"I’d bet you’ve thought, shaking your head and muttering, something like: “Jesus. We live in an age of impossibly catastrophic stupid.”You’re not wrong. About a decade or so ago, hot on the heels of the financial crisis, something happened — an old story began to be rewritten, as the world found itself poorer once again. There was an explosion, somewhere deep in the human heart, and a tsunami rippled across the globe — one boiling and bubbling with every imaginable variety of stupid: human folly, gleeful ignorance, self-destructive greed, reckless spite, dim-witted cruelty parading itself as enlightenment.And so now a tsunami of imbecility is rolling like a slow-motion thermonuclear bomb across the globe.Lightning bolts of foolishness shiver down it. Smoke clouds of idiocy billow from it. Here are the five kinds of stupid wrecking the globe — because your first job, these days, as a human being, is to make sure you’re not being turned into an imbecile by this wave of stupid, too". -- Umair Haque, Eudamonia, 3/4/2019
I'd never heard of the guy, and started reading him because he was echoing things I thought, which is scary. Then I googled him...turns out the guy is a highly respected management guru with a meta-view. Which, when you think of it, is a rarity. Now, perhaps sort of a bit of humanist eschatology, which is an interesting concept in itself.
Folks who are neck deep in the struggle to make the world a more humane and human place might gain from his perspective or might find it annoying. Good on you. But, I think that even people trying to save the world might occasionally need a slightly contrarian buzz. As for the rest of us, I think countering the age of the imbecile is a pretty laudable exercise.
I don't know where I want to go with this, but I think it's something people who think about the things they think about can find a better place to put the lever. Invite comments, thoughts, and suggestions...
So I said good-bye to government, And I gave my reason: That a really good religion Is a form of treason. -- "On Banning Bokonon" Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
Way down in the state of Georgia/ among the swamps and everglades / there's a big hole in Tiger Mountain/ God help the man who gets lost in Miller's Cave...
Sometimes I think that Wolf Country should relocate to Miller's Cave...
"Of course, our grotesquerie of a president decided that it was horrible that these disasters keep piling up, stoked by a combination of overheated rhetoric, totally unhinged and evil behavior, and perhaps the full moon were detracting from his many accomplishments like…crashing the stock market? Threatening the Federal Reserve, supposedly telling the Chairman not to raise rates or he would get even; then, ok-ing the largest bond action to get over the known monster deficit his beloved tax disaster — err, law — shot in the Federal coffers."
Look, Russia invaded our country by interfering the election and has been engaged in information and cyber warfare against us and our allies for at least a decade. Trump is doing everything possible to cover that up and let them have an expressway into the next election. It's treason in effect; it certainly violates the espionage act and a variety of other things. We need to start saying that out loud.
Look, the things that made America a world wide power weren't an isolated economy and military power. It was when we stepped up in 1941 through 2012 and tried to lead the world through a leadership based on principles of liberal democracy as opposed to Realpolitik, selfish national interest, and greed. When we violated those principles, we ran into problems…and on a world stage, problems tend to play out over generations if not centuries. So, if you are crafting an overarching policy for governing a great world power, "don’t do stupid things!" would be a great first principle. This administration instead has an overarching policy of "Abe Lincoln was a Republican...I bet you didn't know that!"
So if you are wearing a MAGA hat, I suspect you’ve already stopped reading my stuff, where ever I link it or post it, so read some history of the US involvement in Iran, Cuba and Latin America, and Mexico instead. Read Mark Bowen’s “Blackhawk Down” and “Tet.” Read Ralph Peters’ series of US civil war novels. Get some perspective that doesn’t include ditto signs. Read some collections of George Wills’ writings, some Ralph Meacham, Sandberg’s Lincoln. Read the history of the US constitution. Get a bit more knowledge and maybe even some perspective. If nothing else, try to be an informed, loyal and situationally aware American.
Kissing the collective asses of Putin, Xe, and Kim probably is certainly not the way to make or keep America great.
The title is from some dialogue in Inherit the Wind, the great 50s play and 60s film ostensibly about the Scopes trial but really about the freedom of thought and expression. Lots of lessons for us, and if you haven't seen the film or read the play, you are missing a treat. I believe that line was lifted verbatim from the trial record. Clarence Darrow, denied by the court of using expert witnesses to justify his client's teaching of evolution, put Williams Jennings Bryan on the stand as an expert on the bible and in a marvelous display of his skills, puts the Bryan and establishment position to shame. In this small bit of dialogue, the Bryan character says that "I do not think about the things I don't think about?" Crowd erupts! Yea, Christianity. Toss the lousy science teacher to the lions!
In the film, Spencer Tracy played the Darrow character, and he looks up and asks " Do you think about the things you do think about?"
This is intended as a way of kicking off a bit of a thought experiment. Both Crispin and I have thought for years that the real advantage to a blog is the possibility of learning. It can be a dynamic conversation, as people reflect on issues and experiences. Lots of it has degenerated since the glory years of the medium. Here's an attempt to start one again, here where I was forced by a prickly weirdo philosopher to start thinking critically and reflecting critically more than a decade ago.
There is nothing unique about what's happening in this mess. Far from it; my boots share some of the same shit Kelly now has on his and if you hang around long enough in leadership roles or advisory roles you'll have it too. The possibility in this case is that this case blows up that sort of People-Processes-Protocols-Procedures-Organizational Dynamics-Learning-Communications-Ethics nexus so we can see it. Not unlike what Plato did in The Republic, taking the question of individual ethics and blowing it up into political science. Looking for the ideal state and finding something like a steroidal Sparta says more about Plato than it does about the thought experiment.
So, please take a second to read my piece from Veterans News Today and just think about the Kelly thing. What have we learned from this about how things that seem so simple go so wrong? What is the key underlying failure here and how does it relate to similar situations where this sort of mud has splattered on your boots --Crispy's famous last stand for the academic freedom to quote Miranda Lambert comes to mind -- and what should we learn from thinking about this? Put your thoughts into the comments here since Vets has gotten weird about comments pages. If you wish, drop me a note at [email protected] because I'd like to know what people think, not just about my failed stabs at brilliance but about thinking about thinking about what you're thinking about.
New post. Gratuitous although relevant Doors music. Shakespeare. List of Russian Movies on Afghanistan. General Character assassination of Trump, although there's really not that much to assassinate. Call for Jesus to Smite Mike Pence. Normal Wednesday here in Wolf Country.
I was working on a different piece, wanting to segue from Trump into some recent books about how generally awful war and diplomacy are when you have no idea as to what you want tor an outcome. However, I began by wondering if I was the only writer on the staff who wondered when the woke daily "what the hell has that idiot done now?" Tapped a vein...
New post. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Outsiders have trying that over and over and over with Afghanistan since Alexander the Great, and it didn't work all that well any of them.
Well, I suspect we might see a US civil war at some point in the future, probably brought on in part by this morass of utter incompetent and deranged bullshit. Definitely, Madison and Hamilton never envisioned a Donald Trump except locked in Bedlam...
One thing I will say is that H.R. McMaster has one of the most thankless and impossible jobs in Washington. Thank God Stephen Miller is writing Trump's speech for the Islamic leaders. That should be interesting, he seems like a nice person to do that.
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 write about the environment very often because when I do I usually get angry and then despair at how incredibly stupid we are. Seriously, it's time for the spiders, because we're useless drags on the universe.
That said, when a bunch of people get in the room, watch a shit sandwich sign a piece of paper and then tell lies about how wonderful it's all going to be, and everybody in the room know that he's lying and ignorant and uninformed and that they're reinforcing this with their Mike Pence wide-eyed, Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love staring smiles, you either get angry about it or die. Even aesthetically, it's awful. Morally, ethically, policy-wise, governance wise, it's awful. Even when some of the victims are there, smiling...it's smug, stupid and alternately self-defeating.
I always found time to struggle through Umberto Eco's stuff, even though it was a hard day at the literary coal face. Most literary philosophers are like that, of course; Foucault's Pendulum really made my eyes ache, and as Wiki points out, Anthony Burgess said that it had so many arcane references and allusions that to get all the jokes, you needed an index. Or, a crib sheet. Cliff notes. A tutor...
But, it was always worth the work. Even if you weren't so sure as to what actually went on and how it happened, it was one helluva ride. So, it was nice to be reminded of that this morning when going through The Guardian I found this:
The great philosopher-novelist Umberto Eco once declared that we will always come up against “the hard core of Being” and the “lines of resistance” that tell us when we are talking rubbish, or acting nonsensically. There was a time when I wondered bleakly if Donald Trump may be exempt from this philosophical precept.
British political reporter and Guardian Journalist Matthew d'Ancona rattles more than a few chains in Trump's attic and cages in his basement. Muslim Exclusion Act is one part of Being's hard core; the AHCA versus ACA is another; and the whole NATO kerfuffle is another. At some point, the whole house of Cheese will just melt into the Dumpster Fire of his ID and his lackeys' ideological venom and self-dealing desires.
In business, I refer to it as having a great idea trip over a relevant fact. Stainless steel pipe is really spiffy, except when you're using it to handle salt water where it will eat through the metal and leak catastrophically faster than cancer through a colon. You can't get jet fuel out of peanut butter no matter how hard you try. You really can't roller skate in a buffalo herd.
And, being President of a complex and multi-layered tripartite government is not the same as being the sole proprietor of a privately held firm. Nobody really has to listen to what you want in government; it's all fungible. You don't really have any privacy or the ability to just phone it in; when you do, something happens. When you get it wrong, people will notice. Smart people, with long memories, and not all that interested in trusting a con artist, poseur and hype-artist. People way smarter than you who remember insults and slights just as malevolently as you do, but wait for the proper time to get even. How much might Lindsay Graham or Ted Cruz enjoy casting the vote that impeaches his President and casts him out into darkness?
D'Ancona finishes like this, no time for parades and an auto da fe' of Breitbart, Ivanka's lingerie line and The Art of the Deal. At least, not yet. But the time is coming...if you keep smashing into Being's hard core by tripping over facts including "You're not the boss of me and you're not so big" you may be forced to drag you orange ass back to that Florida swamp and hand out timeshares.
To change the metaphor: the waves of Trump’s sociopathic belief that he can say and do what he likes with impunity are starting to hit the rocks of reality. There is nothing to celebrate yet, no cause to relax, no outcome assured. Let us just say that this may, conceivably, be the end of the beginning.
Interesting article about Britain, English folk music and tradition, and in a way, about us.Stick in the Wheel is a relatively new English Folk Group, and started to wonder about the roots of English traditional music. Nicola Keary and Ian Keary are two members of the band and recorded a series of field recordings of traditional British music with a wide variety of the musicians currently practicing the art. They wrote the piece for the Guardian and it's well worth it. The resulting album, From Here, is being released today and is available as MP3 and CD from Amazon and others.
The UK is at least as diverse a nation as we are, with many similar problems, and we share a surprising number of anal-retentive characteristics. The Brits voted for BREXIT with less than half the electorate showing up and a lot of votes in favor of it just because they were pissed off at the seeming inability of government to cope and rather than blame it on themselves for electing the Tory wankers, they decided to blame the EU as the representative of all their woes.
The message of protest is often intrinsic or hidden. It has to be quietly subversive because our enemies are among us: our rulers and bosses
We, of course, had less than half the electorate show up and of that, less than half voted for Donald Trump. Our food, beer and dental work is superior; they have better schools for the most part and a functioning national health service, except they've shown in it and the other aspects of community life that if you want to have nice things as a nation, you need to spend the necessary money. Trump shares little with Margaret Thatcher except greed and basic deep-seated meanness.
From The Guardian Books Newsletter, January 26, 2017--Poem of the Week
Slow Food
I would like to feed this child who is dying with slow food, So that time might stand still for him, so that a grandfather Clock might not fall apart in his arms. All of the laziness of air
In our warm temperate climate, all the anxious hands Of young barristers at this morning’s Farmers’ Market, All of this complete snobbery of the gut, might bear down
Upon one dying child. Here is my Euro, child. Here is The olive oil and the stuffed artichoke. Here is the conscience And the conscience money. They stole my land too,
They took my small cottage apart, stone by stone. They surveyed all of us and we nearly died. I am sending, child, Very fast Irish food from my evicted great grandmother. --Thomas McCarthy, 2016
Reading this and seeing mental visions of pictures and faces and memorials, I also saw similarities to Alepo and Syria, and Israel and Palestine -- coffin ships, starving refugees seeking something probably inescapable, and a heritage of a horrid night and day...Pandemonium is the capital of Hell, and when the evil doers sit there and plot against heaven with fallen angels and demons, they'll be singing along with venture capitalists, factory farmers, religious bigots and imperialists throughout history. No one's heritage is clean...we should be better.
So, not being a folk singer, I wrote this article.... We may be the cops of the world but we're really not very good at it. As with so much since the death of Truman, we may mean well but our efforts to make the world a better place end up in an orgy of negative masturbation, doing things that neither feel good nor accomplish anything meaningful.
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.
He begins to sense the walls closing in, his options limited, his power constrained. He wants to fly in his own jet and discovers that after January 20, that just isn’t going to happen. How can he be expected to fly in an airplane where his bathroom doesn’t have gold fixtures? He is no longer important; his office lends him what importance he has. It’s a different kettle of foie gras…
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.)
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?
After reading an article in the New Yorker that seemed to confuse Merle Haggard with Jean Paul Belmondo and maybe Johnny Holiday, I gave up. Lucinda Williams recommended a piece and that made me think it might be really possible to still communicate authentically in English. So, while this is kind of a review of the writer's piece, it's really my tribute. Haggard was a lot of things but one thing no one ever accused him of to his face, anyway, was being some kind of auteur. So, in a probably misguided attempt at authenticity...Melancholy Honkytonk.
Being authentic and honest has it's dangers and downsides -- ask Crispin -- but if you work at it, you might be surprised a bit. Maybe even in a good way. --Mike
I've been reading Mary Beards, SPQR-AHistory of Rome and it is fantastic. Imagine that you are public intellectual and on TV a reporter asks a little girl "Who do you want to be when you grow up?" and the girl just beams and smiles and says, "Mary Beard." Not Duchess Kate? Somewhere, a unicorn may have died, but I think the English Women's Rugby Team will continue to put the Men's Team to shame.
I was having a bit of writer's block and came upon a piece on Premier Guitar. Their Chief Content Officer, whatever the hell that is that's different from Managing Editor, Shawn Hammond had a great piece about shoulder devils and guardian angels and what to do when you are hearing a constant refrain of "You suck..."in your head. He recommends watching "The Young Ones" which might work for most people...especially if somehow you missed Rick and Vivian and Alexi and the Boys raising hell on BBC or PBS.
Anyway, I went through a couple of re-writes -- I never re-write; Crispin gave me a C- on a post just to get me to proof-read and edit, and produced this - part review of Beard's really good book; part discussion of her most key point, at least for me -- Rome provides a context and a model for us, but don't look there for solutions. We're on our own here, and trying to do a double envelopment like Hannibal at Cannae won't help with DAESH.
I've been very sick the last couple of weeks. One course of pretty nasty antibiotics and I started to feel better and then wham! Back to the local Stop&Doc where I got the first prescription and the office, which serves a couple of hundred people daily. They couldn't find a substitute to cover while the normal guy took some vacation. We commiserated back and forth, since I needed help; and they -- four people -- were waiting for the word to close shop and 3/4s of a day's pay.
While this was a personal problem, it got me thinking. I've had 2-4 cases of strep throat and associated problems every year since before Crispin was born. Had the tonsils out when I was 20 and the idea that no more sore throats was a total lie. However, there was a lot less misery. Still, when it gets full blown, I'm pretty useless. More so than normal, according to some.
On the other hand, I've never had smallpox, tetanus, swine flu, diphtheria, thyroid, tetanus, rabies, rubella, shingles, malaria, plague, anthrax or any of the other stuff I've been vaccinated for. Made me wonder why this is so...
Been wondering what will happen to the nation and the world and your 401K and the Mets when Boehner is gone and the guy who wants to invade Syria takes the gavel as the Speaker of the House? Well, in general, everything is fucked.
I sense that like me, Crispin has been taking a vacation from giving a damn about US presidential politics, but occasionally feels pulled back into it. Certainly, in the progression of American culture, presidential politics, choices and elections have been used to make transitions. Kennedy replaced tired, worn out old Eisenhower with vigah! and such -- in reality, drugged to the gills for back pain, suffering from Addisons and various iterations of venereal disease. Ronald Reagan was going to reform everything after the weakness of Jimmy Carter and then should have been impeached for the Iran Contra deal. And so on -- Barrack Obama was supposed to mark out transition to being a post racial nation, and since then we have gotten to continually play out our dark night of the soul in communities all over the country.
Crispin's more populist work, like cheese it, tend toward an ironic approach which was my first reason for reading his stuff. This piece, which comes at least in part from his piece on the Philosophy of Edgar Allan Poe, contains more than a little of it. Basically, one could contend that Crispin examines the idea of human self-improvement as moral and ethical and compassionate human beings.
It's safe to say he approves that outcome, he just doesn't think it's very likely. I suspect most of us will probably agree, at least in part. As I tell the conspiracy freaks who normally read my stuff, if I'm looking for a reason why somebody did something stupid, I opt first for stupidity and then for the seven deadly sins. Dr, King was hopefully correct about the arc of human history being toward justice, but I'd hedge those bets with one's on sloth, gluttony, greed, lust, hatred, anger and pride.
I have placed an article that I originally published over at Veterans Today at the Defeatists, considering Norman Mailer in some contexts as well as using it for an allegorical lead-in to a question about a question nobody ever asks -- why the hell are we in Afghanistan? I'd appreciate a few readers of Crispin's and my occasional blithely spirited nonsense taking a look at it and answering the question what the hell they think we're doing there, besides spending blood and treasure and propping up narco-lords and war profiteers. I've gotten some good comments at Vets as well as the usual stuff blaming Kazakian Talmudic Mafia or whatever the hell that is?
If you haven't read any of Mailer, I'd recommend starting with his journalism; if you've read Harlot's Ghost or that bizarre thing he wrote about Ancient Egypt, I really recommend going back to the journalism. Advertisements for Myself, Cannibals and Christians, and The Armies of the Night. He is credited as one of the inventors of New Journalism which seems kind of unfair that he shares credit from Hunter S. Thompson and Truman Capote. He predated them pretty much, and was at least as fucked up as Thompson. He got in fights, ran for Mayor of New York City with Jimmy Breslin, made auteur-style awful movies staring himself and Rip Thorn, and pontificated about existentialism, art and why he had stabbed his wife. He was very much like Crispin, except Crispin has done none of those things.
If you have thoughts, please post them here, or at The Defeatists or find the article at Vets Today and let me know about them. I intend to consolidate them and publish a summary. So far, the verdict is split between stupidity, cupidity or crime.
I've been sulking in my cave as I follow the news avoiding anything about Presidential Politics that isn't outright hilarious, so obviously Bobby "Alligator Gar" Jindal and Donald "Singing Bass" Trump and Ted "Hey, I'm an asshole, all right" Cruz are amusing the hell out of me. Unfortunately, the rest of the world sucks.
The Mother Emmanuel killings were horrible, and the relocation of the Confederate Battle Flag to the the Statehouse Museum in Columbia was so overdue that the joy seems as sad as the tears and anger. I was slightly enraged about all the nonsense with the faces on the dollar bills, since I am a fan of Andy "By God" Jackson, the first true Democrat and elected man of the people as opposed to aristocrat who would have handled things a bit differently than Lincoln. Since he threatened to hang his Vice President, John C. Calhoun for sedition with his nonsense about "secession" and "nullification" I suspect he would have been very nasty to the south early on in the secession kerfluffle, resulting in a lot less death and destruction. I also think there's no reason to have the permanent fixtures on the bills anyway...rotate them with bona fide distinguished Americans and heroes who were not politicans; have multiple faces on the bills.Let each new Secretary of the Treasury usher in new placeholders on the Bills.
Then David Brooks wrote some nonsense about removing all the monuments to Confederate heros from the public byways and locations in the South. In a way, Brooks is advocating something a lot more draconian than just moving one flag and possibly changing a couple of others. Of course, his big focus was on Robert E. Lee which was silly. Lee made one ethical error that resulted in the destruction of his beloved Virginia, the loss of his estate, and the death of friends, family members and close associates including more than a few Yankees. It was an ethical judgement that he struggled with; had Joseph Jackson not been seriously wounded and forced to spend a couple of years recovering, Lee had been asked to fill and had agreed to fill a non-combatant job advising Jefferson Davis, whom he disliked, and who was not so fond of him. Lee also refused to be buried in his uniform and famously told his soldiers to go home. He was one of the first of the Southern generals to request that he be granted his citizenship back.
So, Brooks -- the smug, wealthy elitist who writes the same Capitalism is the answer/Globalism is great drivel as Tom Fiedman although less hysterically -- pissed me off. I mused over that article, but before I could get my teeth into it, the Cosby thing blew up. And continued to blow up.
Now, possibly alone in my generation and subsequent ones, I never liked Bill Cosby. His last original stuff was in the first couple of albums, and the rest of his body of work has been jejune and marginal. I never watched the show, and think anyone who goes out of his way to wear some multicolored vomit looking sweater needs help. I had no problem with his diagnosis of many of the problems in the Black community; I did think he was pretty smug about it and very good at blaming victims.
But, I'd never picked him as a serial rapist. Surprise! At the same time, it appears that Kim Fowley whom I've written of recently with a certain amount of respect, raped at least one and possibly more of the members of the Runaways...when they were minors. He wrote in one of his memoirs that he had never "made love" to any of the Runaways. Well, the HuffPo article bears no resemblance to a description of love making...he drugged her, ripped her clothes off and fucked her in front of a room full of people including some of the other members who were so intimidated that they never spoke of it.
Ok, the Kim Fowley I got to know a little and whose Underground Garage Show on SiriusXM that I enjoyed was the guy 40 years later. He was a rock and roll auteur; most of the stuff he produced and did himself was pretty awful dreck and he admits it. The Runaways were probably his greatest success after getting people to light their lighters to show John Lennon how much they loved him as he made his first Plastic Ono Band appearance and I shouldn't forget Alley Opp which was actually his first record and probably his biggest hit.
So, Cosby and Fowley were both reprehensible men. The difference between them is that Cosby held himself to be a role model; Kim Fowley never held himself up as anything except a rock and roll animal. One is a hyprocrite; one far less so. I know which I prefer.
I strongly recommend political junkies and philosophy fans take a look at Anat Belitzki's The Stone column in the this morning's New York Times, Making It Explicit in Israel. Excellent piece by an Israeli philosopher about the implications of the stark differences between the incoming government and the way Israel has portrayed its intentions toward the Palestinian community. Not particularly optimistic, except that only by making underlying issues explicit can we begin to deal with them. Perhaps the reason yesterday's solutions do not work is because they never were solutions so much as bromides.
Belitzki is a professor at Quinnipiac University here in the US and at the University of Tel Aviv, and has a record of activism in Israeli civil rights. She references the work of American philosopher Robert Brandom who believes that it is possible to use language to make explicit what is real and implied in our social, cultural and political norms. For example, in Israeli-American dialogue, the two state solution is a given, and we're just discussing means and implementation and guarantees.
Bizetzki says that just isn't true, and that the most recent Israeli election shows that very starkly. She writes:
The government that will be formed this week is the most clearly articulated, narrowest, most right-wing, most religious and most nationalistic government ever assembled in Israel. A combination of the fundamentalist Orthodox clerical parties with the nationalistic chauvinism of the Jewish Home, led by Naftali Bennett who makes no attempt to hide his annexation plans, has been orchestrated by Benjamin Netanyahu in no uncertain terms. Along with Likud, Netanyahu’s home, which is the largest party in Israel today, and Kulanu (All of Us – a breakaway of Likud), this whole bloc is unambiguous in its Jewish, nationalistic agenda. (Emphasis added)
She believes that this explosion of truth into what was basically polite lies and cocktail conversation between Israel's leaders and the world was foreshadowed and made inevitable by the two month long attack on Gaza by the Israeli army in July-August 2014. The implicit issues between the US understanding of the agreed path forward -- Two State Solution, Camp David Accords, etc. -- and what Israel's government intends is pretty well illustrated by the odd mis-translation of the name of the operation. Operation "Tsuk Eitan." was announced to the world as Operation "Protective Edge" which has a somewhat defensive tone; she says that a more accurate translation would be "Firm Cliff" which has a vaguer yet more threatening tone. My use of a Google translator resulted in "A Rock" which opens a wide range of possibilities. Perhaps "Perhaps Operation Masada" or "Operation Stoning" would have been more appropriate.
one thing i'd say about our cultural moment: people hate to argue, or even disagree. they don't want to argue about politics, or art, or anything else, and the sheer fact that you disagree with someone threatens their self-esteem. now people do still want to insult and berate people but only in the company of other people who agree with themselves. no one wants to have an actual exchange. i am going to be uncomfortable in a world like that, and really it's not a world conducive to philosophy, for example. i do think it's a chickenshit moment: people are scared that they're going to be harmed by a well-turned phrase; if you live in fear of words and ideas, i think you need more grit. i grew up among extremely combative and definite adults, arguing all the time about everything. most of the time, this was good: straight up fun for all concerned, even when they were turning red in the face and exploding with insults. if disagreement is prohibited, we'll merge toward completely unjustified consensus within groups and a total incomprehension and ignorance between them that is the last straw of polarization. people are making themselves stupid cowards on principle. also people are credulous to the point of emptiness within their own little spheres of fake consensus, merely subordinated, and by their own choice. you might think that arguing pulls people apart, while agreement pulls them together. but in politics, this approach is liable to leave us in two camps, bristling with hostility toward one another and totally disabled in communicating with one another. arguing is what keeps a democracy unified.
i do think philosophy is pretty essentially agonistic. many would deny that, or seek to overcome it, or connect it to the male-dominatedness of the profession, etc. but usually people who have thought that a consensus must emerge merely fantasized that everyone would eventually agree with themselves. (i don't know why people would think that women can't argue or are always agreeable or something.) but anyway: plato vs. the sophists and aristotle v plato, right? all those hellenistic schools against one another. empiricists against rationalists, and each against each other. an important source of kierkegaard's philosophy is his loathing of all things hegel. nietzsche against everyone. quine against carnap or austin v ayer. or even: confucius vs. lao tzu and mo tzu, etc. people want the issues to be resolved; i'm especially interested in those i think never will be, which are wide-open contexts for debate. seriously, i just wrote a big old 'system of philosophy' a la schopenhauer or something. do i think that it will set things, or anything, to rest? i hope not, even if i do think (right now, provisionally) that my positions are right. i know my fantasy of owning the future with my philosophy is just that. i'd like to be read, but i'm as happy to read with hostility as with agreement, though i'm happy about that too if i ever get any. but without my extreme rejection of plato, kant, hegel, rorty, etc, the thing wouldn't exist at all.
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