to rise
Like rehearsed alibis." -- Seamus Heaney, "Away From It All"<br />
<br />
I can't tell you what I'm referring to, but it is a feast of malignant intemperance. The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-57997783404002282192014-06-15T11:27:00.002-07:002014-06-15T11:27:52.801-07:00Probably HyperboleI was at Mal-Wart on a Sunday morning, after church, and the lines were long. For some reason, we dumb customers simply REFUSE to go to the teller-less checkouts. Long lines'll teach us to fight Mal-Wart's obvious wisdom in going to a labor-free retail environment. (It's true: the management is decreasing cashiers and making cashiers stand by the "check yourself out" lines to "guide" people. Unfortunately, people would prefer to wait than check themselves out.)<br />
<br />
Ned <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/?no-ist" target="_blank">Ludd was right</a>, by the way.<br />
<br />
Ludd's loss isn't why I'm writing. <i>Cosmopolitan</i> is why I'm writing. Its cover this month is:<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">If I were good, I wouldn't hotlink this, but I don't think my traffic will inconvenience anyone.</span></div>
<i>Cosmopolitan</i> is supposed to make people who view its cover think about sex. In this case, I will admit that I thought about nudity, simply because the dress-thing on Katie Perry was so offensive to the eye that I could only think about how much I'd prefer it if she took it off. I think a Burqa would be preferable. The copy on the cover explains that "Katie Perry is on fire," and this may be true, but not when she was photographed. When she was photographed, she appeared to be decomposing, as the gangrenous hair dye and the dress with cut-outs looking like a bug's eyes reminded me more of the grave than flames. (A thingamabob that's shorts, but with a long, exposed zipper, and long sleeves? Is there any element of the garment that works with any other?)<br />
<br />
No, what made me pause is the magazine's offer to provide "20 OMFG Moves" and "Epic Summer Sex." I suspect the magazine's copy editor was drunk.<br />
<br />
Many moves will result in a partner making the sound, "Omfg!" I believe an unexpected elbow to the solar plexus or the chin is quite effective. A sudden belly flop of one partner onto the other can routinely elicit that noise from <i>both</i> participants <i>and</i> "turn up the heat."<br />
<br />
It's the "epic summer sex" that had me scratching my head. My fifth edition of the <a href="http://www.thriftbooks.com/viewdetails.aspx?isbn=0023564105&gclid=CImN5uG9_L4CFbTm7AodtxYAUw" target="_blank"><i>Holman Handbook of Literature </i></a>tells me that the epic is,<br />
1. Marked with elevated diction,<br />
2. Invokes the gods and involves supernatural aid,<br />
3. Deals with matters of national foundations,<br />
4. Covers a large scope of action.<br />
<br />
I appreciate the writers at <i>Cosmopolitan Magazine</i> making a contribution to the American epic. After all, the English epic has proven elusive enough. Oh, sure, everyone says that <i>Beowulf</i> <a href="http://historymedren.about.com/od/beowulf/p/beowulf.htm" target="_blank">is the English epic</a> -- About.com says so! -- but it's about the founding of a nation called the Geats. . . in Europe. John Milton was gonna write an English epic, but he decided that writing an epic-epic -- the story of Man -- was better, so he wrote <i>Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained</i>. Everyone knew that King Arthur was the potential epic subject, and William D'Avenant's <i>Gondibert</i> had tried an epic in the a,b,c,b ballad rhyme in the 17th century. Finally, Alfred, Lord Tennyson did <i>Idyls of the King</i> and ended anyone trying to write an epic in English anymore, because it frankly kind of stank. American efforts have been even worse.<br />
<br />
"Hark! we hear of hookups past in Forum and fanzines,<br />
How Fifty Shades of Grey taught his lady much to endure,<br />
She crouching and swooning and swatted and pierced to ecstasy,<br />
That was good erotica. Then came she, he, and all<br />
To America, the gods to bless, greedy for good sex, alluring. . . ."<br />
<br />
I can't do any more, I'm afraid, because I didn't buy the issue. I am, however, looking forward to the summer sex that founds new nations and spans vast territories.The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-11729483464287140042014-05-26T18:55:00.000-07:002014-05-26T18:55:04.965-07:00The Dumbest Argument of All TimeWayne LaPierre, executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, announced his current argument about gun ownership on the day after the Newtown, CT mass shootings. On December 12, 2012, LaPierre announced that what <i>caused</i> shootings by nice young people was mental illness and video games. The answer, he declared, <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/full-text-nra-remarks-gun-control-debate-newtown-article-1.1225043" target="_blank">was easy and obvious</a>: "Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun."<br />
<br />
The Republican Party, and much of the Democratic Party, has faithfully echoed LaPierre's remarks. The GOP has been relentless in saying that video games and R-rated movies are to blame. (Today is the day after a shooting in Santa Barbara, and something called <i>The Daily Republican</i> has an article pointing out that the shooter's father is a <i>movie director</i> and therefore tied to the "culture" of violence. I won't link to it.) Paul Ryan and a few others have even talked about the culture of "<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/03/13/3399441/ryan-research-lazy-inner-cities/" target="_blank">urban youth</a>." Poor people outside of "urban" areas are deserving poor, but the people who are "urban" have a bad "culture."<br />
<br />
LaPierre has been doing that "kids today and their scary movies and video joystick games" junk for a long time. In fact, it's such a stale act that, when he responded to Newtown in 2012, he <a href="http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2012/12/nra_video_games_movies_wayne_lapierre.html" target="_blank">did so by blaming</a> "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110632/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Natural Born Killers</a>" and the video game "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Kombat" target="_blank">Mortal Kombat</a>." A movie from 1994 and a game from 1992 were to blame, he claimed, for a severely mentally ill child killing his mother and then children at a primary school. It was such a <b>lazy</b> and slapdash evasion, blaming "media culture," that it didn't catch on. The people who have followed LaPierre have typically done so by just using "culture" as the grand conflating variable -- the monkey wrench with which they plan to deny any causality to a correlation between guns and crime (e.g. "Sure, when children have access to guns they're more likely to have gun violence, but how do you blame the gun instead of the insanely violent culture?").<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb0efTSM_jMPuCVJixpTFlzeZJmgORtUC2rnfMQ3mloppbXUrmA8Po__nFPpU-NB7Re1RmjS6aD_BEkGbwK2y1WcygCFfRwLrx_YJBq_L1K-fYSNc7jS5R4ot3xNMFfajHlDV2/s1600/Altama-museum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb0efTSM_jMPuCVJixpTFlzeZJmgORtUC2rnfMQ3mloppbXUrmA8Po__nFPpU-NB7Re1RmjS6aD_BEkGbwK2y1WcygCFfRwLrx_YJBq_L1K-fYSNc7jS5R4ot3xNMFfajHlDV2/s1600/Altama-museum.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div>
What amazes me, though, is the staggering number of people -- mostly men -- who seem competent enough to hold down jobs who will say that "only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun." That is, quite literally, the dumbest argument of all time.<br />
<br />
First, if you have been near a shooting, you know, as I do, that you didn't know it when it was happening. You are trying to sleep, and the noise you hear outside will be anything -- your brain will do its best to ignore it, as you're trying to sleep. If you can't ignore it, you'll imagine that it's a trash can lid falling, a piece of metal falling from a rooftop, anything. If you are going down a street, and someone is shooting ahead of you, you will be thinking, "Where do I need to go next? She's pretty. Do I have money to go there? Maybe I'll walk this way," and you simply won't process the sounds as gunshots. Even if you know what gunshots sound like, you won't think "gunfire" until your eyes tell you something is wrong or your ears give you other signals -- quiet, screams, sirens.<br />
<br />
Second, if you process quickly, you have to be extremely accurate -- as accurate as you are fast, at least -- to know where the gunshots are coming from, take cover, get your own gun, remove the safety, chamber a round, and then shoot as few times as possible. Every time you miss, your bullet will continue travelling until it is stopped by something solid, like an innocent person's body. If you were in Santa Barbara and strapped, there is no way you would say, "Pistol shots," get your gun out, and aim carefully before the shooter had moved on.<br />
<br />
Here, though, is why it's the stupidest argument in history: I'm writing this on Memorial Day.<br />
<br />
During war, do all of the good guys come home uninjured and all of the bad guys die?<br />
<br />
In war, we have good guys who are well trained, expecting to have to fire, armed with the best weapons, and facing off against "bad guys with guns," and yet -- amazingly -- it appears that bad guys with guns actually win some of the time and good guys with guns kill bystanders sometimes and good guys with guns are killed sometimes. In other words, in the <i>best possible case</i> of a "good guy with a gun" -- an armed soldier anticipating battle -- we do not get greater safety, just greater casualties and greater death.<br />
<br />
That is what <a href="http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/memorial-day-2014-052614" target="_blank">Wayne LaPierre is selling</a>.The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-54564564414338734452014-05-08T17:21:00.000-07:002014-05-08T17:21:02.390-07:00"9/11 Changed Everything," indeed.
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> To
begin to write for the third time on this subject, I would need to go
to the ends of the subject. As with each previous time, the real
occasion for writing is obscure, as it should be, if
there is going to be any use to it. Way back in 2001 and 2002, the fools who had to
have something to say as they closed their thirty minute tours of
news would quote governmental press releases and talking points
fallen from Dick Cheney's desk and say, "It's no exaggeration to
say that 9/11 has changed everything." I didn't believe them. I
vaguely remember a floating head on a screen waxing poetic and
summoning all the atmospheric Murrow he could (but only managing Brokaw) and saying that we would be telling our children about the
event that defined their world. It was Pearl Harbor. . . or not quite
<i>that</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, but it was like it.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> The
news readers going </span><i>basso</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span><i>profundis</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> was
inconceivable comedy to me. Even looking back, the most I can come up
with by way of how I felt is a paraphrase of Lincoln, who said that, if the United
States were ever to die, it would be by suicide, not conquest. </span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Then again Lincoln embarrassingly
underestimated the thanatopsic urge. So did I.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> Oh,
historians of the time in question have said that Cofer Black and the
Spook Patrol began giving W. Bush daily briefings with unfiltered
intelligence -- that is, with no analysts involved, no hierarchies of
threats, no assessments of feasibility or reliability, just every
single hateful and violent threat made by the whole world -- and this
every morning before the Ovaltine. It scared Bush senseless, and he said "Yes"
to every request. This is how the USA PATRIOT ACT went from
controversial to routine -- even boring. The same scary people
with scary reports kept working on their haunted house routine,
because Obama began saying his job was, "Keeping Americans safe"
in 2009. The man who campaigned on civil liberties began devouring
them at a pace that his predecessor would not have imagined.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhBAVLpJA0-krA6WCGF1Ns-WOGnrR-C5JJzqc-LCsuGpR0j6gxjRNrkeothsfZLD_t7YEggCSrgVrIwGK5S-oBRJ0KTXmei-Z0g1isquXTVtl4xIiwG3PHtHtxXGw9JQHMvgbs/s1600/Esso+Tiger+10-8-99.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhBAVLpJA0-krA6WCGF1Ns-WOGnrR-C5JJzqc-LCsuGpR0j6gxjRNrkeothsfZLD_t7YEggCSrgVrIwGK5S-oBRJ0KTXmei-Z0g1isquXTVtl4xIiwG3PHtHtxXGw9JQHMvgbs/s1600/Esso+Tiger+10-8-99.jpg" height="187" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<br />
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> Assassinations?
Secret detentions? Suspension of habeas corpus? Phone taps on a
national scale (i.e. a small nation of people, not every person in
this nation)? "Why object, if you have nothing to hide"
uttered as a legitimation, when it had last appeared in satire or
dystopian cliche? All of this has come to be a portion of the
invisible architecture of American reality -- a base condition for
living for most citizens. W. H. Auden's "<a href="http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/unknown-citizen" target="_blank">The Unknown Citizen</a>"
is unteachable now, both because its commentary has been bunted in front of home plate and, more, because its world of a state with an indexed population of statistics is now so far <i><b>beneath</b></i> the N.S.A.'s capabilities
and the ostensible goals of "<a href="https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/" target="_blank">total informational awareness</a>"
as to seem boring.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> September
the eleventh thrust a cup of hemlock into national hands. Our leaders presented as a chalice, and all drank. </span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;">I do not
mean, though, that losing "the American way" or civil liberties was the death of
America. Instead, I mean that, frighteningly, the vapid people were
right: <i>we</i> changed everything on the day, soul first.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> In
2011, the little people who live inside of the television asked, "What have we learned
from 9/11?" We learned nothing, of course. We learned nothing because there was nothing <b>to</b> learn from a billionaire attacking centers of international capitalism. We learned nothing because 9/11 handed its victims <i>suffering</i> rather than <i>pain</i>, and suffering neither teaches nor presents norms. Most of all, though, we learned nothing
because to learn we must first recognize our world and ourselves.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> September
the eleventh was suffering for those of us in New York City. I feel
confident that it was for those in the affected wing of the Pentagon
and for the families of the lost in Pennsylvania as well. <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-religion/" target="_blank">No one </a></span><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-religion/" target="_blank"><i>can</i></a><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-religion/" target="_blank"> learn</a> from suffering, only from pain, but suffering is less
focused. Rarely is suffering for a particular reason, or
even for a passion. Even more rarely is suffering for a passion or
reason that carries with it a moral value or heuristic principle.
Instead, people may </span><i>grow</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
while suffering, but they grow by having empathy or understanding (of
humanity, of self, of family) increase. </span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Most of us would rather attend a seminar.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjocpmj4LKdEviebGgDbjhmivxT1bMjYIkiykTjKtvgz6wkzMC1T4uwrXASt5s1Id2gQK0xpfoWyWENsTJ17CDKSroEG4jWq5INoCphgH_4fFOtXrH2nexNMxx8weKMC7zlVHFP/s1600/Camilia+ground+2-28.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjocpmj4LKdEviebGgDbjhmivxT1bMjYIkiykTjKtvgz6wkzMC1T4uwrXASt5s1Id2gQK0xpfoWyWENsTJ17CDKSroEG4jWq5INoCphgH_4fFOtXrH2nexNMxx8weKMC7zlVHFP/s1600/Camilia+ground+2-28.jpg" height="320" width="194" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> Among our problems with 9/11 is just simple recognition. "We" don't do much introspection of the moral
sort. For a nation of self-help patrons and "Face the Press in
Review This Week" organizers, we love to look at the individual
self and the weekly events, but not much from a decade or a
community.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> <b>Why there is a new government,</b></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><b>and why the parties are disenfranchised</b></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> The
Republican Party has variations on "self" in its
definitions. It's the party of "self-reliance," of
"individual liberty," of "personal responsibility,"
and it performs a fan dance with libertarianism. (Well, it used to.
Since 2012, it has been more of a peep show, where the primaries are
all access libertarian and the general elections put on a flag
G-string.) The Democratic Party is the party of good governance, of
community building, of ensuring welfare and commonweal. Most of its
definitions feature "community" and "common" in
them. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><i>September
the eleventh made both parties aliens to the United States</i>. Unlike
the United Kingdom and numerous European nations, the U.S. has no
"government" distinct from its politicians. We do have a
civil service, but it is weak and without an identity of its own. It
is certainly not operating contrary to the political system. There
could be no American "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osoF7nzSy2A" target="_blank">Yes, Minister</a>" the way there was an
American "House of Cards," because our civil servants have
less and less job security and are beholden to political appointees
who face the spoils system. Thus, most talk of "the government"
Americans do has been faulty from nearly the day of Andrew Jackson.
It has certainly been faulty since the 1980's. However, since 2001,
we have begun to </span><i>grow</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
a government, complete with self-protection and ideology separate
from the political EVEN AS the traditional civil service has been put under more political control than ever before.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> This
government of 9/11 begins and ends with a fiat: It is the job of
government to keep the citizens safe from "evildoers"/
"those who wish us harm" (the difference is one of dialect, not language). You heard Bush say that his job
was keeping Americans safe countless times. You may have even heard
Cheney and others lie and claim that Bush was a good president
because there were no terrorist attacks on Americans during his
presidency. If you have been listening, you have also heard President
Obama define his job this way, and probably as often as his
predecessor. </span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> The
problem is that, well, keeping citizens safe from harm is simply not
one of the duties of the presidency. The president of the United
States is the head of the executive branch. He is the chief cop and
the chief enforcer of laws. In war, she is the coordinator of the
armed forces ("commander in chief"). There is <b>no warrior
king, priest king</b> ("decider"), or even "CEO president" function to the
job. Armed forces keep us safe from foreign powers, and police keep
us safe from those on our soil </span><i>if</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
they have broken a criminal law. Secret services stop agents of enemy
and foreign powers. Quick: what part of the government is the Secret
Service a portion of?</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> We
all want to be safe, of course. However, we also all want to be asked
how we are kept safe, if we are a democracy. A critical difference
between democracy and fascism is that we do not believe that a Great
Man (or woman) might, with will or strength, achieve what the people,
with consent, do every day. A critical difference between democracy
and the Soviet is that we do not believe that the Party or state
leadership can, with critical efficiencies or expert policy, achieve
what we do in our stumbling consensual manner.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Never
mind my idealism, though. The parties are aliens to the government of
the United States because this government dedicated to keeping
Americans safe has a new question to ask. It is no longer concerned
with the individual's happiness or the group's welfare, as both are
irrelevant. Instead, it asks, over and over again, "Who are you?
What is the identity of the citizen?"</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> Define for yourself the goal of N.S.A. and other agencies dedicated to defeating foreign
agents in an era when "agent" no longer means what it once
did. Whereas once an agent was a person not only acting in the
interests of a foreign entity but acting at the behest of that
foreign entity, an agent now does not need the alien entity's
knowledge, much less involvement. This is because the agent is no
longer of a foreign power, but a foreign ideology. Furthermore, that ideology is not named. It isn't "the Communist Party": it's "terror" or "wishing us harm."</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> Even
though we in the United States do not have an official religion or
official ideology, we have a shifting net of enemy ideologies that
are largely identified solely by the willingness of anyone
propounding them to, coincidentally or consequentially, advocate
violence against the U.S. military, U.S. citizens, U.S. territory, or
U.S. assets. Think back to 1978 for a moment and remember the
anti-nuclear protests held throughout Europe. It was a weapon that made plain the
fact that some of Europe would be a battlefield in a coming war
between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., and the people living on that
battlefield were less than pleased. Some of them were infiltrated by
Soviet agitators. Some of them were violent. Most of them were
neither. Were that today, would N.S.A. label "Belgian" or
"Social Democrat" as enemy ideologies? Under the
philosophy that demands that all believers in a religion or religious sect are "enemy" today, it might. This is a
consequence of 9/11 and defining the goal of government as
"protecting Americans." Once that becomes the goal,
violence is the only qualification for enemy status.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> Imagine
that you are floating in the ocean. Now, so long as you float, you
will be rescued. However, a line is tied to you and attached to
everyone you know. For reasons unclear to you, some of these people
cannot swim and have weights attached to them, while others are just
struggling swimmers like yourself. Even the people you are tied to who are swimming are themselves tied to all the people <i>they</i> know, and some of them are sinking. It is fairly likely, depending upon how
many people you know, that you will be dragged down.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4wqLh1eJgQTxTG73pv19vrpJMQrOacSdtGT4HxthH_uNBheabkWxAsOkedgfTr8e-eQeTNySobvWv9DlWtr1dxtApdom-SaYqV-iFiMt-6GlslpP9lo4uVVZIXWVKc3bThSC4/s1600/Perfect+Flower+9-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4wqLh1eJgQTxTG73pv19vrpJMQrOacSdtGT4HxthH_uNBheabkWxAsOkedgfTr8e-eQeTNySobvWv9DlWtr1dxtApdom-SaYqV-iFiMt-6GlslpP9lo4uVVZIXWVKc3bThSC4/s1600/Perfect+Flower+9-01.jpg" height="316" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> As
far as the security government is concerned, a person is not a
person. A person is a set of associations -- a deferred identity calculated by its connective power. Each association is
either dangerous or not. If an association is not dangerous, it
carries no weight. If it is dangerous, it weights the person.
Furthermore, the attachment's weight is determined by its own
attachments. Are you an enemy of America? Well, a friend of yours who
has a friend in the Peace Corps who made friends with a group of
people in Yemen has sunk you. You do not know this, of course,
because you do not know your friend's friends. Your friend, in fact,
does not know his friends are today called "terrorist" by
someone. They, indeed, do not know that they are "terrorists,"
necessarily. Even if they have shouted, "Death to America,"
they could have repented of the view. It would not matter. It does not matter because the government's role is to "keep Americans safe," not to produce an accurate risk assessment.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Once
we take the one, small step, from "provide for the common
welfare" to "keep Americans safe," safety trumps all
political activities and all operations of the state. The citizens
cease to have civic value and transform into menace or neutrality, and <i>only</i> menace or neutral. The two political parties, therefore, become entirely beside
the point. Individual liberty or community building are meaningless
questions to a government dedicated to detecting threats and sifting
its own population into only two piles.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> I
could offer up homespun analogies on the philosophy of safety. I
could ask you to compare a nation to a household and to think of the
effects of parents who seek to keep their children safe at all
costs with not a thought to the children's happiness, prosperity, or education.
However, those analogies foster reductive thinking, because nations
are not families, or businesses, or enough like anything except
themselves to be profitably compared except to each other. In fact,
nations are capable of a phenomenon that is almost without parallel
in any other organism: they can grow alienated from themselves.
Nations can, under the worst possible circumstances, begin to operate
one way while believing another; they can begin to concentrate power in one
spot while announcing it in another. The most famous, and therefore
guarded against, condition of national alienation is the phenomenon
of bureaucracy. When the civilization is not rule by the <i>demos</i>
(democracy) or representative (<i>res publica</i>/republic) or
divine person, or by select family, or by the wealthy, but, instead,
by bureaus, then an unthinking, vegetable mind governs indifferently
to all concerns and makes all political exchanges inefficient.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> We
are not in a bureaucracy. We have something else. Dana Priest's
report on “Secret America,” where she began to see just how large
the expenditure and secrecy is in Classified work, certainly
testifies to a potential bureaucracy of safety, but, forgetting the
inefficiencies of duplication and lack of oversight, we have an
alienation where no one votes for safety as a national priority.
Neither chamber of Congress, no election, and no presidential order
reorganizes society onto safety first. All the same, it is there, and it determines the activities of all other facets of the nation.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> One
way that we can tell that our nation is alienated is the staggering
bathos of the safety measures. When, two weeks after September
eleventh, military with sub-machine guns were stationed in Penn
Station in New York City, it did not make travelers feel safer.
Coming in from Madison Avenue and having one's eye first fall on a
soldier with a slung machine gun did not set a commuter's mind at
ease. The harlequin pantomime that has replaced airline boarding –
shoes off, hands up, standing in a booth – does not give safety, either.
Crucially, both “left” and “right” react the same way to
these measures. The left rejects the loss of civil liberties, and the
right fears “the government” and calls for a right to have
personal firearms to protect itself. These measures launched in the
name of security represent no one's <i>political</i> idea, no one's
civil goal, and deliver no one's social good, but there they are. The most conservative president in history and the current president alike have presided over measures seemingly no one has endorsed.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"> What
began as an urge to reverse every expansion of civil
liberties of the 1970's with the USA PATRIOT ACT turned into
something else. It has turned into something with the power to
generate itself, something that moves by a vegetative mind, with a motive (to make
America safe) that is paramilitary and unconstitutional. The
government that is arising now, what people call “the security
state” (a misnomer, as this is not the state; it is beneath the
state and beside the state), sets out an end goal that cannot be
achieved without the elimination of free will.</span></div>
The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-40611640418781920392014-03-22T10:53:00.000-07:002014-03-22T10:53:30.093-07:00Misericordia, the surgeons want to be cool!
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
"Fashion is something barbarous,
for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without
benefit." -- George Santayana</div>
<br />
My brother had a radical retropubertal resection of his prostate to treat aggressive prostate cancer. Due to the relationship we have, I could not have offered him any advice. If I had, it would have been ignored or operated in reverse. My opinion of his opinion of my opinions is not relevant here. The point is that I had told our intermediary, our father, that I hoped he would not get the surgery done by a DaVinci surgical robot. He did.<br />
<br />
My dislike of the surgical robot was based on reading on the benefits of robotic vs. manual surgery. So far, the story of the robotic assistants is mixed. There has been <i>no clinical advantage</i> in outcomes for using robotic suites thusfar. The robot surgeries have a much higher incidence of surgical complications, though.<br />
<br />
Additionally, I was against the idea because of how much of a fashion there is for them. When "everyone" is in favor of a brand new treatment, and the old treatment did not have noticeable deficiencies, then <i>cui bono?</i> Pro Publica has been watching the corporation behind the two robot prostate surgeons pretty carefully and has documented several instances of dangerous, <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/when-a-university-hospital-backs-a-surgical-robot-controversy-ensues" target="_blank">unethical</a>, and shady practices. Essentially, the companies that make the robots are <b>investing</b> in getting their surgical suites bought and used. They are also investing in medical research and ensuring that the report on whether the robots are clinically worthwhile points the right way.<br />
<br />
As a patient, it turns out that the best bet is to go with a surgeon manually performing the surgery, if she or he has many repetitions. The robotic suites are responsible for more accidental injury than traditional surgery. However, the robotic suites <i>discharge patients to home quickly</i>. A patient who has a robotic surgery goes home quickly. This may give a better clinical outcome in the sense that such a patient is not exposed to hospital pathogens. However, the real benefit of the robotic surgery is to the health insurance company and, at least theoretically, the hospital administration, as both benefit from getting the patient out of the hospital bed as quickly as possible, whatever the surgical outcome.<br />
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When I was in graduate school, I was fortunately unfortunate enough to have to work full time and to do that work in a biochem lab. There, I worked with people developing bench science into a medicine, and the things had to be researched against and with <i>everything</i>. I was aware that any university researcher would investigate an agent every which way, so when the first Cox-2 inhibitors appeared on the market and <i>advertised that they were good for patients taking Coumadin</i>, I asked the local School of Pharmacy to check into the studies on patients on Warfarin. Two weeks later, they got back to me and said, "There aren't any." "What do you mean." "There aren't any." "Does that sound screwy to you?" "Yes. I wouldn't take the medicine, if I were you, and we're going to have to investigate this further." It was eighteen months later that enough people had died for the <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5470430" target="_blank">Vioxx scandal</a> to begin.<br />
<br />
"MBA culture" is notoriously slimey and wicked. It's the whole, "If the law lets us do it, then we have to do it" mindset. It's the mindset that leads to doing anything for this quarter's profits, even if it means destroying the productive capacity. MBA culture has been running the pharmaceuticals since 1990. Aside from a few wild-eyed hippie start ups, it runs medical device makers, too.<br />
<br />
There are surgical fashions and fads. This fact alone ought to make every human who depends upon blood and oxygen freak out (i.e. everyone but <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cheney-helped-for-many-months-by-a-mechanical-heart-is-terrific-after-transplant/2012/03/25/gIQAfy1eaS_story.html" target="_blank">Dick Cheney</a>). <br />
<br />
You only realize the perniciousness of surgical fashions and medical fads when they've passed. Where I live now, it is automatic that every hyperthyroid patient will have a thyroidectomy. It's automatic. Personally, I think that's barbarism, since there are good ways of suppressing thyroxine without hacking away at a fairly small organ and thereby making a person <i>dependent, for life, on daily purchases of Synthroid</i>. Oh, it's easy to say, "They have no endocrinologists in the turnip fields where you live, so let 'em get to zero thyroid function and replace physiologically," but that is admitting that "Paying every month to a pharmaceutical company" is a way of life. (Hyperthyroid patients can go into remission.) Similarly, every inguinal hernia here gets the mesh. Good old mesh. Nothing bad ever happens with mesh. Every atherosclerotic gets a stent. (Re-occlusion is less common now than it used to be, I admit, but the rates of reliance on stents is unaffected by this. It was the <i>fashion</i> here. No bypasses: stents.)<br />
<br />
Whenever there is a fad or fashion in medicine, the question is who is making the decision? Usually, it's the health insuring group. They, in turn, make it for <i>all</i> patients, and not just their own.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, I was at a used book store, and I mentioned that I had just had a lumbar radiofrequency ablation of nerves getting pinched by spinal arthritis. The proprietress told me about her husband. You see his problem was really that <i>one of his legs was longer than the other</i>.<br />
<br />
Remember that one?<br />
<br />
That was a scam that went around in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Faith healers and quacks alike used the gag. Put the patient in a chair, hold up his legs at a very slight angle to his body (coinciding with dominant leg/hand), and one leg will be "longer" than the other.<br />
<br />
"He used to go to ______, where he'd get these inserts for his shoes that would let him walk right, and he'd keep them until he'd wear 'em out, and then he'd go get more. But _____ isn't in business anymore, and when he went to the orthopedist, they didn't want to do that!"<br />
<br />
She was unhappy with the orthopedic surgeons who didn't want to feed him more rubber heels.<br />
<br />
"He went to his chiropracter to be sure it wasn't an alignment issue."<br />
<br />
So, because the fellow went to an orthopedic surgeon, you can guess what happened next. The surgeon wanted to surgically repair the herniated disks. Two surgeries, much pain, and the patient is still convinced that it was all a matter of walking "wrong" and needing special soles.<br />
<br />
For my part, I just had nerves killed. There was no promise of making anything better except pain. I have arthritis in my spine and cannot take any anti-inflammatory drugs. However, commercials are airing now for all the people who <i>don't</i> take Warfarin but do take blood thinners to take a new pill instead.<br />
<br />
If "everyone" is having something, someone is wanting it to be that way. Make sure you know who it is, why it is, and that you agree completely. <br />
<br />The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-6958055452419821252014-01-17T17:48:00.001-08:002014-01-17T17:50:06.412-08:00Galatea is "Her," and She Is Always GalateaConfession: I live in the middle of radish fields, and the only movie theater plays nothing but "Smash and Boom III" and "Tyler Perry Presents Loud and Noisy." Consequently, I will sound like a moron if I talk about Spike Jonze's film, "Her." I will, therefore, instead, talk about <i>reviews</i> of the film and the premise of the film and hope that I don't miss any of the former that invalidate my commentary and that the latter is as it has been communicated.<br />
<br />
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Tentatively, therefore, I want to propose the following: "Her" plays upon the Classical myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, and yet it does so in such an attenuated and developed way that reviewers either miss the model or do not bring it up. This mythic structure has a great deal to offer us, both in terms of a contemplation of art and the powers of humanity, chaos, love, creativity, and, indirectly, politics.
The story occurs in Ovid's <i>Metamorphoses</i> X, in one of the Orphic songs. You can read a translation <a href="http://poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Metamorph10.htm#_Toc64105570">here</a>.<br />
<br />
The song is very, very short, and the tale is very evocative. Pygmalion is a sculptor who is, in some versions, very ugly. In all versions he is very skilled. He makes a sculpture of a woman whom he could love -- the perfect girl. In Orpheus's version, she is chaste by virtue of her marble-whiteness. He loves the sculpture so much that he wants no real woman for a bride. At one point or another, Venus/Aphrodite turns the statue -- Galatea -- into a real woman.<br />
<br />
The Victorians loved the story. W. S. Gilbert <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_and_Galatea">did a version</a>, and G. B. Shaw (yes, yes, a Modern in . . . and yet not) did the famously class-based satire <i>Pygmalion</i> that became the rather denatured <i>My Fair Lady.</i> Of course Rousseau had written a Pygmalion as well, reflecting the later-Romantic fascination with the limitations of creativity, and this would show up in pictorial treatments by the <a href="http://www.preraphaelites.org/the-collection/1903p26/pygmalion-and-the-image-the-soul-attains/">Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood</a>.
For the artists of the turn of the 19th - 20th century, the theme seemed to be the power of imagination, and the dangers of fascination. "The Lady of Shallot" is, in some ways, a mirror of Pygmalion: that which can be imagined can be beautiful, but having it brings danger. Their versions of Galatea, like other products of artistic imagination, inevitably transferred human stains or impossibility when they crossed into reality. Either the human malleability of the lover or the demands of perfection would, like Frankenstein or Mr. Hyde, show the impossibility of the perfect more than they would affirm the value of the real.<br />
<br />
The new "Her" would not be the first use of the Pygmalion theme with technology. We have a long, long, long line of silly and crude efforts, from 1970's science fiction fear films about super computers. "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/">Colossus: The Forbin Project</a>" from 1970 set the tone for the "Oh my gosh, it has taken over the world, because we're not logical enough," but "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075931/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Demon Seed</a>" had the best creep factor, especially with the explicit (at the end) Pygmalion/Galatea dynamic, with poor Julie Christie being the unwilling model. For the silly, we get everything from "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090305/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Weird Science</a>" (super models from a Tandy TRS 80!) to "War Games" (yes, it's silly, and the Galatea is the non-geek girlfriend).<br />
<br />
"Futurama" had a great time with the social scourge of "robosexuality." In one episode, it was a way of discussing the hysteria and vacuity of Proposition 8's anti-homosexuality. The show even had Hubert Farnsworth do a parody of the self-parodying <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/07/worst-anti-gay-marriage-a_n_312538.html">"storm clouds" ad</a> from the National Organization for Marriage ("nom nom nom"). In another episode, though, Fry downloads his own Lucy Liu-bot. To discourage him, Professor Farnsworth shows him a government propaganda film, <i><a href="http://vimeo.com/12915013">I Dated a Robot!</a></i> (If you haven't seen it, you should click on the link, as it's one of the finest bits of parody in the show's history.)<br />
<br />
<div class="dkimg-c">
<span class="image_container"><img alt="Sculpture at Carrboro, NC farmer's market." src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/4842/large/Farmer's_Market_Sentinel_5-10-00.jpg?1346669249" height="" width="" /></span></div>
<br />
For a legitimate enactment of Pygmalion and Galatea, where there is potential culpability or unforeseen implications of reality, literary fiction had a flirtation with <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Galatea-2-2-Novel-Richard-Powers/dp/B004KAB4D8">Galatea 2.0</a></i> by Richard Powers in 2004. It is a very well written novel with extremely fine style and control. The "Galatea" of the title is, ostensibly, an effort at natural learning for an AI. The neuroscience and AI in the novel is quite good, but the real Galatea of the novel is the novelist's own wife, who breaks away from him in the course of the book, having an affair as the marriage breaks down.<br />
<br />
"Galatea," we may understand, is every romantic love. Men attempt to make their mates. (Neil LaBute plays assure us that women attempt to make their mates, too.) Consequently, we believe we find the image, but then we believe that we create the girl/boy inside the woman/man we love. After Venus gives the gift, though, comes the problem of change, life, and the fact that what was perfect only remains perfect if people are immobile or manage to move together.<br />
<br />
The Shaw Pygmalion has to understand that his Galatea may not <i>remain</i> an experiment, that language does not remake the person, that class is or is not simply a disguise (it's not clear). (This ambiguity is gone in "My Fair Lady.")<br />
<br />
The early Modernists had a strain of rejecting reality. W. B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" posits a reality of art that is parallel to the reality of daily experience. It might emanate <i>from</i> artworks, but it isn't coexisting. T. S. Eliot would argue for a Christian mystic experience that is, again, separate, superior, informing, but away from the quotidian, where all paths lead to the same place, and the place is not any one physical place.<br />
<br />
The Victorians and early Modernists were living in a world where empire had shown Western aspirations and appetites in action on a global scale. Whether the Belgian Congo or the British Raj, the best practices had resulted in atrocities, repression, and oppression. Appetite had triumphed over planning. For the Modernists, the high minded belief in progress had smashed into World War I, when the most "civilized" nations on earth had used chemical weapons against each other.<br />
<br />
Today? Are we stuck reiterating the tragedy of love alone, or can we look at Iraq, Afghanistan -- not to mention Honduras, Nicaragua and other places where American best practices have been at work -- and feel a similar skepticism about projecting human will into practice itself? Surely it is the fate of love, just as love itself, to be lashed to humans who do not live in sync, but is it in the realm of any human creation to breathe without carrying with it the stain of its creators?<br />
<br />
If we re-tell Pygmalion/Galatea simply to explore the degree to which the beautiful can only exist fleetingly, and outside of the grasp of the mind, then we do not add much. It's true that the American public is cynical, that one doubts that even the architects of the neo-liberal invasion of Iraq and the supposed vision of a spreading garden of democracy achieved by the overthrow of Saddam <i>believed</i> what they said, but just crossing our fingers behind our back -- swearing that we didn't really mean it when we said that we thought we were making the world a better place -- does not absolve us from having done our best and having created. We, with our names and bumper stickers attached, sent troops to destroy and enforce governments. We, with our right wing radio telling us that Jesus was involved, did what we said we believed what was right and good.<br />
<br />
We, with very sincere dreaming in print, made the Internet, opened it to the .com's, sold domains, and preached freedom. We created the world that spies on us in order to sell us pregnancy supplies before our daughters have missed their second periods. We created the super-intelligent super intelligence in our action movies, and now the 4th amendment is unknown.<br />
<br />
An OS coming alive and loving its user sounds more like the Demon Seed than a lesson in love to me. The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-38070651762983883242013-12-31T20:29:00.000-08:002014-01-01T06:41:02.475-08:00Nature Abhors the Vaccuum<span style="font-size: x-small;">[No one need <a href="http://www.wordsmyth.net/?level=3&ent=vacuum" target="_blank">bother me</a> about the spelling of "vacuum/vaccum/vaccuum," as the word has three legitimate spellings. I go for the one with the most letters, of course.]</span><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/06/06/154349295/a-brief-history-of-nothing" target="_blank">Aristotle was the one</a> who said that nature abhors a vaccuum. The personification in the statement is interesting, because, as we now understand vaccuums, it is enough to say the noun to imply the activity. Vaccuums are absences, and thus all presences rush toward them. There is no need for any one or any thing to be horrified or angry.<br />
<br />
When Christians imputed a directly intentional and <i>affective</i> value to forces in nature, Aristotle's statement had more profound rational and cosmological ramifications than a simple induction. First, his statement affirmed the <i>plenum</i>. (Contra the prior link, it was not "Descartes" who had the plenum. It was everyone. It was Newton, too. I hate scientists with heroes and villains stories to tell.) This cosmological outlook did not hold that the universe is varied and rich, but that it is <b>so rich</b> that there are no discernible gaps between orders and classes of living and non-living things. Creation is <i>so full</i> that there are infinite steps of quality and complexity between ranks and infinite ranks overall along <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2028:10-19&version=RSV" target="_blank">Jacob's ladder</a>. (Jacob's ladder, meanwhile, is not merely a metaphor for a vision Jacob had (Jacob sees angels of the Lord going up and coming down from heaven, and then that graduated ranking is described by means of a figure of speech, "ladder"), but a vision of the order of the universe (the universe is composed of moving ranks and graduations reaching from Heaven to earth) that is eternal and may be understood by multiple figures of speech.)<br />
<br />
The <i>plenum </i>itself reflected God. This was not code, but rather nature. While the enlightened soul and those in a state of grace might contemplate God's love in the plenitude of creation or by imagining and constructing with art a microcosm/macrocosm, whereby the whole perceptible and spiritually experienced universe was, like a vast fractal, infinitely reproducing and consistent, the intent behind all things was love, being, and essence rather than a message. God is God, and the infinitely full universe might give intellectual delight or emotional solace, but the fullness was not there <i>for</i> a statement, but simply because of God's nature and creation.<br />
<br />
The second effect of Aristotle's statement for Christians in the renaissance was that some popes (Leo X on, basically) grew so famously pleased with the coherence of the cosmology of the <i>plenum</i> that they made a Scribblerian mistake. Martin Scribblerus, hero of <i>The Memoirs of Martinus Scribblerus</i>, is a well read fool, and he consistently insists that whatever is logical according to <i>deduction</i> is true, no matter what evidence or reality says. So, too, these popes took a bold and brave stand against the vaccuum. Arguing against the real in favor of the logical is a losing proposition, but only in the end. Nobody likes to give up on logic just because some smart-Alec claims that Archimedes made a vaccuum pump.<br />
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<br />
<br />
It's grimly amusing that fractals these days make Fibonacci numbers look more and more like justification for the old faith in the <i>plenum</i>, but there's no irony in it. In the event, zero had enough of a reality to demonstrate, and soon scientists and mine owners began evacuating all over Europe. Volta guns and light bulbs would appear apace.<br />
<br />
There was another kind of vaccuum that inventors played with. Boil your cabbage in a tin pot, and then seal it shut with solder. The molecules in the air will be very far apart, and, as the cabbage slurry cools, the air will compress. The can of cabbage can be sold to Napoleon, and he can take it to Russia, where it will be somewhat fresh three months after the cooking.<br />
<br />
Canning started with Napoleon's army -- although <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/01/147751097/why-napoleon-offered-a-prize-for-inventing-canned-food" target="_blank">they really began with bottles</a> -- and that meant a need to find ways of holding seals and temperature. The Thermos bottle was the German patenting of a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/0/21835405" target="_blank">Scottish invention</a>, and our Apollo rockets, like some of our missiles, are just grand Thermos bottles at heart (and you thought "Thermos" was an English word? Did you also think Robert Goddard invented rocketry?). Now we even offer to have super-cooled electrical transmission lines, and people propose liquid nitrogen in the field.<br />
<br />
We never have found <i>nothing</i>, by the way, nor might we. A simple vaccuum of air is easy, and the pope could have kept his seat cushions untussled. A zero, though, is imperceptible by definition, and I agree with Kant that it's really a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_%28Kant%29" target="_blank">foul ball</a> in intellect.<br />
<br />
Loss, cooling, and vacuum seals are another matter. Them I believe in.<br />
<br />
Before Christmas, during one of the freestyle bits of the liturgy, when the priest fills in the blanks ("May we, along with _____ and all your saints, be in your eternal kingdom"), he mentioned Saint Joseph, as he rightly would and should. Back in 2001, I heard a deaconess at the <a href="http://heavenlyrest.org/" target="_blank">Church of the Heavenly Rest</a> in Manhattan talk about Joseph. She talked about his role as the patron of adoptive fathers, about the acceptance and humility he had. He did not reject Mary, and he went as a refugee to Egypt to protect her and the child that was not his. I have never since been able to approach Christmas without thinking about Joseph, or without why he stands out so.<br />
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In 1999, the children left for Rhode Island. I can't criticize. There are many gripes to gripe, but there is no point. When they left, I lost a deeper part of myself, a deeper connection, than a limb. I have a missing place where two children were, and it is permanent. That cavern is hollow, and there is no way to fill it. There isn't a way to reconnect, either, because I didn't lose friends. By 2003, I didn't mourn <i>every</i> day, but the stone was formed. I was a drum.<br />
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My mother's death is surprising. There are practical manifestations of such a loss. When the branch from which the leaves hang is gone, the leaves have no connection to one another anymore. Without children and wife to be interconnected, I am untied from the large mass that was family. Each holiday, therefore, sounds out against the hollows where once there was a messy complication of family.<br />
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Aside from that, when I am not working every day, I dream of her death's fact four nights a week, more or less. It might be dreaming of a tree in the backyard that is no longer the back yard. It might be neighbors casting paving stones at birds and killing the pileated woodpeckers. It may be having to drive my mother to see the family. It may show up in a dozen different disguises, but it's the same event, the same fact, the same concavity.<br />
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I wish to finish this essay soon, so that it will be nominally in 2013, because 2013 is its subject.<br />
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I'm lying. The subject of this essay is, of course, the surprising vaccuum. I have not changed, as I am as baffled by career as ever. I am as honest and friendly as before. At the same time, it is shocking that some things, some events, are not plastic, that some clippings and removals are permanent; they leave their profiles in consistent places that will never more be regained. When I am alone, when I hear my own thoughts, I don't regret anymore being alone. Instead, I regret the fact that there is no use in arguing with fact, that there is no use in complaining that things do not work out justly, and I have these resonating losses, this vaccuum seal, that moors me in zero. The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-19630011831135521782013-12-24T11:57:00.000-08:002013-12-24T11:57:04.207-08:00GraceI can't stand talking about grace, because it gives me a headache. The problem is, we shouldn't be speaking of "grace" as a noun at all, because the moment we do, the word suffers a syntactic infection from other nouns, and then there are flavors of grace, stripes of grace, and amounts of grace. That said, I can no more avoid the nominal form of the word than anyone else.<br />
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<span style="color: black;">“<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But
a greater inconvenience it bred, that every later endeavoured to be
certain degrees more removed from conformity with the Church of Rome,
than the rest before had been; whereupon grew marvelous great
dissimilitudes, and by reason thereof, jealousies, heartburnings,
jars and discords among them” (<i>Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity</i> I, 2.2).</span></span></span></div>
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"Grace" as a word just denotes "gift." It is, in fact, what <i>Advent</i> is about -- a gift being given to humanity. The word "grace" shows up in "gratias" (for free) in Latin (which becomes <i>gratis</i> in UK/US parlance -- "no charge"), "gracias" in Spanish, and "grazie" in Italian. (The Romans used "gratis" for "thanks" in the same way that Spanish uses "de nada" -- "no problem/charge/burden" -- or English says "no big deal." Spanish and Italian derived their words from Latin.)<br />
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Celebrating Christmas is strange. In a churchly setting, there is the mass of Christ -- the church service with eucharist/communion -- held to honor the feast of the birth of Jesus, but that is a single day of obligation. It doesn't necessitate, or bear, a great deal of wittering and frittering. On the other hand, Advent is the liturgical season leading up to the feast of Christ, and that <i>does</i> have pageantry and a series of themes. The traditional theme, and the one you will hear in your lectionary readings, is the fulfillment of prophecy, the <i>kairos</i>, or rightness and fullness of time.<br />
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The more Protestant side of the celebration is the theme of grace. Advent shows God <i>giving a gift</i>. Jesus's birth as man is neither obligatory nor deserved. It is something given by God for God's will. Man was dead set against the birth and the message.<br />
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You cannot ask for a freely given gift, and you cannot earn a gift. If you ask for it, or earn it, it is not a gift. Therefore, while Paul ends some of his epistles with, "May the ... grace of our Lord" be with the congregation, it's a strange idea. We have to assume that Paul is hoping only and not actually petitioning. In the Book of Common Prayer used by all in the Anglican communion, parishioners ask God for grace for repentance after confession.<br />
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Salvation had been possible before the incarnation, but only for the Chosen people, and only by the law. God gave a superabundant gift in being born and breaking the first major falling of man in the process. (When man fell, the first great consequence was being divorced from the presence of God. Being unable to speak directly to God and to know that there is a certain moral universe is the profound fall of the soul and undergirds all else.) God gave a second gift on top of that by giving salvation to any and all who would but follow <i>the</i> Christ. Men still had and have a choice, and they could -- as most did -- continue to insist that the messiah had to be a Davidic king who would conquer Rome and set up material wealth for Judea/Israel. Third, of course, in the death and resurrection, Jesus gave a gift of eternal life and the Kingdom of the spirit rather than the law. He sent thereafter the <i>paraclete</i>, or Holy Spirit. Since then, nothing has fundamentally changed or needed to change: through the comforter, we have access to God; we still must choose the Christ; gentiles and Jews alike are called.<br />
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This is grace. Man did not earn it. Man did not even know how to ask for it. What was given was given by God for God's will.<br />
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This is not how I hear people use the word "grace." I hear it, instead, used as "state of grace" and mumblejumble grace for salvation. I hear the word "grace" used to talk about a sort of rocket pack or Flubber for the soul. What's worse is that all of this comes out of the most perverse need to justify assumptions rather than observation.<br />
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One line goes like this: If men are born with a sin upon them, then men are born fit for Hell. If they are fit for Hell, then they are depraved. If they are depraved, then they are depraved through and through. If they are depraved through and through, then they can't choose to accept the Gospel and believe on their own. Instead, "grace" has to do it. Because grace, and grace alone, is responsible for the conversion of the depraved sinner to the saved elect, it is irresistible and total. What's more, it is "abounding" and "abiding," and that means that, having been the rocket pack that makes the person seek God, hear God, and accept God, it sticks around to steer.<br />
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The other line says, If men are born with sin upon them, then they are born erring. If they err by nature, they cannot see the good from the evil reliably. Their conscience now, their intellect then, and their bodies another time will alternately fail. Therefore, the seeker needs help -- a bit of extra bounce to get above human capacities -- but the seeker must then be peak human to decide on salvation. This grace is flubber, and it sticks around, too, but it is a special force that God brings to bear only when the human is in most danger of being lost.<br />
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The first of these theologies leads to abuses whereby people argue that their salvation is permanent, no matter what they do. As Fielding's Parson Adams says, they'll meet their Savior and say that, though they never acted on any of his commandments, they believed 'em all. The second one leads to further qualification and quantification of the types of human and supernatural flickering and sparking. Both lead to folks being the judge of their own grace and, if possible, other people's.<br />
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I lean far more toward the grace that resolves to the human soul's free will, but I mainly lean away from any discussion of "grace" as a thing. The arrogance involved in saying, from this example in the Bible or that one, that God affects a turning heart by doing exactly this for each and every heart is <b>staggering</b>. What Job went through is not what Mary went through, and what Peter went through is not what Thomas went through. For people to argue what "must" be the case with God's operation in the Holy Spirit is shocking.<br />
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We should, instead, be ashamed that we don't know how to respond to a gift. It is with gratitude and celebration.<br />
<br />The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-8967014420404830772013-11-03T12:00:00.000-08:002013-11-03T12:00:18.510-08:00What Changes<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Brought to you in GLORIOUS</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The utterly inexplicable <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092005/" target="_blank"><i>Stand by Me</i></a> opens with gang #2 mesmerized and propelled into action by the question, "Hey! Want to see a dead body?" Gang #1 has claimed the corpse, they discover after their <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Hero-With-Thousand-Faces/dp/B000NU7IVQ" target="_blank"><i>Odyssey</i></a>. I would like to reiterate, here and now, my initial reaction to the movie, since no amount of pay could have moved me to read the book: <b>Who the hell would want to go see a corpse?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Oh, sure, might as well ask, "Who the Hell would read a Stephen King novel," since the questions are equivalent. After all, what is the question except a promise that, some pages ahead, King is going to <i>describe</i> a corpse? In that regard, he is providing <i>pornography for virgins</i>. If he gets it right, the readers who know he did will not get any reward except a trip to a place in memory that cannot bring any joy, and, if he gets it wrong, his readers by and large will be none the wiser. He is not, generally speaking, describing a corpse as much as he is describing what pathology photos look like or what a corpse <i>feels</i> like to an objectifying gaze. Thus, the virgin gets the joy of self-fulfillment or self-abhorrence, but no real experience has changed hands.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The little blighters of the story are supposed to Change and Learn, and the experience Refines the character from the dross, revealing, like Buonarroti's marble chips, the <a href="https://www.shevet.org/sites/default/files/children/sima/Prisoner.jpg" target="_blank">prisoner within</a>. The thing is, King missed everything. I know, or suspect (I cannot really speak to the man's state of mind, only the narrative), because of what has changed in me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You see, we think of the dead and living, and we fear thinking of dying, but Death. . . death the thing, the moment, the extinguishing, is something we cannot think of. For centuries, poetry has spoken of the <a href="http://biblehub.com/revelation/6-8.htm" target="_blank">pale rider</a>, the <a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/POE/masque.html" target="_blank">midnight visitor</a>, the hungry stranger, the <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html" target="_blank">guttering wind</a>, and we have mistaken these as parables. They are not. They are as literal as our minds can accept of death itself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the time of her death, my mother and I had nothing unsaid. We were sympathetic to an enviable degree. There were still times, of course, when she would refuse to say and I could not intuit, but our feelings were open, and I had no apologies to give or accept. This does not, of course, take even an atom off of the scales (on my eyes or that I eye) whereby guilt is measured. It was my job to keep her alive, to swat away medical mistakes, to hear all the doctors and translate into English, to call in the family when deathly ill turned to moribund but then to be wrong. I knew that I couldn't <i>win</i>, but I also knew that losing, as I had to, was going to be bad -- very bad. When, therefore, my mother's death did not cripple me, I knew that this was just a sign that what was coming was going to be a wave spawned from a deeper shock -- slower to arrive and higher when it arrived. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I tread water furiously as she died. I fairly ran from the deathbed. I told myself a true lie -- that I was giving up my place to her sister and to the rest of the family. I had nothing to say to her, nothing to hear, for we had spoken often of our love, and my own prickliness was something she was <i>finally</i> understanding. (I confess: she still could not tell my "exasperated" and "sad" faces from "angry" faces. When your own Mama thinks you're pissed off all the time, the problem might be in the face. (Then again, I've never been too in love with this one. (A very short line of ex-girlfriends can endorse the sentiment, by the way.)))</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In truth, more was happening. (I cannot, by Goggle, find the true source of the definition of a swan as "Grace and calm above; furious paddling below." I was told it by an absent friend.) I was trying to avoid the evidence. If my mother was going to die, I didn't want to see it. I simply didn't need to, I thought. Let it be a fact, as abstract as my own death. Let it be a case of here and then gone. Let me drive in to the funeral and comment on the coffin. That's the modern thing, after all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I'm sure you know, I was there at the death. I arrived fifteen minutes after the actual death, but it's not long enough that the stranger was not still in the air. The skin's color changes in a flash, and the full relaxation of the face into a droop did not suggest rest, to me. My mother's life force was five times that of anyone else I've known. It was furious, and she barely had any flesh. Without animation, the corpse was and is a negative affirmed. It wasn't loss: it was lostness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Prior to my mother's death, I had put two dogs to sleep in my arms, and the swooping in of death in those circumstances was frighteningly sad. This is similar, because now there is a <i>body</i> that bears only a resemblance to a being whom you love passionately and fully, but this is worse, because the body fights. Even as the hospice personnel were making it "easy," there was nothing easy at all. If I were to have an angelus that said, "All was well at all that time," it would not change the effect on me, because what struck deeply was the core of the core -- life itself versus ceasing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Prior to this grief, I would sing odes to death (mine only) daily. I considered it rather normal. After all, I knew that I was praising rest, not death, really, and, when I last came near to genuineness, I had shuffled away from suicide as being an insufficient improvement over living. Nevertheless, I had, and still actually have, little relish for the days. I have a mighty slate board in my mind of wins and losses, and the latter have been etched, while the former keep getting erased or forgotten. Every month, my poverty runs me against abject failure as an adult, and without feeling qualified as an adult, asserting my skills as anything else are unlikely.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That has stopped now. Now, I think that I want to live. I don't have a good reason for it. I won't even say, "I'll quit when the stupid people do." After all, they replace themselves, and more. I can only say that we should know Death. We should know the unreasoning enemy who bears us no malice. Death <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/212228-sin-is-behovely-but-all-shall-be-well-and-all" target="_blank">is behovely</a>. We are the ones who fight it with more than just our will.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tolstoy wondered what value any of his work had, in the face of death. <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/death-of-ivan-ilych/" target="_blank"><i>The Death of Ivan Ilych</i></a> is one explanation, but it's not Tolstoy's own. No, that story is not about meaning, but about meaningfulness during life. It is about one very, very narrow question: "What are you living for?" The contemporary Kierkegaard would say, </span></div>
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"And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when
the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or
ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is
still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual
in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not." -- <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9988.html" target="_blank"><i>The Sickness Unto Death</i></a></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Despair is any state wherein the infinite (soul) and finite (mind and body) and the barrier between them (self) are <i>unaware</i> of their own heterogeneity. (It works out much more simply and profoundly than it seems, but you can do that on your own.) Tolstoy was right, though, that we will never get out of despair if we never see death.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am miserable (sum quod eris) (<a href="http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/augustinewill.html" target="_blank">non posse</a> non peccare) ("I am a man -- reason enough to be miserable" (Menander's <i>Epitrepontes</i>, I think, because it isn't <i>Dyskolos</i>), but to even feel that requires the flame. I have changed from my experience with dying, but not heroically. I am grieving, and not myself. Instead, I am, I think, far, far sadder than I was, because I have seen the inescapability of the flesh, the way that the rock refuses to let go of its figure, and I have heard the groans that must accompany the liberation.</span><br />
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The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-65122131907643794972013-09-17T11:42:00.000-07:002013-09-17T11:42:45.350-07:00Pain and Suffering (the usual)<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Probitas laudatur et alget."--Juvenal Satires I 74</blockquote>
Virtue is praised, and it starves.<br />
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I've been in a dark, dark place for a while. Last Wednesday, before I found out that I had $88 to last until September 30th, I was faced with a choice: do I tell my first year students about 9/11 or not? If I do, then I'll have to <i>go there</i>. If I do not, then they may have no idea that their entire world was created out of an act of instinct rather than thought. As I have before, I chose to go. My thinking is that I may be the only person who lived through the two months that were "9/11" in New York City that these people will ever meet, and, if I do not tell them, they will never know.<br />
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I began, therefore, with the day. I have written about it before -- how the sky was more perfectly china plate blue than any sky I have ever seen in any place, how the temperature was the sort of chill that teases at one's senses like a lover, enticing and exhilarating at the same time, how the air was so clear that it was possible to see all the way from 90th street to the end of the island, how sparkles appeared on the painted steel lines, how sky scrapers popped one by one across the edge of the window frame on the #6 train. It was a day when even I wanted to play hookey, and I was a) new on the job, b) never skip. (I've taught with high fevers, with tubes running into my bile duct, and once while hungover.) I told them how a full house in the WTC would have meant up to 40,000 dead, so God (or random meterology) saved a lot of lives, because a whole ton of folks went in late.<br />
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I told them how, at 10:30, I went on my religious pilgrimage to the bodega for a bowtie donut and a cup of coffee. "You guys will learn that I am very religious," I said, "about lunch." I told them that I gazed down the vast hill and saw a snuffed candle and didn't know what I was seeing. I told them how we knew that we had orphans in front of us, that we were teaching children who had no parents, but we had to be cheerful and normal. Teachers whose own children worked in the towers had to show no signs of concern.<br />
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Then I told them about the young woman. I said that she was very attractive, and they seemed puzzled, so I had to add, "I'm a heterosexual man. I'm <i>going to notice</i>. You may think I'm old, but I'm not dead." I told them that she confirmed that people had jumped from the towers. She was filthy, and on 9/11 I silently upbraided her for it in my mind. I now know that it was the 120 mph dust cloud that made her dirty. She had said to me and another stranger, "I was in Liberty Plaza. I was where the bodies landed." I mentioned to the students that, all her life, she would have to deal with seeing people alive, falling, and then, in a fraction of a second, dead.<br />
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"What a jovial and a merry world would this be, may it please your worships, <br />but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief, <br />discontent, melancholy, large jointures, impositions, and lies!"--Sterne </blockquote>
The people who saw 9/11 on their televisions received a different thing. They felt <b>pain</b>. We humans have only had movies and television a very, very short while, and we neither evolved nor were made with these technologies. If you see or hear a person get injured, you <i>immediately wish to respond.</i> This is human. Despite those people who say that we are all indifferent to one another and out to line our own pockets (shouldn't someone who says that be placed on a malarial island somewhere?), the fact is that we're pretty social. The sound of babies crying is used as a torture. We can't watch or hear another person get hurt without wanting to react to it, to make things better.<br />
<br />
Out in America, and perhaps the world, people <b>saw</b> the planes hit the towers, heard the firemen calling for help, saw the towers fall, and then saw it all again and again and again. However, <i>they could do nothing . . . nothing at all, to help.</i> There was no "donate money here" button on the screen.<br />
<br />
Television presenters are accustomed to narratives, to stories, and they told 9/11 through a narrative structure. Before the afternoon had come, they were <i>saying who did it</i> and going on to "Why do they hate us?" By the next day, the television news had a complete arc: "They hate us because of our freedom, and they struck us to take our freedom, and now the sleeping giant will get them for what they did."<br />
<br />
When you feel pain and cannot respond, pain leads to <b>frustration</b>, and frustration leads to <b>anger.</b> People lined up to enlist in the armed forces. They were angry. W. Bush played on that anger. He might even have genuinely felt it for all I know. The fact is that watching a huge amount of pain delivered and being unable to anything to, about, or for the situation is going to make anyone angry. This is extremely potent stuff for the amygdala of anyone. <br />
<br />
In New York City, however, <i>we did not see it.</i> Even the people who were at Liberty Plaza could not have seen it without incredibly bad luck. Had they seen one impact, they'd not have seen the other. Had they seen both, they'd not be standing there to see the collapses. Had they seen the collapses, they'd not have seen the ash and debris cloud. Instead, everyone heard the part that <b>directly affected the individual</b>. The people in New York City knew less about what was going on than the least attentive viewer in Hawaii.<br />
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Whatever we saw, heard, or felt, we <b>responded.</b> We had no choice but to respond. If we wished to, we could go down to the pile and volunteer, too. Many civilians volunteered on the first and second day. Even people in the outer boroughs, though, had to respond to the attack, because all had to get food. No trucks were allowed across the river. We had to get transportation. We had to find out if the people we knew were lost or had lost people.<br />
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Also, 9/11 <i>never stopped</i> for us. It played all night, each morning, all day, every day. The ash floated down for days. The smoke blew for over a month.<br />
<br />
New Yorkers had an a) unrelenting, b) unexplainable, c) irreducible, d) <b>meaningless</b> and constant <i><b>suffering</b></i>. Pain makes you act. If a person has pain and cannot remedy it, the person feels anger. Suffering is otherwise. Suffering will not listen to anyone saying, "They hate us because of our freedoms." Aside from that statement being irrational, the statement is entirely non-ameliorative. No one and no thing is made better by understanding that someone hates us for freedom. If the fires burn today and will tomorrow, it does not matter. Furthermore, there is no "make them pay for this." Not only did "the evil men who did this" already "pay" for what they did (they were in the pile), but the fire would burn tomorrow just the same, whether some Afghanistani village were blown up or not.<br />
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Suffering is knowing that the air is harmful and that it will be that way for a month. It is seeing ash-covered bicycles being discovered long after the event. It is men with submachine guns suddenly showing up in the subway station to "reassure" us! <i>Suffering teaches no lessons. Suffering has no meaning. Suffering is not sent or received.</i><br />
<br />
<i>Job</i> is the greatest book about suffering ever written. Job does not learn anything, precisely. However, Job grows as a soul in the course of his suffering. You and I are not Job. At the apogee of his growth, Job is able to say, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." He is not happy with the giving or the taking, but rather saying that the power is God's and that <i>God remains good irrespective</i> of which act is involved or how it affects us. He is not, I think, saying what Leibnitz says -- that what is painful or bad to a human is good in the grand scheme of things -- but rather that however giving or taking treats the happiness of a person is incapable of lessening God's glory and goodness.<br />
<i> </i><br />
To arrive at a conclusion like that and not be a quietist or defeatist, to keep insisting that he will not confess a false sin, nor lose faith, Job's soul is truly great. There is no lesson, though. Had Job not reached that wisdom, the suffering would have been the same, and coming to the understanding doesn't make the boils drop off.<br />
<br />
If you are punched in the arm, you will want to match aggression for aggression, but if you suffer, you won't think that more suffering will help. I think about a bomb or missile that blows up a building and kills four or five innocents but also kills the most lethal terrorist. The village will neither know nor care about the military value of killing this aggressor, but it will know suffering, as it has to have funerals, tend to orphaned children, live with seeing that flash of light and the flicker between life and death. It will have to repair a building, constantly aware that here was where this or that man died. This is why it was hard for those of us who went through 9/11 to agree with the Bush administration's need to go "get" the bad guys.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, for those who felt the pain and frustration and, honestly, impotence, of seeing that much pain without redress, a vast act of aggression was on the cards. The nation's instinct was pushing, and that allowed for politicians with dark ambitions and black hearts to get passed unthinkable laws and to reverse America's position on human rights without a discussion, much less a vote, even less a judicial review.The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-20226941355272403132013-08-11T17:53:00.000-07:002013-08-11T17:53:07.453-07:00How Bill O'Reilly Can Be Accidentally CorrectWell, Bill O'Reilly is going to have a heck of a time being correct on purpose. He made an argument, a very smug one, on the absolute proof of the existence of God. In case you missed it, it happened a while ago that <a href="http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/bill-oreilly-thinks-tides-are-proof-" target="_blank">O'Reilly said</a>,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr.
Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain
that. </blockquote>
His statement was stupid, and it still is. In fact, it is a bottomless stupidity, because it requires Mr. O'Reilly to not merely <i>not know</i> something that most of us know, but to actually <b>forget</b> things that he almost surely learned.<br />
<br />
What causes the tides? The moon. The moon is large enough to attract rocks, to attract water, to pull on everything, even making the Earth bulge just a wee bit. Effectively, as we go from day to night, as the moon goes from over the water to opposite the water, a huge <i>wave</i> develops from the center of the ocean rising, then falling. Voila! The tides come in and go out. <br />
<br />
However, O'Reilly thought that the tides were mysterious, proof, <i>in their reliability</i>, of God. Nothing so vast could be so precise and so regular, it seemed to him, without the omnipotent being attentive to it. Interestingly, another argument of ignorance for God is that something is too <i>unreliable or small</i> to be anything but evidence of God. Thereby people will argue that a cancer in remission or a car accident must establish a divine intervention (randomness mandating a controlling intelligence) and that the modern tide tables' precision proves that God is being a global harbormaster.<br />
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I know that there is a God, but I would not offer the sort of argument that either Bill O'Reilly did -- where the vastness of anything proves it or the bewilderment of chance demands it -- and the idea of holding up such an argument as if it were self-proven is sadly funny. However, Bill O'Reilly, as I said, got accidentally correct. The first place was by showing, rather than knowing or telling, the process of his need.<br />
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It's not my place to judge anyone except students who pay me, and then I only judge their writing. I do not know the depth or complexity of Bill O'Reilly's faith, and I hope that it is deeper than he showed in that anecdote. What he showed, though, was a faith born out of incomprehension rather than mysticism and an assumption that Authority is always in control of all large actions. A person touched by that need will carry with him an assumption that "the government" is in control, that a bad meal at a <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2007/09/21/oreilly-surprised-there-was-no-difference-betwe/139893" target="_blank">restaurant</a> was the result of "the staff" persecuting him, etc.<br />
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O'Reilly's attitude toward tides is not fundamentalist Christian. We can glance back a couple of centuries and see how actual puritains viewed the inexplicably large. See Daniel Defoe's <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41063" target="_blank"><i>The Storm</i></a> as one grand example. At that time, no one knew how the winds worked, really, although they were getting close, and you can see that Defoe ascribes divine power to a place <i>beyond</i> the physical but saw in individual providence of survival or perishing as tinged with God's power. Defoe, unlike some today, had the brains to realize that bad events did not equal a scourge. (See also his <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/376" target="_blank">A Journal of the Plague Year</a>.</i>)<br />
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O'Reilly's "proof," that tides are too big to exist without some Authority in charge, is a true statement about a mind set, a psychology. For some people, all things incomprehensible are also under authority. The atomic bombs are well regulated, the NSA spying is too big to understand and thus a self-aware and self-controlled entity. <br />
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The other way O'Reilly was accidentally accurate is that, in the most technical sense, we really don't know what causes the tides.<br />
<ol>
<li>The moon's mass is sufficient to attract the oceans, which are 70% of the earth's surface (<a href="http://www.universetoday.com/65588/what-percent-of-earth-is-water/" target="_blank">0.02% of the mass</a> of the planet).</li>
<li>Time lapses with cameras on a <a href="http://www.calacademy.org/products/pendulum/" target="_blank">Foucault's pendulum </a>show that stones on a mountain side rise and fall with the moon.</li>
<li>#2 is probably wrong on the how they compensate with the cameras.</li>
<li>In physics, gravity is the weak force that all particles of matter have attracting to other particles of matter.</li>
</ol>
So, each bit of matter wants to be near all other matter.<br />
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Very well. How?<br />
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The truth is that the simplest, most logical explanation for the tides is the gravitational effect of the moon. All persons of sense would accept that answer. Certainly, that's my answer. However, Isaac Newton, when he was working with gravity, couldn't explain <b>how</b> it reached out. He had to resort to spirits, in effect, and "fluxions" to get things attracted. No one can see a "gravitron" or any strings pulling pieces of matter together. We universally recognize the force as present, but it isn't even like a magnet with iron filings.<br />
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Bill O'Reilly's explanation is no explanation for the existence of God, although it does give us insight into a paranoid personality complex. Further, if he <i>were</i> to be correct, on the basis that no one can adequately explain gravity, he would exchange one type of indeterminacy (perfect regularity, but no visible cause) for another (perfect agency, but no visible means).<br />
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<br />The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-32870493608929108892013-05-04T16:34:00.001-07:002013-05-04T16:34:36.591-07:00Me and My BrainMy mother died at the end of March, during Holy Week. Since then, I have discovered that, just as no one in my family knows me (and I'm easy to know -- I've left a pretty wide swathe across the Internet), so I don't really know them, either. Alike, we know where people <i>were</i>, and we do not know what time has done, or what they have done during the battle with time.<br />
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I knew my brother as a man of slogans, bluster, intimidation, and basic goodness. Hard times had not done good things to that kernel. I have become, since they knew me, maybe lazier.<br />
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First, I don't argue with dumb people anymore. Well, I very, very rarely do. I'm far more apt to explain something once and say, "I can see that you're not trying to understand" and then let them go hang. This is a function of security in my opinions. I now know that they're not weak, so I can be more certain that the person disagreeing and wheeling out anecdotal evidence and "This one time" proofs is self-deluding.<br />
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Second, I don't have much in the way of hopes. Quite a while ago, I scaled those back to simply no longer being a host for parasites and staying out of the elements. Being free of parasites is important, but it's not easy to achieve these days. You get a cell phone or some cool new service like Netflix, and the next thing you know it hatches out into a parasite that eats your bread before you can.<br />
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Third, I expect disaster. I have learned not to expect it, expect it, but I have seen arbitrary firings and layoffs, and I have seen nepotistic promotions and replacements far too often to hope for a meritocracy in any sense where my merits might count -- provided I even had any.<br />
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So, about that being lazier, I think I can explain.<br />
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<br />
Oncet, I'd blame all my bad features on birth defects. Finally, I realized that that was stupid and counter-productive.<br />
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Let us suppose that the psychoanalysts of the Tavistock school are correct and children who are hospitalized frequently and for long periods of time are liable to depression. So? Let us suppose that any boy disqualified from sports will have some maladjustments in social skills. So? All of the things that might have been true could be interesting explanations of past phenomena, but they bore no relationship on any present tense. I.e. you know why you felt or were more likely to feel a particular way, so bully for you. Now, though, you make yourself.<br />
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After <i>that</i>, I even got free of the physical complaints. I got all better, thanks to medicine. Hooray.<br />
<br />
[Essayists always have digressions. This is supposed to look like one.] I always knew that my feet hurt. . . a lot. They hurt much more than anyone else's. They hurt when I was twenty-two, and twenty-five, and thirty, and forty, and forty-five. In other words, they have been constantly painful, every day. I can wear rubber sneakers or hard soled shoes, and my feet hurt. I can get Dr. Scholes's most expensive orthotics, and my feet hurt. I can even get a foot rub from a pretty girl, and my feet hurt.<br />
<br />
A neurologist the other month, when talking to me about my spinal arthritis, said, "Oh, that? That's probably neuropathy." I began to protest that I was not some slovenly diabetic, and he explained that all the radioactive tracers and compounds I had gotten in my veins for all those years tended to settle in the extremities and kill nerves. In other words, it was medicine killing nerves in my feet, and thus there was nothing to do for it.<br />
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I have also always gotten tired more quickly than other people. I hear the same thing in response to this as I heard about the feet: "Lose some weight." Ok. I have. I'm just as tired. "Lose some more weight." Alright. I have no objection to that, but I rather suspect it won't have the magical properties being touted. In fact, now that I think back, "Dyspnea" is a side effect of every medicine I take and a primary symptom of what I grew up with. Also, the warranty I got on my last surgeries said, "Normal lifespan," not normal life.<br />
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I may, eventually, be able to forgive myself for how tired I get. I will never be able to convince anyone else, though, that I'm not getting lazier as the days go by.The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32348861.post-39666426063535760632013-03-24T10:08:00.001-07:002013-03-24T10:08:30.644-07:00Where's My Montage?Cinema tries to imitate life, both as it occurs and as it is perceived. When it imitates the perception of life, it's expressionist, and some expressionist marvels have been so true, so accurate to our perceptions, that they've been repeated to the point of cliche.<br />
<br />
You know what I'm talking about, even if the terms are unfamiliar. The person in an accident on screen has everything go into <i>slow motion</i>. Real time doesn't do that, but we experience time that way sometimes during traumas. Some director decides, during a climatic scene, to have a single flower in a brilliant color to indicate the real way that human perceptions work, where a detail that seems irrelevant may stand out more to a participant than the materially important events.<br />
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Well, how about the early parts of "The Graduate?" You know what I'm talking about. Dustin Hoffman puts on his new SCUBA gear and walks into a party of people speaking gibberish to him and sinks to the bottom of the swimming pool. The replica of his tropical fish tank and his private metaphor (being on view, being an object), as well as the director's (being cut off, being unintelligible, having dialog streams that belong to different languages/species) is perfect. You loved it. I loved it. After all, we were always Dustin Hoffman's character, because we were the camera.<br />
<br />
Then came the fast motion montage. You know this, too. The framing character is impassive, stunned, catatonic, and the rest of the scene is filled with a stop-motion or slow-film-stock film of people running at sixteen times normal speed and interacting. They're all <i>doing</i> things, while the character (you) is out of it (out of time). The point of view character has declared a separate peace.<br />
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In the days of rock videos, the technique was a cliche, if only because the feeling was a cliche. It's a large part of what adolescence and young adulthood is: being overwhelmed, like The Graduate, and incapable.<br />
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However, the heart of it, of the humanity that affirms the cinematic gesture, that makes us resonate, is in much graver circumstances than the prom or graduation. The heart of it is the inconsolable and unreasonable. The heart of it is birth and death. The lie of it is that the point of view character who becomes a cork in the maelstrom does not end up safe and saved, but farther at sea, with dilemmas that cannot be reconciled.<br />
<br />
In short, it is a cinematic lie. It is an expressionistic truth that is a living falsehood.<br />
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Nevertheless, I sure as hell wish I could have one right now. My mother is in hospice care for her last days, and her death is all going to be on me. All the decisions are mine, and all the financial burden will land here, but, more to the point, her death will explode my life, because my life for seven years has been devoted, first of all, to looking after her. I always figured that, after that did not really matter: my job would be done. It sure would be good if the montage were true, and not mimetic.The Geogrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841884887406653516noreply@blogger.com3