We're Better

Fuck you, you Lords and Ladies. I soothe myself sometimes with British drama. Okay, okay, it's a choice I make for the visual pleasure of it but, my God, there are people in those shows whose lives are extraordinarily significant and those whose lives are nothing at all. Evidently the lower classes buy into it for whatever perverse reasons. Fuck them all. 

It disgusts me, the idea that there are better and lesser people by birth, and the creation of subclasses of humanity. All this is reinforced in all kinds of formal, above-board ways and in more insidious and entrenched ways by inertia and by the weight of tradition. Why would we welcome this horrible practice into America? We've been a refuge from it for so long. 

But look at how wealth in America accumulates at the top for no reason at all. Nothing to do with innate worth or merit or productivity, anyway. It's impossible for anyone to be that productive, so much so that they have the kind of money these people have. Let them be rewarded, sure, and well enough, but wasn't that already the case, before the 1980's?

When, it was, that Republican economic policy took hold and the rest is misery. There is no doubt that the bad policy caused the extreme concentrations of wealth and that it continues through lies and deceit and strong-armed political tactics, systematically disenfranchising hard-working and loyal Americans, who live responsible lives and really fight the wars. 

We are the United States no longer. Fuck you, too, to the Republicans who have caused this. I hope someday they pay, though it may only be that they are eventually seen for what they are, greedy scoundrels and crooks, and betrayers of the true American traditions of decency and democracy and fair play.

Gods and Monsters

I've just read something on Edward Snowden and I have an opinion about him. I don't know much about it so this is a wide-angle, soft-focus view. To me he is a hero. What he did can't be said to be generically right, as a form of behavior, but in this instance it was right.

It doesn't matter what he intended or if he's a good person or has a big ego or what. At root it all has to do with nukes, no doubt, weaponry that is a totalitarian's dream, a great equalizer. The United States has struggled in trying to come to terms with the nukes.

They are major military mojo. And a paranoid's best friend. Our country was designed to be administratively inefficient, to protect us from totalitarianism, so there's a natural tension. We can level the field by becoming more totalitarian, with respect to the Russians.

Or whomever, and that's a big whomever because the people who developed a taste for fear or got overly attached to it out of familiarity are going to want fear and a focus for it, and with nukes that's easy, though "Islamo-fascism" is catchy and may stick around.

And someone just made it up. Anyway, let's suppose that America has gone somewhat totalitarian out of neurosis over the nukes and other threats, real and invented, and that Snowden is anti-totalitarian--not the man, necessarily, but what he represents.

I think this is the case. And let's look at the fear supposedly justifying things. Do nukes really change everything? I don't think so. Annihilation is annihilation, once or ten times over. One of life's greatest challenges is to put yourself in another's shoes and situation, historically.

When has annihilation not been a threat? It wasn't so long ago that people didn't know to look for rational explanations for things. You start with this, reason, one would think. Once it was all ascribed to gods and monsters to help with the fear. Now consider James Inhofe.

We have a guy in charge of a Senate committee on the environment who believes in causal explanations having to do with gods, and similar people in all kinds of positions of power in Washington and remember, we have nukes, and now no allegiance to reason. 

Oh, 9/11: fear-motivated people were in charge then, anti-rationalists and true believers. The USA as we knew it ceased to exist. It was never a perfect country but damn good in some respects and there were those who loved it in a grownup way, accepting its flaws.

Snowden is the antidote to this, the work of a fear-mongering coterie, our totalitarians. If they weren't justified then Snowden is. I won't fault him. But those other guys, the lovers of fear, have a lot to answer for, as Snowden has shown. And read about ABLE ARCHER '83.

In Wikipedia or wherever, when you have a chance, if you think it doesn't matter. See where the irrational guys can get you when they decide to have some fun and play war games. They almost got us all killed, all the while swearing that they are wise and militarily competent.

Flat-Earthers

What sense does it make to judge a society on how well it takes care of people who don't need taking care of? It's not much of a standard. It's the standard of the flat-earthers, those who deny reality out of fear or stupidity or greed or the need to submit to authority, to dehumanize themselves because they can't handle the responsibility of their own freedom. 

Hail the Conquering Heroes

How did the Kochenlocher boys get so rich? It's all kind of fuzzy. They went to a party, a sendoff for the poor slobs in the workingman's trenches, and woke up insanely wealthy and without a clear memory of how it happened. So they say. The working people may have had something to do with it, you would think, since that kind of money doesn't come out of nowhere, but those workers may get uppity and start demanding a share of the wealth so the money will be declared illegitimate.

Fatherless, and outside the realm of normal human causation, that is. Legitimate as hell on the Kochenlocher end, of course. I mean, what would you do but try to hang on to it in every way possible? And marry, ally yourself and legitimize the cash. Give it a daddy. A libertarian daddy. This is how you reverse-engineer the whole thing, you declare the creation of wealth to be the work of heroic individuals, the Norse gods of big business, excluding everyone else and social systems and infrastructure and so on.

Your think tanks put out memoranda to the effect of your greatness and how your golden touch made all that money in spite of the horrible, lazy working scum trying to hold you back and the hideous feds, memoranda replete with stats and figures and graphs and all kinds of fancy rationalization. There is no social aspect to the creation of that wealth at all, they say. It was a miracle, the miracle of J.P. Morgan's Creek, dwarfing the Loaves and Fishes incident. They are gods, ascended masters. Regard them with awe.

And leave them alone, it is recommended, for God's sake, and for your own good. Somehow, they reassure us, it all works out better that way, even for those whose jobs went away and who didn't come out of that last, libertarian-engineered economic crash intact. We must believe: they are heroes. We must trust them because we need heroes and they're plausible heroes, no matter how all the work actually got done and how many innocent people were hurt or neglected as the Kochenlochers made more and more money. 

Psycho Disaster

Who identifies with some nonentity who gets annihilated as a trivial thing in a violent movie? Nobody does but that was a person, too. Not really, but you know what I mean. Annihilation is something that happens to someone else, especially in a trivial scene or as one of a horde of people obliterated. This is the point of civilization.

Someone could walk up and shoot you but they don't, usually, because we have rules about that. Standards. Laws and regulations. How different is it to have similar rules in the worlds of business and finance? But, no, we can't have that. Why? Because certain persons have the equivalent of assault weapons and others have nothing.

Guess who wants to keep it that way. Financialization is dehumanization. It makes some people, arbitrarily, into nonentities, like some helot slaughtered in a film, the human equivalent of a packing peanut. So, when you go to see the new Mad Max movie, identify with all those slaughtered nonentities. Clearly they were not chosen.

They were not the elect, not preordained for salvation. The financial types must have been preordained for multiple money orgasm. The chosen choose themselves and then brazen it out from there, hoping they don't bite off too much and get caught at the chicanery. They think they've won but can't comprehend that some people don't care.

That it's not an issue for them, who's on top. Until, that is, the psychos take over and they get so hammered they have to act, meaning they are subjected to the financial version of someone walking up and shooting them. Has this not happened? It has, again and again. The sick thinking of Calvinism, the fatalism, determinism and resignation, is pervasive. 

People are persuaded that you get what you deserve and that it's inevitable. The winners foist this on those with hardship who, in fact, enable the rich to get rich, in many ways but notably by not shooting them. Deprivation is a slow form of slaughter. There is no freedom in insecurity. It causes fear and resentment but it's a big part of the New Jerusalem.

The New Jerusalem of the money men, that is, their well-rationalized society of unilateral predation, where they have their own set of rules and hope to hell against fair-play and the civilizing effects of regulation, real competition, without the leg-up they so love.

More, the Moving Target

Another aspect of narcissism is the culture of "more." Do you see the connection? A self lacks definition and so seeks definition through acquisition, as a way of saying "look at this shit, it's what I am." But the acquisitors are also trying to see themselves in the stuff, to get reassurance that they are the person they think they are or hope to be.

Of course it never works. The self has to have some kind of existence independently of the stuff or the stuff could as easily be said to be looking at the self, which is circular, the stuff reflecting on the self and the self on the stuff. There's no static point of reference, just interdependence, and the stuff is tainted by association with the insecure self. 

What did Groucho say about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him? So the insecure self can never be reassured, since it is looking for reassurance in the wrong place. And it has to always have "more" in an attempt to fill up something that is losing ground out the other end because the acquired stuff loses its power and becomes diminished.

The circle must be broken.

Running for the Exits

Occasionally I make the mistake of clicking on a video on YouTube with a title such as: "O'Reilly Gets His Ass Handed to Him." Usually I only watch music videos. The striking thing, besides the not-so-latent aggression and bogus indignation of Bill, is the belief in the rightness of America no matter how we behave. America must be right: always, everywhere, and irrespective of what we do. 

Love it or leave it. But in this virtual world of ours we know who is heading for the exits. You can head for the exits as though it's a video game and over time through technology because your financial self is a kind of avatar. Corporations are people. People are corporations, limited liability entities, with the ability to cross borders in all kinds of inventive ways. The motivation: to avoid taxation.

These self-proclaimed patriots don't think they have any responsibility at all to the society that made it possible. They think the society is the beneficiary and should be grateful that they deign to live here. Well, pardon me. Excuse me for my existence, for interfering with their money-lust, but I think they are the beneficiaries, as Franklin Roosevelt stated as though it were so obvious it couldn't be argued. 

Those who benefit the most are more responsible, in every way. Let me look at my crystal ball. I'm back. The crystal says that if we do the inconceivable, raise taxes to the levels of the fifties and sixties, let's say, when America was in fact great, when we made stuff and acted reasonably intelligently as a nation, O'Reilly and his clan will clog the exits, their virtual, financial selves and maybe bodily.

Be gone. "We the People" will live on and be better off without you.

The Mathical Month-Man

This is a story about what happens when people become part of an equation and hidden assumptions are forgotten or abandoned. Assumptions, I mean, about why productivity matters, why waste is bad, and what we are doing when we work and strive for something.

Work doesn't mean anything if it doesn't relate somehow to human welfare. Otherwise it doesn't matter. It fact it's obscene if all the intelligence and effort and expenditure of resources fail to result in more happiness for more people. That's where we are, though.

We're blowing resources and working our asses off and making rich people richer and nothing else, all to comply with a sick psychology and we're all implicated. All of us, that is, living in the USA.  We need help but of course we think we're better than everyone else. 

That's how it works. Crazy people don't think they're crazy, they think they're right. Normal people don't worry about being right, they want to be happy. Instead of humanizing economics and politics and all the sciences and education we quantify and objectify people. 

We make them into things. I propose that we consider the life of a person, for a month, in reasonably pleasant and satisfying circumstances. It has value and not only for that person. And yet this "month-man" becomes mathematized so that it has no weight. No value. 

There is human suffering underlying all the statistics and lots of confusion. People are frightened and don't understand what has happened. What's happened is that they have been systematically thwarted and disenfranchised, not by conspiracy but by common interest. 

The common interest and application of people who care only about themselves, clearly. I think it will all end in more suffering, the kind of suffering we have brought to other people with our greed, our compulsions, our demand for oil, our demand for drugs and for more stuff.

It has to stop.

Cristo, el Verdadero Amigo

Cristo, el Verdadero Amigo: I saw this on the back of a van and felt the warmth well up in my heart, in a way I never could have in reaction to any of the English translations I can come up with. I hate to think of anyone without a verdadero amigo. It may as well be Cristo. Cristo will not let you down. 

Everyone else can, by dying on you, if in no other way. Maybe in Spanish it's trite to native speakers, I don't know, but the only languages I've begun to learn well enough to sense the nuances in were ancient ones. I could do better in those than in English in getting new understanding and insight.

Take "arête." As a translation "excellence" doesn't cut it. It's an entire concept of culture and appropriateness. Evidently "simpatico" works in that way, comprising an ill-defined world of meaning which is, at the same time, entirely clear in it's fuzziness, being in the realm almost of harmonics.

English to me is so screwed up in this respect: so many words are too concrete and commercialized to be useful. I think English can rock in the macrocosm of writing. It's an incredibly rich language in it's scope, with so many innovations and introductions from interesting places.

And there are multiple strains of Latinate and Romance stuff, roots, particles and words, on top of the Germanic base. Though it's a great language there are problems at the atomic level. "Virtue." That's another reasonable translation of "arête," but it sounds like a whole lot of un-fun.

It also doesn't begin to capture the idea. Let's say we stick with "arête" for now. It's a word in English as well or should be.  I don't think he came up with it but E. F. Schumacher wrote about convergent and divergent problems and the corresponding kinds of thinking needed to address them. 

My fear is that American English has gone all convergent. We want answers, solutions without trade-offs, because we define everything worth having in terms of control and productivity, so it's all about solving problems and durable goods. Fine, but try to show the value of el Verdadero Amigo.

In that arena, or the value of arête. It's pointless. Must everything have an obvious point? For me it's what's worth worrying about, all the divergent things, where there are trade-offs and uncertainties and indescribable aesthetic joys and where there's room for the truth of human inadequacy.

A linguist once told me that to be funny something had to be un-captured by language, somehow elusive of it, so the convergent world of capture and containment is also humorless. Soulless. The convergent world is important. You want bridges not to fall down but soul matters as well.

Even if you can never properly define it or put your finger on it, because it's soul that gets you to sympathy and kindness and, one hopes, perhaps, to el verdadero amigo, the true friend, or maybe true friendship, where one can be simpatico in the world, with happiness and with humor.

Predation

Many people have written on the core difference between conservatives and progressives in America since the beginning of the extreme polarization, which I date to 1994, when Newt Gingrich and his horrible crowd of self-righteous, religious conservatives showed up in Washington. The things I have seen talk about authority and the need for certainty. 

Conservatives love authority and need certainty. The problem is that this is me. I like authority and believe in certainty, that there is truth or true things. I think that authority and truth are always there, that a belief in anarchy is a belief in anarchist authority, for example, and that truth is a matter of belief and that you couldn't get out of bed without it.

A real belief in chaos and meaninglessness would result in the disintegration of one's psyche. So what's up with the Gingrichers? They are not real conservatives. What they believe in is predation. Even this may have validity but they believe in biased predation, a situation in which they can't lose, so you see the roots of this in two things: slavery and inheritance.

The white Southerners in the coalition believe in predation with the situation hopelessly fixed in their favor. The wealthy believe in the same thing. Predation is great as long as they can't lose and the power can't be turned against them. Speaking from the point of view of the prey, this is not fair. If they want a death fight, okay, let's give it back. 

Let the bullies be bullied. They scream and squawk whenever there's a hint of this, as bullies always do, because they are cowards. They never realize the consequences of the system they adhere to, at least the negative ones. They dump all that on us. Enough, I say.