When Fish Jump Into the Boat

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, media/propaganda No Comments

Some days you write the posts, and other days…well, it’s like Ed McMahon shows up at your door with a big gift-wrapped box with a shiny bow on top. You find a silver platter inside. Upon which sits a post like this, already written and ready to go:

Newly elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele plans an “off the hook” public relations offensive to attract younger voters, especially blacks and Hispanics, by applying the party’s principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”

The RNC’s first black chairman will “surprise everyone” when updating the party’s image using the Internet and advertisements on radio, on television and in print, he told The Washington Times.

Could it be? Will he finally reveal the secret of why he’s never been seen in the same place at the same time as Shock G?


Roi Fainéant

By in crime and punishment, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

 

President Barack Obama gave a cool welcome at his Monday night press conference to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy’s (D-VT) call for a “truth commission” to probe alleged abuses under George W. Bush, offering a fresh signal that the new president may not be interested in investigating President Bush.

An attorney for President Obama’s Department of Justice has told the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that it supports the Bush administration’s controversial state secrets defense in a lawsuit over the prior president’s “extraordinary rendition” program.

Let’s not lose sight of the big picture here, though. As long as Olympic swimmers are punished for smoking pot, and as long as baseball players are pelted with garbage and obscenities for using steroids, God’s in his heaven and all is right with the world.

Yorick’s Skull

By in alan watts, nietzsche, poetry, religion, the big sleep No Comments

That’s the way I like it, baby
I don’t wanna live forever

– Motörhead

I don’t either.

For we are all insulted by
The mere suggestion that we die
Each moment and that each great I
Is but a process in a process
Within a field that never closes;
As proper people find it strange
That we are changed by what we change,
That no event can happen twice
And that no two existences
Can ever be alike; we’d rather
Be perfect copies of our father,
Prefer our idées fixes to be
True of a fixed reality.
No wonder, then, we lose our nerve
And blubber when we should observe…

– W.H. Auden

As was so often the case for me, it was Alan Watts who said it perfectly: there is a world of difference between having all the time you want, and having time without end. It’s easy to imagine lying on your deathbed lamenting the fact that you left too many things unfinished and unattempted, but wouldn’t knowing that you could never die actually be a form of torture? An American Buddhist writer I like a lot, Steve Hagen, used an example of real flowers vs. artificial ones to illustrate how the fact of mortality is what makes a flower (or life itself, of course) precious in the first place – “we want it because it dies, because it’s fleeting, because it fades.” When it becomes plastic and predictable, it loses meaning and we lose interest. I can’t even say I want to live to old age itself, let alone hang around for millennia.

So you want this lovely consciousness of yours to last forever? Is that not immodest? Are you not mindful of all the other things which would then be obliged to endure you to all eternity, as they have endured you up to now with a more than Christian patience? Or do you think to inspire them with an everlasting sense of pleasure at your existence? A single immortal man on earth would be enough to drive everything else on earth to a universal rage for death and suicide out of satiety with him! And you earth-dwellers, with your petty conception of a couple of thousand little minutes, want to burden eternal existence with yourselves everlastingly! Could anything be more importunate! Finally, let us be indulgent with a being of a mere seventy years! He has not been able to imagine the everlasting boredom he himself would experience – he has not had enough time to do so!

– Nietzsche

On Being Large and Containing Multitudes

By in alan watts, foolosophy, george carlin, identity, nietzsche No Comments

A good friend recently said in a conversation that she was making an effort to write without cursing or being misanthropic. I laughed and said that for me, that would be like trying to write without vowels. Then I started thinking more seriously about being “misanthropic” and noticed something interesting.

The intellectual conscience.— I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time, I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil; nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight—nor do people feel outraged: they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward—the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower! Among some pious people I have found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that: for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience! But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [“Discordant concord of things”: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19.] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody:—some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my sense of injustice.

— Nietzsche

Two of my most important intellectual influences are Friedrich Nietzsche and the more Western strain of Zen Buddhism, which I’ll personify for the sake of convenience in the form of Alan Watts. Both were intensely anti-theoretical or anti-abstract, if you will; both in their own way stressing the need to focus on the way things are rather than allowing ourselves to be deceived by projecting our own feelings onto them, or allowing our perception to be refracted through the prism of our hopes and fears. Yet both also seemed to betray some hints of an inability to fully embody what their intellectual consciences told them.

Gone!
He has fled,
My only companion,
My splendid enemy,
My unknown,
My executioner-god! …
No!
Come back!
With all your afflictions!
All my tears gush forth
To you they stream
And the last flames of my heart
Glow for you.
Oh, come back,
My unknown god! my pain!
My ultimate happiness! …

— Ariadne’s Lament, from Dionysus Dithyrambs

Nietzsche came from a very religious family and was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfathers and become a Lutheran minister. Despite his notoriety as the anti-Christian philosopher of atheism and nihilism, it’s clear to anyone who reads him that his enmity for Christianity is the kind that can only be held by someone who once loved the object of his scorn with all his heart, the jilted lover.

One day the wanderer slammed a door behind himself, stopped in his tracks, and wept. Then he said: “This penchant and passion for what is true, real, non-apparent, certain – how it aggravates me! Why does this gloomy and restless fellow keep following and driving me? I want to rest, but he will not allow it. How much there is that seduces me to tarry! Everywhere Armida’s gardens beckon me; everywhere I must keep tearing my heart away and experience new bitternesses. I must raise my feet again and again, weary and wounded though they be; and because I must go on, I often look back in wrath at the most beautiful things that could not hold me – because they could not hold me.”

In addition to his famous essay attacking the scholar David Strauss, he frequently heaped scorn on ordinary Christians who only mouthed the words while changing nothing in their behavior or thinking (“there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross”). If anything, he constantly took believers to task for not being worthy of their belief, for not treating it with the respect and seriousness he felt it deserved.

And here is where my disgust commences: I look around me – there is no longer a word left of what was formerly called “truth”, we no longer endure it when a priest so much as utters the word “truth”. Even with the most modest claim to integrity one must know today that a theologian, a priest, a pope does not merely err in every sentence he speaks, he lies – that is, he is no longer free to lie “innocently”, out of “ignorance”. The priest knows as well as anyone that there is no longer any “God”, any “sinner”, any “redeemer” – that “free will”, “moral world-order” are lies – intellectual seriousness, the profound self-overcoming of the intellect no longer permits anyone not to know about these things… All the concepts of the Church are recognized for what they are: the most malicious false-coinage there is for the purpose of disvaluing nature and natural values; the priest himself is recognized for what he is: the most dangerous kind of parasite, the actual poison-spider of life. We know, our conscience knows today what those sinister inventions of priest and church are worth, what end they serve, with which that state of human self-violation has brought about which is capable of exciting disgust at the sight of mankind – the concepts “Beyond”, “Last Judgment”, “immortality of the soul”, the “soul” itself: they are instruments of torture, they are the forms of systematic cruelty by virtue of which the priest has become master, stays master. Everyone knows this, and everyone none the less remains unchanged. Where have the last feelings of decency and self-respect gone when even our statesmen, in other ways very unprejudiced kind of men and practical anti-Christians through and through, still call themselves Christians today and go to Communion?.. Whom then does Christianity deny? What does it call “world”? Being a soldier, being a judge, being a patriot, defending oneself, preserving one’s honor, desiring to seek one’s advantage, being proud – the practice of every hour, every instinct, every valuation that leads to action is today anti-Christian: what a monster of falsity modern man must be that he is none the less not ashamed to be called a Christian!

It’s been pointed out that he never fully escaped the teleological Christian worldview, as he still felt the world needed to be redeemed – in his case, by an Overman who could show the way towards transcendence, not of the pain and suffering that made this world a vale of tears according to Christianity, but of the weaker, sickly qualities of human nature itself. And of course, his life was for all intents and purposes over by age 44, so we can only guess if he would have eventually overcome even that aspect of his thought:

For me, they were steps, I have climbed up upon them – therefore I had to pass over them. But they thought I wanted to settle down on them.

Alan Watts, in his dozens of books and countless lectures, elucidated an understanding of Eastern religion and philosophy that had no need for elaborate rituals or pretensions of secret, esoteric knowledge. His sort of Zen was playful, not ascetic, and his genuine love and passion for the subjects he focused on made him a joy to read and listen to. And yet…

“I’d say to him, ‘Dad, don’t you want to live?’, and he would say, ‘Yes, but it’s not worth holding on to.'”

– From Genuine Fake: A Biography of Alan Watts, by Monica Furlong

The man who showed how so many existential dilemmas would simply vanish if looked at from the correct angle drank himself to death by age 58. I certainly am not one of those who think being “enlightened” means someone floats around on a cloud, impervious to life’s slings and arrows, but it does seem a little odd that a man who preached such an accepting philosophy, one that didn’t try to explain or justify suffering away, but simply acknowledged it as the other half of the same coin with joy, only seemed to be able to live in the world while falling-down drunk.

“I must make one confession” Ivan began. “I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbors. It’s just one’s neighbors, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance…One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible.”

— The Brothers Karamazov

You might not know it from some of the things I’ve said over the years, but…I like people.

— George Carlin, It’s Bad For Ya

I see the same sort of inconsistency in myself. I’m politically left/liberal, but I don’t have much faith in human nature, and I don’t often think very highly of my fellow shaved apes. There are times when I’m fully in agreement with Ivan above, and I find myself disgusted with individual people and their weaknesses and flaws while consoling myself with thoughts of a better potential for humankind, and then there are times when I treasure individuals while damning the species as a whole to hell. Most often, though, I find it almost impossible to truly forgive people their frailties and failures, which is only somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I’m even harder on myself. Why this insatiable drive for a perfection that I know full well doesn’t exist? Why do I berate myself and others for allowing the passions and inconsistencies of everyday life to overwhelm abstract philosophical principles? I understand what Nietzsche and Watts were saying in this regard, really, I do, so why do I fall prey to the same tendency to disparage what is in favor of what might have been or could be?

I wonder what it would be like to truly embody this mentality:

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

— Spinoza

How Can You Have Any Pussy if You Don’t Eat Your Meat?!

By in fresh hell, herbivory, jests japes jokes jollies, samesecks No Comments

I’ve been called gay for many things, being vegetarian not the least among them. I think it’s just that for your average troglodyte, “gay” is the catchall term for anything different. All alternative roads lead to Gaytown. Homosexuality is the sea level, and any behavior that doesn’t fit the mainstream is a tributary feeding into it. I’ve been called a fag for having long hair, having earrings, reading books, listening to certain styles of music, being extremely taciturn, preferring world football to the American version, getting along better with women than men, and insisting that I don’t find the typical blond bimbo supermodel attractive. My own parents wondered if I were gay since I spent a lot of time alone as a teenager instead of chasing skirts – not hanging out exclusively with guys or anything, just keeping to myself. Whuddayagonnado?

These days, I just point out that since I’m not a reactionary, I don’t have any hangups about it and would be out and proud if that were the case; it’s only the right-wingers who have to sit in those dark closets loathing themselves.

Contra Mundum

By in free speech, media/propaganda, moralizing, ohferfucksake No Comments

So Rush Limbaugh says he wants Obama to fail as president. The sky is also pretty blue today.

Yet due, I suppose, to many liberals’ rekindled love for the Oval Office and the dreamy hearthrob occupying it, this has struck a nerve among the netroots. Blog after blog over the last several days had comments from outraged little soldiers demanding that tired old tactic, the advertising boycott (because it obviously worked so well the last time they used it).

I’ve seen this come up several times now over the past few years, and really, the only example that could even be partially described as a success was the Imus brouhaha from a couple years ago. Partially, because it wasn’t the netroots alone who applied pressure, and most obviously because Imus just had to lay low for awhile before getting right back in the saddle again. But everyone’s drunk on hopenchange juice and their own self-righteousness, so here we go again.

I’ve asked people before how they feel comfortable with such tactics, and they usually give some lawyerly response about how it’s not really censorship as long as government troops aren’t kicking his door down, that no one’s saying he doesn’t have a right to his opinions, just that he doesn’t have a right to broadcast them to a national audience on the public airwaves, that they’re perfectly within their own rights to refuse to patronize businesses that provide the funding that put him on the air. All of which is true in a limited sense. Unfortunately, it’s also sophistry. It’s extremely disingenuous, relying on indirect loopholes to shut someone up. Hey, I didn’t put a pillow directly over Grandpa’s face and smother him, I just locked him in an airtight room!

Ask yourselves this: when the same logic was applied to the Dixie Chicks case in 2003, did you see that as fair play? After all, no one was trying to say they couldn’t express their opinions to anyone within earshot, they were just saying that they didn’t have a right to a musical career, and the consumers were perfectly within their rights to tell radio stations that they would no longer listen to them if they continued to play songs by the Three French Hens. Amazing how everyone saw this for the bad faith effort to silence unpopular voices that it was. Liberals Progressives still occasionally bring up how terrible it was that Phil Donohue’s show got canceled despite good ratings because no one wanted to be associated with a slightly liberal show when the whole country was going apeshit with jingoism. I don’t know why, because after all, it’s all about making the consumers happy, isn’t it? How about when Michelle Malkin led a crusade against Dunkin’ Donuts for Rachael Ray’s scarf, or just a few weeks ago, when the fetus-fetish crowd went after Krispy Kreme? Was that grassroots democracy in action, or just paranoid, thuggish intimidation? (All of which brings up another important point: the right wing is much, much better at this sort of army ant behavior, so perhaps you should think long and hard about legitimizing this sort of strategy for dealing with political opponents.)

And you know, if your typical liberal progressive had any brains at all, they’d put Limbaugh, Coulter, Palin and the Plumber in a Real World-style setting with cameras and mics on at all times. Wind ’em up and let ’em go. Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican party! But no, the impulse to act like a hypersensitive shrieking ninny is too powerful, I suppose. The end result is that it does nothing but reinforce that besieged bunker mentality, to allow Rush to tell his herd how once again, the forces of political correctness are trying to keep them from hearing the truth, letting them wallow in their persecution complex. Even if you could somehow get his radio show removed from the airwaves, he’d reach his minions through direct mail, webcasts or some other means. What the hell is the point? It’s still good advice for people not overflowing with their own moral rectitude and self-righteousness – if you don’t like it, don’t fucking listen to it.

One thing that’s always struck me since beginning to read the mainstream political blogs is how the issue of concentrated media ownership never comes up, when it was a constant feature of actual leftist commentary. Instead, here you have these morons unwittingly trying to make it so that only someone like Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch can express a pointed or controversial opinion without having to fear for their job. Really, guys? You want to ignore people’s increasing dependence on corporate sponsors to provide anything like a platform or a megaphone that can cut through the oceans of white noise and Twittering idiocy while doing everything you can to make those advertisers more skittish and unwilling to take a chance on anything that doesn’t suit their already vanilla, anodyne standards? Brilliant!, as the Barq’s root beer ads go. Let’s make it so that opinions have to run the gauntlet of mob rule and fickle public opinion to get a fair hearing! Why, I can’t possibly see how this could come back to bite you on your oblivious asses.

Chomsky Wept

By in augean stables, media/propaganda, ohferfucksake, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

I am the plan, I am the man who tells you what and when you can. I’m the old one that torments you. I am the voice that tells you to:

“Don’t get caught with your fingers in my pie. Mess with me and boy you’re surely gonna die.
If ever you’re in doubt about who or where I am, I’m here, I’m there, I’m everywhere.
I am your Uncle Sam.”

—Primus

The noive of these guys!

“I’m concerned about the level of frankly subversive activity that the Iranians are carrying on in a number of places in Latin America particularly South America and Central America,” Gates told lawmakers.

“They’re opening a lot of offices and a lot of fronts behind which they interfere in what is going on in some of these countries,” he said.

Seriously! Countries that pull that sort of shit are just begging for a bombing, aren’t they?

It would be as if Iran were to invade and occupy Canada and Mexico while constantly trying to provoke us into a fight and complaining about us “interfering” in other Middle Eastern countries (except we actually are, but let’s just pretend there’s some alternate universe where we don’t treat the world like our property).

Who is this sort of propaganda aimed at? No one else in the world is stupid enough to believe it, so is this aimed at the American public? Is that even necessary? I doubt most Americans would let any vague moral concerns get in the way of sustaining their lifestyle (and even the Great Liberal Hope made sure to stress last week that “we will not apologize for our way of life”), so if you explained that those Persians are standing in between us and one-dollar gas, threatening to behead Ronald McDonald and close down all Wal-Marts, I’m sure the majority would shrug and say “Bombs away,” then. Or is it like Chomsky always suggests, that most people don’t have the courage to face themselves and say, “Yep, I’m a greedy monster, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get what I want,” that when you find yourself with your boot on someone’s neck, you have to find a way to make it their fault? Is this just the story the elites tell themselves to be able to sleep at night?

Don’t Pray in My School and I Won’t Think in Your Church

By in ohferfucksake, religion No Comments

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

— Some Dude

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
— Epicurus

Can’t do it. Can’t force myself to watch it. I’m feeling queasy from a headache and backache, so I just can’t take the risk.

Why couldn’t kids just pray in the morning before they even go to school? Would that not cover the whole school day? Do prayers need to be recharged every so often like batteries? Does God forget what you asked for and need to be reminded? Why couldn’t they just take a moment in between classes or during lunch to lower their heads and mumble a few words? There’s dozens of ways that kids could have a private moment between themselves and their imaginary friend if they wanted to, but there’s only one way they can do it while forcing others to watch or participate, otherwise we wouldn’t even be having this argument.

Of course, I shouldn’t say “kids”, because as a former kid who had to sit through a dozen years of daily silent moments with other kids, I can safely say that no one gave a bouncing fuck about contemplating anything – it was just one more stupid rule to be contemptuously followed in a day full of them. No, this kind of stupidity can only come from parents who have no idea what their little god-fearing darlings get up to when out from under their watchful Puritan gaze. It’s a stereotype as trite and worn-out as Republicans in the closet, but in my experience, it was always the ministers’ sons who would smoke or drink whatever was handed to them, and it was always the bible-thumpers’ daughters who were the most eager human mattresses. Amazing how these people just simply never learn.

Kitschfinder General

By in art, bread and circuses, jests japes jokes jollies, music No Comments

This made me think of what it would be like if Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon had a slightly better sense of humor. I stole the post title from a thread I saw some months back where someone called her that – the only other part I remember was one of her own comments, where she (apparently in complete earnest) argued that schlocky art corroded the mind, spirit, whatever, in the same way that junk food affects the body. Spoken like a true straight-edge militant. She has the kind of grim Puritan zeal about attacking artists she considers impure that most people outgrow once they leave high school, but since she refers to herself in an ironic, self-aware way as an “Insufferable Music Snob”, I guess that makes it okay. Or something.

Shit-talking is fine if done with a sly wink and a smile; with the understanding that ultimately, whatever moves you for whatever reason is fine with me. I good-naturedly tease friends about music taste sometimes, but I’d have to have a major thorny stick up my ass to make a sustained effort to try and convince them to stop listening to an artist I hate or to start looking down on them for musical incorrectness. When you find yourself seriously trying to argue that some artist is harmful to impressionable minds, it’s time to calm the fuck down, shut the fuck up and stop taking yourself so seriously. What makes the music snobs so tiresome is their myopic inability to understand that other people approach from different vantage points and take different things away from a song (or any work of art, for that matter). I don’t listen to bands to receive philosophical or moral instruction; I listen to them because I like the way their music makes me feel. If the lyricist happens to be really inventive and thought-provoking (Beck, Neil Fallon from Clutch, Andrew Wood from Mother Love Bone), so much the better. Mark Sandman of Morphine was a goddamned genius and created some of the most original, hauntingly beautiful music ever, but his lyrics were pretty ordinary; I don’t think I can come up with any that I would bother quoting. I also listen to some cheesy pop because the melody is pretty and prompts me to daydreaming. It doesn’t suddenly make my IQ drop fifteen points and inspire me to go buy framed pictures by Thomas Kinkade.

Rosenbaum said it in a funny way, but really – he hates the guy’s music so much he went out and bought a greatest hits compilation (rather than, say, downloading songs off of LimeWire) just to, um, figure out why he hates it so much? Riiiight. And Ted Haggard was just delving deep into the sordid homosexual lifestyle in order to better understand how Satan could tempt people away from God. Sounds like someone has himself so indoctrinated with ideas of what he is allowed to like as an intelligent, culturally educated man that he can’t just enjoy a melody even if the lyrics are insipid. This kind of rigid insecurity is really fucking sad, that people like this are so fragile they fear being changed for the worse by a song, movie or a painting.

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