I've just learned that 52% of my Facebook friends are Democrats and 48% are Republicans, so I went to read some of their blather. One told me that there is an alarm clock that will wake you up to the smell of bacon. Another of these alarm clocks will wake you up with the voice of Jeeves. This led me to the discovery that the actor Stephen Fry is on Twitter. Fry tells me that there's a website called Freerice.com.
At Freerice.com, you can answer vocabulary questions, SAT style, and for each correct answer, you donate 10 grains of rice to a starving child. So I found it a little ironic that the first question and answer pair were pretext = guise and the second one transitory = fleeting.
There is no way, no way I say, that answering vocabulary questions via mouse clicks in my 11th floor hotel suite in San Jose feeds children with flies on their faces somewhere half a globe away. Unless somebody with a strange sense of humor has decided that it should. That person or persons are the hucksters behind Freerice. I say hucksters because, all conspiracy theories aside, this is how it comes to be that a great deal of injustice is done to the laws of physics and the principle of cause and effect. We get people to believe that certain things are correlated, like Madoff and security, like Tehran and transparency. Hey, anything's is possible for the credulous.
Physicists tell us that there is a such thing as remote entanglement, a phenomenon in which two atomic particles react to one another as if they are in immediate proximity no matter how far they actually are from each other. As far as I'm concerned it's a bogus claim. When you entangle my cell phone connections to the dark side of the Moon, I'll believe it. Until then it's just something somebody wants me to think about. It's brain candy. It makes me feel smart 'knowing' it just like the ability to count Mafia Wars energy points, dancing pinhead angels, Whuffie, carbon credits and other mythical currencies.
I understand now. Finally, once and for all, what the purpose of war is. The purpose of war is to destroy myths. The purpose of war is to restore human faith in cause and effect. The purpose of war is remind humankind of its limits. And now I understand how that can be a good thing.
I've never believed in the term 'senseless violence'. The only truly senseless violence is that generated by things without senses like volcanoes & tornadoes. People get violent because they sense a reason, even if that reason is only a belief, as in "I believe you need an ass-whooping today". That is purposeful action, Hurricane Katrina was not. People may decide not to grant any sensible purpose to an ass-whooping but they'd be wrong. Just as surely as they are wrong to suggest that any weather event constitutes a moral test for a political leader, unless somebody with a strange sense of humor has decided it should.
"Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow," Obama said, detailing how the facility near Qom had been under construction for years without being disclosed, as required, to the International Atomic Energy Agency. "International law is not an empty promise."
Yes it is. And it especially is with Presidents like you around. See international law is an empty promise because what really makes the world go around is foreign policy ambition. And international law is a figleaf of convenience for those ambitions. Grownups know this. Those behind Obama apparently do not, or do not care - they being so hypnotized by his articulations they cannot conceive how others cannot be equally persuaded.
Obama's foreign policy ambition is to defund America's exceptionalism until it fits in the same size 9 shoe as every other second rate Western socialist democracy, with their 21 member panels and boards of experts, like the Council of Zion from the Matrix Revolutions. Yeah well guess what. Iran wants to be much more powerful than the 9/11 bombers. They want a size 13 hobnail jackboot to cram up Israel's hindquarters, and the Great Articulator is inviting them to tea. Well, not now.
Now he is pretending that he didn't know, no wait, he did know that they were building a second nuclear facility all the time but pretended not to know, and he planned to what, embarras them in front of their friends like a vengeful schoolgirl? Badmouth them in the international high school cafeteria so that all the cliques of nations will laugh and point? Shame them into emptying their pockets?
Not giving me much confidence this Obama one. Acts like he was raised by a single mom and never punched a bully in the eye.
If you like pina coladas, Getting caught in the rain... - The Escape Song
The thing that has changed my view of the world has to do with equilibrium and power. More specifically why it is that when 36 million people are absolutely convinced of the truth of something which defies the status quo, the status quo doesn't change. It has to do with the willingness of people to wage war against the willingness of people to accept discomfort.
But there comes a time when discomfort is a bit too much but still not anything worth dying and killing for. In that direction we plot escape.
Just last night I was comparing road trips with a colleague who runs marathons. He said that from Ohio to Denver is a 24 hour drive, but even after all that, you're only halfway to San Diego. Anyone who has driven across Texas knows that there is plenty of space for plenty of people. And yet we mostly live in crowded cities with people who, more often than not, make us very very uncomfortable. It seems to me that I could escape in the US. And every time I fly over flyover country, especially when I see long straight highways, I wonder who owns all that property down there, and how could I get a eyeball full.
An eyeball full of real estate at 36,000 feet is about as large as a decent sized county if you're looking straight down. I don't know how many counties there are in America, but they're all named after someone. Might as well be one named after me. But I know that I'll not likely have the time to learn what it takes to look after several paltry square miles. The very idea of shaping an acre to grow enough ingredients to fill a Big Mac is daunting. So I'm stuck with my pathetic urban skills. I'm not likely to do much better on a desert island. As it stands, I can't even decide which 10 DVDs to take to the exclusion of all others.
Nope. I need fellows. This place I would escape to must have people. But it's not about just being with people but doing things with people. There are things that I would like to accomplish - tinkering with the tools of my trade like the mechanics who build a monster truck in their spare time. It's a uniquely Western passion I think - this romance with gear. I've got the bug. I can satiate that through online channels. But my fellows in escape, we need to share something in the lore of the land. I need to be in a place that makes me wear different clothes and communicate with people over distance that takes some doing. So I am drawn to islands and places with interesting geological features that make them less accessible to the world, and binding of those that are there.
Hilton Head Island has these ingredients. Martha's Vineyard has these ingredients. I've thought about retiring both places. Once when I was still under the thrall of Stanford University, Menlo Park had that magical quality to it. I very much enjoyed living in the enclave of South Pasadena for the time that I did. I thought it to be the greatest little city in the world. But South Pasadena and Menlo Park are still too much under the influence of their larger communities. To be there is more like hiding, not escaping. These are not destinations of destiny, rather they are convenient hollows still adjacent to all the bustle. Bustle means dependency. Escape leaves one independent in an organic spot. Hilton Head and Martha's Vineyard are just unique enough by their very nature that they draw people through them. Santa Fe, NM has the same quality I think, although it is not so magical to me - magic for me requires aquatic access.
So I contemplate a final living place for myself. My final home. My last place on earth. That if I make millions or if I make none, I can come back to that place from wherever I travel and feel that it is my best corner of the planet. Where the food and the language is mine. Where the attitude and the community is right. Where my fellows have that same need to be at arms distance from the foolish endeavors of the masses and the concurrent desire for elevated company.
--
Carlin speaks inspired from Pat Buchanan's ruminations about the disunity of American society. He suggests that we might be fortunate one day to live up to the doctrine of the Tenth Amendment. And I have my own hopes of that as well. States rights. Private property. I want to be someplace American where common Americans require some education of a sort to access and remain. The kind of education that makes you respect liberty. The easiest way to say so is money. You can't just walk into a penthouse at the Beresford on Central Park West. Then again, money alone is not enough there. That's the point. There is something unique about what we have evolved to be the places where America might be considered to be at its best. You escape to those places.
Everyone's idea of escape isn't the same. Riffing off Carlin, what say Hawaii becomes the Marijuana State, that Vermont becomes the Gay State? Sure, why not? In fact, we can only hope that becomes the case. Every man has a destiny. Heaven forbid it be the Mainstream.
I just came across The McCaffrey Letter and I'm wondering the extent to which the American appetite for geopolitical realism depends upon their ability to motivate the media to attack the President. I realize such matters are currently under my radar, but are they below the general American radar as well? Are Americans even interested in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan any longer? The current President certainly has done nothing to present a vision that approaches the conceptual continuity of that of the prior holder of his office. It just has me scratching my head a bit.
There's something very weird going on that I need some women's perspective in understanding. I just happened across a statistic that informs me that in 2005, about 35% of American women delivered via Cesarean Section. 30 years earlier the rate was about 5%.
WHY?
I have no clue as to why American women are increasingly having c-sections, but my instinct tells me that it's related to the sexual revolution, a set of social changes I find increasingly dubious. So I'm poking around and here is what I find.
Nearly half of obstetricians in Canada say a woman should have the
right to choose a caesarean section when there is no medical reason to
warrant one.
The finding comes from a nationwide survey of
maternity care providers that found many obstetricians appear to
support the wide use of technology, despite a push by their own
professional body to "normalize" childbirth and reduce Canada's rising
C-section rate.
Forty years ago in Canada, five per cent
of babies were delivered by caesarean. Today the rate is 28 per cent
nationally, and more than 30 per cent in B.C. and P.E.I. More than
78,000 C-sections were performed in Canada last year.
What are some reasons that would mean I would need a cesarean?
Prolapsed cord (where the cord comes down before the baby),
placenta abruptio (where the placenta separates before the birth),
placenta previa (where the placenta partially or completely covers the
cervix), fetal malpresentation (transverse lie, breech (breech can
sometimes be managed by External Version, exercises or a vaginal breech
birth), or asynclitic position), cephalopelvic disproportion (CPD,
meaning that the head is too large to fit through the pelvis. This can
also be over diagnosed, it can be caused by maternal positioning either
from restraint to bed, lack of mobility or anesthetics.), maternal
medical conditions (active herpes lesion, severe hypertension,
diabetes, etc. (please note that these conditions do not ALWAYS mean a
cesarean.)), fetal distress
(This is a hot topic with the recent studies indicating that continuous electronic fetal monitoring
increases the cesarean rate and does not show a relative increase in
better outcomes. Discuss with your care provider how they define fetal
distress and what steps are used to remedy the situation before a
cesarean.), maternal exhaustion,
and repeat cesarean, these are the main reasons for cesareans.
This article uses the US debate over elective Cesarean sectionto re-consider some of the more contentiousissues raised in feminist debates about childbirth. Three waves of feminist commentary and critique in the UnitedStates are analysed in light of the ongoingdebate over whether women should be able to choose Cesareanfor non-medical reasons. I argue that the alternativebirth movement's essentialist and occasionallymoralistic rhetoric is problematic, and the idea that some women's preference for high-tech obstetrics isthe result of a passive 'socialization' into'dominant values' is theoretically inadequate.On the other hand, the invocation of women'schoice and appreciation of high-tech childbirth serves as aweak foundation for a feminist perspective onchildbirth. By limiting their analysis to therhetorical and discursive nature and functions of 'the medical' and 'the natural', poststructuralist critics of the alternative birth movement obscure theconnection of these discourses to practicesthat have very different consequences for maternal and infanthealth and, most importantly, for the consumptionof health care resources.
The alternative birth movement is a consumer reaction to paternalistic
and mechanistic medical obstetrical practices which developed in the
United States early in this century. Alternative birth settings
developed as single labor-delivery-recovery rooms in the hospital or as
free-standing birth centers. Both alternatives offer family-centered,
home-like, low technological maternity care. In order to overcome
physician resistance to non-traditional maternity care, alternative
birth center policies eliminate all women who are expected to have a
complicated pregnancy or delivery. Physician resistance to alternative
birthing is publicly based on the issue of maternal and infant safety.
Additional issues, however, are that physicians fear economic
competition and resist loss of control over obstetric practice. This
paper (1) traces the historical antecedents and social factors leading
to the alternative birth movement, (2) describes the types of
alternative birthing methods, and (3) describes ways in which the
obstetrical community has maintained and rationalized dominance over
the birthing process.
The best answer I could find comes from Childbirthconnection.org which I artlessly reproduce in full:
Reasons for the Rising Cesarean Section Rate
The following interconnected factors appear to be pushing the cesarean rate upward.
Low priority of enhancing women's own abilities to give birth Care
that supports physiologic labor, such as providing continuous support
during labor through a doula or other companion and using
hands-to-belly movements to turn a breech (buttocks- or feet-first)
baby to a head-first position, reduces the likelihood of a cesarean
section. The decision to switch to cesarean is often made when
caregivers could use watchful waiting, positioning and movement,
comfort measures, oral nourishment and other approaches to facilitating
labor progress. The cesarean section rate could be greatly lowered
through such care.
Side effects of common labor interventions Current
research suggests that some labor interventions make a c-section more
likely. For example, labor induction among first-time mothers when the
cervix is not soft and ready to open appears to increase the likelihood
of cesarean birth. Continuous electronic fetal monitoring has been
associated with greater likelihood of a cesarean. Having an epidural
early in labor or without a high-dose boost of synthetic oxytocin
("Pitocin") seems to increase the likelihood of a c-section.
Refusal to offer the informed choice of vaginal birth Many
health professionals and/or hospitals are unwilling to offer the
informed choice of vaginal birth to women in certain circumstances. The Listening to Mothers
survey found that many women with a previous cesarean would have liked
the option of a vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) but did not have it
because health professionals and/or hospitals were unwilling (Declercq
et al. 2006a). Nine out of ten women with a previous cesarean section
are having repeat cesareans in the current environment. Similarly, few
women with a fetus in a breech position have the option to plan a
vaginal birth.
Casual attitudes about surgery and cesarean sections in particular Our
society is more tolerant than ever of surgical procedures, even when
not medically needed. This is reflected in the comfort level that many
health professionals, insurance plans, hospital administrators and
women themselves have with cesarean trends.
Limited awareness of harms that are more likely with cesarean section Cesarean
section is a major surgical procedure that increases the likelihood of
many types of harm for mothers and babies in comparison with vaginal
birth. Short-term harms for mothers include increased risk of
infection, surgical injury, blood clots, emergency hysterectomy,
intense and longer-lasting pain, going back into the hospital and poor
overall functioning. Babies born by cesarean section are more likely to
have surgical cuts, breathing problems, difficulty getting
breastfeeding going, and asthma in childhood and beyond. Perhaps due to
the common surgical side effect of "adhesion" formation, cesarean
mothers are more likely to have ongoing pelvic pain, to experience
bowel blockage, to be injured during future surgery, and to have future
infertility. Of special concern after cesarean are various serious
conditions for mothers and babies that are more likely in future
pregnancies, including ectopic pregnancy, placenta previa, placenta
accreta, placental abruption, and uterine rupture (Childbirth
Connection 2006).
Providers' fears of malpractice claims and lawsuits Given
the way that our legal, liability insurance, and health insurance
systems work, caregivers may feel that performing a cesarean reduces
their risk of being sued or losing a lawsuit, even when vaginal birth
is optimal care.
Incentives to practice in a manner that is efficient for providers Many
health professionals are feeling squeezed by tightened payments for
services and increasing practice expenses. The flat "global fee" method
of paying for childbirth does not provide any extra pay for providers
who patiently support a longer vaginal birth. Some payment schedules
pay more for cesarean than vaginal birth. A planned cesarean section is
an especially efficient way for professionals to organize hospital
work, office work and personal life. Average hospital charges are much
greater for cesarean than vaginal birth, and may offer hospitals
greater scope for profit.
All of these factors contribute to a
current national cesarean section rate of over 30%, despite evidence
that a rate of 5% to 10% would be optimal.
Astounding!
Are American women that stupid? Given this information, the decline of marriage and the rise of abortions since the American sexual revolution, I would say that on the whole our nation has radically degenerated on the very basics of human survival. Good Lord!
But let us never forget in these days of 'health care debate' the final paragraph. The incentives that encourage this surgical procedure increase its market share. Here is something I think all conservatives should make an absolute stand on. Defund elective Cesareans.
Here's an amazing story. My iPhone was updated today so that the MMS feature (picture messaging) will work. We waited until today because even though the iPhone could do it for months now, AT&T couldn't handle the traffic.
So I upgrade.
It has been about 15 minutes since I rebooted my iPhone and I am still searching for an AT&T 3G signal. Now to show you how crazy that is, I have synched the phone and I have sent and received MMS messages, through my wifi connection. I'm going to reboot my phone again and see if I can get an AT&T signal. Any AT&T signal at all.
12:29 - powered down
12:30 - hit power up button.
12:31 - fully booted. (Searching...)
12:31 - sync in progress (Searching...)
12:32 - sync complete. (Searching..) phone goes to sleep.
12:33 - i go to settings and put it in airplane mode and turn it back on.
Aha! There's AT&T. It took you slackers long enough.
So here's your evidence. A picture of my iPhone taken with my wife's Verizon phone. It shows clearly a picture of me taken with my own iPhone and that my phone is still searching for AT&T but connected to wifi.
So the first use of my newly enabled but already functional MMS software goes through my iPhone not through AT&T, but through my Verizon FIOS wifi, to my wife's Verizon phone and then back to me from her phone through my wifi, before I could even get an AT&T signal.
Increasingly, Barack Obama sounds like one of those stentorian orators of the era of the League of Nations and disarmament.
Iran is building, hey guess what, a second nuclear enrichment plant. And experts are beginning to see the light that it's very likely that they can build a nuclear weapon within the next six months. Ours is the president who extended the unconditional hand of high level diplomacy and got smacked in the face. So what's he going to do? Condemn the actions with the strongest rhetoric possible, I'm sure.
I just thought about something after reading this longish and well thought out essay on password security. A key is just a key. It doesn't matter how sophisticated the lock is if you can break the door.
The answer to his questions and longing are PasswordSafe, a tool that generates excellent quality passwords and doesn't require you to remember them. I've been using it for years and I have 843 passwords.
But think about choosing passwords just like you choose car keys and how cars are stolen. Wait. You say you don't spend a lot of time choosing your car key? And you know that car thieves don't pick locks, they hotwire? You mean they just defeat all that security by going around it? Yep. When identity thieves steal, they might make use of the occasional unlocked door, but they have tools that bypass security systems over which you have no control.
But use a good password anyway, and have a nice day.
Today fresh off the Kwaku Network is a complaint that alleges this picture is in fact not Photoshopped and exists in a Barnes & Noble in Coral Gables, Florida. So I says to myself, self, why is this bookstore not burning to the ground?
The first reason is that black Americans are reasonable, they know Barnes & Noble isn't racist, they can take a joke and this is no big deal.
The second reason is that this is a prank, either by some employee or by the person who photoshopped the picture that was clearly the work of a single minded racist. It's not worth burning down. I also note that the original email was dated back in February of this year.
The third reason is the title.
As Cobb readers know, I believe in noblesse oblige as well as torches & pitchforks. So who's a real protester outraged at American racism and who is a poseur? Lest ye forget, I'm married to a woman from Detroit.
Every time I watch a video by Bill Whittle, I am reminded that there are people out there like me who, if things go to shit, I will be perfectly comfortable betting my survival on.
I just finished Five Thrillers, a sci-fi by Robert Reed. It's the serial about a character by the name of Joseph Carroway, a man with two extraordinary talents. He has an innate ability to read people's motivations, size them up, and figure them out. And, he has a sociopathic ability to do whatever it takes to save human lives. The combination make him, ultimately a sort of philosopher king, but he goes through life as an assassin. You've all heard of the moral exercise of 'The Lifeboat'. You're shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean and you have six people but room for only five. Who lives, who dies? Joe Carroway is the one man who can make that decision better than any human, but his logic is extraordinarily precise, and correct. Hearing it out makes you realize that more often than not, we make choices that are comfortably dismissive of the value of human life - that we have ways of thinking that make high minded appeals to sacrifice, when in fact the situation calls for heroism or justice.
To give away some of the ending of 'Five Thrillers', Carroway makes a statement about the necessity for cannibalism in anticipation of an extraordinary global calamity. Cannibalism a year so that one generation can survive to be 10 generations. Brutal selfishness and paranoic distrust for 10 generations so that those generations can survive for 50 generations, until a world is reborn where the possibility of liberty can be actualized. Else, extinction.
--
Today Roger Simon pinged the idea that the end of the American Dream is at hand. And I wonder about that. Without having read anything below that soundbite, I figured he was talking about the probability that banks will no longer fund 30 year mortgages for the American middle class and that in some not too distant future, the only Americans who will own property are those who already do. I've long been aware of this paradox when I noted in my bohemian days the sleeping habits of the homeless in NYC. You see NYC being a winter city, banks often enclosed their outdoor ATMs in heated glass enclosures, some the size of a good sized bedroom. You use your ATM card to unlock the security door and use the ATM, unless there was some bum sitting there in a huddle. Why should they be allowed to sleep on bank-owned property, I thought. Well, how many of us do sleep in bank-owned property? You may call yourself a homeowner, but have you had a mortgage burning party lately?
Why not assume the worse? What if America goes feudal, and we're all just peasants who will never get the benefit of a general heartless corporation that offers money at a reasonable percentage so you can pretend to be the king of your own castle for 30 years? Imagine you have to work for a person, not an institution. Imagine you have to be a name and not a number. Imagine that everything had to go through your boss's boss's boss. That there were no credit scores, no SATs, no demographic abstracts about your qualities - that it all hung on the word of that man. Yeah man. The Man. Imagine that there were never any telephone agents or customer service jagoffs for you to complain to - no middle management, no flunkies or flacks. Everything goes to The Man. That's the kind of feudalism I'm talking about. No corporate institutions. No United Nations, no Safeco Field, no Organizations for the Whatever of Whatever. Just The Man whose kingdom extends as far as you've ever walked in your life from the place you were born.
Do you have it within your power today to find such a man? Can you ever imagine such a powerful figure to be just? I can.
That's what I've been thinking about these past few years. If I have the God given right to make life and death decisions, well then I want to be The Man. It is why I read Shakespeare's tragedies. It is why I read Plato. It is why I study politics and culture and philosophy and theology and history. It is why I game. It is why I write. Because I know there's a Man behind all of this, and when the institutions rot to the ground, those men will still be around. And how will you find them? And how will they know you? And what will you do if society's institutions all go bankrupt? Since Enron I've been thinking this. And immediately since learning of Stalin's atrocities, I've been thinking this. Do you know how, do you know why?
Because one day I walked into a bank in Texas and tried to deposit a check for $7500 that I earned and it took me half the damned day to get my cash. I saw the failure of the institution, but I still remember the man named Buck who got me the job that sent me to South Texas that paid me the check from Buck's bank in North Texas. All these peasants were standing between Buck and me. And they called themselves 'working', but they were just sleeping on bank-owned property and getting between me and my money.
--
I know what it's like, relatively speaking, to be The Man. And I know what it's like to be despised in that position - to have all of your honor called into question by some bureaucratic formalism. You do too. That's why you hate talking to those drones on the phone all the way over in India who ask you your security question - that is, when their computers are functioning. Because they have no idea of your value as a human being. They have no way of assessing your character, of judging your honor, of knowing what kind of person you are, of sizing you up and putting some understanding into the equation. They just know how to process this corporate transaction. Or this government transaction. Whatever. You're just a number, and they're just doing their job. Surely you must understand, you have that kind of job too, don't you?
--
The problem with social collapse is that there are pockets of plenty, of private, well-managed business, that gets drowned with the rising tide of failure. We're all interconnected, after all. That is no longer in question. I don't want to see the end of the American dream. I kinda like the anonymity of being a number. But if we go feudal instead of corporate, I think I'll have some advantage because I was never the one asking my government to do more. I was never the one surprised by institutional corruption and mendacity. I was never the one begging for bureaucracies to expand and deliver more of their transactions to more of the middle class and the deserving poor. I was the one looking for The Man. I was the one trying to be The Man for me and my people.
Individual liberty is not incompatible with feudalism. It depends on the man. Try getting that institution to defend your individual liberty.
It's official, space scientists have confirmed that they have no sense of perspective whatsoever.
Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island and colleagues reviewed data
from Chandrayaan-1 and found spectrographic evidence of water. The water
seems thicker closer to the poles, they reported.
"When we say 'water on the moon,' we are not talking about lakes, oceans
or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl
(hydrogen and oxygen) that interact with molecules of rock and dust
specifically in the top millimetres of the moon's surface," Pieters
said in a statement.
Scientists said the breakthrough would change the face of lunar exploration.
It's time to say that face is very, very boring. The best thing about this space science is that it makes me appreciate good science fiction even more.
Simply
stated, one hundred years from now, people will forget Nelly, but they
will still be playing Thelonius Monk. In the words of Stanley Crouch,
there is some music which seeks to 'elevate with elegance', and then
there is music to shake your ass to. Seeing as men and women will
always have reason to shake their asses, it won't really matter if it's
Nelly or someone who has yet to be born, rise to pop stardom and then
fall into obscurity. The asses will be shook, the tune forgotten. But
for those cultural productions which are part and parcel of the will to
reach excellence and perfection, for those which sustain the spirit,
the memories will be strong.
When I first started to write this brief, I didn't think I would be able to find any Stepin Fetchit on YouTube, seeing as how difficult it is to get access to the old banned stereotype cartoons of MGM. But it turned out to be easy, although still I know very little about the character or the actor who portrayed him. Bottom line stands. There are no immortal quotes of Stepin Fetchit, only, I suppose, an immortal stereotype, which over time will have to be studied so that we know that they were.
How do I know? Because I know that the Three Stooges were Jews. And I didn't know anything about that when I was laughing my ass off as a kid. But some time during my adulthood I found that out, I suppose. It didn't shock me as much as finding out when I was 15 that there was actually a such thing as a 'Pollock'. And the story I was told was that the reason Pollocks were the butt of stupidity jokes was because of the fact that they tried to defend their country against Hitler's tanks on horseback. All of these things I imagine to have close to zero emotional resonance with black Americans. That is because for one thing we don't largely take multiculturalism past its stereotypical 'people of color' fetish. I say 'we', but really don't know what I mean by that - we Americans, I suppose.
There are those perennially fearful black Americans who are full of righteous indignation and racial pride who have decided to direct their energies to countering the conspiracy. But in the end, only quality matters. And I'm afraid that the quality of saving black people from stereotypes doesn't require much quality at all. We are not saved, nor are we defeated. It seems to me that the only ones who are defeated are those with enough brains to know that the stereotypes are ridiculous, but lack enough common sense to believe that black Americans aren't actually victims. Another Talented Tenth / White Liberal trap. Two doors on the same roach motel.
The latest first person shooter to hit the XBox is Halo 3: ODST. I introduce it as an FPS because it compares well with others and invites such comparison as well as to the world of Halo. That's something unexpected.
Clearly, as Halo Wars has shown, some of the best talent in gaming is attracted to the Halo universe. More than any other series, save perhaps Dr. Who, Ender, Star Trek and Star Wars, the Halo universe continues to remain compelling over various tellings. It has been a book, an FPS, an RTS, a campaign game, a co-op game and now a squad game. Of course it has always been greatest, since Halo 2, as an online multiplayer. ODST is better because it is different.
The Campaign The first thing you notice about ODST is that it's quiet. It's night. You're lost. You're sneaking around trying to find your way around New Mombasa and there are patrols of Covies around every corner. But you've got silenced weapons, enhanced vision and your Halo skills. Fair fight.
The music is thematically very different. It's occasionally noir, jazzy, solemn. It feels like the music of the dark and lonely night. For moments, ODST approaches Splinter Cell. In fact, that's the first way to think about it as an FPS, because you are not the Master Chief, the monk's chant is not in the background, you are on Earth and there are no Elites to be found alive. What the heck is going on here?
You are on the front lines.
The hardest thing, and the greatest thing you have to get used to in ODST is that you start to realize how deadly the Covenant are. Sure, when Brutes were introduced in 3, it took a minute to figure them out, but after a while you mowed them down. You were the Chief. Now you're not and it takes two, maybe three melees to take out a grunt. And if you think you can just melee a brute because his helmet is off, think again. Your combat style has to change. Heroics will get you killed. You are not a Spartan. This is not Sparta!
Instead, you find yourself gravitating to the shadows, making flanking moves, plinking off headshots with your incredibly accurate headbursting magnum. Double kill, triple, killtackular, spree, running riot. No wait. That doesn't happen in the campaign. That only happens in Firefight. In the campaign, you run, you hide, you search for health packs (which are plentiful on Normal), you make the most use of vehicles and other marines when you can find them.
The most important thing is the feel of being differently abled than a Spartan, and I'd say that you take damage almost exactly like a Gear from Gears of War. You are more robust than Rainbow Six, so you live longer. In fact, in Firefight, you live a lot longer than you do in Halo multiplayer. It's more like the best battles of Halo Co-op without the aggrevating plot devices and cut scenes. Like Gears, it's straight to the action. So let's do that comparison.
Firefight Firefight is like Horde. Firefight is better than Horde but exactly in the same way that Halo is better than Gears which is according to your tastes. Firefight has vehicles. Firefight works at night. Firefight has more kinds of weapons. Speaking of weapons, did I mention that ODSTs can carry 12 grenades? Yep. Makes up for the lack of dual wielding.
Firefight is organized into 3 sets, each with 3 rounds each with 5 waves. That's 45 waves of baddies to shoot, snipe, melee and blast your way through. Me and and two other guys got up to 3.3.4 on Normal but couldn't get past 1.1.4 on Heroic. The fifth wave is always the toughest. Remember what I said about the difficulty with Brutes? Imagine three chieftains swinging hammers with invulnerability on. Literally brutal. And boy to they talk smack.
If you do good, you can earn extra lives and weapon drops, but the Covenant get power ups too. Let me tell you something. There's a skull called 'Catch' and it means that the Covies throw lots of grenades. The guys at Bungie amped up the AI and those grunts are deadly with grenades. And you can no longer dodge the Phantom drop ship cannons, you basically hide until they're gone. And even worse are those pesky Jackal snipers. Carbines hurt. On the map we played, Crater, putting snipers beyond our immediate reach (and not part of the enemy count) made a huge difference.
You need to do a lot of weapons trading in Firefight. More than you do in Halo multiplayer. A new tactic we've used is to get a pistol (which we've got some stock of) and go into the field and find a hammer or needler, then bring it back to base, trade back down and drop it for later use. Near the end of the wave, you get less and less time to scavenge ammo.
I haven't figured out all of the skull power ups that the Covenant get other than the basic three. But I know that when they're all turned on (because there are bonus rounds between sets) you find yourself banging away at grunts who just won't die, that is unless you headshot them with your trusty magnum, which is super deadly head on, but won't leave a mark if you shoot them in the back and can't penetrate a shield worth diddly.
No swords. Don't miss 'em. No BRs, no big deal. The minigun rules. The magnum is awesome. The fuel rod gun is very useful. The needler is a staple of combat, the shotty is not. That's because you generally don't want to be so close that you have to rely on melee and by the time the shotgun is available, the Covies have damage skulls, anyway that's how I've been playing.
Grunts are tougher, Jackals are peskier and you can't blow through their shields as easily. Brutes come in larger packs and the chiefs use invulnerability. Buggers have been cranked up a notch and are way more difficult and deadly. No Flood. AI is better all around. New Mombasa is gorgeous.
So. The best thing about ODST is that you play Firefight with your friends, not with anonymous jerks like in Halo multiplayer, and suddenly Halo is civilized again. You focus on fighting the bad guys, and their AI is so good that outsmarting them is non-trivial. Smarter than Rainbow Six, smarter than Gears, as deadly as COD Modern Warfare.
On the Downside. The VISR is useless during the day. I'm sure they wanted it that way. It would have complicated things to have multiple modes on the X button.
On the Whole Solo play in the campaign is dramatically different as ODST. This is a great way to extend the series. Firefight means that tactical fighting has returned to Halo. You must flank. You must coordinate. You must have ammo and weapons tactics. There are no patterns to memorize, you have to think on the fly. It's right where I like it, more Rainbow Six-ish but nowhere near as predictable, more Gears-ish but very Halo. Definitely an improvement over Halo multiplayer, where people gripe in the lobby and say 'Veto! Veto!'. No more of that. No vetos for ODST.
It just goes against my core beliefs to sit quietly
while the art community is used by the NEA and the administration to
push an agenda other than the one for which it was created. It is not
within the National Endowment for the Arts’ original charter to
initiate, organize, and tap into the art community to help bring
awareness to health care, or energy & environmental issues for that
matter; and especially not at a time when it is being vehemently
debated. Artists shouldn’t be used as tools of the state to help create
a climate amenable to their positions, which is what appears to be
happening in this instance. If the art community wants to tackle those
issues on its own then fine. But tackling them shouldn’t come as an
encouragement from the NEA to those they potentially fund at this
coincidental time.
Citizen journalism has never been better. Breitbart leads.
Somebody remind me exactly how this ACORN stuff is supposed to stick to the President. I don't get it.
It's obvious that this community organization scam is just that - the sort of business that passes for business where people don't do real business, which is to say a cyclops in the land of the blind. But where's the beef aside from guilt by association?
Six years ago I was actively fighting racism through my blogging. I came up with all the answers and I satisfied myself in many ways that racism in America was clear and present, but by and large not a danger. Along the way I found that most people, in fact the overwhelming majority, wanted racism to be beat, but they had no idea how to go about that politically. Personally, I think most people don't have a problem figuring it out.
These days, the old political punching bag is taking its hits as people from all directions call fouls and punch the racism bag in somebody else's direction. But the bag never goes away and nobody steps around it to actually punch the other person.
I am perturbed to a certain extent. On the one hand, like most people, I want to see racism defeated. Not more than I want a million dollars, but a lot. I also would like to see Americans have a single clear and comprehensive understanding of what racism is, and what to do about it. But I know that's pretty much impossible. Therefore I plink targets and do my small part within the context of the more or less perfect framework I have established over the decades.
Today my target is the people who 'play the race card'. If you understand the phrase then you understand that such people are corrosive of both civil society and true anti-racism. I accuse them of a lack of perspective, they are people who are apoplectic for inadequate reason. They are exactly like cops who arrest without probable cause, they are fanatic and misguided. But most importantly, they are a key component of the constituency that rightly wants to fight racism. They therefore need not to be defeated, but redirected and corrected.
There is only one way to be wrong and that is to be ignorant. The race carders, or 'Carders' as I will term them, along with Birthers and Truthers a swelling class of fanatics within suffering America, have history on their side. That is to say they mis-categorize current instances of racial bigotry alongside a long history of American racism which all folks understand to be heinous. So if their charges of racism are denied, they accuse the deniers of being blind not only to the present but on the wrong side of history. As I said at American Digest:
The thing to recognize about people who play the race card is that
it is part of a narrative that stretches back 400 years. The cycle of
accusation and denial is self-perpetuating and only strenghtens the
convictions of the accusers who are convinced there is an impenetrable
'white wall' of racists and that American thought itself is its
foundation.
The only way to combat this strategy is through judo - by using its
own energy against it. Reason and evidence may be on the side of the
Sheriff, that doesn't take bullets out of the bad guy's guns.
Therefore let us look at Effective Resonance once again which was my way of assaying what was two, four or Six Pounds of Racism. My intent, as always is to have the punishment fit the crime and rid ourselves of fanatic excess.
Class Three - Background Noise This will include
all such insults, slights and disrespect as is generally expected to be
found everywhere in this nation. Examples include but are not limited
to being ignored by cabbies, flying confederate flags, nazi propaganda,
being mistaken for the help, being shown costume jewelry, being asked
one's opinion of, or to account for the opinions of the Fungibles, and most nigger calls.
Class Two - Political Intransigence Class
Two racism involves denials of public accommodation or private standing
which are not criminal, yet grossly unfair and unjust. Such acts would
include imposition of glass ceilings, racial profiling, white flight,
medical misdiagnosis, educational tracking, false arrest, false
imprisonment, racist vois dire, racist jury nullification, denials of
service with plausible deniability, any institutional individual or
institutional racism which must be tried in civil courts and all such
active bigotry one associates with hate groups which fall short of
incitement.
Class One - Crime Theft, criminal
defamation, cross burnings (now), hate crimes, murder, rape & all
that stuff for which America has never made any extraordinary effort to
repair.
Now my own cynical point of American repair of racist crime notwithstanding, it is quite simple to look at everything that has been called racist in this 'post-racial' era and see that very little of it, including the Gates fiasco, rises to the level of Class Two.
The point, my friends, is not to tell the Carders that there is no racism going on, but to explain to them that it is not their grandfather's racism. They'll have to agree, although what is plausibly deniable gets foggy. After all, even the Carders will deny that they themselves are not making stereotypical judgments.
Today is one of those days where I feel like everybody around me was raised by hippies. The worst part is not that I can't deal with that, the worst part is that I'm stuck here, outside the patriarchy.
You see 'raised by women' is what I'm really trying to say and I'm realizing that I and most other American writers have been robbed of the power of metaphor because of our idiot sexual revolution. Americans have been spending the greater part of two generations robbing 'masculine' and 'feminine' of all their historic rhetorical resonance.
More to the core of my complaint is that I am more and more convinced that men want to blow things up and women want to smooth things over. So men act with haste and women talk things into submission. Both men and women are pitifully imbalanced and left to their own social devices become foul, smelly and homicidal. That is not to say that men should be more like women and women more like men. Perish the thought. Men should be more with women and women more with men. As such the men should be more masculine and the women more feminine.
Well, actually that's not the core of my complaint, but that I'm in a situation that is all hippie-like and collaborative. Collaborative to a Gordian fault. It is, I say, a symptom of an over reaction to an overproduction. That pendulum is on the female side and it needs some swinging back. What I'm talking about is a species of new-age Silicon Valley youth culture management style. It is a management style that defies regimentation. It is a management style that defies hierarchies and conformity. It is a management style that doesn't punish indecision. It is a management style that is, for all intents and purposes, aptly suited for well-paid people at the top who don't really have to give a rat's and for political animals in the middle who are expert at avoiding accountability and for slacky puppies at the bottom who are just working for the lifestyle perks. In other words, it is the opposite of a masculine, military, gung ho organization. It is a feminine, let's take it slow and talk about it, can't we all get along organization. The kind of company on whose board of directors you'd likely find David Schwimmer and Sarah Vowell. It is a management style that rewards formalism and process, and God help me I'm vulnerable to it.
You see I'm a team player. And there is often a great deal of confusion between collaboration and teamwork. When I say I'm a team player, it means that I want to be on the winning team and kick the other team's ass, by any means necessary. Not that Stewart Smalley stuff. When I hear 'There is no 'I' in team' I think, no there is no you on *my* team, loser. *I* am the team captain, and *I* say 'My name is Inago Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die'. My team is a gathering of the best who gather under the duress of understanding that they will get squashed as individuals otherwise. My team has tryouts, and a heartbreaking cut list. My team has a first string, a second string and a couple of mascots. My team is not about empowerment, it's about power - bringing the pain, kicking ass and taking names, total domination, the best team on the field. In short, it's masculine.
Collaboration is something else. But I'm not trying to give 'collaboration' a bad name because I'm not anti-diplomatic. I just have a problem with that thing I'm calling feminine management which is everything that made you curl your little pouty lips when you read the previous paragraph, sweetie.
The Gordian problem is well known, and what I'm trying to express is the fixedness of human character and the tragedy that flows from experiments in relativism. So long as men make war, the feminine organization will fall. But the mistake is to believe that such masculine haste is always errant. It is what we have been socialized to believe. Yes, it's true that we have been socialized, and so men have not had the righteous confidence they should have in their masculine impulses - and thusly have disabused their own nature making a vice out of virtue. Eager to subvert what they falsely consider the guilty pleasure of manly actions they have laid waste to their own saving graces. And they have become hippies, female enough to not be male and forcing women to act like men.
I don't hate my parent's generation. Maybe what the saecularists of the Fourth Turning said is right.
The Prophet archetype is born in a High, enters young adulthood in an Awakening, midlife in an Unraveling, and elderhood in a Crisis.
The Nomad archetype is born in an Awakening, enters young adulthood in an Unraveling, midlife in a Crisis, and elderhood in a High.
The Hero archetype is born in an Unraveling, enters young adulthood in a Crisis, midlife in a High, and elderhood in an Awakening.
The Artist archetype is born in a Crisis, enters young adulthood in a High, midlife in an Awakening, and elderhood in an Unraveling.
I know that I'm a Nomad and I know my son is a Hero and that we are now living in the Crisis. But it's those damnable Hippie Prophets that got us all into this mess. I read Vikram Seth's Golden Gate salivating over the prospects of what seemed to be the dawning of a new age. What was I thinking? I was thinking what I was expected to think, that we were all some new kind of human being, unleashed from the lessons and traditions of history as if it were some soul-crushing weight only suitable for destruction it its self-evident old age. History was to us a senile grandparent to be hidden away, in whose footsteps we would never follow. Ha!
World inversion is a monumental deed. But management of millions is but a small deed in the face of history. I am working in the cultural context of a squabbling mass of cross-motivated gabbers who seek the comfort of words in a paucity of action. 70% of youth of draft age are unfit for military duty. We were all raised by hippies, and so averse to righteous masculinity that it has become a fetish rather than what it simply is.
There is no great 'someday' for the future of the organization of humankind. We will always be men and women and we will always think like men and women. The sooner we reconcile our society to this fact, the better off we'll be.
I am basically incapable of giving Obama a fair hearing. That's because I never trusted that he was anything beyond a Chicago machine pol. These days I'm beginning to believe that we are getting what we deserve.
After five minutes of sitting down in my hotel room with the TV on, I have heard four mentions of 'adult programming'. Porn. And when they mention children, these video sales-voices on the Marriott cable channel, it is to remind parents that they can turn off the porn. Suddenly I want to be in a place where the very idea of making porn easy to turn on and easy to turn off is not discussed so casually.
HEY, YOU! THERE'S PORN HERE. BUT HEY, YOU CAN TURN IT OFF IF YOU LIKE.
I know I'm not just old and crabby. Our society is just nasty, and I'm noticing it all over the place.
There used to be a black bookstore called Eso Wan in Inglewood just south of Centinela on La Brea. The last time I was there was back when The Bell Curve was in the news. I tend to remember the exasperation of the proprietor who found that every day black folks walked in off the street to ask about the book, jawbone it. It was his best selling book. His customers wanted to buy it 'to see what white people think'. He couldn't stand it. Just then, a woman came and interrupted our conversation. She wanted to talk about The Bell Curve.
Eso Wan is there no longer. What was once a bastion in the 'hood, with serious books from serious authors now sells dolls, fraternity swag, blackified Lladro, children's books and the latest bodice rippers from E. Lynn Harris.
Meanwhile over in San Bernardino, the latest ACORN sting has been posted to YouTube. This episode even outdoes the previous ones. A woman who brags about shooting her ex-husband dead is giving advice about how to run a child prostitution ring to the undercover reporters. They days of Clark Kent and Peter Parker are over. This is the new journalism.
'Jackass' is the word I hear that Obama has used to describe Kanye West, the airhead often defended as the most intelligent hiphop artist on the planet. Myself, I think West is a bullshit artist but not one quite as accomplished as Obama. After all, West's demographic is only marginally cultured and educated, whereas Obama has people as intelligent as Andrew Sullivan licking his behind. There's not much to say here. West is a crashing boor and Obama threw him under the bus.
Speaking of other affronts to civilization. I hear that those detainees that have been moved from GTMO to Bagram AFB in Afghanistan have lost several of their 'rights', such as a right to counsel. Now if you were a Neocon like me and you took the research of Gonzales seriously, as I did, you would have been plenty satisfied that 'enemy combattants' had no such 'rights'. If, on the other hand, you were a bleeding heart with no sense of propriety about who is trying to kill whom, you are now faced with the fact that your current President has gone one step further in the 'wrong' direction than your prior President. If any of you has the courage of your convictions, mail me the YouTube of you eating your heart out. Sucker!
Speaking of suckers. I should mention that my old nemesis Craig Nulan should, by all rights, be putting a FAIL sign on the banner of his conspiratorial blog. You may recall his predictions.
1. Total reorganization of the world financial system to begin in
December 2008 at the Bretton-Woods II conference and to be completed by
no later than the martial law stimulating crisis loose lipped by Joe
Biden the other day. Let's say summer 2009.
2. Incremental replacement of U.S. greenbacks with "redbacks" or
some alternative that penalizes cash hoarding - no later than October
2009.
3. Declaration of martial law in selected municipalities and
possibly states/regions when some of your plaid flannel shirt minions
who drank too much Black Helicopter kool-aid during the 90's go
buckwild with some of their 250 million privately owned firearms and
explosives when they can't get at their "cash - no later than August
2009.
Old fool should have tied his predictions to some unemployment figures. It take 20% I figure. Then again you can always go into child prostitution, and as you can see, plenty of those peasant underlings live just fine in Sherwood Forest.
On fine summer days like today, yes we have Indian Summer out here in California, I take to dreaming that there are fine corn-growing communities in our nation that are deeply distant to the social corruption of this despicably retarded mainstream. Somewhere back in Kansas, people don't know who Lady Gaga is and don't ever find out what people I am too electronically close to are trying to find out.
Meanwhile I'm trying very hard to do some intelligent, disciplined hard work in the software business and scrape together enough coinage so that I can escape.
Don't you know That it's true That for me And for you The world is a ghetto. -- War
Lord knows I try, but the more things stay the same, the more I gotta change.
I had a WTF moment this morning when I got through, with some considerable difficulty the first several questions of a survey. But by the time I got to this question, I was just too through.
I have to say that this is just about as well-meaning and pathetic as I've ever seen. It point to a sort of crabby self-selection that just reeks of insecurity. But what else could it be than exactly what it is? It is a confession.
Like any confession, it is of the most sensitive nature. It expresses a desire to come clean, to reach absolution, to get salve for the wound. Which is why it would hurt so much to find such a survey coming from some other source than one which is trusted. I don't know who 'Black Female Accomplished' is, but what if the title at the top of the survey read 'Confederate Caucus'?
My boy Jimi passed out the survey and asked for at least ten responses. I can't do so in good conscience. I'm not exactly the right demographic. Still, I expect that he'll reach his quota, and it saddens me. It saddens me not that there are men who find themselves at this particularly forlorn lunch table, but that it is so self-fulfillingly the 'black' lunch table. These are the parameters and the dimensions of what is understood within and without to be the plight of the Black Professional Man. And these are the sorts of questions he is asked to confirm about himself. Each of those complaints have 50 terabytes of websites and umpteen magazines full of information leading towards understanding. Although I've never seen 'Police Harassment Magazine' I seem to find plenty of civil rights attorneys whenever I look. But here in one place is the compendium of maladies and it's all the exclusive property of you, black man.
If there was an entry called 'demeaning stereotypical surveys' I might have just answered that one question and left the rest blank. Except I have a blog where I can say such things, and I just did.
--
I told my daughter last night that all kids come from a small town. That even in a big city, all of their friends are from the same little elementary school, they'd be lost if dropped 4 miles from home, they all shop from the same supermarket. My point is that if you don't make use of the big city, it doesn't matter how big it is, for you it's just your neighborhood. It's just your ghetto.
Catholics are great. They try so hard to be righteous. They pore so deeply over their eternal souls. They obsess over sin so constantly. They attempt to be completely clean, down to the fingernails.
It's the fear. It's not the superstition of religious mystery. It is the disciplined hand of the inspired man that swings high in threat over the child's upturned eyes. There are, according to the ancients, three primary motivators of men. They are greed, glory and fear. And while there are many who pretend that their motivations are more realistic than those of the God fearing, men and women of the cloth put it plainly into the same human terms.
So I have seen Doubt, the film, at long last.
In some youthful imagining of mine there was something of Arthur Miller in every play, and so in every highbrow entertainment I expected moral edification. I expected it from LeRoi Jones. I expected it from Eugene O'Neill. I expected it from Chekov and from Achebe. I thought it was all of the stuff that educated people did in their spare time. And so I was disappointed, not in them, but in everyone else. Because if anyone dared to suggest that following God's will through the institution of the Church and at the hands of the priesthood, then certainly they must have had a better idea. So perhaps The Crucible got me on a tangent of doubt, or clouded up the firmament blocking the divine stars navigating my youth's journey. Either way there is doubt. Doubt which strengthens faith. Doubt which requires our attention and introspection, meditation and prayer. You simply can't get it from the Theatre. You simply can't get it from the Church.
You must internalize the discipline, down to your fingernails.
--
I also saw Layer Cake, the film, at long last.
Seeing it reminded me of the old men I have met, especially the ones that make me afraid. They are the capable ones. I used to think once upon a time that I could belly up to the brass rail and strike up a conversation that would lead to my edification. And I forget that most of the time I ambled home reminded of my weaknesses. There are two such men I have in mind at this very moment whose good regard I believe I have. But I am afraid to engage with them at length for fear they would hand me an assignment for which I am deadly unprepared.
Such men are only men though, and perhaps they are like stone soup. Doing nothing and being there, they make me through in the proper ingredients. Yeah. It's the fear.
--
I am drawn to conflict of the close combative style. The kind that makes you answer for yourself. It's how I was raised. Yes sir. And I grew to watch myself closely because I was watched closely. And I came to outdiscipline my own parental taskmasters, and those of my parochial school, and so on through life. In my thinking, and in my spirit. And I know that God is out there, infinite.
So the thing is to watch your soul. And wash your hands.
I went to bed at 8:30 last night and so I've been up since 5. I've read a bit of the web and nothing in particular sways me. It's a big country.
The first thing I thought was that I should view some 9/11 stuff. I watched the WTC attacks from three different YouTube perspectives. There was one in particular I had never seen before that was extraordinarily crisp and and stunningly accurate. It was a professional's home video set up on a tripod and caught the second plane ripping through. I had in mind parts of a longish piece I read yesterday on United 93, a film I have still yet to see. I cried, predictably. I cry thinking about it now. I rather expected to cry; it still hurts me when I look.
Asshats everywhere in YouTube comments flame each other's mothers about what it meant. Others claim they have proof it was a bomb. Somebody spotted a third plane, a missile. Some call attention to the falling bodies. The outrage of crass humanity is familiar.
I registered at Dan Carlin's PHPBB site. It feels claustrophobic and very 2000. It's only been a day and I can tell who rules the joint. Conversations last about 8 or 9 comments and then diverge into madness.
Let me now be one of the few more serious bloggers who mentions the name of Sibel Edmonds whose allegations are both extreme and incredible, but must certainly contain the sort of truth that our ill-disciplined media are incapable of pursuing. The difficult and complicated truth - the sort that defies our contemporary understanding because it doesn't fit our narrative.
Over in Turkey some sleazebags set up a fake Big Brother house and held 9 young women captive for two months, filming them and then webcasting them to a porno channel.
The community commissars of ACORN are busted on sting video showing a 'prostitute' how to cheat federal and local authorities.
--
I've been thinking about what impels me to study - to satisfy my curiosity and desire to be wise. I don't question it, I just try to reconcile where it puts me in relation to my fellows. I've lived in the Northeast, in the New South, on the West Coast. I've worked in the Northwest and married a Midwesterner. I like Texas, but deep down I'm a Californian New Yorker. I've met thousands of people and I find myself at this point in my life trying to do a bit of business with some of the best of them, and so my life, while filled with the self-knowledge that is the inevitable consequence of being so many times out of my comfort zone, is not about me but my relationship to the world. I absorb and abstract. I can go for paragraphs on end using aphoristic meta-explanations. All of the particulars are... merely particular.
Every once in a while, I'll look you straight in the eye. I'm one of those people (I think) that people find arrogant and aloof. It's not that I won't laugh at your jokes, but you can tell that I've heard it before. It's not that I'm bored, but most of life is ordinary and doesn't require me to raise my voice. So I'll talk at length and chime in occasionally and multitask while I'm speaking in the same car or at the same table or in the same office with you. But finally you'll say something interesting and I'll stop grunting and nodding and look you straight in the eye. It may take a while, but I don't want you to think I'm rude or self-absorbed. I'm simply not going to get emotional about everyday life - it's that I'm trying to see the big country.
Boyd says freedom to do things requires one to get rich or reduce your needs to zero. I'm trying to do both and I'm projecting myself into a future where everything is not so expensive - where I can focus on the people outside of the middle classness of all of us. Where I can put the context of our daily living and our striving ambitions in perspective and look you in the eye on the important things.
Does that make sense to you? I don't want to be outraged about 9/11 so that I end up screaming at people like an idiot. I don't want and FBI informant's revelations make me believe that all of Congress is more or less corrupt than is to be expected. I don't want to pontificate. I've seen too much, and I know people are peculiar. I know that I want a perspective that requires me to take all things in context and that most people don't need that discipline because most people aren't philosophical writers as I'm trying to be in Cobb.
I'm an American. Eight years from being attacked in my big country things don't surprise me much any longer. My eyes and ears are open, and I don't sweat the small stuff. It's not Israel that's the problem. It's not Turkey. It's not Afghanistan. It's not America. It's people who have, in their moments the chance to represent their own interests as if they were more... Bin Laden isn't Saudi Arabia. Crazy A is not Iran. Bush is not America. Obama is just another man. But sometimes we think that the country isn't so big and we try to reduce our focus to the little bit that we say is representative. It's not fair, but it's what we do.
I think I may have found something here. In engineering, there is a three legged proposition. Speed, quality and cost. You have to pick two. If you are building something, you can build it quickly and cheaply but it won't be of high quality. Or you can build something of high quality and low cost, but it will take forever. Or you can build something of high quality, quickly, but it will cost a lot.
Now we turn to the world of political ideas. You can stick to your principles and your ethics, but you probably won't get anything done. Or you can pick you principles and your results, but you'll have to play dirty to get it done. Or you can ruffle no feathers and get what you want, but you'll have to play both sides. Let's give these tactics some names shall we?
OK, so maybe Dvorak was halfway wrong about the President's CTO, but I've seen about 7 minutes of Van Jones video, some of which is Congressional testimony and I'm thinking that Obama must really believe that older people are incorrigible and unforgivably stupid.
But maybe I'm thinking the wrong way about how czarist political sausage is made. Maybe you hire smart young people who haven't built anything to be the mouthpieces of the office of the President. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around, that you got the most experienced people you can to advice the White House on how things really work and then reality-based policy moves from there. Nope. That's not the Obama way. He gets young Turks.
Well, this turkey is out on his can. Let him fast talk someplace else.
A thoughtful reader addressed my perspective on gangs, specifically the conflicts between American authorities and black communities. I think about this problem in the context of world history. I didn't always go there.
Last month I wrote a piece called How Fighting Racism Makes You a Pawn of the Left. In trying to contextualize the conflicts between black and white in America, black politics has always taken the Left road. It was always an intellectual path, a road paved with honest intentions. My problem was that I thought it was the only high road. I was mistaken. But there are still fairly massive tragedies in what we have come to know as black history and those tragedies still energize and motivate people to do good. How do we use it without being foolish? There's the challenge.
The thing that snapped me out of my daze was the realization that only about 5000 black Americans have been lynched in the history of lynching. That's about a week's worth of combat on any island in WW2's Pacific Theatre. Maybe a couple days at the Battle of the Bulge, and a few hours at Stalingrad. But also from the other direction, I was angry about hearing about every rock that got thrown in Gaza when black Americans were dying in the streets of South Central. Being me, I decided to get above and beyond it all and focus on what I called a Lynch Factor, which at the time I set at 3000, whcih was the sum total of my estimation of all the lynchings of blacks, and not coincidentally was the total death toll of all the Intidfadas since 1948. If it didn't kill 3000 folks, it doesn't matter in world history so far as I was concerned. So why should a worldly guy like me be concerned.
But I also knew that the Crips in Los Angeles, had killed more than that. According to this website (which I'll link to later) the Crips are more deadly than most people understand.
--
We are faced, we black Americans, with making sense of our time in this experimental nation. And in some ways we are the perfect people for it. Chattel slaves were post-modern before modernism. We had, to quote Malcolm (or was it Farrakhan), lost our land, our names, our religion. So who better to imprint the principles of Liberty than those who need it most? That may or may not be practical because we retain the memory and the subsequent political struggles which are the heirs of the Middle Passage. This brings us to our title.
I think that the lions never have their history. They only have their pride. But the hunters win and so the hunter has his history. Black history has tried to invert this and I beleive that it fails. The winners of wars write the histories and in the end everything else is lost. But such cycles of history are longer than we might think so there is some back and forth over generations. But when black activists start raising questions about Middle Passage and attempt to document 400 years of degradation, I say they are ignoring the fact that they are alive to persist. It should be obvious that the faces at the bottom of the Atlantic have a far greater tragedy to tell, except that they don't get to tell it. Nor do the slaves who got beat to death; they don't get to tell the story either. Nor do the black soldiers who fought on the side of the South. They don't get to tell the story. Only the survivors.
So what story is it important for the survivors to tell? Do we tell about the faces at the bottom of the Atlantic? I say no, because in the end, those are only fighting words. You can't talk about genocide except in an academic fashion. If you want more, then you have to fight, and any politics that pretends to be anything else but blather has to be out for blood.
All this puts, for me at least, a taste of finality on the revolutionary black history in America. There is no sustained underground. There are Crips and Bloods fighting for space in prisons and this block or that block, but they cannot and will not command any leadership beyond their own petty feuds. Yeah we got a crowd for the clemency of Tookie, and Mumia Abu Jamal can still draw a small crowd to his side. But those are academics and bored middle class pseudo radicals. They don't even know how to fight, much less lead a fight.
One day a class of black radical politicos are going to wake up and see thousands of black men in uniform in the US Armed Forces. It's going to make them think again, or run and hide.
This is going to be the landing pad for my cultural biography of my old neighborhood. There's a lot to say and a lot to remember some of which I've already documented and some of which remains to be said. I'm going to leave comments open because I want folks I have found from over the years to come and speak. This may be the only record that remains.
As we transition to the period After Facebook, we may have that double-edged possibility of finding people who remember what we did and who we were many years ago. Whether or not our eyes were watching God, somebody's eyes were watching us. And so I'd like to use that power and bring back to mind something of the place that made us, (or not) who we are today.
I start this with the phone call I got from my brother that woke me out of bed this morning. Dorsey High just had his 25th class reunion. And so there were people to talk about The Cork, Maverick's Flat, VIP Records, Leo's BBQ and Baron's Market, all landmarks in our old stomping grounds. I've done such reminiscing from time to time. But now I need to compile it so it becomes a bit more permanent.
You only know what you know
You only see what your heart will show
You only love when your soul remembers
We all come from the same December
And in the end that's where we'll go
--Prince
Yesterday morning in preparation for work, I reflected on the fact that my good friend Spence made it to the Daily Show. The night before, I had dinner with another friend whom I met IRL for the first time over steaks. The latter was a conversation that had so much momentum that we were still gabbing two hours later in the parking lot. Part of our conversation was about how I consider myself a part of my family so much more than a part of that thing called 'blackness'. And so when I thought about Spence on TV with Stewart, I wondered exactly what might I have talked about. I didn't have an answer.
As I listened to myself speak about representing blackness, I realized how incoherent I became. Nothing I could think of made sense. I was completely outside of that box, spiritually, which was different. I've always been outside of the black box mentally. By this I mean to say my communion with black Americans has always been there in spirit but my mind goes from place to place. But this particular morning, I found myself at a loss to say where the particular spirit of black America is at this moment in history. I haven't been paying attention, and I find it difficult to bother. Not because I don't care about that branch of humanity, but because I see blackness as a box that I don't live in. For me, it is a prior address.
The blackness box is problematic in that it is rather like that great barrel of metaphor. You know, crabs in a barrel are always trying to keep those near the top from escaping. But what we have, through various types of blackified successes is a barrel network, a 24/7 CNN of the blackness box. You can get it anytime, anywhere it seems. If you want black leadership, there's that. If you want black music, fashion, religion, educations, social status, there's all of that. So to extend the metaphor, the barrel has become transparent. Everything that catches the eye inside the barrel is viewed outside of the barrel and everything outside the barrel is visible from inside. So why stay in the barrel? Because it's 'our' barrel. Blackness is the distinct creation and property of the African American and the African American, is by and large determined to be black forever.
Have you heard of the Long Tail? The idea of the long tail is simple. Think of a contest in which you are voting for the top 100 X of all time. You have 10 votes and there's a 1000 people voting. If the X was Basketball, then Michael Jordan would get the most votes. Way down in the lower ranks you might find Spud Webb. (pun intended). The point of the long tail is that if you add up all the less popular stuff that still fits in the category, you end up with just as much bang as for the top 25%. The trick is to capture all of the bucks of the whole long tail and add up your bang. That's called monetizing the long tail and when you monetize the long tail, you assure that no matter how obscure and unpopular a choice might be, it's still significant if you add it all up with all the other obscure and unpopular things.
There is a long tail of blackness that has been monetized. Oh sure you can be sure that Oprah and Michael Jackson still dominate the fat portion, that hiphop and sports have the overwhelming majority of attention share. But way down the tail of that market, where just 3% of the black American population can tell Trey Ellis from Paul Beatty or Lorraine Hansberry from N'tozake Shange, it's still inwardly focused on the 'my' in 'my blackness'. But also on the functional vs the dysfunctional scale, all the petty, uneducated hot ghetto mess that the overwhelming majority of black Americans want nothing to do with - well that gets aggregated under blackness too. And there's the problem. Ultimately the answer is in copspeak: "Sir, I'm going to ask you to put your hands where I can see them and step away from the blackness."
The great irony in this is that blackness hasn't expanded. It has been a monumental failure in its Pan Africanist dreams. African immigrants to America don't want to have anything to do with that thing that blackness and black culture has become. And black Americans want little to do with Africans. They are as alien and strange to black Americans as the Hmong. The reason is because the political and historical narrative of blackness is a case of arrested development. It may go back scores of years to Harriet Tubman but it always ends up at Malcolm and Martin, Jesse, Rev Al and now Barack Obama. The 'African' part is a slave castle or two, some Kemetic glory thrown in, and Nelson Mandela for good measure. But it has very little to do with Africa itself and so black Americans are confounded (and probably should be embarrassed) by their own Afrocentric view of Africa which is as deeply tied to their own racial and political dreams as that of the average European. I mean who really knows what Nigerians think of Nigerians? And what language do they speak, that is besides spam? And really, did even Kwame Ture, nee Stokely Carmichael imagine in his wildest black American dreams that we would be meeting so many Nigerians through electronic means and dumping their entreaties into the trash? No we had no idea where blackness would go, but it didn't go very far, certainly not to Africa, nor even much into the Caribbean.
How can I say it clearly enough? Blackness is a navel-gazing dead end. Except for political historians and scholars like my good friend Dr. Spence. But then you have to ask why such a sensible and well-educated gentleman such as Spence has to sit with a clown like Jon Stewart. Well, I know the reason and it's simple. No black American TV producers. That lack could be a problem, but then that depends entirely on whether or not they point their cameras on that same old barrel.
Hmm. Let me qualify my dead-end statement, because that's only true from the perspective of advancement. You see, way back in the early 80s Melle Mel coined the hiphop phrase "..and everyone knows what you've been through.." Opposing that POV is the other chestnut '..and half that story's never been told..". Well it's been 20 years of hiphop and as a retired amateur scholar, I'd say the story's been told and Melle Mel was right even back then. If it wasn't the story of ghetto oppression, nobody would care to evoke the legacy of slavery and all that (narrow) history of the Western World vs the Negro. We know it. The only people who don't are the raggamuffin youth, who are always being born in the same places under roughly the same conditions, but still by and large with every expectation of running water, electricity and free healthcare, if not healthcare insurance for luxury healthcare. Please somebody show me where black Americans are being born at home in the ghetto and not in hospitals. Inquiring minds want to know.
My point here is that the barrel life is, as any multiculturalist will tell you, full of dignity and respect and worthy of not calling insulting names like 'peasant', the word I use around here all the time. But it's the same life of minds and spirits terribly wasted in the greatest nation on the planet. It's about being a peasant in the land of plenty - about seeing the rich and knowing less and less about how they operate, yet having the spleen and gumption to say 'fuck the police' and various other off-putting mannerisms that disrespect and take no criticism from the great American melting pot. My blackness don't take shit from nobody. Integration? You mean conformity? You mean name my kids John and Mary? You mean drive a Camry? You mean wear clothes from JC Penney's? I didn't think so.
I come across all of this thinking about something my 75 year old uncle sent me this morning. You know, off the Kwaku Network. It's an 18 minute video embedded into the video transcript of a city council meeting in Alabama. It is the heartfelt lament of people who watch 'blackness' get pwned by dark forces. And there's probably no better way of expressing this lament for those attuned to the old black narrative. The director of the video is captivated by the imperatives of the Talented Tenth, which are the good crabs at the top of the barrel extending claws down to lift the suffering up and out. Me, I've dislocated a shoulder or two in that exercise so now I only send words. Like these. In all directions at once, and not particularly at the transparent barrel, but today maybe - depends. Still I am struck by how quickly one becomes invisible when you don't try to aggregate the long tail of blackness - when you don't invoke the metaphors of black legend, suddenly you disappear. You are off the radar. When you don't invoke the spirits, the same old narrative, you become like I was yesterday. Incoherent.
I don't have anything to say about what blackness is, except the above. I have found no new orthodoxy but the old lament. "Look what you have become. Do better!" And I know the frustration of expecting a prescription and hearing none, all the while loathing the idea of wearing chinos instead of kente. If you are black and your world is black and white, why would you ever be white? Even when you know how ugly black can be? That's where I think several millions might be. In between worlds without enough confidence or FU money to experiment.
The video is just another 'Scared Straight'. And I knew in my young life that it didn't apply, but I didn't know how to critique the best black had to offer without seeming ungrateful. I had to confront the end of my blackness. And time after time I did, and I came back from invisibility to try and be another angelic crab at the top of the barrel. It's because I could think of no greater moral purpose in the world, and that lack of imagination was the manifestation of the sin of pride. Black pride to be sure. Because if you look at your own suffering and link it to the suffering of a race, then your race becomes the most long suffering and most deserving. In black America it's done with slavery and institutional racism and a host of other long tailed dysfunctions like 1 2 3. And they add up. And that aggregate blackness obscures the good stuff and everything else. Everything else on the planet.
This is the new black handicap. Exposure. We can all generate all that content we've been dying to spew since the days of black and white television. Output, output, output, a long tail of blackified trivialities that all add up, as long as they stay black. And we can sell them to ourselves. We meaning America. It's an old skin game people of all skins have had skin in.
I consider myself much more a part of my family than I do of blackness. I want to be a good Christian an order of magnitude more than I want to reperesent black America. That is not for a lack of trying, but from a final realization that it is impossible to be responsible to a segment of humanity such as black America, an America out of step with any orthodoxy but the stale, contradictory and marginal edicts of blackness. But I cannot change what my focus has made me along the way, which is partly a slave to the imperative of the Talented Tenth. If I were to ever write the book I've been promising everyone it would be about my escape from the imperative of a movement that lost its moral momentum. I hear echoes of the call every day.
I leave you with this. An old story capturing a slice of life that was once pretty much everything in my life. Spike never answered the questions. They had only individual answers. At the end of School Daze the last word was Wake Up. Maybe you've been living in a Dream.
A thoughtful reader sent along a Progressive view. I respond interactively. His piece is indented, my responses are in italics. My bottom line is this:
Whatever happens in Washington after the machinations, rich people like
Michael Jackson will try to buy doctors to help them live against
impossible odds, and they will die. Poor people will try to afford
doctors to help them live against impossible odds, and they will die.
And everybody that lives will take life for granted and try to tell the
sick to live like the well, and Death will not be impressed at all.
Makes sense, but the left (correctly I believe) is getting
suspicious of the gov supplements to lower HC costs for the poor. They
will amount, in the end, to cash payments to those who are driving costs up in
the first place, namely the health insurers and drug companies, in exchange for
promises to provide “savings” based on their own estimates of what
the costs would normally be.
This reminds me of saving the banking industry, driven over
a cliff by greed, by giving them cash on the hope that they will perform so
well and responsibly that they will pay the money back with a profit. That
was followed by an urgent need to reign in executive compensation in light of
the awful political realities around bailout cash going to crazy executive bonuses.
And of course we “saved” the auto industry, driven over a cliff by
incompetent leadership (whoever signed off on job banks was an idiot), by
giving that same leadership tons of money on the hope that they will perform so
well and make such great decisions that they will pay the money back. Gm
responded by shedding 4 brands (including some profitable ones), and then “reducing”
their number of models from 48 to 34. And of course Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, whose function in the economy was risk management, failed to see
the concentration of risks around mortgage backed securities and associated
derivatives, and required a government bailout that is counting on them to make
enough great decisions to turn the housing market around so we can get the
money back. So far, no good.
This is called throwing good
money after bad. But it is the inevitable consequence of industrial
policy. Once you decide to bailout an industry, you bail it out
unselectively. You cannot enforce any law or priority that will ever be
more thorough, exacting and fair than the law of supply and demand. You
merely stimulate artificial supply or artificial demand, then sit back
and admire your ability to juice the system. It doesn't change the
people involved - it doesn't make them better businessmen, it only
proves that they respond to incentives. In other words, you substitute
one sort of greed for another. And in this case it is the greed for
money provided by politics instead of the money provided by private
enterprise. It's Obama money and those that get, get.
What is troubling about all of this, when looked at in
aggregate, is that it smacks of Reaganism. I hated Ronald Reagan.
Sure, he offered some entertainment value, but I thought his ideas were
whack. He delivered them so well, that he emboldened an army of whack
thinkers who still threaten our political stability with their stubborn refusal
to use reason to navigate our way through tough issues. It is very hard
for Sarah Palin to use reason. Sarah Palin is, by choice, unreasonable.
Faced with a series of nation-threatening scenarios, her and her band of angry Appalachian
dwellers have united with Rush Limbaugh to fight for the right to do
nothing. As much as I hate Ronald Reagan, at least he had the decency to
surround himself with smart people. Jim Baker earned my respect, as did
Frank Carlucci and a number of other Reaganites. But his ideological
legacy is Sarah Palin, and that alone is grounds for an ass whoopin. His
political/economic legacy is the trickledown theory. And that is what we
are practicing right now, in spades.
Sarah Palin is what people used
to call a useful idiot, but more importantly, she is the most
successful ruse imaginable. Palin doesn't have to lead, just like Jesse
Jackson and Al Sharpton don't have to lead. She merely needs to keep
all eyez on her and speak an occasional obvious truth. Nobody who
discusses Sarah Palin is serious. Nobody.
I don’t think progressives sit around dreaming of ever
increasing government influence over the economy and our lives. Shoot, we
pay taxes too. It was the actions of George Bush (Ronald Reagan with no vision,
no charisma and a much tougher opponent than Grenada or Daniel Ortega), that
lead directly to where we are now, with no choice but government intervention
on a major scale. Progressives do dream of better living conditions for
everyone. We do sit around and dream of reducing the disparities between
the rich and the poor, not by necessarily bringing down rich folks, but rather
bringing up poor ones. We recognize that we need a bit more of rich folks
money to do so. But up until recently, we tried to find ways to directly
impact the communities that were suffering. Those days appear to be over.
Progressive dreams are dreams
deferred. There is a reason for that, which is that they defy the order
of things for the conceit of any temporary ability to make the weak
strong, the poor rich, the foolish wise, the uneducated brilliant, the
common extraordinary. Progressives revel in achieving social
inversions, to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted,
and they do so from a perverted sense of obligation to achieve through
politics what their souls are too thin and selfish to accomplish
through Christian charity. It is not enough for the Progressive to take
his own money to feed the hungry, he must take mine too, and it is only
through this sort of unity that the Progressive achieves satisfaction.
This is why Progressives are never silent and have nothing to be proud
of. Their struggle is endless. It is the struggle to politically
steamroll everyone into their perverse universe where the poor are
always noble and deserving and the rich are always suspect and
corrupted. I for one hope that Progressive dreams shrivel up like a
raisin in the sun. Progressives always hope that it explodes.
One of the most successful government programs is Medicare,
which directly impacts the lives of poor people. One of the least
successful was welfare, which was implemented wrongly and then decimated too
suddenly. The democratic party seems so shaken by the reality of the
failure of welfare, that we have caved in to Reagan’s point of view.
Indeed, Obama the candidate upset the party with some almost nostalgic references
to Reagan’s impact. Perhaps that explains why every major
solution to date has smacked of trickledownism. While the administration
is trumpeting the success of the stimulus plan (which admittedly included a few
bucks directly to citizens), unemployment continues to increase right alongside
corporate profits. The tax rebates are spent, the cash for clunkers
program (a whopping $2.4 billion…less than 1% of what we gave to B of A)
is over, foreclosures are still skyrocketing, yet we still have billions set
aside in case any other executives fall upon hard times.
Medicare will not defeat death. Every major solution must smack of trickledownism because that is the nature of hubris. Those
that seek to achieve the impossible are always selling their plans to
people dumb enough to believe. There are no solutions to be had from
the top down. There is only what you do from the bottom up. The very act of asking for a solution makes you a sucker.
With that as a backdrop, we are engaged in a bitter struggle
over absolutely necessary health care reform, and progressives are being asked
to give up on a government run alternative to the ridiculously expensive
private solutions. The reason the status quo fears a government run health
care alternative is that it will most certainly lower costs (and profits) by its
very existence. Managed Health Care is a commodity now. There are
no more important innovations outside of electronic records (drug, equipment,
and treatment innovations are being developed in academia and in laboratories,
not corporate suites). You don’t need armies of overpriced
executives to make awesome business decisions on how to give Johnny an immunity
booster. Managed Health Care executives are spending all of their time
trying to figure out how to increase the size of their yachts. Trust me,
I know a few of these people. They are mostly older men with a penchant
for good drink. They don’t deserve to profit so handsomely from the
suffering of poor and middle class folks (the rich don’t need health
insurance, they pay directly). A government run option is the best way to
fundamentally rein in costs, which is the most important component that needs
to be reformed. Trickle down won’t work in this instance. All
these other gimmicks, which fill a few thousand pages of dense legislation,
amount to compromises that progressives are not impressed by.
Don't take Viagra. Don't buy
Anacin. Deal with your headache. Study anatomy. Birth your baby at
home. Whose fault is it that people who own human bodies understand
more about how their cars and their iPods work than how their knees and
their lungs work? You don't have a right to be stupid about your body.
But just like crime funds a prison industrial complex, such stupidity
funds a hospital industrial complex. What else could you possibly
expect from the clever people who spend maybe five more years in their
lives studying the human body except for them to exploit the fools who
do not?
I still support Obama. His health care sticker is on
my business website because he asked me to put it there. I cringe at the
thought of a McCain/Palin administration. But I hate the compromises Obama
is making. I am beginning to wonder if it even makes sense to reach
across the aisle when you know that the folks on the other side enjoy playing
with venomous snakes. I am beginning to think that a strident,
ideological left is just what the doctor ordered in these crazy times. If
you like Reagan’s impact, don’t copy his whack ideas, copy his
swagger, his command of the stage, his conviction. It will get the
drama-addicted media back on our side, and with that, who knows what we can
do. Right now, we look like suckers.
Washington is the wrong direction
to look. So long as your orientation is "I need Washington to do X for
me to lead a happy life", then all you'll ever do is compete with
people who want Y, and Z, and R, and D, and Q, and P. In the end you'll
only get F'd.
To reach the Western Lands is to achieve freedom from fear. Do you free yourself from fear by cowering in your physical body for eternity? Your body is a boat to lay aside when you reach the far shore, or sell it if you can find a fool... it's full of holes...it's full of holes.
-- William Seward Burroughs
Only Democrats want to live, right? No wait. I think I got that backwards. Only Republicans want to live. It's the other guys who want to die, right? You would come to understand this logic if you follow the political rhetoric surrounding the phrase 'death panels'. The bad guys want to empower people who are going to kill us all. Yeah, that's it.
As Americans, we all deserve to live. In fact, according to the polls, we deserve to live longer than anybody else on the planet. And when we die, even when we get sick and suffer discomfort and pain, it's a crime. We should never have war. We should never have famine. We should never have poverty. We should never have side impact collisions in our automobiles. We should never have high cholesterol and sodium in our foods. We should never have water that tastes funny. We should never have air that isn't crystal clear.
We should have fighters. Fighters who fight the good fight. A fight worth fighting for against the evils and perils and problems and difficulties and all that. Freedom fighters! Fight malnutrition. Fight fires. Fight pollution. Fight childhood obesity. Fight racism, communism, cynicism, cronyism, aneurysm, cataclysm, hypnotism, despotism and schism. All the evil, all the bad. We can see it, categorize it, raise awareness about it, and with the right amount of political courage we can destroy it. It is our right. It is our responsibility. It is our duty.
Are you part of the solution or are you part of the problem?
Well, I'd say that the solution is part of the problem. Because there is no solution, and the sooner off we recognize that there is no solution, the better off we are dealing with the real problem - which is the idea that we live in a world where eventually things can be fixed. Eventually things cannot be fixed. Eventually things are in the hands of God, and that especially counts when you don't believe in God.
There's a Christian slogan that I don't believe. It says "All things work together for good for them who love the Lord." It is a sunny interpretation of fate that puts a smiley face on the capriciousness of everyday life and everyday death. Let me remind you of something real. Death hurts. Pain and suffering are real. They are the worse things we experience and there is no way around them. They are our destiny and they spell doom to our ambitious plans to thwart them.
We Americans have decided not to raise the level of debate, but the amount of volume. And we are all on the wrong side because we keep giving the other side responsibility for death. What hubris. Nobody is in control of death's hand, nor suffering's ambit. So in all of the efforts to fight death we are forgetting that these are all failures. Death will not be conquered. And I feel like what an idiot you must be for me to have to remind you.
The only thing we can rightfully do is celebrate life for the fleeting thing that it is. Right here. Right now. In the moment.
He and other Catholic politicians made America dizzy with the oddball
notion that one could be “personally opposed” to abortion but too
broad-minded to “impose my views on others.” That sounded so
reasonable and tolerant that it simplified the abortion debate for
people who did not care to consider how nonsensical it was. Being
“personally opposed” to the death penalty, would Kennedy have tried not
to “impose those views” on states, had he the chance? Had he been
“personally opposed” to slavery 150 years ago, would he not certainly have tried to “impose” his views on others?
Part of the difficulty of dealing with death, and I suppose this applies particularly to Americans, is that if you haven't faced your own mortality you might come away less inclined to live. As I write this, I cannot remember the last moment I felt as if I should discipline myself to perfection. To discipline oneself to perfection is the proper attitude to life because there is such joy and inspiration in being a vessel of the perfection that is available to us. It is to submit to the highest will and thus gain orientation over one's own life and destiny. But I happened upon a biography on PBS this evening on Karajan, and it is music that is bringing me over to that kind of appreciation I once had for my own perfection.
Small perfections.
That was how I used to run my life. And I think of the short years after having read Ayn Rand and a moment in time when I was watching Jeopardy and calculating my own score as a fourth player while adjusting the others down and distinguishing Monk songs in my head, broiling New York strips and reading Moliere and falling asleep to CBS Mystery Radio. lt was the start of a new life for me in 1987, but I'd have to check my diary to be precise. I was looking to perfect myself because the order of things became apparent - I realized that I had wasted time trying to help others to do things that cannot be helped.
And I'm rather there again, because I've been saying "It's not about me", for several years.
The phrase in my head was "Civilization is where you put it." And for a young man with a vision of the digital future and quite enough nerve to assume a role in its creation, I was putting myself always up to the task. I discounted my surroundings and dedicated myself, and I was called arrogant and I liked being called arrogant. I only wanted to be clear-eyed and unafraid.
Karajan reminds me of what it must be like to be that vessel. To have such dedication to clear one's mind of clutter and to master, over all things to attain mastery and reach the point at which the answer is clear. He memorized concertos and operas and symphonies. He exerted his will to create. He dominated in order to perfect, to create a powerful harmony, to achieve an excellence. His is an expression of will I've not perceived since my appreciation of Yukio Mishima. It was Mishima who set me free to perfect in those mid 80s.
How one lives a life of compromise is a matter of inattention. It is by not having a vision that demands your perfection that you slip, human-like into your own smell. If you stay in bed long enough, you breathe less oxygen.
Life is too long, and it is too short, not to believe in self-perfection. We are fortunate that in youth it is done for us by the simplest unsullied application to our pure and genuine ambitions. But as life becomes long and we forget it becomes longer still to reapply without world-weary cynicism. That is why there is great God-given asymmetry in the ability to perceive and to produce. For all of Karajan's great dedication and perfection to his craft it only takes us an hour to hear and appreciate. For all many years of practice and discipline any man exerts, we have only to recognize it to be made rightly inspired. And greatest yet we have only to have faith in God to build a religious perfection in ourselves. To do otherwise is to self-destruct.
I am realizing the necessity of my discipline and my aim towards perfection. From God through Beethoven through Karajan to me.
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