I'm with my ultra-liberal cousin's house and he points me to a book he's reading by Nell Painter. I told him I don't read those kinds of books any longer. I noticed that there's also a book by Sherman Alexie lying around. Yike.
This morning it occurs to me that American peasants who aim to gain some sense of integrity with their passion are wasting a great deal of time and energy studying the liberal arts. If you craft arguments and rearrange your brain to engage politically, sooner or later you're going to be disappointed by the powerful enemy who dismisses all of your thought processes. There is always eternal frustration at the end of the rainbow because you'll never get the document declassified until it's too late. In other words, Truth, although it serves no man, will not be discovered in time. Whether it's the truth about where Obama was born or what burned down the WTC or how many American troops are actually still in Saudi Arabia or if Sarah Palin's baby is really her own. Whatever you're trying to find out to make your political position reality based is always seven steps behind the attention span of the masses. And the people with power have already thrown the lever and moved ahead.
In memory are the coffeeshops of Boston back when Starbucks was fledgling and the eternal grad students with their shabby clothes and 8 1/2 x 11 inch flyers and dynamic inquisitional fury would attempt to decrypt the inner workings of the powers that be. The bohemian grrrls and the bluesy romantics and the prophets of rage - they all refused the conformity of getting over in America. There was a truer way to live. Except they didn't care about math or science or technology or chemistry or physics or biology. Well, maybe the biology of whatever species was on the post office wall whose continued protection could thwart any multi-million dollar anything. But lab work? Yeah right.
Obviously because of the sort of peasant I am, I'm working back the other way. I start with the conformity of math & science, of logic through computing and set my life's boots in that concrete setting. Then I try to walk my way back through the gardens of the arts and politics. I'm hobbled of course, having decided against hobbit feet. But I made that choice and am happy with it. And I have the satisfaction of the ability to know that eggs is eggs and all the microchips on the planet work on principles I understand. The magic at the end of the rainbow is stuff I could construct myself because the principles don't change because of political powers. When the powers throw the lever, it's all 110 volts, just like I need. I can load the software, I can check the source code or SHA256 the binaries.
My ultra liberal cousin has some of the same kind of liberties. He's a trauma surgeon. And it probably never gets old for him to open somebody up and see the liver is on the predictable side and that the heartbeat means X and always X. There must be equivalent satisfaction in his life to find a good trachea tube as I find in a good text editor.
People make the world go 'round not so much by what they think but by what they do. There doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to not have natural reality informing what you do - well, the shortcut is not ultimately profitable.
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