cheese it, the cops!

honestly, exploring bob dylan's miracle essence of america or whatever is horseshit. i'd be more interested in someone that is not a dominant generational cliche. i can tell you the meaning of bob dylan now in my sleep. who can't? and if i were a princeton historian thinking about devoting my life to a pop star, i'd start off with someone a little less overrated, full of shit, and charlatanish. also i'd try to find someone that everyone else including himself wasn't already writing about. also i'd pretend that i think works of art, even "blowing in the wind"  - the paradise lost of our time, if paradise lost had been written by a toddler -  are made by human beings, not scrawny gods. really, i guess we'll have to wait until a generation dies to stop hearing this solemn crap about dylan, and that is an excellent reason to hope for a babyboomer plague or something. the world does not need another "how the beatles created the sixties," bruce springsteen and the meaning of america" etc. sean wilentz liking bob dylan is about as surprising as my ten-year-old liking lady gaga: just a cliche or emblem of affiliation. tell you what, though: i'd rather listen to gaga. at any rate, it's great that janie likes lady gaga. now if she were proposing to devote her life to explicating her lyrics and cultural location, i would cock an eyebrow.

"the masked, shape-changing American alchemist," etc etc: a version of automatic writing that calls out automatic reading. 

i'm reading dante's inferno in pinsky's verse translation, because i am semi-voluntarily teaching it to freshmen. as every time before into dante, i start by saying: obviously this is important and this time i'm going to get something out of it. and as every time, i am ending by slogging through in boredom and irritation. it's interesting as a "renaissance" document, in its attempt to reconcile christian theology and a pagan worldview, although it conspicuously refuses to take up any of the actual issues and tensions this raises. it strikes me as a series of aesop's fables: extremely childish moral allegories: here are misers and spendthrifts crashing into each other over and over! it would shock me if anyone down through the centuries had actually been improved morally by reading that sort of thing, and it surely can have no other purpose. what's missing from dante that you find in aesop is humor, irony, lightness of touch, a bit of indulgence for human foibles. what's missing from aesop that you find in dante is a continual grinding of specific political resentments against parties and individuals, arguably the great theme of the inferno. it's as though john boehner wrote an epic poem describing god's terrible judgment on nancy pelosi. at any rate i guess the italian (which i don't read) is beautiful. given the content, it had better be. i can't think of a classic i regard with less affection.

i'd personally like to do the real-life expendables, with a twist. so i say parole mark david chapman. maybe hook him up in a team of super-schizos with the person who shot selena. parole bob marley's cancer, or janis joplin's self-destructive impulses. arm them to the teeth and send them after...sting, billy joel, the indigo girls, elton john, etc. it's a matter of aesthetic security.

just for the hell of it, i'm going to defend your right to burn korans. now one thing to understand: a text is, at least apparently, an abstract object. there are millions of korans: each equally is and is not the text. the koran itself - well, this is how we think about text - is, using the phrase of arthur danto, "logically incombustible." anyway, go ahead and burn my favorite books - perhaps the essays of ralph waldo emerson -if you like. that doesn't seem to hurt them, much less me. y'all muslims aren't idolators; that's why no pics of the prophet. you're textolators. yeah it's an abstract object, but it's not allah either.

perhaps you just can't stand for your religion to be treated with contempt, even by floridians. i don't know, get over it. think of the contempt of floridians as a badge of honor. or contempt em right back; burn the works of carl hiassen or dave barry or something. 

the basic picture is supposed to be that the average muslim can't understand that everything that happens in the u.s. is not done by the government, or by everyone or something. they'll hold us all responsible for acts we condemn etc. if this is indeed the case, and if i splain this to you and you still don't get it, i don't think you're the kind of person who's going to be acting comprehensibly in general, so i guess if you're gonna try to kill people or something as a consequence i can't really do much but shoot back.

you know what's got to go? "that said."

like you, i love the culture of standardized testing. like you, i believe in accountability, and i believe simultaneously that accountability is itself the only goal, so that there is nothing one should be accountable for other than accountability itself, in an endless loop in which all is assessment and there is thus nothing to assess but assessment itself. like you, i think like you, talk like you and pretend to be able to read like you. and like you, when i raise my children, i think only one thing: how can i render them competitive, in a world standardized testing regime, with little fuckhead in hong kong? that is what i call love. but japan has the right idea, which is to count pages in textbooks and make sure that our textbooks have more pages than the textbooks in hong kong. who is counting the total number of textbook pages and making sure that we are in the lead? i would take some of the people currently assigned to be sure our children's textbooks are unreadable dreck and reassign them to counting pages, a task for which their skills so admirably suit them.

at any rate, let me say this about the educational approach of george bush, margaret spellings, barack obama, arne ducan, michelle rhee (now superintending the school system that both created and expelled me): if i could, i would destroy everything you're doing. your program, your position, your institutions: first i'd club them down, then i'd stab them, and as i soaked them in gasoline and set them alight i'd riddle them with bullets. then i'd blow them the fuck up. then i would pursue them to the afterlife and vaporize their immortal souls before the throne of god. after that...

now if you're an fbi agent (which, if you're reading this, you probably are), you're wondering why i'm threatening these fine authority figures. but i want to note that i did not threaten these persons. indeed, in the world they are making, threatening persons is impossible. for in that world, there are no persons. 

i don't think there are many things that could make me endorse some sort of rigid theocracy, which is not the kind of thing anarchist atheists such as myself endorse. but theocracy can look pretty good in comparison to kleptocracy, especially a kleptocracy propped up by a foreign government, which we are doing all over the region, or the world. i would like to know the amount of the personal fortunes of karzai and zardari and how they came by them. at any rate, the taliban looks better every day when our dudes are simply stripping their countries and depositing the gdp somewhere.

surely the obama admin is regretting that they didn't dump karzai after he won the election fraudulently. and one might point out that we seem to be stuck with these leaders. maybe we are, sort of. but the gap between what we do and what we say we do is astonishing. we seem to love or at least recognize a capitalist, someone always in the business of maximizing his own wealth. but if we do this often enough all over, than that is what we're actually bringing to the poor oppressed people of the world: total exploitation for the sake of greed. like i say, this would make even a perfectly rational person entertain the idea of leaders who at least appear to be incorruptible because they're religious fanatics.

headlines: electric light orchestra cellist killed by giant hay bale.

i hope that stephen hawking is better than he's represented as being. and no doubt he is; i guess you can't get joe schmoe, or me for that matter, to understand the physics/mathematics of our pythagorean multiverse etc. maybe he knows something we don't. 

Due to laws like gravity, noted last week's excerpt, Hawking writes that it is entirely possible that the universe "can and will create itself from nothing." That's why we exist. That's why there's something rather than nothing. We don't need God.

now surely he's going to discharge the further obligation to explain why there are these laws rather than others, or no laws, for example. how can the headlines be about hawking's denial that there is a god, when in fact the argument appears to be that no god is necessary in an explanation of the origin of the universe? these things matter in the terms of the ancient argument.

at any rate, maybe theism/atheism turns partly on aesthetic sensibilities. there can be beauty in a city that grows up willy-nilly chaotically over time as well as of an area designed from whole cloth, a planned environment. the willy-nilly city may of course also be in principle explicable: well there are economic and political histories and so on. but it teems, is wildly profligate, always just barely eluding your explanatory machinery.

kathleen parker is right that there's twelve-step stuff behind beck, including a basic stance of kind of desperation for god's help. but there are also many ways and reasons that what beck is doing is bad 12-step practice, however excellent it may be in other directions, or not. one thing to say: twelve-step programs have no leaders, no one who owns the ideology. the principle of anonymity means that aa, e.g. has no spokespersons, and they constantly emphasize "principles, not personalities." i do think beck presents himself in many ways that are immediately incompatible with 12-step practice. 

parker by the end says that 12-step programs proselytize, or are "evangelical." i'd say this is a complete misunderstanding. the twelfth step inculcates "carrying the message to the alcoholic that still suffers." and helping others recover is presented as an essential dimension of one's own recovery. but this means one at a time, helping particular people who need and want help find help by sharing your story. it has absolutely nothing to do with ranting for hours on national television, or getting up on the steps of the lincoln memorial and gesticulating. at the heart of the program is a severe and serious cultivation of humility. i'm not sure that beck's declarations of his own humility are entirely sincere

glenn beck, let's say, is the opposite of bill w., who didn't even want to give his name, who never presented himself in public as a leader or spokesman: there are no leaders or spokesmen. i was perfectly serious when i said that it's likely that beck's twelve-step sponsor basically thinks that all he's doing is courting a relapse. well, we'll survive glenn beck's relapse, and twelve-step programs have a survived a thousand distortions/appropriations by a thousand egomaniacs, a thousand attempts to profit or to promote oneself.

Tradition Eleven—Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.
Trad Twelve—Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities