cheese it, the cops!

black lives matter, circa 1844

at the moment, i am working on a more satisfactory version of my nathaniel peabody rogers book. i was going too fast last spring. it was filled with typos, and i am still struggling to get the details right on createspace. also, i am adding a number of rogers' essays to make a somewhat more substantial volume. anyway, i am struck over and over again by how radical rogers was in how many dimensions: astonishing for an american newspaper editor in the 1840s. here is a slice from something that will be in the new version.

Bursting of the Paixhan Gun

Herald of Freedom March 15, 1844, Writings p. 375

On February 28, 1844 in the harbor at Alexandria, Virginia, President John Tyler was touring the newly commissioned USS Princeton when one of its long guns, "The Peacemaker," exploded. Tyler himself was below deck and was unharmed, but six people died: David Gardner (Tyler's prospective father-in-law); Thomas Gilmer (Secretary of the Navy); Beverly Kennon (the Navy's chief of construction), Virgil Maxcy (ambassador to Belgium), Abel Upshur (the Secretary of State), and Armistead (President Tyler's valet and slave). Rogers' take on these events is remarkable.

The reader has heard, by this time, of the terrible catastrophe on board the nation's War-Steamer Princeton, where five of our governmental chieftains were struck down at once by the exploded fragments of a great death-engine - intended by them for the destruction of others. They were practicing with it and amusing themselves with exhibitions of its hideous power. Five chieftains and a slave killed: John Tyler's slave. The bursting of the Paixhan gun has emancipated him - and left his owner behind. How busy death has been on every side of that owner, since he was thrown up into power by the fermentation of 1840! Above him and below him in place, 'the insatiate archer' (as poetry has called a dull genius, that never shot an arrow in his life), has brought down the tall men, and left him standing like an ungleaned stalk in a harvested corn-field. He seems to have been the subject of a passover.

I saw account of the burial of those slaughtered politicians. The hearses passed along, of Upshur, Gilmer, Kennon, Maxcy, and Gardner, but the dead slave, who fell in company with them on the deck of the Princeton was not there. He was held their equal by the impartial gun-burst, but not allowed by the bereaved nation a share in the funeral. The five chiefs were borne pompously to the grave, under palls attended by rival expectants of the places they filled before they fell (not those they now fill), but the poor slave was left by the nation to find his way thither as he might, or to tarry above ground. Out upon their funeral and upon the paltry procession that went in its train. Why didn't they inquire for the body of the other man who fell on that deck!

And why hasn't the nation inquired, and its press? I saw account of the scene in a barbarian print called the Boston Atlas, and it was dumb on the absence of that body, as if no such man had fallen. Why, I demand in the name of human nature, was that sixth man of the game brought down by that great shot left unburied and above ground? For there is no account yet, that his body has been allowed the rites of sepultre. What ailed him, that he was not buried? Wasn't he dead? Wasn't he killed as dead as Upshur and Gilmer? And didn't the same explosion kill him? And won't his corpse decay, like theirs? Don't it want burying as much? Did they throw it overboard from the deck of the steamer to feed the fishes? What have they done with it! Six men were slain by the bursting of that gun and but five were borne along in that funeral train. Where have they left the sixth? Could they remember their miserable color-phobia at an hour like this?

Did the corses of those mangled and slaughtered secretaries revolt at the companionship of their fellow-slain and demur at being seen going with him to the grave? If not, what ailed the black man, I ask again, who died on the steamer with Abel Upshur and Thomas Gilmer, that he couldn't be buried? Are they cannibals, at that government seat, and have they otherwise disposed of that corpse? For what would not they do to a lifeless body who would enslave it when alive? I will not entertain the hideous conjecture, though they did enslave him in his life-time. But they didn't bury him, even as a slave.

They didn't assign him a jim-crow place in that solemn procession, that he might follow to wait upon his enslavers in the land of the spirits. They have gone there without slaves or waiters. Possibly John Tyler may have had a hole dug somewhere in the ground to tumble in his emancipated slave. Possibly not. Nobody knows, probably - nobody cares. They mentioned his death among the statistics of that deck, and that is the last we hear of the slave. His tyrants and enslavers are borne to their long home, with pomp and circumstance, and their mangled clay honored and lamented by a pious people. The poor black man: they enslaved and imbruted him all his life-time, and now he is dead they have, for aught appears, left him to decay and waste above ground. Let the civilized world take note of the circumstances.

 

 

on election fraud

right, i'm not that worried about wholesale falsification of the results. but some of the arguments going the other way are discrediting to those making them. biden argued that we have to  believe in the integrity of the process, because our democracy rests on trust. well you know, a rational person would place just as much trust in the process as it is trustworthy. it sort of sounds like you are morally obliged to trust the process, even if it's rigged. or then: how would you rig an election? you'd need to control 50 states' governments etc etc. no that's just obviously disingenuous; a relatively few votes in let's say one to three states could prove decisive, yes? anyway, don't turn your offense at trump into rank bullshit, ok? he's discrediting himself; he's discrediting you too unless you resolve to think a second and try to speak the the truth instead of the next manipulation.

the real first ladies

 

 

 

honesty issues

obviously, we are having 'trustworthy and honest' issues with the major-party candidates. as often, the primitiveness of the categories masks the complexity of the question. trump is far more honest than clinton in one particular dimension: his public persona is, one would think, closer to his private one; his public persona more closely enacts his actual inner life; or he shows you who he is. (not that he too doesn't have some issues here.) i think that is important. in one way it is obviously essential to democracy: we really do elect insincere fakes all the time. hillary's white papers on wall street might sort of matter, but not if she intends to do nothing about it. you have to infer who and what you're voting for from leaked emails. trump's frank self-revelation is good because now you can vote against the actual him.

of course, the sort of integrity where you hang together as a human being is only one sort of honesty: you could have a lot of that and pretty a pretty bald liar and deceiver. and of course honesty is only one dimension of moral character, and you could be a pretty honest groper, for example; trump has been. or you could be a pretty honest fascist etc. in that sense.

anyway, the scandals hurtling around clinton today seem worse to me. this band memo thing is filthy, really filthy. there are hundreds of avenues of exploration now open, more to come. i think we'll be in an impeachment before many months have passed, and this one will be richly warranted. 

i think the chaos in the political system has actually eventuated from mindless partisanship: both parties have been devoted for a quarter century only to decimating each other: every utterance is another strategic little manipulative salvo, and all that money is generated to destroy ypour mutual enemies. so i think in a way if it is to survive, the system has got to open up, reconfigure, become much more multidimensional and much more representative. if nothing else, these two parties have thoroughly discredited and shamed themselves this year.

been on a collecting jag before winter.

iggy pop meets rene descartes

at various times on this blog, i've written about my experience studying with richard rorty. i've brought a bunch of the material together with some new stuff for splicetoday: richard rorty: an intellectual memoir. this here's a pretty good representation of the public rort:

 

i agree with what he says about the concept of 'objectivity' here.

if you want to see the opposition between rorty and sartwell encapsulated, these two shorts encapsulate it. already this was the shape of the debate in '85.

 

 

the one below includes a bunch of delighted richard bernstein on rorty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

keep on rockin me baby

coupla more. +six names of beauty.

 

welcoming and bracing for the gynocracy

i do think this thing where straight guys run the world is over, and thank god, for we have been grotesque oppressors with a stunted capacity for self-examination. the way trump or bill clinton think about and behave toward women seemed sort of normal for powerful dudes a couple of decades ago - think about that for a second. the swaggering mecentric fuckwad has just got to go. now, i also do have some concerns about the coming era of rule by straight women. it's worth it, no doubt, just to ameliorate rape culture. what i think is coming, though, is what we might call a verbal world: the basic mode of oppression won't be pushing you into a closet and groping you, but hedging your every utterance around with an incredibly elaborate network of taboos, which you may find yourself violating at any given time because they are too many to know. straight women operate with a metaphysics we might term rortyan: yapping produces the world, especially if we do it in unison. this will be in the service of the production of a giant ersatz collective consciousness, in which we all apparently say and believe the same thing as we transition from the yoga studio to the pet grooming place. anyway, that's really going to suck, and i myself am having a hard time shutting up in the prescribed dimensions. but at least it ain't patriarchy. anyway, perhaps donnie will be the last person to 'talk like a man' in public. 

it seems like the mode of sexual assault today involves rendering the victim unconscious first? i don't know how men think about sex, i just know it displays a demented power hunger.

above the snowline

again, suiseki is a traditional japanese art in which unaltered (but carefully caressed) natural stones are displayed, often representing mountains or landscapes: not by picturing but by 'encapsulation.' here is the same stone flipped over, believe it or not.

it's a little one: about 5in wide.

clinton 45

here's the splicetoday piece on the debate, or rather, turning to what happens next. the hillary admin is really really going to be long and scandal-ridden. i think that, from the periphery, trump/breitbart will continue to present the republican party with an extreme dilemma. he will relentlessly seek to delegitimize her; republicans in congress will waver continuously, but begin to go hyper-aggressive on investigations etc. hillary will go all hardball on her critics, and a scandal war will erupt. etc. dude this is really going to suck. 

[near spring grove, pa. photo by jane sartwell]

i may well tweet during the debate, but in any case i'll be up with a piece tomorrow morning on splicetoday.

white suiseki with natural bridge

 

 

look it up

i've finally indexed entanglements: a system of philosophy: the last phase of the author process. (due out from suny, march 2017). i have often enjoyed indexing my books, but i had never tackled something like this: 400 pp of extremely referenceful text. it took frigging weeks, and is still no doubt multiply flawed. quite the fucking slog by the end. the book is certainly about many things, ideas, people.

generating an index is a hermeneutical activity, creating an interpretation of a book, and some things surprised me actually, like the fact that the nature of the self, if any, is one of the dominant themes. i have found that looking at the index can be a good way to get a sense of an academic book, especially where it seems likely that author had a hand. anyway, here it is.

very small mountain

 

 

 

[collected in latimore township, 10/16. about 8 in wide, 3.5 high. double-click.]

 

[photo credit: jane sartwell]

election: the rural view

jane sartwell's working on an election project in her photo class. we got some good stuff over the weekend!

 

 

pure machiavelli

realize a few things. first off, you'd have to speculate that the eruption of accusations against trump was orchestrated by david brock's oppo research operation. that's always been the clinton's gift: truly hardball politics, pure machiavelli. so, now we get to brace ourselves for years on end of that; you can bet the partisan divide will re-emerge in a conventional way: it's all the clintons know.

on the other hand, this does not mean the accusations are false. i completely believe them. i'm still half-expecting tump to drop out any minute. one worse story than those so far takes him out. but i don't even know how he can withdraw now; he'll be on the ballots in any case? he should go away now; he's very much confirmed the worst prepossessions of his obsessive haters. he knows no bounds. he's throwing crazy, desperate, destructive shit around. he has got to go away. he will, but then we're left with her...

perhaps you already knew that kevin spacey sucks.

predicting trump withdrawal soon, btw.

bob dylan: greatest hits

anti-dylan

godbob

nobob

bd's miracle essence of america

bob dylan sucks

irrefutable proof that bob dylan sucks

 

[double-click]

me on the debate at splicetoday. ain't that some crazy shit? the image i come away with is hillary's rictus smile. it might have been even more interesting if hillary had any tendency to improvise. or if trump was trying that on a guy: suddenly your lowdose testosterone starts pumping and you turn into little marco or low-energy jeb. so at least she didn't do that.

us politics has never been more of a circus than it is tonight. check me on the debate tomorrow in splicetoday.

My fishin' pole's broke, the creek is filled with sand...

 

The latest round in the fabulous adventures of Gaius Tiberius Trump is probably going to confuse, mystify, anger and amuse people for generations to come. Does the private behavior of a despot indicate anything on his ability to serve the commonality? Well, that's begging the question, ain't it....

I've been very bothered by the one thing made clear by the VP debate which is that we live in a society where we seem split into the fact-based, reality-grounded community  versus the possibility-based, faith-grounded community. Or, as Lewis Black put it so well, the Idiotic versus the Psychotic. Trump's pretty obviously leading the Psychotic Legions; Hillary by default leading the new Idiots. Collectivists versus Anarchists, perhaps? 

oh mama,

one way or another, i guess i do think this is finally the end of trump. it is a crazed emergency in republican world and in trump tower right now. but...what a spectacle he has provided: enough to keep media/cultural studies profs, polisci types of various sorts, and scribblers of all varieties going for decades. i am telling you, however, that there is still time for hillary to get caught in a dispositive scandal. and then where would we be? personally i think we ought to ask fethullah gulen to emerge from his compound in the poconos and administer the us under martial law. or if that's not mercan enough for you, perhaps we could turn the country over to roger goodell.

notes: grab her by the pussy is really no smoother as vernacular bad english than is colin powell's dicking bimbos. i really think we need some sort standardized testing to make sure our young people can express themselves: we have just got to do better than that. anyway, these sound like they have been badly translated from the malay or something. or really, i picture them in an eastern european accent. let all this teach you again, one more time, why men want power and what they do with it when they get it.

greetings from scrutopia

 

i feel a great affinity for the british philosopher roger scruton, whom i've been reading on and off for decades. he's a fine writer, and a political dissident with regard to academia. we've both written books about beauty. somehow we have both ended up spending a lot of time in rappahannock county, va. he's charmingly yet at times brutally contrarian and eccentric and distinctive, things i would quite like to be myself. on the other hand, he is a self-declared conservative, and i am a self-declared anarchist. 

for several years i've been planning a book called the tragedy of the left, which is to weave the tale of how the world left, and very particularly the academic left, spent a century endorsing totalitarianism, and still is. or putting it another way, the idea is to explain the interminable repetition of marxism in each generation: the political restriction, lack of imagination, and lack of self-reflection in, you know, sartre, adorno, althusser, foucault, zizek. (in cases such as sartre and foucault, the thing is in excruciating tension with their own basic orientation, i believe.) the amazing thing is that we're still here. but basically the theme is 'left: beautiful ideals, nightmare procedures, extremely confused or disingenuous thinking.'

so it pleased and yet displeased me when scruton came out last year with fools, frauds, and firebrands: thinkers of the new left, with a very similar project and a very overlapping list of people to be attacked. of course, the angle is very different, because i certainly do not consider myself a person of the right, and because i think of the left's goals - equality, justice, tolerance, etc. - as admirable. i will be writing in some ways from within, though still angrily, because i think these ideals have been sucked into nightmare statism due to extremely obvious empirical and theoretical and moral mistakes that could have been fixed for anyone who thought clearly or independently for a moment. they were too busy with solidarity and schism to do anything like that, and this includes some of the smartest people of the century, who made themselves evil idiots in the service of a politics of death, even as they flashed some brilliance on all sorts of things.

but there will also be a bunch of overlap. scruton is pretty hit-and-run, i must say, and the purpose is essentially polemical rather than theoretical; i hope to go a bit more carefully. also, i am flummoxed by some of the choices of figures, as scruton folds extremely mainstream liberals into the radical left just by moving from one to the next: why john kenneth galbraith and ronald dworkin, for god's sake? like, wrong context. habermas too, in a way. these are really not marxiists of any stripe, and yet they get kind of wrapped into that history here. at any rate, there are too many and too various figures treated too quickly. also, i would say that scruton's treatments are often incompatible with the screechingly condemnatory title. he has great respect for foucault as both a writer and a thinker, for example; the same is true for a number of the figures discussed, e.p. thompson, for example. 

all in all, the assessments, though presented quickly, are thoughtful and informed and relatively fair. if you just put the pictures of derrida, foucault, said, sartre on the cover of a book over the words 'fools' and 'frauds' you sound like a pretty primitive culture warrior, and whatever those people were, they were not fools. also, scruton does not end up treating them as fools either. he is a relatively careful and thoughtful interpreter, but also hits too much too fast. his sideswipe insults can be wonderful, though. chapter title: 'tedium in germany: downhill to habermas.' 

 

also, i feel that 'roger scruton' is an excellent name for a philosopher.

 

scattergories

so here i am in splicetoday, with the piece about the apartheid imposed on our heads and in the real world by demographics, polling, political consultancy, and so on.  the basic use of demographic 'data' in politics is to find strategies to make groups more cohesive, more insular, and more hostile to other groups and their politicians. the politicians, meanwhile, are becoming little but representatives or stereotypes of group memberships. also, the two-party system is shifting under this influence from an ideological competition, albeit of remarkable narrowness, to gender/race parties. in my opinion, these divisions are very likely to increase even more, because they are working on it technologically, as it were. and also, what the hell: the 'science' under the data is grotesquely problematic and consists more or less entirely of the deployment of stereotypes. also, its general relation to reality is ridiculously problematic. anyway, i kind of think this is an important point! share the splice column here and there?

i guess i think one reason this has happened is because you have a critical mass of profs/pollsters/pundits/pols who have gone to college since the 1980s. the whole period in academia has been waves of identity politics. now, that kind of pomo moment could have gone many ways, circa 1990. if you thought of identities as 'social constructions' or artifacts of power a la foucault, for example, you had equipment to throw racial and gender identities into chaos, or open them up, or show them as liquid over time in many dimensions: "anti-essentialism' in feminism or critical race theory. instead we ended up essentializing and freezing identities, in an attempt to get justice for those that had them on the oppressed end. a breathtaking example of that is the way people have come to think of gay/straight or trans/cis: something you're born with, your very essence, your very identity, and something that can never shift. 

i was working on race in the mid-90s in a way that had a definite identity-politics component. but what i wanted the upshot to be was to try to unfreeze the race binary, or to show the ways it was extremely optional and...not true. i actually think the right approach is neither to relentlessly emphasize the group identities a la 2016 politics not to relentlessly attack them. i think we should play with them and let them flow.

apartheid political science

my splicetoday column this week will be about this kind of analysis: highly-educated white women will be the decisive swing vote. the first thing to say is that we are more obsessed with race and gender and class, and more divided by them, than we were in the 19th century. the second thing to say is that well-educated white women - if indeed in any sense that is a group of people - are no more decisive than any similarly-sized demographic, for example right-handed people with bad taste or something. believe it or not, i say that point is obvious and provable.

p.s. the rather new fashion for focusing on education levels is just a sneaky way to express class. i think most pollsters and consultants have spent the whole cycle congratulating themselves on being 'highly-educated.' i think hillary supporters have been congratulating themselves throughout the same way. i think the mushass, imaginationless leftists of america has been congratulating themselves all day for decades on their level of eduction/indoctrination. but that lame-ass shit doesn't make you smart or good, though, does it? it just channels your thinking down the same old narrow canals. political positions correlate with education levels because much of american education consists of leftist indoctrination, every hour of every day. this is a central fact of american higher ed. the faculty is unanimous; they all say the same sentences in the same order, because they are highly-educated. but it starts in pre-k.

startlingly, the guardian is much  more reflective on this than the nytimes,