cheese it, the cops!

blowin', in the wind

i'm up on splice today, drilling bob dylan a new asshole. it's the first in a series: "why they suck." the forthcoming victims are unlikely to surprise regular readers of this blog. 

nobob: the genius of don chiasson on the genius of bob dylan

on sean wilentz on robert zimmerman's miracle essence of america, or whatever

"Depart from me this moment"
I told her with my voice
Said she, "But I don't wish to"
Said I, "But you have no choice"
"I beg you, sir", she pleaded
From the corners of her mouth
"I will secretly accept you
And together we'll fly south".

Just then Tom Paine, himself
Came running from across the field
Shouting at this lovely girl
And commanding her to yield
And as she was letting go her grip
Up Tom Paine did run
"I'm sorry, sir", he said to me
"I'm sorry for what she'd done".

  

if you need me to start explaining why that sucks there's no hope anyway.

 

*

 

Winterlude, Winterlude, my little apple
Winterlude by the corn in the field
Winterlude, let's go down to the chapel
Then come back and cook up a meal
Well, come out when the skating rink glistens
By the sun near the old crossroad sign
The snow is so cold but our love can be bold
Winterlude, don't be rude please be mine.

Winterlude, Winterlude, my little daisy
Winterlude by the telephone wire
Winterlude, it's making me lazy
Come one, sit by the logs in the fire
The moonlight reflects from the window
Where the snowflakes they cover the sand
Come out tonight everything will be tight
Winterlude, this dude thinks you're grand.

 

*

 

Something there is about you that moves with style and grace
I was in a whirlwind, now I am in some better place
My hand's on the sabre and you've picked up on the baton
Something there is about you that I can't quite put my finger on.

 

*

 

Idiot wind blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the backroads heading south
Idiot wind blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot babe
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe

 

quite.

 

*

 

Old man sailin' in a dinghy boat
Down there
Old man sailin' in a dinghy boat
On there
Gonna pull man down on a suckling hook
Gonna pull man into the suckling brook
Oh yeah !

 

*

 

these five examples are drawn from the first seven songs i looked at. the other two weren't good either. 'overrated' doesn't even begin to cut it. there has never been a less competent lyricist.

 

re-re-re-education

150 years or so into universal compulsory education, we might ask: what was the justification for it, and how has it turned out? perhaps the justification was egalitarian. to what extent has it closed gaps of race or class in this country? i'm talking about reality, not yapyap. i attended dc public schools in the 1960s and '70s. they were an incomprehensible useless disaster then, and they are now. they're just about to get it right, though: have been since 1881. perhaps the idea was universal literacy? perhaps indeed, but the people who have tried to make that happen are at best semi-literate themselves. or put it like this: even if margaret spellings or arne duncan can, strictly speaking, sound out the words on their telepromters, they are under a terrible misapprehension about what literacy actually is. their vision is that by the time you reach 18, you should be able to mechanically produce a five-paragraph essay, like a parrot or an idiot. they've failed even at that.

i can't imagine that these are the actual motivations, because then people would register that the means are grotesquely incompatible with the ends, and that the results are nothing at all like the professions, over a very long trial. i think the purpose was subordination of populations; i think compulsory education is merely authoritarianism. it is explicitly authoritarian, for it is compulsory. i think you might want to consult your own statutes on child labor and kidnapping. to a great extent, we've done to everyone what we did to american indian children: snatch them and try to 'integrate' them into the dominant culture: to control them and reshape them, because parents and communities don't share the values of the dominant culture. the form that takes now is that we're not adequately filling cubicles, so let's let bill gates write a universal curriculum. i think the purpose is to shape and control minds, as in forced labor camps in the cultural revolution, to destroy sub-cultures, to make everyone as much like 'us' as possible.

i think the motivations are racism, classism, and cultural imperialism intended to result in cultural destruction or 'assimilation' or 'integration.' the other side is internment for the unassimilated, as in high-rise housing projects and mass incarceration. this combination is summarized by urban public education. i think the goal of compulsory education overall is to produce a uniform american child to feed into the maw of the state-capital octopus, dropping all others into the dark dimension where they can't be seen. other than that, though, it is a very inspiring vision.

i think you'll find that many of the same people who were pushing universal compulsory education were advocates of eugenics. one intended effect of 'universal literacy,' and of standardized testing, and of compulsory education, is to wipe out what deleuze calls 'minor languages': slangs, dialects, etc. language is central to culture; destroying vernaculars is cultural destruction. however, major languages are dead without them, as arne and margaret and hillary so vividly demonstrate. and in all this, the progressive people effortlessly, with no self-consciousness or self-reflection, took themselves to be obviously the normative people: just what all people should be, should be compelled to be. with little variations, they're still right there.

a couple of lessons from the obvious century-long failure: if you seek to produce egalitarian outcomes by authoritarian means, you simply produce more extreme hierarchy. that should have been obvious to everyone all along. the history of american progressivism has been a history of effortlessly deploying white bourgeois norms, regarding them as universally valid, and using them ('unconsciously') as instruments of renewed or more thorough oppression. race was at the heart all along, i believe. the idea was that black people and poor people (in appalachia, perhaps) were not capable of raising their own children, that they could not be trusted with their own children, that their communities and families were 'dysfunctional' or 'pathological' and that we could help. help=make them more like white middle-class people. this made it hard to distinguish between cultural uplift and cultural annihilation. even by the standards of the progressives themselves, the results have been disastrous. 

money runner

a number of things might scuttle the clinton campaign. i don't think the death of vince foster is among them. if i were guessing, i'd say it will be the mcauliffe matter and in general, moneymoneymoney.

 

i fear hope

i'm up on splice today with my little rap on fear, anger, and hope in presidential politics. i'm going to try to ship them a piece every week or so for a bit. actually i think it's an interesting publication, one of the few zones of the media not completely dedicated to simplistic or obviously false partisanship, with independent voices. it's edited by russ smith; i was a music critic for his baltimore city paper in the '80s, and his new york press in the 2000s.

free our babies. or, babies: free yourselves.

i am telling you that the average american school is run like an eastern bloc dictatorship. i assert this flatly and seriously. i would ask the administrators, those grotesque little martinets: in virtue of what do you think you have the right to tell human beings how to dress, what to say, where to gather, and so on? and i'd just point out that attendance is compulsory. and then i'd gesture at the standardized testing regime, for there is nothing else left in american education. we are brainwashing people in a totalitarian system designed by authentic idiots. and then i would add also that the baby authoritarians are rocking the colleges now with their unthinking intolerance and their constant appeals to authority, and that this is incompatible with citizenship in a democracy, or with any of the ideals that america has ever professed. i do recommend a rebellion, within each of these interment camps, if there is anyone left in them who is capable of experiencing their own continual, palpable oppression. resistance is a moral obligation.

there's a lot of anger and fear out there.

how can we explain the hillary clinton phenomenon? who could have anticipated it? it makes no rational sense. but then politics isn't about rationality. for myself as for so many, it is inexplicable that anyone could vote for her at all; one cannot understand the motivations of the people who have brought her to the brink of the democratic nomination. but here is an explanation: there's a lot of anger and fear out there, particularly among women. hillary is exploiting that anger and fear. that's what leaves people open to demagogues, but also to empty surfaces such as hillary where people can sort of project their fears and desires.

guardian:

“If you want to imagine what Trump’s America would look like, picture more kids at risk of violence and bigotry,” Clinton said.

“Picture more anger and fear,” she added. “Ask any of the mothers here tonight if they want to live in that kind of America … Enough is enough.”

Clinton’s remarks were in direct response to Trump’s appearance at the NRA’s annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. The billionaire, once a proponent of stricter restrictions on firearms, countered skepticism among pro-gun voters by embracing open carry laws and calling for an end to gun-free zones in schools.

That idea, Clinton said, “isn’t just way out there. It’s dangerous.”

“This is someone running to be president of the United States of America, a country facing a gun violence epidemic, and he’s talking about more guns in our schools. He’s talking about more hatred and division in our streets, even about more nuclear weapons in the world. That’s no way to keep us safe.”

 

99 pounds of soul

watcha listenin to, exprofcrispy? my candidate for the most underrated recording artist of all time: ann peebles, everything i can get ahold of. she is at once in the mainline of great soul singers - aretha, for one - but also with something completely distinctive. man she sounds both letter-perfect and perfectly spontaneous, every time out. without checking, i'm going to say that 'i can't stand the rain' (one of the great songs in pop music history) might have been her only top ten hit. but there is a truckload of great material. for one thing, it's the hi record shop (responsible also for all those great al green songs): comparable to the stax/volt or muscle shoals soul shops, but with a groove at once mellower and more evil.

 

 

 

man the horn charts just kill me. gonna also direct you to 'i'm gonna tear your playhouse down' and 'feel like breakin up somebody's home,' which i've blogged before. the albums straight from the heart and tellin' it. also i'm strongly recommending hi records: the soul years, with the great o.v wright, among others.

the revolution is coming to a school near you.

we've republished spyder's rebellion, or how to overthrow your school: better size, better cover, better proofreading. also kindle. i think it's pretty damn good, though i would i guess. it would take a special kind of parent to buy it for their middle-school or high-school age kid, though. but no doubt it's a coming sensation; perhaps it can replace my income. yeah, no. but it's fun.

 

leftist revanchism

nathaniel rich has a several books by and about james baldwin in the may 12 nyrb. it's not the worst thing i've ever read, though rich is no baldwin. but it ends with this typical symptom of obsessive, delusional political partisanship, which runs like painful urination through the pages of the new york review of books, the new york times, the new yorker, and so on.

Baldwin’s novels and essays describe a nation suffering from a pain so profound that it cannot be discussed openly. This was not a pessimistic view; it was, rather, deeply optimistic. It suggested that most people, deep down, wanted to resolve the crisis—that they were not apathetic or, in Baldwin’s term, brutally indifferent. Today it can be difficult to preserve this optimism. Still there are strong indications that there is more pain than indifference. You can tell this by the general level of fear, which is, after all, the source of that pain. It has risen to the surface, often reaching the level of total panic, evident in the calls to “take our country back,” to “reignite the promise of America,” to “abolish the IRS,” to “restore America’s brand,” and the many other revanchist sentiments that dominate the political discourse. These messages do not ring of indifference. They are expressions of great terror.

now, rich echoes baldwin in insisting that white americans examine the bigotry in themselves and its effects on their own psyche. rich engages in no such self-reflection, but just goes for the autonomic trump-bashing. but truly, his approach is just bizarre. so, for example, 'abolish the irs' is supposed to be an obvious expression of great terror and racism. say what? i suppose the internal revenue service is an agency dedicated to ending the national nightmare of racism. only a racist would have misgivings about american tax policy. 'restore america's brand' is supposed to be something you'd only say if you were terrified, i guess? also i suppose that the most wicked insult rich has at his disposal is 'revanchist.' is there nothing people like you, nathaniel rich, will not try to turn to partisan account? and can you do it no better than that?

what baldwin - one of my heroes - would tell someone like nathaniel rich is to try to start peeling back his own racial attitudes before he starts hurling his inexplosive bombs. and i will say, as i have said before, that american leftism has been an extreme disaster for the black community. we are approximately as segregated now as we were in the 1950s. housing programs in particular, but the welfare state in general, has frozen a permanent racial underclass and destroyed black communities. democrats loved and prosecuted mass race incarceration until they pretended to see the light. that they've trapped black folks in this insane dilemma where they vote 90% democrat is unforgivable. and there is racism at the very heart of white liberalism, but it is 'unconscious': incredibly condescending, taking no account of the experience of the people whose conditions or selves it proposes to ameliorate, engaged in continual moral self-congratulation, which is what it is for.

also, just for the hell of it, hillary's campaign is already based entirely on fear, of the 'dangerous loose cannon', etc. of course, some fears are rational, so that accusing someone of operating politically on fear is not adequate to condemn their position. also 'make america great again' sounds strangely like hope, though not like my hope. and sheer hope isn't enough either; it depends on what you hope for.

the partisanship we see now - and i emphasize the left though it's certainly coming from both ends - is obsessive, manipulative, and delusional. baldwin would tell you that if he were still around, rich boy. the people who write in this mode for these publications are only writing for people who already agree with them, and the whole thing is an exercise in slapping one's own back, all day every day. also the people who already agree are the only people who could be expected to nod along with non sequiturs of this caliber: disliking the internal revenue service can only be an expression of racial terror. i hope your ass gets audited, son, and they end up coming for your paycheck. 

talking only to people who agree with you leads to thinking of this quality, as heads bob up and down in unison. also it's liable to lead to some kind of partition in this country, or maybe a civil war if it keeps going like this. tell you what: let's see where race is after 8 years of hillary (admittedly, hillary getting elected is unlikely). just where we are now, i believe. or after 8 years of trump: also more or less just where we are now. engage in some self-reflection or leave james baldwin alone, son. you are not ready.

Just sitting around waiting to die at the wheel of my Citroen!

 
Reading the morning email from The Economist, I discovered to my amazement that the Israelis have a problem besides the personality transplant on back order for Bibi Netanyahou. (Should note that Typepad's suggested spelling for Bibi's last name was "Hootenanny.") Seems that they have a small reactor we gave them for experimentation purposes which is being decommissioned as it should be because it's outlived it's usefulness. Then, there's a bigger one out in the Negev desert that doesn't produce anything except plutonium and similar stuff...and it's a year younger than Barrack Obama. The recommended retirement age for one of these things is 40 years; this one is 53 years old. 

What the hell, what could go wrong? Well, it's worth pointing out that the reactor was made in France in the 50s...I for one wouldn't be all that excited about depending on the well-known French quality engineering system that existed 70 years or so ago. Wine, bread, cheese, sausage, cider--they have that down. But, nuclear reactors? 

Would you want to have your children's future depend on the equivalent of a '58 Citroen?

There's more discussion of it here... 

 

 

 

 

i have faith in the american people

republican candidates had an argument that trump would never be the nominee: the voters are really smart; i have faith in the american people, etc. so i wonder whether these bozos are teachable? admittedly, the whole thing was the most boilerplatish pandering horseshit. but i pray they have lost the faith they never had. in fact, they believed that the american people are incredibly easily manipulated by emitting little catch-phrases, or engaging in diabolical yet idiotic strategic communications. the clintons are going the same way now: the american people are too good, too wise; i trust the american people. lord knows whether they've ever met any american people. but they sure do recite their little cliches mindlessly, which perhaps shows that they are themselves american people.

Guy Clark -- 1942 to 2016

 

The news this morning that Guy Clark has passed away in Nashville, while not at all unexpected, is still quietly defiant and sad. I've listened to Guy's music since I picked up a copy of Jerry Jeff Walker's "A Man Must Carry On" in Germany in 1977. First heard him sitting in a hotel room in Dublin in 1978, on the English Channel of Radio Eire, doing "LA.Freeway..." First record I ordered when I got back to the states was "Old Number 1" and the second "The Fool on the Hill." 

 

He admitted that he lived in Nashville because that was where the work was for him, but he as Texan as you can be, and all in a good way. Work hard, drink some whiskey, sit around with friends and talk shit while passing the IW Dance and a guitar. Be tolerant, kind, and take no shit.  He was a frequent visitor to the "Guitar Pulls" at Johnny Cash's home. People would show up, play their stuff, and pick and grin and bullshit. Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Rodney Crowell, John Anderson, Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris,Bobby Bare and whomever else was around would show up. Showcase their new stuff casually -- somewhere between "I've been working on this one" and "networking." Get ideas, add and steal licks, sing some harmony and learn from each other how their music could sound. 

mugger mugs again

my schtick on politics and entertainment is up this morning on splice.

still valid

white house press pass of my grandfather franklin sartwell, who worked for the washington times-herald. the t-h was bought out by the post in the fifties, by which time he was in a 'sanitarium' for alcoholism, i believe.

here, he is killing someone's copy:

this thing where trump posed as his own publicist under an assumed identity, far from being a scandal, is hilarious and wonderful. so very often, each of us is posing as his own publicist under an assumed identity. that is what distinguishes us from bacteria, if indeed we can be distinguished from bacteria.

oppressed wealthy rulers

typepad doesn't seem to be letting me edit previous entries, so instead of adding at the end i'm writing new ones. i am not saying that hillary clinton, for example, has not faced sexism in a variety of ways. but the first thing to point out is that membership in any group is never univocal. hillary is not only a woman. she is a white heterosexual woman. perhaps you should look at her residences or itinerary or income. or perhaps you should consider that she will raise about $1.5 billion dollars, in large measure from her mega-rich patrons, clients, and friends. she is one of the most privileged human beings in the world, alright? and i would feel sorry for billions of the earth's peoples and take their claims to have been treated with prejudice and oppression much, much more seriously. or seriously.

privileged sub-alterns

and i'll add this. if you are a tenured professor at an r1 university, or a columnist at the guardian, you are a person of privilege, even if you are black or female. you're going to have to grapple with that fact. if you believe that hillary clinton is sub-altern in virtue of her gender, you are being very disingenuous or very foolish or both. i predict that hillary and/or her surrogates will be portraying her as a victim throughout the general election campaign. they ought to be ashamed. 

spree feech

where's mario savio when you need him? dunno, but we've still got the great camille paglia.

anything at all

i do think extreme lack of entertainment value has been a practically bad aspect of american political discourse for a long time, and i trace the real total boredom to the clinton era. bill was a good speaker and better than most at presenting the focus-grouped, consulted phraseology, but he is remembered way too enthusiastically. but he got us to the position where you go with whatever's polling, and say as little as possible, and always try to short-circuit your opponents by apparently absorbing their values or exceeding them, as in the crime bill (that'd be a good nickname).

but look, was it wrong that martin luther king or abraham lincoln was a spellbinding orator? was that important in motivating and persuading and moving people? alright compare that to al gore circa 2000: taking no positions, including nothing about climate. doing absolutely nothing but focus-grouped sentences. safety, strategy, extreme cowardice, no convictions that would actually motivate him to passion, unless passion was polling, then he'd simulate. so, is it bad for democracy when it is impossible to pay attention to what leaders are saying, or when that are not saying anything, yet saying the same thing over and over? apathy is the only possible and the only rational approach. think about pericles, or the way aristotle conceived rhetoric: as bound to truth as well as to persuasion.

i'm thanking don for bringing the personality, the definiteness, for taking chances, for speaking his own words, for not having a gaggle of mediocrities feeding him strategic advice. other people can do that too; sanders comes a lot closer to clinton to having some reality or belief or...anything at all. 

voting and self-interest

i'm serious when i say this: if i were voting my pure self-interest, i'd have to vote for trump. the main stake i, like most americans, have in the presidential contest is that i will have to watch the winner on television, every day, for at least the next four years. i have no idea how donald or hillary's agendas would affect my bottom line or whatever, and actually i don't think hillary has any agenda at all, except 'you won't notice me doing anything.' that's because i don't think she has any beliefs except that she should aggrandize herself. but i sure will have to watch her yapping robotically, and i long ago had way too much of that. 

people keep howling that politics has become mere entertainment. no, it has always been entertainment, in large measure. now shit does happen. someone might take you into a disastrous war, for example. but you can't really know that ahead of time unless they're screeching it, which is unlikely.

anyway, i am not down with trump's nationalism, with walls or muslim bans etc. not at all. but again, if i were actually to vote only on my self-interest, it's obviously trump. you too, i'm thinking, probably, though maybe not. it's just that msnbc, cnn, and fox will be 24-hour saharas if she's elected. i'll know what she's going to say about anything at any time before she says it: it will be the safe thing, the polled thing, the empty thing, the consulted thing. it'll be all manipulation all the time, yet it will be unbelievably repetitive, predictable, contentless: just as though she is an idiot.

some sad sad shit

what this theory of communication which everyone appears to share (that communication is manipulation or propaganda in every case) has led to politically is this: a completely incoherent set of political positions on which people seem to be unanimously agreed in their demographic. so, the whole left since marx has been dedicated to achieving egalitarianism through maximum inequality of power. marxism is the most extreme and insane version of this, but no egalitarian can consistently be a statist, bro. indeed, the whole american left will end up voting straightforwardly for oligarchy, motivated essentially by vilification and dehumanization of their opponents. 

on the other hand, watch the thrashing about right now about who is really a 'conservative' etc. now, is right-wing foreign policy militarist or isolationist? trump will run 'to hillary's left' on military interventions, etc. that doesn't mean anything, because 'right' and 'left' don't mean anything. do right-wingers want minimal government, or do they want laws telling people what bathroom to use (next: laws telling them how to poop, etc)? no idea bro, because 'the right' makes no sense.

every day i watch and am just stunned that people are throwing around these terms (left, right, progressive, conservative, etc) when they obviously have no idea of what they mean whatsoever. they don't even notice. that's because they are not trying to say or advocate the truth, but only to form up groups against one another. nothing could be more obvious, all the damn time. that is some sad sad shit.

all i want is honesty

that's a quote, and i am still working sk's attack upon christendom.

a couple of people asked me, apropos of the entry below, whether i support trump. let me say this: that i do not support trump, think he's dangerous, etc, does not entail that i should believe that everything he says is false, monstrous, etc, or that i should pretend i do in order to help form up the like-minded, impress or comfort you with the fact that i belong to your group, etc. people actually believe that the only reason anyone would say anything is to achieve manipulation=solidarity or whatever. this is false, and all you need is a few cases where obviously the person would say anything to join their group together or make its members feel good about themselves or manipulate people into agreeing (='epistemic partisanship') to get to the point where that person ought to have been thoroughly discredited.

all i'm trying to do is say the truth, not lead or follow a movement, not work you emotionally to agree, not to congratulate myself or you because the people we oppose are so stupid. now, obviously that does not entail that what i say is actually true - not at all. but it ought to be the minimum standard of human credibility. i often feel that i am the very last american with any commitment along those lines whatever. 

all day every day, people just flamboyantly parade the fact that they don't care about truth at all; they care about group membership, and that means they care about exclusion, destroying or discrediting their opponents. i don't see how people give rush limbaugh or timothy egan any credibility whatsoever, or krugman on politics or whatever. the obvious minimum standard for human cred is that you do try to speak the truth. now, the fact that such people may think of themselves as trying to do that, when it is false on its face, might be the saddest thing of all.

thrash

hillary clinton was born to get destroyed by trump, much like jeb bush. she has already focus-grouped her phraseology: right now it's 'risk' and 'loose cannon,' over and over again infinitely. someone on morning joe this morning said that her whole campaign will be based on fear, because 'women are more risk-averse.' then they'll get pissed when don says she's playing the 'woman card', when every single person in the universe knows that that's her basic strategy: above all, no one in politics should be permitted to say anything true.

meanwhile, donald just rolls through the improvisations, as in wv last night: (more or less) 'the bill clinton administration was a disaster. and she was involved in all of it. well, maybe not in absolutely everything. i hope not, anyway.' much laughter. man you don't even have to say anything; all you have to say is 'bill' and images of interns and cigars swim into the minds of americans. 

while she mechanically parrots her strategic bullshit, he will roll her up and lob her casually into perdition. i don't think she can survive two weeks of trump, much less six months. it will be 100% woman card by the end, and she'll fuck that up too somehow, like that gloria steinem stuff. 

hillary, the most privileged person in the world, will be whining all fall about being the victim of bullying...because women respond to that, according to her internal polling. if the way women are being portrayed now by everyone, and particularly the clinton campaign, is anything like true - fear and spoiled whining being the two major factors in their vision of the future - it really is a devastating indictment of the gender. i have a funny feeling that trump is going to do much better than expected with women, however, because actually i think most american women outside the highest classes of white women aren't really like that.

your spyder sense is tingling

as crispy press rolls on, i have republished - in much better form - the middle-readers/ya/peoplelikeyou book spyder's rebellion, or how to overthrow a middle school (also kindle). it was originally roughed out and kindled in like 2007-8. i started this time around with a document in my hard drive on which my teen daughter emma had labored, on dialogue and characterization particularly.

Spyder (Sarah Paulette Eider) is a 14-year-old anarchist and writing prodigy who more or less overthrows her Pennsylvania middle school, in concert with a wild group of non-conformists and interesting non-non-conformists. One of the few books to take teenagers seriously as political activists and intellectuals, this novel traces the characters' awakening to the problems of the world around them - from animal cruelty to ridiculous authoritarianism. It rollicks through their disagreements, as well as budding romances, party weekends, strange preferences in music, problem parents: in short all the accoutrements of modern adolescence.

If you were thinking of overthrowing a public school (peacefully, more or less), you could get some tips, for the story is based on real events in the lives of the authors. Crispy overthrew Alice Deal Junior High School in 1972.

"Like 'Hunger Games' without the hunger or the games; like 'The Fault in our Stars' with plenty of faults but zero stars."
--Bogul S. Purvy

here's a vid i made first time.

 

one thing i've found out: you're never too old to get expelled from school.

institutionalizing the truth

i think it is fair to say that institutionalized or 'established' religion is destructive of spiritual truth or living in contact with god, if any, in particular with regard to its own priestly hierarchy. you're likely not there for god. you're there to rise in prestige and power and wealth, or to be regarded as in contact with god so you can lord it over people. that's what kierkegaard is saying in attack upon christendom.

this is even more true with regard to philosophy. that's precisely why we still tend to tell the story with a giant leap between the ancients and the 17th century: not that there's no philosophy in between, but it's polluted by the enforcement of dogma. in circumstances where you pay a terrible price for dissent - your works repressed, your person extruded or immolated - it is not even possible to tell whether the claims are sincere. likewise where the rewards of conformity are potentially great - rising in the hierarchy, social prestige, power over other people. the relation to truth which must be at the heart of philosophy is fundamentally compromised.

i say that is the position of philosophy in academia now: quite like medieval philosophy in relation to the catholic church. the reasons people assert what they do: they want tenure; they want status; they need to find a prestige group and conform to their dogmas. to some extent there are multiple dogmas or churches, but you have to find one that can carry you along in the hierarchy. but in the matter of politics, the dogma is pure and total: you must agree or pay the hideous price that heretics pay.

that is anathema to the quest for truth; it is incompatible with philosophy. academic philosophy today is not philosophy, and if there is a future of philosophy, the people building it will skim over this period as offering almost nothing, as polluted fundamentally by power relations and social slavishness.

not that there have never been good philosophers who were professors. but the dogmatism of the institutions and the hierarchy, the mood of desperate conformity and resolution to rise to professional respect of this moment are extreme. try to imagine your tenured professors - today's little priesthood - or the endowed chairs in their bishoprics, paying the sort of price for speaking their truth that socrates paid, or spinoza, or nietzsche. people think they can do both. i don't think they are, though, and i think many have lost track of the fact even that they are not seeking the truth. that condition is fatal to a thinker, and there can be no resurrection from it; it is soul-annihilating, as ole sk might put it, or emerson.

you might think about what happened to platonism, to confucianism, to christianity when they were institutionalized. they became boring, repetitive, immune to truth. any moment of innovation or originality emerged at a moment of institutional crisis. hold on to your smugness and mediocrity while you can. clutch hard onto such prestige as you have achieved. actually, i think you'll be fine, for i don't see any crisis looming. hold on long enough, and you can really be safe, and put this philosophy thing to rest forever.

fear of language

sorry, d. watkins, but i can use whatever words i please. you can try to stop me i guess.