A Really Immature Femme?

This is a movie review of a film you've never seen. Don't worry: it's absolutely not important that I'm right about the movie. If I am or I am not will make no difference to whether or not you should see it, and the only way you can see it is by going to a dimly flourescently lit video store or belonging to Netflix. The film du femme is "A Real Young Girl" ("Une Vraie Jeune Fille") written and directed by Catherine Breillat.

So, why write about a suppressed and virtually unknown French film? Well, imagine the most unrealistically gynephobic voice from The Vagina Monologues and imagine that voice got over the class consciousness and was given a 16 mm film camera and a cast and crew. Also imagine that, instead of being a poor or bourgeoise woman of the usual sort, she went to the Sorbonne around 1971 and got a head full of ecrit feminine and, amazingly, believed it. Astonishing, stretching credulity, I know, but you have to imagine the combination of "writing is done by the vulva" with "I hate my vagina" and keep all the narcissism that leads to a one-woman show. You then have to put all of that into the amazingly cold and treacherous medium of film and ... wait until you hear this ... expect people to think the result is deeply real.

The star of the film is a very, very beautiful young lady whose other films are confined to pornography of the lighter sort. All the men show their penises, and pretty much all of the women show their mons veneris, while our heroine is inserted, opened, and given metonymic close ups. Remember: this is feminism. This is truth. Essentially, our heroine loves disgusting things because she disgusts herself, even as she desires the disgusting things that disgust her, and she is compelled to sitting wrong way on the potty, denying would-be lesbian lovers, and rejecting the boys she finds arousing because of her disgust, while she has to look longingly at her father's inappropriate genital display because it's disgusting. She's a filthy whore, her mother tells her, and so she feels ashamed and desirous of shame and being violated by men who simply don't give a f....

Haven't we heard this story before, and didn't we find it unconvincing? Didn't it seem like hyperbole already? What's worse is that this compulsion to document is doubly complicit. On the one hand, the author (of the "novel," Breillat, when there might be six pages of dialog in the whole movie...but dialog isn't something she's interested in, as that involves other people) is inflicting her vision on an actress and some actors, so, if she's out to tell her personal story of shame and nymphomania, she's making someone else go through it. On the other hand, the moment you film a woman's vagina being dressed in earthworms, you have committed pornography. If there is supposed to be some healing process back there, some way that the director is getting over her bad upbringing and shame by pictorializing it, then she's picking a medium in which she must, by the very nature of it, do exactly as she complains: expose her genitalia to express her revulsion of it, become a pornographer to complain about pornography. It's chowderheaded in the extreme, or else it's smugly recidivous. This is pornography from Andrea Dworkin, psychotherapy from Mark Foley, a reformation of manners from Heidi Fleiss.

If you, personally, do not get along with your naughty bits, that's a matter for the couch. Filming it and enacting it means that you have some hope or some doom to seek. Later on, Breillat would continue her pornography as protest with Romance (which is even duller and more disconnected from its own medium than A Real Young Girl is, as its central conceit is that a woman is only interested in a man who is gay/impotent with her, while she goes about getting raped and accosted and whipped in sadomasochism and provides us with exceptionally leaden monologs about her vagina), and there a baby and the timely death of its father would prove to cure the problems.

I know I'm doing nothing to get you interested in these films, and I'm not trying to. Instead, I'm thinking about the powerful mystery of sex. It is a powerful mystery, because we make it one. Give a person enough time, and he or she will become convinced that accidents of birth explain everything, that the root of all problems is some thing that can't quite be examined. Usually, it's parents. This is a good ticket for a while, but being a boy (when you wish you could cry at movies) or a girl (when you wish you could just charge through life without a care) will show up at some point. Being small/large, top heavy/top light, ugly/beautiful, dark/fair will explain most of your problems, if you're left alone for long enough.

The fact is that your genitals have very little to do with anything. They serve their function, or they don't, but most of the time, even if you're Wilt Chamberlain, or Agrippina the Younger, they're just minding their business and waiting for the next overfull bladder. Oh, there are all sorts of potent chemicals given off by them, and they do tend to "flash and yearn," as John Berryman said in "Dreamsong 14" (read it at the Poetry Foundation). They flash when near an object, suitable or not, and yearn for use, but they don't do a lot else. Men are lucky, in that theirs are usually in view, but then that means that they get obsessed with cyllinders and sizes and such. Women need a step ladder and a mirror and seem to be inhabited by a cranky stranger, and that can lead to all of this mystification and worry and hatred directed at a not much at all.

Sex (not gender, which is appropriately complained of by everyone...even the chick magnet and party girl) is elusive enough and mercurial enough and deeply seated enough to act as a great locus of problems. Why not, after all?

The problem is that you only have a 1:2 choice, and every single thing you suffer from, being male or female, is something that around half the population suffers from. You're not the first one. You're not the proper spokesperson. It's normal. It's normally difficult, normally unsatisfactory, normally obvious and normally obscure. If you let it get to the point where you think your personality, much less your writing, criticism, and speech, are determined by this one extrusion or recession of embryology, I can only draw one conclusion: you're bored. You obviously need a real enemy or friend.

Given how many victims of violence there are, how many starving, how many tortured, how many disappeared, how many discriminated against, how many fattened, how many derided, how many bullied, how many kicked out of home, how many preyed upon by bankers, how many shipped out of the country, how many jobless, how many addicted, how many leading anonymous lives, how many abused in elder care, what the hell are you doing worrying about how much you hate your pee-pee?

Cliff's Edge Notes for the below post

The blog entry below this one is dense. I wrote it all at one throw, in a stream of consciousness, and like a lot of bad stream of consciousness writing, it required that you have read the same books as I at the same time and understood them the same way. Well, that might work for some people, but I'm nobody and have ambition to one day be nothing. No clove cigarette from my lips, beret on my shaggy head, no chaps on my broad thighs, no New York acclaim is mine. Therefore, I'll try to be less opaque.

I. Why I failed to communicate:
Well, the big thing is that the first paragraph is comprehensible enough, but then I have two paragraphs of etudes on 18th century philosophers and poets whom I hardly identify and do not explain. I then go to a fully frenzied rant about conservatives. That's normal enough, but no one's reading by that point.

II. The schoolboy philosophy
1. John Locke
Locke's empiricism begins with the senses. He maintains that we are made of our experiences, made by them, and not by an inherent essence. We are not born to be a king or a pauper, but we are made into a king or pauper by our experiences. Furthermore, we know nothing without perception. Percept leads to concept -- the inward shape of the outward sense -- through synthesis and distinction in the human mind. Now, what's important is that you not put a Nehru jacket on him: he is not B. F. Skinner in a periwig. He's closer to Arthur Koestler than that. Locke does not see us as wholly without innate qualities, and he believes that we have a sixth-ish sense, the sense of commonality, the common sense. It is this that allows us to combine disparate sensations into types, to form generalizations, to make predictions. This is coupled with judgment or wit, which allows us to distinguish individuals and to analyze complexes into their components. Remember this common sense.
2. Shaftesbury (the not-Zimri one) and the Killer B.
Shaftesbury had suggested that there is a different innate sense, a sort of common sense of morality. There is, he thought, an inward sense of the right. This (we mustn't call it a moral sense yet, historically, but it was in all but name) sense told us what is right and good, and it responded to that which is harmonious. According to Shaftesbury, we are all inherently inclined toward goodness. Now, we go awry, of course, but, left alone, we would be good if we could. In opposition to this was Bernard de Mandeville, whose "The Grumbling Hive" and "Fable of the Bees," suggested that, in fact, we're much more beastly than that. We are, at heart, selfish, and this selfishness does not result in anarchy. Instead, greedy, carnal, miserly, spendthrift, and rapacious individuals generate a social good by their very vices, that they employ people, that they generate surplus wealth that must flush out into a generalized economy. That's a cheap version of Mandeville, who is really quite nuanced, but it's not unfair. Mandeville saw humans beneficial in aggregate, not in individuals.
3. Hutcheson
Francis Hutcheson was going to save Shaftesburian optimism (the sort of optimism even Pope wouldn't have endorsed) by reiterating and systemizing the sense of goodness Shaftesbury had posited in a Lockean system. He's the one who argues that the moral sense is a sense as natural as the sense of commonality in Locke. He suggests something akin to a pleasure sense, a sense of fitness and beauty inherent in the human mind. This allows us to have a universal sense of beauty and a universal sense of morality.

III. The screed about Conservative "Thinkers"
I was pissed off that my edition of Hutcheson came from The Liberty Fund, Inc. The problem is that there are mutliple funds and institutes like this that are interested in bolstering the "heritage" of conservativism. They do this by appealing to the 18th century in England almost without fail. However, they either don't read all of it or they pretend that they're unaware of the debates that the "heroes" of conservativism were engaged in. They seem to have read passages of Locke, but ignore the fact that he was trying to overthrow absolute monarchism. They have headlines from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, but no awareness of Mandeville or Hobbes. They especially like to cut out paper dolls from Adam Smith, but never understand his Theory of Moral Sentiments or even the introduction to Wealth of Nations.

IV. The quick summary of the blog post below
There exists a trend in America where right wing groups have decided that they need "intellectuals." Therefore, they have these groups who have read excerpts from the 18th century and publish them for everyone. The members of these groups then get rolled out on dollies whenever conservatives need "intellectuals." They're not intellectuals, or not intellectually honest, because they have a clip-art view of 18th century political philosophy. By stopping the clock at various points to grab one tired Scotsman or another by his collar and hauling him out to say something, they're missing the entire context of 18th century Insular philosophy, which was a dialog of empiricism trying to deal with its glaring epistemological shortcoming (i.e. "How can we be only our experiences and yet not be plants spinning about in phototropism?). Each of philosopher tried to spackle over the dent at the bottom of the system, and their opponents were no better at system building than they were, but the very imperfection and mortal stature of the philosophers kept them going at it.

Conservatives these days don't have intellectuals, because their practical system is antithetical to everything the empiricists would have endorsed, and their quoted fathers, Locke and Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, would have had Barry Goldwater brought to the Old Bailey, while they would have had W. Bush committed to a private asylum. All the same, conservatives fool themselves and apply small dabs of ointment to their intellectual consciences by saying, 'Oh, yes, what we're doing is firmly rooted in the best part of intellectual history.' What they're doing is, in fact, global rape, but they convince themselves of the lie and then expect the gullible and the long gummed to believe it, too.

The Clown of Unknowing

I was listening to my favorite show just a bit ago, "Music for Lava Lamps." Before it could be replaced by "Mambos for the Gormless," I tried to relax and float amongst the astrals, but to know a veil. I'm far too riddled with guilt and riddles to enjoy the echo of thoughts on the vastness of my tiny skull, so, instead, I read a bit of Dorothy Parker and some Francis Hutcheson. One of them was a lot more pleasing to me than the other, I can tell you, and even though it was a story she had failed to finish. My danged fool lava lamp was looking more like a poop lamp than a lava lamp, and I understood why one fool damned himself by putting his on a stove top. It's supposed to be a lamp, and lamps are supposed to be hot.

So, there is Hutcheson, next big thing of 1725, trying to save poor Shaftesbury (the good one, not the Zimri one) from a grumbling hive of killer B's. Bernard (the killer bee) had said that everything was selfishness, and Shaftesbury had talked about an inward goodness that generates a sense of morality, and Hutcheson tried to ... really... just replicate Locke. (He's a major philosopher why?) Locke's empiricism has needed five senses and an inward common sense. I.e. it had specified a sense innate in the human (even tabula rasa) that synthesized and distinguished impulses. This common sense was necessary to save us from being vegetables turning toward the sun. Hutcheson just says that there is an innate common sense of morality that takes actions of beauty and rightness and synthesizes and distinguishes them. Big deal. To my knowledge, Mandeville never returned fire, but it would have been amazingly easy to do so. Even as Hutcheson's "greatest good for the greatest number" (it's his phrase, y'all) turns into Utilitarianism (and you thought it was their phrase), Mandeville's cynical retort is always lodged just beneath the flesh. Let's say that that inward sense of morality and common good is not a sense but a need. Let's say that it is the need for either getting goods or the need for simple company. Let's suppose that humans are naturally social. I mean that they're naturally social. (We know, as clever citizens of the future, that humans are.) Mr. Hutcheson, meet situational ethics, which will knife you the moment no one is looking.

I was hoping for more. It's not that I thought I was going to get very much more from Hutcheson, and his aesthetics are great for swinging the hinge on Samuel Johnson's more out-of-depth Rambles, but it was rather sad all the same. What's worse is that the edition I got was published by some highly suspicious group. It's published by (and I say this to my great remorse) The Liberty Fund, Inc. of that mecca of metropolitain thought, Indianapolis, Indiana. Oh sadness! Finally, 18th century philosophers reprinted, with decent introductions by real philosophy types, and done by a Liberty Fund, a fund, no doubt, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and that all governments are created in Hell. Oh, my! How does the introduction begin? With a quotation of the Commonwealth of Virginia declaration of rights. What is the spirit of the introduction? Francis Hutcheson is important for American independence. All of that is true, but all of it is worrisome.

I don't worry that they stop the clock in 1765. I worry that they excerpt the clock. Bernard de Mandeville is much closer to David Stockman and Ronald Reagan's philosophy than Shaftesbury (the good one) is. John Locke would take one look at Alfred W. Newman, the current Prednisent of the US, and shriek. Heck, the entire ship load of 18th century philosophers would stand, mouths agape, staring in disbelief at Goldwatery conservativism. They never once thought of their "liberty" as the defense of the rich against obligation. They never once thought of freedom as being the tax cheat's rally cry for his survivalist time share in Montanna. Furthermore, they were men always in dialog with one another. The certainty of each brings out the skeptic in the other. Because the "John Locke Society" (click on that only if you have taken your dramamine) and Liberty Funds of this world present only the selected highlights of the thought they think instrumental, they leave out what that thought was thinking about. They leave out the earlier positive statements that their demurrals refer to, the earlier provocations that their assertions seek to stabilize. They also cut out all those nasty clarifications and challenges that would make these versions of empiricism look naive.

You want to read Locke? Do. Read Swift, too, though. You want to read Essay on Man? Do. Read also Caleb Williams.

I'm a long way from Music for Lava Lamps, I'm afraid, but this is why I couldn't space out. There are people out there who swing dead philosophers like truncheons, who know not one end from the other but who nevertheless shove them forward whenever their absurdity and illiteracy is pointed out. Those people, then, are exalted as intellectuals by the manifestly anti-intellectual "conservative movement." "Oh," they say, "you should read George F. Will! He's an intellectual!" No. He's just another craven egoist.

Conservativism as it exists in the United States is all about selfishness. It might reach as far and climb as high as being vaguely eugenicist, but it's generally the life of the market, and the market is about a profit now, not about an investment. The only miracle is that these people managed to ever plan anything, given how much instant return they demand, and they only planned in the sense that they kept repeating themselves for lack of anything new to say. Conservativism isn't about "values," except as they allow the conservatives to beat up on others and define themselves as Not Them. (Do we really need the rogue's gallery of GOP congress golems caught with their pants down this year alone? Do we really need to name all the ones divorcing multiple times, leaving dying wives, and sleeping with same sex partners of various ages?) It isn't about Christianity, except that it gets them elected (as Bush makes fun of fundamentalists while claiming to be one and the GOP national convention arranged the rostrums to look like Calvary, which would shock a devout person with its hubris). It isn't about the market, except that it is about profit. (Can we find one who hasn't enriched himself with shady deals?)

Conservativism is about denying the common sense, the moral sense, the universal sense of the beautiful. It is about appetite and cancerous expansion. It is voracious, anti-moral, and as thoughtful and intellectual as a reflex.

How can I mellow out? How can I rest and listen to Sigur Ros noodle meaninglessly in authentic New Norse Gibberish? I was better off reading Dorothy Parker, I think. She only had the horrors of Warren G. Harding's illegitimate daughter and the profundity of Calvin Coolidge to complain about. While she never seemed to go see a good play, at least there were plays to go see that hadn't yet been subverted to glorifying the greatest dunces of her age. In her day, the conservatives at least had the good sense to wear top hats and spats, so the poor people weren't so duped as they are now.

My stupid lava lamp still looks like a stool. Everything kind of does these days.

October Harvest

The fatted smoke of burnt offerings,

the sacrifices in memory,

chokes your heart, and you wonder if you

dowse it with the three raindrops on a coat sleeve,

the expressive spatter of mud on a boot's shank,

the bleating of an ewe. From such a place, speak.

The dance steps are broken, the dancers renew

but the sound of the empty hall echoes in the sighs of the wallflowers,

the rumble of the chairs, and two balloons left over,

the humid car on a rainy evening, and the gravel of the train tracks.

As dark breaks free from the horizon hills

and sweeps you into its heart, shuffles you away,

ever away,

the night fires start, the signal men rouse themselves from their cabins,

and the priest mops the spilled blood from the sacrifice of the wedding party.


(My apologies. No, I don't think this is good. I just think it's an explanation of the last week or more.)

Exampli Gratia

Because the previous two posts (look down, dang it) may seem like more academic muttering, I've decided to give just examples of what happens when the world goes wrong and people, left in a mass, an undifferentiated and unmotivated mass, start to define their own clubhouses. Trust me: I'm not being fey. This is important in its consequences, even if there is nothing apparent in the way of solutions. (That said, it's always nice when you know what the real causes are, because only this will prevent the unforgivable hydroencephalitis of mounting a crusade against "PC" or "fundamentalists" or other persons who are merely being persons who have retreated to the safety of their tree forts. (If I never close my parentheses, I can never die.)

I regard any other web or computer identities I might have as irrelevant both to my life as I live it and to ideas and cultural history, and yet I have seen a perfect illustration of my point recently, and so I have to give in and mention the world of e-people. In general, I like dogs much more than people. ("History is more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than friends," as Alexander Pope said.) As little as I care about people, I care about e-people even less.

In this web encyclopedia, a number of rules have been growing for the last few years, and sometimes new behaviors show up that aren't covered. That has meant that some of the administrators react quickly, without consideration of any procedure, and do so because they know best. This has prompted other administrators to oppose them. The first group then set up an IRC channel simply to talk to each other. Since the group was founded on the basis of "the rules are onerous and get in the way of what's best," the discussion in that IRC channel is propelled by presitge earned by showing greater and greater scorn for the opposing administrators and regular users. Because it came into existence for people who think they know best, the participants have to know better than the best of each other, have to keep moving the down marker, keep saying worse and worse things about regular folks and acting in more and more outrageous ways.

Or, let's consider a college, or even a church, set up along the lines of being "real Christians." The very definition is contrary. It is built on not being like the others -- the others being the "false Christians" or the "humanists." Therefore, one moves up in these ranks by being less and less in conversation with the rest of the society. It begins with disallowing Halloween celebrations, goes briefly to avoiding R-rated movies, and then cheerfully mows down all music not in the "Christian" rack, television, most radio, most novels, etc. Soon, greater and greater public avowals of religion turn to religiosity. It is spiritual pride that didn't start out with self-love at all. Instead, it started with rejection, with exception, with umbrage. It began not with any desire to make oneself the holiest, but rather a desire to be least like the plainly degenerate secular world.

I know it wasn't clear, before, so let me try one last time: When any group is founded on umbrage, on exception, on rejection, that group is going to gain momentum in its divergence until it ends in absurdity and frenzy.

The socialists began by rejection of the decadent capitalists of the everyday society, and soon they begin sniffing out counter-revolutionaries and insincere bourgeoise apologists. The feminists begin by being more free than the male dominated and masculine-identified world, and soon they are declaring that all heterosexual women are subjugated. If the founding principle is fear, disgust, or reform, the ultimate conclusion, if there are no checks, will be solitariness, harshness, and a competition to be extreme.

Perhaps I am being too general. Perhaps I am being hasty in saying that this must happen. However, it must happen to the degree that exception and umbrage are the only ideals and motives. If there is a normative value connected to the rejection of the wickedness, then frenzy may not result. If there is a utopia to distinguish from the dystopia of the real, then there is a chance that the group will become Shakers. It's all a question of whether fear and persecution are the only impulse or not and whether such rejection can achieve satisfaction without compromise. Even when excepting groups have normative and utopian visions, they have to fight against those who compete for negation.

There is no answer for this, by the way. I said that the answer is to ask the town what words mean, but there is no force on earth that can prevent people from dividing up into neighborhoods with neighborhood patrols. Therefore, the only answer I know of is an individual one. I can't stop the persecuted from becoming persecutors, and neither can you, but you can ask yourself, every time you find a new group that wants to include you or that you want to join, if the group offers something to be, or just something to not be.

Gimme Back My Umbrage pt 2

So, is everyone good and drunk? Fat and happy yet? If this post makes no sense, it's because you folks are drunken gluttons.... Or it could be because you didn't read "Gimme Back My Umbrage" first. (The possibility that I am incomprehensible will not be admitted.)

"He that complies against his will,

Is of his own opinion still." -- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

The problem with a town that splinters in its language is not merely that the linguistic community is no longer cohesive, and therefore that language's meaning is weakened. It is not that introspection over words begins to take precedence over speaking to communicate. Those may well be problems, but they are tangential to the psychological and anti-social component of such a rupture. Why do people change their minds about terms? The terminology we have been discussing before are "identity politics" terms and general onomastics. Those change because of the projection of a group onto itself, or sometimes a projection of an individual onto him or herself. Therefore, succeeding at it gives an alternative identity, but it succeeds not because folks agree with it, but because the general speech community fears offense, and they do that because it threatens their peace.

Once there is success along these lines, then we set up a race, a race to take umbrage. Each person who needs additional esteem or wishes to reverse a political or social wrong, are encouraged to go as far as fast as they can. (Of course, where there is demonstrable and unquestionable social persecution, no one is going to disagree with any harmless effort at reversing such differentials, or erasing them. Thus, the "negro" to "Black" change -- part of "Black is Beautiful" -- was something everyone could get behind, while my dog's self-esteem is unaltered by becoming a canine American.) The race to offense is my topic in general. Once we set up power for the offended, we make offense more attractive than negotiation or forgiveness.

I'm reminded, inevitably, of what happens when religious communities gain power by being more "primitive" or "reformed" than the others. It begins with an overburdened and corrupt establishment, but it quickly gets to the Committee for Public Safety. It begins with selling indulgences and ends with shattered stain glass windows. In the Islamic world right now, the always shaky doctrinal authority has been superseded entirely by the race to be more restrictive and "holy" than the next fellow. The Koran might mention purdah (as Leviticus does, and as early Christian documents do in a lessened form), but that doesn't mean much. It says that women ought not be showing off their bodies and keeping male worshippers from paying attention and encouraging other women to get into a fashion show. Fine. So, one Islam group says, "Veil? You horrible heathens! We make our women cover their whole head!" The next says, "Head? You can still see their breasts, you dogs! We make ours wear robes!" The next says, "Robes? You have no faith at all. We make our women wear full sheets!" The next says, "Those sheets are awfully alluring. We make our women wear trashbags over their whole bodies!" Next will be burqahs without eye holes.

Lest we engage in fashionable Islamobashism, let's remember Christian and Jewish communities that have done much the same. Remember our beloved "Pilgrim Fathers" in the United States, who began wanting to get rid of the accidental confusion of intercessory saints and angels with idolatry and quickly (very, very quickly) got into a similar contest of umbrage? "You people got rid of saint statues, but you have saints in your painted windows!" This is followed by the tinkling of broken glass. "You just break the stained glass windows? We think singing is pride!" Down comes the choir loft. "You got rid of the singing, but you send your priests to seminary instead of relying entirely upon inspiration of the moment? You heathens!" No more apostolic succession, then. "You still have your women worship with the men, though," says another Puritain group. Welcome the single sex non-monastic religious houses.

What is the power of Jerry Fallwell and Donald Wildmon? Is it his attractive good looks, soothing voice, and doctrinal expertise? What was the power of Mary Whitehouse in the UK? What was the power of even Flush Limbaugh? These people all have the power of offense. They have the power of endless piety through eternal restriction. By advocating little but shouting and pounding out their philippics constantly, they attract those who seek to define in contradiction to the speech of the wider community. The "culture" is "seccalar hoomanist." By whittling, by carving a group away from the block of humanity and then a group from that and then a group from that, the power is in the attraction of being offended. If you are most offended, you are most pious and empowered.

Part of this is probably sociology. If you put people into a very crowded auditorium, they will soon created a living room sized space out of it.

However, the critical thing for me is that "PC" and shouting out objections to the decadent society of "political correctness" are the same fundamental action in terms of language. Both attempt to create an alternative discourse by refusing the terminology of the wider culture. Both empower by using umbrage. The general culture acceeds to these requests for fear, for desire of peace, but the end result is that the cohesion of the underlying communication is weakened even as the possibility of cultural progress is destroyed by that culture's being made up not of a whole, but of factions and fractions. The inherent hypocrisy (that each group needs to reject and vilify the culture as an imagined whole) is apparent, but the danger lies not in that as much as in the way that this tendency renders all our words meaningless.

Now, sober up and go on a diet.

Gimme Back My Umbrage!

Gimme back my bullets.

My roommate's gun got nine bullets.

I'm sick of umbrage being taken, and I think it's time for umbrage to be given. The great Holy Spirit covers us, and dawn shows his brooding over the world. Let's all sigh, raise a glass of hackles, and show our bristles, for we make a bloody world thereby.

(The photo on the right is just a backyard of a house I lived in. Pretty, isn't it?)

We are surely cursed by our own genius. This blog entry will be part of a series, I'm afraid, although each time I hope it's the last I have to say on the subject. Unfortunately, it blends in with the two posts on deconstruction and the prednisent, below/above/before. The actual subject here is interpretation of language, again, but this time in an examination of what happens when we don't ask the town what a word means, or when the town is constrained by half of an ideology of niceness.

It used to be en vogue to kvetch about "political correctness." Students today searching the world wide web will probably stumble across one or another of the old Jeremiads and be puzzled. They won't know what "PC" is. What's more, they won't be able to figure it out from the rants, either. They'll encounter Limbaugh setting up a hue and cry against it. They'll find William Bennett yelling about it, and George F. Will. They'll even find Lewis Lapham upset about it, and they'll all be right, or seemingly right, but I doubt anyone will be able to figure out who the "politically correct" advocates are from those rants. Who on earth had been in favor of this absurdity?

No one was, of course, and yet everyone was. Oh, one minor tea light of intellect or another might have campaigned for one piece of what came to be called "PC" or another, but no one actually proposed all of the things that worriers (like me, I admit) were against. One feminist might have proposed "wymyn" for "women," and one person may yet propose "canine American" for "family dog," and, among the converted in the audience, there might be widespread approval. The pre-selected audience members who go to hear that fringe feminist or that animal rights person will agree, but they knew what they wanted before they came and are only being served with popular demand. It's only news when the fringe speaker turns out to have a more social and conversant position, like head of the Humane Societies of the United States. That's not the issue, though (and that "canine American" thing was in use before, so he didn't invent it or first propose it). The issue is that these terms get adopted by those outside of the choir loft. That's the issue, and that issue has nothing to do with rights campaigners. All along, the shotgun blasts being aimed at the "PC" were misdirected. You can shoot Gloria Steinem with your rhetoric all you want (even though she has been moderate and sane all along in language issues), but Andrea Dworkin and Wayne Pacelle aren't the proper targets. Like Dick Cheney's supporter, they're not quail. "Accidents do happen," in the words of the resilient Harry Whittington.

The underlying problem behind "PC" is much worse than a person whose "fancy gets astride his reason." Indeed, the problem seems to be that "there is a peculiar string in the harmony of human understanding, which in several individuals is exactly of the same tuning" (same author, but here). When one note is struck, it hits unison and harmony from others, so Wayne LaPierre shouts out that libruls and commies want his guns, and a host of frightened militiamen shout "amen." That seems to be it, but it isn't. The note that is sounded is not what you think it is. If it were, we would simply segment into thousands of groups of true believers who cannot communicate with others and therefore cannot achieve any social change or trend. Rather, the problem is that we already have had such groups long before they sound their chords, and we are much molested by them. I hate to stick solely to Swift's great work, but I must: we all prefer peace and superfices in most things. We do not want to dig, for nothing seems improved that way. Furthermore, when we dig into the flesh of a subject, it reacts. We wish, most of all, to not be in an argument with the true believers. As T. S. Eliot said, "The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith."

We want peace, and so we spend much of our time negotiating the minefield of discourse, trying neither to spill the soup nor trample on the toe of someone bigger than we are (or someone with friends). So, it only takes one nasty afternoon spent in accusation and guilt to stop saying "girl" and start saying "wymyn." It takes less time to stop saying "Black" and start saying "African American." One or two PeTA paint splashes, and you'll be saying "canine American," too. We want to be nice. We want to call you whatever you want us to call you, because we don't want to have to fight it out.

When we ask the town what a word means, we can resolve as the town does. If the town is split up between a series of neighborhoods, each of them calling a bagel something different, we learn to call a bagel a flurry of names.

Believe it or not, I didn't want to talk about PC. I really didn't. I set out to talk about Christian education. Don't believe me? Go get a cup of moonshine and a Moonpie, and I'll connect the two. I'll wait.

The Geogre Reads a Who

Pelham Bay, Bronx, NYC, NY

Yesterday, I had one of those experiences that refuted what Seneca once wrote...or maybe it confirmed it:

"It is when the gods hate a man with an uncommon abhorence that they drive him into the profession of a schoolmaster." -- Seneca

I took a relative to the hospital. We had been told to do so, told to get admitted, and then to get tested like crazy and let all the chemists run all the fluids and tissues through every instrument in the joint. Ever obedient to authority figures, especially those with spiffy white coats, we went two and a half hours by car to the hospital. We then waited an uncomfortable and bone jarring three and a half hours on insufficient furniture meant for those moribund and unconscious.

No parent should bury a child, and yet all children are expected to bury a parent. It's one of the rites of age. I've got to tell you, if you haven't done it yet, it's not easy, and I think no parent should bury a child because all parents have had to deal with their own parents' losses. I am, blessedly, not anywhere near this position yet (well, it's hard to say, but there was a reprieve). I have gone from a clueless and hesitant maturity to a baffled middle age, but I suppose I am not alone. The most assured of us are simply choosing to pretend to know what we're doing and then find that the pretense has value.

Anyway, I had three hours there. I noticed that others had been in that examination room before us, and they had been as uncomfortable and bored as we. It's always assumed that one is not the maiden illness of an ER suite, but this time I had evidence. Ron had been there. Ron had been bored, and Ron had been equipped with a sharp implement and a ballpoint pen, for, inside the door, Ron had written:

"Ron was hear" -- Ron.

He had then carved "RON" in a FUTHORC on the door's simulated wood. I quipped, "I'll bet Ron never wrote on the inside of the schoolhouse door."

Driving back the 2.5 hours after we were kicked out of the hospital by an overworked attending, I played the antonym game. The antonymn game is a game of my own invention, invented last night, and I recommend it to anyone driving through a city. Here's how it's played: every time you see a sign for a commercial venture, you must come up with a new name that is composed of antonymns of each of the words in the original name, and these antonymns should capture, if you're good, something witty. For example, I went by the Econo Inn. Now, you could offer up "Richie Out," but that would be inferior to my final candidate last night, "Waste Away." "Taco Bell" can be inverted with "Souffle Cup," as a souffle is a dome opposite of a taco's parabola, and a bell is a cup until it's struck.

So, there I was, thinking how much more clever I am than Ron and how lucky I was that Ron wasn't in my class. Then again, Ron is one of my best buddies from my years in college. Ron mowed lawns for a living and constantly dreamed of doing better. He and his brother lived in a small apartment, and Ron was a great spirit, a wonderful person and the real salt of the earth. He was honest, harder working than I've ever been, and fun to be with.

One night, my band was playing at an "alternative lifestyle" club back in the 1980's, and we didn't have a term like "alternative lifestyle" to talk about such clubs. The thing was, punk rockers and gay clubs were fast allies from the start. The most culturally adventurous people with refined taste (and with horrible taste...what's with all that wretched disco?) were in the gay community. Anyway, it was "Ladies Night" at The Celebrity Club. There was exactly one woman present, and she came with us. However, there were quite a few convincing drag queens and a few transgendered people who were quite well integrated. There were "girls" in miniskirts and fishnet hose dancing on the bar. Ron arrived to support the band, and I think he even liked our music as well as us personally, and he and I sat down for a beer.

I noticed Ron's eyes drifting upward, slowly climbing the legs of the dancer. I said, "Ron, don't." He said, "What?" I said, "No. Seriously, Ron: don't." "Whaaat?" he asked. I shook my head and tried to figure out how to explain to him why, beyond the usual rules of decorum, he should keep his eyes on his beer, but Ron used that thinking time to try to get some profit.

"Oh, man!" Ron shouted.

"I told you!"

"I thought you were...."

"No," I said. "I meant it."

"Oh, man! Oh, man!"

So Ron's a great guy. (Of course, the Ron I knew wouldn't have carved on a door, and I think he could spell difficult words like "here.") I thought, as I played the antonymn game on the way home, "I don't need to teach Ron anything. He can't spell, but it doesn't matter." Ron's inscription was much more literally true, much more of a synonymn game than my original sneer gave him credit for. What, after all, is the point of this blog? What is the point of any graffiti (which is what the blog is)?

Ron was heard. Ron was there eternally. He was always in that room, always waiting for the doctors to pay attention to him. He was visible in a way that other patients weren't, because he was part of the room now.

That's where my sermon-like blog essay should end, with this "aha" moment. After all, I have achieve my ironic counterpoint, and you have seen how clever I really am. I have demonstrated my superiority to Ron and my sympathy. I've proven that I'm humble at the same time that I've shown my pride. That's not where it ends, though.

First, the realization of my own complicity in this rhetoric is an occupational hazard. However, there is more and worse. I sat patiently for three hours in that 8x10 room while my loved one ached on an uncomfortable "bed" and struggled to breathe. I cheerfully openned a book and read to my loved one, trying to pass the time. I jotted notes in a notebook. I looked at papers to grade (and didn't grade them; for some reason I was distracted). I had a pocket knife, and it stayed in my pocket.

Union Square

"He, therefore, betook himself to that true support of greatness in affliction, a bottle; by means of which he was enabled to curse, and swear, and brave his fate." --Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild.

I wish I had done so. Instead, I mutely and numbly stood, like so many thousands of others, and wondered how I was supposed to react. The contemplation of the reaction overcame the reaction itself, and thus I simply delayed and determined how I would really react.

It was a gorgeous day. Everyone who was there should tell you that first. It was a perfect day. I can seldom recall a more clear blue sky or temperatures more perfect. The morning was crisp, exhilirating, the sort of autumnal day that makes young men dream of play and old men remember walks with lovers, the day too fine for work, and many people played hookey from work and therefore lived through the day. I remember riding the #6 train south from the Bronx, where I lived, and looking out on Manhattan, memorizing every building that appeared on the huge turn on the bridge over the Bronx River. Piece by piece, the architecture appears, breaking itself free from the window frame and displaying like a debutante in a parade as the train takes the turn into the east side of Manhattan past Hunt's Point.

Let's be clear: I was not there there. I was more than two miles away. I was on east 89th Street, teaching computers to behave at an all boy's middle school hard by the Guggenheim Museum. New Yorkers know the place, I'm sure, and they know their own geography. Instead of parks and flowers, New York has buildings, and they are every bit as entertaining and engaging and interesting as flowers, though not as functional sometimes. For those who have not spent years there, though, Manhattan is hilly, sloping generally up to a peak around 96th Street. That means that the area below the grid (the streets south of 1st St. (i.e. Greenwich Village and Alphabet City)) are lower in elevation as well as "lower Manhattan." The avenues run north-south, and the streets run east-west. From 89th Street, I could look straight down Park Avenue.

At 9:30 AM, I was done with a class and had a bunch of repairs to do, so I decided to sneak out and grab a cup of coffee and a bowtie (only not by Dunkin' Donuts...those things are gross; this was the bodega on 89th and Park). I love bowties. I love that coffee. I insisted, every day that I worked at that school, on getting that combination every morning. Five years ago today, I got the combination and stepped out to enjoy the fantastic weather. I looked down Park, and I saw what looked like a candle snuff. It was only one of the world trade towers. I didn't see the other very clearly.

By the next hour, I knew. My colleagues were very worried. Some of them had children working in the WTC. More to the point, our children were from very wealthy families, mostly in the financial sector, and that meant that some of our students were likely orphans now. Therefore, we had to whisper to each other whatever news we had heard, while we kept everything else as secret as we could. As soon as students would leave our rooms, we would turn on radios or televisions, and then turn them off when students were nearby. By lunch, the clever 8th graders, who are all-knowing and possessed of a seering cynicism had figured it out. They told each other that there had been an attack on the Statue of Liberty. We confessed that they were too clever for us.

At the end of the school day, we herded all the students to the gym and held them. No child could go home without a parent picking him up. This would be our only way of knowing who didn't have a parent.

When I left work, it was strange. New York City isn't supposed to be silent, and yet it was. No planes overhead. No cars. No trains rumbling. No buses rolling. No noise at all, except lines of ashen faced people like me wondering how they were supposed to feel, and an endless line of useless cell phones held up to ears. The cell repeaters had been on the towers, of course. The land lines would stay busy and overloaded for a day to come, at best.

Everyone in America knew more about what was happening than we did, really.

The trains began running again, and I got on a different #6 train for home. Everyone was quiet and polite. New Yorkers generally are nice to each other, despite what the rest of the world thinks. We're just nasty to tourists. Well, Manhattanites are polite. The outer boroughs are more thuggish.

The trains took detours, and the loss of the WTC hub had thrown a lot of chaos into the system. A young woman in a dirty t-shirt on the train with me told me that she had been at #7 Liberty. She was small but tough, an artist, a woman too busy and intelligent to worry about being pretty but pretty all the same. She was in a shirt that was dirty before the morning and now filthy and hanging loosely on her trunk. She looked up at me and the other fellow, as we were talking in hushed tones, and said that she had seen something I had not yet heard and didn't initially believe: people were jumping out of the towers. She had seen them. She had seen them land.

The smell of the cloud was difficult. I cannot explain it. It was a salty smelling cloud, not overly morbid or decayed, but not traditionally ashen, either. Every time I smelled it, I knew that I was smelling things that were bad.

For most of the days to come, the wind blew to Brooklyn. On a couple of days, the wind blew up toward work, and one day the wind blew up to the Bronx all day and night, coming in my window air conditioner. The next morning, we were assured by the Bush administration's pin-up girl that the air was safe. I don't think anyone was fooled by that, but what choice did we have? The bridges were closed, and no one could stop breathing. Public health officials told us that everyone in Manhattan on that day was due for some serious depression and difficulty. What choice did we have in that, either? Most of us were kind of numb and wondering why we weren't more disturbed or less.

Today, I talked to three classes of 18 year olds about the moment that defines their generation, one way or another, and I held a moment of silence. I haven't done that before. I also told my story, or as much of it as I've said above. I did not go any deeper, as I don't see what good it would do them.

You see, I'm stuck on the images of those people jumping. It's not the leap, necessarily, or the horror, although both hold my mind fixed agape. After all, I cannot imagine the fear and evil experienced by the passengers on the planes. Their terror had to be unimaginable. The leapers, though, had a deliberate horror, a slow certainty of death and the agony of burning air ripping their lungs from within.

They jumped. They preferred clear air and being able to breathe their last as they plummeted to their deaths to the rending heat of the towers.

What obsesses me is whether I could have been one. Those who died by the crush of the building collapse, those who died by the explosions, they died horribly, but would I have chosen the jump to death? That, though, is just one of those moments of cowardice that I reproach myself with, as I know that I would not have been one. I would have stayed inside, believing that ingenuity or miracle would keep me from the inevitable and had that fail. That is not it, though, for I cannot say even that it was bravery or defiance or freedom or doom that was involved in those who jumped.

The problem is always that they landed, that there were people down there, that some people had to witness the most horrible sight ever. They had to watch a person fully alive and then, less than a second, much less than a second, later, dead and gore. They had to see the split second of impact, the life dashed out, each life individually, and not in an abstract mass. No "2,973 dead," but "that face of that person falling, and that person dead."

If the public health officials were right, if every year that goes by the horror of that day inches closer to the surface of my mind, it's no wonder. I did nothing. I was powerless and helpless and useless. I was another passenger, another passive observer, and whatever goes on now is just another case of really having no option.

Explanation of today's blog post

Buddha in the Sand, Carrboro, NC

It occurs to me that the post below (the earlier one, the one that one would say "see above" about, except that it's below) natters and fritters and smokes and says not much, and therefore I wish, in the spirit of outrage, to explain it.

Language, words, only mean something because we agree that they do. Trying to study the structure of a language is nothing less than trying to map out all of the agreements a people have and can have made. What's more, these agreements limit the things that a people can think about, think about themselves, and think about thinking. The interior of the mind is, therefore, built of inherited verities, in the form of words and grammar, and it is unique only in the way that a pattern of cast sticks can be unique. The more sticks you cast on the floor, the more likely the resulting pattern to be unique. A grain of sand is just a grain of sand, but if you get a whole big mound of it.... See above.

No one asks our opinion of whether the blue house is blue. We are told that blue is the carrier of that color experience. It is sad, some people think, that so much is coerced, but it is not, in fact, sad or happy, for it cannot be otherwise, and "sad" and "happy" are just as inherited as "blue." You can't sit there with your thumb in your mouth, either.

Ah, but what if we play with language and refuse to go left to right and top to bottom? Can we not see every unsaid word between the said words? Indeed. And when you defy the gods of signification, what is the result? Is it freedom? The freedom of the freezing savage or the freedom of Buddha?

You see, words mean because we are social. We are unfree because we are unalone. How do you know the house is blue? Simple: ask someone.

That's the thing: you can answer many interpretive questions by the simple method of asking the town. (The President is overruling the town, and he is therefore a mocking mirror image of the "originalists" and "fundamentalists" who try to examine words with a loup and determine "what the author meant" without considering the town they're living in now. They're both hilariously wrong, except that one of them has a gun, and the other has a prison system.)

Neocons Bash Decons

The image to my left is a tree beside a path beside a creek adorned by a sign explaining that one would be more than half in love with easeful death to drink from, play in, submerge in, or paddled upon that water. It has nothing to do with my topic, apparently.

Rhetoric is king. Structuralism is a con. Langue is a joke. Parole is fact.

It's hardly seasonable to worry about words. We have bigger marlins frying than the ancient anxiety of political correctness and hate speech. We have an executioner executive who has reduced all language to fiat. From "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is," we have gone to "I have never said there was a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam." We have gone from Clintonian gridlock to Bush league signing statements and the "I had my fingers crossed" [ed. Read that; really] of government and "I call take-backs!" of jurisprudence.

Crossing your fingers says you didn't mean it. The body with crossed fingers overrides the mind with its semantic freight. I said I would halp you fight the bully, but it's your fault you got clobbered, because you didn't look behind my back to see that my fingers were crossed. You cannot believe in the structure of meaning, the sentence or statement, we learn as children, for meaning is in the speaking moment alone -- meaning is in my fingers, my nasal whine, my narrowed eyes, the rock in my shoe, or in my hands. In fact, I might have been high, so why do you believe me?

I personally want to thank the Prednisent for making an eloquent argument against Jacques Derrida. The deconstructionists start with princess Ferdie and his General Linguistics. Distinguish twixt langue and parole. Know your diachronic and synchronic descriptions. Oh, but a word is a sign, and signs don't have any posts to stand on! They slip, the poor dears, and therefore it's dear season all year round. Long after Wittgenstein in Traction asked if a blue house is a blue house if it's read, we hear that it's whatever we want it to be, so long as the damn thing isn't blue.

A friend told me of a friend who said that deconstruction was like looking at a bridge over a polluted river under an electron microscope, seeing all the electrons bouncing about, and then announcing, "It's mostly empty space, this bridge, and therefore all who step on it will fall!" The point he was making, I assume, is that all that movement was between points in a very firm constellation, that the nodes (or modals or nucleii or bonds or monads or quiddities) were glued tightly together, even if there was some shifting of position, and one's foot is much, much larger than any space. In other words, langue was less mobile than any single component of it, and langue is a reliable human construction. Additionally, any given speaker is speaking in a moment that is singular, not diachronically active, and each speech act is entirely nailed down by its system in that moment.

So, how to Bush?

It's obvious, isn't it?

Neocons beat decons by crossing their fingers and showing conclusively that other langue determines the parole. The speech act means because there is more than one system involved. The one system that is always determinant is power. A word means whatever the man with the gun says it means. Spend some time in camp X-ray and you'll agree.

Better than that, see the freely floating signifiers of the GOP campaign strategy. What does "cuttenrun" mean? What is "Islamafashiz?" Better far, how is there "absolutely none" in re the connection between 9/11 and Iraq and yet "significant ties" between them? How can redeployment in Iraq be giving in to "terrists," if terrorists aren't trying to take Iraq? (They're not, you know. They can't. Terrorists are destroyers and destabilizers. They cannot rule anything.) (Wait. I'm not done. The IRA couldn't rule, so it became Sinn Fein and disavowed terror. Hezbollah and Hamas have the same problems. Triumph doesn't empower terrorists: it ends them.) (This is not to suggest that we should leave Iraq, but the idea that "the terrorists win" is linguistically and logically problematic, if you take some time to think.) In fact, how can we give them what they want in any case, if we don't know who they are and they don't know what they want? It doesn't matter: the statements are as meaningless as a Derridean critique, and they are as meaningful. You see, they have power through a reference that is absolute and not free floating at all. These phrases refer to the body, to emotions, to id, and to the unmistakable, unfurled, unreasoned, single finger the Prednisent is waving.

The single speech act is paradoxically the only meaningful thing because it is an act of will, desire, threat, fear, force, pity, and defiance. The isolated grunt of the Prednisent surpasseth all understanding, all constitutional restraint, because it is an act of power.

Fashion!

This week, I've begun waking up at 5:00 AM, and that means waking up before most creatures of the daytime world. I go outside to walk my dog when it's completely dark, look at morning stars, then finish the first cup of coffee and go back out when dawn is just breaking. I hate being sleepless all the time and having to go to bed before anything worth watching has been on the television, but pre-dawn is almost worth it.

This particular Saturday morning, I slept until just before dawn, and I went outside to walk the dog down the street before anyone else has a dog outside. I heard a mockingbird right by the house. I had startled it awake, and it was singing. Unfortunately for the bird, it was the first avian up.

Mockingbirds are mimics. Everyone knows that. They get mentioned in Southern literature quite often, even before Harper Lee. It's a bird often complained of in blues music, for example. Even faux Southerners like to say something something mockingbird. For people who grow up in the south, mockingbirds are notable only when you're trying to be accurate, because they generally disappear. After all, they're mimics, so you never know they're there.

Bull. Mockingbirds are not mimics. They're prima donnas. They are not ignorable, either. Mockingbirds set themselves up in prominent places, low down, make sure no one else is around them, and then begin to show off. Songs are to mockingbirds what clothes are to famine fashionistas. They sing everything from chainsaws to car alarms to finch songs to titmouse songs to warbler songs. Notice, however, that they never finish a song or leave well enough alone. If they were mimics, if they were camouflaged by their songs, then they'd just sing the Pine Siskin song and flash their wings, so other mockingbirds could say, "Whoa, great imitation... had me fooled until I saw your white wing bars." That's not what they do, though. They do siskin, then do a quick change and come back with the Black capped chickadee, then segue into bulldozer (no link available for the usgs guide to bulldozers in the wild). What mockingbirds are doing is showing off and preening (if you'll forgive taking a taken metaphor back).

Going out at 6:00 was bad this morning, because I saw the runway model naked. The mockingbird had no clothes to flash. It could only sound like itself, and what it sounded like was hoarse, unattractive, and repellent. The bird was shouting at me to go away, that he was not ready, that I was in his dressing room. It was the fury of a fashionista caught with only her own body to show. In fact, it was so ugly a noise that it would make me, if I were a bird, want to sing my own song, sign the air with my voice, just to show him how it's done. That, of course, would allow him to go to his knock-off textile factory and try to steal my fashions.

The Eternal

I apologize for being religious two blog entries in a row, but I promise that this will be brief.

I've been reading a novel just now where a real figure's last words, or last-ish words, were reported as being that she would go to find the origin of all things. That rang a note of unison with a respected friend, also a German, who, nearing his death, said that he was beginning to sense eternity.

The thing about eternity is that, as David Byrne joked, nothing ever happens. In eternity, all time is present at once, and so all things are always at beginning and ending, and there is simply being. There is no becoming. Therefore, in the eternal, one is in a continual gesture, alive in all moments that ever could have been or can ever be. That is why God needs no beginning: He is beyond time, and "begin" and "end" only make sense if there is a clock.

That's terribly philosophical, though, and the other idea, that you're going to find out, that you're going to the undiscovered country, is attractive. It's also not any less philosophically sound. After all, saying that God's being beyond time means that there is no becoming leads us to the dead-end of Plato, where the perfect God never creates a thing because creation implies need, which implies imperfection. It could also lead to the engineer God who creates as a part of His nature but could never take part in petitionery prayers. Islam, Christianity, and Judaism demand that God be perfect and yet alive, and living implies some desire, some motive, some engagement inside of time, even if God is beyond time. Christianity says that Plato is imposing human dichotomies on the supernatural.

Besides, it's possible that time is part of eternity, that becoming is what eternity is.

I've thought very little about the after life. This is more out of despair than hope, though. I don't think I'm in line for a great reward, and I try not to think of anyone in line for death, but this is because I've decided that it is something I simply cannot know until I have to know it, and anything I think or say about it until then is bound to be wrong and could very well be distracting. You serve God because you love God, and not because you're going to get a two car garage in your heavenly mansion or because a foul beast waits to rend your flesh if you don't.

I can't say, though, that I'm comfortable with either the undiscovered country or the eternal being. I think I like the latter better than the former, but I have sour ideas of what the former would mean for me, individually. I would find out, most likely, that in my autobiography I was merely a minor character. I might be told the secret and have to say, "Ah! I see now, that if I had only done that one thing, or recognized that one message, it all would have been well, and I would have accomplished something to the glory of God!" To me, these would seem punishments. If I were to go to find out, I would want to find out that my meaning was the fullest meaning I could offer, that I had increased the vineyard, or that my nothing was as much as could have been. That would be comfort, if comfort is part of what we properly seek.

I can't even decide that a reward would be comfort. It may be better to ram my fingers more firmly into my ears and hum as loudly as I can, as the present moment is more than enough for me to worry about.

The Penitentiary

The original pentitentiary, as I'm sure everyone knows, was a place for doing penance. The idea was to reform a person's soul, and then the body would follow. We've kept the name, even if we haven't kept anything else. We think, now, that the body controls the mind, and the soul is trapped beneath that, somewhere, maybe. I'd like to write about this some more, but I won't... at least not now. I just picked this title for the post because I need to repent of my million dollar idea.

Satire's fine, but some humor is dangerous. One reader wrote in privately from Stagger Falls that pills like this might one day be made and might lead to a number of deaths. That's true, and drunkenness is, of course, a social malady, and that was sort of my point, that people are beasts. I suppose "people are beasts" is sort of the point of most of my blog entries, though.

Speaking of the bestial, and particularly the puzzled simian, which is the state most humanity is in, whether you believe that simians are ancestors or mirrors of ours, I think naturally of the current president of the United States. Now I won't impugn his intelligence, curiosity, wit, or ability to do the job -- whatever it is -- of president. After all, he is demonstrating that the job is not what we thought it was, and no one is challenging him on that. No, I'm not going to do that. Instead, I want to take a stab at his inside: his claims of being born again.

I don't really believe him, you see. I may be wrong (another point of every blog entry of mine), but I really don't see in his actions anything that resembles the born again experience that I know from my own past. I grew up in a vague suburban church and so I took it upon myself to read the Bible. I read the Gospels several times, struggled through the wordiness of Paul in his declamatory mode, and started looking for the end of the world. I went to Camp Meeting every summer, which was a "tent revival" where we would all be encouraged to repent and "convert" annually. This was done under the sanction of the United Methodist Church, even though that church is not Calvinist and does not support the continual conversion method. The point is that the week of shouting evangelism easily overwhelmed the year's sedate and amorphous conventional church services, and I became not just born again but Born Again. I grew fundamentalist, and I took on board all of the messages of radical Calvinism. It nearly killed me.

My favorite Robert Lowell poem is "After the Surprising Conversions." (Click on that link! Seriously: it's the Poetry Foundation, and they own the rights, so it's a legal version of the text.) He talks about a New England town after Jonathan Edwards comes through and leaves. After the townspeople were awakened to their sinfulness, their utter depravity, and the fact that every moment of the day brought sins condemning them to Hell and a need for abject craving for undeserved forgiveness, they began killing themselves. Lowell has people,

"Once neither callous, curious nor devout,
Jumped at broad noon, as though some peddler groaned
At it in its familiar twang: 'My friend,
Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!'"

You see, the critical thing about being Born Again (as opposed to what Jesus Christ meant by being born anew in the Holy Spirit) is that it carries with it a profound sense of depravity. It insists, every day, that, every day, you are unworthy of the salvation granted to you, for the conversion that brought you to it required an absolute sense of guilt and insufficiency. It emphasizes, every day, humility and need. Its critical fault is that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, but when we know what demons incarnate we are, we do not love ourselves at all.

If you want to know a born again president of the United States, it's Jimmy Carter. He told Playboy in 1976 that he had committed adultery in his heart, and those with no exposure to fundamentalism laughed and betrayed that they also hadn't read the Sermon on the Mount very recently. He was and remains humble. He was and remains concerned about the needs of others. He was and remains sure that he must seek God's will, for he does not own it. These things are in sharp relief to George W. Bush's actions and words.

Bush's autobiographical comments mention his surprising conversion always in connection with a profligate past. That sounds like a Puritain conversion narrative. It sounds like the sort of religion that the camp revivers preach. It sounds enough like it to pass. However, it is subtly different from the old conversions, from the old born again movement, from the fundamentalism that we might know. It's Puritain in the way that Oliver Cromwell was a Puritain. It is second generation movement.

One of the most important sections of the Bible, to me, is the Sermon on the Mount, but you needn't dwell there. Consider the words of Jesus Christ: Matthew 6:1 ff. :

"Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven."

I'll have more to say about that verse later, when I get to Christian Education, but for now let's consider the importance of it by itself. The born again Christian of my generation was shy of talking about his or her religion, and particularly of being public with worship. Jimmy Carter very, very rarely spoke of how pious he was, very rarely spoke of how often he prayed.
Switching over to the KJV, let's see Luke 6:37-8:

"Judge not, and ye shall not be judged; condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven. Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men given unto thy bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again."

That used to scare me. Judge not, Jesus said. Therefore, I thought the sense of it was plain: worry about giving, about loving, about adding, and not telling other people how they needed to be better. Do these good things for their own sakes, and not because you expect the reward or the fame. The generation of born agains that I knew would rather eat glass than be caught proclaiming their piety, and every time they denounced an evil, they had a twinge of worry that they were judging others. Since they knew that they were loathesome, horrible, miserable, disgusting creatures, they knew that judging anyone else would really be offensive, and they knew that any good they ever did would be just paying the smallest part of the interest on the debt they owed.

Things aren't like that anymore. Curiously, the doctrine of depravity led to a strange form of the doctrine of grace. I have met people who, when told that only those without sin could cast the first stone, said that they were, indeed, without sin, because they were saved. As born again, they had grace abounding that covered every sin, wiped all of them out, and as charismatics, they were led by the Holy Spirit and could not doubt it. Therefore, it was the Holy Spirit that told them to beat gay people, to throw rocks at pregnant women going to Planned Parenthood, and disrupt high school education. Therefore it was inerrant, and therefore, this person implied, what Jesus really meant was that he should cast some stones.

This is the second generation born again. This is President Bush's version. This is a marriage of half-understood doctrines perverted into sanctimony. This is why Jimmy Carter has recently written a book condemning the new type of "born again Christians."

Both forms of fundamentalism are ultimately dangerous, from my perspective. I was forced to leave that type of fundamentalism (the kind I seem to be praising), because the belief in the vileness and loathesomeness of humanity is, as Lowell suggested, only answerable by suicide or spiritual suicide. The other form of fundamentalism is without conscience. It is fundamentally egoistic. As the individual believer believes more and more that his belief justifies his beliefs, he cuts himself off from the voices of the needy, the suffering, and the sinful. Jesus Christ went to the worst houses, dined with the sketchiest people, and had working men and women of low rank among His followers, but the pious contained within the narrow and solitary cloisters of their own minds listen to their inner voice with utmost confidence and declare all the rules governing the fallen invalid.

The one form of fundamentalism is self-destructive, and the other is sociopathic.

I can endorse neither. You can tell that this prednisent is not any type of fundamentalist that either I or Jonathan Edwards would recognize because he believes himself without sin. You can tell that this trend has traction because it promises perfection without society and denounces all dissonant societies as dens of iniquity.

For me, the answer was to move toward a church that honored the sanctity of free will, one that embraced the notion that our reason and conscience and desires are all to be in continual dialog with the spirit of God, one that put a premium on history as God's will both in terms of actions and the development of theology. Finally, it is a church that has a doctrinal core that protects against some of the wilder swings of enthusiasm and avarice. I also moved to the theological position of semi-Pelagianism, as I could not believe that even the Fall could entirely negate the goodness of God's creation (yeah, I know it's a heresy, officially). It was the only way I could remain true to the unambiguous commands of my Lord, to the degree that I was capable, and still hope that I could be turned to some use, after all.

A Million Dollar Idea!

This is my idea! It's worth millions, and I know you folks want to steal it, and that's why I am entrusting it to this highly public form, so it will have a date attached to it, and I can prove that it's mine. It's also why I always write under my legal name.

My sister, An, and my little brother, A, are always carousing, getting covered in ejaculations, and having to turn away unwanted prepositions while they seek out that one desired conjunction. It's a phrase they're going through, while I'm now of such a period as to have ceased to modify my subject.

Business runs on the wheels of inefficiency, and liquor does more than Newton can to explain the retrograde progress of our enterprises. It used to be that Amurica was a great nation. Amurican business set the pace for the world, and all the world sat enrapt at Amurican feet to learn its secrets of efficiency, labor insensitivity, and leverage, but the real lessons they could have learned was contained in an obscure part of the tax code. It has been disallowed, and Amurican business has been in decline ever since. Business needed the buoyancy, the bon vivancy, of lunchtime bacchanalia. Our captains of industry struggled up through the ranks in hopes of getting looped at lunch, talking golf, and taking advantage of each other.

No more, alas. Those prudes at the IRS disallowed the three martini lunch deduction, and no one could explain to the stock holders that the lunch expense should be a loss to the company.

That's why I came up with the following cast iron golden idea: ethanol caplets.

Let that sink in for a while.

Imagine: you get some ethanol, put it in a gelatin capsule, and then sell it to those over 21. A beer is about 6% alcohol, if you're lucky and a snob. It's 5% alcohol otherwise. So, of 12 oz., 0.5 oz. is actually alcohol. (For those of you doing metric, that's about, uh, 15 ml.) You can put 15 ml in a pill! So, for a martini, you have to take maybe 3 pills. For a 3 martini lunch, just gulp down 9 pills, and you can prosper in business with nothing smelling on your breath. Furthermore, it should be much less expensive to get the effect this way. The glycol capsule could contain some nice sugars on the inside, helping the alcohol bind, and you can even include B1, B2, and E vitamins to prevent hangovers! You could even take a NoDoz with your Beer Pill to get the edginess of caffeine and the sloppiness of booze. You'll be able to make terrible judgments at twice the normal rate!

It's worth a fortune, I tell you.

Soon, only people who actually enjoy the flavor of alcoholic beverages will go to bars, and how many people could that be?

Bastards of Jung

It's Sunday, so I'm thinking theopolitics again. (I'll keep using that term until someone notices.) The photo over there is another I took, altered, etc., and it was taken in The Bronx, NYC, NY, and not in The South. I have not seen an actual minstrel show lawn jockey in the south since 1968. Never mind that. The fact is, I'm thinking theopolitics, which means that I'm writing it, which means it's on a little spiral bound 6" notebook, and that means that I'll put it up here when there is some evidence that someone has read this particular post, which I thought up two days ago, wrote yesterday at the Huddle House, and didn't want to post until my reader saw the not-bad essay on bumperstickers. (It's not as good as the one on prophecy, but it's not bad.) Therefore, you might see my thoughts on Christian Education (and please stop e-mailing me wanting to see them...I cannot answer more than 400 e-mails an hour) some time RSN. It should be before Windows Longhorn is released, anyway.

"Bastards of Jung"
The Archytypical Nostalgia Trip (part one)

I got a "best" of The Replacements. It's a failure as a collection, as it had to be. It is like the best of John Donne in one respect (only), that fans of the early "Mats" and puke-covered Keds are not fans of the late, arch, Johnny "Rude Boy" Mercer style of Westerberg. You're better off getting "Pleased to Meet Me" or "Tim" -- your choice. ("Tim" is great.) Anyway, the record collected the milestone tunes, including one of my favorites, "Bastards of Young." (Hey, I have to have an obvious title at some point.)

I have no idea what the song's title means, but I sing along boisterously, pounding a new moon roof in my Gran Dam and shouting something between "It's yours" and "Detroit" at the end. I glare at cops and old people. I spit on the sidewalk and get a self-conscious haircut. I dream of Kim Gordon with Exene's haircut. In short, I feel it, and more than "Freebird" or "Blowin' in the Wind." It's my song, man.

For you poor narcoleptics who don't know the song, it managed the impossible: it was an anthem for an unmarked, dissolute generation even more alienated than its ancestors by being unpraised and uncondemned, a generation without a cause, a generation sorely pressed by forces that stoutly refused to have a face. We had the mascot of Ronald Reagan, but even the most ardent savages in our midst knew that he had not gotten himself elected nor formulated any policy. He was the first mask president we knew of, the first corporate spokesman president (not the first corporate shill, of course, but the first paid celebrity endorser as president). You could hate him all you wanted, but he wouldn't understand, and he was infinitely not responsible for whatever evil he committed. We couldn't point a finger at a George Pullman of our day or Hard Hats, either, and yet we were dangled empty slogans, silently told in what ways we were cool, and gulped down by the consumer management Combine. We were, in short, an ignored generation, and ignoring a child is the worst thing you can do to it.

Things are no better for today's txt msg PMme gnrtn, although the Combine has offered them better illusions of community than we ever got, but how do you have an anthem for the uncooperating, unclubbable, unacknowledged generation? If you managed it, would they sing along? Paul Westerberg managed it: "Income tax deduction/ One hell of a function!/ It beats picking cotton and waiting to be forgotten." Cool. "Willingness to claim us/ We've got no war to name us": hell yeah! "The ones who love us best.../ We'll visit their graves on holidays at best" is absolutely chilling. He did it by explaining, in a concise form, that we were meaningless, a "blank generation," because everything that would have stuck to us and given us importance had been evacuated. We didn't get enemies. We didn't get friends. We didn't get musical idols of our own generation. We pulled the wool over mass culture's eyes by making ourselves into punk heroes and realized that our parents didn't get the joke and that the result, in the end, was depressing. After all, when you shout out that there is no meaning to be had in fame, the only person you really enlighten is yourself. After you pogo with Sex Pistols, you hang with Joy Division.

To write your generation's song, you have to start with what bothers you and then figure out what about that is actually new. Every generation is constrained, psychologically and corporeally, by parents, and every generation wants to make more love than war, so you have to think about what keeps you from it. Westerberg is right that it is easier for The Vietnam War and McCarthy era generations to clue in. He was also right that the lack of an enemy willing to speak and show himself is infuriating, as bad as having self-involved or resentful parents would be (and heaven help the generation approaching 30 now -- talk about your self-involved parents!), but talking about how your only uniform badge is lack of focus brings to mind the real genius and victory of those who made war on us by fighting FDR and Joseph Stalin with our money and our bodies. Because the spokesmen kept talking about false history (the Fonzie Family that never was) and historical irrelevancies (the march of Communism from Nicaragua to Brownsville over the 9 hour highway Reagan speculated) and outsized lies (racial equality, which, having arrived, obviated the need for any program with "equal" in its name), and because those behind them would never speak of their goals, we never met each other, never managed to do anything.

We met only in opposition. We met to battle, and battle was joined, but often enough we were fighting for fame we derided and attention we explicitly devalued. Those of us cursed with enough self-awareness to agree with Westerberg were simultaneously ennervated. We were singing boldly of our lack of purpose, celebrating the forces that had neutered us by denying us even a target to aim our rage toward. Our daring was confined to sentiments like Cracker's: "Think I'll go find some place to be surly." Our demonstrations were not in the streets but in restaurants and diners the nation-over and were of bad manners and ill humor.

The fact is that our anthem is a pitying moan. Psychotic depression always follows revolution, in music as all else. 1966 is revolution, and 1972 is dead girlfriend songs. (You want proof? Ok. "Honey," "Wildfire," "DOA," "Patches," "Wishing Well," "Billy Don't Be a Hero," "Seasons in the Sun," "Time in a Bottle," "Indiana Wants Me," "Morning After," and "One Tin Soldier" to name just a few dead person songs. There was a couplet of years where everything had dead people in it, from "Love Story" to the evening news. The culture was littered with lachrymose corpses singing or being sung to.) 1977 is revolution (well, sort of...1976 maybe, 1980 maybe) and 1980 (sort of...1985 maybe, etc.) is "Bastards of Young." In this, at least, we follow the archetype. We find out that we hate ourselves only slightly less than we hate those around us, and then we get bummed out about it, and the fact that we were repeating a gesture of disillusion and inertia as old as the species, but without the satisfying gullibility of a Replacement, is really depressing.

Do not read this

Coming soon:

1. Bastards of Jung (above)
   
2. The Unforgiven Prednisent (above that)
   
3. Naked Chicks (written, but it bores me with its preachiness, so there will be a delay while I remove the man in the buckled hat)
   
4. Road Story #1, which is a lie
5. Christian Education
6. The Enema Within
   

The Semiotics of the Bumper

I have always been agitated by the rhetoric of bumper stickers. In fact, I have been mentally molested by the rhetoric of bumper stickers. I suppose it's because of my age (which is ancient). I was born in the early 1960's, and therefore I am part of the generation of the real Golden Age of television. (By the way, one should use an apostrophe when marking the plural of acronymns and dates. This is to prevent the /s/ being read as a part of the number or abbreviation. I am emphatic about this.) Oh, the "Golden Age of Television" was the era of Your Show of Shows and Ed Sullivan, according to the first historians of television, who became historians of television merely by writing a lot of wistful columns in Variety and other scholarly journals. Those were the years, they said, when television was its noblest. The real Golden Age of television was not noble at all. The content was not best, but it was more irrelevant than any later or earlier time, and therefore it was the Golden Age for television. It was when television was most efficient and powerful in delivering money to its investors, when three networks were at war for advertising dollars, when every American of sufficient means, and many of insufficient means, sat down every night and half of America every day to watch whatever was on. It was the age of advertising.

With the age of advertising came the slogan as cultural centerpiece, when a bastard witticism would be more powerful than any literary work or any artform else. The television shows generated catchphrases, but these hadn't the persistence and ineffability of "Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everyone did?" or "It's the real thing." Don't get me wrong: advertising hasn't lost its power with the loss of television. It's gotten stronger, in fact. When a bent world can be persuaded to pay money to do the advertising for a shoe company and wear a slogan with no semantic value like "Just Do It," it's inarguable that advertising is the central load-bearing column of communication now. That's not the point. The point is that the bumpersticker is, to me, related to the Golden Age of Television and the nascent power of the advertising slogan as a community bond. The armchair sociology involved in that thought is something I'll return to another day, but today I want to focus on only one slogan.

(Everything I write seems so long. I'm sorry.)

Two years ago (my goodness, has it only been two years?), Wonkette had a lot of fun with a George Bush campaign "sloganator." It was designed for Bushers wanting to advertise and create a bandwagon without printing expenses or actually being met, known, or approved by the Republican Party. You'd go there, type in your slogan, like "Catfish Noodlers for Bush," and press a button to get a printer-friendly yard sign. Well, that was fun for some of the less dignified Kerry voters, too. They could go there, too, and put in their slogans, like "It Won't Get Any Better Bush/Cheney '04" or "Run for your Life! Bush/Cheney '04" or "War Crimes Docket: Bush/Cheney '04."

A friend of mine is married. Several married people are friends of mine, but this one was travelling behind a budget vehicle on the highway whose rear (the vehicle's) was covered with the fashionable vinyl siding of bumper stickers. They were for four or so bands that haven't been on the charts, a "Mean People Suck" sticker, and other evidence of mass-hipster humor, and his wife (the friend's) noted, "You know, he could have saved a lot of space with a single sticker that says, 'I'm in my mid-twenties.'" Great idea. If bumperstickers do anything (more deep questions like that on the day I talk about the ICTHUS sticker), they inform others of one's identity. They are the $1.00 identity politics solution. She was cutting to the heart of his discourse: he was advertising only his age, and not his taste, because everything else that his stickers said can be safely assumed by those who assume the mantle of dying adolescence.

That happened years ago. I'm talking about it today because a single grain of sand irritating me has produced its pearl (this blog post, I mean), and that grain of sand is "I X and I Vote." You know the form. Which ones have we seen?

• I Am Pro-Life and I Vote
• I Am Pro-Choice and I Vote
• I Own Guns and I Vote
• I Pay Taxes and I Vote
• I Farm and I Vote
• I Hunt and I Vote
• I Am a Mother and I Vote
• I Teach and I Vote

What bothers me about it is that it seems to have lost its way as a slogan. On the one hand, it seems to be a bit of communication to presumed political readers, but, on the other hand, it seems to be an identity slogan. On the one hand, it's like "Mean People Suck" in that it communicates a general identity that is so large as to be unremarkable, and, on the other hand, it communicates something individual and personal that is yet not a true identifier. I guess it's like "Mean People Suck" in that regard, too.

You see, if you try to say, "I am pro-choice, and I vote," your audience is supposed to be some politician who is against choice, and he (or, in the case of Kathryn Harris in Freon County, Florida, she) is supposed to say, "Gosh, I'd better back off on my criminalizing legislation." First, of course, we ask ourselves about the efficacy of such a statement. Is Rick "Corpse Cuddler" Santorum (as the married friend calls him) going to be shocked into a new line of thought by such a slogan? This is even worse when the slogan isn't specifically related to a legislative issue, such as "I am pro-gun and I vote." After all, who is "anti-gun?" There are plenty of people who are anti-unlicensed guns, anti-huge guns, anti-automatic guns, anti-assault guns, anti-particle beam guns, and some anti-electron gun, but is anyone "anti-gun?" The news for "I am a farmer" or "I am a mother" is even worse. I'm told there are people against motherhood and hood mothers, but I haven't any proof of that. No, what these things say is far too general, and they can each be specified much more simply, like the hipster, above, as "I Am A Republican" or "I Am A Democrat," with "I care enough to register to vote some of the time" appended.

On the other hand, as a statement of personal identity, as a definition of how the self is not part of the others, these slogans are not terribly effective, either. After all, and make no mistake, these bumperstickers and t-shirt slogans are about who you are not, not who you are. They each have, implied within them, "Unlike the forces threatening my values, I plan to strike back at the ballot box." The real message of "I am an organic farmer and I vote" is "People are passing laws that threaten my livelihood, health, or happiness, and I will not support them." It's a laughable failure as a message. After all, it is the kind of oppositional identity bred of pure despair and frustration, and therefore it is an identification with a martyred loser or a beseiged minority. It admits, from the start, that the bearer feels all alone and wishes to put a thumb in the eye of the oppressor. Even when the position is actually the empowered and majority position, the slogan is defiance and rage born out of a sense that everything worthwhile is about to be destroyed.

Finally, as a statement of primary concerns, which would be what a real slogan of identity would be, it's a failure, too. Each variant on this slogan is attempting to say "I AM" a particular thing, with the promise that the reader can come up to the bearer and start a discussion or argument or fight. The problem is that very few people actually contain their identities in these issues. The issues are all high level complexes of propositions (sorry...I've been warned about that... they're all social tensions rather than individual ones), whereas identity is a psychological projection into the social sphere. In other words, although I may be passionate about getting us out of the current war and repairing our international standing, it really doesn't come up all that much in conversation. I rarely meet people who say, "You know, I hope we have more war, and screw the international community." Few people who know me would say, "Oh, he's a Democrat and he votes" in the first ten minutes of description. They'd probably comment on my conversational style, my body mass index, my vices, my alledged virtues, my purported learning, and my spastic manias, but they'd be a long time getting to my stance on the income tax.

So, I want to propose something, here. Everyone with such a sticker or slogan, go out and change it. Rip off the first part, at least. Replace it with the thing that really does identify you as a voter, as a person. Let's see some good ones. You know, the thing that your acquaintances (not your friends...if you have friends, you really should be talking to them instead of reading blogs) would say about you.

• I Am an Alien Abductee and I Vote
• I Am a Car Collector and I Vote
• I Am Depressed and I Vote
• I Hate the Neighbors and I Vote
• I Threaten People and I Vote
• I Think I'm Artistic and I Vote
• I Am Lonely and I Vote

Let's get some real meaning in our slogans. After all, no one actually cares if you vote or what you vote for, so at least let's make the first half of the slogan terrifying.