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November 15, 2012 - November 8, 2012

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

FOLLOW-UP. Usually, commenters demonstrate the validity of the truism about herding cats. They seize on one phrase or paragraph in a post and run off in their own individualistic directions. Which is fine and to be expected. Not this time, though. Three generations -- preponderantly the 50+ crowd -- checked in to report on their own relation to the map test, implicitly confirming that it is somehow important, even if the knowledge involved never made them rich. Left unsaid: it made them wiser and more concerned about the state of our nation's youth. They don't need to know precisely why. They just know it's not trivia. They also took my question about "Rhapsody in Blue" seriously and answered it honestly. Which is to say their comments weren't about showing off. They were about pondering the bigger question I'm asking.

The dissenters were equally revealing. Penny likes attention. Here's her response:


Really, Penny? If the readers and kids didn't count with me, I wouldn't be here. Nasty? Maybe. And maybe the kids need to know that there's someone who's willing to call them on their bullshit. Because make no mistake. A bullshitter knows he's a bullshitter. He keeps doing it, though, till he gets caught and held to account. It's long past time that the veneer of learning is differentiated from the real thing. I think it might actually constitute a relief for them: I don't have to keep faking everything with no end in sight.

Speaking of which, there was also Helk, who commented four times. First, with a snide link without explanation designed to jeer at the whole subject of American culture:


But then, as other commenters piled on, he couldn't resist resisting their import:



I'm sure he'll forgive me for responding to all of them at once. I think it's called multi-tasking, something only you tech babies are supposed to be capable of.

Yeah, I know Coolidge. His son went to my school. I used to see the boy's portrait in Traylor Hall every time I was called to the headmaster's office to explain the latest outrage I'd published in the school newspaper or the school literary magazine. He was a handsome kid, Coolidge's boy. He died of blood poisoning. At my school. He wore colored socks in a tennis match, got a blister, and the dye did him in. Maybe a reason why Silent Cal was so silent. His best quote? A woman at a dinner party sat next to Coolidge and told him she'd bet her girlfriends she could make him say three words. He replied, "You lose."

The same message I have for Helk. You're simultaneously so above the trivial nature of my tests that you can't be bothered to take them seriously and yet so beneath their esoterica that you paint a portrait of yourself with your hands sunk deep in the good earth, just trying to make a buck like Coolidge said we should, doing the real American thing.

What a crock. Because then you proceed to hang Coolidge's subsequent words from the same quote about idealism around my neck. That's called having your cake and eating it too.

You're too authentic to have to know anything about your country because you're operating under the Prime Directive of your country: to make money and forget everything else.

Then you top it off with a jeering link to "The Greatest Speech Ever Made," hoping to impress by the subtlety of your supposed learning, which you personally don't need at the moment because you're shaking the money tree, yet you just had to twinkle your implied superiority because all us "idealists" are just too self-involved with cultural trivia you know just enough about to piss on. Color me unimpressed.

You know that I know that you know "the Great Dictator" was a massive critical failure. The "greatest speech" is widely considered the disastrously mawkish, self-indulgent end of a career that would have ended more nobly if Chaplin had retired when talkies came in. (I never cared for Chaplin anyway.)

So, again, you're trying to have it both ways. You're not accountable to any objective standard of learning, but you just have to show off what you think of as learning ("I'm conversant with... what?")

You're a quick study and a multimedia dilettante. But if you're so focused on making your fortune, why do you you keep scratching the itch of my posts? Because you know I'm right. There's a difference between being smart and being intelligent. The Latin root of 'intelligence" relates not to IQ but understanding. Which has nothing to do with quick command of facts and references but learning and wisdom.

I'm no idealist. I think Chaplin's speech is farcical and idiotic. I'm a pragmatist. An imaginative realist, if you will. I believe we can make things better, not perfect. I don't believe in any human paradise. There will always be pain and suffering and injustice and waste. We mitigate these by doing the best we can to understand as much as we can and make good decisions that aren't exclusively selfish in their intent. Knowing the human legacy is a vital resource for keeping the intent honest and resolute. If you've read as much of my work as you say you have, you know this already.

I think that's why you came here and why you stay here. Your cynicism, your various poses, your provocations, all have to do with the fact that you're using brains as a substitute for intelligence. You sensed that I had the ability to see through that. You wanted me to see through that.

And, no, I'm not trying to break you down. In my twenties I was like you. I'd skated through everything on smarts alone. And then I realized it was a dead end. That's when I sat down and taught myself how to write. The most painful process I've ever been through. I'd graduated from college at the age of nineteen without knowing how to write. When I'd learned how to write, nothing was ever the same again. Knowing one thing made me aware of how much I didn't know about everything else. Honest humility is the surest defense in the world against slick fakery. Everything I tried after that I did to the absolute best of my ability, because I knew it would never be good enough. I may seem like an egomaniac at InstaPunk. In reality, I always see myself as a week late and a million dollars short. (Thought you'd appreciate the monetary reference.)

It's not me trying to humiliate you that I can see and anticipate your debating maneuvers as easily as Neo with Agent Smith at the end of The Matrix. I've been there. How can I be so smart and keep getting nowhere? Hmmm.

This is your wakeup call. Sure you can win what you want materially. Making money for a smart person is about being fanatically focused on money. But I'm talking about life. And you can't quite figure out how to have one of those.

Go print out the map. Fill in the names of the states. Et cetera. Et cetera. I guarantee you, you are not above the exercise.

HALF-ASSED SPOILERS AHEAD. I should explain that Mrs. RL is very quick on the trigger with movies and TV shows. "This sucks. Get rid of it." Sometimes, though, I find things she slowly comes to enjoy. Why I do what I call pre-screening. I did that with Terra Nova, Steven Spielberg's new gigantic TV epic. I was skeptical from the first promos. "Something you've never seen before!" Really. Like we didn't see Avatar and Jurassic Park I thru VIII. Okay. Excuse us for remembering. We promise not to do it again.

But I watched it On Demand anyway. After seeing the trailers for Prime Suspect, she said, "No way." But after the pilot episode, she's intrigued.  So what's the deal with Terra Nova? My report.

Honestly, I find myself chuckling. I can see Spielberg's and all of lefty Hollywood's intent, and I can't help thinking they've swallowed their own grenade. The show is supposed to be a billboard for environmental paranoia, meaning the need for our acceptance of draconian governmental control of energy resources (you know, to save us from ourselves), and after the first 20 minutes it becomes something altogether else. An advertisement for free enterprise, the need for military protection even in a putative utopia, and a startling contextual preference for dangerous, unpredictable frontier life over regulated nonentity.

Talk about counter-propaganda.... and it doesn't end there. The script's need for drama requires that all the old human weaknesses be repeated in the Jurassic world of Terra Nova's brontosauri and T-Rexes. But as with all Spielberg pieces, the most active agents of chaos are the Kids who refuse to listen to their parents, have no common sense, and absolutely no personal connection with anything like community responsibility. No wonder Spielberg makes campaign contributions toward an all-powerful nanny state. His parents couldn't control him. He can't control his kids, and, well, QED.

Which raises the philosophical question, if snotty narcissistic kids aren't evil and parents' attempts to discipline them are, then why are we even talking about the Nature of Man? Civilization was obviously doomed from the moment American children learned they could tell Mommy and Daddy to go fuck themselves. We should be agonizing over The Natue of Teenagers, the one force in the universe even God doesn't have the guts to confront. Why bother doing this all over again in 25 million BC when Spielberg has made it the central theme of every movie he's made that contains kid actors?

Because of the CGI, stupid.

Which is pretty good.The dinosaurs are convincing. Kewl. The other flora and fauna are convincing. The parents, excepting their characteristic doormat relationship with their sociopathic progeny, are decent enough. But we've seen all this before. Why watch?

One reason. The Sore Thumb.

You know. The thing that things stick out like?

Why I enjoyed this show so so much. The Sore Thumb is liberal Hollywood's understanding of the basics of civilized life. The biggest fantasy aspect of this sci-fi fantasy blockbuster isn't the time machine that transports Los Angelenos to the Jurassic Age, or the dinosaurs that pursue our heroes, or the immensely imaginative foliage that papers the sets. It's the Terra-Nova settlement itself. Everybody has a nice little house with bedrooms and decorations (discussions of paint), running water, and there are military vehicles charging hither and yon (powered by what?), nice new clothes (made by whom?), etc, etc.

Understand. The trip to Terra Nova is one way. They can't order provisions from the fatally stricken 22nd century earth. But the appurtenances look better than what we'd expect from Walden II.

In the entire two-hour pilot episode the only reference to actual labor was one day in the life of the hero when he had to cut down vines on the protecting wall in the so-called "agricultural unit." No sign of factories, mills, refineries, oil rigs, blacksmiths, or anything else that bespeaks an industrial civilization. Truth to tell, Terra Nova is more reminscent of the Eloi in H.G. Welles's Time Machine than it, well, isn't. So there. I can't wait for the Morlocks to show up. Oops. That's an entirely different new series. Sure it is.

Hence my title. It's liberal magic. The scriptwriters don't know anything about plumbing or electricity or manufacturing or weaving or sewing or energy production or home-building or motor vehicle maintenance, so they just assume it's all automatically there while the actors fret about where their kids are, knowing they'll never know. Because their kids are all absolute stone fucking brats like Steven Spielberg.

I think the show's a keeper. Funniest thing I've seen in years. This really is how lefties see the world. The invisible labor of people they don't care about will just materialize whenever they need it. Like an assistant with a Valium and a mango. And did I mention that the opening credits list eleven different "executive producers"? Obama would be proud.

Kewl.

CLARIFICATIONS. Right up front: I didn't mention abortion because I took it as understood we're all on the same page. It's bad. Unborn babies shouldn't be stabbed in the brain. This is me officially making that explicit. OK?

Since this is, as has recently been stressed, his blog, my responses to Robert's comments get their own post.


There's a Snake River-wide gulf between not having babies and letting babies die. I'd like the Followers of Christ membership to dwindle to zero as much as anyone, but passive infanticide is not an acceptable means to that end.


I'm reminded of George Will's speech to last year's CPAC. "The liberal/conservative argument in our country is alive and well. It turns on the two polar values of western political thought: Freedom and Equality. Both important, always in tension, always being adjusted." I'd argue the two polar values are, properly understood, freedom and justice (liberals got their portion wrong because that's what they do). That tension is complex enough to merit its own post. Or its own thousand posts. That's why I didn't address it in my entry on murder-by-faith-healing, a much smaller issue.


Which is why I didn't try. Hence the "agnost" part of "agnostic." And that's why your and urthshu's objections to my Holocaust example are moot (not to say I have any problem with their substance). The Holocaust proves God can't be relied on to preseve life on earth. It proves it. And it's not the only proof. I explicitly declined to make a claim one way or the other what that says about God. I'm more interested in what God's unreliability means for us, here.


Pascal (and Will Ashbless, via his 21st century updating of the Wager) got it backwards. God cannot, in justice, punish sincere disbelief. All he'd have to do to dispel legitimate doubt is make Himself manifest unambiguously to every individual-- small potatoes for the omnipotent. The fact sincere disbelief in Him can exist at all is His fault, no matter how good his reasons or extenuating his circumstances. And He understands this.

If He does punish honest nonbelievers, He's unjust. What can I do against tyrannical omnipotence, except hope for the chance to spit in despot God's eye before he sends me off to the eternal punishment of the upright? Maybe some great thinker will one day devise a contingency plan for a thing like that. Personally, that's not a battle I pick.

­I don't deny there may be a veil. I don't deny the veil is worth trying to pierce. I do deny I have any pressing imperative to pierce the veil. I do deny I ought to live according to any merely potential obligation to an unproven Creator.

Since there may not be a God, and we only potentially owe anything to a God who refuses to prove He exists beyond reasonable doubt, it makes sense to me to err on the side of atheism. Which means acting as though there's no safety net of life after death or of (infrequent at best) divine justice here in mortal life.

So in that sense, in Will's words, "there are no agnostic actions." In another sense, behaving as if this life is the one shot we've got is the action of a rational agnosticism.

I won't pretend I'm not biased one way or the other. I would prefer a Godless universe, with room to explore and build. I don't want God or anyone or thing else having dibs on the whole of existence. But my want alone doesn't affect reality. God might be real as hell. He may have done most or all of the building and exploring there is to do. When I die, I may have to just come to terms with that. I trust (hope) any God who does exist would be a paragon of goodness, and won't condemn me for not going against my honest judgement.

One last thing. Commenter ErisGuy made a remark I can't let lie.


Wrong. The state derives it's power from the consent of each individual governed. The individual, not the family, is the fundamental unit of society (don't feel bad; the Mormons make the same mistake). A free society respects the sanctity of self-determination. The family's most sacrosanct responsibility is to make sure its children develop a self that can determine its... self. ­A child can't very well determine himself before he has a self to determine.

Erm.

(9/29) MORE CLARIFICATIONS. From the comments:

But why is [abortion] bad? Don't get me wrong... I'm glad that you think so. But you haven't explained what your basis is for such a judgment.

Happy to oblige. Abortion is bad because life is the standard of value. Life-- not God or anything else-- is the purpose of morality. I'll explain.

It's that there's no objective moral law. The little detail that always gets left out.

But that's wrong, sir. The standard of life is the most objective morality there is.

When I read "there is no resurrection without Christianity" instead of "there is no Christianity without resurrection," I committed what psychologists call a Freudian fuck-up. Robert thought Christianity justified the resurrection. I thought the resurrection justified Christianity. Robert was operating from the primacy of God. I was operating from the primacy of life.

Put another way: Is God subordinate to good, or is good subordinate to God?

Imagine this. Somewhere in the universe, God has created a planet with human beings like us. The difference between Earth and Planet Q is, He's sending everyone on Planet Q to hell. Without exception. Regardless of merit. From serial rapists and Stalinesque tyrants to miscarried babies and sweet, gentle retards and five-year-old girls without a mean bone in their little bodies. Their brief, often frustrated lives were the closest to happiness they'll ever get. God created them to send them to hell. No salvation. No recourse. Just endless, eternal punishment. Forever.

Are you OK with that? Does no part of you object to that? Is your response "Whatever God wants is good"? Really?

Really? Really?

Really?

Are you sure?

Really?

IF it's not OK for God to create conscious human beings for the sole purpose of torturing them without end, then God is subordinate to good. Then morality is transtheistic.

You want something even more objective than the preservation of life? Sorry. Even God can't help you with that one. Any more than He explains the creation of existence? If God created everything, who created God? If God doesn't need a creator, why does existence? Similar problem with the morality question. Is an evil act good when God does it? If not, why not?

So God is accountable to you? Pitiful.

Straw fiat. God is accountable to morality. I've done my best to determine what morality consists of. Care to explain how I'm accountable God who keeps His existence ambiguous? Or how anyone is?

God is good if he serves life (same goes for the family, ErisGuy). I'd like to hear an argument to the contrary. Honest, I would.

STILL MORE. It isn't my, or maybe anyone's, responsibility to prove the existence of God to you.

Which is why I haven't asked you to.

And it lies within the realm of possibility that God may not view individuals as all that important, and He certainly doesn't seem to view death as an Evil, so maybe you shouldn't either.

The Holocaust wasn't evil, since God let it happen? Thanks for clearing that up. Your way is so much easier.

Guess what I'm saying is if you're going Agnostic, go all the way and stop building expectations of behavior towards a being you admit to knowing no definite information of.

Muhfugga, how many different ways do I have to repeat this? I'm not saying God should do a damn thing differently. I'd like Him to do more real-world saving, yes, but I'm not pining for it. When I was younger, I wanted to be saved by God or the lottery or the vaginas of my various crushes. But I'm putting away childish things. Believe it or not-- and I doubt you will, because I'm not sure you can begin to conceive of this-- I don't want to be saved anymore. I want freedom. Real freedom. Where both risk and reward are all mine. Where I get to take credit for what I make of my own life.

God can be what He wants. As it stands, He's chosen to save life on earth from horror and tragedy so infrequently that He effectively doesn't exist. Maybe His reasons for this are genuinely good. I'll repeat that in boldface, so you can't pretend you didn't see it: Maybe His reasons for this are genuinely good. That's literally fine. I'm interested in how we ought to conduct ourselves in light of His absenteeism.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

PSAYINGS.5Y.1-56 -- THE BARE BACKBONE. Since I've determined not to withdraw from the site I've had a change in perspective, prompted in large part by a couple of recent posts and exchanges with our younger hotshots. I realized I may have been making a mistake I was making when I began The Boomer Bible and had to learn not to make in completing it. I'm not trying to be pompous and superior here, just reportorial. My first outline and drafts were allusive and brief, depending on a base of shared cultural and historical knowledge I thought was our common heritage. Rather than the book of Ziggie, I had a book of Minoans, designed to lampoon Freudian concepts without ever mentioning Freud, for example. I thought everyone knew a little something about Freud. Then life intervened, as it does, and I had to put away the manuscript for a number of years, during which I learned that what I thought people knew they didn't know. Why The Boomer Bible turned out to be the monster it ultimately became and why I was afraid to resume the writing of it for so long. The more I learned about what people didn't know, the bigger the unwritten book got.

Now I realize I'm possibly repeating an error no man should make twice. I'm dazzled by the brilliance of multiple youngsters who have contributed to InstaPunk in recent years. They know plenty about plenty of things. But they also have a habit of wrenching themselves into absurd postures that make absolutely no sense to me. They display a kind of cynicism, and naivete, I can't comprehend. And, yes, I frequently use a cynical voice because that is an integral part of my role as a satirist -- to be scathing, denunciatory, and dismissive . But the very purpose of satire is to hold the world up to a moral standard the satirist really does believe in. By definition, he cannot be a cynic. Or he would not write. He does write because he desires to provoke thought, not to be God himself sitting in judgment.

I'm sympathetic to the spirit of youthful rebellion, because I was a rebel too. But I'm beginning to suspect that something is missing in even our brightest youngsters that I never doubted for a moment of my youth -- a ferocious admiration of the incredible beauty of life and the ineffable courage, creativity, and genius of the human race.

It's not my intent to point fingers. Examine recent posts and comment threads here, and you will find what I'm talking about. The education system in our country has failed them utterly. They're having to do it all for themselves, and maybe I've been remiss in repeatedly returning to the easiest of cultural touchstones -- popular music, TV, the movies, and the politics of the moment. My failure. Why I've been losing my temper so often. Failure will do that. Politics isn't about ideology, as written by this or that recent seer. Politics is about life, about preserving and promoting what is best in life, what makes life worth living, which can never be reduced to "jobs" or cold theories or individual chunks of legislation or monolithic villains of various stripes. To think intelligently about politics, we must all have a very deep context of the whole that includes not only what we most revere but also what we do not revere and yet need to know about.

What is context for a human being living in America in the early 21st century? It begins with a timeline of important historical events beginning all the way back in ancient Sumeria when writing first made history possible. But it doesn't end there. Dates aren't history and they aren't life. They're just the alphabet we need to learn before we can learn how to read. There is also geography, which is the landscape of history that begins to make sense of how people, ideas, conflicts, and illumination spread from one culture and one time to the next.

Permit me to take time out for a simple test. Can you fill in all the names of the states on this map without looking anything up in a book or on the Internet?