Harry Hope's Saloon

Move this thing?

2005-10-15T22:04:00.000-07:00

Worth thinking seriously about. I like the title of the Blog and I would hope to keep it - though creative activity has been next to none for months, it remains a space that begs to be filled in the spirit of its name ...

I don't like the settings here anymore. I don't care that herbal drug and textbook salesmen think this blog is worth a bookmark.

J, let's go.

Als das Kind Kind war...

2005-09-30T15:20:00.000-07:00

Recently, I revisited the “City of Angels” soundtrack, a real basket of gems with one each among the best tunes by Sarah McLachlan, U2, and Alanis, plus a great prog-rocky piece by Peter Gabriel and some classic Hendrix. It’s a hard album to just leave on in the background, jumping between styles with what can feel like the speed of channel surfing. But, moving on...

I think I’ve nailed down my reasons for increasing dislike of the American remake of Wim Wenders’ colossal “Himmel ueber Berlin”. Plenty of people on the IMDb have bashed CoA as boring, as heavy-handed, as “horrible, sentimental garbage”, and it is certainly all of that, although not unworthy enough of a spiteful “1” vote. But, no, the real reason it’s so terrible is that it has taken the profound, pervasive theme of the original and swapped it out for lame cliches. In the process, it bears witness against typical (late 20th) American palettes of desire and loss. And by looking just a little deeper, the filmmakers had every opportunity to avoid this insult.

The theme of “Himmel ueber Berlin” is foreignness. It takes place, of course, in a divided city, whose halves simultaneously face societal unity and division, where a physical symbol of disconnect looms large. The central human characters are: a French acrobat with a traveling circus, disconnected as a foreigner and as a performer; and Peter Falk, whom nobody can help seeing as Columbo. And then there are the disconnects of time and memory: an old man visits Potsdamerplatz, in his mind a bustling center, now a weed-choked lot. A poem runs throughout the film, concerning the loss of childlike virtues in the adult. Foreignness goes down to the smallest detail, as when Nick Cave’s inner monologue reassures himself that he’s “not gonna tell you about the girl”, just before he takes the mike and introduces a number with, “I’m gonna tell ya about a girl.” And, of course, there are the angels who want to be human, and the human who wants to be an angel.

What then, is the comparable theme of “City of Angels”, in a city not devastated by change or separation (and seemingly chosen only on account of its name), where all of the principals seem to be true blue Americans? What jumps out at me is: death and sex. Looking back, it’s striking how little death per se is present in HuB. The suicide witnessed by Cassiel, of course, but even there, the death seems less significant than the despair. But in CoA, death is everywhere. The acrobat has been replaced by a surgeon, whose chief source of despair is children passing on “before their time”. Peter Falk is replaced by Dennis Franz, whose character is introduced as suffering from serious health problems. And, of course, the ending, and the realization that when one “takes the good with the bad” as a human, death is the Big Bad.

And the Big Good is sex. Not the notch-in-your-belt kind, of course, or the sixties love-in kind, but the cheesy chick flic kind. One reviewer nailed in, writing that in the post-“Top Secret” era, he couldn’t believe anyone would try to play a fireside sex scene straight. In a cabin, mind you, on a quiet wooded lagoon up at Tahoe. For anyone with any ironic sense whatsoever, it’s a far cry from the rich erotica in Berlin clubs or outside a performer’s trailer at night.

What’s makes CoA so disappointing, even insulting, is that the United States, and particularly Southern California, has more than its share of foreignness, personal displacement, and roles that disguise the real person. The characters could have been a Guatemalan immigrant, a tabloid-hunted sitcom star, a “VH1 Where Are They Now?” aging rocker, a newly-imported Yao Ming type playing for the Lakers, or a bazillion other interesting things that would Americanize the theme of HuB as well as being more inherently interesting than a generic “cute lady doctor” or a generic “very sick man”. There could have been some real feel for the rich local culture, instead of some generic muggers, a generic homeless dude, and, you get the picture. And, yes, I like the soundtrack, but jeez, somebody really decided to remake “Himmel ueber Berlin” in L.A. and not have any scenes of real musicians performing in local clubs? The fallen angel could have been Gwen Stefani; that would have been fucking awesome.

What I’m particularly looking for response on is: whether the mass American audience is really so incapable of artistic appreciation for themes as rich as displacement or isolation, such that it demands a explicit payoff of sex, death, or close escape from death, to keep engaged. That’s the question that continues to emerge from contrast of this great film with this mediocre one.

Nice Priorities...

2005-09-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

Investigators said Marco Garcia, 54, was found dead inside Ybarra's Jewelers on Sept. 13. He had apparently been killed during a robbery, according to authorities.
[...]
"Besides being my brother-in-law, he was my manager here at the store," said Samuel Ybarra. "I'm going to miss him so much because he was a great help in my business."

Six degrees of insomniac surfing

2005-09-10T01:42:00.000-07:00

So, I'm on a Scrabble server and notice some kewl lyrics in this guys finger notes. He warns me that the group is "very emo". "Emo" is a rather nebulous musical term, of course, so I go to Wikipedia what for to look it up. There is a page-of-the-day on anarcho-capitalism. So I click on that, leading to an approximately hour-long surf session that goes like this:

anarcho-capitalism --> David Friedman --> Society for Creative Anachronism --> Rennaisance Fair --> Longform Improvisation --> (my thought: something that is the opposite of) --> David Mamet --> Homicide --> Murder --> Year and a day rule --> Jubilee --> Jubilee (comics) --> Generation X (comics) --> Generation X --> emo.

Aaaaaah. Much better than typing three letters to find what I was looking for.

New at The Onion

2005-09-09T16:39:00.000-07:00

Damn, these guys are good...

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing African Americans "looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses."

Very important survivor

2005-09-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

Hehe, glad to know he's safe, up there at Red Stick.

So much to learn...

2005-09-04T13:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, before you ask, I stumbled upon this little testimonial in a particularly surfy kind of mood, via anti-Disney pages.

Although it may be tedious, I urge you to read through to the end, for there is truly a payoff. Oh my god, man, oh my god. (Scott: read it out loud to the girls. That would be hilarious.)

Expertise and the educated layman

2005-09-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

John Derbyshire on National Review Online in response to a post on political parties and Intelligent Design, goes deeper:

The problem with science is that it's a gnosis -- a body of esoteric material you need to spend years mastering. It is therefore inevitable that the people who do master it become a gnostic elite; and it follows from that that any public issue involving science can, and usually does, degenerate into an elite vs. masses squabble.

I don't know any way out of that, but I do wish we could do a better job of showing people what a proper scientific attitude _is_, a thing which I think can be grasped by anyone, even without any specialized training in a particular science.

This speaks to what may be among the trickiest features for a technologically advanced pluralistic society to negotiate: while we certainly need oversight of specialized elites by well-rounded, critical-thinking laymen, this oversight needs to be infused with appreciation for what specialization requires and for the levels of analysis it allows. I myself depart from many libertarians in (consciously) allowing many of my values to be shaped by the expertise of others. For example, I don't take the primary job of a music or film critic to be informing be of stuff that I would like today (although that function is certainly nice), but rather showing me ways of liking new things, and new ways of liking old things. Similarly, but with graver import, I think that the primary job of an economist is not to provide me with ammunition for positions I am already determined to hold.

On a societal level, however, I'm worried about how well this balance will hold, and what the consequences (short- and long-term) might be if it further degenerates into "elite vs. masses" warfare.

Posting just before work

2005-08-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

Scott, I suspect you'd really appreciate this guy.

For instance, this old entry.

Artists and Criminals

2005-07-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

This, attributed to Stanley Kubrick, film maker non pareil, obsessive craftsman, and genuine eccentric:

I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists. Neither takes life as it is.

I'm presuming he means "peculiar weakness" the way most people do when they confess a weakness for chocolate or nicotine or long legs (all of which can be very bad for you) - that is to say, he rates them highly. To say "I love you" is to surrender, to admit weakness, to give up freely because you are worth so much (or because I need something to exist that is worth so much or my life won't mean anything).

[Hey, where the hell am I going with this?]

Anyway ... yes. So I'm presuming Kubrick doesn't just mean that criminals and artists are interesting subjects for film. That artists and criminals are valuable forms of life ... somehow higher: like Nietzsche's artisits and saints and philosophers.

Artists and criminals. Criminals and artists. I like that.

Wish I could be one.

Don't I Know my Brother?

2005-07-21T10:33:00.000-07:00

Almost just as I thought ... dude calls me up last night to tell me my name was not so much included in the list of familial flag-wavers for the sake of irony ... as that the flag-wavers were added for the sake of extra punch in a joke intended entirely for my benefit.

I love that kind of stuff. That's good quality humour.

Fighting for Glory (oh yeah, and my freedom)

2005-07-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

And he ran along the trench, with its mortars and riflemen, machinguns and grenadiers. And he killed them all.

I do not know exactly why - I think it was either an accident, or a lark - but my brother included my email address in a list when he shared this link today.

It's titled This Will Make You Proud - and it's a lustrous, adoring, genuflecting, tribute to "real American" Brian Chontosh, USMC, who directed his humvee into the buzzing center of a dark ambush, saving some of his marines, and killing and wounding dozens of enemies. Gasp.

Knowing my brother, I do believe I was being winked at. I recognized most of the other addresses/names in the cc list - family, and old friends of the family: a regular bunch of hard-working, boot-lacing, rifle-polishing, law-enforcing, law-breaking jacks and jackies.

I really don't like being a single inclusion on a mass email - not typically. But something about this was okay. I felt kind of special. Thanks bro. I love you, too. And ... gosh. Thank you Brian Chontosh!

P.S. The following, with a subtle wink of my own, was my reply, to the entire list:

Man.

Who the hell created this life-slandering treacle?

And why was it sent to me?? I'm not a military worshipping zombie ....

Is this supposed to be ironic?

Choices

2005-07-18T02:31:00.000-07:00

Check out what Julian Sanchez is penning these days.

Monuments

2005-06-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps so those few of us can, by comparison, more deeply appreciate this, which I feel particularly blessed to have come across quite accidentally.

Freedom Tower

2005-06-29T16:39:00.000-07:00

Who named this thing, anyway? Why do "we" have to be represented in such an embarrasing way at every opportunity?

I kind of like the necessary emphasis on anti-kablooey, indestructable security throughout the design of a project so named, too. Good stuff, when you think about it.

Clear!!

2005-06-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

fweeeeeeeeeee ... Chu-chunk! ...

fweeeeeeeeeeeeeee....

Self-Control

2005-05-17T17:40:00.000-07:00

Here's what I think: it might not be the case that nobody who can laugh and dance without fear or self-consciousness ever lost their job, their house, their car, their credit. But I'll bet that nobody whoever lost their job, their house, their car, their credit knew yet how to really laugh and dance.

Looking over these words from my last post, I'm thinking this was not a very careful point to make in connection with John Riegle, the Elvis taxicab driver. The article does not say, but maybe Mr. Riegle did know how to laugh and dance before his wife's death. Maybe he felt all of life so passionately, and suffered this loss so greatly, that losing possession of everything else was just consequential, just stuff that also happened. Maybe then these did not even feel like losses though.

The point I was making was really autobiographical. For I feel always like I am just about to lose everything. I feel always on thin ice, dragging my things around with me. Scraping my feet along always so softly and fearfully ... and incrementally, that I never begin to approach the horizon ... slipping around in place. I have this theory that I should just dance; that what's beneath the ice is part of the world too, and I should not dread to touch it. But I never test the theory. Every instinct tells me to be careful, for God's sake. Don't bound. Don't leap.

To move away now from the metaphor, it's like this: I feel fixed. The world frightens me. I sit there quivering, trembling with restraint. I'm resentful, insufferable. I'm isolated, ignorant and incurious. I can't dance ... so don't ask me.

Long live the King

2005-05-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a great little story about redemption --- after a fashion. John Riegle drives the "Elvis Taxi" in Sacramento (about 12 miles from my home in Davis). Okay, he's a bit cracked. Says he "channels" Elvis. He sings and shimmys and shakes his pelvis in front of his cab, carrys on like a damned lunatic ... and delights his clients ... and makes a tidy sum. I especially like this passage:

Beneath the sunglasses and the alter ego is a savvy business person. Riegle has a bachelor’s in marketing from San Francisco State University. But he’s in it for more than money. Riegle says driving a cab helped him heal from his wife’s death. "I lost everything back 11 years ago. Lost my job, my house, my car, my credit. Wound up a hobo, wino, over in Del Paso Heights. Spent about two years in the VA hospital rehab. What a mess my life was when I lost Judy. Oh my god. Fixed and all better now, though. The cab business is one of the things that has fixed me, and made me strong and healthy again."

Here's what I think: it might not be the case that nobody who can laugh and dance without fear or self-consciousness ever lost their job, their house, their car, their credit. But I'll bet that nobody whoever lost their job, their house, their car, their credit knew yet how to really laugh and dance.

Thus Spoke Wittgentstein...

2005-05-15T12:48:00.000-07:00

God can say to me: "I am judging you out of your own mouth."

Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen them in others.

--Vermischte Bemerkungen

Gibt es irgendwo eine lebendige Blume?

2005-05-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

Thought this might be germane. It's certainly German:

...Und zwar ist die Religion das Selbstbewußtsein und das Selbstgefühl des Menschen, der sich selbst entweder noch nicht erworben oder schon wieder verloren hat. Aber der Mensch, das ist kein abstraktes, außer der Welt hockendes Wesen. Der Mensch, das ist die Welt des Menschen, Staat, Sozietät. Dieser Staat, diese Sozietät produzieren die Religion, ein verkehrtes Weltbewußtsein, weil sie eine verkehrte Welt sind. Die Religion ist die allgemeine Theorie dieser Welt, ihr enzyklopädisches Kompendium, ihre Logik in populärer Form, ihr spiritualistischer Point-d'honneur, ihr Enthusiasmus, ihre moralische Sanktion, ihre feierliche Ergänzung, ihr allgemeiner Trost- und Rechtfertigungsgrund. Sie ist die phantastische Verwirklichung des menschlichen Wesens, weil das menschliche Wesen keine wahre Wirklichkeit besitzt. Der Kampf gegen die Religion ist also mittelbar der Kampf gegen jene Welt, deren geistiges Aroma die Religion ist.

Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volkes.

Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks. Die Forderung, die Illusionen über einen Zustand aufzugeben, ist die Forderung, einen Zustand aufzugeben, der der Illusionen bedarf. Die Kritik der Religion ist also im Keim die Kritik des Jammertales, dessen Heiligenschein die Religion ist.

Die Kritik hat die imaginären Blumen an der Kette zerpflückt, nicht damit der Mensch die phantasielose, trostlose Kette trage, sondern damit er die Kette abwerfe und die lebendige Blume breche.

-- Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie

Ay, there's the rub. Sane writers from Epicurus through Nietsche to d'Unamuno and Camus, when distilled, have been telling us precisely that there is no such flower. Where Dawkins' science forces us to go, we can see no artificial social repression to be removed, which we might have hoped to yield a true image for which religion is the negative. Instead, we see social and personal fault woven into the very fabric of our selves and our societies. With this science, this wisdom in place, it no longer appears merely practical impossibility, but a conceptual impossibility, for "us" to separate ourselves from what we despise.

(I really need to get ahold of a hard copy of that book, BTW.)

Why the unreasoning right?

2005-05-05T18:15:00.000-07:00

The Dawkins interview mentioned by Scott in the previous post is, to my mind, both highly admirable and generally uninteresting. It's admirable that he's unwilling to give ground on the stupid "agnosticism" tactic. And it's admirable that he's willing to stand against the intellectual crippling of children and adults. However, most of the interview is spent knocking down easy targets, and the two really engaging questions it raises are never pursued.

One of these questions is how the advent of genome mapping, screening, and engineering will affect the future course of species and ecosystems, and especially the kinds of organisms we're willing to call "persons". I'll put this one aside, along with the question, developed by Scott, of how religion can interfere with the pursuit of meaning and goodness. For the time being, I want address the issue of the current American turn toward religious conservatism, and its relation to the Enlightenment spirit that inspires Dawkins. He says:

My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America. Unfortunately, at present, it's slightly outnumbered by the ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in.

But the broad direction of history is toward enlightenment, and so I think that what America is going through at the moment will prove to be a temporary reverse.

But what isn't mentioned, and absolutely ought to be, in this segment of the interview, is the impressive momentum throughout the twentieth century of intellectual systems which, while godless (at least in principle), were nevertheless immune to the enlightenment of science, rooted in wholly unreasonable conceptions of human nature and history, and often as deeply threatened by the insights of evolution as is any godly religion. As a short list of isms, I'll mention Marxism, racialism, modernism, radical egalitarianism, second-wave feminism, deep ecology, and Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It's important to reflect on the rise of these belief-complexes in order to remind ourselves that we don't avoid the pitfalls of bad religious belief (what Dawkins calls "delusion") merely by disbelieving in an Old Man In The Clouds; but also, with more immediate significance, it allows us to more soberly, and less fearfully, assess present ideological trends in the USA.

The idea that we're heading into a "dark age" for science, and in particular for evolutionary theory, is a tough conclusion to avoid, if we were to tacitly accept that the major enemies of "the right" (from either side's perspective) are in fact mostly Enlightenment, pro-science value systems. At an anecdotal level, I'm not at all convinced that that's the case. As one example, the "left" in this country has managed to deeply entrench a taboo against considering genetic contributions to psychological differences between the sexes and races. (Dawkins' head should be shaking at the obvious dearth of endocrinological and evolutionary biological expertise among "gender studies" departments.) As another example (and somewhat contradicting the first, if reason is to be our tool), a more recent taboo has developed against research concerning environmental contributions to sexual orientation. Not always, but far too often, the wrath of the academic and political left has descended upon researchers who attempt to quantify and test a broad hypothesis which (to my mind) is patently obvious: that such undesirable behaviors as rape, sexual harassment, adultery, bigotry, and male-on-male violence are largely manifestations of genetic patterns that have had great reproductive power for our ancestors. (As opposed to their primary cause being, say, the propaganda of a patriarchal conspiracy, or the alienation brought on by technological developments.) Having read most of Dawkins' books, I'm virtually certain that he'd agree with me in condemning these taboos. Among Salon readers especially, he should have taken the opportunity to mention them, and to expressly connect them to the harmful aspects of religion.

Ultimately, what I'm suggesting in mentioning these points is that the broader social dynamic which we're undergoing, of which growth in the religious right plays a crucial role, is probably not as simple as Dawkins makes it seem in the interview (a temporary swing away from enlightenment, to be followed by a larger swing back toward it). It may actually be more comparable to an immune system response, against so many godless anti-enlightenment movements of the last century. That is, it may be an indication to the contemporary left to thoroughly purge itself of its own delusional and dangerous ideologies, and to more fully embrace the teachings of legitimate science and history when it comes to our biologies and our social structures. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I'm increasily noticing indices of precisely that dynamic.

And, after all, Andrea Dworkin is out of the picture. Let Dawkins be the new left, then -- hallelujah.

Beating my Chest ...

2005-05-01T15:47:00.000-07:00

This isn't very gracious, I know. But I want to revisit this paragraph I myself wrote earlier in All in One Take:

Amor Fati, Nietzsche would say - Embrace your fate! Take the world, good and ill ... this is no rehearsal. This is your moment on stage. What a miracle ... you're here! Do you know, statistically, how impossible that even is?? And what, you want more?? What, another life?! Oh man, Let your heart race now, let it skip, eternally while you breathe!

And these thoughts I want to compare - their content anyway, if not their tone and measure - to this brief response from Richard Dawkins in an interview currently in Salon (Registration required, but you can get a day pass):

How would we be better off without religion?

We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.

To that let me just proudly add ... yeah, see? Exactly.

The Cowen Questions

2005-04-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has had the audacity to claim that he holds beliefs with what is quite possibly insufficient evidence. (!) Although deeply offensive to my normative standard of 101% rationality (according to which, as follows rationally, we are all sinners) I feel that such an attractive assortment deserves sniffing.

[clearing throat]

1. China will someday just get up and attack Taiwan. Recent progress aside, how many rational decisions have Chinese governments made in the last six hundred years? And its inability to get over the idea of conquering Taiwan will stop China from democratizing anytime soon. I am not in general a "China hawk," but I view Taiwan as, sadly, a goner. I remain amazed by how many "liberal" Chinese simply think Taiwan is "theirs."

While it certainly seems that the PRC will get away with assimilating and corrupting Taiwan, is it not far more plausible that a series of deals between the Party and crony capitalists will faciliate a reunification scheme to (like Hong Kong on a much larger scale) establish much greater superficial freedoms on the island, and providing much more in the way of bread and circuses than the mainland gets, while gradually consolidating ultimate power?

2. High-quality American high school students study too much and have too many extracurricular activities. Yes, I am thinking zero-sum game. It would be better for most of them to go out and get jobs bagging groceries. They would learn more about the real world.

Hell yeah. The only thing I'll add is that most of the application-padding extracurricular activities (and, probably needless to say, far too much of the curricular) reflect a painfully shallow standard of well-rounded virtue, with all of the attendant absurditites of thoughless adult value-projection onto adolescents. For a particularly clear example: I doubt that many kids list "Dungeons and Dragons" on college apps. I sure as hell didn't. But looking back, there's no doubt in my mind that the role-playing game did far more for my intellectual development, on a diversity of subjects, than did French Club or Debate Club or wherever the hell else I hung out with my smart friends for one hour a week.

3. Shaquille O'Neal is the greatest NBA player ever, bar none. (Well, OK, there is some evidence for this.)

Heh, no way. I'm writing this from the Sacramento area, so you may disregard with a snicker if you so choose. But Shaq has done so well because he gets away with many offensive fouls, every game, appalling in frequency and degree, by almost any standard you can name: the history of basketball, the spirit of basketball, or the standard by which most his contemporary centers are held. Most of his points come from shielding the ball with his back to the net, knocking a defender back or down a couple of times, and just kinda stomping to the basket for an easy lay-in. Okay, so rules evolve, and maybe he's pioneering a new style that hasn't caught on widely enough. If so, basketball is going to end up a really stupid sport.

4. The first two Star Wars installments (yes, that includes the one with Jar Jar Binks) were excellent, and will someday be recognized as such. Maybe you view those films as engaged in excessive pandering. I see them as a Bildungsroman (Anakin/Darth) which makes few concessions to popular taste and also presents public choice theory in sophisticated fashion. Lucas simply doesn't care if the films make no sense in stand-alone fashion, nor should he. By the way, in the interests of personal safety, I've decided to limit my number of car trips before May 19.

I haven't seen "The Clone Wars", so can't really address your point. But I thought the first movie was atrocious, for the acting, the weight of uninspired action over development, and especially for the weirdly quick resolution.

5. High-quality barbecue (alas, not available here in Virginia) is better than most expensive French restaurants. And I love most expensive French restaurants, especially when someone else is paying.

Yep, but lots of ethnic and local cuisine is, at its best, also better than expensive French restaurants, often with much less fat and snob content. Somehow the imported Thais seem to make consistently excellent dishes without reminding you of that fact incessantly, or criticizing your beverage pairing. You know, the main reason I've opted for muckety-muck French restaurants is precisely nostalgia for a time and class level where I might have lived as such a snob. Luckily, I don't get that disease very often.

6. Aesthetic judgments are, in principle, objective rather than arbitrary.

Well, duh. Unfortunately, I suspect the master key will lie far in the future, coming from advances in the study of cortical structure, philosophy of consciousness, and a really rigorous form of semiotics. Hell, if we're already having so much trouble with the concept of "IQ"...

Why I don't like your music :->

2005-04-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

Oh, what a breath of fresh air to read this summary of a certain artist's own musical tastes:

There's a certain kind of melodic sense and a more old-school approach to songwriting, like a more crafted song. I'm not so excited about bands that are more about vibe than about good songwriting. But then again, the vibe has to be there too. And lyrics that are written to a certain standard, with the music married to the lyrics in a particular kind of way.

Hopelessly vague? Of course, but it makes for a rallying cry.

pontification

2005-04-03T19:39:00.000-07:00

Man, I'm about to fucking lose it at just about every single article rigorously alternating the terms "pope" and "pontiff". What are you assholes trying to do, show off your SAT vocabularies? I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure that the last time I read a story about someone's child, I didn't see gratuitous substitution of "offspring", "progeny", etc.

Good genes

2005-03-29T20:31:00.000-08:00

My cousin has just been signed by the San Jose Earthquakes. He's such a great guy -- I'm really happy that he's back in the area.

ad non sequitum

2005-03-24T21:41:00.000-08:00

Here comes my Terri Schiavo post ...

Heard a set of propositions bordering on the sublime this afternoon as I tuned in to the eminently entertaining Michael Savage "Savage Nation" radio program (and I mean that in the very worst possible way).

A guy calls in and says something like:

Oh man, I tell ya, these liberals! They're all het up to murder this handicapped woman, but man, they couldn't stand to see Christopher Reeve die. I mean, his handicap costed a helluva lot more money, he needed a lot more care and resources, so why are they so eager to kill this poor handicapped woman????

And this was Savages immediate response:

Let me tell you something. Here's the bad news. What we're seeing today is just the first steps to Nazi rule. Do you understand that?

Too rich.

Can you spot the fallacies? This is college textbook material.

But I lied, of course. This is not a Terri Schiavo post. The ethico-biologico-juridico questions that are the crux of that case are of only occasional, academic, interest to me ... not more so than in the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, or of Nancy Cruzan, or of the diaboloical case of Josef Mengele (which seems to be what Savage was referring to).

Which is to say that here I'm more intrigued by the fray - by listening to the way some people, in some regrettably too large public squares, talk about the way other people talk about, and react to, whatever happens to be on the docket for the week.

I mean it's all too rich.

Appropos my last post ...

2005-03-20T15:10:00.000-08:00

To go along with the passage I quoted from Berger, James Wolcott fires hard against cause celebre spectacle and hypocrisy in his latest blog post, railing against the usual suspects - Peggy Noonan, Tom Delay - quoting liberally (no pun intended)(...no, honest!) from Alexander Cockburn and Paul Craig Roberts, and including this passage from The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris:

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists will maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc). And yet where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem-cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimises innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.

Harris' book was recently skewered in a review on reasononline, and perhaps justifiably: bad enough this comment is flatly anecdotal - which is okay when I do it - it's also, I think, flat wrong. This might be fixed by a little qualification: "Faith tends to drive a wedge between ethics and suffering..." or "The faith of some - maybe even most - people tends to drive a wedge ..." Something like that. I think this is why Wolcott includes this passage in his post; he means to be saying "The faith of scum like Tom DeLay and Rick Santorum never seems to succeed in anything but driving these wedges..."

Taken as such, the passage makes its point. Speech about morality sounds always empty to me when it is busy naming pariahs, creeps, freaks and dangerous characters; when it is busy circumscribing "family values" and declaiming outsiders and degenerates to that hallowed version.

To me, individual morality would consist in never- or seldom-flagging humor ... love, patience, curiosity and tenderness to all (or all possible). Social morality must probably consist in the old, forgotten liberal values: eradication of poverty, respect and protection for the least among us ... that kind of thing.

So, for now at least, I guess you can count me out. I'm crabby, not very patient, not fighting to alleviate the scourge of want and constant social care. These beliefs of mine, if true, only include me in the number of those who recognize something like the extent of their own depravity, and to a small degree, among those like, in this case, Wolcott, Roberts and Berger, and among those like the good people at Sojourner's (check out The Budget is a Moral Document) who want, I think, not only to say, "hey! we're moral too!!" but to kick over the tables in the temple and clearly call the money-changing moralists immoral.

Bad Day, Bad Mood ... Bad writing

2005-03-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

Liked this passage from a recent article in Salon.com, {Kevin Berger, author) concerning this week's congressional hearing on steroids in baseball:

I should admit that I tuned into the hearings Thursday mostly in agreement with Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Randy Wolf, who said that Congress's new zeal around steroids amounted to "chemical McCarthyism." The din of condemnation seemed hysterical, hypocritical and a distraction from baseball's much more serious political scandal, which is its exemption from the federal antitrust act, which allows wealthy owners to earn exorbitant profits and pretty much rob cities of taxes in the process. And isn't it rich that this is the same government committee that mostly failed to investigate wrongdoing at Enron? The collapse of which made it awfully hard for a lot of folks in Houston to afford tickets to watch the Astros' Jeff Bagwell slap a double to the right field gap. In short, the steroid witch hunt seemed another log on the bonfire of religious moralism that blinds us to the country's more serious problems.

I don't really think much of the comparison to investigations, or lack of same, into the Enron scandal, which sounds too much like the tired old defense of Martha Stewart, who is supposed to have been molested in ways spared Ken Lay, but the overall sentiment, and especially the final statement, hits the mark.

I've been lamenting for some time, to anyone unfortunate enough to raise anything like the issue around me, that the incorporated "religious right" in this country suffers from a very distinct and conspicuous lack of real morality.

And I think the problem spreads way beyond that amorphous, scolding group. Everywhere I turn, to whomever I look, left and right, I seem to see pinched faces, thin skin and gleaming eyes staring in judgement, bespeaking an urge to punish - compounding resentment and misery; redistributing shame and rage in the name of gods and parents and children and family values and structure... in accordance with the way we are brought up. It's all very modern crisis, very Munch and Brecht, very fin de Siecle...

I'm judging: I find it immoral.

jailbait: fifties and nineties

2005-03-14T12:18:00.000-08:00

I must confess: if someone would have suggested this connection to me yesterday, I'd have scoffed at such superficiality. Now I'm just sort of dumbfounded.

From the Wikipedia entry on Lolita:

The case of Amy Fisher, whom in 1992 the press dubbed the "Long Island Lolita", helped popularize the term among a new generation. Screenwriter Alan Ball considered writing a play based on the Fisher case, but the story soon got away from him and mutated into the screenplay which became American Beauty (1999). The narrator, played by Kevin Spacey, falls for a teenage girl, who is a "lolita" in the mainstream or pornographic sense but is too old to be a Nabokovian nymphet. His name, Lester Burnham, is an anagram of "Humbert learns".

Utter Bullshit

2005-03-07T18:37:00.000-08:00

A friend recently emailed me a link to this book review of cartesian scholar Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit.

How nice to see eminent philosophy training its best lights on the world we actually inhabit.

top ten atrocious rhymes

2005-03-07T13:32:00.000-08:00

A lot of people don't like 'slant rhyme' (near rather than absolute identity in the ‘rime’, the final stressed vowel of a line and all following sounds. See, for example, the rhyme ‘rivers’/’lovers’ in Stalling's "Listening to the Monkeys..." -- and see what she does in stanza 5!). Unfortunately, I often hear it described either as laziness or as a sort of antinomian rejection of a pure-ryming tradition. However, aside from its usefulness in the deliberately weaking of a pattern, slanting can save a poet from the atrocities of the present list. In some of these cases, an obvious semantic link renders the rhyme completely uninspired. In other cases, usually when perfect rhymes are sparse, a rhyme pair is so highly conventionalized that it often seems undermotivated by content (‘forced’).
“The bells that cool my horse's tramp”, was Emily Dickinson’s apt metaphor for the value of slant rhyme. The following, then, must be elephants, or perhaps Panzers.

10. ‘seven’/’heaven’

I guess it's not as bad as ‘twelve’/’delve’ in the old nursery rhyme, but it's much more common. Country Joe and the Fish deserve kudos for the line "five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates", simultaneously a) punning on ‘8’, b) semantically evoking the lame rhyme for ‘7’ without lamely articulating it, and c) staying on topic. Best counting song I’ve ever heard, and maybe the only decent one.

9. ‘death’/’breath’

If Shakespeare jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

8. any combination of ‘fly’/’high’/’sky’

“Wind beneath my Wings” uses all three. Nice song which otherwise adheres to a regular pattern of fairly weak slant rhyme (‘shine’/’behind’; ‘truth’/’you’; ‘be’/’wings’). Yet one attempt at pure rhyme, and it’s hella lame.

7. ‘love’/’dove’

Whoa, how lucky that we have a symbol whose name rhymes with the name of that which it symbolizes! Guess we won’t have to put any, uh, thought into our poetic metaphors.

6. ‘junkie’/’flunkie’

Sorry, Sheryl. I still love your songs, even this one, but the rhyme is so severely lame that it needs live-in care.

5. ‘wait’/’late’/’date’

Billy Joel rhymed ‘date’ with ‘masturbate’. That was much kewler. BTW, did you know that Senator Clinton used “Captain Jack” at a major campaign function? Hilarious. I guess they read lyrics as often as they read bills.

4. ‘baby’/’maybe’

Okay, so not much rhymes with ‘baby’, but please don’t qualify your love on the basis of a purely poetic desperation.

If we were old-school Mormons, love songs might be adressed to our ‘babies’, facilitating rhymes with ‘rabies’ or ‘scabies’.

3. ‘bad’/’mad’/’sad’/’glad’

The words are far too literal, and the emotions too superficial, to be so strongly juxtaposed as in rhyme. Rhyme them with ‘fad’, ‘clad’, ‘plaid’, or ‘Galahad’, but not with one another.

2. ‘cry’/’die’

Which one did Elvis say he was lonesome enough to do? How about Hank Williams? John Denver? I always forget.

1. ‘mother’/’brother’

Anticlimactically obvious, I think. Lots of nice slant rhymes to choose from here. Highly recommended.

Will to Will

2005-03-04T00:27:00.000-08:00

Will Wilkinson has been writing open letters to an old Randian self-slice. In the things-I-wish-I-had-written file:

"(Further suggestive-but-incomplete Nozickian digression . . . Capitalism and reason developed together, but this isn't obvious. Proponents of reason missed this, and indeed thought reason had been sufficiently refined to transcend capitalism and rationally plan a good society. This turned out to be a disaster. But this is a new sense in which capitalism contained the seeds of its own opposition, and in which anti-capitalism was unwittingly (and ironically) anti-reason. The next step in the development of reason is its self-consciousness about its limits, and its contribution to a dynamic unplanned order. Hayekian Hegel!)"

Centers

2005-02-21T15:11:00.000-08:00

Last night, I was browsing my ancient (late 60s) National Geographic books, and in "The Amazing Universe" by Herbert Friedman I came across two jaw-droppers concerning the accompishments of astronomer Harlow Shapley:

"Moving our sun trillions of miles seems a Herculean task, but Harlow Shapley accomplished it in 1918 with an inspired assumption. Until then, astronomers guessed at the size of the Milky Way, usually placing the sun at its center..."

"...single-handedly, Shapley removed the sun and earth from a central position in the Milky Way and placed us close to its outskirts -- an almost Copernican accomplishment. In the Missouri native's words, it was 'a rather nice idea because it means that man is not such a big chicken.'"

Jigga-wha??

What we call the 'Copernican revolution' was indeed a great astronomic paradigm-shift, but is much more significant as a revolution in theology, philosophy of science, and the rest of the humanities. It means, for one thing, that we don't allow religious authority to straightjacket our investigations into the world. Even more importantly, it means that if we are to pursue meaning, we must follow other paths than cosmic centrality (or perhaps, by implication, immortality).

I can consider myself neither a scientist nor particularly a historian of science, but I am completely incredulous as to Friedman's claim: that professional astronomers in the twentieth century actually took as their default the centrality of our solar system in the galaxy, and that there was anything shocking about a disproof. Hadn't the real revolution, the conceptual revolution, already run its course? Whether an accurate depiction of 1910s astronomy or just one author's bizarre take on it, is there any limit, an existentialist might say, to such absurd goalpost-shifting?

So much for homogeneity in academia...

2005-02-20T14:58:00.000-08:00

More on Ward from the Rocky Mountain News:

Another controversial Churchill essay is his Pacifism as Pathology, a treatise contending that nonviolent protest is ineffective and a sure loser.

His defiant stance is underscored in big and small trappings of his life; on the side of the refrigerator in his kitchen, along with more mundane items, is a small patch bearing the silhouette of an assault rifle, and the words, "Peace Through Superior Firepower."

Interesting dude. This may be worth getting a hold of. Most striking for me is how close this sounds to the frightened stereotype of armed citizen advocacy that I encounter with regularity from leftist acquaintances. Although I don't want to leap to conclusions without having read his full explication, I suspect that I support civilian gun ownership for reasons almost diametrically opposed to Churchill's. My support is for local, immediate deterrence to personal crime, the self as the primary source of personal defense, and a reduced reliance on massive bureaucracy for local civility and morality. I see guns, in essence, as tonic against explosions of violence in two respects: first, by reducing the local crime (including that committed by police!) that can set them off, and second, by allowing individual decisions to react to the problem locally and proportionally. Peace, in other words, comes not from besting a threat through active use of weaponry, but from staking out one's personal sphere sufficiently that aggression becomes too costly at the level of local decision-making. In a diverse society, making civility pragmatic is an important precursor to healthy cross-pollenation of ideas and traditions, although this latter societal value naturally requires a bit more than a healthy set of thorns.

But to think of oneself as among the oppressed, and aiming to amass sufficient firepower (literally and metaphorically) to defeat the oppressor, seems to me exactly the wrong way to go.

Paul Craig Roberts

2005-02-20T13:43:00.000-08:00

Here are his bona fides.

And here is one of his most recent columns.

This is your calm answer to the aneurystic Zell Miller ... only don't look for him to be delivering any major party keynote addresses in prime time.

Eichmanns (part 1?)

2005-02-20T11:08:00.000-08:00

I'd like to thank Scott for inviting me to his little unbirthday party. I've brought some more candles for his cake, and they're the special kind...

OK, so I've been reflecting upon Scott's recent post regarding the Ward Churchill "scandal". Now, I'm not going to get into advocacy of academic freedom, because the relevant arguments are either (moral universals) both widely available and rather boring, or else (sociological applications of evolution theory) somewhat beyond my expertise and worthy of separate discussion. Nor am I going to discuss the ethics of killing innocents (from whatever the agent's own perspective on justice) in the service of targeting the guilty. Here, instead, I want to discuss the other question, the one at an intersection of ethics and metaphor/analogy theory: to whom can our received construal of Eichmann and his role justifiably be mapped?

First off, I'm going to take it for granted that 'evil' is either preserved in any such mapping, or reduced somewhat (perhaps to 'very bad'). If moral badness were not essential to the analogy, I see no sense in choosing Eichmann as the source concept, rather than any number of morally neutral cogs throughout history and literature. Second, Eichmann is a conduit for larger evil forces. Third, he is personally dispassionate toward the evil cause he serves. Whether or not this is literally true of the man (and it almost certainly isn't), it has come to be, as a result of his "just following orders" defense at trial and of Hannah Arendt's general acceptance of his self-characterization for the sake of her larger points about human nature and history, critical to the symbolic Eichmann, which is what concerns me here. Fourth (and this is as true of the symbolic as of the real man), Eichmann not only witnessed, but made executive decisions in the organization of, the evils for which he and his society were condemned. The suffering was before his eyes, he was in a position to tabulate it, and did in fact report on it to his superiors as progress made. Put these features together and I get an analogical frame like this:

Eichmann Frame (EF): An Eichmann is a person who is evil by virtue of acting out of duty to an institution, while dispassionate toward the institution's values, and who thereby knowingly lets evil work through them as a conduit, while personally confronted with the suffering that makes such work evil.

Now, a frame is not an analytic definition, so a person need not satisfy all of the above precisely in order to be reasonably called an Eichmann. Features of the frame can be weakened or backgrounded; they can even be dropped, so long as enough of pragmatic importance is preserved in the frame. (Somewhat in Churchill's defense, he did refer to the WTC deceased as "little Eichmanns", and, as the qualifier 'little' suggests, did not claim that the individual evil of these individuals rose to Eichmann's level.) So, my two questions are: (1) To what extent are the various features of my 'Eichmann' frame central or peripheral? (2) To what extent do the WTC deceased (universally or on average) make the analogy go through?

Hold that thought. Scene change.

Here, in The Stand, is how Stephen King introduces the dark man, Randall Flagg:

“His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature -- pamphlets for all seasons, rhetoric for all reasons. When this man handed you a tract you took it no matter what the subject: the dangers of atomic power plants, the role played by the International Jewish Cartel in the overthrow of friendly governments, the CIA-Contra-cocaine connection, the farm workers' unions, the Jehovah's Witnesses... the Blacks for Militant Equality, the Kode of the Klan. He had them all, and more, too... There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think -- and you would be right... It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody.”

Aha, so here we have evil manifested as passionate hatred, ideology of all 31 flavors, movements in every case to cleanse the world of the corrupt. The force of the devil, says King, is the force that can make trivial differences into fuel for murder, and more substantial yet still surmountable differences into fuel for genocide. (I see essentially the same message in the Stones' Sympathy with the Devil, for what it's worth: the crucifixion of Jesus, Nazi expansion, October revolution, and in every case the same "game"; "Anastasia cried in vain" because the passion of the movement was immune to sympathy.) So how does this relate to Eichmann and Eichmanns? Well, consider my above formulation of the Eichmann Frame: it seems that the only difference between the EF and the Flagg evils involves the word 'dispassionate'. So then, how distinctive should this single feature be? Should I think about two very different evils, perhaps a Scylla and Charybdis to navigate exactly between? Or should I construe them as manifestations of the same evil force?

I'm inclined toward the latter. Until this very moment, I never planned to invoke Dungeons & Dragons in a blog, but in a flash I realize how formative may have been its bidimensional model of moral character ('alignment'): good-neutral-evil along one axis, lawful-neutral-chaotic along the other. When I invoke the concept of good versus evil in describing an individual or behavior, I instinctively attempt to distinguish it from the concepts of reliability versus spontaneity, thoroughness versus cleverness. The distinction cannot always be made of course, and is likely unjustified in many of the cases where I do make it, but nevertheless my working position is the Lawfuls of the world (as little as I enjoy talking with them at parties) differ from my personality in ways orthogonal to moral goodness.

Thus, I would tend to isolate such traits from the rest of my Eichmann Frame, resulting in something like this:

(EF'): An Eichmann is a person who has predominantly Lawful personality traits, and who is evil by virtue of knowingly letting evil work through them as a conduit, while personally confronted with the suffering that makes such work evil.

I think it fair to assume for the sake of argument that the majority of deceased WTC workers were not of a primarily revolutionary or radical bent. That is, I will grant that any evil they might bear is more of the Eichmann than the Flagg variety. In deciding the extent to which Churchill's Eichmann analogy goes through, I want to further pursue the second and third clauses of (EF'). That is, we should ask two questions of the analogy's target domain: (1) What can the person reasonably believe about the institutional forces which they serve as a conduit; (2) What is the person's revealed capacity to perform explicitly cruel actions, to see suffering and continue to push it forward?

It seems obvious to me that the majority of WTC workers did not reach little-Eichmann status with regard to these two features. Perhaps we should discuss, however, how a hypothetical individual might qualify?

Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children?!!

2005-02-19T17:55:00.000-08:00

Tonight I learned, listening to Weekend Edition on National Public Radio, that former presidents Geroge H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton are currently touring Thailand - to visit areas ravaged by last month's Tsunami.

"Both men," we are told "became emotional when given photos showing children being washed away by the tidal waves."

So ... why do I need to know this?

Mind you, there was no other information imparted. Just that the two presidents went to Thailand and choked up (or became quiet and reflective - whatever. I guess we are to use our imaginations) over photos of doomed children. It was reported so succinctly, a matter of such quick course. And I - cynically - wondered ... did they really? Why are you telling me just this?

Sensitive and Serious Consideration

2005-02-19T14:24:00.000-08:00

Well, my fine gentlemen, let the trumpets sound! Let's see whether meanness and mediocrity have the power to gag a man who wants to clean up society!
-- Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People

Thank heavens for The Leiter Reports. Having so very little time to do my own research these days, Brian Leiter's site has been my portal into the progess of the great Ward Churchill "Little Eichmans" essay flap.

Churchill's claims need to be assessed and challenged without equivocation - without fingers pinching noses, without mealy mouths garbling invocations of the first amendment or academic freedom no matter the requisite feelings of revulsion.

This entry from Leiter, which among other things, references Ibsen's observations concerning majority opinion, shows how. Here is an excerpt:

Yet it is equally clear that Gerald Dworkin (Philosophy, UC Davis) was absolutely correct to say the following:
[T]he main theses [of the essay] represent moral, political, and empirical claims about the cause of the attack, and its moral character. No faculty member should be dismissed because of such claims.

It is easy enough to reconstruct something like the crux of Churchill's argument which shows it to bear out Professor Dworkin's characterization. Churchill is making three claims:
(1) The success and profitiability of American capitalism depends on U.S. imperialism, and, in particular, on U.S. actions that have brought death and misery to millions around the globe. (This is an empirical claim.)

(2) Those who (actively? intimately?) participate in the power centers of capitalism (and thus profit from it) are morally implicated in the aforementioned death and misery. (A moral claim about responsibility or, as Churchill says, "collective guilt".)

(3) These same people are, therefore, legitimate targets of retaliatory violence. (A moral claim about desert.)
This omits stuff, obviously--for example, the empirical claims Churchill apparently shares with the Pentagon about why the U.S. was targetted.

The empirical claim in (1) is plainly a topic of legitimate scholarly discussion. Academic freedom obviously protects one's right to affirm it or deny it outright, or to take some view anywhere inbetween.

The moral claim in (2) raises a whole host of important issues about the moral responsibility of institutional actors, issues which are also plainly legitimate topics of scholarly discussion. Churchill plainly has no systematic or even clear view about what level of involvement confers moral responsibility. Nonetheless, it would be extraordinary if academic freedom did not protect the right of a professor to make moral claims about how participation in an institution imports responsibility for the actions of the institution. ((2) is also the claim, I take it, that gives rise to the inflammatory Eichmann comparison: Eichmann was a functionary within a system that brought death and misery to millions, and thus bore moral responsibility for those wrongs. That there are disanaologies, obvious and otherwise, between Eichmann and, e.g., investment bankers [as actors within the "capitalist system"] that bear on moral culpability is the real reason for thinking the analogy inapt, and thus gratuitously insulting. Yet a bad analogy, in the course of making a claim about collective responsibility, can not possibly be grounds for termination in a society which protects academic freedom.)

The real candidate for a claim that is "morally depraved" is thesis (3), but it too is a moral claim, however shocking, that is related to the kinds of issues that are discussed all the time in connection with the moral legitimacy of war and the killing of civilians. When I have called the various academic war-mongers (none of whom have had their jobs threatened, to my knowledge) "morally depraved," it is for the same reason people are calling Churchill's (3) a "morally depraved" view. I think it is morally depraved to countenance the intentional or foreseeable killing of civilians, whether in the World Trade Center or in Iraq, and I do not see any plausible way of explicating claims (2) and (3) (about responsibility and desert) such that one's conclusion ought to be otherwise in these cases. (Some, including Churchill himself, have suggested that the point is not to endorse the justice of retaliatory violence against responsible institutional actors, but simply to make the ironic point that such a principle follows naturally from the standard U.S./Pentagon attitude towards civilian casualties in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the essay as originally written does not, I think, support that interpretation: vide its last line, for example.)

For what it's worth, I think I can illuminate at leastone of the disanalogies attendant on the Eichmann reference this way: Adolf Eichmann was a something of a case study. The nominative subject of Hannah Arendt's book: Eichamann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. He was as Leiter says, a functionary in a deathly pernicious system - a cog with a peculiar talent for organization. More than that, he was, I think, for Arendt, an exemplar of the character of modern evil - trivialization. Eichmann was a trivial man, with a small soul, easily fobbed off with warm comforts and lazy rationalizations - cordoned off in his restaraunts, his automobiles and his offices and apartments - disconected, incapable of suffering and constitutionally unsympathetic.

But Eichmann himself was standing - in his plexiglass casing - before the bar, in high relief under the lights. His story was played out. Given that, he became for Arendt a symbol of what was at the time a barely perceived condition. He is the index. He was not himself the condition. And those who died in New York on September 11, 2001 will not simply, just like that, become, en masse, symbols of a symbol - exemplars of Eichmann.

Some who died that day may very well have been trivializers too. But how are we to know? Who's to tell us so?

This open letter to Churchill, from the brother of a victim, which I also accessed through the Leiter Reports, Says much the same thing, and much more, and much better ... Deserves serious consideration.

Welcome New Member

2005-02-16T18:20:00.000-08:00

In the august tradition of Scrappy Doo, Cousin Oliver and that kid who used to call Conrad Bain's character "Mishter D", I am happy to welcome my brilliant friend and spiritual brother Jeremy Goard to the saloon.

Jeremy's intellectual standards are high, and his voice and style are everything I have ever hoped for with this blog. I look forward - with relish - to the exchange in store. Here we go now, he and I, writing our little hearts out about politics, criticism, literature, film, philosophy, religion, philosophy of religion ... tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral ....

Mein Freund ... Wilkommen

Devil's Workshop

2005-01-31T19:22:00.000-08:00

I have recommended to my lil 'ol bookclub that this week we read this essay by Mark Slouka from the November issue of Harper's Magazine - a superb consideration on the diminishing American soul.

Googling the essay, I came accross a decent thread on the subject on the Majikthise blog -- which was recently rolled on jameswolcott.com.

I'm hosting the club this Friday -- I intend to ply everyone with delicious bread pudding, and hold earnestly fourth about the urgency of increasingly narrow margins and the frustration generated by rampant instrumentalization.

What am I talking about? Read the essay...

The Cost of Cruel Ignorance

2005-01-21T13:41:00.000-08:00

Overheard this morning --

Bush supporter John, of Indianapolis, being interviewed on the street at the presidential inauguration by DemocracyNow!'s Amy Goodman:

Goodman: So do you give any thought to the soldiers coming home from Iraq in body bags?

John (sounding definitely no more than 25 years old): Absolutely. That's just the price of freedom.

Jerk.

What's he doing in Washington?

Resurecti

2004-12-22T22:21:00.000-08:00

At last ...

Just about one month since I sat in my two-bedroom apartment, preparing to take my temporary leave from the blogosphere (so called), from virtually all form of life in the Web - unable to surf for any sustained period of time, to ponder over email, to stay electronicaly abreast of world events --

I am in my new five bedroom, two-story home, computer room assembeled. Ready to begin again.

Witness

2004-12-15T19:31:00.000-08:00

Take an emetic ... you who read this. You know well the Christian meaning of witness to the truth: a man who has been scourged, beaten, dragged from one prison to the next, until at last he is burned, beheaded or crucified.

- Kierkegaard

Scrupling

2004-11-26T14:41:00.000-08:00

In All in One Take I wrote:

And am I blurring a distinction that ought to be taken to exist between romantic and universal love?

Some of the most eminent thinkers in the history of the Occident have already answered no. Plato, Augustine, Dante, Castiglione (Castiglione?!) all wrote of the sure and steady path from focused ardor to divine rapture - as I think I did once, proceed from love of a single girl, to a passion for the universe that brought her to me.

This passage needs qualification, doesn't it?

It raises the question, or questions: what if the universe takes that object of focused ardor away, as it did your Denise when you were fifteen? What follows? Moral devastation? Rage? Universal melanchoy and maybe hatred over the ungracious take-back?

I think these questions can be answered something like this: devastation and melancholy, definitely. Also the potential for rage and hatred. But these last emotions, and others like them, usually resorted to in order to give direction and vent to the melancholy, are never necessary. Just incredibly tempting.

We want to have the capacity for suffering, to bear immense pain and emotional trauma. These are the wages we pay for being open to great joy. I believe they entail a capacity for empathy - for deep moral engagement.

I want to submit that giving in to rage and hatred are indications that we do not have such capacity. That we will rather vent than bear it.

And this is a sign that we are unable to venture on love. We won't risk it. We will gamble away our better angels.

To Shifting Constellations

2004-11-25T11:40:00.000-08:00

To my enigmatic father and his wonderful, patient wife; to my own Miss On-again Off-again. I miss you, today especially. Wishing you the happiest Thanksgiving possible.

My son and I are moving this weekend - same town, new house. Posting will be rather spotty, I predit - spottier than usual. It all depends on SBC and how quickly they can reconnect my DSL in the new place.

Disclaimers

2004-11-25T09:55:00.000-08:00

Textbook disclaimer stickers, lifted from the often brilliant Leiter Reports.

Tainted Blessing

2004-11-23T22:53:00.000-08:00

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by purposelessness in their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.

-- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

All in One Take - Hyperbolic

2004-11-21T22:25:00.000-08:00

Tell you the truth: I'm waging a personal battle with myself these days, as a confirmed Christian in the Tolstoyan sense of turning the other cheek and resisting not evil.

Did I say Chrisitan? I did. But I'm also an atheist. I'm not saying, with the agnostics, that one just doesn't know for sure what lurks beyond the veil, and therefore cannot be sure ... I'm saying that religion is a matter of faith and I believe that God, that white-bearded trinity, that all-knowing and all-mighty personification of perfection in the heavens, does not exist. And I think that makes me an atheist.

But then again, I am a Christian.

Some kind of one, anyway. The kind that would fain follow the example set by Jesus of Nazareth if he were taken as a man. I believe in the power of passion and redemption. I mean passion in the Latin sense of the term: passio, root of patient, suffering the world to exist and press on me. And I mean redemption through love - real love, as in curiosity, awe and amazement in the face of that world.

Amor Fati, Nietzsche would say - Embrace your fate! Take the world, good and ill ... this is no rehearsal. This is your moment on stage. What a miracle ... you're here! Do you know, statistically, how impossible that even is?? And what, you want more?? What, another life?! Oh man, Let your heart race now, let it skip, eternally while you breathe.

Let the infection of insult and petty resentment, the plague of fear and mean annoyance, starve and die in your breast. Don't let it boil and incubate. Don't let it spread and touch others. There's your power to make a huge difference. Live now all in one take, and teach through your example ... like Christ. Try, anyway.

That's the imperative ... the only one really worth heeding, I think. Obey just this, and what will follow? Compassion and creativity? Yeah. The sort of deep humanity which is the surest spring of justice? Yes. Intellectual and emotional acuity, a penetrating view of your social and natural environments? Yes, yes, and yes!

Hey. Let me ask you something...

Were you ever young and really in love? Did you then find yourself leaping out of bed ridiculously early, whistling in the shower while it was still pitch dark outside? I did ... every day for a month. I was in high school. It was my first, and so far only, experience with being completely gone, head-over-heels, crazy in love. The gril's name was Denise, but that hardly matters any more. I loved Denise, but more than that, I loved the world that had Denise in it - how brilliant it was! How sharp and distinct its features and forms, how generously it nourished and innervated me. I hardly slept a wink, and never needed to.

We were young, restless, fickle. Denise would break my heart and shatter my beautiful world - but I have the memory of all that pure energy and stunning joy that was just really unabated while my good fortune lasted. With apologies to Nabakov, this sort of thing happening to a boy in his fifteenth summer will mark him for life.

Therein somewhere lies the transformative promise of love.

I would hope I may experience such a transformation again, and this time let it sustain ... transcending, without replacing, the contigency of fickle hearts, gloriously embellishing the shifting consteallions of human relationships. But is it possible? Or have I -getting older - pretty much lost the ability I once had to drink so deeply?

And am I blurring a distinction that ought to be taken to exist between romantic and universal love?

Some of the most eminent thinkers in the history of the Occident have already answered no. Plato, Augustine, Dante, Castiglione (Castiglione?!) all wrote of the sure and steady path from focused ardor to divine rapture - as I think I did once, proceed from love of a single girl, to a passion for the universe that brought her to me.

So long ago.

But today, like I keep keep noting, I cherish my enemies. Today I'm thankful for the ire stirred in me by the Ann coulters of the world, for the one fingered victory salutes from Republicans and hypocritical "family-values" Christians, for giving me something against which to rail. I'm grateful to the the assholes cutting me off in traffic, to the skin-deep groveling gossips trading in offense and insult.

They allow me to participate in the mean little game - while I wait, someday to be transported. I don't leap out of bed; but having gotten up, I always find I have the sinister drive to fight another crummy day.

Sacred Cash Cows

2004-11-15T19:42:00.000-08:00

Over on Lullabyes and Alarums, my pal Jeremy Goard has a nice little meditation about Audrey Seiler and the Wisconsin kidnapping hoax, and the quick redirection of ire and spite by a disappointed public that had been primed for manhunts and trials.

"Heightened by the impending national outrage, and subsequent purging from collective memory," writes Jeremy, "my feeling for this face, name, and story left a lasting mark. I believe it continues to teach me essential lessons about myself, about "human nature", and, indeed, about Christianity."

Now, in the aftermath of the Scott Peterson double murder trial, comes a fresh disappointment. It seems the Chamber of Commerce muckety mucks hosting the trial in Redwood City are feeling rather let down because the case brought a smaller boom in tourism than they had hoped when they began lobbying for the honor.

Why were there fewer pilgrimages than anticipated to the site of sensational history in the making? I don't know. Maybe the case was too old and shriveled, the hype too weak. Ah, but probably not. I don't know, I wasn't watching. In any event, this dearth of ghastly tourists should probably just be taken as a minor exception to the rule. I think in most ways there still must be good capital to be made in peddling judgment and outrage - still a good ghoulish trade in pitchforks and torches.

Revelling in Revenge

2004-11-14T11:35:00.001-08:00

That's the title (in English) of one from the hundreds of endlessly suggestive epigrams penned by Friedrich Nietzsche.

"Uncultivated people," he says, "who feel insulted are accustomed to set the degree of insultingness as high as possible and to recount the cause of insult in strongly exaggerated terms, so as to be able to revel in the feeling of hatred and revengefulness thus engendered."

Appropos of Nietzsche then, I found this blog site while browsing through Salon's Right Hook column the other day.

It includes this One Fingered Victory Salute, by a blogger going by the Nom de guerre The Elder, who vents his passion with provocative relish:

The truth is that ever since the 2002 election (and earlier in some cases) we've had to put with a non-stop barrage of invective directed against President Bush. And now it's time for a response.

To the sneering punks who called Bush a smirking chimp, the conspiracy nutjobs who couldn't say four words without Halliburton dribbling out of their mouth, the goons who tried to shut down GOP campaign offices, the morons who think Bush is an idiot, the defeatists who encourage our enemies while demanding that we don't dare question their patriotism, the thugs who painted swastikas on Bush campaign signs, the sophists spouting "regime change begins at home", the historically challenged fools who compare Bush to Hitler, the "It's all about oil" idiots, the Fahrenheit 911 watching simpletons, the delusional paranoids who claim that fascism is now upon us, the self-important nobodies who fancy that their dissent is even worth crushing, and the disaffected expatriates who trash our president and country overseas to curry favor with their Euro buddies, I have a simple message using the straightforward words of Dick Cheney:

Go fuck yourselves.

I also want to extend my one fingered victory salute to some specific individuals and groups. So here's a big Fuck You victory shout out to:

Michael Moore, The City Pages, Al Franken, National Public Radio, Bruce Springsteen, MoveOn.org, Barbara Streisand, the a-holes at The New York Times (big-time!), Dan Rather, Rock The Vote, Garrison Keillor, CBS News, George Soros, The Guardian, Michael Stipe, The Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial board, P Diddy , Minnesota Public Radio, Nick Coleman, CNN, Paul Krugman, Kim Ode, the eastern half of Canada, Molly Ivins, Whoopi Goldberg, and France.

And I have a further message to all those (especially relevant for Michael Moore) who claim that they'd rather leave the country than spend another four years in George W. Bush's Amerika:

Don't let the border gate hit your ass on the way out.

So he writes ... probably trembling with excitement.

Of course, being rather uncultivated myself, my sensibilities are offended and I embrace the insult like a lover. I nurse it as a precious grievance - I post it here so I can share the feeling with you, so we can wait impatiently togehter to revel, and gloat, in our own spectacular revenge!

Bad Faith

2004-11-11T21:18:00.000-08:00

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "Business as usual." But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, thier chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defense, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush.

--Yann Martel, Life of Pi

The Day After - WTF?

2004-11-03T07:32:00.001-08:00

Wow. Republicans pick up more seats in the Senate (including, of course, Tom Daschle's)and the House. Bush wins re-election and I guess it wasn't really very close - in spite of the Kerry campaign's wan pledge last night to have every vote counted in Ohio.

How could Florida have been so closley contested in 2000 and so firmly in Bush's column now, and especially with the president's record? ... and with Nader a non-factor, no less. I scratch my head.

And what in the world would it have taken? Why could Senator Kerry not beat the man who lied about the evidence needed to make war on Iraq? Who pranced and cavorted around before the cameras in his flight suit while people were dying over there? Who lets us pay for his war, with our 3 pennies a phone call tax, our spending a half-hour's wage on a gallon of milk, a quarter-hour's on a gallon of gas? Who supported Vietnam but ran from the fight? Whose number two did likewise? Who calls for a constitutional amendment discriminating against homosexuals (and that's what it would do)? Why could Kerry not defeat this man? Why, for God's sake, was this man not impeached years ago?

My New Favorite Blog

2004-11-01T18:27:00.000-08:00

...one of them anyway:

James Wolcott, editor and critic for vanity Fair.

Clear Choice

2004-10-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

Returning immediately to the theme --- hermaphroditic democrats and brush-clearing republicans...

There's a video making the rounds showing John Edwards primping and fluffing his hair for several minutes before a television interview.

And I guess in immediate response to this, one of my favorite columnists - Michelle Malkin, and I'm speaking facetiously, in case the use of italics is not a sufficient tip-off, laid the terms of the argument as bare as could be.

Cogito, ergo sum

2004-10-30T16:09:00.000-07:00

I'm looking up the word "egghead" in Webster's Third New International Dictionary. The first term of definition is "intellectual." This is followed by an example of usage, from some old Newsweek article. In the example somebody is described as "something of an egghead himself. He boned up for covering the Korean war by reading Thucydides." [Here's my own example: "he's kind of an egghead - actually has a copy of Webster's Third New International at home."]

I'm going to ask my readers, the few and, I hope, the faithful, to take their time with this post, visiting each of the links provided, at great leisure. Go brew a cup of tea ... or shake up a cocktail ... or roll yourself a big spiff. Whatever helps you settle in all comfy cozy.

The Lie about Taking Risks

The election is, to borrow a phrase from the film 28 Days, "extremely fucking nigh," and I'm thinking - as I'm wont to do - about the peusdo-manly, anti-intellectual quips the president seems to be tossing off more frequently in his speeches as the day becomes more nigh. "The senator from Massachusttes," he says for example, "is real good at taking positions - he just can't take a stand."

I think it was during the second debate - the one in which he refused to acknoweldge having ever erred in office outside of nominating a few judicial candidates who turned out to have lesser character than he originally thought - that Mr. Bush kept insisting: leaders must be willing to make unpopular decisions. They can't stick a wet finger in the air to guage the political wind. They must be guided by principle and do what is right. Bush would appear to be such a leader. He has, as Zell Miller decalred at the RNC: "a spine of tempered steel!" ... unlike Kerry, who will not stand up, Kerry the weathercock who squeaks and twists in the breeze. Going to war in Iraq was just this kind of decision: risky, unpopular, but right and neccesary.

This little essay, from Stewart Nusbaumer, in Intervention Magazine, suggests on the other hand that political absolutism is very, very popular, and may be growing more so:

Anti-intellectualism has a long tradition in America, a long tradition in every country, yet today in our country it seems stronger and more vicious--a relentless plague wiping out reason in whole sections of our country. Males especially, admiring our inarticulate, dimwitted president, have never been prouder of their own inarticulateness and wear shallow thinking as evidence of their swaggering “manhood.” John Kerry not only rubs them the wrong way, he outrages them.

Sometimes I think our advanced technology and great wealth is only a fig leaf for our pathetic primitiveness. Lately I have been thinking that a lot.

Although many of us still cling to the Jeffersonian promise that common citizens in public dialogue can craft thoughtful solutions, we can’t hide from the spreading darkness.

That Bush has harnessed the energies of this old tradition, this ancient popular will, shows a shrewdness and a sense of history that nobody I know would probably think to admit.

He is the latest in a long line of straight shootin' sons of guns - a line that includes Davy Crockett and Roscoe Conkling, that runs through Dwight Eisenhower, Dirty Harry Callahan and Ronald Reagan. He has expediently chosen the posture of reassuring inexpedience.

The Horror of Long-Haired Men and Short-Haired Women

In the old Dark Age natural encyclopedias and taxonomies existed to catalog God's creation. Everything in the Great Chain of Being was qualitatively defined and clearly classified. Apparent hybrids, which blurred the lines between species - baboons that resembled humans with doggish ears and grotesque arms, or just dark races of primitive humans lacking any civilized manner, copulating freely and without bash - were counted as monsters. This was when fantastic fables, bestiaries and morality tales featuring serpents with wolves heads, humans with serpents heads, dragons, centaurs and changelings really proliferated. Paintings and illuminations typically depicted the devils of hell as cloven or claw footed, scaly beasts on two legs - leering, half-formed with narrow chests and pregnant bellies, prodding, poking and eating the tormented sinners consigned to their evil domain - this in contrast to the unblemished, perfectly-formed, in all aspects human, except for their white wings, angels of heaven.

Earlier in this blog, I mentioned Richard Hofstadter's book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Hofstadter describes several of the pillars of popular thought in the history of this country, one of which is the insistence upon certainty and clear delineation, simple truths and well-defined roles. In the late nineteenth century, for example, during the period of the big reform movements - abolition, women's suffrage, temperance - politics was held to be a man's business. It was messy, bare-knuckled and hard-swinging. Politics was for unsentimental realists. Reform, on the other hand, was for idealists and romantics. It was for people unsoiled by the dirty business of living. It was for women.

Reform ideas were lofty, they were worthy, but they were unobtainable. If they had only been left for women to tend, respectable women - wives and mothers - they would have been fine, as ideals. But whearas they were unworldly, they tended to attract confused and unworldly people who could not perceive their proper place in the scheme of things. Groups of agitators gathered around the movements, populated by bossy, short-haired women in pants and effete long-haired men with soft hands and overgrown fingernails. They were all freaks, monsters. Of men, for instance, Hofstadter wrote:

It was not enough to say that the reformers were hypocritical and impractical. Their cultivation and fastidious manners were taken as evidence that these "namby-pamby, goody-goody gentlemen" who "sip cold tea" were deficient in masculinity. They were on occasion denounced as political hermaphrodites. The waspish Senator Ingalls of Kansas, furious at their lack of party loyalty once denounced them as the "third sex" - "effeminate without being either masculine or feminine."

And the women:

they would become masculine, just as men became feminine if they espoused reform. Horace Bushnell suggested that if women got the vote and kept it for hundreds of years, "the very look and temperament of women will be altered." Their appearance would be sharp, their bodies wiry, their voices shrill, their actions angular and abrubt, and full of self-assertion, will, boldness and and eagerness for place and power."

It must be entirely intentional that today Mel Gibson would cast a woman in the role of Satan for his blockbuster film, The Passion of the Christ (Italian actress Rosalinda Celantano), making her up to seem a more than vaguely female male. Androgony is sinister. Ambiguity fearsome. The erasure of bondaries confusing and unnatural.

This is interesting: I have this book by Joyce Salisbury, a professor of History at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay, titled The Beast Within. Dr. Salisbury points out that while we may find squirrels and chipmunks appealing if we're outdoors watching them scamper about, we might recoil in some horror if they happen to cross our thresholds and take their act into our houses - dashing into our homes, darting underneath our sofas. This, I think, is a small but really extraordinary insight. I believe I just might want to react by fleeing from the house myself.

It's perfectly human to draw these lines. Even among the most unapologetically sensitive and tolerant of us, they have to be laid down somewhere, and anything crossing over them induces a sort of inexpressible anguish. The popularity of the president's position rests on his claim to the time-worn mantle of unapologetically protecting the least sensitive and tolerant among us - and a great mass I think it is - from same-sex marriages and snaggle-toothed terrorists.

The Medium is the Moral

But is Nusbaumer right? Is darkness spreading? Is anti-intellectualism in America actually getting worse? Well, four years ago, on the dawn following the last presidential election, Todd Gitlin said that it was, pointing especially at what seems to be the know-nothing imperative being reinforced constantly by the "psuedo-intellectual" punditocracy, repeating their maxims and phrases ad nauseum, stating the terms of any kind of debate as simply as possible and circumscribing everything. Gone are the likes of Walter Lippman. Cokie Roberts now stands in his stead:

A central force boosting anti-intellectualism since Hofstadter published his book has been the bulking up of popular culture and, in particular, the rise of a new form of faux cerebration: punditry. Everyday life, supersaturated with images and jingles, makes intellectual life look hopelessly sluggish, burdensome, difficult. In a video-game world, the play of intellect -- the search for validity, the willingness to entertain many hypotheses, the respect for difficulty, the resistance to hasty conclusions -- has the look of retardation.

Again, there is a continuity to the earlier nation. Long before Hollywood or MTV, Tocqueville observed that Americans were drawn to novelty, turnover, and sensation. How much more so in a world of cascading, all-pervasive images, where two-thirds of children grow up with 24/7 access to television in their bedrooms, where video and computer games flourish, where mobile phones guarantee access when and where one chooses, where the right to be instantly entertained and in-touch seems to preoccupy more of the citizenry than the right to vote and to have their votes properly counted.

The pace is relentless. Cable and network news, talk radio, public access programming, and weblogs, and the online publications I myself rely on and link right here - packs of wolves in sheep's clothing (speaking of boundary crossing). In the benign name of creating an informed populace, this style-over-substance noise just keeps hammering us all into shape. Clear shape. Simple forms - with simple truths. Who has time for Thucydides? Indeed, who is capable of him?

Bloody Nuisance, Modern Evil

2004-10-25T19:37:00.000-07:00

Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents is, I think, one of the staples of college survey courses on the literature of the "modern crisis" - that loose collection from the western cannon that is taken to chronicle man's complete alienation from ... well, everything, including himself. And college is in fact where I did happen to read this, one of Freud's last works. If someone were to ask me now to describe Discontents, to summarize what Frued has to say therein (which, honestly, pretty much never happens), I would probably think a few seconds and answer something like, "Well it's definitely a cultural critique, particularly of a technology-driven culture, in this nuclear and increasingly electronic and consumerist age, where our values are placed, or I should rather say misplaced, only on the so-called virtues of hard work and self-sacfrifice, in the vague name of progress. It's weird that so many of us toil so constantly, run so hard, after these perceived creature comforts that seem, when you think about it, especially designed to make our toil and running just more efficient - it only encourages us to toil still longer in pursuit of an even greater, and no less elusive, comfort. This dehumanizes us. I think this is what Freud was on about; many others, especially since Freud, have said pretty much the same thing .."

Yes, I really do tend to speak this way.

And at about this point in my discourse I would probably be hoping that my interlocuter might stop me, or better still, help me somehow, by picking up the weave of conversation and knitting their own observations into it. More likely though, they'd just kind of stare at me, and let my speech, inevitably, dissipate into a string of ever more disconnected generalities, frayed by frequent pauses.

See, I don't remember perfectly at all the thrust of Discontents, and this hypothetical courting is based on the one passage that has always remained with me. Here I reach for the old Norton volume I actually used in college, in which I have underlined:

One would like to ask: is there no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and indeed in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man? And there is a long list that might be added to benefits of this kind which we owe to the much despised era of scientific and technical advances

Let me interrupt to point out - in case it needs to be: much despised because considered responsible during the industrial revolution for the displacement of families, for the removal of homes and hearths, for the ashen city streets and blackened landscapes around victorian-era Manchester, for Dickensian villains and mutated factory children, for tenements andrampant consumption (I mean, tuberculosis), for the peppered moth proof of natrual selection.

But here the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself heard and warns us that most of these satisfactions follow the model of the "cheap enjoyment" extolled in the anecdote - the enjoyment obtained by putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing it in again. If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infant mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the old days before the reign of hygeine, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneifts of natural selection? And finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

Well thank goodness for this, anyway: we have since engineered such techniques of birth-control as makes its exercise cheap and almost universally accessible - so that a little care allows us virtually to "beget children" as often as we please without begetting any we don't want.
so hooray for progress!

On the other hand, there is something to this cost-beneifts analysis of Freud's, and it is, a few antiquated variations aside, I think, a kind of timeless caveat. I think of that sequence in Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11. We see an actual television ad for some communications company. It seems they are working hard in Iraq to provide the telephone and computer link-ups for soldiers to keep in touch with their families. "Here at XYZ Corp, we're making sure our brave troops lose none of the experiences of being at home!" Or on a more quotidian level - I think of the evening recently when I watched three young ladies sitting at, but not sharing, a table in a pizza joint. Each of them spent the entire meal engaged in private conversations over their separate cell phones. Distance is stressed and warped. These gadgets make it easier for us to get away just so we can reach longinly back or something. Weird.

Man, oh man

2004-10-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

George Bush is out on the stump in Illinois today. Here's what I heard of an excerpt from his speech:

"The Senator says the war in Iraq is a disaster" (this line greeted by the obligatory boos from the orthodox). He calls it a colossal mistake (boo!), a diversion (no! boo! no!). And he thinks he's the man to win the war?? (guffaw!)"

Um, good point George.

I do get comments

2004-10-17T14:14:00.000-07:00

I know that a few people are keeping up with this site (not difficult, since I seem to be posting so infrequently) and sometimes I even get comments. So far, most of them are comming from J. Goard. And so far I've been neglectful of engaging them. Let me begin to redeem myself thereof.

Recently I asked, in regard to the argument against juvenile execution:

But is there any sense in which we might say that by definition one would have to lack some capacity normal to a person's majority in order to commit murder? In other words, isn't murder always a case of some retardation - some fundamental immaturity? What then?

To which J. replied:

To the last question: no. To the penultimate: probably not any reasonable sense that's not appallingly parochial. It's only because we live in a very recent (and still rare) kind of society with an complicated and flexible network of social structures that murder isn't part of our normal repertoire.

There's a deeper issue here of the relationship between concepts like morality, spirituality, awareness on the one hand and sanity, health, naturalness on the other. I'm no Hobbesian (except maybe in the tiger sense), but I do object to using concepts from the latter category (roughly, the functioning of human systems) to the former. The examined life is often profoundly dysfunctional, as attested in Kafka's _Hunger Artist_ and in the author himself, and the well-functioning life often quite barbarous. If we can achieve both true spirituality and healthy function, it's an accident of our birth in one of the best societies that has thus far existed, NOT a deep congruence between these concepts.

Of course the last question (what then?) is not of the yes or no variety, but I think it's clear that J. was excluding it for the moment and addressing the first two questions -- which, however I had meant to be two ways of putting one question. Hence the use of the phrase "in other words."

Then again, J. might have been speaking rhetorically, addressing the question in two ways to say, "the answer is no, because of the parochialism..."

But enough quibbling. My real response to this comment is that it is difficult to tell whether J. sees that I'm wondering if what I called the socio-biological argument against juvenile execution, if accepted, might not just be generally applicable.

If we might say, for instance, that children and the insane should not count as moral agents because they have not reached the age of reason and so factors of accountability do not work to shape their behavior, could we with justice say that murderers in general just haven't learned to process such factors? That murderers are just the kind of folk who, like the certifiably insane, never happen to reach the age of reason?

Eau de Toilette

2004-10-14T21:05:00.000-07:00

G.W. Bush to J.F. Kerry in the final presidential debate:

"You know, there's a main stream in America ... and yer out there on th' far Left Bank."

Again I go back to this post from September 30.

Justice for a New Frontier

2004-10-13T21:58:00.000-07:00

Here's the socio-biological argument against executing juvenile murderers in the case of Roper v. Simmons, now before the Supreme Court, very simply put:

Juvenile ofenders lack the brain development and social maturity required to distinguish between matters of ultimate right and wrong, and therefore, as in cases of mental retardation, cannot be held to ultimate account for their rash, ill-considered decisions, however evil the consequences.

Okay. But is there any sense in which we might say that by definition one would have to lack some capacity normal to a person's majority in order to commit murder? In other words, isn't murder always a case of some retardation - some fundamental immaturity? What then?

Three More Quotes

2004-10-09T23:12:00.000-07:00

Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is freely accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human.

-- Sir Isaiah Berlin, 1988

Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that, you know? And just be faithful in what happens.

-- Britney Spears, 2003

No doubt ... I have no doubt

-- George W. Bush, 2004 ... according to Bob woodward, now of the Washington Post, during a personal interview when the reporter/writer asked whether the death of American soldiers and the lament of their families might ever upset his presidential slumber.

Aus der Aufklärung

2004-10-09T16:33:00.000-07:00

Not the truth in whose possession some human being is, or thinks he is, but the honest trouble he has taken to get behind the truth is what constitutes the worth of a human being. For it is not through the possession but through the search for truth that his powers expand, and in this alone consists his ever growing perfection. Possession makes tranquil, indolent and proud.

If God held in his closed right fist all truth and in his left hand only the ever live drive for truth, albeit with the addition that I should always and evermore err, and he said to me, Choose! I should humbly grab his left hand, saying, Father, give! Pure truth is after all for you alone!

-- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1778

A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!!

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887

You can be certain, and be wrong.

-- John Kerry, 2004

All right, not quite so poetic, that last one, but the point remains something like the same. If only he had the courage for a real attack on someone else's convictions.

Fact Check

2004-10-06T23:57:00.000-07:00

I wish I had discovered this on my own ...

But I just heard on NPR's All Things Considered that when you click on the website mentioned last night by Dick Cheney in his debate with John Edwards, factcheck.com, you actually get directed immediately to georgesoros.com, the domain of a billionaire philanthropist whose site is titled "Why We Must Not re-elect President Bush." Type factcheck.com into your URL and see for yourself.

On top of that, it turns out Cheney was actually talking about a site called factcheck.org, which as of today carries the headline, "Cheney and Edwards Mangle Facts."

Huah!

2004-10-06T23:04:00.000-07:00

Good article in Slate Magazine online this morning from another journalist growing somewhat nonplussed over the especially enabling television medium. Remember those frequent and disturbing broadcast images of our triumphalist "mission accomplished" commander-in-chief of a year and a half ago, framed always against bleachers filled with cheering enlistees? Remember how those superimposed flags used to billow translucently across the bottom of the screen all the while of every rally? Remember the Thanksgiving surprise last year? They were campaign commercials then, too.

To say so, I know, isn't very original. Who needs to have this pointed out to them who isn't beyond help?

Meanwhile, Back in Hope's Saloon...

2004-10-03T01:58:00.000-07:00

Yes, I watched the debate this past week, with a quick wit and a jaundiced eye (so I flatter myself). Very much looking forward to, what is it, two coming up this next week? vice-presidential and presidential candidates?

And, yes, I thought Mr. Bush acquitted himself very poorly, as has been well attested in every medium since. I was struck at one point when he noted, for the kazillionth time, that the "war on Terror" (not terrorism, not terrorists: Terror) is "hard work," and claimed his personal anguish as he "reads the casualty reports" every day, and sees "how hard it is on the TV screens." I wondered if this sort of easy and insincere sympathy would ever become the long term target of ridicule - like when Clinton famously bit his lip and told that single mother that he felt her pain. Or rather, I didn't really wonder ... I immediately doubted. And I continue to doubt.

I watch this man perform - watch him squirm and sneer and blink - this godly man with the mean little spirit - and I marvel at the stubborn stupidity of those who I'm thinking will almost certainly return him to office.

Am I angry? Confounded? Yes ... and maybe, no.

In moments of such pique, perhaps, we should also think about an epigram written by Friedrich Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human:

Anyone who has declared another to be an idiot, an unpleasant fellow, is annoyed if in the end he demonstrates that he is not one [Translation by R.J. Hollingdale]

Would I be happier if Bush proved to be a moral exemplar, really working to protect me and my children, this generation and the next? Would I feel better if it turned out that the war on Terror was actually something quite concrete and necessary, and that the president knew precisely what he was about in "staying the course?" If his decisions indeed made the world safe and united under one banner of freedom? I mean real freedom, involving unfettered spheres of activity and opportunity for individual expression and enlightenment? Freedom not polluted by its current Republican hard and constant association with the other "F" words: faith and family?

Man, I don't know. I think I really like the idea that he is just wrong - and that his supporters are ill-intentioned, misguided fools. I mean, I really do think that, but I also suspect that I like thinking it.

This, by the way, also goes (of course) for all those everyday knuckleheads whom I meet and know and who seem to get in my way at every turn - whose tics and traits irritate me so, whose peronalities seem so off-putting and behavior so obnoxious. The jerks! God, what would I do, when you think about it, if they reformed? What if they no longer gave me grounds for complaint? I don't know about y'all, but I believe I need my foils.

Or am I crazy?

Flip Flop

2004-09-30T01:41:00.000-07:00

Fresh Air host Terry Gross, a day or so ago in a Salon interview, when asked about her impression of the current presidential campaign:

Well, it's interesting for me to see Kerry being criticized for being complex. I guess in a campaign situation maybe you need to speak more simply, but it surprises me that complexity should be seen as a liability for a president. The issues are, in fact, complex.

But of course the plain truth is that complexity is, and always has been taken to be a liability in this country ... for president, for governor, for congress, for school board, for whatever. "Character" is infinitely more important than intellect (and since politics is indeed theater, it matters not one single little old whit whether the character is organic or not. It should just appear so). Are you for freedom and against evil? Will you just quickly know what Jesus would do? Then good.

Someone once wrote of Thomas Jefferson:

At the seat of government his abstract, inapplicable, metaphysico-politics are either nugatory or noxious. Besides, his principles relish so strongly of Paris and are seasoned with such a profusion of French garlic, that he offends the whole nation. Better for Americans that on their extended plains "thistles should grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley," than that a philosopher should influence the councils of the country, and that his admiration of the works of Voltaire and Helvetius should induce him to wish a closer connexion with Frenchmen.

[More recently, Zell Miller at the RNC: "John Kerry wants Paris to decide when we should defend our country ... I want George Bush to decide!!"]

Oh Man! God preserve us from these silly statesmen and feckless philosophers; let them do no harm. Let them stay reclined in their perfumed parlors where they belong, brushing their hair and reading Helvetius - or I guess, these days, Foucault.

note: the quote on Jefferson is attributed to Joseph Dennie in Richard Hofstadter's classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published by Vintage Press, page 149.

The Dowd Factor

2004-09-27T20:43:00.000-07:00

Maureen Dowd, columnist for the NY Times, was to me unbearable during the bleak "Monicagate" years - she of the prudishly Dickensian name who harumphed with such sardonic relish over the president's pecadilloes and giving comfort to the hypocritical value-harpies who wanted to use impeachment as a political tool (as I saw them, anyway).

These days (now that her columns agree with me) I think she's simply delightful! Since the Times charges for her columns after about a week or so, I want to quote her last one in full right here:

It's heartwarming, really.

President Bush has his own Mini-Me now, someone to echo his every word and mimic his every action.

For so long, Mr. Bush has put up with caricatures of a wee W. sitting in the vice president's lap, Charlie McCarthy style, as big Dick Cheney calls the shots. But now the president has his own puppet to play with.

All last week in New York and Washington, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of Iraq parroted Mr. Bush's absurd claims that the fighting in Iraq was an essential part of the U.S. battle against terrorists that started on 9/11, that the neocons' utopian dream of turning Iraq into a modern democracy was going swimmingly, and that the worse things got over there, the better they really were.

It's the media's fault, the two men warble in a duet so perfectly harmonized you wonder if Karen Hughes wrote Mr. Allawi's speech, for not showing the millions of people in Iraq who are not being beheaded, kidnapped, suicide-bombed or caught in the cross-fire every day; and it's John Kerry's fault for abetting the Iraqi insurgents by expressing his doubts about our plan there, as he once did about Vietnam.

"These doubters risk underestimating our country and they risk fueling the hopes of the terrorists," Mr. Allawi told Congress in a rousing anti-Kerry stump speech for Bush/Cheney, a follow-up punch to Mr. Cheney's claim that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for another terrorist attack on America.

First the Swift boat guys; now the swift dhow prime minister.

Just as Mr. Cheney, Rummy and the neocons turned W. into a host body for their old schemes to knock off Saddam, transform the military and set up a pre-emption doctrine to strike at allies and foes that threatened American hyperpower supremacy, so now W. has turned Mr. Allawi into a host body for the Panglossian palaver that he believes will get him re-elected. Every time the administration takes a step it says will reduce the violence, the violence increases.

Mr. Bush doesn't seem to care that by using Mr. Allawi as a puppet in his campaign, he decreases the prime minister's chances of debunking the belief in Iraq that he is a Bush puppet - which is the only way he can gain any credibility to stabilize his devastated country and be elected himself.

Actually, being the president's marionette is a step up from Mr. Allawi's old jobs as henchman for Saddam Hussein and stoolie for the C.I.A.

It's hilarious that the Republicans have trotted out Mr. Allawi as an objective analyst of the state of conditions in Iraq when he's the administration's handpicked guy and has as much riding on putting the chaos in a sunny light as they do. Though Mr. Allawi presents himself as representing all Iraqis, his actions have been devised to put more of the country in the grip of this latest strongman - giving himself the power to declare martial law, bringing back the death penalty and kicking out Al Jazeera.

Bush officials, who proclaim themselves so altruistic about bringing liberty to Iraq, really see Iraq in a creepy narcissistic way: It's all about Mr. Bush's re-election.

As The Chicago Tribune reported, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage alleged that Iraqi insurgents have stepped up their bloody attacks because they want to "influence the election against President Bush."

At a recent G.O.P. fund-raiser, House Speaker Dennis Hastert claimed that terrorists would be happier with a Kerry presidency. "I don't have data or intelligence to tell me one thing or another," he said, but "I would think they would be more apt to go" for "somebody who would file a lawsuit with the World Court or something rather than respond with troops."

Faced with their dystopia, the utopians are scaling back their grand visions for Iraq's glorious future.

Rummy suggested last week that a fractional democracy might be good enough. "Let's say you tried to have an election, and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country, but some places you couldn't because the violence was too great," he said at a hearing on Capitol Hill, adding: "Nothing's perfect in life."

At a Pentagon briefing on Friday, Rummy also blew off Colin Powell's so-called Pottery Barn rule that if we broke Iraq, we own it. "Any implication that that place has to be peaceful and perfect before we can reduce coalition and U.S. forces, I think, would obviously be unwise, because it's never been peaceful and perfect," he said. "It's a tough part of the world."

As he said after the early looting in Iraq: "Stuff happens."

Is there anybody else right now so clearly and publicly calling it a spade? I had something very similar to the same reaction, listening to Allawi describe Iraq as the "central front in the war on terror." Who's writing this guy's speech?

Appropos of nothing else ... I recently caught Ms. Dowd (to use the Times' own naming convention) on Chris Mattews' Sunday round-table show, and let me just say, with all due respect ... yummm!

Gategate

2004-09-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

So instantly this whole diversion over the 60 Minutes, forged Bush-slacking documents has been dubbed "Rathergate."

Interesting how the -gate suffix has become so fixed over time. Contragate, Nannygate, Travelgate, Monicagate ... well, here's a fuller listing ... if you exclude the most recent entry.

On one level this is just tedious and unimaginative. But on a deeper level, it strikes me as sort of sinister. There is something in the compact economics of this apellation that just seems to foreclose whatever issues are connected to the event at hand - which is probably not entirely unintentional. Everybody understands what the suffix means, just as everybody understands that Hitler was evil. There isn't anything more to be said.

Hmm.

Looking back now, should we start referring to the original as Watergategate?

David Simon

2004-09-21T07:34:00.000-07:00

Please read this splendid little interview with David Simon, creator of HBO's The Wire, which I've never actually seen. Think I'd like to, though -- maybe when and if it comes to DVD.

And notice the setup, in which the interviewer describes the thrust of the series' second season when "the program explored corruption on the waterfront, with the tale of a union official who dealt with criminals not to feather his own nest but to reverse the declining fortunes of the port, with terrible results; the story was closer in spirit to a classical tragedy than a police procedural".

Sound familiar? Maybe if you read all the way through this post in which I discussed (my take on) Kazan's motivation in On the Waterfront. Best intentions laid bare, and all that. My hunch is that Simon feels this way about most institutional efforts - that rot will creep in.

I'm pretty certain this is his diagnosis when it comes to the drug war.

Beef of the Day (a petty rant)

2004-09-20T19:40:00.000-07:00

Back in the days when Jay Leno used to be amusing, and before he (may or may not have) betrayed David Letterman - I'm referring to the mid to late 1980's - he (Leno) was one of those regular guests of Letterman's NBC Late Nite show - others included Terri Garr, Howard Stern and Harvey Picar. The recurring Leno-Letterman dialogue was always smart and edgy (to some extent, anyway) - and featured, in my opinion, some very precise and very well-executed facial comedy from Leno. He would double-take and roll his eyes in perfect sync with Letterman's intentionally stupid questions.

They developed a little "thing" that became known as Leno's beef-of-the-day. Somewhere near the end of their faux antagonistic exchange Letterman would ask, in his ironic-serious manner, "Okay Jay, so what's your beef these days? What's eating you? What's crawling under your skin?" It was an invitation for the comedian to give a little sample of his observational stand-up routine from his seat beside the host. Leno would pull his mouth into a thin line, his brow down to his pupils, all in a mock simmer, and say something like: "Why do they have a crossword puzzle in the back of the TV Guide? Are people supposed to feel intelligent or sophisticated if they happen to know the character who replaced 'Fish' on 'Barney Miller'?"

Ah ... good stuff.

So in the old-time spirit of L & L, here's my beef o' the day. You wanna know what's eating me? Crawling under my skin? [Imagine that I'm exhaling audibly through my nose.]

Mass emails from people I'm acquainted with.

I don't like them. I get dissapointed when I recognize someone's address in my inbox and I discover that mine is only one of 45 or so names in their to or cc list being encouraged to check out some Post article on administration tyrrany or answer some survey meant to test my knowledge of rock n' roll or 1970's catch phrases, or whatnot.

In the future maybe everyone who pulls this kind of thing will have a blog of their own, and will, as I'm doing now, share their treasures there rather than doing it via email. Then when I go visit their blog it will be with the prior understanding that they did not necessarily have me specifically in mind when they posted.

It's cranky of me, I think, but I get all irked when I find that isn't the case in an email. Maybe it's because I'm a bit lonely, and I just crave the attention. But then so be it. I want people whom I know and like, when they are addressing me, to actually be talking to me. I want intimacy. I want personal correspondence. C'mon. Talk to me ...

Holism

2004-09-19T14:30:00.000-07:00

Rainer Maria Rilke, after first considering, then rejecting the idea of psychotherapy:

If my devils are to leave me, then I'm afraid my angels will take flight as well

- Quote found in Rollo May's Love and Will

Acts and Words

2004-09-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

I'm a junkie for Salon.com - subscriber, read it each day, enjoy its smart liberalism, its unembarrased intellectualism, its thoughtful essays on politics and popular culture. In the days of constant Republican assualt against the upstart president Clinton, especially during the whole, surreal, Lewinsky scandal, when every major network or cable news program, every publication of any repute, seemed to be intentionally missing what should have been the real story of the era - the entrapping sting tactics of the Starr mafia, the actual creation of conditions in which Clinton would be compelled to commit impeachable perjury - Salon was an electronic oais for me. And I'm still faithful.

So I'm trying to figure out why it is I feel rather dubious about this recent article from Mary Jacoby featuring the recollections of one of W.'s old professors at Harvard Business School. When I say that I'm dubious, I don't really mean that I disbelieve the story entirely, but some of it seems a bit ... contrived.

The moral of this story, I think, is suppposed to be that a leopard doesn't change his spots. The chortling rich-boy frat-brat in the bomber jacket, slouching disdainfully in the back of the class, spitting tobacco juice into a coke can, whom the professor recalls, is the same jerk who has been giving the whole rest of the globe, and the intellectual half of his own country (if that is anywhere near an accurate fraction), one colossal noogie. I definitely get that.

And it's important to note, as the author here implies, that Bush is a fortunate son with no sense of the old noblesse oblige, either then or now, who, if in fact did support the war in Vietnam so strongly, while avoiding the fight, as I keep hearing he did, must be essentially disconnected from his countrymen, then and now, without a moral bone in his body, and probably should not be on any city council, much less installed on the throne of all the world.

Count me among the millions in the land who feel this way. It drives us crazy that our ethical sense is so radically different from that of the millions of others out there, the evangelicals, the pharisees, the hypcrites (for so we see them). The Manichean Majority which despises thought, and believes what you proclaim (and declaim) is more important than what you do. John Kerry fought in Vietnam, but said it was wrong. Bill Clinton took a draft number but openly said he did not want to fight. Never mind the reasons. To have them, and elaborate them, can be taken as treason. We believe in acts, they believe in the redemptive power of lip service. Sin all you want, just profess your faith ... and denounce.

Of course Salon is written for us. I will read it, from the choir. Millions of others will not. So I'm wondering: what is the purpose of this Jacoby article? Reinforcement?

I don't know. But so much of it seems so pat. In this paragraph, the professor - his name is Yoshi Tsurumi - remembers (pretty lucidly) his doubts about the future president's National Guard assignment ... doubts the belligerent youth does nothing, in his cavalier gall, to dispel:

"I used to chat up a number of students when we were walking back to class," Tsurumi said. "Here was Bush, wearing a Texas Guard bomber jacket, and the draft was the No. 1 topic in those days. And I said, 'George, what did you do with the draft?' He said, 'Well, I got into the Texas Air National Guard.' And I said, 'Lucky you. I understand there is a long waiting list for it. How'd you get in?' When he told me, he didn't seem ashamed or embarrassed. He thought he was entitled to all kinds of privileges and special deals. He was not the only one trying to twist all their connections to avoid Vietnam. But then, he was fanatically for the war."

I don't know, doesn't that seem too perfect somehow? Too convenient that Professor Tsurumi has got Bush II's number so thoroughly, then and now? As I say, Salon is written for us, but to me, this story seems to be written for the least thoughtful of us, and appears therefore to be a piece of (almost) shameless agitprop.

Better, I think, was this here article by Michelle Goldberg on the American Film Rennaissance festival. The AFR provides a forum for the "beleagured" right-wing artists of America to level their sights on Michael Moore and his legions of America-slandering liberals. It includes a righteous analysis of the methods and productions of The Protest Warriors, which rather reflects the complaint I was making above. I like Goldberg's way of thinking when she writes:

Being around people who are so defensive about national greatness makes one wonder what private anxieties are driving them. True pride, after all, is rarely strident and bellicose. I suspect that, just as there's no one more homophobic than a closet case, so those most enraged by criticism of America harbor some secret suspicion that it's accurate. How else to explain a documentary like "Michael Moore Hates America"?

I like this just because it is a way of thinking. It doesn't say, "here, Comrade, is another reason for you to hate Bush and/or the right-wing bully boys ..." It gives the author's own reasons for her position. Reasons that happen to dovetail nicely with my own. It's a different kind of reinforcement - reinforcement by edification. It's more a talking about the theater of politics than participation in it, and I respect that.

And Goldeberg's suspicion calls to mind for me one of the charateristics of Ur-fascism described by Umberto Eco in his little book Five Moral Pieces:

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-fascist transfers his will to power onto sexual questions. This is the origin of machismo (which implies contempt for women and an intolerant condemnation of non-conformist sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since sex is also a difficult game to play, the Ur-fascist hero plays with weapons, which are his ersatz penis: his war games are due to a permanent state of penis envy.

[In describing "Ur-fascism," Eco means to be listing several aspects, the presence of one or two of which will bring a system of interacting human beings into the family of fascism. "Ur-fascism" means eternal fascism.]

By their works ye shall know them.

The Meek Shall (maybe not) Inherit the Earth

2004-09-15T22:01:00.000-07:00

My hopes are high but my goals are modest for this little project - this weblog of mine. It's all about being slow and persistent, posting with some regularity and trying thereby to find my "voice," as your typical community colllege creative writing instructor might have it. Being new to the medium, I've been scouting as many blogs as time allows for method and content.

My favorite so far is The Leiter Reports,
hosted by Brian Leiter, in the Philosophy Department at the University of Texas. He posts frequently (at least once a day), he leans my way politically and culturally. Discerns a frighteningly definite fascist strain at work in our society.

I used to own one of Leiter's books (wish I knew what became of it), Nietzsche on Morality, a pretty decent introduction to Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals that treats the proto-existentialist and psychologist non pareil as a hard-headed philosopher of naturalism and virtue-ethics. Some of his posts, indeed, are Nietzsche-oriented, and tend to be a bit crabby. Philosophers in America are kind of a prickly bunch, sometimes defensive, often a little nasty and even contemptuous in the way they attack the arguments (or pseudo-arguments) they find in the lesser lights they take to be encroaching on their field. This is an old tradition in Philosophy. Schopenhauer, in his writings, used to refer to his own contemporary Hegel as a "blockhead." In these less colorful times, in this more muted environment, professional philosophers won't usually go so far - at least not in their published work. But in the informal so-called blogosphere, the gloves seem to, well, sort of be off.

For instance, on The State of Nietzsche Studies, Leiter fumes over the discount thinkers who resort to establishing "specialty" associations and journals in order to publish their sub-par work on Nietzsche that just cannot cut it in more general, and more professional, academic journals:

the reason there is a proliferation of specialty Nietzsche forums is because the field is populated with mediocrities and incompetents, who can't perform in ordinary scholarly and philosophical contexts. Because the majority of those who write on Nietzsche don't do work that is publishable in legitimate journals that feature important work on Nietzsche-- European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Journal of the History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Journal of the History of Ideas (not to mention Philosophical Review and Ethics!)--it is necessary to create "specialty" journals that have almost no scholarly or philosophical standards in which the vast amount of rubbish on Nietzsche can find a place

Whoa. Well, I will be aiming a bit lower than these poor "mediocrities," as I keep myself for now below the acute gaze of the professionals. Heaven save me from the tragic flaw, hubris. Stay invisible and enjoy their regal disregard.

Using my Words

2004-09-13T21:59:00.000-07:00

My buddy Jeremy Goard, read the last post, In the Company of Women, and scrupled a little bit over my use of the word "effeminate" to describe the image of Christ on the cross. Jeremy thinks the word conveys the wrong sense for what I want, as too often it is used pejoratively to indicate the swishy, lisping qualities of the gay "girlie man" (this, I swear, is the only time I will ever use this ridiculously fashionable phrase) stereotype.

Actaully, I picked that word with special care, just in order to rescue it, if possible, from such associations. But if that is not possible, if it will help me keep the sense I mean, I am happy to concede and use "feminine" instead.

In the Company of Women (a long one)

2004-09-11T16:13:00.000-07:00

I recently joined a book club. Last night we met to discuss The Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters. This is the first in the series of "Amelia Peabody" stories, about a proto-suffragist in Victorian England. I say, "proto-suffragist," but really, I think Amelia is more a model for suffragists - a capable woman, able to adapt in difficult circumstances, like the preferred Victorian bloke - than she is a political idealist herself. Progressive in deed; not just progressive in thought.

Six of us assemebeld in an apartment in downtown Davis. I was the only male. And how wonderful to be surrounded, as I was in this case, by five so very lovely women. Mostly unavailable, but still, oh God, so attractive. What luxury! Does this sound "sexist" to say? Oh well. Let me amplify: Ah, girls, girls, girls! How they wink and giggle and flirt ... adornments on my life. Cream in my coffee.

Disclosure of some psychoanalytic reflection:

When I was young, and some occassion would bring my extended family together, the men and boys would typically huddle together, usually in back yards and garages. They would talk - I swear - about guns and hunting trips, about engine repair and plumbing, about things that are fixed and improved. The women would populate living rooms or migrate to kitchens. And they would talk about people. They would gossip, and they would scrutinize the desires and motives of anyone who came under discussion. In those days I used to start out with the men, stay quietly around their fringes for the sake of appearance or something, and eventually, but invariably, drift into the circle of my female relatives, where the atmosphere and the conversation was always warmer, prettier, and inifnitely more interesting. I was always a little self-conscious, a bit embarrased by my desertion of the fraternity to join the sorrority. But, thank goodness, I gradually got over that.

The last book of the recently deceased philosopher Richard Wollheim is set for publication this month by Waywiser Press, and titled Germs: A Memoir of Childhood. An extract appeared in the August edition of Harper's. He describes his early discovery of something like what we might call the feminie mystique - strength in vulnerability, power in beauty, passion in sympathy, potential in curiosity. Wollheim writes:

I had come to the conclusion that the only way, though not
an easy way, in a world in which women love women, a man might come to win a woman's love was to try, in thought, in speech, in gesture, to become as like women as nature would permit, in much the same way as, within religion, which was only just beginning to lose its command over me, or perhaps to exchange one form of command for another, the believer tries to come closer to Christ through the imitation of Christ. The way to a woman's heart, I had come to believe, was along the hard, stony, arduous path of effeminacy.

This seems a remarkable insight for a young boy. It may have been something more like intuition, a feeling that the grown man would be able to articulate later. It stands against most current convictions that women, as a rule, worship naked power and obvious success; that they are attracted to men with aggressive characteristics who stand alone and aloof from others. I have known women who have told me, quite taken with their own candor, "look, don't believe us when we say, 'oh, we want men who are sensitive.' That's all bullshit. Nothing turns us off more than when some dude breaks down to cry. We like men to be in command. We want y'all to be strong, not blubbery."

This of course is grossly unfair to men. Why should our options be so limited in this manichean way? I think Wolheim's intuition is that strength and weakness are closely intertwined. The Christian illustration in the passage I've quoted is more apt than may first appear, isn't it? Think of the symbol: Christ naked on the cross. Nobody could be more vulnerable. No act more corageous. Nothing more effeminate.

Traditionally women have been regarded collectively as the flower of civilization. The chivalrous role of men has been to protect and defend it - from, as it turns out, other men. So it has been our dual role, I guess, to destroy and defend women. But ultimately it has really fallen to women to contend with their own considerable adversity, when the masculine line of defense gives way. The chief lament of ill-fated Hector was over the terrible burden in store for his wife Andromache once the Trojan warriors were to be defeated. Women have had to be much stronger, being so weaker. Be much quicker, being so precarious. Iron is at the core of their beauty. [Forgive all these generalities of mine, please. But look at individual women you know, look at particular cases, and see if I'm not right.]

To illustrate Wollheim's point: I'm thinking of the film On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, the faded boxer and jaded strong man for corrupt union bosses on the Hoboken docks of New Jersey, and Eva Marie-Saint as Edie Doyle, the sister of a man whom Terry unwittingly sets up for murder (he was about to sing, the canary, and jeopardize the union racket. Edie doesn't know about Terry's part).

In one scene Terry, who has started to fall for Edie, brings the girl, who has started to fall for Terry, to Friendly's Bar, the dockside gin-joint. Edie has been hoping, fruitlessly, to discover how her brother was killed. She knows it was union business, but nobody penetrates the code of silence on the docks (and so Joey, her brother, was killed in the first place). She tries to appeal to this man she's falling in love with, but he is impassive. They have the following dialogue.

Edie: You don't believe anybody, do you?
Terry: Listen, down here, it's every man for himself. It's keepin' alive. It's standin' in with the right people, so you got a little bit of change jinglin' in your pocket.
Edie: And if you don't?
Terry: And if you don't - right down.
Edie: That's living like an animal.
Terry: All right, I'd rather live like an animal than end up like -
Edie: Like Joey? Are you afraid to mention his name?

Terry's "philosophy" of life is 'do it to him, before he does it to you.' It's a kind of outlook where the answer to aggression is more aggression still. Where resentment is a coping strategy that helps alleviate turmoil and pain by spreading more of it around -- purging yourself of tension through redistribution. Where doubt is considered deadly and sensitivity tantamount to weakness. On the other hand, this an outlook reinforced by the code of silence - almost codified by the dock bosses, and certainly ratified by the oppressed workers.

See, this film was directed by Elia Kazan, a couple of years after he testified before the House Unamerican Activities Committee and famously "named names." Kazan was a "reformed" Communist who had come to embrace I think the, again, manichean, worldview that socialism was a Godless evil in historic battle with Christianity. There's a sense in which Man's best intentions are laid bare in the attempt to create heavenly utopias on earth. Socialism and unionism, he would say, are ripe for corruption. Because humans are finite creatures of such short sight, they cannot possibly forestall the endless contingincies that will create avenues for real bad men to come along and place their boots on the necks of their bretheren. Terry's "philosophy" of life is an example of genuine weakness: the rationaliztion of a downtrodden coward.

But the scene with Edie in Friendly's Bar marks a turning point. We see this coward transformed. Brando, the great method actor, registers with every facial flicker, Terry's growing tenderness toward Edie. In each instant he seems more sensitive to her pain and isolation, and absorbs, and keeps more of that pain in himself. The dialogue continues:

Edie: Help me if you can, for God's sakes!
Terry: Edie, I'd like to help, I'd like to help, but there's nothin' I can do.
Edie: All right. I shouldn't have asked you.
Terry: Here, come on, have a little beer. Come on, come on. (He puts the glass to her lips, but she doesn't drink)
Edie: I don't want it. You just stay here and finish your drink.
Terry: Oh, no, no, listen, don't go. I got my whole life to drink. (pause) You sore at me?
Edie (innocently): What for?
Terry: Well, I don't know, for not, for not bein' no help to ya.
Edie (intensely): You would if you could. (She strokes his face gently)

From here Terry Malloy embarks on that hard, stony, path of effeminacy. He tells her, significantly, that she's making him crazy. What he means is that she has shaken him. That she has brought him the kind of agony that is simply inextricably bound up with love. The kind that comes with caring. The kind of agony a person guards and keeps and which drives him (or her) to do ... just, more. [Because he aches, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, "just like a woman."]

So Terry Malloy becomes a hero. A sensitive hero. An emotional, caring, iron at the core hero, ready to hang himself on the line. Ultimately responsible for facing his own adversity. Unabashedly arduous.

Whew.

Anyway, I love being in the company of women.

termini

2004-09-08T22:21:00.000-07:00

I'm dying. Maybe in a few minutes. Probably not that soon. But I'm dying. And all I can do is sit here typing.

Incipi

2004-09-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

This blog takes it's name from the setting for O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh -- a lousy gin-mill; a smoked-out, greasy dive where the habitues have all landed, it seems, permanently. Their lives, in each case, are paralyzed by fear and laziness. Their relationships to one another are defined in modern parlance by terms such as "dysfunction" and "codependence." Each is just barely able to stave off a kind of final desperation by rather dim and tenuous dreams of redemption through some personally significant act: getting off the juice; making a re-entry into politics; joining a revolution; in one case, admitting defeat and committing suicide. When these dreams are threatened with exposure (as mere dodges, through the agency of the "Iceman," the temperance-preaching, pipe-dream-smashing Theodore Hickman) the gang turns viciously one against the other, fighting to hold onto life - however bleak - at the expense of anyone else.

I think I'm suggesting that Hope's Saloon waits to harbor any of us. I would guess that to one degree or another every person is defensive, psychologically. Everybody tends to undermine others with some assortment of slings and arrows from behind the veil - to whatever degree, I think, that dreams have gone unfulfilled, potential untapped, promise unredeemed. Proportionate, I further think, to the level of dread one suffers from.