No, Rousseau, No

By in environment, nietzsche No Comments

A friend loaned me the movie Into the Wild recently. I found it to be trite, typical romanticist nature worship, with a thoroughly unlikable protagonist – a spoiled college kid who thinks his parents are just, like, so shallow and materialistic, man, so he runs off on a two-year journey to the Alaskan wilderness where he starves to death, but not before arriving at the stunning conclusion that there’s nothing particularly moral or impressive about living a narcissistic life removed from all human contact. Most of us manage to figure that out without leaving our family to agonize for years over our well-being, until they finally get news of the discovery of our corpse, but apparently I was supposed to be impressed by his determination to find authenticity. I was more struck by the way he didn’t bother to tell his younger, adoring sister goodbye, nor contact her during his absence. In fact, several wiser people throughout the film attempt to make themselves available to him, but his head is too full of idealistic clichés (and too far up his own ass) to take notice.

In light of the fact that the above review is so inexplicably positive, I thought I’d dig up one written more than a hundred years before McCandless ever picked up a Jack London novel, but which nonetheless is far more penetrating:

You want to live “according to nature”? Oh you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purpose and consideration, without mercy and fairness, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power—how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom as much as “live according to life”—how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?— In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose and incorporate your morality, your ideal onto nature, even onto nature, you demand that it be nature “according to the Stoa,” and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image—as an immense eternal glorification and universalization of Stoicism!

The Very Base String of Humility

By in music, the big sleep No Comments

Today marks the day that I am the exact same age that Mozart was when he died.

So, I have until tonight to write 41 symphonies and a few hundred sonatas, concertos, operas, arias and overtures, or I have to conclude that my life has been a wretched failure.

The Old Man Died

By in george carlin, the big sleep No Comments

 

Spirituality: the last refuge of a failed human. Just another way of distracting yourself from who you really are.

After the death of some person (even many years after) you will often hear someone refer to the deceased by saying, “I get the feeling he’s up there now, smiling down on us. And I think he’s pleased.” First of all, it’s extremely doubtful that there’s any “up there” to smile down from. It’s poetic, and I guess it’s comforting. But it probably doesn’t exist. Besides, if a person did somehow survive death in a non-physical form, he would be far too busy with other things to be smiling down on people. And why is it we never hear that someone is “smiling up at us.” I suppose it doesn’t occur to people that a loved one might be in hell. And in that case the person in question probably wouldn’t be smiling. More likely, he’d be screaming. “I get the feeling he’s down there now, screaming up at us. And I think he’s in pain.” People just refuse to be realistic.

Road rage, air rage. Why should I be forced to divide my rage into separate categories? To me, it’s just one big, all-around everyday rage. I don’t have time for fine distinctions. I’m busy screaming at people.

Beethoven was a pupil of Haydn, and Schubert lived near the two of them. Supposedly they all frequented the same little cafés. I wonder if they ever got together and gang-banged a lady piano player. Just a thought.

I wonder if a classical music composer ever intentionally composed a piano piece that was physically impossible to play and then stuck it away in a trunk to be found years after his death, knowing it would forever drive perfectionist musicians crazy.

As far as I’m concerned, humans have not yet come up with a belief that’s worth believing.

Suppose you took an oath by placing your right hand on the Bible and raising your left? Would the oath still count? Does God really give a shit? Does anyone?

Middlebrow bumper sticker in California: IF YOU CAN DREAM IT, YOU CAN DO IT. Yeah, sure. Unless the thing you’re dreaming is impossible. Then, chances are, you can’t do it. But try to enjoy life anyway.

One objection to cloning human beings is that there’s a chance for abnormal offspring. Yeah? So? You ever take a look at some of those families in the South?

You see it on packages in the supermarket: homemade flavor. Folks, take my word for this, a food company operating out of a ninety-acre processing plant is functionally incapable of producing anything homemade. I don’t care if the CEO is living in the basement, wearing an apron and cooking on a hot plate. It’s not gonna happen. Same with restaurants. Homemade soup. Once again, it doesn’t matter how much the four-foot, amphetamine-laced waitress with the bright orange hair smoking the three Marlboros reminds you of your dear old mother, the soup is not homemade. Unless the chef and his family are sleeping in the kitchen. And if that’s the case, I’m not hungry. Sometimes the advertising people realize that homemade sounds too full of shit, so they switch to home-style. They’ll say something has home-style flavor. Well, whose home are we talking about? Jeffrey Dahmer’s? Believe me, folks, there’s nothing home-style about the boiled head of a Cambodian teenager. Even if you sprinkle parsley on the hair and serve it with oven-roasted potatoes.

I don’t understand why prostitution is illegal. Selling is legal, fucking is legal. So why isn’t it legal to sell fucking? Why should it be illegal to sell something that it’s legal to give away? I can’t follow the logic. Of all the things you can do to a person, giving them an orgasm is hardly the worst. In the army, they give you a medal for killing people; in civilian life, you go to jail for giving them orgasms. Am I missing something?

Michael Jackson missed his calling. If he had become a Catholic priest, he could have spent thirty or forty years blowing all the little boys he wanted, and no one would have said a word.

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other going in opposite directions.

What is all this nonsense about angels? Do you realize three out of four Americans now believe in angels? What are they, fuckin’ stupid? Has everybody lost their goddamn minds? Angels, my ass! You know what I think it is? I think it’s a massive, collective chemical flashback from all the drugs smoked, swallowed, snorted and shot up by all Americans from 1960 to 2000. Forty years of unadulterated street drugs will get you some fuckin’ angels, my friend! Angels, shit. What about goblins? Doesn’t anybody believe in goblins? And zombies, where the fuck are all the zombies? I say if you’re gonna buy that angel bullshit, you might as well go for the goblin/zombie package as well.

Americans are fucked. They’ve been bought off. And they came real cheap: a few million dirt bikes, camcorders, microwaves, cordless phones, digital watches, answering machines, jet skis, and sneakers with lights in them. You say you want a few items back from the Bill of Rights? Just promise the doofuses new gizmos.

I keep hearing that America lost its innocence on 9/11. I thought that happened when JFK was shot. Or was it Vietnam? Pearl Harbor? How many times can America lose its innocence? Maybe we keep finding it again. Doubtful. Because, actually, if you look at the record, you’ll find that America has had very little innocence from the beginning.

What’s all this stuff about motivation? If you ask me, this country could do with a little less motivation. The people who are causing all the trouble seem highly motivated to me. Serial killers, stock swindlers, drug dealers, Christian Republicans. I’m not sure motivation is always a good thing. You show me a lazy prick who’s lying in bed all day, watching TV, only occasionally getting up to piss, and I’ll show you a guy who’s not causing any trouble.

Here’s a thought: If you have a perfectly DNA-matched identical twin, technically, it’s possible to go fuck yourself.

The male disease includes the need to be in charge at all times. In charge, in control, in command. A “real man” sees himself as king of the hill, leader of the pack, captain of the ship. But all the while, in order to fit in and belong, he has to act like all the other men and do what they do, so he’ll be accepted. And get a good job and a promotion and a raise and a Porsche, and a wife. A wife who will immediately trade in the Porsche on a nice, sensible Dodge van with folding seats so they can be like all the other boring families. The poor fuck. The poor stupid fuck…So, little boys learn to hide their feelings, and society likes that because, that way, when they get to be eighteen, they’ll be able to go overseas and kill strangers without feeling anything. And, of course, the bargain includes a certain reluctant willingness to have their balls shot off: “Honey, I have to go overseas and have my balls shot off, or else the rest of the guys will think I’m too afraid to go overseas and have my balls shot off.” The poor fucks. The poor stupid fucks.

Art, music, and philosophy are merely poignant examples of what we might have been had not the priests and traders gotten hold of us.

The keys to America: the cross, the brew, the dollar, and the gun.

Conservatives say that if you don’t give the rich more money, they’ll lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.

Let’s start with faith-based, which was chosen by right-wing holy people to replace the word religious in political contexts. In other words, they’ve conceded that religion has a bad name. I guess they figured people worry about religious fanatics, but no one’s ever heard of a faith-based fanatic. And by the way, none of the Bush religious fanatics will admit this, but the destruction of the World Trade Center was a faith-based initiative. A fundamentalist-Muslim, faith based initiative. Different faith, but hey, we’re all about diversity here.

With all this natural selection going on, why doesn’t the human race get any smarter? Is this it? Why are there still so many stupid people? Apparently, being a real dumb jackoff has some survival value.

Another empty sentiment concerning the death of people; you hear it on the news, and you hear it in real life: “Our thoughts are with the family.” What exactly does that mean? Sympathies I can understand; prayers, as ineffective as they are, I can understand. But thoughts? Why thoughts? What kind of thoughts? Just thoughts? Like, “Gee, he’s dead”? How does that help?

After every horror, we’re told, “Now the healing can begin.” No. There is no healing. Just a short pause before the next horror.

In years past, it went like this: “The old man died, so the undertaker picked up the body, brought it to the funeral home and put it in a casket. People sent flowers and held a wake. After the funeral, they put the coffin in a hearse and drove it to the cemetery where the dead man was buried in a grave.” But in these days of heightened sensitivity, the same series of events produces what sounds like a completely different experience: “The senior citizen passed away, so the funeral director claimed the remains of the decedent, took them to the memorial chapel and placed them in a burial container. Grieving survivors sent floral tributes to be displayed in the slumber room, where the grief coordinator conducted the viewing. Following the memorial service, the funeral coach transported the departed to the garden of remembrance where his human remains were interred in their final resting place.” Huh? What’s that? Did someone die or something?

Thank you, George. I’ll miss you.

Christ the Vampire

By in books, religion No Comments

Anne Rice:

“In 2002 I made up my mind that I would not write anything that wasn’t for Christ,” the former vampire queen explained. The title of her latest novel stakes out Rice’s new preoccupation. “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt” tells the story of a young Jesus from his point of view: a 7-year-old boy who is discovering his powers and his identity.

…Rice immersed herself in Christian scholarship, and her book draws heavily from many sources, from Josephus to N.T. Wright. But she discards much of modern New Testament scholarship, as she explains in the author’s note. Her contempt for what she calls “skeptical scholarship”–including “arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts”–is obvious throughout the note.

…The story of Jesus that she constructs includes some legends about miracles the boy performed. But she makes her tale consistent with the Gospel of Luke, forming an elaborate and imaginative addition based on a few lines describing Jesus’ childhood. “I took my cue from Luke,” she says. “I saw a great framework there.”

…”I offer this book to those who know nothing of Jesus Christ in the hope that you will see him in these pages in some form. I offer this novel with love to my readers who’ve followed me through one strange turn after another in the hope that Jesus will be as real to you as any other character I’ve ever launched into the world we share.”

Rice’s future “strange turns” are likely to continue to be inspired by Jesus. “My life is committed to Christ the Lord,” she said. “My books will be a reflection of that commitment.”

I don’t see why she couldn’t find a way to combine the two as J.G. Eccarius has done.

Lost Causes

By in ohferfucksake, old dixie No Comments

I saw a guy wearing this t-shirt this morning. Is there any cause that can’t be spun as being a fight for “freedom”?

Anyway, I think I should have one of my own made. It’ll say, “Jesus, The South, and Your Limp Dick — Three Things Guaranteed to Never Rise Again.”

Karma Curmudgeon

By in atheism, extraordinary popular delusions, religion No Comments

References to “karma” have pervaded popular culture for some time, and with many in the liberal blogosphere enjoying the fruits of epicaricacy as a result of Bush administration scandals coming to light, the k-word is getting thrown around quite a bit, and I’m afraid it’s unleashed my inner pedant. There are various ways to interpret the word, but I see a few common themes that come up repeatedly in popular usage, so those are what I’ll free-associate about here.

A simple-but-obvious thought: Couldn’t “karma” be used interchangeably with “law of averages” or “God’s wrath”? If you’re the kind of person who would feel ridiculous about invoking God’s wrath to explain Tom DeLay’s troubles, why do you feel any better about invoking karma?

“What goes around comes around.” Apparently, to many, this is profound. Actually, it’s a sequacious truism. Simply by existing, you will have a variety of experiences, some pleasant, some not. One is limited only by imagination in drawing causal lines of connection between events separated by space and time. How can this be disproved? Two events may have nothing in common other than sharing a vague, tendentious description of being “good” or “bad”, yet one is smugly assumed to have resulted from the other with the intent of evening out some cosmic ledger or imparting a lesson.

If I spit in someone’s face and they punch me, no one would call this “karma”. It seems to be a simple example of cause and effect. It’s only when there is no intuitive link between two actions or events, or a significant stretch of time between them, that this idea comes into play. If I find a wallet loaded with cash, and decide to keep it for myself instead of looking up the owner’s phone number and returning it, an observer would call it karmic justice if I were to lose my wallet some day, or if any other kind of financial misfortune occurred.

The truly dedicated can find proof in any sort of misfortune, of course – one person tried to chalk up a rough day I once had, involving car trouble, to the fact that I was often aloof and unfriendly to him. (Guilty as charged; he was an obnoxious fucker.) The same old anthropomorphic pettiness usually ascribed to an irascible deity is in this case applied to the universe as a whole. Ironic, considering that many people who would reference karma would most likely hate to be thought of as belonging to “organized religion”. God (or the universe) apparently takes offense at slights and arranges for certain situations to arise as punishment later, which may or may not effect any changes in the person’s personality or attitude (that part seems to be left unexplained). How does an impersonal universe feel a sense of moral outrage at injustice and move to react to it?

The unexamined facile definitions of “good” and “bad” really get to me. How can we measure the inherent or total value of an event or action? Where does the ripple effect from an action ever end? Also, there’s a facile assumption of being able to quantify what an action means to everyone involved. How can happiness and pain be measured in the same way as a financial transaction? By what standard can you assert that two separate events are somehow equivalent? Is there some sort of metaphysical currency that serves to measure their value, thus giving us some idea of how to judge the appropriate reaction to a particular action? (“karmic units”, or “KU”, perhaps?)

And the narcissism; oh, how it galls me. In order to believe that the world is constantly rearranged in response to your actions, what does this imply as far as other people’s agency? Are they simply unaware instruments of karmic retribution? Are they held responsible for actions that they undertake in the course of bringing about your comeuppance? And how do you know that decisions you make under the guise of free will aren’t simply part of the whole plan as it relates to someone else’s karma? Are you really so sure that you aren’t just a supporting actor in someone else’s drama?

Let’s consider Stalin as an example – how does karma fit with his life? Must he be reincarnated and brutally murdered millions of times to pay off his karmic debt? Or does he just have to live one life of unrelenting, utter misery? (I’m granting the dubious assumption of reincarnation here, because I don’t think even the most gifted sophist will be able to convince anyone that Stalin dying in bed as an old man was somehow fair.) Or, on a more sinister note: was he just a convenient way to quickly pay off millions of other people’s karmic debt?

All this relies on the ancient dichotomy between free will and determinism, which I mercifully won’t bother with here. I will mention what seems obvious to me, though: our ability to conceptualize and use symbolic representation developed slowly over the course of our evolutionary history. There never was a clear point in time where we were either “completely” self-aware and self-conscious (the way we think of ourselves now), or completely controlled by outside forces, which would seem to throw a huge monkeywrench into the whole scheme.

Personally, I think all this becomes moot when thinkers and authors like these pull the rug out from underneath the whole idea: there is no permanent, abiding essence or identity to attach this kind of responsibility to in the first place.

Sociopathic Design

By in religion No Comments

So, I’m slogging through yet another “scientist said/creationist said” article on the upcoming court battles over trying to sneak creationism into schools via the Trojan horse of Intelligent Design, feeling depressed over the absurdity of it all, when a possible compromise occurs to me.

It seems clear that the creationists have set up a false dilemma here, trying to make it seem that finding any fault with evolutionary theory somehow makes their ancient mythology more respectable by default. What’s more, it’s clear that the figure of a loving, personal father-figure God is the keystone of this particular myth. If it weren’t for the tantalizing idea of a happy afterlife with this loving God, no one would be clinging so desperately to it to begin with (and it’s interesting to note that this particular vision of an afterlife is nowhere near universal).

But why does the Intelligent Designer have to fit this mold? What reason is there (I know, I know, if reason had anything to do with any of this, we wouldn’t be having this discussion) to assume that any deity with the ability to create a universe has to fit our limited conception of “good” or “pleasant”?

If we’re going to insist on anthropomorphizing this hypothetical Designer, what if we secularists postulate in response that He/She/It is more like, say, a mathematical genius in terms of intellect, but cold, aloof and distant emotionally? Like a John Nash, or worse, a Ted Kaczynski? All the brains but no conscience — why is that any less valid of an archetype to build a God around? Think of all the time formerly devoted to discussions of theodicy that this view would save!

There’s no science involved in this case, so they couldn’t use a perverted version of it to obfuscate their aims. I just think it would be refreshingly honest (and amusing) to see people fall back on the real reason behind their defense of Bible study-as-science: the inability to emotionally accept such a bleak viewpoint, as if the universe needs their permission to be the way it is.

Art Appreciation

By in art No Comments


I discovered this amazing work of art this morning, just sitting at the end of a rural driveway. Curious place for an exhibit.

Now, you might think, “Oh, come on. It’s an earnest but empty gesture in a culture known for an overabundance of sentimental platitudes, full of kitsch and banality, signifying nothing. It’s a garbage can, ferchristsakes.”

Two words for you, my friend: Ceal Floyer. Go argue with her £30,000 of prize money. At least the work that I stumbled across doesn’t hide behind disingenuous attempts to make superficiality appear as some kind of all-inclusive, everything-at-once deep meaning. No, our anonymous artist has a very sharp point to make. It is meant to draw blood. When that becomes clear to the observer, it is readily understandable why she or he has a desire for anonymity. We do not live in tolerant times.
But enough gloomy history. Let’s focus on the message of this piece and take heart in our artist’s raised fist to an unjust world.

At first, I thought perhaps the artist had been reading Geoffrey Stone’s Perilous Times, and that this work was a skewering of the Patriot Act. We have deliberately trashed our freedom in a moment of panic, in exchange for cheap sparklers and trite clichés on the Fourth of July. Dystopian slogans arose in my head. “Deposit Freedom Here” suggested itself to me. “Freedom is Untidy. Don’t Let Stuff Happen – Keep the Fatherland Clean”. I imagined days of infamy being memorialized in state-sponsored patriotic marches (oh, wait, that actually did happen. Shit.) The straightforward blue plastic background, reminiscent of clear summer skies from my youth, seemed to speak to me of innocence and lack of guile, and the jarring incongruence between that and the sinister malevolence of creeping, star-spangled fascism (represented by the streaks of mud) caused a poignant ache in my heart, a sense of anomie. I thought of the noble, Enlightenment-inspired intentions behind our ideas of free speech and democracy, betrayed by the usual cowardly culprits, fear, greed, and heartlessness, and my blood began to boil.

Then a more ironic interpretation occurred to me. Maybe this artist was making a satirical comment on our gluttonous consumer society, in the tradition of Adbusters. A society that consumes worldly resources far out of proportion to its population. A society where an individual getting their news from cnn.com could see this story and this story less than a year apart. After all, close to 40% of eligible voters didn’t participate in last year’s Presidential elections, one of the most significant events of our time, but we always seem to find time to take in more useless celebrity gossip. Maybe “freedom” means nothing more to the average American than the freedom to buy stuff, which can then be conveniently disposed of once the novelty wears off, never to trouble our beautiful minds again. Stick me behind a barbed-wire enclosure a mile away from where the President is speaking, but you’ll never prevent me from expressing my spirit! Give me liberty or give me ersatz!

And maybe both are correct. Or maybe the point is just to provoke thought in the first place, which in itself is a victory over the forces of reaction. So I salute you, brave artist. Your effort did not go unappreciated.

Fun With Etymology

By in language, sex-you-all No Comments

I recently read a fun book concerning a subject that I’m sure would be extraordinarily popular in high school: the etymological roots of foul language. I’ve long wondered about what seemed to be a too-frequent-to-be-coincidental phenomenon; namely, the fact that many of our most vicious insults are sexual terms. (And I’m still amazed at the apparently unconscious knuckle-dragging attitudes behind ostensible “compliments” like noting an act of courage or integrity by a woman by referring to her having “balls”, as if by her actions, she’s become an honorary guy. Congratulations, toots!) Why the fluid interchangability of love and hate, sex and violence? Is it something peculiar about Americans, with our infamous neurotic attitudes about sex? Well, apparently not:

 

[Fuck’s] most likely etymological roots are in English’s Continental partners – the Latin futuere (or pungere or battuere), the French foutre, the German ficken. All these words follow the pattern of having two contextual meanings: the first, a physically violent one (to beat, bang, hit or strike); the second, to engage in sexual activity…Richard Dooling says that fuck is related to a widespread Germanic form (Middle Dutch fokken, Norwegian fukka, and Swiss focka), all of which have striking, thrusting, pushing-type meanings.

And So It Begins

By in nietzsche No Comments

‘In doing this you will cause pain to many people’ – I know; and I know also that I shall have to suffer twofold for it: once from pity at their suffering, and then through the revenge they will take on me. Nonetheless, it is no less necessary that I should do as I do.

— Nietzsche

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