Job and the Neutrality of Suffering

“'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 Job 3, where Job curses the day of his birth. It's a long way to go for a joke, 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 now I know it,” is similarly mirthlessly funny. One of the reasons I like these writers so much is that they had been made unafraid, had been plunged into the miseries and truths we would like to avoid, and had gotten a humor that was neither gallows nor false out of it. Samuel Johnson wanted epitaphs to be dignified and to elevate the sentiments 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 dead and the living.

I could expound on the ambiguous “now” of John Gay's grave marker, but there is no point. Instead, I have been thinking about Job. The book of Job is pretty ancient, and the textual folks think it may be the oldest part of the Bible. Those who notice that invariably go wrong by then doing source studies and looking at analogs. They have a project of reconstructing the True Meaning of “the adversary” as the composer of the book 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 and divinity 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 illness a 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. The friend 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 confess sins by commission. Job's friends can make no sense of his sufferings without a more primitive belief than Eliphaz is willing to admit. Eliphaz might say, in effect, "Everyone is sinful and deserves a kick, so don't defend yourself," he seems to believe that not admitting some active sinfulness (not marching up to the altar rail to confess) is the reason that God is punishing Job. In other words, he thinks that all deserve punishment, and none get it. However, by refusing to say you deserve it in a specific way (by not committing sins willfully), you will be punished.
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

It's time to have it 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 it once. 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 the glass sky scraper it bumps into?

Immediately after September 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 none of that. First, there were worthier stories, worthier people, worthier deeds and witnesses. Secondly, I had nothing to say. Nor was I honoring my phlegmatic heritage nor modesty by trying to allow the graver wounds a place in line.

Whenever there are military memoirs, they begin with statements like, “I arrived on Paris Island October 3, 1967” or “I served Mil. Sec. IV, Advanced Combat, for III Corps in-country 1971.” This is one reason such memoirs have always had the smell of gun oil about them for me. They begin, and sometimes continue, with barking of incomprehensible military acronyms and slang, and I never understood why any honest person would write that way until I came to write about 9/11 for a wide audience this year (2011). I make no claims for my honesty, but the reason that the military memoir starts with such mystifying language is fear. It is the same reason that I would not go forward at the time, the same reason I would not speak of my experiences, the same reason that I do not have a right to be bothered by them now.

We live in a world of official voices and official views, an atmosphere deep in images and narratives of what has happened and, worse, what it means or meant. A soldier writing about Fallujah first knows that an official account exists and/or that 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, “Richard Lowry'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 to say exactly who they were inside the context of the military and how they have a right to a story in the first place. Even if the public never challenges the author, the author feels that challenge, just because she or he knows about the competition, knows that, in a sense, the world does not need a new story as much as the author needs the world to hear it.

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

My experiences were non-traumatic. I lost no loved ones. I was not injured. My apartment did not burn, and I did not even go without electricity. I have the least right to a voice of any who were on Manhattan that day. This is a fact, and it is an inescapable one. I have reminded myself of it, too. Every time that the vague misery, the disquiet that cannot be found or quelled, the sense of misunderstanding and theft, has come up, I have repeated this to myself. I can be depressed about my economic position, my finances, my family life, my love life, politics, the people claiming to speak for 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 knew talked about them at all. We knew about them, so we didn't talk about them. Even as we navigated around the attack sites, we did not speak of them. As we developed strategies for teaching students who had lost parents, we did not speak of the attacks. As we saw and read about the clean ups that were going to identify “abandoned” cars and property, we did not say anything. In fact, the first time I remember even alluding to the attacks with another New Yorker was in early August of 2003, when I was on the #6 train, heading home at 4:30, and the power went out just as the train was over the Bronx River. We sat in the car for twenty minutes before MTA had a solution, and, while we sat there, we talked, and several of us were of the opinion that it was another terrorist attack, and we'd just have to find out after we got somewhere what was affected. (We sat in the car for only twenty minutes, because the MTA had all sorts of plans and were very well practiced. They got us from a trestle bridge to a station without A/C power.) The attacks were there, like the delays, like the smoke, like the hole, like the idiot tourists, like the souvenir sellers from New Jersey, like the new emergency plans, like the economic depression that hit the island, so what was to talk about?

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

My experience was of an open question, of an unsolvable riddle. I do not mean “Why did they do it?” Who cares why they did it? It would make no difference. I do not mean, “What are we going to do about it?” It doesn't matter what we do, neither to the dead nor the living. I also do not mean, “What does this mean?” I think most people would be satisfied with knowing that it is random or purposed or cut off from sequence. I mean, instead, “Who am I in this? What happened?”

That year, 2006, I grappled with the single question that had been most on me since the day: am I brave, selfish, giving, or cold? Hundreds of people 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 and cried with survivors, but I didn't. I was practical. I was analytical. I was intellectual. I considered the various authorities, evaluated them, and made decisions. The jumpers and those who were showered with body parts or the binary of life/death presented in a second mesmerized me as a symbol of all of these questions combined. Neither prepared, thought, analyzed, but each had to be herself or himself, and I did not know that I had such a self to rely on, that there was a core beyond the analytical. The artist – refined soul, delicate senses – and the vision most raw and unsought flung upon her became my heroine. She was 9/11 in sum. [I link little. I can tolerate few.]

Five years later, the world has only grown colder, and the chill has allowed 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 the Palestinian 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 and arbitrary edges cannot be understood by the living, because to understand a thing, we have to have a concept of it, and that means being able to define it. To define something, we must know where it begins and ends. (Hegel's phenomenology vexes us because, if someone points at an apple and says, “I mean that apple,” he says, “By apple to do you mean the skin, the red, the shape, the thing on the table, the thing on this table, the thing and the table, the thing, table and chairs? What is it exactly that makes it 'this'?”) When there is a 9/11, no one inside it can know it. It is too big, and we are too small.

We started out not knowing what was happening, but we who lived did so 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 the attack were changing. We all knew and mourned and loved the lost firefighters and police who responded to the attacks. We took flowers to the fire houses. However, before Oliver Stone's movie, “9/11,” came out, but definitely shortly after, the nation's image of the victims of the attack changed from stock brokers and office workers to firefighters and police. The image now is perhaps two large, empty buildings falling on 3,000 firemen.

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

The attacks also meant the rapid passing of numerous laws that took away civil rights from citizens. There followed new practices and Executive Orders that reversed longstanding U.S. practices. These are each comprehensible. The wars fit into a narrative logic for the national mind and mood. The civil rights measures affect citizens and inflame imaginations. If we combine this “meaning of 9/11” with the other, we have either a fascist or proudly strong state either regaining its strength or betraying its foundations. Either way, it makes for good television and good debate. It also makes for possible debate.
From Iwo Jima.com: a vigorous debate!
As the tenth anniversary has come along, outrage pushed me. I am no closer to solving the questions the day embedded in my soul. I do not know who I am at core, do not think that I have now grown some core being that would show in the flame. I do not know what the day meant. I do, however, know that understanding its ineffability will do absolutely 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 facts yet.

I should allow the nation its track and train, and saying “Not in my name” rings hollow, but there is an evil at work that is as old as the serpent. Humans can turn on the television or the DVD-box and 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 a knife to stab another man in the stomach. However, if we hear a baby cry, 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 have a place in our minds called Story. In Story, violence is acceptable, because it is “not real” and always has a reason. For a non-sociopath, reality is sharply different, and the person who can watch violence in story may not be able to watch any pain in person. 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 it propaganda. Other times, it is done unintentionally, and we should watch out. I hope what is happening to 9/11 is unintended. I hope that the news people of the moment and the producers today were and are overwhelmed by the event and as unable to put contours onto experience as we were, that they were as shocked and blinded by the violence as we and that their subconscious minds merely protect them by imposing a narrative. However, after a decade it is no longer possible to forgive or excuse imposing story.

The actual story tellers have avoided narrative (“9/11” and “Flight 93”), 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 is the battle to find the Guy” (climax) and a wished-for “Mission Accomplished” (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 fiction of getting “the guys who did this.” They, of course, were dead already.

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 be untellable. 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 stop inflicting the trauma on us is to let the trauma be too big to be falsified.

The Crime of Cant

"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 of 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

"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

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?

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

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!

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

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

"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.