Month: January 2011

I thought I might add my two cents. I have not followed this closely, so these are general observations, based on general understandings.

Mubarak has to be understood in the context of the “our son of a bitch” aspect of American foreign policy. Egypt cannot stop being a democracy, since it has never BEEN a democracy. Nowhere in the Arab world, outside of Iraq, do ordinary Arabs have civil rights. Everywhere you have secret police, who can make people disappear, and do awful, unspeakable things to them.

And we made the decision some 35 years ago to, in effect, pay Egypt off as a condition of signing a peace treaty with Israel. That was Jimmy Carter, for those of you who are historically illiterate. Sadat paid with his life, but we have kept in people loyal to that basic agenda since then.

It has seemed for some time, though, that given the amount of money we give them annually, that we should be in a position to influence political liberalization. The fear in that region, of course, is always that in an open election the Muslim radicals will win. That means, of course, the end of open elections. It’s a one-off deal, then you get Iran, where the leaders decide who gets elected.

What the Muslim world as a whole lacks is a genuinely Liberal impulse, one which neither supports autocratic Sharia, nor the rule of the strongman. Given this gap, this lack, it is hard to find the people to back who will actually work to help anyone outside their small clique. Always with small-minded people it is win/lose, zero sum games. They don’t ask “What is good for Egypt as a whole?”, but rather “how can I take over Mubarak’s corrupt regime, so that the benefits of corruption will flow to me and mine?” It’s not corruption, per se, they care about.

Obviously, Mubarak is the target now, but whoever takes over–if someone takes over–can be counted on to be just as bad.

Democracy depends on decent people capable of looking at the big picture. For any people that is not decent, and not capable of wisdom, it is not viable. Such people get the governments they deserve, even if they are not the ones they want.

The word “holiday” comes from Holy Day. The intent was to create a separate type of time, of which the Sabbath is one example. It seems to me this is a useful idea. I sometimes get into that other type of time, when I’m not preoccupied with problems, planning, and the endless ruminations that define so much of my personality. Sometimes I’m just there, enjoying the day.

When you get like that, you can see your normal life in relief, such that you have perspective. So often I think we live mechanically, but never really stop to think about it, or see where we could do things differently.

To this day Catholics recogize different types of time, and even though I suspect most Catholics don’t take it very seriously, most do at least nominally adhere to, as an example, Lent.

All religions of which I know have this feature. It is useful. Most of us just run like rats on a wheel. Eventually, we retire or die. We can do so much better, as individuals, and as a culture.

Some random thoughts after a long day in normal time.

Edit: I want to add to this.

I think back to some exceptional meals I’ve had–Muriel’s in New Orleans, the Oak Room in Louisville, a hotel in Mendocino–and I remember some details (the first time I had a really good steak au poivre, or duck, or foie gras), but what I mostly remember is a feeling, that of contented engagement, of sufficiency. We never seem sufficient, do we? At least, I never seem to. There is always something just over the horizon. In a round world, that means it never gets here.

Or some memorable musical moments. I will never forget being in a literally smoky old blues club in Memphis at 2am–needing to work the next day, but being unable to drag myself back to my hotel room–listening to a first rate band, playing what they wanted to play. After about 1am, it just doesn’t matter anymore. I can’t remember one song they played. But I remember feeling the room, feeling the crowd, and it was pleasant. It was another sort of time.

Or a walk I took on the beach in Myrtle Beach. We had an hour between one set of meetings and another. I didn’t know what to do, the sun was setting, and I figured I’d explore. As I did, something in the atmosphere entered me. There was a sense of peace. And you look at that, and wonder if you’re going crazy. If you never feel deep, profound peace, it appears to be a species of insanity. It is qualitatively different than anything else in your experience. I doubted it, and to some extent I remember fighting it as some sort of foreign influence I didn’t understand. Yet, in the end, I still remember that time, as a unique moment in my life I didn’t expect.

It seems to me that we process life as many discrete qualitatively distinct moments–both good and bad–filled with a muddying average-ness whose quality is, I suppose, perhaps influenced largely by our openness to qualitatively good moments, and where we choose to set our average, perceptually.

What is the Good Life? It seems to me we all need to answer this question in our own ways. It seems clear to me, though, that our environments are all filled to overflowing with the raw ingredients needed to build it, from any starting point (almost).

I probably need to reread “Flow”, and then see what he’s been up to since. I tend to shy away, in the long run, from metaphysical pessimists. It colors their work in subtle ways. Yet, when mechanically correct–and I view thoughts and the words that form them as operating on the level of machine–they can be useful.

Linked on the title. Respond if you care to, but keep in mind I am not stupid, patient, timid, lacking for words, or ignorant.

At root, here is the question: is the President above the law, or isn’t he? Is he a normal citizen with an extraordinary responsibility, or is he like a King of old, who obeys only those laws that suit him?

No person applying for any sort of security clearance can avoid providing basic documentation. This will always include the birth certificate that EVERYONE–barring exceptional circumstances, examples of which I am unaware–has. Mine has my footprints on it. It says where I was born, what doctor delivered me, how much I weighed, how long I was, who my parents were.

I had to provide it to get my Social Security card. I had to provide it to get my Driver’s licence, and again to get my passport.

This situation is as plain as day. There is no ambiguity. There is no leeway, or room for doubt. The man most responsible for enforcing our laws is showing himself in profound contempt of them, both as implemented, and as intended in spirit.

I’ll add my two cents.

Obama always seems to me to be trying to act Presidential. He seems to be reading words written by a committee of people trying to imagine themselves into the perceptual space of a real President. The relevant scene is that in “The Birdcage” (one of my favorite comedies) where the various homosexual friends of the parents are trying to rework the apartment to look heterosexual. They put a Playboy in the bathroom, since that is what “they” read.

At root, though, they are trying to create the outward trappings of a culture they really don’t understand.

Similarly, Obama has none of the shared passions of the rest of us. He literally grew up outside our nation, culturally. Even when he was living in our borders, and going to our schools, he was surrounded by radicals. The grandfather who raised him in Hawaii from age ten on was almost certainly a pot-smoking Communist. Imagine what those discussions must have been like around the dinner table.

It is unremarkable, given that background, that Obama would have gravitated to radicals in every State and university where he subsequently went. But the key point here is that NONE of the traditional associations that send shivers up OUR spines–the flag, the invocation of sacrifice in war, the National Anthem–resonate with him at all. He has none of the sense of the sacred that is common to the rest of us.

Neither do the people with whom he feels comfortable, with whom he has chosen to continue to surround himself as President. When dealing with Obama, you have to factor in the Hive Mind around him, which includes the “advisors” he meets in places like Martha’s Vineyard.

They don’t get it. They have what are in reality very chauvinistic, very prejudicial notions about ordinary Americans, but they have to act, for political purposes, as if they felt themselves in synchrony with the very people they despise, or at least the caricatures of whom they despise.

So you have multiple levels of disconnect. First, they misunderstand ordinary Americans. Then, they reach out to their sterotypes, with feigned goodwill. In the end, they are neither communicating their truth, nor our truth. They are simply speaking. This cannot really be covered up with focus groups, and the outward mechanical appropriation of the methods of professional marketers. They are selling a person, and that person is plainly not who we want or need him to be, and no amount of scrubbing can obscure this fact.

As I look at Obama, I see someone who has made himself into something like a machine. He has exorcised all genuine traces of spontaneity, actual good humor, and sincerity. At the same time, this machine is arrogant. George Bush was cocky, in the way that the best kid on the baseball team is. Yet, I never doubted that he loved the country, and that he had deeply held opinions on the nature of right and wrong. I doubt that with respect to Obama.

I don’t think he has any core beliefs. If forced to guess, I would hazard a guess that his focus is some sort of revolution–however he frames it–and that he has consecrated his life to the task, a la Sergei Nechaev. This is certainly what Alinsky taught, and Obama, we are told, was perhaps Alinsky’s most talented heir.

From a fundamental muddle of deceptiveness, misunderstanding, and malignity with respect to our national traditions, how could anything positive result?

Just look at the use Obama tried to make of the attempted murder of a conservative Democrat, and the actual murder of a Republican judge, and 5 others. This is perhaps the most naked and vile political opportunism I have ever witnessed in my adult life. It is amoral. It is compassionless. It is ruthless. He provided teleprompters for the audience, telling them when to clap. He made of a genuine tragedy a political farce.

No, I don’t like Obama.

The point of liberty is that personality–a sense of identity, either personal, familial, communal, or national–is an emergent property of the operations of the principles and decisions free people. You cannot tell someone their name is Ray, they like the color red, and that they are enthusiastic about fixing cars, and expect it to stick, especially if they are adults. Yet, that is the project the brainwashers of the Left set themselves. You cannot be yourself, if you are not free. You do not have the space to create yourself. Identity creation is a somewhat sloppy, imprecise process. You have to fail, fall flat on your face, then get back up, and learn. If you cannot fail–if you do not have the freedom to fail–then you will always be less than a complete human being, and will always be less happy–even miserable, as one sees in “Community Development” projects the world over–than necessary.

It is interesting to contrast, say, New Orleans with some slick German city, where everything is metallic, and seems always to have been polished within the last hour. New Orleans, we are told, has “character”. In what does this consist? Is it not in no small measure the freedom to be mediocre in its own way? Katrina was many years ago, yet much of the city is still beat up. One senses that efficiency is rarely prized above style.

And what is style? Is it not a way of being in the world, an identity? And is that identity perhaps not inconsistent with efficiency, with getting things done, with, in effect, playing the role of a machine to perfection?

We don’t want to be machines. This is the dream the Socialists–heirs to the Positivisit tradition, and trying to make people as susceptible to “natural laws” as logs rolling downhill–envision for us. They want to “force us to be free” in Rousseau’s memorable phrase.

What is mediocrity? Is it necessarily the same as lacking a desire to push oneself hard all the time?

For myself, I know about GPS. I know about Garmin. They are very efficient. If one sets oneself the task of travelling from Point A to Point B with as little wasted motion as possible, they are probably the best way to do it.

At the same time, I have always found getting lost to be useful. I use maps, and in very complex cities, spend a lot of time meeting new people, and asking them for directions. The other day, I was daydreaming and got off an exit early for a place I was going. I wound up driving an extra 20 miles or so, but after I got over my confusion, then anger, I enjoyed it. I saw places I never would have seen. A man was kind enough to drive me to the closest reasonable point of embarcation, from which I was unlikely to get lost again.

We never know what we need to know to grow. We never know what random input, what random scene or conversation, or thought sparked by novelty will lead to the next step. This is the value of inefficiency, and yes to some extent mediocrity.

And we sense this, I think. Restaurants that are very nice–suburban strip mall clean–will pay a painter to paint murals of decrepit walls. Why? It adds “character”, which is the say the apparent possibility of randomness intruding into a very well structured existence, in which food never has germs, everyone washes their hands, the floors were sanitized last night, the HVAC works flawlessly, and everyone is safe from crime, floods, and anything they don’t expect.

We know we have to die. I think sometimes we want a respite from security, from the illusion of permanence.

These are a few scattered thoughts, cobbled together from some musings of today.

It occurred to me last night that what might be termed Aryanism is really a re-invocation of the Noble Savage. Where once there was a proud, innately honorable and strong race, the Aryans (this term comes from philology; the term “Arya” means noble, and is what the Indo-European immigrants to northern India called themselves; Iran is based on the same root), it was diluted by “mud” races.

Logically, in the same sense that Communists invoked this meme implicitly to justify the murder of the “cold blooded” bourgeoisie, so too the Nazis invoked it to murder Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and no small number of Slavs.

I will add, too, that as a political doctrine Conservatism evokes not the distant past, but the “present” past. So-called right wingers, at the farthest to the right in the French Revolution, wanted a restoration of a monarchy, albeit normally one greatly reduced in power and the following susceptibility to corruption.

Anyone who wants a decisive break with the present past is not, by definition, a Conservative, and not a “right winger”.

Hitler was not popular with the Junkers, the Prussian elite who ruled important parts of German society. He was not popular with most Catholic leaders, although he got many of his followers from the “lumpenproletariat”, many of whom were Catholic. He never polled more than a third of the electorate, and when he was finally seated in what I believe they called a Cabinet, he was opposed by virtually everyone.

In short: given his evocation of a past that was not a part of the experience of ANYONE living, and which probably never existed in the way he imagined it; and given his skepticism and detachment from the institutions of the day, socially, practically, and politically, it is simply not a sustainable claim that Hitler was a Conservative, and hence a Rightist.

He was a Utopian, who dreamed of bringing back–by pruning back all the people holding them back–the noble simplicity of the “root race” of the Indo-European cultures. He spent his last months building models of beautiful cities to be build in the Russian plains, which had been denuded of inferior races. He intended, of course, to keep as many as needed for slaves (root: Slav, since the Vikings took so many captive to be sold into “slav”ery), but mostly to “free” the world from the impositions of the inferior.

All Utopian projects are Leftist. Self evidently, the French Revolution had its own dynamics, so exact parallels with the Assembly are impossible; but to the extent there was a commonality of spirit with any one group in that room with the Fascists and Nazis, it was clearly the far-left Jacobins, architects of the Terror.

Pick a Glenn Beck show, any show. Tell me what is wrong with it. We will then look at it together, and determine 1) how many facts were presented; 2) how many of those facts were accurate, to the degree of reasonable doubt; and 3) how many remain which you can present credible reason to fault as wrong.

Self evidently, my contention is that most of his critics are, in effect taking a statement from him in which he says 2+2=Four, and shouting WRONG, 2+2=4. He is a hypocrite. He is a liar. How can he say this?

What I have ALWAYS found with leftists is that they NEVER fully contextualize their statements. They sift through days and days of statements, to find a few which they can intentionally misrepresent and misconstrue.

But those are decontextualized generalities, aren’t they? Point away, leftists, and if you are right that he is always wrong, hell that’s just a roll downhill, and there’s nothing I can say about it, right?

I drove by an airport today, and realized it has become for me a literal symbol of political oppression, in a formal sense. No principle of just government or prudence grants to our elected officials–and the officers they empower–the right to deprive us of our dignity.

And plainly, subjecting people to the choice of public nudity or public molestation is absolutely, incontrovertibly incompatible with liberty. The Nazis themselves did not do this. They looked for people who they had reason to believe were guilty of something, then questioned them. They did not strip search every German citizen who passed through any checkpoint. This would have led, in short order, to Hitler becoming hugely unpopular.

We are protected, Constitutionally, by the Fourth Amendment, from this sort of offensive, and unproductive intrusion in our lives by the government.

And patently, it doesn’t even WORK. Not only is this policy a horrific abuse of the personal space that the government is supposed to PROTECT, but it is not even likely over ANY period of time to prevent any attack. The underwear bomber: his FATHER warned authorities what he was going to do, and the stupid SOB’s did not ACT on it. This is the heighth of stupidity. This is the reign of incompetence. We are getting a maximum violation of our civil liberties, in exchange for NOTHING.

Bigger picture, it is hard not to feel, as I have said before, that certain people in the government are simply trying to break down our sense of stability outside the intrusive reach of the State. They want us to accept their power to touch our penises and vaginas and breasts, and those of our children. They want us to accept that they OWN us in certain places and at certain times, that there are no rights once you get into an airport.

One would think that hijacking was a major problem. Yet, not ONE death has happened since 9/11 as a result of hijacking. The major problem is car accidents. Tens of thousands–maybe hundreds of thousands–die of that every year. Thousands die of flu.

In my view, the whole “groping” thing was very intentionally planned to be as unpleasant as possible, such that people would willingly accept public nudity as less offensive. Yet, this is a HUGE erosion of our civil liberties, and I for one will not ever forget it.

Republicans: Put the screws to Obama, and force this practice to change in the direction of common sense. If you are REALLY concerned with hijackings, copy the best practices of the airline, El Al, with the most experience preventing terrorism. It really very simply a question of inconveniencing the possibly guilty, or destroying the liberties of everyone, including the manifestly innocent.

Love is one of these words like racism, compassion, and imperialistm with a lot of baggage. One can assume, I think, that any word that finds itself consistently on T-Shirts sold at Wal-Mart and Target has been denuded of much of its meaning. I try to avoid words such as this. Yet, it is really the best word we have, so the option of defining it usefully seems better than trying to invent a new word, like Grok (although Heinlein and I are on the same page).

Love and Goodness, in my usage, are more or less synonymous. Goodness is taking pleasure from the happiness of others, and the capacity to live happily on one’s own. What is necessary for this? Obviously: transcending your own parochial difficulties, pains, and concerns. On a superficial level, this means actually listening to other people, recognizing they are there. Many people, in talking with others, are mainly fishing for good gossip, and the opportunity to share with someone all the trials and tribulations–and successes–of their own lives.

I have found, for example, that there are few of the most intimate details of their lives that many people won’t share with you in bars, if you will simply give them your full attention, and show them you are focused on them, and not your own response. If you pay careful attention, I think many of the conversation you hear are, in part, reciprocal monologues.

Likewise, too, I think most of us, perceptually, are really mainly concerned with our own worlds, and a very small number of other people, normally family and close friends, if we have any.

This world is a sort of cage, that keeps out the sunlight. I had a dream the other night, which led–through the convolutions of my ruminatory intellect (I suppose I am a sort of intellectual cow, with many stomachs)–to this post. First, the dream, then my interpretation.

I was travelling around, and became aware that Oprah was going to be at a book reading. I thought that sounded mildly interesting, so I went up, and at the top of some old wooden stairs, in a somewhat musty, but not overly run-down house, was a woman, and a window into the room. I looked into the room, and there were Oprah and Gail, sitting in the front row, with perhaps 20 other people, packed into an upstairs room, that did have windows all around. They were listening in rapt attention for the Next Big Thing. The whole scene was cloaked in greyness. It wasn’t dark, but it was overcast, like a day that just doesn’t want to shine. I started to go in, but was told the admission was $10, which didn’t seem reasonable to me, so I left. When I got to the door, it occurred to me I just float through it, rather than open it, and I did. When I did this, the world exploded into a feast of light and color. There were rainbows and waterfalls. To put a word to it: beauty.

As I thought about it later, I realized that this world is always RIGHT THERE. What we have to do is drop our small little cares and worries, and swim in the big sea. It’s all always already there. The movement there is not through a book, or through thought. It is with your spirit.

This morning, I realized that with Love, you are never alone. You are the other person’s best friend, always, such that no matter where you go, or what you do, you have communion, you have companionship.

And when you have renounced caring about pain and suffering, it doesn’t matter if others try to hurt you: you are immune. You just move on. The energy in you is flowing out. Their energy does not flow into you. It’s irrelevant. You dictate the terms of the engagement.

This is, in my view, a useful insight.

Edit: Rumi:

“Does sunset sometimes look like the sun’s coming up?
Do you know what a faithful love is like?
You’re crying. You say you’ve burned yourself.

But can you think of anyone who’s not
hazy with smoke?”