I work to understand what values we can live by in a world as connected, chaotic, and potentially catastrophic as the present. -- Avram Alpert
Alpert is one of those public intellectuals who manages to straddle the academic, publishing, and actually thinking about what he's thinking about. In some ways, his "work" as a lecturer and Fellow/Lecturer at The New Institute in Hamburg, a Fellow and Lecturer at Princeton and a Lecturer at Rutgers reminds me a bit of Crispin Sartwell. For me, Crispy seems to have the same underlying goal, striving to understand relevant values for this new way of living. Crispin has just chosen a more structured and traditional way of doing that work. Another way to look at it, of course, is that being a Fellow and Lecturer or being a professor of philosophy is their way of having a day job that's relevant to their work. Alpert's new book, The Good Enough Life strikes me as a direct way of doing his work while possibly working at a side gig, being a writer.
One of my High School Teachers, a Diocesan priest who was nicknamed Charlie the Tuna because of an similarity to the protagonist in Starkist's advertising, presented us with a philosophical problem. He said that he was perfect. That got a laugh as well as starting a discussion. He asked if we didn't agree that only God was perfect. It was, after all, a Catholic high school -- and for sake of argument, we agreed. He then asked if we agreed that it was our duty to seek perfection in every way. Bit more complicated, but based on the Baltimore Catechism, we were conditioned to agree. He then asked if that didn't mean we were doomed because we could never achieve the goal of our duty, to seek perfection. Muttering in the crowd. Ok, if we had duty to seek what we could never achieve, how to resolve it? And, if only God is perfect, wasn't our solution to seek to be perfectly imperfect, and he figured that he nailed that one...so?
I have struggled with that particular dogleg for a long time now; as the greatest Country poet of the 20th Century put in his last musical release before he died, "No matter how we struggle and strive, we'll never get out of this world alive." I don't believe Hank Williams was advocating giving up; rather, I think he was suggesting that we recognize as he did that we were here for the struggle, not for the acclaim that comes with the being recognized as the greatest. As soon as we get recognized as that, we're going to fall, because somebody better would come along.
This new book, The Good-Enough Life by Avram Alpert presents a more complex yet simple solution. It should be enough for each of us to be recognized as the greatest something rather than seeking universal acclaim once, and then go on with our work in this life. As another country-music poet, Emmylou Harris, sang "I was born to run/to get ahead of the rest/and all that I wanted was to be best//To live free, and be someone/I was born to be fast, I was born to run."
Alpert credits another writer with the solution to this philosophical and ethical maze. " Michael Walzer’s influential notion of complex equality. Social life, Walzer says, divides itself into many different spheres: business, science, athletics and so forth. We want those spheres to be internally coherent, such that the most recognized athletes are the most athletically talented, the most successful businesspeople are the ones who offer the best products at the best prices, and the most celebrated scientists are those who are the most scientifically brilliant. Accordingly, the spheres should be externally sealed off from each other. Top athletes should not use their celebrity to make millions endorsing sub-par business products. Successful businesspeople should not use their wealth to sway scientific research agendas. Gifted scientists should not figure out how to dope athletes in technically legal ways."
Avram seems to admit that change might be a far reach, but still, if society as well as individuals accepted the "good enough" goal, we might be spared Charles Barkley hawking sandwiches and Doug Flutie supporting Frank Thomas in hyping a Testosterone product.
My latest piece of at Veterans News Today. We're kind of banned by Facebook these days, and I'm ok with that. It seems pretty clear that while we all must be insane to think that writing for an alternative media independent and intentionally unbridled will in any way accomplish or gain anything. Hell, we don't even get T-shirts.
“Logicians have but ill defined /As rational, the human kind; Reason, they say, belongs to man,/But let them prove it, if they can. Wise Aristotle and Smiglesius,/By ratiocinations specious, Have strove to prove with great precision,/With definition and division, Homo est ratione præditum;/But, for my soul, I cannot credit ’em. And must, in spite of them, maintain/That man and all his ways are vain; And that this boasted lord of nature/ Is both a weak and erring creature. That instinct is a surer guide /Than reason-boasting mortals pride; And, that brute beasts are far before ’em…” Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, 1697
An odd part of the fallout from the Facebook-Twitter-Instagram Bot investigation is that a lot of internet publications that depend on outside collaborators can't post various places like Facebook because their content won't pass the Decency Test. Veterans Today is one of those places, and they've been struggling to find the right formula to differentiate from old bad actors and new, possibly more bad bad actors who are a bit more politically correct. I guess that did us in at Veterans Today -- I think that our awarding liars "Motherfucking REMFs" for the extent and grossness of the reality may have been the proximate cause.
Not to worry. Despite losing a lot of retweets and views and various things, we still exist.This is a new piece -- I confess that for someone with a seriously bent sense of humor and a tendency toward satire, the Trump administration is an embarrassment of riches. It's just impossible to write seriously using satire to make points while presenting an argument when you're dealing with this chiseling lowlife. I know that Maddox prefers some varions on Military Monk as a nickname pointing to his dedication, straight shooting integrity, and disdain for comfort and wealth. However, life with Trump for someone in his position probably felt a lot like self-flagellation with barbed wire. Somehow, it just didn't pass the smell test. So, he lasted a helluva lot longer than someone not a Military Saint would have. Trump would have had me at the Bastille Day ceremony.
Anyway, one thing that has been a problem for me is finding the right epitet for Trump, one that mocks but captures his pieous side. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, belongs to the realm of stories where the hero is destroyed by a fatal flaw in his own makeup. Well, Trump is a nexus in and of himself of lots of fatal flaws. Did he ever give or get a blow job from Roy Cohn? Possibly. Knowing Roy Cohn well enough to have a personal opinion about the guy makes him unqualified to be president -- but that might give his base pause. You need to have a really well developed handle on recent American History to know what a louse Cohn was. He was a genuinely evil man; he died of AIDS denying that he had the disease or was Gay in public up until he died. He probably ran a bit of a gay cabal on Senator McCarthy's staff, which the drunken fool wouldn't have caught on to. He was disbarred for various nasty stunts like suborning perjury, witness tampering, embezzlement, and who knows what else...that's who he's referring to when he'd complain he wanted his own Roy Cohn...
I've given it a lot of thought, and had settled pretty much settled on some variation of President Manatee, but realized that was unfair to sea cows. Then I heard someone say Trump is from Queens and I thought, yeah,,,and then Howard Fineman said something about his administration being the most corrupt government since Caligula. Well, I don't think it's close; I think it's probably worse. Of course, Trump hasn't married his horse yet after appointing it to the Supreme Court -- As Gaius "Caligula" Caesar did -- of course, we know that Trump is scared of animals, and I suspect that horses really scare him. And, Caligula did decide to invade Britannia and then had his Army beat the waves with the flat of their swords and fill their helmets with seashells to represent his booty, planning to display this on his triumph.On the other hand, there was the great parade debacle and the "guard the border against the caravans" nonsense, so...close enough.
So, does "the Queens' Caligula work for him? Or does it make his ass look fat?
Odd times over at the Veterans Today Network or where ever the hell it is I write. Problems with their server, hackers, attacks and so on; oddly, they believe that they've traced it to Army hackers at the Intel School at Fort Huachuca because Trump hates us. Did I mention I collaborate with a bunch of crazy people? That is, other crazy people. Still, as a group we're probably a pain in the ass to just about everybody in the political spectrum so...
New piece. Chance to use Henri Le Chat Black, Edith Piaf, The Dead South and a variety of other wierd stuff to talk about France's election and Marine Le Pen...did you know that Brigitte Bardot and Sarah Palin have compared Le Pen to Joan of Arc? I mean, seriously...
She has proposed that they re-write the curriculum for history in French Schools omitting things like, oh, French Colonialism and the Second World War. All part of the French Identity...sheesh...
Seriously, this started out about a column in The Stone on this morning's Times Op Ed page about whether or not Bo Diddley was a Buddah...and it then morphed into Brian Williams stealing a line from Leonard Cohen's First we'll take Manhattan and then TRUMP and then more stuff about blues music and improvisation and then Trump and then ...Olbermann? On Trump now being coherent in a false equivalency to a normal president because he's blowing shit up....
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom For trying to change the system from within I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens I'm guided by the birthmark on my skin I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I'd really like to live beside you, baby I love your body and your spirit and your clothes But you see that line that's moving through the station? I told you, I told you, I told you, I was one of those
Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I don't like your fashion business mister And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin I don't like what happened to my sister First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin Then we take Berlin, then we take Berlin
I don’t know what to say here except there’s something for everyone, I supose. And that includes these hand-crafted Cthulhu sex toys by Necronomicox. How did these things come to be, you might ask? According to Necronomicox: “I saw a niche that needed to be filled, so to speak.”...Because in his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming masturbating, amirite? --- Dangerous Minds, 11-5-2016
As a sort of pseudo-journalist, I am temporarily homeless. Veterans Today and Veterans News Service are reorganizing, and I'm temporarily without a home for my Wolf Country Dispatchs. I hate to take up a lot of Crispin's space, so I'm looking for a temporary home...since I've always wondered if I might be somewhat unloved there because I'm not friendly to various wingnut batshit conspiracy theorists but...hell, it looks like the Batshit Conspiracy Theorists got it half right...
Anyway, one country's useful idiot is another's...President Elect. So, my thought is simple. I think everybody who has a vestigial fondness for the Constitution and American myth, should immediately send one of these sweaters to your favorite Republican weasel. The more Christian they claim to be and the less they indicate it by their beliefs, the better.
Is it the Batshit Old Bag on the committee that overseas the NLRB who hates unions and doesn't understand why workers want them? Great, she wears a large. Is it Paul Ryan, the Eddie Munster Look Alike Ayn Rand worshipper who has no clue about economics, economic theory, Catholic doctrine and teaching, or basic concepts of justice? He's a tall skinny weasel by comparison to the COSTCO bargain sized old broad so I'd say a large also. Is it Mitch McConnell, the useful Idiot who sold out American interests and autonomy to Russia so that Trump would be president? See if they have one with a turtle neck and get an extra large so the Turtle can just turtle his way into your heart.
And, if sweaters aren't your thing, there's always the Cthulhu dildo, which is appropriate for either gender in the GOP anti-American crusade.
If you're not familiar with Masha Gessen and you're interested in Russia and how autocracy works, you should be. She's a great writer and journalist. A Russian Jew and dual American citizen, she's lived much of her life in Russia, working as as journalist through the fall of the Soviet Union through Yeltsin and the rise of Putin and the Oligarachs. Her work appears in the Times, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Daily Beat, the Atlantic and any place intelligent people argue about exactly how the world is ending, fire or water. She's written about Putin based on both her journalistic reporting and one hell of scaring paternalistic intervention into her career; about Pussy Riot and the band's meaning; about the Boston Bombing and aftermath; and a recent book about a well-meaning Stalinist attempt to resettle Jews in Siberia. She's a talented, brave and uncompromising talent and spokesperson.
In a recent article right after the election, Masha published a guide to surviving the Trump whatever the hell the next four years are going to be. I'm writing about Trump and the inter-regnum with a calmer mind after reading her work here. She has basically five rules for surviving the Autocrat with mind, integrity and sanity still in tact. I've used my last two pieces to discuss the first two rules. They are:
1.Believe the Autocrat. A more elegant writer than I, she doesn't put it this way but -- No matter how completely the statement uttered as policy is illiterate, ill considered, at odds with the facts on the ground and the general laws of god, nature, physics, mathematics and aesthetics, doesn't mean the rabid wombat who has taken control doesn't fully intend to do it. Think Mao deciding to make everybody build small blast furnaces in the courtyards of their buildings and thus triple the output of steel overnight...or Stalin, deciding to imprison or execute everybody in the senior ranks of the Army because he had a bad dream and figured he'd let the dialectic sort out the sheep from the goats. Or Trump saying he doesn't want to live in the White House...Fifth Avenue is going to never be the same. I'm not sure where Trump is going to rank on the lunatic-sociopath-psychopath-schizophrenic-bi-polar autocrat scale. I'm thinking of equating him with God in the theory that God is 80% malevolent but only 20% effective.
One of the projects Crispin and I have been putting off until he's in the witness protection program here in California is our own musical-poetical-satirical-philosophical unified field theory. Fuck Einstein, our's will work. Here's my latest stab at it from over at Veterans News Now or where ever they're putting my stuff...
Congratulations Crispin. Truth, justice and the American way triumph...understand you can say whatever you want to now about whatever you want to say, so long as it is in classic Greek with stones in your mouth. Way to go...
As Guy Clark wrote in The South Coast of Texas, “Living on the edge of the waters of the world calls for the dignity of whooping cranes and the likes of Gilbert Roland.” Instead, we’re offered the mortgage broker who lost his license and runs Hispanics for Trump and his concerns about Taco Trucks, and pigeons. (I feel compelled to state almost unequivocally, that there is no truth to the assertion that the meat in Trump Towers Chicken Taco Salad is a mix of pigeon and sea gull, any more than the beef taco is rat.)
It's entirely too spring like in the high desert of California, damn it. I know I wanted nothing more ten years ago than to get out of Western Washington and the rain, but it's El Nino time and we're getting robbed here? I know the East Coast is getting slammed, and the midwest is getting slammed but...why are there no flash floods here? Where are the mudslides in LA? God is a real clown, isn't he?
Good, what an amazing morning! The two favorites in the New Hampshire primary both won big...what does it mean? I don't know, maybe Karl Rove is a lousy pollster and if you know what you're doing in a small market, you should probably be able to at least figure out 1st Place?
The Fed has figured out that the world economy is on the brink of disaster because you can't base a world economy on the sale of cheap sex toys and Pokemon cards. Or expensive Sex Toys and High end art work...
Sad news -- Kim Fowley passed away. Now he was old, and had been fighting cancer for about three years but he was still doing his show on the Underground Garage and making appearances and such as well as running a producers workshop down in LA until the end. The guy who brought us "They're Coming to Take US Away" and managed the Runaways and supposedly invented the holding up lighters at concerts crap while working with the Plastic Ono Band was an interesting guy. I don't think he really meant any harm, and he did produce some very interesting stuff.
Of course, at his drug addled worst, he was a raging, self-centered asshole, I suppose. He also appears to have been a nice guy who when sober admitted to having been a less than stellar human being. He made peace with people he'd hurt -- and in fairness, had hurt him back -- got married a couple of months ago to his much beloved girlfriend, and was funny as hell as well as a perceptive commentator on Steven Van Zandt's station on Sirrius XM. He didn't take himself too seriously, and didn't take rock and roll too seriously, while at the same time taking the position that it did change lives and culture in ways that no one expected.
It changed mine. And, he made me laugh...and think. Laughing and wincing and shaking my head simultaneously.
Most of my writing appears over on Conspiracys are US.com, and I occasionally feel badly about that. When I recently read a bit about how the Je Suis Charlie thing was really a Mosad false flag operation to punish France for voting for Palestinian statehood in the General Assembly, I felt like sending the managing editor some new and improved tinfoil. However, I didn't. I like writing for and with nutcases; it appeals to my sense of the right of free expression. And, my bizarre background and sense of humor, of course.
But sometimes thing just overload you. We spend so much time in today's world being bitchslapped by reality and media and what the fuck is that, that we end up confused, and disoriented, So, when I had nothing better to do, except read the comics on line which I have still to get to, I wrote this and out it up over at Veterans Today where the editorix will toss it up later; and over at the Defeatists.
And in thanks to Crispin for letting me share a better class of wingnuts, here's some British Blues by someone who looks a lot better than Jeff Beck or John Mayall, Joanne Shaw Taylor.
You know who Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes really misses right now? Hunter Thompson? Well, yeah. Molly Ivins. Well, yeah, of course. But another voice we no longer hear commenting is Warren Zevon. Waddy Wachtel, the great session guitarist and lead player was a close friend of Zevon and related troubled geniuses, and did an interview for a European rock magazine about Zevon's first album, saying that Jackson Browne who produced it, didn't know what the fuck he was doing.
Wachtel got a call from Browne soon after that, and while wishing he hadn't said that, head Browne say that "You're exactly right. I had no clue how to handle him," followed by a offer to have him co-produce the second album, something about werewolves in London and something about lawyers.. The rest is history.
Anyway, things get a bit strange at times. We do have equivalent voices, I suppose, but I still miss the old gang. You have to wonder how Ivins would have reacted to the Bengazi nonsense or how HST would have responded to the Democrats anti-Democratic campaign in 2014. Somehow, I think Zevon's still pretty relevant.
I really don't like that bloody thing. Upworthy -- what the hell does it even mean? It's kind like RL Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse which some people find poetic but I always found it to be saccharine, maudlin "why the hell did they give me this instead of the book about Vikings I wanted" even when I was a kid. But, in the words of the old Russian proverb, Даже слепая свинья находит желудь иногда,oras we say in Dusquesne, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THIS SCREWY INTERFACE?
Ok, it's ok now. Actually, it translates like this...
Charlie: You're getting on. You're pushing 30. You know, it's time to think about getting some ambition. Terry: I always figured I'd live a bit longer without it. --
And if you're taking a course in Aesthetics and Politics with Herr Professor Doktor Sartwell, compare and contrast values based on this contrasting versions of the Clash piece by Mr. Yoakum and Ms. McColl with extra credit if you can describe the similarity in the personal sitations of Ms. McColl and Mr. Strummer in 2012. Guaranteed C-, I tell you. Trust me. I used to be in govenment...
The Times has an interesting article this morning on the conflict between the Japanese concept of lifetime employment and the whole Milton Friedman "Shareholder value is not the most important thing, it's the only thing!" approach. The UAW had negotiated a similar package for its members in the 50s and while it cost money, it did keep the social fabric in places like Detroit and Flint and Gary and other places devastated by the goat rodeo that was the auto industry in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. As that program was downsized and ultimately eliminated by through contract negotiations, bad situations got worse. Similar approaches were used by other firms, including professional firms, where "excess" engineers, planners, business managers and so on would be assigned to social programs or to nonprofits to help the recipient organizations cope with their challenges. I assume the corporation was able to write off that time on taxes as a charitable contribution, although I do not know. It certainly showed community involvement and was effective PR.
so i am going to start noting cases in the media of extreme, redundant, or incomprehensible qualification. i notice this with regard especially to contemporary politicians: they will issue a decisive-seeming sentence with three qualifications which make the actual assertion amount to nothing at all, or reduce it to sheer gobbledygook. ok first case, daily beast:
For
years critics have claimed Edgar Bronfman Jr. is a buffoon managing his
family company, Seagram, and taking over Warner Music, but a new book
proves that he might be the man to save the music industry.
now there could be cases in which you could prove that something might be the case: that ducks can mate with humans, for example: i didn't know that was possible!even that is not the parallel case. this is more like proving that barack obama and lady gaga might be the same person, which would follow - if it does follow - from metaphysical speculation rather than any actual facts. at any rate: to prove that i myself might be the person to save the music industry is unnecessary and trivial: to prove that i am the person to save the music industry will be extremely difficult until i actually seize control of the music industry, which, you know, i can prove might be possible.
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