Litgeek Rambles

Dangerous faiths

2012-02-24T17:42:00.000-08:00

"The majority of mankind islazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion,and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith."-- T. S. Eliot

This last week, I heard a speaker say things that sent me back to my childhood, and not to any happy moment of it, either. The speaker was a Baptist minister, and he was extremely entertaining. His banter was quick, and his talk was full of self-deprecation, and there were one-liners from Comedy Central comedians, although I'm sure that neither he nor his flock ever watched such foul-language fare, and he brought such smiles to the faces of the congregation and so many laughs that it was very hard to hear the click when he pulled the pin on a hand grenade.

I was, am, and ever will be a crabbed, unnatural, and acursed audience. I am a critic.

"Of all the Causes which conspire to blind
Man's erring Judgment, and misguide the Mind,
What the weak Head with strongest Byass rules,
Is Pride, the never-failing Vice of Fools.
Whatever Nature has in Worth deny'd,
She gives in large Recruits of needful Pride;
For as in Bodies, thus in Souls, we find
What wants in Blood and Spirits, swell'd with Wind;
Pride, where Wit fails, steps in to our Defence,
And fills up all the mighty Void of Sense!
If once right Reason drives that Cloud away,
Truth breaks upon us with resistless Day;
Trust not your self; but your Defects to know,
Make use of ev'ry Friend--and ev'ry Foe." -- Pope, "An Essay on Criticism."

As Umberto Eco says, in his piece on journalism, intellectuals are lousy friends, because they're not friends at all. They have to point at errors, have to pick at details, never leave things alone. This is why I thought having faculty go to sermons was a terrible idea from the beginning. The only thing that could happen is that someone would find a fault with what was said, thought, or felt by one of the parties.

This particular speaker was a star attraction, or an attractive star. His brother had been or is big news in politics, and there is some, eh, controversy attached. I, myself, was not tuning in for that, although if it happened, I'd probably have jotted notes. Earlier, there had been a talk entitled "Ten Things Christians Need to Know about Islam," but this was a "Personal Testimony."

Here's the thing. I will come straight out and say that the gigantic emphasis on conversion stories bugs me.

The brother's story (click on "His brother," above to see my point illustrated) shows how there is a tendency for a person's holiness to be directly related to his or her sinfulness. A person who was a gay drug dealing prostitute Pit Bull fighter who repents gets a large congregation, where the person who had been in doubt and comes to faith is yawned toward. This makes the "testimony" an act of entertainment and demands a dramatic structure to it.

What was Mary's conversion? What was Timothy's? What was James's? What was Peter's? What was Andrew's? The Magdalene and Paul are not all. This theology does not allow people to grow up in their churches. They all have to convert.

It's one thing to say that all are fallen by nature, but it's another thing to rip a single verse from Paul and treat it in a strange, strange way. If you want to understand virtually all of the Southern Baptist churches and evangelical churches, you're going to have to read this and understand it. I'll paraphrase after.

Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?
²For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.
³So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.
⁴Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.
⁵For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.
⁶But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.
⁷What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.
⁸But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead.
⁹For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.
¹⁰And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.
¹¹For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me.
¹²Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.
¹³Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful.
¹⁴For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.
¹⁵For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.
¹⁶If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good.
¹⁷Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
¹⁸For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.
¹⁹For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
²⁰Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
²¹I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.. -- Romans 7

Now, if I were to render a concise version, I would say that it is:
"Those of you who know the law know how the law has power over a man as long as he lives? A woman is bound to her husband by law as long as he lives, for example, but when he dies, she is free. If she marries someone else while he is alive, she's an adulteress, but not if he is dead. Just like that you have become dead to the Law by the body of Christ so that you may be married to another, to the one who rose from the dead, so that you can be fruitful for God. When we were part of the flesh, we only produced the fruit of flesh, which had sins working through the Law in it. Now that we are delivered from that law, which is dead to us, and we are new in spirit and not old in literal confinement.
"What can I say, that the Law is sin? God forbid. No, I had never known sin, except through the law, and I had not known lust except that the law said 'do not covet.' Sin, using the commandment, brought up in me all sorts of lust. Without the law, sin was dead. I was alive without the law once, but when the commandment came, sin arrived, and I died, and the commandment, which was created to give life, I found to give death. Sin, took the commandment and deceived me, and it killed me by the commandment.
"The law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good. Was the good made deadly? God forbid, but sin worked death by that which is good. For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do, I do not allow. What I would do, I do not do. What I hate, yet I do. If I do that which I deplore, I consent to the law that is good. Now it is no more I who does this than the sin that lives inside me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh), dwells no good thing, for to will is present in me, but how to perform the good I cannot discover."

I'm sorry to inflict so much Bible on you, but this is the basis of "sin nature." Google "sin nature," and you'll see how thick the hits come. It is one of the tenets of faith for Southern Baptists these days that the unconverted have a "sin nature" that gets changed into another sort of nature upon conversion. When I read Paul, I see a Jewish man wrestling with the concept of Jewish law and the capacity of human will. I see an educated Roman citizen wending through philosophies of the soul to try to understand his faith and experience and revelation in terms that would fit into the conversation. When I read it, I see it as a man saying, "My flesh is imperfect, and I do not have perfect control, and all things of the flesh are temporary, and the law is a law of the flesh." I see a dualism here between the physical man, or at least what the man perceives as physical (desire and want), contrasted with the affective and spiritual man. I see Paul arguing that, until we are saved, we can only hope for laws binding our flesh to keep us from barbarism, and our flesh's imperfections are such that we can even use that to be evil, but, once we are saved, we are putting all of our moral guidance on Jesus, whose standards are absolute and above the physical.

"Essence" can mean two things. There is a Platonic essence -- the template on which all items of a type are made, the core heart of a thing -- and an Aristotelian essence -- a set of characteristics that may have no existence anywhere but the mind, a concept of the universal quality found in all of a type. For these believers, sin nature is Platonic. It's the heart of humanity and deterministic. It not only limits our reach, but it makes us devils.When they convert, they believe that every part of them changes, because they are wiped clean inside and out, and they really are not driven by the same force as before.

Why do I read Paul this way and they that way? It's part of what I'm getting at with this post, and it's part of what ties my objection to what I heard this week in.

You see, if you already know what the answer is, then you can find proof of it in examples. Imagine that you already know that Jim down the hall is a racist. All you need to do now is listen to every word he says for it, and you'll hear it. If you know that The Declaration of Independence was written by Christians, then you'll easily find proof of that. If you are certain that a person who undergoes salvation is saved forever or not at all, then Paul's discussion of the nature of post-lapsarian man and the role of the Mosaretic law is obviously a discussion of how entirely a person is changed in capabilities after the conversion experience that also must occur.

Don't trust me on these things by any means. Click my links.


Polyptych of the Misericordia, by Piero della Francesca

The speaker this week told the crowd that each of them had a conversion story to tell. This story was each person's own testimony, and it was a sovereign message. In that spirit, I have to note something else he said and why my own testimony conflicts with it.

He spoke of how true the Bible is. He said that it is, and I will try to do this typographical justice, INERRANT from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 "and if they can get you to give up a single verse, they can take the whole Bible from you." Who "they" are was not stated, but, presumably I'm one of "them," as I would argue the above, for example. I would argue that Paul is talking in the context of Hellenistic philosophy and Judaic metaphysics and ethics as he attempts to explain a role for redemption, while they would say otherwise, and since they know in advance what the answer is, I am trying to "take" it. I am the enemy.

However, because the Bible is inerrant, he said that "all the answers" are in there, and "it answers you." He spoke specifically on the idea that a person could and should turn to the Bible when wondering how to meet the bills, when wondering how to perform a task, etc. He then said, "Christianity isn't a crutch. It's a wheelchair!"

I thought about that for a while.

The Rascal of Righteousness?

This man, I realized, was the very embodiment of what cost me my religion the first time.
When I was eleven, I lost my faith. I had been attending tent revivals every year, as well as church with my parents. I don't remember the latter, as the washed out United Methodist ministers gave sermons that amounted to "be nice." On the other hand, we had itinerant evangelists like Ford Philpot and Jimmy Swaggart come to catch us on fire every year at the revival. They offered up a 100% conversion experience, with altar calls that went for thirty minutes and sexually promiscuous teens getting saved on cue on the next to the last day. They had the most beautiful and handsome college kids as the most pious. They made it all infinitely desirable and impossible.

Everyone, especially at the Swaggart camp, had hysterical conversions, and all of them had extremely dramatic stories. They were whoring, drinking, wife beating, gambling, cheating, violent people until they found Jesus, and now they were so happy and completely saved that it was astonishing.

I was precocious, I guess. I had already read the entire Bible in King James. I knew my New Testament. I sinned every single day, and I repented, and not once did I get converted. Furthermore, I not once got flung to the rafters. I also didn't want to start drinking or beating on people in order to do that, either. I felt peace after repentance, but peace isn't want these folks had. Worse yet, I felt guilt. I felt a lot of guilt.

I wasn't in a wheel chair.

I felt certain that I had to love actively, else there was no salvation. I didn't give two poots in a paper bag over "works," but being prideful and greedy sure looked like things Jesus condemned and said that folks were damned for. I could only hear this "completely changed" thing so often, though, before I was forced to choose:
1. Either I was worse than them, and God was rejecting me, or
2. There was no God, or
3. There might be a God, but these jokers were liars or blockheads or in mass hypnotism.

I had indescribable spiritual pain. It was no easy thing to walk away, as I did when I was thirteen. It cost me much more than an ideal, too.

When, much later, I came back to faith, I came back with discernment. I also came back with a determination that there were times and issues where it was worth fighting. I wish no one ill, but these are dangerous things. These are not faiths, but certainties. These are not beliefs, but wishes. They spread because elected they make the ones who elect to believe that all Christianity requires of them is hating the people who disagree.

Why is the Gin Grinch saying these mean things?

2012-01-19T07:45:00.000-08:00

I'm thrilled that Newt Gingrich is getting some of the negative attention that he has deserved for decades. He has enjoyed a Pat Buchanan like existence -- uttering troglodytic slogans, spitting poison, retreating to a cavern of stink, and always, always, always getting paid. Finally, though, his millionaires have met up with Romnoid's millionaires, and Newt's getting Newtered.

That said, he hasn't changed. There are three stages of a newt's life cycle. There is the newt in repose, when it gathers resentment and money, the newt campaigning, when it empties its bladder of all the stored resentment, and the newt sunning itself on the rock while in office, which is the time it picks on flies and claims to be defeating dragons.

However, Newt Gingrich, from Pennsylvania, found a niche in a defense contractor dominated area of Atlanta, and he migrated into that area and expanded to fill it completely. When he lost his position in Congress, he played dead, perhaps, but he is an old pro at playing possum. Once he was no longer Speaker of the House or minority or majority whip, what was the harm in putting him on Meet the Press FIFTY-THREE TIMES? After all, as an unelected, non-policy person, who could be more germane for a Sunday show?

I know that Mitt Romney is supposed to be the "perfectly lubricated weather vane," but Newt is self-lubricated. As for where he points, it is not where the voters push, but where they pull. Himself, he goes here and there, spinning as ego and carnal bliss may lead, but as a campaigner? He has one trick.

It seems tone deaf, if not suicidal, for Newt to go for the racial folderol, doesn't it? Even an audience that booed Jesus Christ applauded (lightly) when Juan Williams pointed out to Gingrich that his garbage about "Food Stamps" seemed racist. In 2008, the United States elected its first African American president, and it did so with a huge popular vote margin. Racism, qua racism, doesn't really win.

It's just that Newt is a salamander of habit.

We got our first taste of "strapping bucks" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps in 1980 from Ronald Reagan. It is possible that, in this age of more-lunatic-than-Reagan economic politics from the Republican Party, we have forgotten what Reagan Republicans looked like. It was Reagan who gave us "Welfare queen" and the "young buck" in 1976, and he kept the language going in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Newt liked. Newt learned.

Reagan Republicanism is misdirection at its most basic. Gingrich is caught. He has lost his ability to appear financially right wing, thanks to the bane of the far right wing corporate attack ads aimed at him. He has lost the ability to be the moral majoritarian, thanks to all the stained bedsheets being waved about. These are his winning issues! He has lost his stance as the smart guy by being exposed as silly, stupid, wrong, and extremely arrogant.

He has nothing, so he goes to the one thing that always works: the flashpot distraction of "lazy Black people are taking your money." It has always saved him in the past, and it's working for him now.

The most significant problem with Newt's flashbang grenade is that the room is too small.

You see, the diversion is working for him, among primary voters who boo Jesus Christ. This group wanted to be convinced only that there was a reason not to succumb to the inevitable Mittens. He has been able to interrupt everyone else by saying, "Don't you hate Welfare queens and gang bangers getting rich in their lazy 'hoods off of your money? Have you noticed that the President is a . . . guy who helps those people do that?" They were saying, "Gingrich has no economic plans as radical as ours, has no social policies as vicious as ours, and he has been free with his penis, unlike us," since the burden to pass for primary voters appears to be radicalism. He has succeeded only by saying, "Maybe, but I'm willing to say racist things in thinly disguised code without apologizing."

The most essential problem with Newt's turn is that it's a repeat. I don't mean by that, by the way, that racists have learned anything.

Have you noticed that Newt never campaigns on his Congressional accomplishments? Wouldn't you expect the legislative leader of the Republican Party in opposition to a Democratic president to campaign on successful legislation? Wouldn't you expect him to boast of his Contract On America? In 1994, Newt announced a takeover. He had a vision. He and his party were going to flat out dictate legislation.

You see, they succeeded. That's the thing. Newt should be campaigning on all he accomplished, because he got his way!

He SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT to prove that "government isn't the solution to the problem. Government is the problem." The nation did not agree. You see, the truth, which is that the government is made up of the people, that our government is us, was made quite clear. Furthermore, he CLEARED THE WAY for corporate contributions to campaigns. He set in motion the destruction of Glass-Stegal that led to the banking collapse. He enabled the merger-mania that made Mitt Romney millions. He cut the capital gains tax so that Mitt Romney could draw ten million dollars a year and pay 15% in income taxes.

Why isn't Newt bragging about all that? Don't Republican voters like what they want?

More particularly, though, Newt's signal success was making good on his promise to get rid of all those lazy Welfare queens. The Welfare Reform Act of 1995 is Newtie's. (I vowed not to vote for Clinton's second term when he signed it.) You see, Newt Gingrich killed Welfare. It doesn't exist anymore.

Under the new thing, no one may receive aid for more than three years without being disabled. Therefore, it's three years and then starvation, so no "ten kids in a Cadillac." Foodstamps also ended. Both are now state programs. This has allowed vicious states to be vicious to the poor and humane states to be less vicious, but no one is being kind, or even reasonable.

In other words, Newt has to claim to have had no successes in order to campaign on lazy people on Welfare. He would rather present himself as a failure to repeat his 1980's campaigns than give up the dodge of racism. The campaign racism of the 1980's was bull to begin with, of course, because, when Welfare did exist, it went to Caucasians at a rate greater than demographic percentages would indicate, and Food Stamps are primarily to benefit dependent children. No one is a "buck" with a T-bone, but no one ever had been.

Never mind that, though: reality is not what Newt wants. It's not what he can afford.

Incidentally, this...

This is very funny and very well done, and don't even bother trying to tell me that it isn't, because there is "well constructed wit," and that's different from "I was in the mood to laugh."

I Get Mitt

2012-01-12T11:36:00.000-08:00

“I like being able to fire people.” – Mitt Romney, January 9, 2012.

People complain about Mitt Romney. They say that his followers are Romnulans. They say that he is a Romneybot. They say that he is a failed experiment by the Blue Fairy, who got bored of granting the wishes to suspiciously loved pediatric puppets and decided to see if she could turn a real boy into wood.2 But I get Mitt. Mitt's a regular guy, and his quote from the Chamber Com/Mers was proof of that.3

While candidates of questionable patriotism like John Huntsman might think the sentiment makes Mittens “unelectable,” I, and CBS Money Watch's Suzanne Lucas, know that Mitt was just being a regular guy! It's probably going to win him votes among highly successful people.4

All Mittie meant, according to Ms. Lucas (and I'll bet she's really pretty!) is what Thomas Carlyle said earlier:

Whoever has sixpence is sovereign over all men – to the extent of the sixpence; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him – to the extent of sixpence. – Carlyle, Sartor Resartus 5

Now that Carlyle guy's character is poor, but the poor people get to fire people, too, and Mitt's unemployed! He doesn't even get a paycheck! So Mitt, just like every other regular guy, just means that he likes being able to say no to the people who fail to please him, and don't we all?

He's a regular Joe six-pack, complaining about the government. Those guys who make more money than he does and do an inferior job. It's the right -- nay, the pleasure -- of successful men to tell off inefficient and lousy workers as you demand better service.

A highly successful American man.

I remember, once, when I was in the small (I guess it's a town; "farm," "manorial estate," and "smear" all seem to miss the mark) of Dunwoody, Georgia. This town suffered from an infestation of money. There was an insidious rot of the stuff everywhere, but especially in the homes and cars, and I was in what was then its shiny new mall, called Perimeter Mall.6 I was in line at the McFood's, but I was unable to practice my love. A middle aged man was in front of me, and he was yelling at the counter help.

The beef patty in his bread sandwich was not warm upon reaching the plastic tray, and the condiments were applied unevenly. Furthermore, the pommes frites were tepid. He demanded . . . . Well, I wasn't entirely clear what it was that he demanded. He refused a coupon and a replacement. Instead, he was telling the counter boy that HE KNEW what it took, that HE had spent years in business, and YOU DON'T GET AHEAD by giving an inferior product.

The boy behind the counter looked as though his head were about to explode.7 Myself, I wanted to rabbit punch the business expert very much. I even formed a fist with one knuckle protruding, and I was examining his medulla oblogata.8 I thought it would be easier than asking him at what point he had gotten confused and believed that he had wandered into a three star restaurant or mistakenly assumed that he had paid for food of higher... well, food.

Now, though, I get it. That was Mitt. He was firing someone.

When depression strikes, and it strikes with a wet thud most of the time,9 some people hit the chocolate pie, some people regress, and a lot of people go for “retail therapy.” Taken to any kind of reliance or extreme, buying one's way out of a funk is a disease, but going down to the hobby store to buy a $1.29 Guillow Glider can be an enjoyable lift of the spirits. Put $25 in your pocket and go to the dollar store, and you can feel like king or queen of the world. Carlyle's quote comes true: you command the earth to the extent of that $25.

You become the Disney Princess, the Man of Largesse. Go to Krystal or White Castle, and you can purchase whole hamburgers for less than a dollar. This is that necessary, joyful illusion of prosperity and comfort and, most dear of all, power over one's tiny, crashing world, that we all have available to us to some small extent, if we have some employment.

Not everyone wants to be the Princess, though. Some people want to be the Queen.

”I don't want to get married. I just want to get divorced.” – Natasha (Jessica Harper) in “Love and Death”

Mittie's one of us, you see. He likes to lift his spirits by going out and, to the extent of two hundred and fifty million dollars, telling people that they're not good enough.10

You enjoy yelling at the mail man and paper boy, don't you? Well, so does Mitt. It's just a question of scale. If you have a problem with the difference in scale, it's not because Mitt's different, but because you're envious of him. It's true that he may have to buy up a company in order to demonstrate to it just how inferior it is, has to hire it in order to fire it, but that's again just a question of scale and envy on your part.

Some children go through the “fa-da” phase. (Ok, all children do, although I promise that I didn't. I only went through the fa so phase.) This is when they demand that Mommy give them a toy so that they can throw it on the ground and demand it again. It is great fun for the infant, because it proves that the infant has power. Some infants get stuck in a pleasure principle of gathering in, and others a destructive principle of tearing down11, and that's just how it goes -- but that's totally normal, just a regular guy kind of thing. The people who get into the love of accumulating can end up being addicted to things, I suppose, but, on the other hand, the ones who like to destroy make good human resources people.

So let's all give Mittie a break. He's a regular guy. He just likes to be able to fire people. Surely that bodes well for all of us as his employees, if he becomes president, doesn't it?
==Notes==
1.
    There is no first note.
2.
     I think it is entirely unfair to the conifer and angiosperm phyla to accuse Mitt Romney of bearing any relation to them. Furthermore, although the dream of a little boy born to a bachelor could be read rather, err, curiously today (just why did Giapetto want a boy he could control?), I think that it isnot true that those who call Romney wooden are trying to contrast the Mormon church's superfetation with the Roman Catholic Church's recent difficulties.
3.
     The connections between the Chambers of Commerce and SMERSH are well known. One has only to look at the video of Romney's remarks to spot several doubtful looking individuals.
4.
   Super effective people don't read books. They read summaries on the web that are based on summaries gotten from hornbooks.
5.
     If Carlyle had staid like he was when he wrote Sartor Resartus, more people would like him today. That book was sort of the last hurrah of the younger generation of Romantics, the last gasp of aestheticism (but no one told Aubrey Beardsley that). Unfortunately, he started making kissy faces at the boots of Great Men. . . and so did his wife, I think. . . and his historical view started getting pretty oily.
6.
     This mall was named for its proud stature of riding the "perimeter highway" of I-285, which is itself a strange thing, as "interstate" 285 goes around in a circle and therefore does not go inter state at all. It does, however, mark the state of "Atlanta, those people, it, what can't come out here" and "Us, normal folks, you know?, do I have to spell it out?, nice places." The demarcation was entirely economic, of course, and completely polite. Except in Stone Mountain. And Cuming.
7.
     This was not because he was going to holler back at the cretinous monster in his face, but rather due to the state of his acne.
8.
   Look at your dominant hand. Clench a fist. Now, stick your second finger knuckle out a bit by means of bedding the nail of that finger against your thumb. Be vewy vewy quiet as you approach the important business executive. Smile and stand behind him. When you hear, "Oh, sure, Obama wants to tax the top 2% of our income, but then it'll be 50%, and it's like Russia" or some other bit of insane certitude, bring your dominant hand back even with your ear, and strike quickly at the base of the offender's neck. Laughing hysterically or jumping up and down in glee is not necessary.
9.
     It can also fall like night, creep like a thief, strangle like a pillow, drown like a flood, massacre like a battallion of syphilitic cossacks, snipe like a myopic sharp shooter, or overpower like a 1949 Oldsmobile sedan being swung on a pendulum from behind you.
10.
     Of course it's completely unfair to suggest that a highly successful businessman would spend his entire net worth on buying things in order to savage them. After all, his five boys have their ten million trusts, and he has operating capital. He probably operates on less than a tenth of that total worth -- $20,000,000.00 or so -- so it's hardly worth talking about. Chump change, really. Not enough room to maneuver, really, even when it's a buyer's and firer's market.
10.
     Bet you thought I was going to go for the anal retentive/anal expulsive thing, didn't you? Well, I'm not. I don't even know about that.

Word of the Weeks: Babbittry

2012-01-05T10:57:00.000-08:00

I will let you look up the word yourself, but you'll need a good dictionary. If you see a reference to Sinclair Lewis, you've got it.

Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares--toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters--were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first sight the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom. -- Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

Sinclair Lewis had the luck of getting to be a great, great cynic and being the first one across the tape when it comes to the stereotypes of America. He wrote bitterly about purchasing the American mind. From the agitated malcontents and racists and dreamers who looked for a frontier, we were losing scope. If there was no more a chance to go West to find gold, the gospel of getting rich hadn't changed: we just began to think the frontier was inside our borders. As the perspective grew narrower, we were selling our minds at wholesale prices. He got to be the first man to write Elmer Gantry. He wasn't the first one to write Main Street. He won the Nobel Prize.

He didn't win the fight, though. In Main Street, Arrowsmith, and Babbitt there is one consistent satirical target: the fatuous, jowl flapping, self-sure, raw faced dullard who nevertheless gets rich and bewildered in America, drunk on belief in platitudes. (That's what "babbittry" is. Pedantry won over writerly instinct, so I had to tell.)

It's a trap!

I will no longer bail water on the Titanic. I get it: the ship's sunk, the horse has fled and died, the party's over, she's gone home with someone else, the ship sailed, the train left the station, Elvis left the building, the sun's gone down, dawn has dawned on a new day, and there is no turning back now. (Is there ever "no turning back" except now? Was there no turning back then?) America belongs to . . . the golfers. America belongs to the Chamber of Commerce, and they don't even want it. It is the inheritance of the Republican Party, the quantifiers, and the people who have home-town spirit and the motivational posters to prove it. The people who think that global warming is "in dispute" because "those scientists" can't be trusted, that "both parties are the same," who believe that they're in the middle class and that they will get rich -- these are the rightful heirs of the land of natural resources, the natural rulers of the nation of the partly educated and lackadaisically free.

There is not a thing I can do about that. Even the "art of a well timed turd" is an useless plastic art when it comes to this tide. I am not young. Young folks shout themselves hoarse over these things and never realize that every generation does the same about the same things because "the bourgeoisie is rising" forever, and it is the nature of the thing to be dull witted and disappointing. Babbitt's SUV radio plays Rush Limbaugh complaining about how They are trying to take his wealth, and Babbitt thinks I'm a complainer.

I just want to help Babbitt be unhappy is all. After all, given the ratings of AM screaming radio, I presume that there are a good many people who want to be angry and unhappy. I'd like to get in on that. I picked up Sinclair Lewis's character because his theology is in improvement. In fact, Lewis wasn't just beating up idiotic rich men; he was satirizing the American religion of self-improvement, dieting, and technology, the belief every American has that he will be rich, that he will rise, that cautionary tales are fiction.

Babbitt himself has an iconography of gadgets. His children are the same. The world improves, as proven by the march of stuff, the never ending song of chrome finishes and carbon fibers and televisions in 3-D with surround sound. This is the empirical evidence of the divine grace of progress. We feel that challenged now, what with the crisis in the one fundamental value, land, but there is still a belief out there, despite all the actual evidence to the contrary, that "I" will make progress, that "people who know what they're doing" will flourish and that tomorrow will have better people in it, and a better surroundings.

Self-improvement is not a matter of faith, but of evidence, once you make one swap. If you agree to this exchange, you, too, can "do lunch" and worry about the size of your riding vaccuum cleaner; if you do not, you will never be comfortable. If empirical and material standards are the only real or knowable things, everything flows after.

How should an economy work? Should it provide maximum capital at the greatest efficiency or the greatest happiness for the greatest number? Is the law that binds society together one of moral obligation or of natural contracts for defense and exchange? What is the value of a man or woman to society? Is it the person's "honor" (marked by birth status and behavior in a code of ethics), or is it the material the person accumulates and contributes?

The questions I am posing are the basic questions that underpin materialist and empiricist value structures and essentialist and metaphysic value structures.

If anyone at all tells you that "capitalism" is the economic system of buying and selling at a profit, then that person is lying to you or completely uninformed. Capitalism is an economic system whereby all moral constraints on sales are removed, where wage and price reflect not cost, but cost and rental on capital. Furthermore, it emerged fitfully, not all at once, and in England for the most part.

People were trading in markets for as far back as we can find. A Phoenician cloth seller and a modern fabric shop operated in much the same way. Both bought their supply and sold with a markup. That's not capitalism. Capitalism, ideally, is a bunch of bankers deciding there ought to be a cloth shop, hiring a shop staff, and then demanding a cut of the profits every month, when their only "work" had been having money. Capitalism is also, though, being able to buy up all the cloth for a season and hold off selling until the price went up enough.

In the 18th century, when Adam Smith argued in favor of capitalism in The Wealth of Nations, what he was describing was already happening. He argued that it should happen more, mind you, and he had brilliant analysis, but he wasn't the king, and no one passed laws because of him. Smith thought that man had a "good nature." See, a lot of folks in the middle of the 18th century thought that was the case. They thought that humans, if schools and laws and churches didn't mess with us, were good. Further, Smith, like Hutcheson and a number of others, thought that we were born with morality in us. We had a "common sense" of what was good or bad. No one would starve a region to get rich! People aren't like that, and saying that they are is "superstition."

Smith also thought that what he was describing was a fact of nature. Leave people alone, without the interference of those nasty and corrupt kings and Popes, and people will operate a more efficient market.

That was it. That was the critical argument.
1. Capitalism is a natural state.
2. People are benign by nature.
3. The natural state is more efficient than any system designed by man.
4. It is best, therefore, to have limits on commerce removed.

Now, I'm sure #2 makes you shake your head. I do not know of too many times in history when intellectuals thought people were basically good other than the middle of the 18th century. However, the arguments against removing the limits on trade were coming from the aristocrats ("we're born with rights and obligations"), the church ("Christ demands that we give to the poor"), and the poor ("You owe us first"). None of these were as persuasive as the idea that man had gotten it wrong with kings and Popes and that "nature" and science would lead us to big money.

Never mind, though. No one did anything because of Smith's argument. They struck down Edward VI's corn laws because it made money for London and for the large land owners and for the corn factors who supported the members of Parliament. Let's be real. However, the argument stuck around. It was an argument that asked everyone to make a clear distinction, to pick a side: do you choose visible measures or moral ones?

It's apple time

Capitalism becomes self-validating.
When you do not have to give the poor first dibs at the wheat harvest, and when you can pre-sell your wheat to a dealer, then dealers ("corn factors") can move massive amounts of wheat from one region of the country to another. London can be fed. Hooray! Also, of course, England can export wheat to France during its revolutionary period. Hooray again! There is wealth 'created.' There is prosperity. The state has money for bigger navies and stuff.

Stuff is showing up.

Of course, during all of this, the poor have gone hungry. Prices have gone way up for the retail customer, but the aggregate customer, the large Market rather than that piddly little market town, is doing great guns. If you need proof of how naturally good it is, simply look at the money involved. If you need further proof, look at the STUFF! Pay no mind to the poor.

Once the real material *stuff* is your measure, improvement is always at hand, and progress is always going to occur. (Look, I'm not going to go into the whole "GDP must grow; capitalist nations are imperialist" and all that stuff. I don't need to.)

Even if an economy or epoch doesn't make any progress at all, an empiricist value system can tell the people that there is continual improvement because there is constant change. All you need to do is say, "Cymbalta is a new drug for treating pain," and you have a major bit of progress, don't you? (Hey, look at Snus!)

If you don't accept material as a sign of progress, then happiness proves elusive. If the .mp3 player that is also a marital aid, pasta maker, car battery starter, and TV remote isn't progress, then progress either vanishes or gets qualified into oblivion. Length of life is progress, but it gets qualified by new diseases. Literacy is progress, but unemployment obviates it. Clean water is very much progress, but it is only on offer for a minority -- the same minority who pretty much had it before.

So, playing golf and driving an SUV and wearing the right color tie or skirt? How about the TV-hat for watching one's iPhone? The rules that govern social ascent and verifiable happiness for the Babbitts are matters of faith, of religion. They worship the works of their own hands, the idols of their own making, and lose, in the process, morality.

Of course, in exchange, they get a sort of ennervated happiness.

Happy Independence Day!

2011-12-30T11:25:00.000-08:00


The well known Christmas azaleas

Today is Independence Day. Congratulations to all of us.

In American Samoa, today is two days, as the islanders decided that the calendar should go from December 29th to December 31st, with no December 30th in between. They can do that, and they did. As the Christian Science Monitor put it, they "lost December 30, 2011 forever." That's right: it's gone, and it's NEVER COMING BACK! What's more, they lost Friday.

"The time present is seldom ableto fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we areforced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation." -- Samuel Johnson, The Rambler #203

We just had Christmas, of course, and I am sure you all enjoyed my constipated philosophical traction-pull on time and tide. Based on the number of comments I got, I would say that it managed to make a month at Mal-Wart shopping for Air Jordans seem like a healthy occupation. It's ok. At least I agree with you: it was boring. This time, I promise to only be repetitive.

Do you remember December 31st, 1999 or 2000? Did you feel a tingle when the clock switched from 11:59 to 12:00 AM? If so, were you touching an electrical wire or engaging in a sex act? When you woke up the next morning, did you find that all of your prior notions were subtly different? Did you find that your attitudes toward, say, cutting and pasting information in a business report or a scholarly study were softened? Did you notice that your memory was worse (permanently, I mean)? Did you say, "Hey! I'm not in the same country I went to bed in! I feel like the nation-state has lost its boundaries as a meaningful geopolitical unit?"

I ask this because, just as "by the year 2000, the #1 problem for Americans will be too much leisure time," so also "in the twenty-first century" everything has changed. You didn't notice? You thought that these things were slowly moving, some on a glacier and others on a surfboard? Well, that's because you weren't looking at the calendar the right way. You were being Samoan.

Call this the "Samoan version" of the same photo.

I don't blame you if you ignore the quotations I sometimes include in my essays. Johnsonian quotations in particular can sound so balanced as to be self-negating and nugatory. However, his quote this time is about the present and how we're not busy enough (by the year 1800, excess leisure will be the #1 problem for the English, someone surely predicted) to occupy our full attention, and so we either remember the past or dream of the future. For Sam the young man, that was a cue to wag a finger at the folly of vain imaginings and delusions. For me, though, it's something else.

I've made the point many times that you rarely or never see a map with "You Are Here" at the corner. That label is almost always in the center, because the sneaky truth is we make the maps, not nature. The terrain is as it is, but we organize it for our maps, and we make sure to spin the world's expanse out from our observing pens. The map is a reference in two senses -- we refer to it, but also it is a marker of a spot we occupied when we constructed it.

The calendar is a reference as well. Time is the thing we live in, through, and with. It courses through the blood firing out from the heart and fitfully returning. It allows all that metabolism to take place. It makes for growing and growing old. It says warm and cold. It doesn't care about our calendars. Instead, our calendars try desperately to match it.

He put away childish things

The New Year comes along, by the calendar, but nothing will change this time more than another time. Any given packet of time that we call by name is just an agreement -- a handshake whereby we agree on when to arrive and depart the party. However, we can use these names because we all learned them, all agreed to them. If the town clock were ten minutes fast, and every citizen set his watch by it, the clock would not be ten minutes fast until someone from another town came by.

Samoa has done what any one may do. They have decided which position in the calendar they will agree to. They had been in the United States's day, and now they wish to be in Australia's day. The BBC World Service has been interviewing people and expecting them to act the way that the British did when they updated their calendar by Act of Parliament. in 1752, when the British were supposed to have rioted and demanded their eleven days of life back. The Samoans seem to be "happy campers" with regard to the calendar change, and well they should be. They have made their own decision on where they are, and when.

Time as it goes through us, as nature makes it and as it pumps through the veins of the world, cannot be argued with. As I grow older, and as my charge has new complaints, I know that there is no arguing with biology, no prevailing on time. If the weather says that we will have water and sun enough for azaleas on Christmas, then so it will be, and if January 1 happens, the world does not know or care.

We are not twenty-first century women and men, nor twentieth century. Like calendar dates, those are references -- words meant only to themselves (the words) stick to one position while their subjects (time, nature, people) move on. You are free, reader! No Mayan, and no abacus clack of days, can master time as it flies, as it slows, as it endures, as it pulses and beats upon our broken shores, nor signal when we recollect or anticipate. We are free of dates, days, and time even as much as we are their subjects.

Advent

2011-12-21T10:36:00.000-08:00

Let us make it clear: this is not aboutthe Christmas spirit, or about the solstice, or about a Fox Newspersonality's paranoid frisson. This is, first and foremost, abouttime. “Time and tide,” we say, when the words are synonyms in OldEnglish. When it's “Eastertide” or “Christmastide,” the“tide” means “season” and “time.” This, then, is aboutAdvent tide, and why that isn't Christmas.

I will acknowledge right off that I ampeculiar. I am an anti-rationalist (which has nothing to do withirrationality, by the way) and a Christian humanist, and so I'mattracted to mysticism. I follow a long parade of better minds inthis regard. From Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein, philosophers who havedealt with the insane limitations of enquiry have come to theconclusion that IF there is a Something Grander, reason won't gothere.

However, liking mysticism is ratherlike being an inhabitant of Greenland. Someone lives there, you know,but they'd have a devil of a time getting you to visit.

Like Anglo-Saxon, Greek had more thanone word for time. “Chronos” is the word used for time ingeneral, and it's the customary word. However, the New Testamentfamously (ok, famously in the circles of people who read Greek) usesthe other word, “kairos.” Even if you reject the tradition ofChristian writing on the New Testament, the word “kairos” carriedwith it a sense of “right time” or “particular moment.”Therefore, a translator might say, “And at one particular time shewas to be delivered,” but that can also mean, “She was due” or“When it was correct” (Luke 2:6).

W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood(or vice versa) have an essay in The Dyer's Handabout /kairos/, and I read it when I was young and impressionable. Ididn't like it. I hated it. Consequently, it has informed my outlookever since. Auden ties the breakthrough between supernatural realityand quotidian reality to separate cycles of time, whereby ournatural, plodding time will assemble itself through myriad acts offree will and necessity into these few shocks of transcendenthistory, when God's history and our history converge in the “fullnessof time.” (It turns out that I am a liar or a doddering fool, as Ihave searched electronic versions of The Dyer's Handand found nothing, but I have found “For the Time Being” by theauthor. I have also discovered that Kierkegaard had quite a bit tosay about “fullness of time.”)

Precision is impossible with theseconcepts because of how fluid they were. W. B. Yeats wanted to findhistory circling itself in “gyres,” where there would be momentsof contact between the coils of the unwound spring. These contactpoints would be transcendent, as a single grand narrative played outover and over again. The French Symbolists, especially as theysuffered revival by T. S. Eliot, saw a second world's significationlying beneath the scattered and broken objects of the war-ravagedlandscape. While they silently held onto a priesthood of art byhaving the Poet be the one who could see the hidden, they alsoovertly secularized transcendence. It was supernatural,anti-rational, profound in the literal sense, and timeless.

By The Four Quartets,Eliot's mysticism was more classically Christian. He had, instead ofa counter-narrative in life, the counter-narrative of humanity and,even below that, a rhyming, pulsing sense of spirit in time. I thinkEliot would not have liked Kierkegaard, or anything that deniedessence, but the two visions fit well.

The reason I am rambling through all ofthis is to show that this feeling, “like a splinter in your mind,”is hoary and persistent. Some of our more sensitive and thoughtfulpeople have also found in it not a grand illusion, but a grand truth.For myself, I have to go back to the real before I can find anythingsuper-real.

Metaphors ofLife

How do we speak of life and time? Wespeak of the “circle of life” and the “river of time.”Sometimes we use a metaphor of a train, a journey, or growth forlife, and the interconnected events of nature are sometimes phrasedas a balance. The Magna Mater is kind of rarethese days, but sometimes Mother Nature shows up, if only inadvertisements for personal hygiene products.

The circle of life is both valueneutral and nullified. It is purposeless, perpetual, and indifferent.We can only break it by caring or evading it. Further, it is ametaphor of biology and science, as it focuses upon eating andreproducing as the meaning of living. Since every time we speak thelanguage, our language speaks us, this metaphor betrays our desiresor infects them.

The “river” of time has been aroundfor thousands of years. While Heraklitus might himself have meant topropose a stoical and mystical end, the metaphor is quietistic. It isfatal, as it suggests the particulate nature of the speaker, thehopelessness of understanding, much less commenting upon, thecurrent, and the inevitability of events.

I was out in the managed wildernessyesterday, and I closed my eyes and listened. To listen, there mustbe sound instead of noise, and being far from a highway allowed me tohear things as they were without our intentionality splattered acrossthem.

Digression forpastoralism

I apologize for being a self-indulgentjerk (it's ok: I forgive me), but this is what occurred to me while Iwas out there.

Mostof all, the birds and the wind sound. The wind does not sigh, atleast not here, not often. It swells a chorale, the chords shiftinggracefully like curtains sweeping across the land, and the tree limbsand leaves, those freed corpses rolling about as tides of memntomoriuntil they bed in graves about the path, sing and shake rhythm andcounter melody beside. And when the wind falls silent, it is onlythinking of the next long syllable to play on the world. The lake'ssurface knows in its body what we cannot hear in our ears: there isalways a breeze, for what else is the current?

The birds play tree specific notes. Sp! Sp! Is all the straw-blendedsparrows say, until one says, Food. As each peeps and sings, thesongs clash, but that mixture and burble is the hillside in winter.Besides, the loudest call, and most common, comes from the one whorespects no season: the red tail hawk who is always complaining to noone in particular about the one that got away. When it is silent, itis only because it has no complaint.

The respiration of nature

Nature's order is each of the things we have said of it, but it issomething more basic, too, something we carry in ourselves. It is waxand wane, ebb and surge. The natural world respirates, andrespiration carries within it the cycle and the motion, for we neverhave the same breath twice.

When we humans set out order, we plan, and we will. We intend, and welet either a goal or a past event (history) set forth our intention,but the natural world accommodates by allowing any individual item tobe whatever it is and still set the growth/release model.

Tide

The Anglo-Saxon tide is a period of time, a season, and an area oftime when things are right. Like /kairos/, it is fullness, fitness,appropriateness. It can also be “area of time surrounding on acalendar,” but that is only true in a very limited sense. This isChristmas tide.

The Advent, for Christians, is not a time for simple meanings. Thesignal events in the Christian story are the ones most difficult,most ambivalent, calling for joy and grief simultaneously, forawareness of birth and death. I heard a young man pray in thanks forChristmas, because “Fathagod” it was “the time when you tookall that sin on yourself.” For that young man and his dualisttheology, he could only think of Advent as the birth of thecrucifixion. The life of Jesus was hardly thereat all.

The birth's meaning is far greater than his understanding, I think.As Auden and the others were saying, this is a moment, forChristians, when the three times intersect, when the natural orderand the narrative order and the divine shatter. The moment ofincarnation is parallel, proleptic, and also unique. Mary's responseto Gabriel in the annunciation mirrors Jesus in the garden ofGethsemane, and the taking up of her flesh mirrors the words ofinstitution at the last supper. (In other words, the flesh isimportant, in all its suffering.) At the same time, it is when thefirst sin, when Eve and Adam wanted to know what evil was and gottheir wish, is given the complex answer in the new humanity. All ofthat is involved, and so every sign repeats, leaps forward, calls tosomething from before, and evokes in such a way that any effort atpinning it down to “Happy baby” or “Whew, the cross is coming”or “He will ascend” is missing everything for trying atsomething.

No one knows when Jesus was born, not even the year. The traditionalmass and feast for Jesus was set for December 25^th in thewest. For many Sundays prior, traditional lectionaries have readingsto prepare for the feast, as this is not a question of Christmas, butof the Advent, nor of a day nor time, but of a tide.

First miracle/ First sin

2011-12-19T07:29:00.000-08:00

"If the light is,
It is because God said, 'Let there be light'" - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "At Sunrise"

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that light is the first miracle, so my constant reader will not be surprised that my title refers to that. In fact, I don't care if my readers are pagans, Zoroastrians, or Raelians, (a church whose founder names himself after "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" and recruits via "go topless day" is something North America deserves), the Hebrew account of Genesis is an amazing organization. I personally do not view it as a scientific or historical organization, or at least not as we routinely use those words, but that is because the Hebrews were quite capable of writing science, quite willing and able of writing history, and they had these genres already (the question goes to 10th and 6th centuries, extant texts, and internal indications of generic conventions that would mark a structural history). They simply didn't need Genesis to be either of them in our sense. (As I said, this is a personal view and not one I want to push. It has nothing to do with the foolhardy "evolution" spat, either.)

It should be apparent by now that I'm attracted to mysticism, but mysticism is something like Greenland: you know that it's there, and some people love it, but it's really hard to convince anyone else to visit. The creation story in Genesis is logical, emphatic, and also reflecting some pretty deep mystical realities. In other words, what may be true in physical science and what is certainly true in perception, affect, and interpersonal communication are sometimes at odds, and, when that happens, it is better to know the latter than to insist on the former. People who insist on mathematical and physics-based realities when the hot confusion of the world throws dung at them tend to end up in a wooden shack in Montana. (That the Unibomber was a mathematician has more than some logic to it.) (Don't take this from me, by all means. Ask Sartre (both of those links were interesting) and read that nasty little Camus's tale of shooting innocent Arab men.)

In the case of the first miracle, though, we're in luck, because physicists shouldn't have too much of a fit if I say that light is a miracle. I am probably wrong (and we live in a probabilistic universe), but my understanding is that there is light and dark. The paradigm of "on/off" still applies. Light either is or is not, and it does not allow for "0.5 of light" or "potential light." There isn't a calculation with "0.2 photon applied to 2.4 roetgens."

June, 1998

We have to retreat, when we want light, to "let it be." We either have light, or we cry out for it. We either have relief from light in a time of true dark, or we suffer for the overload. Either way, light itself is too basic to be understood in any component part. All we may do is accept it as a whole and find attributes to it, like color, wavelength, and diffusion, but it is either there or not.

I said, above, that Genesis goes in emphatic order, and you probably thought that I meant it went from least to most important. In a sense, it did -- a moral sense -- but in another sense it is organized from most powerfully complex to least. Light out of the continuum of darkness, the land from the continuum of sea, the starry sky heavens from the terrestrial, then grasses before angiosperms, division of terrestrial time into its familiar seasons, days, nights, etc., fish and birds (and God told them to multiply that day, and by the next day they have populated the seas and skies and earth, which is kind of a clue that the readers of the story originally would not have thought of 24 hours), then we get cattle and insects, and then man in God's image. This order reflects the systems that require greatest interdependence, in many cases, to those that rely upon the prior. Man is the last and least in some sense -- the island creation, sitting atop the mass on the throne of the garden. (Genesis 2, you know, tells a different story.)

The order presented in the two accounts is harmonized. It is essential. In this creation, there is a dynamic order at work rather than a rigid one. Like light, like respiration, there is an order of wax and wane, growth and sustenance that needs no rule in order to reflect a very real rule.

As for the first sin, we all know what it was. It was the desire to understand, to create, to "be as gods, knowing good from evil" (Gen. 3:11). It wasn't any apple. the disobedience is in the acting on a desire to take on the responsibility God had of knowing what lies on the other side of creation. Inside the paradiso, mankind is part of creation, united with it in being innocent -- unable to create and murder, unable to create goodness because unaware of evil. The enemy offers them the chance to be creators, to take on the responsibility, to wear God's shoes, to find out about what one creates from and what parenting keeps at bay.

So we have an elaborate doctrine of original sin. (If you're dusty on why babies are damned, etc., then read that: it's the Roman Catholic doctrine summed up pretty well. This is not my view, but it's the view that all the other churches in the west are reacting against.)

There are a lot of things to say about the first sin. All I want to focus on, though, is the fact that we can't handle the truth.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. -- T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

We cannot handle very much, indeed, of that sort of reality, because we remain inside of the created universe, the physical universe, and if we ask questions about its nature, about the state of "not/is," we are asking ourselves to take on a perspective beyond that state. We cannot question God without being like unto gods, and we cannot be like unto gods so long as we are ourselves. We are imperfect. We do not know, any longer. We do not hear the song, rise and fall with the divine breath, see the light behind light.

Our fellows read Paul's epistles and fixate on the change of "nature" from "sin nature" to a heavenly one and miss entirely the fact that we still see as through a glass, darkly. We're still small vessels with cracks in them. Paul's epistles are like,

"...that wonderful piece de Interpretatione which has the faculty of teaching its readers to find out a meaning in everything but itself, like commentators on the Revelations who proceed prophets without understanding a syllable of the text.” – Jonathan Swift, Tale of a Tub, Section II

In every thing that we do, we repeat our first sin. We now can create, but broken things. Our hands, hearts, and minds are incomplete, broken, and so we have the urge we asked for, the knowledge of both the chaos and the order, but we only make ourselves over and over again.

We strive for Eden and make dictatorships, because our orders never manage dynamism. Worse, we amplify ourselves in our creations. We magnify our desires with our assemblies, exaggerate our loneliness in our social networks, and testify loudly about the brittleness of our attainment when we claim to have found solutions.

I fear this has become a rant. I did not start out that way. I, too, will never overcome flaw.

Welcome, Bald Spot

2011-11-25T10:13:00.001-08:00

"This world is gradually becoming a place
where I do not care to be any more."--John Berryman, "Dreamsong 149"

I detailed, some way back, my adventures with andropause and its ready remedy. I suspect that either that remedy (shooting myself in the arse with testosterone just like a big leaguer) or the present semester has triggered the pate of my fathers. All men lose a great deal of hair and fret that they are going bald. It is their version of worrying about getting fat. However, there was, has been, and is a sudden increase in the weight of the sink's tribute. Some people have pay toilets; men have pay sinks.

The added chemicals of someone or something's testicles could have convinced my body that it had done the deeds of manhood that make a bald spot apt. I haven't. No children, house, career, retirement, heartlessness conceived as 'toughness' and boasted of as sincerity, like Mitt Romney strapping the family dog to the roof of the car, but I have had stress.

[This section link free. Ed.]
Two years ago, nearly, my employer's inability to pay interest on the loan it took out to cover interest on a loan from a very controlling lender (a certain religious group) meant that all of its money was going to covering the viggorish, and so the place began to collapse. 20% of the faculty lost their jobs. An entire division was erased. The process took half a year, so there were six months of terror before the blades swung and the bodies fell to the ground.

A year later, the loss of a fifth of the faculty and the crippling of reputation had not, miraculously, gotten the interest payments to go down, and so the president left. This meant that the people who owned the primary loan -- the ones whose loan the other loans had been taken out to prevent having to deal with -- asserting control. Their move was to fire another 20% of the faculty and to institute increasing demands of religious purity. ("Purity" is an important term.) (To me, it sounds like a medicalized inspection of a wedding night bed.)

I won't criticize the controllers of the debt or the institution. Both rounds of firings were suspect. In the first case, other than the division, all of those let go had a medical diagnosis of cancer. The people doing the firing can't have known that, of course. The Trustees would have no knowledge of it. The only catch is that one of the trustees who did the firing owned the health insurance company the school used. In the second case, morality of a peculiar sort appeared to be working, where videre quam esse triumphed. [No translation of the Latin? Ed.] [No, Ed. It's the NC state motto, but I'm punning on it.]


The Curious Spear fends for Chaos

However it may be, it was. And this semester I have had the entire freshman class. (Actually, I had all but one section. However, I had one section of sophomores, so, numerically I did manage the whole first year.) I love students, love my students, and want each one to become wonderful, instead of merely a wonder. The thing is, though, that the sacred teaching load of 4/4 (eight classes a year) is now ?/?. In my case, it's 5/6. Also, the school has stopped contributing anything to retirement, has not given a raise of any sort since 2006, and now does not pay for classes beyond 4/4. This means that I am paid for four classes when I teach six. [A link to the 13th amendment, perhaps? Ed.] [Butt out, Ed.]

Even that I can say is part of the misery of life, but the truth is simply that five sections of freshmen is impossible to grade. I do not mean that I don't want to, or that I'm dragging my feet. Both of those are true, for me and any human being. Grading is obnoxious.

Smart people don't like reading the same thing over and over, and grading means reading virtually the same paper covering a single assignment.
Nice people do not like judging others, and grading means calling bad bad.
No person likes to waste effort, and there is a deep sense that anything one says on a paper will be misunderstood or ignored.
No one wants to do a bad job, and those who care about teaching want to improve the student's work by writing comments, which take a great deal of time, and yet are going to be duplicated on the next paper.
Advice is like advice to someone on making a foul shot in basketball. It can be good, but it won't do any good until the person receiving it practices... a lot.

No, it's not because of that. It's simply a matter of time. Our Thanksgiving break began Friday, 11/18. I was in at work, and on the 19th, 21st, 22nd, and 23rd. I put in 35 hours of work in my office during break to catch up with where I should have been on grading on the 17th. It also means that I have no time to prepare new lessons for my classes, to adapt to their needs.

I have been, quite genuinely, broken down, even as two more parties have begun garnishing my wages and my benefactor brother has announced that we must move from the house.


The shaft of entropy lights like a match

It has been a semester that has, I feel, cost more than fifteen weeks of life. It has been a harrowing of my head. My soul went through its pains of isolation, meaninglessness, and all the other thrills of enmeshment long ago, I think (one can never tell about these things), but this has been a grating of the head, a wearing, scratching, frazzle. America is in a non-capitalist system right now, in a system without a name, and suffering is written across the walls.

Therefore, if my hair is burned away, my crooked smile's ugliness now braced by a flash of light from the top, then it is only fairly foul to reflect the foul unfairness.

Hymn to Morning

2011-10-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

The first miracle is light, and each day gives a microcosm of creation -- or our tales of creation must fall upon the resurrection of dawn as their inchoate and coeval models. Either way, light is the pulse and breath of awe. Before vision, and far earlier than awareness, there is light soaking and being shivered off of every thing that we will know. Thus it is that light had to be and not grow from constituent parts. Fiat lux is the only way.

Just some trees.

In morning, crisp bird wing cracking from the limbs as each tests its voice in an alarm, a call to the tree and leaf, as the owl calls its last for mates, the sounds on the wind are indistinguishable from the hopeful light, ingrafted thoughts and breezes and glimmers, with the colors -- even the dead browns -- dipped in hue again because of the teasing fingers, the question of the light. Then especially I cannot help seeing with the special sight daylight and nightlight deny. I have to see the skyward vocal of geese as part of the rustling trees and a foil for the hammer-fall of a barking dog shouting to absent or sleeping owners that he has seen a threat. The swirl of pinestraw in the roadway is an accident of eddies in rainwater and microclimate, but in the morning light I cannot miss the way that the pinestraw has repeated the shapes of the clouds against a gray sky of ashphalt.

The swirl.

The "infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing" is not here, but only because here would become a place. From freedmen in Herculaneum to indebted and suborned Americans, men have stuck single trees in front of their houses, and the wind has shaken the trees for thousands of years. The leaves sparkle like exploding tinsel as their starved trunks swing wildly, acting as if they had a mind to break free and get out of the place at last, though the wind always slides away before the sapling can snap. . . or fly. A few more decades, and the tree will no longer try such things but will stand still, acting as if it felt nothing at all. The same wind will blow. In fact, the same wind is blowing now that blew the freedman who lived safely outside the crime and corruption of Rome, for it has never stopped. The air is always stumbling down the stairs, and we breathe the breath our heroes let fly, ourselves only rooted to one place and time and waving about.

I ask my memory and imagination for an explanation that will stick, for a metaphor that will shatter words and images and alarm the reader enough to make the fire leap, but every metaphor has been worn to the nub of catachresis. My memory and imagination come back to me, chiding like Lazarus: the reading world has better counsel than yours, so why would a court listen to one with so little wergild?

Autumn's flares

The symphony, the song, the rhapsody that remains a poem no matter how various -- every new accident becomes part of a plan that always was -- all are reflections. Each is a word in a new sung voice. Each is a hymn to the glory of God. Let some new, arbitrary, accidental, curious, ugly, sound or shape or shade fall into the light, and the light makes it part of the song, and now it was always part of the harmony, always a rest in the measure or a cross hatching in the brush stroke. Such is the greatness of the first miracle.

The Challenges of Mormonism to Fundamentalists

2011-10-21T07:10:00.000-07:00

The reactions we are encountering to Mitt Romney from "evangelical" Christians are not surprising, largely because of prior experience, for the nonreligious and apathetic and parochial. They sure don't surprise me. I actually think the pastors who say that Mormons are nice folks, but doomed to Hell, are simply following their convictions. No one in favor of tolerance has much of a position for denouncing someone whose monotheism is jealous, simply because it is jealous.

No: people in churches are allowed to think members of the congregation down the road are all heathens. Speaking as a person who is viewed locally and increasingly as "unsaved" because not having a conversion experience but rather believing in the truth of Christ Risen, I know that opposing the right of people to think what they want will do no good anyway. I also know that making fun of Baptists and Assemblies of God folks is missing the mark. The outrage is not that a group has an identity with an include/exclude criterion. That another group disagrees isn't news, is it? For how many centuries have there been groups that think of themselves as Christian but which other Christian groups either wish to or do exclude?

We don't need to start with Martin Luther for that one. We can go to the Docetists, if we want.

In churches with hierarchy, any revelation has to go through channels, as it were. Further, any logical argument with dogma must also go through the process. This means, of course, that the channels limit what gets through, and what comes out tends to look like the pipe it traveled through. Dogma strengthening bishops is approved by bishops, etc. Sometimes, though, some really revolutionary material gets through. Sometimes the power, the spirituality, or the popular spirit of a revelation or reform will overtop the levees, and reformers like Francis of Assisi or visionaries like Julian of Norwich or Juan de la Cruz or Theresea of Avilla will pass into the body and change the world.

However, when churches without "papist" hierarchy encounter revelation, they depend upon the Bible, naturally, and the congregation to discern the revelation.

Further, the nature of the "evangelical" movement is to assume a few critical intellectual positions that are by no means common to all churches:

When Jesus commissioned His disciples to go out and heal the sick and spread the news, that commissioning is open-ended to all who would follow Jesus always.
When Jesus commands that His followers carry the good news of salvation to the corners of the earth, that is a specific sanctification of each believer to be an evangelist.
The Apostolic Age either has never ended, because the Holy Spirit performs the same miracles now as before and the same state of "spiritual warfare" exists now as in 32 AD, or because there is a special dispensation due to "end of days" whereby a new Apostolic Age has emerged.
"Witnessing," which is to say telling another person about one's own conversion story is the principle form of spreading the Good News, as this Good News is a converting news.
Exposing the unbeliever to the Good News is efficacious by itself in affecting a conversion.
The efficacy of the Word is known by the converting of the person from sin to non-sin, accompanied by a change of essence, whereby an old human nature is lost and a newly perfected one comes in, accompanied with a vast emotional change.

Many Christians can and do argue with several of those assumptions. This is why we have separate denominations and churches. I do not want to argue these points, except that I, myself, am growing weary of 4-6 in their effects on me. You see, I recall that Jesus also had a story about the "good seed." The seed (the Word) is good, and the sower may be fine, but that doesn't mean that there is a return.

Anyway, to return to my subject, these assumptions are very important. It means that we know the truth of the message from the response to the message. In other words, the way we know that the minister's vision and visitation were holy is that he "brings people to the Lord." Efficacy is attributed to holiness.

We have all long ago noted the consequence of this assumption. Elmer Gantry and "Dusty Rhodes" are examples of this natural, if not superstitious, habit of assuming that the person who sells a lot of units must have divine blessing. What Sinclair Lewis noted first has not changed: the emphasis on gathering bodies to the church encourages the adoption of hucksterism and puts a pressure on the minister to study advertising and psychology and sales. It takes the slight theater that is inevitable in any positioning of a priest before a church and turns it into full on circus, as the speakers go into trademark gestures, patented cadences, and jumps and leaps that would surprise an orthopedist.

The ministers are sincere, I am sure. However, the assumptions of their church put a pressure on them to conform to a Westmoreland-like body count. "Last night, forty-two young people came to the Lord!" someone gushed recently and concluded "___ is a really special speaker." Hrrrm.

So far, it probably seems more like I'm interested in belittling evangelical churches than I am explaining the heeby-jeebies they get with Mormons, but I really do need to explain these peculiarities of practical theology (beliefs about God as they are manifest in action) before I can explain. You see, if the message's validity and the messenger's holiness are both proven by the convert without any hierarchy or history to check it against, then the Mormons are frightening.

How do you -- yes, you -- explain the fact that Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in the world? How do you explain the relative uprightness of the flock?

It's tough for anyone who isn't a Mormon.

I was driving today (told you all my ideas come in the morning), and I was thinking about how I could explain "kairos" in "Little Gidding," and I was reflecting on the fact that, in the 19th century, a lot of people were beginning to see History as a series of circles. I then thought, "The Mormons are big on that 'it happened before and will happen again' thing." I then thought about how that religion started and spread. Here's the problem: the foundation story of the religion is very, very... implausible [warning: link auto-plays].

So, a man in New York claims to have seen an angel who led him to buried golden tablets that he can only read with magic stones and in the bottom of a hat, and from that he can dictate the Book of Mormon, which is a sequel to, or "further adventures of," the New Testament. No one can see the golden tablets, or the magic stones, and no one sees the angel but him. The revelation consists of giving permission for multiple wives, commands for clean living (a common 19th century temperance movement feature), and gleeful mistreatment of American natives. It gains adherents, is immediately attacked, gains more, and begins moving with, and then ahead of, the frontier.

Why did it keep growing?

A person with access to "secular" theories would say that the religion incorporated many of the movements of its age and so appealed to many of the psychological and social pressures of its adherents. Such a person would point to other groups nearby who had similar calls. However, that doesn't do much. Then, of course, there is what having multiple wives and as large a family as possible will do for a religion. Then there is what mandatory mission work will do.

What, though, if you do not have such a theory to use? What is using such a theory is fearful, because it might be used against oneself?

Mormonism puts revelation and enthusiasm into the crucible. If the only test a person has of the validity of a belief is the Bible and the effect on a person, then Mormons are hard to challenge. Mormons fall all to pieces if they have to be squared with tradition, with the writings of the Fathers, with rational analysis, and with the test of confirmation (does no one remember that Paul says that a person with a prophecy has to have corroboration? the Holy Spirit isn't, so far as I know, in the business of keeping the truth a secret from those who seek).

When a Christian evangelical looks at a Mormon, it is looking at a mirror of fear. Mormonism itself is an extension of evangelical assumptions, and so there is nothing that an evangelical may say, except, "You're going to Hell." There is no mechanism by which she or he can speak with the Mormon, no reasoning he or she may offer, because, at base, there is too much similarity in frame.

The borders of Paradise

2011-10-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

This morning, and I have all my essay ideas in the morning before thoughts can side track the natural impulse, I heard an Iranian-German artist lady talking about filming dancers in Iran. She said that dance is absolutely forbidden in Iran, but they have something called "rhythmic movement" that is allowed.

"No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of the misunderstanding of the ends of art." -- Ruskin

We can take Ruskin's quote and nod sagely. "Yes, yes," we say, "and out of the crooked timber, what-what." The later Victorians were full of awareness of imperfection, situated as they were in the satiated and regretful phase of empire. Category and clarity had swept away the sights of beggars, but not the beggars themselves, and "The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings," as Hazlitt wrote in 1829. Many had come to realize that the noise could not be shut out, that, as Horace said, "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret" (in Epistles) ['You can drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she will return again']. Cover the nudity, and it's still under the covers.

Nevertheless, when we persist through these ages of empire, of decay, of self-conscious sadness, there is a tendency on our parts to turn from a red faced public servant with a sack full of fig leaves to John Cage. We go from purists to artists of Autotune. This produces its own dialectic, if not enterically then exotically. The religious fundamentalist and the political fundamentalist alike appeals to any population that is awash in too much embracing of porous borders. Each generates its own idealistic ideology, its own Zion Celeste.

The political idealists are easier to talk about than religious revolutionaries, as they seem to conform to readily understood causes that have economic and material bases, and they often transform into other parties, other organizations. Thus, it's not so hard to talk about fascists in Germany (but you'll have a heck of a time nailing them down in Italy), and it's not that hard to talk about the John Birch Society in the U.S. or the National Front in the U.K. These groups all set out to be puritanical -- to achieve an ostensibly conservative goal by the eradication of all accumulated state apparatus and the imposition of a morality and clarity that had been muddied by Them and the agents of evil.

The political groups want to stop the flow of population, the drift of genes, the spread of culture, the transformation of economic structures. In that regard, they are not conservative, but Utopian. They are not, and never have been, summoning glories of the past but promising a thing that cannot be: a frozen moment of security. To achieve any of their goals would require immense power, tremendous abridgments of liberties, and endless regulation -- as both Italian and German manifestations of fascism have attested (and the latter also required a reiteration of slave labor for its economics to function). This is because they are attempting the impossible: they want to stop nature.

It is natural for people to mix their genes, to mix their tongues in more than one way, to invent and forget, and to flow as far as they can to opportunity, because humans are opportunistic.

Is the same true of political purists of the communal variety -- the socialists? Since these groups begin by embracing paper work and rules and the state's place in administration, it is hard to see how they are betrayed by their actuality as much as that they fail by siphoning off their potential in their implementation. The ideological and idealistic energy behind their endeavor lessens with each aparatchik, each factory boss promoting his buddies, each rigged election, and each set of police necessary to monitor these.

In Iran, they had a completely idealistic revolution. It was simple: they would have a real theocracy. In Afghanistan, the same thing, more or less, from a different branch of the religion. In 17th century England, too, they had a clean, clear idea: the Lord's own nation, led by saints inspired by the Holy Spirit. We know from history that the English were unhappy with their government and, because of the semi-feudal nature of the remaining state, were able to affect a second revolution to restore, but with changes, the prior government and nation state structure. That is not to say that Cromwell failed, or the Taliban failed, or the Ayatollahs failed, because "fail" depends upon the goal sought.

I know that it's convention for the Marxists to reject religious socialism as being non-revolutionary, it's also true that the power of the supernatural ideal powers the endeavor once in place far more effectively than a philosophical system. The problem, though, is that they have a problem of ensuring that their ideology extends into the subject. In other words, when Christianity or Islam ceases to be a religious choice and becomes your employer or your state, then your state and your employer have to, as a matter of existence and operation, extend religious faith into the mind and soul of the employee and citizen.

The ideal, which is lovely and functioning when idealists join, becomes state power when those idealists triumph and make the ideal the innervating element of the state.

Once Oliver Cromwell became Protector General, it became necessary to ensure the Christianity of the people. Instead of trusting the people to be Christian, the state now had an interest, and therefore it had to have proof. Further, it needed to specify for its functionaries how and what would be considered moral. Idealized states spin paper as a precondition of their existence. Perfection, after all, is only perfect if it is protected in a static position, and that means ruling out change or ruling in qualities.

Therefore, the Iranian "rhythmic movement" and "approved hairstyles for men" are examples both of the native authoritarian extension of power into an ideological space of the subject and the deterioration of the subjective ideal that frames the power impulse. A state may start out with the simple ideal of good men and women, but it will need to say what constitutes good, and then what constitutes bad, and then it will make the soul of the individual, as well as the body, its concern.

Our dilemma, then, as humanity, is that we accept the blood and pus and confusion of allowing each other to sin, and thereby create a call for our overthrow, or we strive to a perfection that, by its nature, is death. Either that or, more sensibly, we worry about the neighbors' health and happiness and our own goodness.

Dude, You Can See, Like, Everything!

2011-10-08T04:47:00.000-07:00

". . . the Brain, in its naturalposition and State of Serenity, disposeth its Owner to pass his Lifein the common Forms, without any Thought of subduing Multitudes tohis own Power, his Reasons, or his Visions. . . . " -- Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub

I make no secret of the fact that I am working on a time machine solely for the purpose of going back in time to shoot the inventor of the cell phone. Mr. Motorola and his wife, Nokia, are in my sights, in the past. The dim glow neighbors see coming from my bedroom at night must be understood to be such lucubrations. The main hindrance to my plan is not any dictate from Dr. Einstein, as, like all creative types, I do not respect his right to make a rule binding on the future, especially now that he has been shown to be a party pooper, but rather the difficulty of finding the moment of creation for the infernal machine. Therefore, I have a fall back position. I will go back to kill, or have the dewclaw removed from, the inventor of SIP.

I have many reasons for this work, but there is a a mission to it. This is a vendetta. All teachers feel the hatred, I know, and college teachers feel the special rage, when the cell phone appears. All those little thumbs diddling themselves to bliss as an alternative to education or responding to the class are infuriating. We liked it better when they whispered to each other all class. Now, they still do, but with their thumbs, and they're whispering to whomever, wherever. That would be enough, but it is not what has given my madness genius.

I have recently acquired "Mcluhan's Wake," and I give it a 5 star review. Phillistines above all others should watch it, but every conscious or semi-conscious being should watch it. The philosopher's books are very, very dense, and this movie makes his thought comprehensible to any audience. McLuhan predicted that there would be a transformation/recreation in media, whereby there would be the recreation (in a transformed way) of the village as we lose our village. Because technology is unexamined, we are destroyed by it. This is the "global village" that McLuhan coined (one of the few things people can quote of his). He was not really predicting, there. He was describing. He was saying that we have already externalized our nervous system (perceptions) in external eyes and ears with television and radio, and that means that someone else now owns parts of the ego. His prediction was the global theater.

Welcome to that, but also to what, in a way, McLuhan never saw.

After McLuhan's books, some people grabbed hold of Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy and combined it with him to make observations about the process of the invention of the subjective self. These critics and scholars tended to follow McLuhan in locating it in the Elizabethan age, too, even though that locus is pretty arbitrary. What fewer scholars have followed is that next, tragic element of McLuhan's analysis -- mainly because no one wants to be caught dead speaking future tense in a scholarly article (and the dead rarely speak of the future), the transformation to global theater.

Yeah, it's a photo. I took it.

My students report to me, quite frequently, that they "never go on the Internet." Instead, they "just go to Facebook." Similarly, many will tell me that they do not use web browsers or any of that. They have no opinion on those matters, because they only chat and "Facebook" (v.) -- and neither one involves the Internet. At the same time, they are increasingly finding reading five pages from the textbook "too long." While it's true that students in 1989 complained about any reading, too, they tended, back then, to simply complain at the outrage that freshman English required any of their time, where today students are complaining that five pages are wearying.

Their complaints are false to some degree, incidentally. The same length, more or less (which is to say, very, very short), is tolerable for them if there are pictures. The textbooks they have grown up with have as many photo inset boxes, illustrations, and break-ins as commas.

They expect a literature book to come with an audio CD, a Chemistry book to have a DVD-ROM. They are not on the Internet. Take each of these incidents of "misprision" at face value and look at them analytically rather than satirically.

Students, if not "people today," have gone that next mile toward a visual addiction. A long time ago, people were weeping that "kids today" would soon speak a purely pictographic language (heard that in 1988). A full generation later, and that prediction has not come true. Instead, what we see is a pictography rather than a visual language. I would argue that the cell phone is emblematic of why the visual reliance of people today, and young people in particular, is not pictographic, but insensible.

[They say my essays are hard to understand because of the digressions. I say that that's part of the subject under discussion in this essay.]

When I was living in the Bronx, the god of wealth, Pluto, sent out a new plague as a way of marking the flesh and scarring the soul of the poor. We had the appearance of "push to talk" phones. These are a way of turning one's cell phone into a very nasty walkie-talkie. Most importantly, they sound out each transmission with a loud beep. In a dense urban mass, the purpose and evil of this "feature" was quite clear.

First, poor people were monitored by their bosses.

BEEP-Salvatore! You need to go down to Queens after you're done to see about another job.-BEEP!

No one ever saw the crowd at Lincoln Center BEEPing at their families, and no one heard Bloomberg BEEPing his way toward elected office. Second, it took the natural horrors hidden in the clam shell of the cell phone and amplified them among those fell in love with the tool.

The evil of the cell phone as a cell phone is that it removes context.

The wall of "home" falls, and the power wall, ideological locus, of "work" evaporates. The worker can be obtained any time and any place, thanks to the cell phone, but, also, the people who choose to use cell phones have no knowledge or acknowledgement of when and how they are at home or work. The push-to-talk phone thus took the old problem of people saying, aloud, in public, their halves of a private conversation ("private" being a cultural category developed after literacy and industrialism) and added the other side of the conversation and, just in case you had managed to hurry down the street without noticing, an ear-splitting BEEP! to announce each.

BEEP! [female voice] I don't know, Sheila. He says that he's out with Ray. BEEP!
[Woman standing in doorway of her apartment] Well, you tell moy so-called husband that he can shove it up his Aasss!
BEEP!I know, right? I can tell you this much, if moy husband thinks he's getting any....

At this point, your correspondent chose between only two options and, instead of rubbing his ear cartilage off on the sidewalk, ran away.

Think about it. The two women were reacting to the natural pressure of New York City, which is to erode personal space and to daily attack the concept of the private, and then were numbed by technology's novelty. The telephone assures one of a private, personal conversation, but the cell phone erases the location. The push-to-talk was simply another disguise for the cell phone, and so the two women were willing to speak of providing sexual access to their husbands and the states of their marriages to the street.

"If Jesus Christ were to cometo-day, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him todinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it." -- Thomas Carlyle, Table Talk.

Carlyle is commenting on the high point of privacy, when decorum demanded dissembling in all places. Today, either Joe Wilson would scream "You lie!" or an audience member would shout "Let him die!" but the reaction would be ejaculatory.

I should go back to wipe out the cell phone for its assault on the hearth, if nothing else. However, it, along with the world wide web, demolished the sense of location and distance, including the very concept of "access" and "inaccessible." The most common personal question I have had to answer this semester has been, "Why do you buy CD's." I'm serious. Earnest, Christian youngsters cannot understand why I buy CD's. This marks a complete switch in the debate, does it not?

The RIAA has continued its terror tactics. Cato would be pleased. However, ten years ago, students would argue with me that they were not criminals for downloading music, and now students argue with me asking me to justify why I am not a cultural criminal for not downloading music. Similarly, the talk among the young is not -- spectacularly not -- for the first time in human history not -- bare flesh.

I cannot tell you how amazing this last is.

Let's add the two together, though. Flesh is available on the Internet -- upon which the young do not know that they have been, and so they do not need to seek or visit pornographic magazines, pornographic movies, or anything like that, because friends have e-mailed them all of these. Therefore, they are still looking, but there is no challenge. In fact, there is so little challenge that there is no awareness that there could be a challenge. The same is true of music. Music simply is. Musicians similarly just are. Instead of only an eternal "now," there is an eternal "here."

What began with the destruction of location has become the destruction of all locations. The world wide web and the free market desire to make each website "your one stop on the Internet" have combined with this, and with Facebook's rape of the American youth, to lead to the vanishing of context. I do not mean the context of this or that, but context itself.

Why are kids not hot to go here or there, saying you can see her ___? Because seeing her ___ is going to be an e-mail attachment, or a flash picture. Why not concentrate on pictures and what they mean (becoming the foretold pictographic language)? Because that would mean that pictures must either mean in isolation or must combine for a semantic stream. Such streams must have a grammar. A grammar, even a pictorial one, implies rules of relationships, and the coherence of single experiences and disparity of separate experiences means that no one has the right to create a rule and no one will ask for it to be obeyed. Why do pictures make five whole, long pages easier to read? They break that difficult (really) tendency of the work to demand setting up a set of walls (past, future; expectation, memory; reference, instruction) necessary for context.

So, if you see me working on my time machine, please don't Friend it or Like it or Tumblr it. Just let me go and find some context.

Where do babies come from? Your Levi's

2011-09-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

"Practise your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our powers shall never establish,
It is so frail." -- John Crowe Ransom, "Blue Girls"

Hold that thought.

On the television, they have medicines more various than any Wild West show tent. At the break of the 20th century, men adventurous and adventitious went about with products to cure each malady, even the ones that people hadn't any idea they suffered from. (Be aware, O ye historically naive, that the wild west in 1825 was Alabama, that it did not go to Texas, Arizona and the like until the 1840's, and the people who showed up fully grown malcontents were already twisted criminals back home in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi.)

The television makes money for people today as surely as the newspapers did then. Why, now you can not only cure your iron-poor blood, but you can make your eye lashes grow! The huckster's old claim that "it" will restore youth has turned into "Regeneris" face cream to putty-in wrinkles or Botox to freeze them, and his pitch that "it" will grow hair on a bald man is, at long, long last, a dream come true. O brave new world that has such creams and potions in it! In fact, the same pill can relieve the blues or relieve your pain, and this is revolutionary, because, in the past, we were only worried about nasty, evil people who, when sad, would go buy illegal drugs that would make them happy and relieve their pain.

Well, among the illnesses we have discovered once we found their cures on the television was "man-o-pause" or, for those wanting language that sounds less like a joke, "andropause." ("Andros" is the Greek word for male, but that "pause" is a problem.) Here is a typical discussion, guys. It will help you with "that little problem."

Now, me? I entered into the shadow of death long ago, and time's umbra covered me in its numbing wing. Like the noble mosquito, "it doesn't hurt when it begins," but, of course, it does not merely begin. I was never particularly over dosing on martial prowess, or any other sort, but a few blood tests showed the infamous "low T." I thus found a ready supplier of injectables and began a few months of imitating Barry Bonds and other heroes of the game.

My motivation on the surface was to rectify biochemical abnormalities and to achieve triglyceride reduction. My ulterior motivation was the relief of fatigue. Really, it was. Ok, and some awakening of desire, but not in any way the other. That, alas, has not been a concern.

You don't care about why, though. You want to know what happened. Well, after a full summer of shooting the dope every two weeks, I have decided to return to my old self. The effect of exogenous testosterone was....

Do you know where babies come from? They come from lawn mowers. Now, I have never seen a lawn mower directly involved in the insemination or ovulation or carrying of a fetal human, but I have noticed an overwhelming correlation between young couples purchasing a lawn mower and producing a baby. Newly weds beware the John Deere salesman! Unless the purchase is of an ATV -- which is a well known contraceptive and cause of sterility -- any purchase of a lawnmower is likely to cause conception.

Not many people are aware of this correlative relationship, but I figured it out about the time my friends Bill and Donna bought a lawn and then a lawn mower. I had no proof of causality, no isolation of the agent, but I knew the phenomenon. I could not isolate the cause... until now! You see, taking testosterone made me want to mow the lawn.

I'm serious. All summer, I watched the grass grow, hoping for it to recover from its last scalping so that I could go inflict more savagery upon it. I loved the soaking with sweat, the smushing of dog poo, the face slap of tree branches, the stings of the ants. I stomped and chopped and was smelly, wet, and manly.

I was not, however, more lusty. Not in one way or the other. Nor did I grow large. Not in one way or the other.

So, do I quit shooting it because autumn will be coming in two or three months? No.

Remember that quote from John Crowe Ransom? Well, compare it to something I wrote recently: "The youth of beauty, and the beauty of youth, demand those who lost years to watch and demand them to seek out the joy of their own vital pulse, the concerns of the overhang and undertow that remove their exceptions, and who can blame either party? The one who missed and misses longed and longs and surfaces briefly in the filling of senses, and the one in potential is compelled and curtailed, devoted and dovetailed by and in time. Nature could allow no exception, and will complies." Pretty whiny, isn't it?

What both of them are talking about is that men and women who grow older as they stand before college audiences notice, more and more keenly, the beauty of young members of the opposite sex. The desire increases as the distance from the competition for them does. Now, there certainly are creeps. Make no mistake: some people are creeps and maladaptive fools. However, every one I have known has been content to sit in the stands and watch the game, has loved walking through the gallery and looking at the paintings. None of them has grown confused and tried to grab the merchandise, run onto the field, or believed that he or she was in the game.

Actually, I take that back. Very recently, I knew of a teacher who was by no means on the field nor artist. However, every female student reported that she was creeped out by the way he looked at her. They were not able to articulate precisely what it was, but they knew what they experienced, understood what was conveyed. The pornographic gaze wishes to take. It wishes to strip, to dissect, to grab, and to own. The other one... the aged eye, I suppose, wishes to linger and to revel and is shy; it wants the original to remain. (It can be as guilty of objectifying as anything -- is guilty -- but not guilty of malice.)

John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt saw the pretty girls. This is no surprise. Robert Herrick saw them too. Whether a man has the years to justify it or not, the same feeling is the same: presence calls to loss, loss longs for surfeit. Surfeit never knows itself. These are truths abiding. However, the sweet melancholy plays an artistic tune in even the dullest woman or man.

At the same time, Levi's Jeans company is running commercials, has been running them, which purport to be American (TM). They have Frosty sounding recitations. "You (glug glug) are a god!/ The gods (glug) dance before you (glug)/ Hoping to catch your radiance (glug glug) on their tongues/ The dumb jerks," the poet says, and we see truly spectacular images of youth.

I'm amazed. The pictures are exactly like the poetry. Both are seductions. Read the Whitman, or the Ginsberg. These are poetic lines in praise of the young American, and of American youth, that is primarily flattering, not celebratory. Instead of taking a real quality and showing its beauty, it takes a quality and gives it hyperbolic, mythic, supernatural qualities. Instead of, "You weave through the air," it is "her skin is like nature dipp'd her hands in milk." Everyone knows that the lover gets the beloved by compliments.

The message from Levi's is not "go, do something," but "come here, you." The visuals celebrate the bodies of youth, youth stretching, contorting, sweating, and doing other physical functions that show the body's shapes and features alone, and they do so wonderfully but synecdotally. Each is a clipped fragment rather than a montage. The message is, "Your blue jeans want to have you," rather than "you want to have blue jeans."

Perhaps young buyers are flattered by the commercials, but it's more likely that men and women of my age are stricken by sympathy pains. We, like the commercial, long for what is lost, and we will buy some jeans. We will need some help, perhaps, need a supply, but we will avoid that longing and shovel dirt into the hole.

Job and the Neutrality of Suffering

2011-09-23T06:43:00.000-07:00

“'Can mortal man be righteous before God? Can a man be pure before
his Maker? Even in his servants he puts no trust, and his angels he
charges with error; how much more those who dwell in houses of clay,
whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed before the moth.
Between morning and evening they are destroyed; they perish for ever
without any regarding it. …they die, and that without wisdom'” -- Job 4:17-21

On his birthday every year, Jonathan Swift used to read from Job3, where Job curses the day of his birth. It's a long way to go for ajoke, but it might not have been a joke in jest. John Gay's epitaph,“Life's a jest, and all things show it./ I thought so once, but nowI know it,” is similarly mirthlessly funny. One of the reasons Ilike these writers so much is that they had been made unafraid, hadbeen plunged into the miseries and truths we would like to avoid, andhad gotten a humor that was neither gallows nor false out of it.Samuel Johnson wanted epitaphs to be dignified and to elevate thesentiments of the reader, and so he did not like Gay's, or Swift's,but Gay's, at least, was a last bit of conversation between the deadand the living.

I could expound on the ambiguous “now” of John Gay's grave marker, butthere is no point. Instead, I have been thinking about Job. The bookof Job is pretty ancient, and the textual folks think it may be theoldest part of the Bible. Those who notice that invariably go wrongby then doing source studies and looking at analogs. They have aproject of reconstructing the True Meaning of “the adversary” as the composer of thebook meant it and battling a received wisdom about the story. Those are interesting things, sure enough, but they're not really so revolutionary. After all, the text gives it to us. To me,though, stands out because of the story itself and what it tells us about humanity anddivinity and the non-Western nature of morality, as opposed to ethics.

Clear your mind of the "God did it!" folderol. It isn't important, unless you entirely miss the point of the book. Is a person good for having stuff? Is a person evil for lacking stuff? Is illnessa sign of being bad? In other words, is Donald Trump a saint? Is a five year old with leukemia an especially sinful child? If you answered "no," then saying that God's causing sores and losses is no indictment.

We're accustomed to beginning from the premise that suffering is bad. In fact, in Plato's Republic, Socrates gets a group of rebarbative and wary customers to agree that the good is that which decreases suffering, alleviates suffering, and avoids suffering. Upon that basis, they could reason forward to other propositions. We tend to agree with the dinner party on that head. However, Job seems to indicate that the good is not in relation to suffering, and that's what is so strange, so revolutionary, so perplexing.

When we were little, we might have said "that which reduces broccoli and squash is the good." We might now laugh at that conclusion, but we shouldn't laugh too much. We would have been using our reason on our data. Our senses affirmed that the greatest bad was being chained to a dinner table with a horror-food before us. Socrates and company are merely doing the same. The reason Job doesn't is that he is asking for a different judgment. Our parents judgment, as the ones >looking over our heads, seeing beyond our senses and our present moment, might say that the vile squash is "good for you," and they would be right on the basis of perspective. Job differs from Western philosophy by beginning with the idea that there is a God who sees beyond all of our abilities in time and space and judgment.

Think about that human reaction to suffering. We tend to react to it based on deserving. Thefriend of Job's who I quote at the top is taking a position that today's Calvinists would embrace,and he grows angry when Job refuses to admit that he, as a sinner by nature, must confesssins by commission. Job's friends can make no sense of his sufferings without a more primitivebelief than Eliphaz is willing to admit. Eliphaz might say, in effect, "Everyone is sinful anddeserves a kick, so don't defend yourself," he seems to believe that not admitting someactive sinfulness (not marching up to the altar rail to confess) is the reason that God is punishingJob. In other words, he thinks that all deserve punishment, and none get it. However, byrefusing to say you deserve it in a specific way (by not committing sins willfully), you will bepunished.
Job, of course, is in a position of being forsworn. If he confesses to sins against God that he has not committed, then that would be sin. Further, his faith is in the uprightness of duty, and doubting that justice would be doubting God.

Still, Job's friends are true friends. If we look at what they do, not how they do it, we can see something to learn. Each wants to help. First, they weep with him (more later). Then, they try to put his sufferings into reason. Then they want to fix the situation for him. Indeed, what makes them angry is not that he suffers, but that he won't take the fixes.

To me, they've always been a perfect illustration of our own responses to random suffering. We should do more sympathizing, but we spend most of our time, like them, trying to eliminate the problem by giving it an explanation. Like Voltaire's doctors, who "pour drugs of which (they) know little into a body of which (they) know less." If we can only put the think into a system, regardless of fundamental understanding, then it will have a place, and a place is a position in relation. What we cannot tolerate is that which eludes the "natural order," even if we have to place it into the "divine order." Death, of course, is, as Alexander Pope said in Essay on Man (ii 135-6), the "young disease, that must subdue at length,/ Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength." It is the natural order.

Similarly, though, it is in our native cast to avoid death, both in our thoughts and in its grisly effects. This means also the alleviation of suffering. The dark lords of our economies who suggest that we are happiest when standing on the smoking corpse of our neighbors or that we have no natural concern for another's welfare are wrong. Sociopaths and narcissists exist in unnatural profusion, the truth is that we hate hearing, seeing, or being near a suffering person.

Rich lawyers complain that it's "depressing" to see a homeless shelter across the street from their social club. Americans wince and give phenomenal amounts of money when they see starving children, homeless hurricane and earthquake victims, and meanwhile the masters of talking-about-politics swear that those same Americans would never agree to a fraction of that amount going to taxes. In fact, we do not want suffering to occur. We want to stop it. The worst thing is suffering we cannot affect.

Men may be worse than women in this, but we're all pretty lousy friends to the wounded. Job shows that we have learned to be bad friends. We want to repair the hurting. We want to say, "Here's what you do, Job." "If you introduce an austerity plan for your children and get your sanitation situation under control by reducing the number of dogs who lick your sores and going without food, we can lend you some money, and everything will be fine," we say.

Job denounces his friends as false counselors in the end because, in the end, they are not counselors, but accusers, and so are we.

When you see a person suffering and reach for the shelf of cures and fixes, what you're doing is complaining that the person has given you sympathy pain. You are saying, "You violate the order of how things should be, and so you must be sanded down or built up." The suffering person is in pain, certainly wants aid, and you are seeking to help, but when you or I cross from helping from love of the other and helping from disquiet, we have gone from friendship to overseer, from supporter to accuser, from beloved to judge.

"Now when Job's three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home -- Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. they met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great."
Job 2:11-3, RSV

The man who shoos the beggar away shoos Christ from his heart, but the man or woman who insists on fixing the poor is certainly cold, as surely refusing the healing power of consolation. One of the bitter herbs of technology is that our sadness and suffering drive us ever onward toward medicine, psychology, appliances, and travel, and we get better and better at amelioration and alleviation. In the process, we lose dying, willfully forget that dead is a noun, but dying a verb of duration. We get so facile at fixes that the irreparable baffles us and then enrages us. The men and women who lived in an age of infant mortality earned their jokes with death, deserved their wide-angle view of joy and murk intermingled, understood that a man who wrote like an angel might suffer like a devil with an infected spine. We could do worse than read again, and this time with feeling.

The Anniversaries and the Lies

2011-09-11T07:42:00.000-07:00

It's time to haveit out with the date, to have the date out, and all that it brings,to neutralize the things above it. I have written about September 11,2001 twice now, and I never thought that I would write about itonce. I hadn't the right, for one thing, and I am not special.Further, there was nothing to say: what does the fly say about theglass sky scraper it bumps into?

Immediately afterSeptember 11 itself, there were calls for oral history projects. One of the major insurance companies, I believe, offered to cover psychological counseling for anyone.(The catch was that they wanted you to become a policy holder, and then they'd offer it.) There were services available, but I needed and had a right to noneof that. First, there were worthier stories, worthier people,worthier deeds and witnesses. Secondly, I had nothing to say. Nor wasI honoring my phlegmatic heritage nor modesty by trying to allow thegraver wounds a place in line.

Whenever there aremilitary memoirs, they begin with statements like, “I arrived onParis Island October 3, 1967” or “I served Mil. Sec. IV, AdvancedCombat, for III Corps in-country 1971.” This is one reason suchmemoirs have always had the smell of gun oil about them for me. Theybegin, and sometimes continue, with barking of incomprehensiblemilitary acronyms and slang, and I never understood why any honestperson would write that way until I came to write about 9/11 for awide audience this year (2011). I make no claims for my honesty, butthe reason that the military memoir starts with such mystifyinglanguage is fear. It is the same reason that I would not go forwardat the time, the same reason I would not speak of my experiences, thesame reason that I do not have a right to be bothered by them now.

We live in a worldof official voices and official views, an atmosphere deep in imagesand narratives of what has happened and, worse, what it means ormeant. A soldier writing aboutFallujah first knows that an official account exists and/orthat there is a news and television narrative competing with his own. (If there were not,he would have no need to write. He could simply say, “RichardLowry's book on the battle mentions X, and I was part of that” or“Most people know that the battle for Fallujah happened twice....”This is why soldiers, to qualify themselves,and to validate and limit themselves, to protect themselves, have tosay exactly who they were inside the context of the military and how theyhave a right to a storyin the first place. Even if the public never challenges the author,the author feels that challenge, just because she or he knows aboutthe competition, knows that, in a sense, the world does not need anew story as much as the author needs the world to hear it.

If a memoirist continues with the slang and acronyms, then he or sheis probably a chowder head, but most do not. The same is true, Ithink, of those who write now, years too late, of 9/11. I will notspeak for others, though. They speak for themselves.

My experiences were non-traumatic. I lost no loved ones. I was notinjured. My apartment did not burn, and I did not even go withoutelectricity. I have the least right to a voice of any who were onManhattan that day. This is a fact, and it is an inescapable one. Ihave reminded myself of it, too. Every time that the vague misery,the disquiet that cannot be found or quelled, the sense ofmisunderstanding and theft, has come up, I have repeated this tomyself. I can be depressed about my economic position, my finances,my family life, my love life, politics, the people claiming to speakfor religion, but not this.

“Nevertheless,it moves,” as the man said. In 2002, we did not talk about the attacks. In fact, no one I knewtalked about them at all. We knewabout them, so we didn't talk about them. Even as we navigated aroundthe attack sites, we did not speak of them. As we developedstrategies for teaching students who had lost parents, we did notspeak of the attacks. As we saw and read about the clean ups thatwere going to identify “abandoned” cars and property, we did notsay anything. In fact, the first time I remember even alluding to theattacks with another New Yorker was in early August of 2003, when Iwas on the #6 train, heading home at 4:30, and the power went outjust as the train was over the Bronx River. We sat in the car fortwenty minutes before MTA had a solution, and, while we sat there, wetalked, and several of us were of the opinion that it was anotherterrorist attack, and we'd just have to find out after we gotsomewhere what was affected. (We sat in the car for onlytwenty minutes, because the MTA had all sorts of plans and were verywell practiced. They got us from a trestle bridge to a stationwithout A/C power.) The attacks were there, like the delays, like thesmoke, like the hole, like the idiot tourists, like the souvenirsellers from New Jersey, like the new emergency plans, like theeconomic depression that hit the island, so what was to talk about?

In 2006, I was away from there. I was in small town Georgia. Thetelevision did not have a major paroxysm over the anniversary, butpublic radio shows that were based in New York or Philadelphia did.Ifound myself, though, having sadness that I could not argue myselfout of. The day – the unfathomable mixture and lack of meaning ofit – was a revenant, and I had come to its grave. I had had anexperience. I had an experience that a million shared, at least.

Myexperience was of an open question, of an unsolvable riddle. I do notmean “Why did they do it?” Who cares why they did it? It would make nodifference. I do not mean, “What are we going to do about it?” Itdoesn't matter what we do, neither to the dead nor the living. I also do not mean, “What does thismean?” I think most people would be satisfied with knowing that itis random or purposed or cut off from sequence. I mean, instead, “Whoam I in this? What happened?”

That year, 2006, I grappled with the single question that had been most onme since the day: am I brave, selfish, giving, or cold? Hundreds ofpeople without training ran down to the pile to help, but I didn't.Tens of thousands suffered the ash, but I didn't. Dozens hugged andcried with survivors, but I didn't. I was practical. I wasanalytical. I was intellectual. I considered the various authorities,evaluated them, and made decisions. The jumpers and those who wereshowered with body parts or the binary of life/death presented in asecond mesmerized me as a symbol of all of these questions combined.Neither prepared, thought, analyzed, but each had to be herself orhimself, and I did not know that I had such a self to rely on, thatthere was a core beyond the analytical. The artist – refined soul,delicate senses – and the vision most raw and unsought flung uponher became my heroine. She was 9/11 in sum. [I link little. I can tolerate few.]

Fiveyears later, the world has only grown colder, and the chill hasallowed not oblivion, but deception. The stunned, altered, confused,tearful visage has suffered another insult: it has been erased,substituted, and summarized. None of us could perceive what happened,either in real time or in its contours. I do not think thePalestinian family or neighborhood struck by an 'errant' missile, or an Afghan wedding party mistakenly hit by Hellfire missiles can.Death that appears so quickly with such ragged andarbitrary edges cannot be understood by the living, because tounderstand a thing, we have to have a concept of it, and that meansbeing able to define it. To define something, we must know where itbegins and ends. (Hegel'sphenomenology vexes us because, if someone points at an apple andsays, “I mean thatapple,” he says, “By apple to do you mean the skin, the red, theshape, the thing on the table, the thing on this table, the thing andthe table, the thing, table and chairs? What is it exactly that makesit 'this'?”) When there is a 9/11, no one inside it can know it. Itis too big, and we are too small.

We started out not knowing what was happening, but we who lived didso only by never understanding what it was that actually happened.To live, we cut our perspective down into segments of arc. However, the nation outside us had an image. While we knew who we lost, for the nation the victims of theattack were changing. We all knew and mourned and loved the lostfirefighters and police who responded to the attacks. We took flowersto the fire houses. However, before Oliver Stone's movie, “9/11,”came out, but definitely shortly after, the nation's image of thevictims of the attack changed from stock brokers and office workersto firefighters and police. The image now is perhaps two large, emptybuildings falling on 3,000 firemen.

Additionally, the then-presidentused the attacks as a reason to bomb (which I supported) and invade(which I supported somewhat) Afghanistan. After that, the then-vicepresident began trying to use 9/11 as a reason for invading Iraq. Iwas one of 500,000 New York City residents who marched to protestthat. However, in the national consciousness these are both “warsof 9/11.” Thus, for many people and, ten years later, mediaservices, the 9/11 attacks are 'about' firefighters and the U.S.military.

Theattacks also meant the rapid passing of numerous laws that took awaycivil rights from citizens. There followed new practices andExecutive Orders that reversed longstanding U.S. practices. These areeach comprehensible. The wars fit into a narrative logic for thenational mind and mood. The civil rights measures affect citizens andinflame imaginations. If we combine this “meaning of 9/11” withthe other, we have either a fascist or proudly strong state eitherregaining its strength or betraying its foundations. Either way, itmakes for good television and good debate. It also makes for possibledebate.
From Iwo Jima.com: a vigorous debate!
As the tenth anniversary has come along, outrage pushed me. I am nocloser to solving the questions the day embedded in my soul. I do notknow who I am at core, do not think that I have now grown some corebeing that would show in the flame. I do not know what the day meant.I do, however, know that understanding its ineffability will doabsolutely nothing to cure the pain the question causes. However,when someone else comes along and says that there are “conclusions”for 9/11, I boil. Conclusions? We can't even find the factsyet.

I should allow the nation its track and train, and saying “Not inmy name” rings hollow, but there is an evil at work that is as oldas the serpent. Humans can turn on the television or the DVD-boxand watch people get their throats slit, listen to the blood gurgle.We can excitedly tune in to see a man saw his leg off to get to aknife to stab another man in the stomach. However, if we hear a babycry, or if our own child is screaming, or if we see a starving child,we cannot bear it. This is because, as animals and creatures, we havea place in our minds called Story. In Story, violence is acceptable,because it is “not real” and always has a reason. For anon-sociopath, reality is sharply different, and the person who canwatch violence in story may not be able to watch any pain inperson. So long as narrative (story) is used only for made-up things,it is useful.

Evil occurs when reality is put into narrative so as to remove part of its meaning. Sometimes, this is done on purpose, and we call itpropaganda. Other times, it is done unintentionally, and we shouldwatch out. I hope what is happening to 9/11 is unintended. I hopethat the news people of the moment and the producers today were and areoverwhelmed by the event and as unable to put contours ontoexperience as we were, that they were as shocked and blinded by theviolence as we and that their subconscious minds merely protect them by imposing a narrative. However, after adecade it is no longer possible to forgive or excuse imposing story.

Theactual story tellers have avoided narrative (“9/11” and “Flight93”), but the news people have resorted to it. From them we get“What is the reason” (cause) and “How will we react”(response) and “What with the country do” (reply), to “How isthe battle to find the Guy” (climax) and a wished-for “MissionAccomplished” (denouement). This narration was overlayed on our reality. Stories have their conclusions built into them by their forms. The political story news created was on top of the original fictionof getting “the guys who did this.” They, of course, were deadalready.

We have to stop telling lies. It isn't that the conclusions of that narrative are worse than another. It isn't that it's a bad story or a good story. It's that it's a story. Let at least one thing beuntellable. Let it be uncontainable. Let it be too big to explain.That, after all, would be the only experience-based explanation. The only way to stopinflicting the trauma on us is to let the trauma be too big to be falsified.

The Crime of Cant

2011-08-10T06:31:00.000-07:00

"Of all the cant that's canted in this canting world, the cant of hypocrites may be most common, but the cant of lawyers is the worst." -- Tristram Shandy

I probably misquoted that a bit. (My commonplace book is in my other cell phone.)

Linguistic scolds always assume a general posture of pursed lips, wagging finger, and wide eyes when "u rit yr txt," and they refuse to "be proactive" when they "do lunch." However, the same will write, in their own professional journals, "Moll's Newgate conversation with Jemy reveals a formidable challenge to this critical shibboleth" (Melissa Mowry, found here). Or an article might be titled, "The role of statistical preemption and categorization in a-adjective production" (March 2011 issue of Language). And we all know that Laurence Sterne, of Tristram Shandy had not experienced the misery of business speak or education jargon. I recommend this dictionary o f Business jargon, although it misses the genuine horror of the phenomenon. As for education-speak, it is as impenetrable as it is unnecessary, and it admits neither light nor any effort at finding its bottom. This is a serious list, meant to help. Its sincerity testifies to the humorlessness and Mobius strip nature of this language. This one is designed to help people pass for MEd.

Why do we do this?

I do not mean, "Why do we use jargon?" I mean, "Why do we castigate it," we scolds? If I can explain this, this axiomatic principle, perhaps I can lay out as a handy tool why this is a lifelong, consistent and positive philosophy and not a "conservative" position, not "luddite," not "retrograde."

Let me take a small piece of text with jargon in it.
This is the abstract of an article by Amy Topper submitted to Developmental Education: Time to Completion. It has not been peer reviewed and is not yet published. I found it via the ERIC database. This should lead you to the entry in question. If there is any loss in the links, I apologize. I quote:

Using data from Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, this issue of "Data Notes" investigates the number of attempts it takes students to complete all developmental education courses to which they are referred. Subsequent gateway course completion and overall persistence are also examined. Three-year outcomes were analyzed and disaggregated by developmental education subject (English and math) and the level of developmental education assignment. Students referred to developmental math were more likely to attempt the class than were students referred to developmental English. The data show that the number of developmental education course attempts and the student's referral level are both inversely related to successful gateway course completion, regardless of subject. Three-year persistence rates were positively associated with developmental coursework completion, but not with the number of developmental coursework attempts.

This is admirably clean writing. In fact, I feel certain that you can understand it, and I quite agree with its observations. However, there are some few things in there that will make my point. "Gateway course?" "Persistence" and "outcomes?" "Level of developmental educational assignment?" "Successful gateway course completion" is on top of that. If we look at the first two of these jargon terms, we will see all that we need to. I picked this sample because I can translate between the worlds ("discourse communities") of college English teaching and blog reading, I think.

Once upon a time, someone argued that we should not call a course that taught basic syntax or mathematics "remedial." If a student perceived that she or he was being written off or called a failure, then that student would conform to such expectations and fail. If the school told the student that he was bad at English, then he would fear English. Therefore, the argument went, it was better to say that these classes were simply gateways, just neutral value classes that could allow a student access to the college's curriculum. I think this is a fine argument, and I agree with it. However, when I use the term "gateway class," just as when the author did, I am passing on that argument in a tight little word bomb. I am giving my assent and assuming it, allowing no discussion or examination. When I use jargon, I buy the argument, agree to it, and perpetuate it, and I silence any examination of its assumptions.

So, measuring student "persistence?" Does this mean that the students would sometimes disintegrate? Or has the author not solved peek-a-boo yet? Actually, the word's meaning is basic enough, but here the word is jargon because it appears not as itself, but as an antithesis, as a replacement. "Persistence" is the word we read, but, when we do, we almost silently supply the words it replaced: "not drop-out." Measuring student persistence means measuring the students who do not drop out of the class.
So what's wrong with dropping out? Well, when you or I say "drop out," we are implying several nasty things. We came up with the term in Education circles in the first place, and so it was that some other Educator pointed out that "drop out" suggests that the person ceases to exist. Well, Jamal was here, but he dropped out of the system, fell away, ceased to be our concern, went off the grid, became an unperson. Additionally, a person "drops out" as an active verb. In the 1960's, Leary's disciples tuned in and dropped out on purpose. The quality of quitting is not constrained in the drop out, where struggling students who stop attending are often forced to stop or driven to stop and feel passive in the process.

Therefore, the argument went, we have to stop talking about drop outs. Instead, we need to study the positive quality of "student persistence." Students who have the quality of trying, the quality of wishing, of working, and how we can foster that. I agree, generally.

This, though, is the heart of the hart. "Student persistence" is the same blunderbuss mistake that "drop-out" was. It discounts the dropping out student as much as the other term ignored discouragement. It blames the instructor as much as the other blamed the student. However, because this argument is passed on in language rather than in propositions, we do not get to debate, or even think about what is being said. We must consent to the point of view to even read the danged paper.

In the paper on Moll Flanders I quoted way up there, the author talks about a "formidable challenge to this critical shibboleth." Well, that term, "shibboleth," is inherited from a particular literary critic, and using it marks both a familiarity and agreement with that school of thought. Further, it suggests that there is an us vs. them war going on in the matter of interpreting a novel from the 1720's, as if one's value as a progressive depended upon fighting dead critics. This warfare, and these arguments, are all present in the word choice, and the assumptions, which are tremulous, not merely shaky, are nowhere to be debated. (I think the critic herself is quite bright, and if we strip this posturing, she has an insight in the article.)

Therefore, and I apologize for taking so long to get to the point, the reason to oppose jargon is not that it's new. We should welcome words from slang or foreign languages that offer meanings not present in English. (I like "homeboy" as a way for English to get pisano, but it's already a dead word.) We should pour acid, though, on all language that passes jargon, and especially that does so unknowingly. Jargon is a way of pushing unexamined arguments and unthought assumptions further and further from the light of logic and human life.

Money vs. Capital

2011-07-27T07:11:00.000-07:00

"Money well-timed and well applied can do anything." -- the 'thief taker' Peachum in The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay

I begin with a very simple and quite unoriginal question. Why are there so many grand, empty houses for sale?
As I said, this is not an original question. We can take this basic question and treat it as a symbol (?). Now, we can add another entirely unoriginal question: Why are house prices falling to three quarters (and dropping 25% per year) or even a half of their purchase prices? Let us treat that as question #2, or (?1). Finally, let us add in the third, extremely important, consuming question: What are we doing with the 20% of our people who are unemployed and facing Republican ruthlessness, who can hardly afford rents? Let's call that (?0), because it is actually the question that occurred chronologically prior to the others.

So, let's leave aside the principle question of why the U.S. economy is not hiring people anymore. I know why, and it has absolutely nothing to do with tax rates. Banks are not making short term loans, for reasons they must answer, and short term lending creates inventory, and inventory creates production. Small loans are business loans, too, and those are not coming, so the "job creators" don't exist. Actual job creation comes, when corporations fail to hire, from artisanal and small market groups supplying what the corporations will not and rising, but, if no one will lend.... Let's leave that aside, though, because I could be wrong. We could have joblessness simply because corporations pay too much tax.

Instead, let's think about those empty houses, row upon row of them, little patches of them snaking through the woods where subdivisions and suburban protection were once planned. In London, they had a problem like this in the Thatcher years, and the response of the unemployed was to start a squatter movement. Brits now look upon it with some admiration, as a goodly number of artists and intellectuals were associated with it (artist and intellectual being traditionally low-paying jobs), so if you prefer a radio history, here is one. Such attempts in the United States, where property rights are, we are told, the basis of the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution, are typically met a mite ... violently. No one would be foolhardy enough to try it.

Therefore, we are left with mute, rotting clapboard constructions staring at mounds of dirt.

Suppose a house were bought at the high market for $200,000. (I know! In 2007, $200,000 barely got a basement, much less a house.) Now, MBWF lends the young marrieds an adjustable rate mortgage for $185,000, because they used grants and other methods to put down a good plunk. The bank has now paid the builder. The builder already paid the contractors, or is about to. The real estate agent has run to the bank with her check. Money has changed hands. The bank now gave out $185,000 real. They did this because they have a 20 year loan and have the couple on the hook for a completely insane amount. Why, the first year, they'll get 1% interest on the payments (185000/(12*20)+((185000/(12*20)*0.01) or $770.84+7.71 for the twelve months and, tee-hee, 8% the next year, 9% the year after, and 18% for the rest of the time. Oh, the profits they will make!

You know what happens, I'm sure.
For some strange reason, the married couple did not experience increases in profits equal to those the bank had planned for itself. Astonishing, that. Now, we can blame the couple, of course. Regardless, let us look, amorally, at what happens next. The couple falls behind for three months, and then they either run from their mortgage or they get the repossession.

Congratulations, bank! You have the house. Now what?

Given the explosion in repossessed houses, the bank cannot sell these "distressed properties," and the prices fall. Instead of getting the imagined profit of all that lovely interest, the bank has a house for sale for a year, then two years, and then three years or more. While the house is waiting to sell for three years, it is getting no prettier, and its neighbors are looking no better.

Why?

I'm serious. Why is it in the bank's interest to repossess a house at all? If they do repossess a house, why is it in their interest to sell it? How is it better for the bank to recover $0 of the $185,000 because they were unable to gain the $1,100 a month they demanded? How is it better for them to say, "Because we did not get all the profit we want, we will get none of the money back?" How is it better for a bank to say, "No, no. We demand that adjustable rate, or you're kicked out, you evil poor people. We don't care if you can still pay the original rate and give us back all the money?"

I couldn't understand this. I could not understand why banks didn't hire real estate companies to manage their "distressed properties" and rent the danged things so that they could get the money back. It makes no sense to a human being.

It makes sense, though, to an MBA. It makes sense if this is what you learn:

Yes. Now you see it. When the bank loaned that $185,000, it wrote down the whole thing as one transaction. It wrote down the profits of $45,000 or so it expected along with the debit of $185,000, and then, when the couple failed, the exchange failed, because the bankers were dealing not with people, but with capital.

You and I spend money. They move capital. Capital is never so grubby as to be material. It is consensual, mathematical, transactional, and powerful, while money is only one of those. The bank passed the "bad loan" onto its underwriter, or it didn't, and after enough time of letting the house sit vacant, they could "write down" or "write off" the loss.

Poof! The whole terrible mess has now gone away, so far as the bank is concerned. Lesson learned: don't lend money, when you can invest capital.

You and me? Well, we squat in the dirt and wonder why.

OJ-KC: What Trials of the Century Do

2011-07-11T07:04:00.000-07:00

The trial of the century happens every few years. We are stunned, aghast, a-riot, that the vile monster, guilty of such detailed crime and giving such explicit horror, in the face of so many angry commentators, was let go, scot-free. I recall the O.J. Simpson trial, and the unfairness, the racism (as the radio told us), that resulted in his getting away with his graphic crime, and now Casey Anthony has gotten away with an equally foul murder. We saw them do it, after all, and those jurors must be racist or stupid to come to any conclusion other than the television's.

If you think my tone betrays me and sounds cynical, you are right that my attitude is ironic, but not that it's cynicism. Consider the history of trials of the century. Trials of the century are a genre.

It may not seem germane, but it is worth remembering that nothing drew a crowd in the good old days of Merry Olde England or Ye Wilde West like a public hanging. The earliest novels arose partly out of journalism. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana were imitations of the sorts of work that he did as a journalist. A sure top seller would be 'Captain Johnson's' “The General History of Pyrates” or The Lives of the Most Notorious Gamblers (1699, Charles Cotton, reprinted in books) or the “Life” of a master criminal recently hung. The public has always liked true crime, and true trial and punishment. The virtue of the criminal biography was that the criminal ended badly.

The first television Trial of the Century that I can remember was Watergate. In fact, I can say that my politics were considerably formed by watching the Watergate hearings. I saw them every day, as my mother, then in her 30's, watched obsessively and kept precise track of what had been said and done by whom. Television ratings were enormous. The effect on America was even bigger. It gave us a hero of John Dean, and it showed us “rat f*ckers” and other low lifes. I was ten and bright, and my eyes were opening to what some people would do and how some folks would fight back. I did not make party distinction at ten. I made honest/dishonest distinctions.

However, O.J. was a new thing under the sun. It began happening around this same time of year, curiously enough, and it played out until the fall. In other words, it took place when students could be home watching it and when it was “slow news.” The 24 hour cable saw ratings booms of tearful, incontinence-causing proportions. The whole nation (and statistically most of that nation did not care about the football player OJ and even less of it cared about the actor OJ) was brought into this dichotomy of either the Everyman African American who made good and the racist cops of LA or the viciously jealous murderer who was going to play “the race card” to get away with murder.

After OJ, the cable news tried to give us others. Lord knows they wanted to have another trial of the century. Winona? Lindsay? Each celebrity gone bad, all the way down to Amy Winehouse, was going to recapture that old O.J. magic. (Television executives, I am told, think in demographics and categories. They won't notice that no one really cares much about Lindsay or that shoplifting is too grubby and ordinary for a Trial of the Century. They're thinking only celebrity + crime + cameras.)

Casey Anthony has happened in summer, in prime coverage. The cable news has had nothing else to report, because they don't want to report on the budget impasse, the Republicans refuse to give them a leader to cover twenty-four hours a day, and the world is expensive (South Sudan would mean flying someone there!), but this comes with a feed, and it comes with details, and it can be made to last all day. From the point of view of “Trial of the Century,” it has worked nearly as well as the Lindbergh baby and the trial of Bruno Hauptmann.

First, it is an “obviously guilty” case, so far as the spectator is concerned. It is obscene. It is agonizing in detail. It has outlandish personalities. The verdict is an outrage, or at least a furore.

Let's be clear: the guilt or innocence of Casey Anthony is like that of O.J. Simpson: a matter of law, not opinion. “Guilty” and “Not guilty” are legal verdicts, not spiritual states; the terms only have meaning inside a court room. Both individuals are “not guilty” of murder, although one is “liable” for murder. I will not take a stance on whether I think the individuals committed the crimes or not, because I do not know. I saw snatches of television, and, like all of those who did, I got the strong impression that both individuals killed a loved one, but I also have learned from a long life that what I did not see might be staggering, that what was not said could be definitive, and that drawing conclusions from television is dangerous. I do not want to talk about the real or imagined deeds; I want to talk about the function of the Trial of the Century and the way it is supposed to work.

So, let's look at a pretty picture and then go on, ok?

I know this is long and academical, but below this, I'll discuss what seems to be the master narrative of the Trial of the Century and why American jurisprudence is necessarily ill fitted to it.

(Above is a gibbet)

What is the most popular type [warning for Linux users: that last link nearly choked my Ubuntu box] of television show in prime time? We may say “reality television,” but that encompasses everything from the contest to the freak out to the freakish documentary. In general, other than “American Idol,” and its Topo Gigio-like dopplegangers, the most popular type of show is the police procedural. Last year, "reality" contest shows were nine of the top twenty shows, and cop shows were five.

It is possible to turn on the cable or satellite television in a major city and watch murder from breakfast to breakfast. One can go through the full industry that is Dick Wolf enterprises – “Law and Order” this and that. One can see the real squad that handles sex crimes on HBO (and they're quite interesting for being -plunkplunk!- not dramatic, but rather professional). One can go over to “NCIS (another noisy link)” for six hours on USA. One can see “Bones,” with its gore, and then there are the Bruckheimer gross-out shows where coroners and crime scene investigators combine “Fear Factor” with “Miami Vice” to show us every bit of prosthetic goo possible. In a day, a television viewer can observe numerous rapes, child molestations, dozens of dead bodies in bushes, lots of decayed corpses in unlikely or impossible places, and, of course, learn that every jogger or dog walker in New York City will find at least one corpse and that one in every fifty people partying to techno at a club will fall over dead from mysterious causes.

Obviously, the people like the procedural. My thesis is that the Trial of the Century is the police procedural writ large (very large), but, because of the function the trial is supposed to fulfill, it faces a dilemma and must either fail as a trial or fail as a social function. The Trial of the Century offers a juxtaposition of generic expectation with wretched reality and evokes rage for that reason.

To explain what I mean, I need to establish some things about detective work as a functional fiction.

What is the functional value of the detective?

The detective is a social physician. In any crime story, the world's social order opens in working order, where the rich are rich, the preppy have nice lives, and the honest workers get by. Into this world of expectations and rewards, an element of chaos enters in the form of the criminal. The criminal offers two forms of chaos.

The most important and first chaos the criminal offers is by his or her absence. It is the not knowing who did it that drives the first frenzy. Because the effects of the challenge are present (a bank robbery, a dead body, a stolen car), but not the narrative surrounding the event, the criminal's absence threatens the smooth operation of the world. We do not know why the man is dead, because the vengeful mistress is in hiding, and the longer she remains hidden, the more upset, literally, the world is. So long as no criminal is present, all criminals are present potentially. (I.e. until we find the ex-athlete with jealousy, the knife wielding killer of blonds could be anywhere.)

When killers are caught, we frequently say, "Getting revenge won't bring Buster back." From the point of view of the actual damage done to society, the criminal's identification is not materially important (the crime won't be undone) as much as it is psychically and socially important.

Second, the criminal's actions disturb our social promise. We promise one another that we allow overbearing police so that we can be safe, and we tolerate the rich, the greedy, the selfish, because we assume that an hierarchy functions. The function forgives the pain of daily life (the rich man's contumely, as Hamlet says). A criminal rejects social commands. The criminal reminds us of the beast, suggests that our neighbors might be insane or evil, and offers us the idea that society might be a cheat after all. Instead of feeling enraged, this makes the average person feel afraid, because, the tough talk of libertarians aside, few people are either prepared for or willing to go hand to hand with the whole world.

The detective is therefore a figure who heals society. The procedural is a particular form of the detective fiction in that it offers us a method and a safety in seeing the method at work. “CSI: Mayberry” reassures us that Otis the drunk will never get away with it, because Science is stronger than the man (link should be read by those who believe too much in CSI). “Law and Order: SUV” lets us know that the detectives are not blasé. They are furious. They are going to overact and throttle their way to a conclusion in twenty-two minutes, but, of course, the defense attorney will get all the evidence thrown out on a “technicality” that some liberal invented, and the brilliant prosecutors will win in the end and give us justice.

The procedural thus lends Society with a majiscule a role as the detective. It assures us that there are things to fix about society, but also that all the dangers that exist anterior to the system (madness, jealousy, hatred, as the crimes investigated tend always to be things that can be related to "bad man" rather than "disequilibrium in the system") can be balanced.

In detective fiction and the film noir, in contrast to the procedural, detectives are themselves transgressive figures. A goodly number of detective novels, insist on quirky, even illegal or amoral, detectives. These figures challenge the social order and heal it by breaking it. Their first job is to disorder the usual social flow so as to get to the truth, because the authors feel that the process (the very one television loves) obscures truth, so Philip Marlow and Lisbeth have to break the laws, offend the rich, and stamp on some toes.

At the end of a detective novel, the oddball detective usually isn't rich, usually isn't rewarded much, and the truth has been detected, but not often with the effect of improving the world (e.g. “Chinatown”). (Inherent Vice is an interesting goof on genre. Pynchon's detective learns little and immediately forgets it.)

Trial of the Century, the script
I referred, before, to the Lindbergh baby and Bruno Hauptmann. Hauptmann was almost certainly innocent, but he was executed. That trial followed after Sacco and Vanzetti, and later there would be Leopold and Loeb. In all of these cases, the newspapers presented the prosecution's case. Why?

Essentially, the television today, like the newspaper then, got customers by getting lurid details, and the prosecution has them. The person mounting a defense has nothing to offer. “I have an exclusive for you about my client sitting at home that day” won't cause a run at the newspaper box or sustain :45 of pundit plaudits. The defense is mounting a case of “not.” The prosecution gives facts that recreate the primary anxiety of crime (the missing criminal) by repeating (“Someone did this”) and offers relief in the form of circumstances (“Defendant said this, but this was true”). The combination writes copy, compels the anchors emotionally, addicts the viewers, and, honestly, works upon our primal selves. Prosecution always has an advantage in a Trial of the Century, no matter how restrained it is, because simply providing the details of the crime and giving the mere name of the suspect is sufficient for our needs to put the two together.

In a Trial of the Century, the public gets to participate in a procedural. The reader of the Daily Paper gets to assemble all the facts, just like the detective, and gets to achieve the greatest of psychological triumphs: healing the fear. The fear crime presents is that any and all of us can be next, and we turn to detective shows because we get to have faith in a world that works, but what we really would want is the chance to solve it ourselves, to be the agent of healing. (The number of amateur detectives trying to solve Zodiac is staggering.) The detailed coverage offers each of us the chance to star in the show.

We can see, I think, that the outrage the public is feeling today is programmed into the very process.

Why the world is angry: Justice and Poetic Justice
Aristotle, in Poetics, said that fiction is better than history, because history only tells us what happened, where fiction tells us what should or must occur. He meant that fiction tells us what should occur, morally, or what must occur, logically. A real king going into battle might yell, “This way!” Shakespeare has him give an inspiring speech about the emerald isle and happy few and into the breech, because Kings should talk that way.

Fictional justice, and we are swimming in it, sets us up the character and follows through with the logic of the character, or with an acceptable amount of curve. In reality, the evil flourish and the good die by the hundreds of thousands.

Real justice relies on juries and judges' instructions to the jury. Real justice has jurors who may be a bit dim. Real justice is what we really have. Sometimes real justice is smarter than fictional justice. Either way, it is real, and the Trial of the Century demands that it be otherwise.

Our Trials of the Century have been best for public interest when they have been most psychologically fearful, most primal, most vicious. Lindsay Winehouse's drugs won't do much, but the graphic case of Othello-scripted jealousy or Medea-like infanticide demands the tragic or epic conclusion. In addition, when the television or newspaper create the beast, it has conditioned into prosecution material, an internal interest in fear, an existential threat to the family structure of America, and thus a need for a guilty criminal for the hanging that will heal that threat.

Real trials can't be trails of the century, unless we want more Sacco and Vanzettis, more Goldbergs, more Hauptmanns.

Are You Tough Enough, Strong Enough, Fit Enough?

2011-07-04T05:35:00.000-07:00

Blake: We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize?
[Holds up prize]
Blake: Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.
from "Glengarry Glen Ross" 1992, found at IMDB

A show of hands: who here was shocked when David Mamet announced that he was a conservative? The man who celebrated strong men preying on weak women, womenly men, and scorning mercy is a conservative? Nooooo, really? What's more, his "conservative" views are remarkably like his characters: Nietzschean humping of the muscled up thigh of the leather glove that slaps, the boot that stamps, and the lip that sneers. Whoopie. Mistress Roxana might help him with his problem without his needing to inflict it on the world.

Mamet has a claim to an American vision, a claim given to him by theater critics who noticed in his abusive, abrasive, and humiliating works an accurate mirror to the world America had become, first in the home (apparently, theater critics have alcoholic fathers) and then in sexual and office politics. The common theme is that America is about competing, and everyone is competing, whether they know it or not, and the strong will not merely triumph over the weak, but they will degrade and punish them, too.

You can tell from my tone, can't you, that I disagree?

I don't want to give it away too much, but, gosh, I'm not sure I can keep it in much longer. The Ayn Randian vision (Nietzsche misunderstood for America) that each superior person must take what is necessary and that compassion is a slave quality is anti-Christian. Rand herself made the point openly. Mamet's expressed vision was beyond her, though, because his strong men were not John Galt as much as John Gotti. (Of course, I rather think that John Galt is John Gotti.) Nevertheless, as countless articles have suddenly realized and you and I have known all along, there is a truth to the observation that the world sure seems to be acting like one of those plays.

Part of this is that it only takes one jackass to dominate the soundscape and convince the farmer that the entire corral of horses is filled with asses. One really determined sociopath can trigger defensive and offensive reactions, and so it just doesn't take much. (I wrote, somewhere, about the person galloping down the hall being a jerk and the rest ducking out of the way, but I can't find the post. I may have deleted it as being obviously about a co-worker.) Then again, our corporate structures have seen no reason not to hold a carpet knife to the collective carotid artery, so there is fear enough for all.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin

We are in competition, constant competition, in the American system, and it is "survival of the fittest." Since Americans know that "fitness means being physically fit," it follows that our society should favor and honor the most athletic, the most intelligent, and the most speedy. They are the fittest. Never mind what you just read. Darwin meant, we're convinced, what we think he meant, even though he never said it nor intended it.

This is the heart of the Nietzschean and Objectivist myth, after all: we will have the greater person by having the best person who will be the fittest person, whether we measure fitness by will or power. The fact that Darwin argued that the best was the most adaptable to the changing circumstances, that Odysseus (the crafty) is better than Ajax (strongest of warriors), just couldn't get through those prejudiced skulls.

We should be thinking about who's creative, who's malleable, who's quick to modify, but we instead worry always.

"... 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, The Man of Feeling.

Are you the right one? Will you keep your job through the year? When you go to the interview, will your looks be adequate? When you go to the dance, will someone be cooler than you? When you wake up in the morning, the referee looks at your eyelids flutter and chants, "1, 2, 3... fight!" Therefore, you must always assert yourself against others, over others, away from others.

I had a brief exchange recently with someone who said that it was impossible to have an identity without opposing someone or something.

The secret of envy is competition, and the seeds of it come from looking about. Oh, sure, it is tied up in pride, but envy is not reserved for the well to do wishing for the material goods of their neighbors. It's in every person who says, "Oh, pshw! Can you believe how much they pay that jerk?" It's comparing.

Descartes beginning point of philosophy was Cogito ero sum. It is quite possible to say "I am" without saying, "and I'm glad I'm not you!" There is no need to contrast in order to be oneself. When the discussion of "I can't believe they pay Bozo so much" starts, it should only be to resolve with "We should all be paid well."

Envy may thrive more today than any time in its history. In a land of plenty, people grouse about income taxes and what's "theirs." In a place of riches, people look over at their neighbors more and more to decry how those people are acting. Envy takes time away from building any part of a self, fills one's heart with ashes, and leads only to imitation or negation, but it is one of our dearest, deadliest friends.

Our Best Fiend: Lust

2011-06-23T12:58:00.000-07:00

Love bears all, but lust bares it all.

On “Freshairre” with Terry Gross today, a neuro-scientist was on to talk about oxytocin and dopamine and addiction and pathways of pleasure. Now, I might normally consider a pathway of pleasure a cool autumnal arbor strewn with pine straw, with a light show of spots of sun poking their jagged thorns through the canopy, but his pathways of pleasure are all chemical. Nuero-scientists are thus Rosicrucians, seeking out a chemical wedding, a chemical bliss, a consummation of the elements in a fusion of ecstasy that is only mistaken for a feeling.

I would like to harsh this trip. It's what I do. It's also not my nature to trust the machine that does not account for the ghost. I'm with Koestler on that, however many mistakes he made in his technical argument. Therefore, I would begin by my usual critique of cause and effect. (I say “my,” but I copped it from Hume. He hasn't complained yet.) If you've read me for any length of time, you've encountered this criticism. Here it is, indented:

Chemicals in the brain may be the result of an emotional state or the cause of an emotional state. Their presence does not establish cause. Therefore, if you orphan a child and examine brain chemistry, it may show depression chemicals, but those chemicals didn't make the child sad. You did. If you prevent the expression of the chemicals, you may prevent the emotion, or you may delay it or push it into another health effect, as we cannot say that bad feelings or good feelings are non-functional.

Well, I want to do that, but I kind of can't. You see, I started to form the syllables in my mouth's mind, or my mind's mouth, and I got as far as “pleasure is.” Pleasure is... what? What is pleasure?

Define "pleasure" without a negation or synonym, and you'll be in for it. Happy? Isn't happy pleasure? The querulous and quarrelsome are going to be reaching for the comment field already, either to tell me that pleasure is simple or that Webster's says it's this or that damned thing. Stop it.

Imagine that you had to program a robot to feel pleasure. You could weight some actions more than others, but that would be preference. You could open up more resources upon the completion of a task, but that's reward. What would you do to create pleasure in a mechanical model? How would you construct an analog of it in a creature that otherwise has never had it?

Maybe I'm being a fool, but I feel moderately confident that this is not an easy task, and not just because it evades me. There are multiple concepts that seem atomic – things that are indivisible analytically, concepts that are nearly immune to Professor Kant's system. They're baseline. Time is one of them. We all have to know what it is before we discuss it, and the same is true of pleasure. Pain, to some degree, is like pleasure, but we have things like “damage” and “firing nerves” that we can lean on for it. “Life” is a wobbler that is somewhat atomic. John Locke would say that these are the ideas that are just plain there as innate ideas. (I'm not aware of any society lacking them. The small group without tense may or may not lack time. It made the news that someone found one small group at all that even appeared to lack one, and this scarcity makes my point rather well.)

So, if we don't know what pleasure is, how on earth can we say that this much or that much comes from this state of chemical eruption or that? Obviously, subjectivity is involved, since these are subjective states we're talking about, and therefore the scientific discussion is going to have to be, if you think about it, of itself.

A creature exhibits the signs of pleasure with oxytocin,
and then a human subject reports feelings of love and intimacy when exposed to it. If there are humans who do not respond to it, or who express a different chemical or in a different mixture, then they won't have been found, but the compound will have been named,
and, from then on, the discussion will be of the compound, not the phenomenon. The equivalence of the chemical and subjective state will be affirmed once and will hold everything together.

Pleasure in its own pursuit is the essence of lust. Lust defines pleasure as the object of desire rather than love. One of the odd things about male sexuality that women have noticed is that men are absolutely obsessed with the female orgasm. While some feminists have spoken confidently of men only caring because they can then claim to have conquered the woman, I do not know where their confidence comes from, unless it is associating with a bad crowd. Men themselves are at a loss to describe or explain it, but they desperately plead that they are doing it out of love. Gay men have the same obsession, it turns out, and the rather unlovely culmination of male sexual activity is a high point of their erotica.

I think, if there is any way of knowing why this is so, it would be more nearly found in pleasure than violence. Men want pleasure and want to observe pleasure, because their sexuality is visual. Pleasure is thus a feedback loop, as emotional pleasure is a feedback cycle otherwise for both cycles and love is a feedback circuit should be for both and is for women. Women will want to hear and know about a man's feelings to feed back into the emit/receive cycle of pleasure/love that works along a non-visual pathway, but men are going for their "pathways of pleasure" by objects being looked at, actions being seen: testimony is not sufficient.

On a more dull level, the pathway of pleasure is the salmon run of teenagers perpetually misunderstanding themselves and each other. “The girls are all stuck up, because they know how hot they are,” the boy told me. Girls are, of course, horribly insecure and think themselves ugly. “Guys always go out with girls who are such sluts. Don't they realize that she's going to cheat on him, too,” the girl asked me. The boy in question is like an animal with a festering disease at his last extremity. He is no more capable of rational thought than he is of growing the chest hair he lacks.

In one town I lived in, there was a massage parlor on main street. On the front door, it has pressed on letters from a stencil set that said, “Use Back Entrance Please.” If that weren't bad enough, the /e/ fell off of “Use.” When someone robbed the place, police were able to find the thieves thanks to the video surveillance the place used in its entry. Suddenly, a great many men in the next town were blanching and having long, serious talks with their partners and wives.

Such is lust. It is not rational, because it is not orderly. It has no purpose. It only has a goal, and the goal is rather ignoble.

Lust's downfall is love. Lust is a psychotic that cuts the heads off of paper dolls. It carefully preserves those 'pathways of pleasure,' but it doesn't have to tolerate fights or compromises or being ignored. Love bears harm, takes pain. Lust refuses to hear its partner's name, walks out in the morning, regrets the night before or forgets it and swears off martinits. Love holds all, encompasses and incorporates into itself, and it can never be described chemically.

Welcome to Valhalla!

2011-06-14T06:06:00.001-07:00

I ought to write politics there, metaphysics here, and oughtn't promise the seven sins and deliver this, but the thought beckoned, and I follow.

You know about Valhalla, I'm sure. Even if you know nothing about Norse mythology, you know about Valhalla. You probably know of it as Norse heaven. This is a misconception, though, because the Norse didn't really have a heaven. Valhalla you may know, then, as a more militarized place, a place of valor, where the Cheetos never stain one's quilted armor or where one may be ready for the "looter" hordes who will come to force you away from "going Galt." Indeed, you know about Valhalla the wrong way, whether you're a skinhead or a puffbeard, a maiden in paisley or a matron in leather.

(1896 German version of Valhalla, Max Bruckner)

I grew fascinated by the Norse. Their religion seemed all wrong to me. It's a death cult, for one thing. How, I wondered, could Germanic tribes hang onto and develop such a religion, and make it into a genuine religion too, for centuries? I say "genuine religion" because they prayed, hoped, and honored their gods and believed that natural forces were engaged in human life. In other words, they had made a leap from the childish, superstitious 'religion' of the Romans and Greeks to something closer to the passionate and personal religion of the east, although only just.

In Poetic Edda there is mystery religion, and one supposes that priests, if not regular folks, had some metaphysics. The problem is that the metaphysics were woven around a basic death cult. The Norse believed that evil would win and destroy the gods. Imagine that. They thought Ragnarok would result in the frost giants coming over the bridge, whooping the guardians, the serpent swallowing the king of the gods, the wolf swallowing the sun, and all going dark. Imagine that as the basis of a religion: "Worship the gods, because they're not powerful enough to protect the world, and they're going to lose, and everything's going to go into chaos and night."

Furthermore -- and I gather the recent movie Thor points this out -- the "enemy" isn't bad. The frost giants aren't evil. In fact, they're the same as the gods. They're just big people, and the gods do very bad things to them. So the gods are not moral, not all powerful, and not promising a heaven, either. Curious, isn't it? The afterlife of Valhalla is for warriors who die in battle, and they get plucked up from the battlefield and brought to Odin's hall, where their reward will be... getting drunk every day and then getting killed every night. Men are treated about the same as Thor's goats.

I never could figure this out. I still can't.

However, I have figured out that we are now in Valhalla, so we can say whether it's any good or not.

When men talk about military history, and military history fascinates the Y-chromosome, wars get categorized. Religious wars, resource wars, civil wars, defensive wars, wars of aggression, and the like have their devotees, and men will think up really interesting lessons to be learned about each, prophesies to make from every one. One way to speak of war is "offense outstripping defense" and "defense outstripping offense."

(George Grosz, "Republican Automatons" 1920)

For example, it is conventional to say that World War I was a time when defense was better than offense, and so it became a stagnant war without outcome. The argument is that people could, with machine guns and artillery and chemical weapons, make any charge impossible. The rifle and tactic had made maneuver impossible and charge suicidal, and so trenches became the war. On the other hand, they say that the early part of World War II was a time when offense outstripped defense, because air power and tanks were new and had no answer. Thus, the Germans could take Europe in a flash of "lightning." (I hear your necks squeaking as you nod agreement.)

There is another "who's winning." We have already noted that Americans don't die in battle anymore. They don't die when they're blown up, even. There has been a major advance in medicine, medical transport, and response, and so soldiers are surviving. This happened before, too. It happened in World War I. Surgeons saved lives, although the men whose lives were saved ended up displeased in many cases. The polite world discovered morphine addiction, thanks to battlefield medicine. More to the effect, though, the thousands of shattered and crippled came home as young men, men who should be in the prime of their work lives, broken and hideous, reminders in body and mind of war, and this irritant was hard for any society to swallow, winner or loser.

Here we are, though: Valhalla. Let them live, but only to fight again, our policy is. This is the kingdom of Hel, at least.

What effect is this having on us? What effect does it have on us to reabsorb our own, but now "saved?" I am not certain, but I surely hope we realize that better than saving lives is not putting them at risk for the sake of a job to do. Better than frenzies of "Idol Voice Can Dance with Talented Fifth Grader," we will face the discontent and malcontent this content causes.

New Series: Best Fiends

2011-06-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that this is my dang blog, and I can do with it what I like!

Ok, maybe I can't confess to reading A Catcher in the Rye, but I can write on whatever subject I like and be misunderstood on it as well here as there. Thus, I propose a new series designed to edify the vast public on what it already knows well, because I have discovered that telling people new things is entirely unprofitable.

As my favorite philosopher has written, "where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is coucht underneath; And again, that whatever word or Sentence is Printed in a different Character, shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either of Wit or Sublime." It is generally the case, after all, and I therefore recommend that my readers repeat the least comprehensible portions of what I write in conversation as an experiment upon the public. One of them may respond and explain the thing.

The series will contain six or seven parts, and it will deal with the dearest, closest fiends that humanity has: lust, gluttony, envy, sloth, avarice, anger, and pride. I'd include new ones, but, since the 16th century, we have invented steam power (unless the Hellenes had it), coal pollution, whale extinction, polymers, dioxins, petroleum, and spreading gasoline by-products on crops to make them grow, but we have neglected the art of innovation in depravity.

Telling Richard Jokes

2011-06-06T07:25:00.000-07:00

"When women consider their own beauties, they are all alike unreasonable in their demands; for they expect their lovers should like them as long as they like themselves." - John Gay, The Beggar's Opera II ix.

"Cloris returning from the Trance
Which Love and soft Desire had bred,
Her tim'rous Hand she gently laid,
Or guided by Design or Chance,
Upon that Fabulous Priapus,
That Potent God (as Poets feign.)
But never did young Shepherdess
(Gath'ring of Fern upon the Plain)
More nimbly draw her Fingers back,
Finding beneath the Verdant Leaves a Snake."
-Aphra Behn, "The Disappointment" 101-10

No photo.
Young men are diseased by youth and cannot enjoy their strength of limb or asperity of figure for the cruelty of their own demon-whipped minds. When young women say that they think about and desire sex "all the time," they have little concept of the phrase. Young men die in the search, hazard mutilation in the quest, and often risk prison for the sake of their misunderstandings. No sane or rational person would do these things.

Mike Judge got his start on television with a series called "Beavis and Butthead" on MTV. In it, he satirized and parodied, quite accurately, the mentality of a fourteen to fifteen year old boy. Every phrase for these two was a dirty joke. Every picture was a chance to see breasts. No discussion of sex was vile enough. They wanted to consume women.

Because the show parodied boys, it inspired them. Mike Judge would continue to revile the duncification of America and to note it accurately in "Idiocracy," but kids imitated Butthead or Beavis (especially "Cornholio"). This is because we forgive young men in a way we do not forgive idiots. Young men can grow up to be considerate and intelligent mates. However, they have to go through this fever, this case of rabies.

Lust doesn't end, but the fever breaks. A constantly burning ember is fine: the grown man still has the desire, can flare up to ravenous if given a chance, but he isn't being chased down the streets by the demon with a hooked whip as much. He can laugh at the boy.

Women have more trouble. They can laugh at the boy, of course, but they're the targets of all those darts. Further, there is one very critical area where the sexes differ and the fire makes a huge difference, and that is in arousal and narcissism.

Beware any fool telling you rules about humans. Generally speaking, men are almost exclusively visual in their eroticism. We want to have sex on top of the covers, with the lights on, and, if possible, with Klieg lights. Women, in general, are more tactile and fantasy driven in their eroticism. This shows up in the never-ending argument couples have about pornography. She says, "Are you thinking about her?" He isn't. He isn't thinking at all. He's looking. Why is he looking? Because it is there. Don't "they" all look the same? Not at all, because each is a different one.

It also shows up in the infamous, "I don't want to because I feel ugly" issue. A man cannot understand this, because self-perception is the tiniest part of his eroticism. It also shows up in foreplay and cuddling, because the man is less tactile in his arousal.

You can get all of this from a hundred pop-psychology websites, though. What's more interesting is narcissism and the male/female split. A boy wants to "see it," as I've said. Young people of both sexes suffer from an inability to think like the other person. This is normal. Even if someone has empathy, life experience is necessary in order to know what the Other is like. Beginners in love are beginners. A girl who dresses up sexy for the right guy to notice and gets noticed by the wrong guy is simply projecting her view onto the world and finding out that it doesn't work that way. A girl who wears her nicest dress in front of a guy and then loses his attention to a "skank" who is wearing a halter top and no bra has used her standards and not realized his.

In general, though, women get it. They get that men are visual, because men tell them. Magazines tell them. Television tells them. Oh, they might not get the depravity of it, or believe it could be true, but they get it generally. Boys, though, get nothing.

A boy thinks, "I wanna see her bits. Why won't she just take off her clothes for me?" He's on the Internet, on Twitter, on chat, on Ritilin, and so he shows her his wagging staff. "See?! Bet that turns you on," he thinks.

So, the Internet is full of penis photos. The current "scandal" on the Internet isn't one of them. It's actually a picture of a marital aid (link may be upsetting to sensibilities and politics). Female bloggers are puzzled at why, oh why, "men" keep photographing genitals. The thing is, few men do.

A man, a grown man past the age of eighteen, who is photographing and showing these pictures is either a beginner at love, a complete beginner when it comes to knowing women, or is, in fact, an abuser. It takes a narcissist, a man who refuses to believe women when they say that such things are not stimulating or even a turn-off, to keep on going, believing that his magic wand is so mighty and special that it will make knees weak. It takes a rapist or abuser also -- a man who thinks, "I don't care how you feel. This is what I'm going to use." A man who sends such a photo is either a repellent virgin or an abusive narcissist, or worse.

This, incidentally, is how I knew that the Congressman in the "scandal" was not guilty. His politics are empathic and devoted to looking out for the weak. They don't match the mentality.

Why, though, with this knowledge being rather intuitive and obvious for those of us who have -- you know -- had relationships -- are television stations going on and on and on and on and on and on showing the photo and repeating the charges as if there were a story? Why are they making every pun possible? Why are they putting Beavis in charge of the Nightly News?

We forgive boys the way we forgive women in childbirth cursing or delirious patients ranting, but what seems to be happening here is a delight in reviving the phase. The news seems to be wanting to relive the worst time of life. Why? What is gained? Who is enlightened?

By the way, the "best" Richard joke I know is Morris.

Their Funeral/Our Trial, or, "What, Us Worry?"

2011-05-23T06:33:00.000-07:00

[Note: I've started blogging at Daily Kos. Sometimes my "diaries" get attention. This one got none. It's either because it was inappropriate material or because it's a bit, um, advanced, or because I did it on the day of the supposed Rapture, and that was everyone's topic.]

If you are an intellectual and you feel free of anxiety, then I would like to know why. So far as I can tell, there is nothing but guilt for the moral intellectual in the United States.

I have a moral question that few will want to ponder and that none will be able to answer, I think. I sure as shootin' can't answer it. I feel like I did well to find a question that will ruin your day. Before I get to it, though, I need to make clear that what I am about to outline might be prophetic. It is possible that what I am talking about is the future rather than the present, and it could be the past for some sensitive souls. I cannot say, because in the United States at the present time it is not possible to discuss moral questions. The Internet has given us each a soap box and a funnel, but that just means a whole mass of barbaric yolps -- not discussion. I can prove that, too, if it's necessary for me to prove what we all know.

Before getting to the question ("Oh, do not ask what is it/ Let us go and make our visit") – and I promise not to play a coquette's or a writer's game with the point – I need to establish my usage of the term “moral.” I know that even the word is rejected by a good many people on the left, while, like toilet paper, it is used without respect to remove stains by "values" politicians on the right. For me, the word “moral” denotes a set of values that the individual believes to transcend the individual, the social, and the temporal. Thus, moral is what we believe to be good and evil, not right and wrong. It is right to stop at a stop sign, but it is good to feed a starving dog. The ethical and civic virtues depend upon context, while the moral ones do not.

Speak of morality and alienate our audiences, provoke arguments, invite lazy, retarded retreats into familiar lean-to's of belief, and it is received wisdom worthy of Flaubert's Dictionary that anyone who says the word is a fundamentalist trying to impose an antiquated scold's bridle on us or or a relativist trying to attack whatever is most dear. Speak of morality and make the gorge, discomfort, or disinterest rise.

It occurs to me that if this received opinion is correct, it is more of a reason to have the discussion than to avoid it.

[A digression follows. Therefore, imagine a lithograph of a nun wearing a cowboy hat on a prayer mat, while a cactus, needles capped by spent shell casings, stands sinister and an Oath Keeper with “Thor” tattooed on his knuckles smiles beatifically to the dexter.]

A result of the taboo on 'morality' for the left and middle of society has been the “religious illiteracy” that Mr. Prothero has documented so well. Another result is that we forfeit the discussion to those who will have it. Taboo creates fetish, after all. The more we make the Good unspeakable, the more sexy it becomes to those who wish us ill. We empower religion, especially, for the right, at the very same time that we surrender our voice and thus ensure that bigots are the only ones in the agora. The result is that most people think that “morality” is synonymous with religion. It isn't. Morality can be derived from religion. It most often is derived from religion. However, depending on definitions, all that is required for morality is a belief that some things are just right or wrong, no matter what, that the good and bad can be irreducible. Argue that passing on one's genes is the right thing because of fitness, that utilitarianism determines the right, that living and non-living matter are the same and that Nature's laws are right, that societies are systems and that the system's health is the greatest good – anything except “it depends on context” or “it is all up to the individual,” and you have argued a moral position, because you have argued that the good and bad extend beyond the individual's desires or the group's demands.

Basically, if it can make you uncomfortable, it may be morality.

Just because we disagree is no reason to be silent. If we are so afraid of having to clarify our assumptions, so nervous about trusting the other person to be calm, that we avoid the subject or claim that there is no truth but the temporary or relative, we end up giving the floor to the fundamentalists, the radicals, and the violent. This leaves us unable to call out their frauds. It makes us mute when we wish to converse and persuade the inexperienced to turn from the visions of fearful glory and martial virtue.

[End of digression. Onto the business of why you should feel horrible. Therefore, imagine that there is a photograph of Cicero with congestion and living Claritin Clear.]

Modernism. "Our virtues are fathered by unnatural vices," Robinson Jeffers said. Well, that's probably poop, but Modernism was certainly fathered that way.

I will abridge any long description of the rise of Modernism and only say that we in the Northern hemisphere of the Earth have, as our defining moment of the twentieth century, World War II. Before that, though, we had World War I. According to the Modernists themselves, who wouldn't shut up about it in their manifestos, they had no choice but do something drastic because of World War I. Rationalism had failed completely. Hegel's assurances, Arnold's assurances, science's confidences, that Progress was coming, that Civilization would lead us forward, had been gassed, died, bloated, and its corpse had exploded in No-Man's Land. Intellectuals after World War I got 1) sad, 2) cynical, and then 3) angry. They produced both the most original and skeptical thought of the century with one of their Cerebus heads and the birth of new vehemence and violence and mis-Utopianism with the other. They either questioned everything, including the unity of the self, in ever-spiraling questions of consciousness and mysticism, wondering if there was communication, or they had to devise a New Order that would not make such mistakes. Communism and Fascism both came from intellectuals rejecting the morality and civilization that “lead” to World War I. Then again, another set gave us the retreating movements. Revved up Theosophism, neo-Rosicrucianism, and tons of neo-nativist societies “discovering” the antiquity of their national tribes and paganism (the Geatish society, the Thule, the Golden Dawn) all retreated from reason in one direction, while others moved toward the hero cult or the truth of machines. Intellectuals were frenzied, desperate.
Well, golly. If that thesis is true, then what did World War II do?
Anyone?

It should have really, really set the world alight, right?

Well, no... and yes, maybe. It was a “good war.” For French, English, American, and even Italian intellectuals, World War II has a nicely drawn contour. Only after the bomb was moral philosophy awakened from its sleep. At that point, there was a searching into responsibility and the value of man as an animal. In France and Italy, the identity and culpability of the collaborator, the heroism and epistemology of the resistance (Sartre, most famously), the meaning of being a by-stander... these nagged and dogged, and some of the absurdism and nihilism and existentialist individualism of the 1950's and 1960's that we celebrate in America and the U.K. may mark a flight into private worlds where social morality no longer applies. However, other than a few moral philosophers like Niebuhr, who kept going on and on about sin, American and English thinkers fretted about tenure and q not q. Modernist skepticism stayed en vogue during the Cold War, because the Cold War kept raising questions about whether humans could be trusted to organize their own sock drawers.

[Since, by now, you're convinced that I'm never going to talk about us and why we should feel bad, here would be a truly diverting cartoon from the first run of “The Phantom,” where the hero instructs the natives on how to use an American revolver.]

I'm a coward, and I was doused in a mixed up form of Augustinianism early on in life, and so I have a big bucket of guilt on me from the start. I read famous philosophers hoping to find someone smarter than I who has gotten the answer. Like calls to like, they say, and so I have noticed that I am attracted, deeply, to those intellectuals who found themselves guilty of being near a crime in commission. So it is that I have been interested in how German intellectuals dealt with being the inter-war generation. One thing I see, over and over again, is that they grapple with the subject of guilt and responsibility of the individual as a component of the whole.

Now that question can't be answered directly. No one can say, directly, what our responsibility is for being near the crime. In fact, I would say that it's a problem that has been asked by many generations, from John Locke trying to figure out his responsibility for being in the regicide generation to us[here be footnotes], but philosophical discomfort is very useful, and the evasions help us. Thus, one of my favorite contemporary philosophers is Odo Marquard.

Dr. Marquard seems to have had the misfortune of receiving his Ph.D. during the “bad” time. Thus, he received his training from those philosophers whose names we do not pronounce. Is that his fault? His consciousness as a philosopher and professional was shaped by the post-war experience, which itself was dominated by the multi-year tribunal. Thus, in Abschied vom Prinzipiellen (Farewell to Matters of Principle [holy cow! they want $98 for it? Sheesh! it's really good, but $98?) we get my favorite contemporary philosophical essay, “Burdened and Disemburdened 18th Century Man and the Flight into Unindictability.” It's clear that the heavy question of guilt of mankind in the question of theodicy and the tribunal of philosophical questions of evil that Dr. Marquard discusses on the surface of his essay is a window into to a a question that is both wider than his historical moment and more deeply affecting than mere words.

The way he sees it, we humans could not say (Leibniz) that God created evil, and so we said that man did it. Well, if man made evil, then man can fix evil, and man is responsible. We, then, are on trial.

If humans created evil, then humans must answer to the tribunal, and the weight of this burden is such that we struggled to invent our social sciences to “presume not God to scan” and make “the proper study of mankind... man,” but we have been forced now to admit defeat. The world wars, the bomb, the germ warfare, the human experimentation, the eugenics... obviously, we have failed in fixing man. What, then, do psychologists, anthropologists, doctors, and others who went to fix evil do? They sweated. Thus, under swarms of qualifications, excuses, and demands that we look at our instruments and navels, we would give anything to not have to fix the problems of evil deeds. Indeed.

[I'm getting to the point now. Here is where we can collectively conjugate the verb “squirm”: I squirm, you squirm, we squirm.]

Aside from praising, awarding, and forgetting Arthur Koestler, we have known quite clearly that, as a democracy, and as a republican democracy, we could never suffer such monstrosities as Stalin or Hitler. Our lesson from World War II was about the individual. Could the individual who was president be insane? Could the “finger on the button” become Jack D. Ripper? Otherwise, we had little guilt and denied even that, especially when we hushed up questions about Hiroshima. The A-bomb is too horrible to visualize, and so we either turn it into an apocalypse (always with survivors) or fall back on Captain America. We need him now, we'd say.

In a democracy, if an administration violates our moral sense, we must vote against that administration and all who stand with it. We must ourselves stand for office. If our image of ourselves as Gary Cooper married to Donna Reed is under threat, we change things.

Here is my moral problem, then. We did that.
George W. Bush used torture and made torture legal. He decided, without legal authority other than usurpation, that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. He ordered that the Uniform Code of Military Justice not apply. His people began to spy on citizens. They decided to reinvent the dungeon in Bagram and Guantanamo Bay. They decided that there were people who needed to commit no crime to be detained and have no trial to be guilty.

We voted. We stood for election, too. We voted for Barrack Obama because he said that he would end every one of those immoral (not merely illegal and unconstitutional) practices. However, he has not, and he will not. Bradley Manning is just one example of an immoral act taken by President Obama. The man has not been found guilty of anything, and yet he has been pronounced guilty and treated with Guantanamo styled tactics, which themselves are immoral and unconstitutional and illegal internationally. The crime he is charged with is barely a crime, and he hasn't been put on trial, much less convicted. Nevertheless, psychological torture takes place and then, on the grounds of psychological instability, restraints.

The shooting of Osama bin Laden is probably also immoral. Do not get me wrong: from a political point of view, bin Laden could not have been captured. Bin Laden as a prisoner would have been a toxin too great for any state body. However, shooting an unarmed man is either moral or immoral. It cannot change just because the person in question is really nasty. That we have sacrificed morality for political practicality is understandable, but it is not acceptable. Further, we find that he was shot because the mission that “got” him was part of a standing program called “Kill or Capture.” That it has a name tells us that it is routine. That it is routine tells us of the erosion of morality like the seabed beneath our feet. It is normal to preferentially kill, but, if necessary, capture persons.

So, folks, what is our guilt? We voted. We voted the way that should have accomplished the moral ends. The vote did not achieve it. How obligated are we now to do more? How obligated are we now to agitate?

If torture does not violate your moral sense, then look at the structure of our economy. Our economy is absurdly immoral at the moment and shows every sign of increasing its barbarism, and this adds to the immoral treatment of prisoners, the immoral distribution of wealth, the immoral abrogation of rights. We voted against it. We have shouted against it. We have even stood outside banks and protested against it. Is that enough? Do we sleep at night? Do we have guilt, complicity, or just despair?

Are we unindictable -- social engineers who simply need to analyze our own methods again, or are we all doubling our Zoloft? Why are our philosophers not writing exclusively about evil, responsibility, and value? How can we, of all times, be silent now?

It's true that we "did what we could." Or is it true? Would we indemnify another citizen of another nation who did as we have, or would we damn? How, then, do we deal?

Unmoved

2011-05-17T06:56:00.000-07:00

"...my interest in most things lies in the nominal rather than the phenomenal aspect. Some fine day I intend to try to get to the bottom of WHAT'S GOING ON HERE -- the real world here, rather than the world of seeming. Are we all liars and humbugs and if so, why not?" -- Myles na gCopaleen

If the average person exists, then the average person in the United States has a smudge where the meaning of “paradox” should be. Of the persons who know the word without its -ical handmaiden (“It's paradoxical that so many people know the adjective and so few the noun”), the Liar's Paradox and Zeno's Paradox must be the only occupants of the set. Oh, “set of all sets” and other strangers wave from beyond the margins at certain professions, but Zeno's paradox of motion far outweighs the argument he made that there is no pain, and Cretans lie (aren't Cretins the only ones fooled by the Boolean trap, or do we hold out for prepubertal viewers of "Star Trek" like me, too?).

For me, Zeno's paradox has been something of a haunting presence. I have never been satisfied with the answers that I have gotten to it, except the answer of my senses (those flying turtles hurt). Furthermore, I am haunted by the fact that we have somehow managed to go about our business, playing Math and Physics for centuries without getting a good answer to the paradox. Not only that, but I am molested, every time I consider this, with just how pleasant the people are who believe that they have solved the 'problem.'

My reader is an above average reader in every way, and so my reader already knows all there is to know about the paradox itself.

[Above Average Reader Of Note: Yeah, but we want to hear you say it, so we can make fun of how much you get wrong, later.]

Well, Zeno was slaloming in between the pillars and posts of his porch, wondering when the Romans would come make it all intramural, and I'm told he was ranting about how much Parminedes bothered him. Parminedes's paradox of time and motion, he said, was stubborn. “The way I heard it,” he told his students, “Usain Bolt and Rafael, the teenaged mutant ninja turtle, were going to have a race. Because it was unfair on the face of things for Usain Bolt to race a fictional character, he decided to give the turtle a fifty yard head start. However, when the race began, Usain Bolt discovered that he could not win, because he was unable to pass the turtle.” “This is because the turtle is a poorly conceived cartoon character, isn't it,” one of Zeno's students asked. “No,” Zeno replied, “but because Bolt, to pass the turtle, had to cross half the distance between himself and it. He then had to make up half the remaining distance. After that, he had to make up the very slight half distance remaining, but only to discover that there was as much distance to go. He crossed half of that, but then there was half again remaining. Of this half, he crossed half, and then saw that he could only cross half of the remainder. This would go on, as it turned out, forever, or for as long as there were divisions and numbers, and Bolt simply could not pass the turtle.”

[Aaron: That's not how we heard it.]

I know. That's why I told it differently. The point is that “time and motion are both illusions,” like Parminedes said, except, of course, that they're not, no matter what you've heard to the contrary.

Aristotle said that the problem with Zeno's paradox is that he presupposes and infinite amount of space to cross, but not an infinite amount of time to do it in. If we segmented time just as infinitely as movement, then the turtle would be in the soup. Something or other to do with the definition of time or the definition of motion or something. I usually agree with Aristotle – which is to say that I usually understand Aristotle – but in this case I'm still left with that “infinite division” thing. Worse than him, though, mathematicians have told me that Zeno's paradox is not only not a paradox, it isn't even a problem. While all of us were sliding off our seats drunk at a wedding reception after-party, a mathematician told me that I was just confused because I hadn't realized that some infinities are larger than others. The infinity of fractions is larger than the infinity of whole numbers, sez him, but they are contained within the whole numbers, and so we were just playing a game with sets... or something... or one infinity overtook or ate the other. I thought it was drink talking until a sober mathematician (speaking of poorly conceived fictional characters!) attempted to tell me something very similar.

Ever since I received those explanations, I have used them as a test of soul, as a Procrustean bed. If Aristotle has it right, then you, Madam, are clearly meant for a physicist. If, on the other hand, new groom Bill's cousin the mathematics professor had it, then, Sir, you may be fit for any number of jobs, but you are no humanist. Both results are, of course, to your credit and health. You will, I have no doubt, sleep better at night, and your horror scope indicates that you will be able to accomplish deeds surprising and proficient.

[Aaron: Yes, very amusing, in a 19^th century Gentleman's Magazine sort of way, but not a humanist? Exaggeration is one thing, but insult is another!]

I mean it, every word. Well, I mean the words I mean, but not the words that are meant in jest or gesture (watch carefully). However, the people who agree with Aristurtle or the math folk are not humanity centered, not placing the human reality at its proper position -- which is the center of all possible perception. This is not egoism, nor species egotism, but rather knowing one's place and recognizing that it's a great deal better than it might be otherwise. Let me explain.

[Aaron: And now he's asking permission? Where's my pouch of Red Man?]

The new groom whose wedding we were dunking till drunk went on to get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. I would like to say that he's one of my life's friends. However, his doctorate was in analog signals, and this was in the middle of the 1990's. “I thought the point is that everything is, uh, digital,” I said to him one day, “so why analog signals?” “Because,” he answered, “at the high end, digital signals begin to act like analog.” I thought about this for a few moments, made no progress, and then went on to worry about chain marks in bibliography class or some other important problem. I still needed, after all, to distinguish between late 17^th century usages of “lampoon,” “burlesque,” “satire,” and “parody.”

I was so ignorant then!

Sometimes a fact will wedge in the soil of the mind, and layers of information, passion, misdirection, reconnection, and agitation will eventually force it back up. The process is not vegetative. People have been speaking of ideas “growing” in the mind since at least Charlemagne, and probably ideas do grow, send out rhizomes, cross-pollinate, and need pruning, but facts do not. Facts are like colored glass beads to the magpie mind. They go into the nest. In the course of the seasons of straw, hatchlings, and matings, the bead will turn up again in a new context where it will – by itself still only a bead – become part of a new mosaic. So it was with the fact that digital becomes analog analogy for me.

Right now, I have iTunes playing in the background. It is playing a song recorded by The Ventures in monoaural in the 1960's that was converted to stereo, pressed onto an album, converted to a digital CD, purchased by me (I buy CD's, and not because I'm old and bewildered, either), and then converted to the super-magic iTunes format, and now it is playing. I am enjoying it, too, in case you were wondering. However, the way those lovely surf guitar sounds were made and recorded was analog.

In analog recording...

[Aaron: Sheesh! Now you're going to explain analog? Plug it in and go.]

...voltage went to a microphone beneath the strings and one in front of the amplifier, and an electromagnet recorded increasing and decreasing voltage continuously that was then recorded, continuously up and down on magnetic film. [I know! 'To learn more about analog recording, consult your local library.'] The vinyl record was a cut groove that continuously reflected the pushing of a stylus in response to voltage increases. The digital, on the other hand, is based on sampling. A computer is told to capture sound levels and take an exact picture of all voltage levels on all microphones and to write this data down. It will do this a number of times a second. It might do it sixteen times a second (low quality) or thirty-two times a second (standard) or one hundred and twenty-eight times a second. Regardless of how many times a second the computer is taking a 'snapshot,' it is still taking a “sample,” which is an audio record of all values, at discrete moments.

You can see now what I did not see, I am sure. The super high end samples will begin to act as if they were continuous. Bright man, my friend Bill.

[...And yet you want to connect this to Zeno's paradox by …]

Quiet you! I do not. I may not be as clever as Bill, but I'm not as clumsy as that.

You see, the digital music that I am listening to right now, which, incidentally, is Pink Floyd, is tricking me. [Pink Floyd? I thought the air smelled a little sweet!] It is playing back thirty-two separate clips of music per second, and I am too sluggish of thought to hear the silences between them. [Yep. That's what happens.] This is because I am a man – sufficient reason to be miserable, as the Greek said. However, if it were slower in its clips, would I still perceive the music? Think about watching television with your dog. Your poor dog never liked your old analog television set, because it emitted a high pitched whine and because he couldn't see a picture. That is because there wasn't a picture. Only a third of the screen was lit up at a time,and the third rolled from bottom to top, and not that quickly, either. If you took a picture of a television screen, all that you saw, in the old days, as a third of the screen. Well, that's what your poor dog saw when you tapped the glass and said, “Look, Rufus! Another doggie!”

A movie is twenty-four frames per second of pictures showing in sequence. A cartoon is a sequence of drawings flipped past the eye. There is nothing continuous in any of these three things. The old television, the movie, the cartoon: all of them were discrete objects that we insisted we experienced as continuous, as analog. Digital music is therefore no surprise.

They call the human blur/blend illusion the Phi phenomenon. Phenomenologically speaking, one can see where this is going – which is around and around, like a fly in a Coca-Cola bottle on Wittgenstein's lectern.

[I really must object! That's neither funny nor necessary.]

They laughed at Heidelberg.

[Yeah, but not at Heisenberg. No one could tell where the punchline was.]

There is always the possibility that Zeno's was 'right,' as it were, or that Parminedes was, and that we don't move, that motion is a phenomenon, a Phi phenomenon. Perhaps analog is digital, and, if we were to look at that “continuous” electrical charge going up and down in a microphone line, it would be made up of greater and lesser infinities of incremental measurements. It's just that there sure seems to be a difference. It sure feels different. Actual movement, with persistent objects, really seems to have some distinction against representations presented sequentially, no matter how rapidly.

If, though, you have enough of a humanist in you to think, as I do, that there is something about the world, about living, that is different, and even superior, to super-rapid sequence, then we're right back at Zeno's question: Where is it? If the digital acts like analog when chopped finely enough and the analog can be chopped into digital, where is the whole number?

You see, the answer to Zeno's paradox that does not require phantasms of infinity or time is to declare that there is an indivisible unit of space. If you deny infinity itself, then Zeno has to stop cutting the space in half. If you say that “there is no more distance,” then Usain Bolt finally gets to the finish line and the autograph seekers. The alternative is to say that a mystic Something Happens whereby the infinities surpass one another in a glibly invisible and imperceptible leapfrog as we move in whole numbers, unmindful of the limitless fractions we toss by. In either case, the skeptic (or Eleatic) has the right to ask you, “Ok, Buck, so tell me where it is.”

It is to avoid that question that everyone else seeks purely logical, non-mystical answers, no matter how much they hurt the brain.

I don't have a bead on the answer. As I said, Zeno's paradox keeps giving me the bad touch when I least want it. I was wondering, though, the other day, that we are so happy to ask no questions about another impossibility. We mumble and mutter along every day with circles and other oddities and their attendant irrational numbers. Pi, like movement, lodges like a pretzel in our windpipes. It just won't go away, even though it is generally a simple expression. What's more, like running around in a circle, it is infuriatingly rooted in the real! We know that the circumference of a circle is pi multiplied by the squared radius. That means that we get pi always from every danged circle. If circles are actual (real, existing), then so is pi. Well, that's simply intolerable.

Is pi proof that there has to be an irrational or a-rational or suprarational answer to the question of divisibility of space, time, and motion? I'm not that juvenile. Pi floats out there, infinitely, and waves at us from beyond our capacity to limit and define, just as motion does, just as the difference between the infinitely divided and the continuous does. All of these weave from the margins of our minds, producing a garland of phenomena and rational limit. They humble us. They insist that we are products of reality and consequently can never judge it entirely.

Witter and Fritter

2011-05-09T05:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know what qualifications there are for the job of "public intellectual." I don't know where one applies, and I'm not interested in filling the position. I do know that other people have commented in the past that the United States does not have any public intellectuals. I rather think, the way the term is applied in other countries, we have too many of them and therefore, in effect, have none. In other countries, intellectuals and knowledge workers who use their expertise in their own fields to analyze and offer solutions to public problems or public cultural phenomena are public intellectuals.

My favorite public intellectual is Umberto Eco. A professor of linguistics and medieval history who is undaunted in analyzing the press, social decline, and the phenomenon of semantic and social power is a hero, even if he's wrong. Jean-Paul Sartre was one. In fact, we can find them in Europe. In the United States, we read Sartre and Eco and Artaud and Robertson Davies, and we go and do likewise, or we long to go and do likewise. In the past, we couldn't, because publishers were necessary accomplices, and they were convinced that brainy stuff don't sell. Indeed, it is unlikely that the public would ever buy a book by an intellectual. If someone were to write about science, that might be alright, and if someone were to write "inspirational," then that sells (like Praying Hands sculptures and naughty "angels"), but they could not imagine giving a chance for an intellectual linking theology, organized religion, and a critique.

At any rate, the publisher has disappeared. More specifically, the publisher has "de-rezzed." Their image has broken into a trillion pixels, their inventory into a terraflop of bytes, and their editors -- long ago fired as unnecessary fussbudgets -- have become budgetary fustian of ages past. Now, therefore, the public intellectual is any intellectual who dares, and Americans are known for their daring.

In fact, one need only go to the parent of this blog -- blogspot -- to find genuine intellectuals offering good and sound advice on public matters. If one wishes to go to WordPress instead, then there are intellectuals there, too. If one goes to a "community" site like DailyKos, then there are intellectuals there as well. In fact, there are hundreds of intellectuals, and I mean the term genuinely, who are writing well, speaking truly, and offering sincere advice.

Therefore there are no public intellectuals in the United States.

We, like depression, are legion. We speak with a thousand voices in a hundred ears. We are myriad spirits attempting to possess a single body. No one pays us any attention unless we do something to achieve spectacle or unless some microcardial politician whose stirp goes to Tail Gunner Joe decides to investigate us.

So, why do we not speak? We do. We talk all the time. Why do you not hear us? You do. You hear us through a filter, probably, as our ideas show up in reaction shots on politicians' faces or in phrases that candidates use or in ideas that politicians reject as frankly absurd. We lack the powerhouse of e-mail forwards that move conspiracy theories from place to place, and we will never get the television.

For myself, I worry that the public intellectuals of the United States, by being so varied, various, free and ignored, have no way to develop an idea. There is no point in having them, if they can't actually use their minds to mature ideas. It's wonderful when a journalistic intellectual says something and each lonely garret responds, but it would be so much better if the conversation took that thesis, debated, refined, and made it practical and pragmatic without the need for walls or pay or paywalls.

Haunted Words 3: Earn

2011-05-02T10:44:00.000-07:00

The frayed knot between morality and social activism has never been so thoroughly worn as by the evolution of the word “earn.” If other market-driven terms are zombies, then this one is like the unfaithful servants of Odysseus, punished with a corpse tied to its back. It pollutes our conscience most, ennervates our outrage, and dazzles us most often with a false sense that gilt is glory. I loathe the word “earn,” because I cannot mean it. I abhor it because I can neither intend nor rehabilitate it, and the places where it goes wrong are so varied that I think the word was always a sin.

Ðæs wæs gud cynninga! The bard who said so used litotes, and English and German speakers were known for it. Litotes's understatement is not the sarcasm of children or the poor mouthing of southern college football coaches. Instead, it creates a gap in the auditor's mind. If I list all of Roosevelt's accomplishments and say, “That was a good president,” the listener objects that I have set too low a value on the deeds. She then must supply her own value, and the litotes engages her, like a burlesque dancer using layered lingerie, to supply with imagination what frustration provokes.

Earning is supposed to be a function of justice, isn't it? In one context, we use it like “deserve.” We say that the scholar earned his degree, the villain his downfall, the meek heroine her prince. In each case, we are declaring the outcome fit and just. However, we use the same word for money and contracts. This is the meaning that shows up in fool phrases like “earn your keep” or “earn your daily bread.” The implication of the first is that its object is kept, and the second implies that some people out there are eating improperly. We further use “earn” simply as a way of saying “suffered for.” I am going to have a beer tonight, because I've earned it, I might say, but what I mean is that my suffering justifies a drunk. Finally, we use it as “met a contract.” In this last way, for example, the consultants earn their pay, even though they tell us nothing and give us less. We cannot begrudge them their payment, because we agreed upon it in advance.

The quadruple conflation would be reason enough to study the word “earn” and demand that a person use something more precise, but what is insidious is that mixing the meanings has brought us to an immoral and immobile state. We who have concern for justice, who have empathy, who worry about fairness, find our throats robbed of their voice, our hands of their gestures, as the grimly smug rich man says, “Hey! I earned my money! Why should my money go to some lazy Welfare queen who won't get off her bon-bon eating ass and earn a living?”

That bastard lie depends on confusion. It takes one meaning of 'earn' (contract) and claims it must be another (fairness), while the Other who suffers and breaks the cliche (earn one's bread) is guilty of another (not deserving 'earn'). These two lies are raised to the power of a third: "my money." We can argue the provenance of money, and I would recall Christ's words that the money's owner's name is on it (U.S. Federal Reserve), but that's not the lie. The lie is that "my money" encodes the belief that the money is the speaker's before and after any contract, that it is fully his, like a foot, a testicle, or a daughter's uterus. What do we say to a creed of malice and ignorance like that?

Persons who translate labor into money, money into value, goods into money, and justice into contracts are operating with an axiomatic handicap. Their assumptions are immoral, or at least amoral.

Morality depends upon a scale or register of values above the human and natural. Whether one calls this religious in the sense of revelation or simply transcendental deduction, the moral is atemporal and trans-social for the adherent. Where ethics answers with “It depends,” morality argues “It never does.” To do this, to perform the magic of reaching beyond a moment, a person, a group, a moral set has to have obligations and references that are outside of the individual's scope in every sense. Ethics tells a person, “Look around: you must consider your actions in light of others.” Morals tells a person, “You must consider your actions in light of others and values whose virtues may be beyond your needs or vision.” Both demand getting beyond the self, and the moral demands getting beyond the powers that be, too.

The sort of person who uses “earn” in every day discourse likes to “earn what” she “has.” She will tell you that she worked for everything she has. When she says this to you, she is conferring justice on its acquisition. The “earn” may be true empirically, in that she was paid a contracted amount and she did not steal more, but she has moved the earning of a salary to the justice of the salary and then taken the salary to the possessions and glazed them all with the same sticky wet juice of satisfaction.

The “earn” person is passing sentence. “Earn” in this context is purely a value judgment, and it is always employed as a law that is higher than fairness. Even though “earn” is supposed to equal “justice,” the people who speak the word most often will insist in one breath that “Life ain't fair, go cry to Mama,” and, in the other, “You've got to earn everything you get.” In other words, “earn” replaces “fair.” In their ethical scheme, the value judgment of “earn” is paramount. They will not complain at the unfairness of CEO pay versus worker pay, but they will complain that the poor person “hasn't earned” a free breakfast. Further, they will demand policy changes to address this last point, while they accept the first condition as the way of the world. In other words, unfairness is just, and not earning is unjust.

What seems clear to me is that “earn” is a self based system. It is immoral because, as a value judgment, it is self-applied. It has no value in consensus. As a conveyor of “justice,” it has lost its only ability to carry that meaning, and yet people continue to twist that concept into their usage so as to pronounce themselves, and only ever themselves, worthy of their present circumstances and others unworthy.

In toil, the man who is fifty-five years old, arthritic, and working on a framing crew in South Florida without health insurance is working much, much harder than I am. In toil, I am working much, much harder than a stock analyst. In toil, the thirty year old stock analyst is working harder than a teen pop sensation. However, the last is paid the most, the first the least (maybe; I might make less). I have suffered the rich man's contumely day after day, and the analyst has not. The groundskeeper has had that same contumely and imagined others. What have we laborers earned more of?

The word “earn” means nothing that its speakers intend, I think. Worse, when we speak it or allow it to be spoken, we enter into a world where we are implying a compelling justice beyond fairness, and yet tainting it with money and suffering. On that basis, we allow ourselves to be lied to and neutralized by the rich, who can always point to their stacks of gold and say, “You go ahead and make money the old fashioned way. Look: I still earned it.”

A Message for the Goon Squad

2011-04-27T04:28:00.000-07:00

[I know when one of my posts is less than great -- mainly because I hit "post." I know when one is far less, too. Also, just from the years, I know when I stumble across my nuts, blind squirrel that I am, and so I share this letter, occasioned by anger at hearing a rather indulgent interview on BBC World Service's "Strand" program.]

An open letter to the novelist of the recent Pulitzer prize win.

Dear Madam, I understand many things about your story, but one thing is missing.

It is true that love is like the thing that cures one of its diseases, mercury (who the Greeks called Hermes), in that it moves with speed, splits, rejoins, and cannot be touched directly. Also like mercury, love is poisonous if taken too deeply, and, like the element, love compounds readily.

We have no power over who loves us, cannot fling love like a brick or fire it like a dart or spitball at the objects we would desire, and our desires and loves are themselves frequently jarring with one another. Married couples of deep mind find that they cannot imagine a world without one another and cannot bear to think of a romantic touch from the other, while the febrile teen's desires overwhelm reason and wisdom alike, and would make him or her suffer any consequence for the chance to join sex. Love itself, though, flickers, jolts, smites, ebbs, flares, and generally frustrates, if it shows up at all.

I understand, quite well, why the fundamental injustice of humanity, a pain as great as our first sin – in fact a mirror of our sin so that we may feel what we have done to God's divine providence by that unrequiting sin – would make a person flee. Closing down the receptors to love is sensible. Cauterizing the wound is a normal reaction for the disaffected, although it rarely works. Diversion is another normal reaction, where we decide that, if we cannot command love that has full meaning, we will take the half love that is under command, whether it is from collecting dolls or imagination or payment.

What I do not understand, though, is why, with all of the possible reactions to being unable to make the desired love, you chose to fall in love with yourself!

Admiring the work of one's hands is a secret joy that any author should be allowed. There is a shame in gazing with dew in one's eyes at the marvel of one's own invention, but it is a shame possessed as a shared secret and each forgives the next without a word. The thing of art may be a joy, yes. Galatea is lovely indeed; Pygmalion is not.

In the fullness of time, I have seen pornography. The voyage of adolescence compelled it, and the liberty of adulthood made it possible. I noted that each item, every year, sought to be more shocking than the one before. Pornographers thereby chug into absurdity long before they peter out of imagination, and that is why pornography, as opposed to sex, is an assault and battery that only a very young man can endure. As time matured, I put away all such clownish efforts of the pornographers to make me feel dirty and sneaky and criminally triumphant.

However, when you go on interviews and explain that your novel was a mere onion skin's chuff of your genius, that it was your craft, that you worked without inspiration from any but approved, monumentalist, classic culture, that contemporary history meant nothing to you, that, most importantly, your novel was a way for you to uncover, to discover, to mine, to produce your own psyche, I have a real pornographic feeling.

Worse yet, I finally feel quite, quite dirty.

A Frayed Knot

2011-04-24T06:22:00.000-07:00

Over the past interval, I have nearly come to log in several times. I nearly wrote, for the first time, honestly, directly, and in my own voice about what was happening in my life -- which is to say that I almost did what blogs generally do -- but the long weekend has allowed me enough hours of self-delusion and numb that I believe I can pretend to be otherly wise for a moment. Besides, it's Easter.

John Arbuthnot pointed out, long ago, that "The law is a bottomless pit." When John Bull and Louis Baboon got into an endless lawsuit over the estate of the dead Lord Stutt, it went on and on and on, and the only ones who seemed to enjoy it and profit from it were the lawyers! Arbuthnot planted the idea that perhaps the lawyers had no interest in seeing the suit ended, so long as the two or three parties had money. Never mind that the "lawyers" did get wealthy and the "suit" proved intractable, there was always someone in the courtroom cheering for one more stratagem, one more push.

As a member of a church (an actual member, not just an attendee), I get e-mail from my local church. As a person who has bought things from the National Cathedral in Washington DC, I get e-mail from them. As a person who, before drinking coffee reads three or four news blogs and listens to the BBC World Service, I hear about the headline grabbers. This morning, two of the four agreed, one jarred enormously. The Dean of the National Cathedral's message was that on Easter we Christians awaken to a world where death has been vanquished, where He Is Risen, and yet our world today seems more like a Good Friday sort of world, where all is lost, and our hopes have died. He pointed out that the women who went to the tomb were expecting nothing and found the news, and then they found their risen Lord gradually. He urged us to know, not see, the risen Christ, to find the hope in our living rather than to wait for the world to change.

It was pretty good for being brief. My priest's message was to think of Mary Magdalene. The disciples, seeing the tomb empty, just up and left her there, and she was left crying by the open tomb. It was to her that the angels appeared and Jesus appeared first. He diverted his point from there to talk about all of us in the world overwhelmed with worldly concerns like the disciples, where I would have stopped to consider the value of the mourning and lamentation, of waiting, and the reward to the suffering exemplified in the mystery. The news folk had nothing much to say on the subject of religion this morning, although Kos had some good stuff prior from people of faith in the progressive movement about how integral faith is to the left's mission (not merely the usual, glaring truth -- that the right's mission is horrifically anti-Christian). The Pope's message to the world today was prayer, diplomacy, and comfort. Again, all is as it should be, in my view: those of us who are Christians are so because of this day. This is the meaning of our lives. The rising of Christ from the dead is both a blazing and glorious triumph and a quiet, secret thing found by the humble. It is always useless for us to impose our reason on God's movements.

The head of the Scottish Catholic Church, though, said that Christianity in the UK is under assault from "aggressive secularists." The BBC World Service then did their "Facebook question of the day" about it, inviting and reading aloud the comments of inane dribblers and scribblers and emotives. Such a thing! I don't want to telegraph my punches, but for a few months, now, BBC News Hour has had these "question of the day" follies. They try to get as many trolls and trite-o-bytes as possible on Facebook -- a medium conducive to both -- and then read samples aloud, the samples chosen to be "representative" of polar points of view.

So, Christianity under attack in the UK by "aggressive secularists." In the United States, Bill O'Reilley has gotten boffo ratings with his adaptation of the "War on Christmas," and Stephen Colbert parodied and satirized that with a spoof "war on Easter." Now, figuring that the two audiences share zero members, Fox's Sean Hannity has declared that there is a "War on Easter." It's in Australia. It's a fake. Of course the "war on Christmas" was back this year, just like last year and the year before and the year before. In Texas, the "discrimination" and "prejudice" against Christians in academia is so pronounced, obvious, and damaging that a legislator has bill to outlaw discrimination against religious academics (who teach Creationism in the Biology Department of a university). I know how Mother Jones responded to the bill, but I also know how others responded: "So, is there discrimination against Christians in academia? Here to discuss it is Nass T. Sneerz to explain that all religious people are deluded rapists and child molestors, and Winky Blinkyeye, to show how everyone is going to Hell who doesn't vote Republican."

Meanwhile, the right wing plays the religious like an over-wound autoharp. Every strike they make generates a heck of a lot of noise, but nothing anyone would call music. People speak of "the religious right," but there is no such thing.

From the German Peasant's War (Zwickau Prophets)

The "right" in religion are the churches resisting change, and those would be the Orthodox, the Catholic churches, and then, in descending order, the Reformation churches -- each of those state churches (- of England, - of Sweden, - of Denmark, etc.), and then Presbyterians, then Methodists, etc. The point is that the groups now called "religious right" are radical liberals, in religion. What they are is the right wing playing at religious.

There is no such thing in America as the "religious left," mainly because such a thing is a tautology. From the Methodists who worked at prison reform, the Crittentons who worked at prostitution prevention and helping women, the adoption services, the orphanages, the soup and aid shelters, the religious houses of Christianity have been providing charity and pushing for more charitable legal conditions. Who has pushed against the death penalty but the religious? Who has pushed for environmentalism? Who is still the first port of call for the indigent?

The point is that it is remarkable when someone to the far right can call on Christianity, much less claim to own it. What has happened to fray the knot between progressivism and religion?

It starts with the fact that the religious who have powered the social gospel of Christ in U.S. and U.K. politics have done so with a full embrace of free will. It may be simply chance, and it may not, but the ones who have done the most have been ones who have emphasized the free will of the poor to choose between sin and virtue, and therefore have felt the need to educate but not to compel. Thus, they've believed in being light handed with the religious message, in allowing choice. Even though now every single missionary is presumed to be a child molester or an amputating conquistador, missionaries by and large seem to be liked by the villages they've gone to, and they, by and large, go without guns, without power. It's true that they offer the riches of education, but cultural contact is cultural contact, and it is better in such a peaceful and persuasive way than the usual way (bulldozers, corporations spraying pesticides, etc.). However, the anecdotal evidence is shameful and damning, and progressives are the sorts to feel very bad about these things.

Secondly, of course, and mostly, we have a free market political world.

We have a "free press," in that the government does not overtly control it, but we have a free market press, meaning that it is for-pay. Since the mechanism of the free-market press is advertising, and advertisers will only pay if they believe their message is reaching many people, the news device must ensure high numbers of readers or viewers. Furthermore, the people must have a way of proving these numbers. On television, the infamous and malignant Nielsen group, while radio depends on the utterly bizarre Arbitron book that no one can read. Web sites and international radio have a stranger argument with their people. How many people are listening to the BBC World Service, for example? Since they can't advertise, it may not matter, but what if they can advertise on their website? What if they can, and their story directs listeners there? Oh, websites use sitemeter and other things, and cookies and other pestilences, none of which your news website wants to put there, mind you.

Eventually, the news service that is sober and serious decides that it will cheat the market. "No, heavens," they say, "we will never run Brangelina baby bump stories!" "However," they confess, "we might take one pop culture outrage an hour and then put something up on our web page so that we can generate traffic and know how many people we have." For a long time, network news fell into a race to put on the trashiest story at a particular spot to grab eyeballs. (Get the viewer at the start, and she will stay.) Once they started competing at all spots with cable, they began running trashy throughout the newscast. The cable companies started competing with each other, racing to who could have the most spurious drama.

The answer to that should be public radio. Public radio went to ground, afraid of conservative budget cuts, then more afraid, then getting cut anyway, then more afraid, and then getting cut anyway, so it was neutralized as soon as it got an audience.

The answer to that should be the Internet. No problem!
The problem, of course, is that all of us, here, like me, are like seeing the Running of the Bulls. The crowd could include Shakespeare, Bacon, and Mozart, but you'd never know: too many bodies, too much screaming. So we got some settling into blog sites and magazines. As soon as any of them developed an audience, though, it needed servers, and then it needed money, and then it found a miraculous buyer. (Look at the history of Salon.com for an example. It got bought, then bought again. At first, it was alternative and serious. Then people like Tracy Flory began writing hyperventilated headlines and cute stories and ... junk ... but the new owners liked that. It got hits. Trick headlines get hits, and hits are numbers, and numbers sell.) Huffington Post began as a news aggregator and then was kept afloat by nip-slips and visible panty lines. These got clicks, and clicks got numbers, and numbers got money.

I'm not off topic. You see, the BBC World Service covered that crazy bishop's comments for the same reason he made them: they wanted attention. They wanted outrage, sensation, and alarm. The debate is null, of course, because it's rigged. No one knows his terms, has an honest approach, and all are affective and arguing from anecdote and impressions, but that's also why it's just a glorious thing to say. Pure emotion.

For decades, "Christian" has been whoever makes TV. TV has been seeking the loudest voice. If there is a protest outside of an abortion center or an execution, and three hold up a sign saying, "Pray. Find Another Way," while one is screaming, throwing things and explaining how murdering the murderers is God's will, which will be on TV? Thus, "Christian" is the craziest person in the room every time, and religious people who want also to be famous will be as provocative as possible, if only to get the pulpit.

Is there discrimination against Christianity in academia? You bet. It's petty, unfocused, and mean spirited -- mostly petulant. Is it job discrimination? I doubt it. Are there "aggressive secularists?" If there are, television and newspapers and magazines and websites will go looking for them. They will be given every possible opportunity to seem bigger than they are.

There is no war on Christmas, no war on Easter, no war on Christianity, except that we who keep harboring war metaphors instead of metaphors of love and life make it so.

Paradox day

2011-04-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

Everyone's going to have a party!

April is the crowded month, breeding sinners from quick wombs, mixing memorials and desire. And so it's the month of birthdays and anniversaries for half the northern hemisphere. The rest have just gone or are planning for theirs. So it is that we with our flesh give our last piece of respect to the seasons of the earth.

Lord knows that tanning beds, bronzers, and plastic will allow summer to bow to our whims, spring to last to our convenience and with our hygienic standards. Winter will only show up as spasm of snow, freeze, and storm, as we unhinge the climate and worry that doing anything else might "cost jobs." And a Snooki is upset that there will be a tax on tanning beds. (No one should tan her snooki to start with.)

(Manasse Block Tannery in Berkely, CA, doing it the organic way)

On my participation in that great involuntary parade of reflection or ejection, I was morose. I know that's a big surprise -- me being morose, I mean, not that I would think of birthdays and anniversaries of all sorts as being a choice between dejected spirits or ejection of spirits -- but I was just numbly so. You see, I had gotten served by a deputy the day before. That's right: In America debts will not go away, it seems. In the past, I moved so often that the "hide and hope to die" strategy worked on both me and the creditor. On me, it helped confirm my self image. On them, it just worked, as they were eager to sell the debt to a collection agency anyway and keep the real economy going. (The real economy, despite what you may have heard, is not manufacturing. It's financing. The real economy of the U.S. is purely usury. There is nothing else at all. We do not make stuff. We make money. We make it up in the sense that everything is devised now for the interest rate and the default and the sale of debt. It employs armies and creates fictional fortunes.)

So, I was morose rather than surly. (My father gets surly.)

My funk was taking the form of a flummery. The distillate of regret, doom, and new fear were all tinctures strained through the mesh of old fear. This all made me sort of unresponsive in the main, and it lead to oddly reflective moments of paradox.

First, I was waiting for a meeting to begin, and I said, "I can't stand w..." and then realized that what I meant was, "I can't stand." It was not "waiting," but the standing.

See applicable copyright

Then I wanted to tell someone that I was, "Not feeling very happy" and corrected it to "Not feeling." This is, of course, a form of the joke that Tom Lehrer made, "Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. I'm very happy to be." I, however, was looking at something else. I was realizing that the meaning was implied in less than the word.

Later on, that evening, as I went off to dream of someone giving me a rose (really! I know it means I'd died, but I hadn't, so up yours, Freud!), I said to myself, "I don't care how depressed I am."

Suddenly, I realized that I had stumbled on a brand new paradox. Really.

Remember (should I say "really" again, just to prove that I don't edit my posts? really, I don't) Bertrand "Stinky Pants" Russell's fit in his hubristic Summa Mathematica? I'm sure you do. It is "the set of all sets." If you want to be bored to the point that you dribble your own flummery, you can read about it here. See, the set of all sets must have, as a member, itself. If it does include itself, though, then it is not a set of all sets. It's a Klein bottle problem.

In a way, it's a reiteration of the liar's paradox, but with math. (If it's a lie, it's true, but if it's true, it's a lie.) The question hinges on a Boolean condition, like "living/dead" or "on/off" and "inside/outside." If I say, "I don't care how depressed I am," though, I am doing the same thing. First, I'm obviously lying. Second, any statement I make about my indifference must be a lie. If I were indifferent, I would not care that I cared. If I were indifferent, I would not note that I did not care. If I were indifferent, I would have no position on caring or not caring, no position on happiness or sadness at or of a situation.

Therefore, let no one say, "I don't care" anymore. Henceforth let all such clauses be banished. If they wish to communicate disinterest, they may do so by looking away, walking off, or starting a separate conversation.

Or do we manage, in conversation, to do what we cannot in physics? Do we manage to be outside and inside at the same time? Are binary oppositions false when it comes to the psyche?

I don't care. I just thought I'd share, in case you did.

PAIN is GAIN

2011-03-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

Post forthcoming, but I realized that I could empty out the ruck sack of "earn" in one utterly depleted phrase: "No pain, no gain."
"It hurt while I got it, and the amount of pain is the amount of deserving to the acquisition" is one of the full statements of "earning" in the United States. Therefore, the woman who can eat all she wants and never lose a curve or gain a lump has not earned her figure, but the woman who frets at the gym and diet counter has, and the man who lifts barbells has earned his muscles more than the man whose body is simply large and hung with muscles.

This grand, well thought out principle leads us to wonderful conclusions. From this basis, we gather that all things difficult are deserved more than those easy, including torture. The information obtained by torture is better than that obtained by discourse because it had so much pain and danger in it. The sport that involves least protective gear, highest speeds, and most violence is the most "athletic." The artwork that looks like a daubed hand of a five year old had made it but is comprised of chiseled granite and diamond over a space of a mile is praiseworthy. Why, just look how much sweat went into it.

It also leads to the Lexis driver going across three spaces in the parking lot. It cost a lot of money to buy that car, and therefore that car has more rights than others. It hurt. It's worth.

Go on, Johnny, and push at that weight stack, and remember that there is no gain without pain, and pain is a sign of being deserving, except, of course, in some cases.

The principle that durance is the measure of justice in acquisition is absurd, of course, but that's how we clowns think and act. The actual standard that we perverted to get here is the principle of sacrifice. Sacrifice cannot be equated with pain, nor with unpleasantness, nor money. I dare say that the gym rat is choosing that pain and has some pleasure in it. Sacrifice would be duty without compensation. That would create worthiness, alright, but we don't see it anymore.

No, we stick to 'if it feels bad, it must be special,' and then we lie. After all, the person who cleans out septic systems has a more unpleasant job than the man who writes advertising. The woman or man who works in the weather on a framing crew has a more unpleasant and painful job than the one who works in an accounting house. The one who pulls weeds, sprays pesticides, and gets a face full of chemicals so that others may have lawns in insane weather endures far more than the people with the lawn who lead teams of engineers. In each case, though, we say that the richer person has "earned it." The poorer person, who will pay more in taxes, will not complain about government services, but we will hear unendingly from some of those others about how "their" "hard earned" money is being taken. It was earned, after all, because they endured for it.

The gamblin' man is rich, and the workin' man is poor, as Woody Guthrie said, but today we actually pretend that they earned the same.

Haunted Words 2: "Consumer"

2011-03-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

Oh, yes, the consumer. Isn't the consumer horrible? It is a plague, like a tent caterpillar, eating up the substance of its own host. The consumer is Moloch, devouring the children of the nation and purifying the economy of its waste thereby. The consumer consumes, leaving nothing.
Gobble, gobble.

This word, "consumer," is of a more recent vintage than other haunted words. Unlike "labor," it does not go back into the pre-history of language. In fact, you can see its usage history here, if you'd like (great site). When we see the word's base, "consume," prior to the 20th century, it is always with "destroy" implied, and "waste" actually denoted. It was in the 1970's that the word got into the collective Business head. (This time, I do not plan to attack business schools.) I can remember, as a child, people objecting to the term. "How dare you call me a consumer," people said.

They don't say that anymore.

Nor do I wish to act as if we need to run for our aluminum foil deflector beanies. No. My point is merely to discuss the term itself, what corpse it carries with it into our mouths and minds, and the effect of speaking and thinking such defilement on us may be. (Photo at right shows, incidentally, and I mean incidentally, some of the difficulties we should have had already. Go to its source and read that essay, if you'd like.)

Conceiving of the consumer, inventing the consumer as an abstracted force in economic transactions, performs the same moral deferral that "labor" does. A crime against your neighbor would be punished by the neighbor, by the state, and by your conscience, but an action against "labor" is "necessary" by "laws" of "the market." In other words, each of these forces that is cited as a compulsion is an abstraction derived inferentially from repeated observations of actual exchanges of goods. An historian, essentially, observes how exchanges have gone, analyzes and infers common principles, and these descriptions are presumed to be predictive of future exchanges. From this scientific basis, we get such concepts -- all linguistic shorthand for massive assumption and deduction -- as "labor, production, material, consumer," and then we act according to "laws of the market" that are not laws. They are habits of humans. Humans are only partly predictable.

I would never cost my neighbor his job, but I can feel morally absolved by "market forces" and laws, even though these forces and laws are people en masse. The moral action on my part has been absolved by numbers, not by a real force. (I'm trying to avoid being obvious or obscure. What I mean is that "the market" does not let me off the hook. The "market" does not exist. It is simply a description of a mass of people and a set of assumptions about their behavior. The morality of actions remains, whether there is a market present or not. You still fired people.)

If a side effect of abstractions like "labor" and "consumer" and "manager" is to create a false sense of laws and forces that will absorb the impact of moral actions, then it is because each word carries extra freight. None of these words is innocent. None is actually a pure economics term. Each one has something strapped to its back. In the case of "labor," it is "uneducated, obdurate, obstreperous." With "manager," it is "executive, brain, judgment." What is it with "consumer?" What does using the word "consumer" do to our moral acts after it has given us a giant marshmallow to absorb the good and evil of them?

Ah, Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights

A "consumer" is a glutton. Gluttony is, of course, a sin. It is a sin in nearly every faith on earth. It is a sin in non-faiths, too. In Christianity, gluttony includes eating too much and simply wasting substance. In Buddhism, it is attachment. In Hiduism, the same. In Islam, the same as Christianity, and in Judaism, it is forbidden. In contemporary culture, gluttony means fat, and fat is bad, but, then again, it is alright if it is in the name of being a consumer, because over consumption is wealth.

A consumer creates nothing. A consumer is an end point for culture. A consumer is a toilet, a garbage can, and a dump. It is an efficient absorber. Now, we all know and accept the truth that no consumer consumes completely, that there is waste, but when we accept the term "consumer," we accept the inherent quality of the big bad wolf who 'ate them all up.' We also accept the fact that being a consumer is being sinful, that consumers are making demands, that consumers are baby birds screeching, mouths open and eyes closed, for more, more, more.

From Thorstein Verblein's thesis in The Theory of the Leisure Class, we have moved on considerably. For him, the leisure class was a form of actual class structure. Since those days, our productive model has inverted. Luxury has become increasingly cheap, and staple goods have become increasingly dear. There is no question that an iPod/Pad is a luxury good, that a 4G phone is a luxury, and yet those are cheap in real dollars, while housing has moved up in real dollars of income for average income. This is because leisure and luxury do not constitute class any longer, but basics do.

When a company makes its product and its managers make decisions (for the dumb hands and feet and mouths that are incapable of 'executive' function), it considers "the consumer." It wants to know how to appeal to the consumer, not how to serve the consumer, how to be known to the consumer, not pleasing to people, how to offer perceived value per unit to the consumer, rather than quality goods for long use, and they want to build brand loyalty among consumers rather than consistent products. By considering this creature -- this vaccuous, voracious and wicked thing called "the consumer" -- as a target for psychological analysis, focus group study, predictive statistics and the like, the company is treating people with contempt, ignoring their product, and focusing on an amoral universe that must be immoral.

Why must a society ordered around labor, management, and consumers be immoral? It must be because the one using the term is included in the term. The problem with the analysis is that same as the morality: there is no way to remove the observer. The producer is a consumer. The manager is labor. The consumer is a producer. The company that has scorn for consumers and works hard to psych them out is being targeted by a supplier, and the executive goes home to be targeted by a luxury maker or a staple maker, and the whole country turns into a game of liar's poker where no one can win the stakes.

Then again, some people just prefer to steal.

Haunted Words 1: "Labor"

2011-03-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

Apparently, there is a loophole in Genesis 3:19 that lay silent in grievous oblivion for centuries. Where God told Adam,

"By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (NRSV),

it appears that modern business schools have made the discovery that only some people are sweaty dust. Other people are management material.

This distinction between management and labor is antique and an antique, a revenant or malingerer. We have had laborers, and the class of 'labor,' as long as there have been corners, and hence corner offices, but for us it probably dates to a difference bred of widespread illiteracy and innumeracy, as well as legally defined class and college being unavailable. Even in those days, the difference between the labor and the management was education, not nature. Today, though, the difference is nothing but the distinction. I will return to this.

Let me pretend for a minute that I have a business reader, that somewhere and some time such a coincidence occurs. That person, trained in business, learned in business, is hardly going to learn anything from me. After all, I don't know anything about business, not having read the same things nor been to the same places. However, I do know from experience certain things about my own behavior. I know why I dropped a local medical supply company for my mother. I did it because the moron who came out to install things did "elder talk" to my mother. He was patronizing, lying, and infuriating. I know why I have paid more for a guitar at one shop than another. I know it was because the bored teenager on the floor at the inexpensive place wanted to shove a heavy metal shreddddder experience in my face, and the more expensive shop actually asked me what I wanted. I know that a local pizza place does not get my business because the teenagers who man the phones are unmotivated and unhappy.

The lowest paid person is the person who is in contact with me, and the person mistreated the most, disposed of most often, least trained, least respected, least cared for by the company is the person who is the only face of the establishment for me.

I am sure that the guitar shop manager had an MBA. I'm sure the pizza shack owner manager had a great business plan. I know the corporation had a clever way of allocating profits. However, each of them treated workers as "labor costs," and the workers knew where they stood and acted accordingly. Shat upon, they shat back.

In the modern Business School, we study business. Business, you know. Not trade, nor psychology, nor accounting, but "business." Think about that, as it may be the first time anyone has asked you to do so. What is "business" divorced from all of the other things? What is "management" divorced from the things managed? What are the things, after all? Are they people or objects?

As it turns out, Business people study how to get inventory, generate profit, manage brands, diversify, and invest. They learn, in short, about a series of abstracted operations that come from case studies. In all of these, they are eager to turn the humans involved into abstract forces that can be predicted, either with game theory or statistical correlation. From these inductions, they come to names, and from the names they come to laws, and from the laws they generate book sales. The people involved are all learning about managing a "business," but none of them are learning about humans who are working, using, disposing of, or depending upon.

(This last point is a critical flaw: I might study how to make shavers, but the premise of "business" is the free market. No one thus trained has studied what to do if her product is a staple good, like electricity, or food. As a consequence, in order to justify market behaviors, people who wish to apply Business to utilities, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture must adopt libertarian lies.)

So, let's suppose that some case study eventually shows, ten years or so after B-School fiends have been monkeying with life, that workers who are shat on shit back and that customers see the lowest paid person. That makes no dent in the idea that there is "labor" and that "labor" is a "cost" (that's how it was taught in B-school!). Instead, "managers" react by creating "customer service scripts" and "decision trees" for people dealing with customers or -- dream of dreams -- getting sophisticated A.I. to man the phones. It's better than training the workers or treating them like they're part of the company.

The truth, of course, is that there is no such thing as labor, or there is nothing except labor. The company is the labor. Business school talks about the product as if it is already always existing. It teaches as if raw materials need no extraction or refining. It teaches as if the product comes in ex nihilo, like words in a text book, as a "widget," and there is a big box on the flow chart for "making it" that acts as a drain on the real business -- the part You the MBA have been trained for -- which is all that stuff about allocating units and game theory. Of course, there is no company without the product, and there is no difference between the person working to advertise and the person working to make. The "executive" (naming themselves as if they were brains!) is a laborer.

Finally, when companies or organizations decide that they need to make more "profits," they seek to reduce "costs." "Costs" include materials and "labor." Since B-school fools have propagated in themselves the lie that there is a difference between themselves and 'labor,' because they think that there is such a thing as 'labor' distinct from 'executive,' they see labor as that same square on the flow chart, and it's a square that costs. Why, just look at how much "we" pay "it" in benefits (what is it that "we" made, again? and how did they come to be "it," anyway?)!

When college is available to all, thanks to community colleges, and when literacy is at a high, and when the Americans with Disabilities Act is ensuring that there are no disabilities making people settle for demeaning positions, the only thing between the "unskilled" and "executive" class is education, and education can be obtained. It's true that we are not alike intelligent, but it's also true that not very many "executives" are brains -- either in or out of college. However, they still speak as if they are one thing and "labor" is another.

This has consequences. Because "labor" is over there, and "labor costs" should be reduced, while top executive pay is an "incentive," when cuts come along, the axe falls with gravity down the chart. No man thinks, "You know, I'm not worth much. I should lose my job." No woman says, "I think my division could get by with half its budget." No. The top says, "Cut 10%," and the next executive says, "Cut 10%," and the next group says to the lower ones, "Cut 10%." The command falls and falls until there is no one in charge -- the workers. The workers get fired, the work gets left not done, and the business goes along with more executives and no product.

Let no person, ever, accept this word. There is no "labor" in a post-industrial nation. We are ALL labor or capitalists, and you are definitely not a capitalist. The capitalists are very few in number, very low in value, and very worthy of our hate. The rest of us are laborers lying to ourselves and committing suicide.

A Plackard

2011-03-12T18:52:00.000-08:00

Just a notice of what's to come. Of course, with the oddness of blog posting, this notice will be at the bottom of the list, so it will act less like a menu or table of contents than a ridiculous testimony of intentions. That being as it may, the next three essays, barring sudden Ideas, are:

The Three Fallacies

1. The Consumer

2. Labor

3. Earn

I have said in other places, other times, things about these concepts, and I worry that I'll not say anything new and trust, at the same time, that these are inexhaustible funds of outrage. I hope to convince readers to not use these words again without giving them serious thought, at the very least.

I'm sure everyone knows that I think
"earn" is meaningless. I said so not two
posts ago. As for "consumer," I think it
was the same post that mentioned it and
"labor" as ghosts, so that may give a
gist -- and never let it be said that I
don't give a gist for my readers.

The Long Apology

2011-03-07T06:16:00.000-08:00

"No one undergoes a stronger struggle than the man who tries to subdue himself." -- Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ 3, iii

Shame is the theme for some authors, and yet it is a feeling that is at once elementary and advanced. There is the basic form, which is actually regret mixed with fear, and then there is an advanced form, which takes that as its based and tunes its song with added notes of memory, inevitability/doom, and awareness. The last one is so refined and piquant a feeling that it can, in its wake, leave us with a shattering sense that all awareness is shame, that any further awareness would result in further shame. I suspect that James Joyce, at least in his Dubliners phase, had this conviction, and a good many of us who read him have to agree.

I recall the first... no, I won't speak of that, as it was not what any of you would expect and is not actually embarrassing at all... sense of reflexive shame, the shame that requires apology to no one, came when I was in the library. I cannot recall now whether it was elementary or high school, but to me there is not much difference in the two, as only the earliest years of the combined experience were tolerable. The girls were outside the glass of the cube where the tables were, and I was inside the study terrarium with a couple of friends. I say "the girls," because they were interchangeable in my mind at that time. They were the Bub Club. Since I had no sisters and was fed a daily diet of pejoration by my older brother, I was even more unequipped to handle what came next with poise.

They giggled. They giggled at me. It had to mean something. I canvassed all my female friends, demanding that they explain the coded signals of the giggle. Boys would be purposeful in such a thing. It would mean sex or violence, which were the only two possibilities in boy world. Was I being laughed at, or was one of them being laughed at for liking me? Either way, I was there as a body, and I didn't like it.

“Can you imagine the pain, the dull imprisoned suffering, hewn into the matter of that dummy which does not know why it must be what it is, why it must remain in that forcibly imposed form which is no more than a parody? Do you understand the power of form, of expression, of pretense, the arbitrary tyranny imposed on a helpless block, and ruling it like its own, tyrannical, despotic soul? You give a head of canvas and oakum an expression of anger and leave it with it, with the convulsion, the tension enclosed once and for all, with a blind fury for which there is no outlet. The crowd laughs at the misery of imprisoned matter, of tortured matter which does not know what it is and why it is, nor where the gesture may lead that has been imposed on it for ever.” – Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, “Treatise on Tailor's Dummies.”

I had thought little of myself as a being. My brother, for instance, had considered his looks, his demeanor, his musculature, and his goals. I had considered my personality, my misery, my soul, my anger at religion, my impatience with my teachers, my desire to create an alternate science fiction universe where I was in control. Neither my brother nor I had considered our selves. Few people do, after all. It's too time consuming, when we're young, and it's too boring, when we're old.

The full self is not merely body, nor mind, nor soul, nor some layer cake, nor even the batter in the blender of all three, but all three with a knowledge of their heterogeneity and friction. Coming to that is a long, long trek. At the time of the giggles, I had managed soulfulness, and mind was on its way, but at the cost of, as Dave Thomas says, thinking of my body "as a way of getting my head from place to place" (said on a "Tonight Show" appearance many years ago). When the girls giggled, they made me think about the fact that I had flesh, that I was occupying space, that my desires had to be fulfilled through body, that the body, which had always seemed, had always, in fact, been the thing I had no power over, would have to be reckoned with. I was ashamed. I wanted to apologize.

Don't imagine that there was something particular that I needed to apologize for. I was in no way outstanding. I was purely average, in fact. Aside from, at that point, a big chip and an aggressive brain, there was nothing to notice, save for naivete.

Since that very early experience, which I have discovered many young men shared with me, the body has been my particular weak spot. It is not, of course, the only avenue. For me, it remains the dog whistle, because it is what I will soonest forget. Tell me about how my food causes uncountable death, pollution, and unthinkable misery, and I will feel that same sudden awareness, that awareness undesired, that fear mixed with guilt and a need to apologize for no particular act, but for simply being. Tell me how the iPod or apple I purchase involved a million miles of diesel fumes, how Gilbert eating a grape meant transgenic Monsanto killer tomatoes, and I will flush red. Nor, of course, is my sex a help in this. Young girls get the body shame far earlier and never have it let up. (The reason that the body was something always beyond my control was that, although I look like a very healthy animal now, I was a very, very, very sickly runt of the litter when young. I was born with birth defects in my heart that seemed to have a Eugene O'Neill sort of determinism for me. Biorhythms and biofeedback was of limited success, and pyramid power didn't work out.) In fact, the reason that the anecdote I began with is notable is merely that it is novel for boys. For girls, it would be one flea bite amid an amputation.

I have seen, since I have fallen into the modern life of apologizing for being where I am and who I am, that others sometimes do so when the pathway is the mind, but more rarely, and they virtually never do when it is the soul.

“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.” – Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

I can leave you to your own scenarios and let my clever reader get ahead of me, if she wishes. However, essentially it comes down to the fact that some people find themselves being forced to become aware of their mental pathways, their mental development and process, when they had managed to avoid thinking about it. When they do, they feel shame. I am not speaking of the, "Shucks, I don't know nothing about no quadrilateral equations" dodge. I mean someone silent at the side of the table, unnoticed by everyone else, suddenly feeling very small, very sad, afraid, and aware. In the United States, it's not so easy to find these situations -- partly because of anti-intellectualism, of course -- mainly because the mind is inside, and the body is outside. It's not easy to see or prove someone's mental process, and therefore it's not likely that the other person will be compelled to be aware, if he doesn't want to be aware. For the soul, the scenarios are non-existent.

What I can say is that I'm sorry. I can further say that I am sorrier still for the fact that, at this point in my life, when the hero of Steppenwolf was about to get out his straight razor, I go back to the most fallacious folly of them all. I envy.

While we who have flashes of involuntary awareness experience complex shame and thereafter feel the need to apologize for ourselves, justify ourselves, make up for ourselves, other people seem impervious. They are in the same situations, but they do not have the shame. We, some time around the age of twenty, decide that they are enviable. "I should have been a mobile home dweller like X," we say, "because then I'd have no idea that I wasn't happy." That's bull, of course, and we'd be terribly miserable, or dead. We are tailor's dummies in our own shape, and were we pressed into another we would spring back into this (Bruno Schulz's father was wrong). The people who feel no shame manage their trick not by being stupid, but by being without a self.

If you do not develop your soul, you cannot feel another's pain. If you do not develop your soul, you cannot engage God as a living being. If you do not develop your soul as part of your self, you can only hate your parts.

So, follow me down this road for a moment, just out of morbid curiosity. I have no answer, but I have a hypothesis. Suppose that a person is active all the time. A situation occurs like mine in the library. The boy in the box in this case hears the giggle and puffs up. He knows he is the center of attention, assumes it's because the girls all love him and struts over. He does not become aware of self, because he is not thinking out. The same person in a meeting who is unable to keep up with the thinking going around him just waits for the answers. There is no awareness involved, because he wants answers, and these people should come up with them. Now a woman finds that her food involves peasants suffering. She thinks that someone should do something about that, probably. It's not her problem. Those people should move, she might think.

The point is not that these are stupid people. They aren't even selfish people, per se. Instead, they are not selves. They are not integrating the components of self to be in touch with the moral, the social, the physical, and the mental. They act. We, on the other hand, inhabit and must therefore be conscious and aware. We are better off, but we live out one very, very long apology.

Power and Glory

2011-02-21T08:41:00.000-08:00

Glory, glory, hallelujah,

right? Thine is the power and the glory? A novel by Graham Greene? Probably something punned on by a thriller writer as well, but do you know what the word "glory" means?

"The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit." -- Jonathan Swift

Where I went to college, the student body was slightly minority Jewish, which made Jewish the largest single religion. (I.e. 48% of the students there were Jewish, but, since all the other religions called themselves Methodists or Baptists or Christian-unspecified or Muslim, that made reformed Judaism the largest block.) The evangelical Christians noticed that our school had a church affiliation and even a school of theology and a seminary, and so they would routinely do what they could to antagonize the Jews and, in the process, the rest of the student body. I, at the time, was far more fundamentalist than I am now, and they forced me into the position of having to criticize my brothers and sisters forcefully when they would invite flames 'o hell apocalyptic speakers to proselytize outside of the student union ... on Yom Kippur. These people were just being jerks, though. They were not looking for converts. They were throwing bricks and hoping to radicalize Christians for a religious war they wanted to provoke.

Where I went to college again and again, though, the schools were public, and so they had "free speech" areas. These were a heritage of the glory days of the 1960's. These areas were most frequently used by "pit preachers." Two, in particular, seemed to appear at both schools. One was named Jed, and one was named Zed. (It seems that Zed is less well known. The web has remembrances of him, but Jed got more attention.) Both of them did much the same thing: preached at the undergraduates about how damned they were, how sinful they were, how they were creatures of lust and constant fornication, and how they were all, "GOIN' STRAIGHT TO HAIL!" If, on the other hand, the students would only accept Jesus, then they wouldn't go to Hail. They'd "Go to Glow-ry."

Zed was particularly entertaining for the students. I never saw either preacher convert anyone, unless you count converting the antagonistic into the radical. They provided an excellent rallying point for gay and lesbian groups, and they were figures of fun for the lunch crowd. At Georgia, the students sat on bleachers and chanted along with the preacher, "GOIN' STRAIGHT TO HAIL!" They'd then applaud, as if they'd just done the wave.

Of course one does not "go" to glory, as glory is not the antonym of Hell. Glory is also not a synonym of power, nor an empty syllable to go with vestigial Hebrew phrases like "Hallelujah." It is, instead, "Fame for goodness or greatness."

Middle eastern rulers understand glory, while northern Europeans understand fame. Fame is glory without historical memory, I think.

People go wherever a dead teenager's coffin goes and stand in line for hours to take a look at all his stuff. They travel thousands of miles to look at all the official statues made as publicity for the tyrants of Egypt. For thousands and thousands of years, rulers in the middle east have known that the very first thing you do upon taking charge is force a bunch of artists to start making your likeness and plastering, taping, painting, hammering, stapling, singing, and gluing it up everywhere. Make sure that visitors and the natives alike cannot escape seeing an enlargement of you and that they realize that you're big, really big.

If you're leader of all Turkmen, you need to show it, in gold, in every direction. Trust your gut: one day tourists will stand in line to bask in its beams.
In the United States, though, we think things like that are ugly, vainglorious, and obviously futile -- unlike winning at "American Idol." That gets an important recording contract and fame. Fame means everyone WANTING you. The other thing means everyone seeing and fearing or obeying you. That's why we consider it the height of progress when we can bring a "Miss Kabul" pageant to Afghanistan and tear down a statue of Saddam in Baghdad. Down with the official power, and up with the fame.

Not that I disagree about the propaganda thing. I'm a Christian. This is why I know that it's revolutionary, absolutely, when Martin Luther said, "yours is the power and the glory." In other words, we follow Jesus in denouncing any temporal glory, but I don't think I can praise the substitution of fame in its stead, nor the quiet way we have given up on the substance of glory.

You see, those dread monarchs were putting up their likenesses because they were going to get authority and fear and quaking knees. Their glory and power were in one body and being. In the United States today, we have moved into a world where power has slipped away, where morality has ceased to exist, because power and morality both have gone into this deferred mass. Individuals go to their Baptist churches and drop checks for $10,000 a month in the plate and go to work, where, for the good of the company, they agree that corporate strategy involves a plan to increase fees for consumers with low balances and overdrafts and a new order of payments processing that might increase overdrafts on people with low balances. That's not evil, though, because it was a good decision for the company.

The company isn't evil, either, because the company's decision, which is going to have a huge effect on tens of thousands of people, robbing many of them and sending hundreds of thousands of dollars from their accounts for no wrong of theirs, is simply a manipulation of that which is allowed, and companies are supposed to maximize profits. This is their command, and they would be failing if they didn't. Furthermore, a competing company would surely do so, and then that company would have that increased capital and use it against this one, and its directors might not be good people.

Our corporate landscape has gone entirely M.B.A. It is working as aggressively as it can according to its solitary rule: maximum profit for the lowest wages possible, with the lowest quality necessary. There is no thinking beyond the next quarter, unless it's about product development. And thus it is that every human on the planet has ingested dioxin, most have been exposed to PCB's, rBGH milk is suspect (IGF-I is identical in cows and humans, and the rBGH causes increased IGF-I expression), and "Round Up Ready" plants are extremely suspicious, and yet now in our food chain. Our own body's genes are patented by Novartis, Monsanto, and Aventis. We live our lives penetrated by radio waves from all spectra. We drink estrogens. We accept that there is such a thing as "the consumer" and that this creature is distinct from "us." We believe that there is something called "labor" and that it is also distinct from us. We believe that "middle class" means just about anything.

These changes are mainly in the last 50 years as well.

What we have now is not what we had. There are no mustache twirling villains and no gleaming smiled heroes. There is no glory. The evil that the average person faces is nameless and faceless. A company is convincing his eight year old daughter to text more, and it is doing so in order to make her a cash machine. It doesn't want her love. It doesn't want her to know its name. It just wants power over her. The bank he deals with doesn't care if he hates it. The Wall Street trader who drove up wheat prices and led to massive instability in Africa doesn't care if people wish him dead. He is without a name and is content. He just wants the power, the money.

They have no glory. They're making us all a Hell.

Consider, thou, the river

2011-02-13T09:55:00.000-08:00

This morning, I was trying to come up with controversial factual statements -- statements whose exact truth could be and is debated by persons of good will -- and I stumbled across the fact that some physicists have discovered a hypothesis of "entanglement in time" at a quantum level. By the way, hypothetical and quantum are the best sorts of entanglements in time. Although the author suggests that this leads to time travel, it would be of subatomic particles, and so it would mean that muons are coming from the past or going back, and we goliaths of molecules are not harmed or benefited in any way.

I've said before how synchronicity has always, even before I read Jung at fifteen, worked for me. I needed no convincing of convergence, because I think the microcosm/macrocosm thing is just fine.

Also this morning, before I sought topics, my best friend treed a cat. She's thirteen years old, nearly fourteen, losing her teeth, arthritic, and still very dainty. All of her life, she has been the aloof and imperious one with her surroundings, fond with me. Her usual habit with cats is to cock an eyebrow at them and to treat them, like most things, as beneath her contempt. Now, though, that she has past her middle ages, I am glad that she got the primal joy of chasing a cat up a tree. She did seem embarrassingly pleased with herself.

As she did that, I thought over the length of my life and whether I had done or been or gotten anything that had been promised or sought. For a day or morning, at least, I could look not at the span. I could say that there is no such thing as this river. There have been segments, only. There have been rapids and swells, deep portions, stagnant pollution, and great agitation, and there will be a petering out in a torpid or tormented run at some point to come, but these things are neither here nor there. Each section is a section, accountable to its own judgment and frustrating any whole.

Did I go somewhere? There is no where to go. Did I achieve something? There are no things to achieve. Is death supposed to be a yardstick? Why? Surely it's no evil thing, if it occurs to every thing that has ever been.

This, you see, is quite pleasant, in the end. Each bend of the river is a river all its own. It begins when the last horizon is obscured and ends when the next comes into view. The very idea that we must look at birth to death and assume that these are appointed and meaningful measures, that there is an opening bell and a finishing tape, is absurd. I'm alright just now. I don't think I will be pretty soon, but right now it's a nice morning, nice afternoon, and with a fresh shave, a good friend (who bravely frightened a cat), and gasoline, it's enough. It's far more than enough.

Unpardonable Interruption

2011-02-02T06:33:00.000-08:00

"Averagely wise a man ought to be,

a man should be
never too wise;
for a wise man's heart is seldom cheerful,
if he who owns it is too wise." Poetic Edda, "Sayings of the High One" #55

I have an idea for writing about interrupting, because I interrupt, and because interruption seems to be a skill by itself, but this is not it. This is, instead, about music, which is why the quote has nothing to do with music.

I have alluded to my punk rock past in the past, and even I am tired of the glory days.

I do still harbor a grudge against Lee Abrahms (now at XM/Sirius), who kept my brothers and sisters off the radio back in '81, who made "punk" a scare word, who played into the "Nightly News" stories on "punk rockers from England with safety pins in their cheeks whose battle cry is 'Anarchy.'" It's shocking that Lee Abrahms managed to harbor shocking thoughts, after so carefully screening America from shock, but apparently he had a "send all" e-mail with some Thought Crime in it. His inside came outside, and that's not allowed in business.

Anyway, before people were scared of rap and rappers, they were scared of punks. The difference is that they never got a chance to get over their fear of punks, never put us in the top 40 (unless you count The Police and Talking Heads, and even now - even as The Pogues sing about drinking to the point of damnation and have it used as a soundtrack for a Kia sport utility vehicle - the same folks who denied us space then are erasing us from "oldies" and making us unexist). We remained the unclean bacon product of music.

Why? Why the hatred from music itself?

Well, our central point of pride was anti-corporate sentiment, so I'm sure that didn't help. On the other hand, we were touring machines, and the corporations don't care what you think of them, if you go on tour for them. We were liberals (unless we were Nazis), so that might have been out of tune in the cocaine Reaganaut industry, but the hippies were worse. We were relatively intellectual. None of this makes sense, though. In general, the punks were no more unmanageable than what came later. (Rappers have been singularly obliging for the corporations. Their "more money, more bling" ethos has been tailor made for corporate bottom lines. The fact that the group is usually one highly addictive personality is also good for managing and replacing.)

No.

I actually think that other musicians and the musical component of the music business (the folks who manned the operating boards) disliked Punk in a way that they wouldn't rap and didn't disco.

Disco, lest we forget, sucks. It is horrible. I don't care what you say: it's awful. It has one beat, no lyrical content, and is, at best, an adjunct to coke and sex, not an art. Take the best disco song, strip the rhythm track, the synthesized strings, and play it with a Dixieland band, and it's fine. However, it had synthesized strings. It had synthesized beats, as soon as they could be synthesized. It had loops. It had, in short, studio magic. The old guys with the ratty beards and stringy pony tails didn't want to ever listen to a disco record (although they seemed to enjoy the coke and sex), but they loved disco because of all the fun they could have in the studio making those interesting burps and gurgles.

The corporate guys.... Well, let's not consider those reptiles. They've demonstrated that they do not think at all, most of the time, and, when they try, it's a mistake.

Rap, too, is a great deal for producers. Rap, in fact, is a producer's medium. The producer often gets artist credit on a rap song, because the studio writes and makes the "song." Studio rats think rap is neato, because they get to push tons of buttons and run all kinds of software and experiment endlessly with loops and stuff. They pride themselves on inventing "beats," which have little or nothing to do with playing drums.

The studio guys, and the corporate guys alike hated punk because we interrupted.

We didn't merely interrupt their smooth progression from Fleetwood Mac to Mack Daddy, but we interrupted musically, too. You see, to make a song, the process is supposed to be:

Audition as a singer
Get a producer from the company
Buy a song that the producer thinks is right for you
Sing the song over some tracks
Thank the company and wear its placard.

Or, if you are a "band" (and they would rather you not be), the process is:

Learn the instrument to virtuosity
With said group of musicians, produce a demo of professional quality
Submit finished record (demo) to Artist and Repertory dude with packet of cocaine "accidentally fell in there"
Get signed and assigned a producer
Have demo re-recorded by producer who rewrites the songs for their "potential," puts new drums on, makes the rhythm sound like whatever sold most last year
Have singer praised and given "side projects" until she or he does steps 1-5 above

What you are not supposed to do is be a collaborative unit or a team, a la The Beatles. You are also not supposed to go perform and build up a fan base of people who like the music as it is instead of how the producer thinks it should be or how Lee Abrahms's closet of teenagers says it should be.

Punk annoyed everyone. The corporate guys saw it as a monkey wrench to a system that was working just fine. The punk route meant less cocaine, for one thing, and it meant that there would be no way to be sure of the next financial quarter's profits.

It annoyed the studio guys, too. It interrupted. Instead of studying the instrument for decades and then submitting the perfected performance to modification, people were shortcutting. They were having their witty lyrics or protests and going straight out with them, and yet without relying on a studio to do it.

That's awful, isn't it?

Instead of sturm und drang compositions about what it would be like to be a ghost in a wishing well, we were strum and dang. We grabbed Ventures records and rockabilly and just ... played ... badly, but we needed no one's help in doing it. If we bored the audience, we heard about it. We didn't have to wait for a report from a focus group.

Rassen Fratsen Hummelsummer

2011-01-26T08:43:00.000-08:00

We seem to be in a time of guns again. Since February 2009, just after the inauguration of President Obama, people have been clutching, fondling, and fantasizing about their guns. Before March could march in, people were marching as well as they could in their re-enactor costumes and Rascal scooters to protest the "tax increases" of Obama -- who had not even submitted a budget, much less raised a tax -- and to swear to "take our country back." Gun sales soared.

Over the summer of 2009 and 2010, we were treated to "town hall" protests with people asserting "second amendment rights" to go to see elected officials with loaded pistols and assault weapons. Apparently, part of having a militia is now intimidating the choice of the popular majority. Part of answering the call of the government to defense of the nation is to menace the duly elected officials of the government.

(What it meant to be armed for the levee.)

Anyway, the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords must not be tied to any of this, we're told. I agree, even, that the shooter is unconnected, more or less. He's a paranoid, and paranoids are not programmed by anyone.

The people with this talk are unhealthy. They are all sick. They are, in fact, petting the gun but not shooting the bullets. They are displaying, threatening, muttering, growling, and hating as hard as they can, but they're not releasing anything, doing anything, or achieving anything.

William Blake's "A Poison Tree" is a bit of a high school cliche, I'm afraid. It talks about the power of anger to breed, to amplify, and finally to overwhelm. It begins by saying that expressing one's anger ends the anger and contrasts that with a hidden anger that ends in murder. Perhaps it's a good poem for the politics of the day. However, I was thinking that there is a change that I would make to the poem. Instead of the foe being dead in the garden, I think the poet/speaker would be dead.

Unspoken anger is an interesting beast. If your horrible girlfriend dumps you -- for no damn reason -- and is off at dinner with some guy -- a complete jerk, of course -- and faithless, with no concern for all that you've done, then you will, naturally, be stung by the injustice of her wicked character. You will spend that night writhing in hate. You won't sleep. Every time you calm yourself down, your brain will remember the day, and even a thought like, "I'm glad I'm not still upset" will lead to remembering it again. Your blood pressure will go up, cortisol levels will soar, muscles will ache, concentration will wane, digestion be ruined, and sleep flee. Meanwhile, that unspeakable cow at dinner will not notice a thing, will not feel the ugly thoughts, will not be pierced by the sharp comments. She will enjoy the dinner and the company, and she might even spend the night with the company, and, if she does, her experience of the night will be unaffected by your experiences.

The misery you have will make more misery for you, but it simply does nothing at all to the one you hate.

And so, if you think that coming up with an Obama joke or reverting to 1960's racist talk will "show them," it won't. I know that it won't. I spent eight years, and it seems like a lot longer, in protest at an administration that violated US law, international law, and divine law. In comparison to that, people showing off guns because they don't like the income tax are pikers.

Oh, go ahead, folks. Say it.

Don't shout about "Taxed Enough Already." Say, "I refuse to accept democracy! It's not fair that my side lost!"

Don't say, "We want America back." Say, "Black people can't be president."

The longer you bottle it up, the worse it will get. I know it hurts that you lost. I know that you're in pain, even though you don't actually have anything to disagree with about the president's policies (just the who, not the what (unless by "what" we mean "race")). Don't forget, swearing helps relieve pain.

Next time, you can vote Yosemite Sam or Phyllis Schlaffey.

Immigrants!

2011-01-16T10:18:00.000-08:00

I was on my way to my church today (it's the mother church for America, of course), and I drove past a number of businesses whose names I only noticed for the first time. One of these was tucked away into a dying -- which is to say non-Wal*Mart -- shopping center and had been in business for several years. I had seen it and its storefront and its sign and its customers on many occasions, but I had never noticed it.

(Who knew? It's a chain! This one is in Virginia.)

That's right: Star Nails. I see now that "Star Nails" is a thing that one can get a franchise for, that it is a company that sells kits and licenses, rather than an actual company that staffs. I do not know if being Vietnamese and female is required for getting the franchise, but, given the uniformity of operators, it seems like it could be. (The mini-icon for the franchise company looks like a lotus flower.)

I have nothing particularly against immigrants, myself. About half of you, I understand, are "very concerned" by those immigrants and want them to "go back where they came from." It's easy to feel that way -- harder to think that way. According to a recent study, most of the folks taking the hard "conservative" stance these days are, in fact, not thinking, but feeling, to start with, and they have enlarged amygdalas. (Some time I mean to write about that study, because I'd say that it's not conservativism that appeals to the reptilian brain.) It's lovely to think in big, gelatinous lumps, to feel secure that the problems are "those people" and that they "need to" do something simple like "go back." It feels wonderful to have an answer.

Unfortunately for me, my family arrived on these shores in the 1630's, so I have had to give up on anti-immigrant feeling. Ever since those nasty Scots started showing up in the teens (1810's, I mean), things have been going down hill. The Germans, Jews, Irish, Slavs.... If we're going to complain, then can't I complain that they're all filthy immigrants coming in to take jobs that belong to the colonials like me? The only ones who have any right to complain -- aside from the Indians, of course -- are the descendants of the enslaved Africans. They've been here as long as the planter families and colonists and frigid Puritans. Curiously, when I see anti-immigration protests in Arizona or Texas, I don't see Black people or Colonial families.

It could be, of course, that the Colonials never did protest immigration, that the "Know Nothings" and the like were always a product of immigrants themselves turning on immigration. In The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson is listing all the violations of divine law and common rights that George III had made, and he lists:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

You see, we of the Colonies wanted immigration. We even went to war to allow it. Now, yabbos want to arm themselves to prevent it, and one Great Tit demands the use of Predator drones to blow up economic migrants.

Vietnamese tend to face less of the hatred than "messicans." Nevertheless, the Americans who hate immigrants hate them, too. They say the immigrants stick together, that they talk their foreign language to each other, that they use only their own family members, etc. (They say the same about Indians, of course.)

Me?

I want to know what the heck a star nail is.

Is it a nail made of flaming gas? Is it what a person uses to tack a star in place so that it doesn't slide down the wall? Obviously, if the salon were offering fingernails and toe nails that look the same as Hollywood and Broadway stars, it would be called "Stellar Nails" or "Starring Nails." If it offered nails that shone as if stars in the sky (would anyone want that? it would require them to be 6,000 degrees C), then they'd call the place "Sparkling Nails" or "Twinkling Nails" or "Fusion Powered Nails" or "H-bomb Nails," since I doubt they have the secret of sustained fusion chain reactions (and, if they did, would they not be Topamak Nails?).

We know the place is owned and operated by immigrants, but what if their sign means exactly what it says? What if they really are selling star nails? What if the ladies (and always one boy) working in the place are not from an indistinct far eastern nation believed to be Vietnam but some place... farther away?

Think about it, man.

Advice for Apocalyptic Living

2011-01-13T06:48:00.001-08:00

Eschatology has always been popular, so it is not possible to say that it's more popular now than any random point in the past. There is not a single thing today that is remarkable in this respect. There are movies now? There were then, too. There are books now? There have always been books. There are people holing up with weapons? Again, no news there.

I have, though, wondered at the birds and fishes dying in unexplainable numbers for mysterious causes. There is no reason I can imagine for the apocalypse starting or finishing in Arkansas, any more than I can think of anything to prove that Louisiana hasn't already been visited by the apocalypse, but the prettiest blackbirds dropping from the skies all at once? Fish all at once bobbing to the surface? Both on the same day? If it's not a sign, one wonders.

When I was young, I read up on the end of days and the end of the world. These are separate things. The end of the world is a question of nuclear weapons. The end of days is when time ceases because of the lack of calendars because God made days and their ending. Some people, in the 1970's, were preparing for the one, some for the other, some for both. As a teen, I was secretly eager for either, I think.

It is not quite thanatopsis, this urge. It is not the inborn swim to the spawning grounds to die, the voice that urges us to the wilderness. Instead, especially as the young love the End, it is a seeking out, I think, of heroism. You see, no one could think of the end as the end. The narrative of the end was always a narrative. The gravest silliness going about now is the "Rapture Rangers" of the Left Behind series. While you might think the end of the world, the judgment of the dead, and the second coming would be fully and adequately described in the Bible -- that it would be, after all, the end of things temporal -- they get sixteen "novels" out of the "end." Nuclear war offered us my favorite, Alas, Babylon (the same author's Stop Time is one of the better things a body can read) as well as the nugget-licious On the Beach and Fail Safe. Since those heady days, nuclear war has given us dozens and dozens of films, novels, and genres of fiction and film -- the nuclear zombie, the nuclear mutant, the nuclear survivor, the nuclear nomad.

Both the end times and the end of the world offer the young believer an opportunity at random heroism. This is important. I could not be a super hero. I would never be bitten by a radioactive spider or bombarded by gamma rays or come from Krypton. However, if The Bomb fell, my innate cleverness might make me a hero, and if the end times came, my virtues could make me a "rapture ranger."

For me, scriptures were too serious for any trivializing with fantasy. God is too ineffable for the horrors of a novel about gaming judgment. God's will is too mysterious and magnificent for anyone to put it into a plot. God's mercy is too divine and superior for any author to create lists for the inferno. Therefore, I never got into a pleasure at the thought of the end, but I did get interested in the signs.

Finding signs and omens is like a Bingo game for the faithful that never ends, but we get to call our own cards.

So... suppose one or the other were to happen. By the time I was sixteen, I realized that, in the event of nuclear war I would be a puff of smoke and that, if I weren't, I would wish I had been. By the time I was thirty, I began to wonder whether that genre of nuclear survival fiction was a sign of national denial and trauma or a sneaky way of getting us all to believe that such wars could be survived by the virtuous, that they might be a good way of getting rid of the undesirables and that they might therefore be a militarist's best friend.

Now, though, I think that either of them is not as described by men. End means end. End means, from the point of view of flesh and time and motion in time, end. There is no tricking of God, no mocking of life, and no restitution one might make to oneself for an end. (Does a person with a week to live who goes to get drunk with a prostitute and a wad of heroin 'make up' for a boring life? Of course not.)

So, if you think there's an apocalypse of any nature coming, I have some advice. You won't be too shocked, I hope, if it echoes what one finds in the Gospels.
1. Don't pay any attention to it.
2. Pay attention to being a good, loving person.
3. Live each day ready for the last, morally.
Climbing on the roof with a bucket or barrel is not required. Buying gold is not helpful. Getting juicy over the prospect of your neighbors dying is almost certainly not to your advantage.

Crazy people

2011-01-09T11:28:00.001-08:00

First, I want to point out that

THAT is some darned fine writing, and it's not fair that I should get nothing for it.

Secondly, as we have an attack by an insane person on a politician in the midst of horrid speech acts and violent implications, the subject of crazy people versus evil people comes up ... again. While the New York Times talks about how this violence shines a light on hate speech... sorry, I mean "hateful" speech... there is a very important nut to be pried lose from the conversation, and that's the attacker.

Congresswoman Giffords's opponent held fun and wholesome events for the whole family, like an M-16 shooting contest. Sarah Palin seemed to need, desperately, for true patriots to "take aim" at Giffords and had a picture of her in the crosshairs, but we now learn that... heck!... they didn't mean it! (You see, in art, we would say that the author does not get to determine the meaning of the message, that the message is produced by author, medium, and audience together, and this only in the act of reading. For Sarah Palin, though, the things mean what she wants them to mean, to the degree she wants them to mean them, and change.) And Republican senators are saying that the crosshairs thing is the fault of anyone who questions it. Lamar Alexander says that people simply shouldn't talk about Sarah Palin's bounty on Giffords.

Now, lets look at all of these weasels and agree that they are vicious, spineless, unAmerican, and undeserving of a place in a polite society. Any person who advocates, or allows advocacy, of violence to settle what cannot be settled democratically in a nation of laws is a criminal, and that includes Palin and the rest.

There is no innocent way to flirt with "second amendment remedies," in Sharron Angle's term. (She was referring to what would happen if she didn't get elected senator: someone would "remedy" the problem by means of arms.)

However, the person who pulled the trigger in this instance does not appear to be a political assassin. He does not seem to be a Leon Czolgosz or even a Sacco and Vanzetti. His Face Book and MySpace pages -- now aired for everyone to ridicule and speculate on -- show that his favorite books "were"... everything a high school kid reads, with the addition of Ayn Rand and Hitler. On political blogs, the right wing trolls are trying to say that he is a leftist because someone remembered him in high school being left wing and because he read Animal Farm and Brave New World. He rants extensively on YouTube about "grammar thought control." He looks for love, begging for attention, and shouts out how angry he is.

That combination of hostility and loneliness is the very definition of the floundering teen. It's why I was dateless for a long time, and why you were -- if you were. It's why adolescent males are toxic substances. We can't help it, of course.

It's the other element, though, that we need to look at. Ignore the fact that the young man dropped out of high school, couldn't stay in community college, and had a trivial reading list for now. Ignore, for now, the "Im cool" gestures. Look at the "thought control by grammar" and the use of past tense. Notice the YouTube conspiracy videos. Kurt Vonnegut said that 14 year old boys make the best soldiers, because they are filled with hormones and have no conscience. Seventeen year old boys are not much better, except that they're angrier. Take that anger and offer it an outlet, give it a target, and you can man your phone bank, fill your lines, and field an army. You can't, though, get a killer, usually.

Paranoid schizophrenics kill. The reason they're not out there being manipulated and used more often is that they almost always insist on a private mythology for their delusions. If Glenn Beck's personal mythology has George Soros pulling the strings of the world, a paranoid schizophrenic listening to him will reject it. Instead, his or her illness will make some other thing, some private signifier, blend in. The angry boy will go off and beat an immigrant for you, and a paranoid schizophrenic will kill, but not for you. The paranoid will take something from school, like grammar lessons, and then inflate that into something huge, and then that will combine with the next thing he hears, and, like a myna bird, he will create a phrase of objects for a master myth.

I actually know something about this, as I probably had a thing akin to it when I was young. I can't say that I was paranoid, nor even schizophrenic, but I know the delusional web. My psychological response to having endless profusions of tubes running into my arm and groin, keeping me alive, was to believe that they were, instead, draining away my soul, and then that such 'tubes' were contained in any touch between any two people, and thus that any touch with any person meant a vampiric draining.

I got over it.

The point is that no one wove that for me. I did it myself, with emotion plus random objects.

The shooter, here, seems, and seeming is all there will be, to be a paranoid schizophrenic. If there was a white male in his 50's who brought the shooter to the rally and launched him at the dais, then that is a killer. That is the difference between the insane and the evil.