Month: August 2012

I was hanging out last night with a group of younger cocktail waitresses that I’ve known for a while, and when I woke up this morning it hit me that it is sad that nowadays they are more or less expected to deliver sex on a second date–maybe even the first date–and usually a BJ.

BJ’s used to be considered a bit of a perversion, something you got from a prostitute, but not from a self respecting girl.  Now, apparently, it’s spit or swallow.  I think we have first Deep Throat to thank for that–a movie in which “Linda Lovelace” we now know was more or less a sex slave–and Bill Clinton.

I watch women, and I imagine their complex of feelings. Sometimes, of course, for men they really like, it is probably a turn on, something that makes them feel happy to be able to do.

Most of the time, though, I suspect there is a complex of feelings they don’t really want to address, which includes shame, anger, a following need to mask both emotions, a certain subtle loss of self respect, and likely an increased tendency on the part of the man to objectify her.

Many girls nowadays come into sex this way.  That is their first sexual contact, is giving oral sex to a boy.  So it starts early.

And to my point here, I feel that damages the capacity of BOTH the man and the woman, the boy and the girl, to play with sex innocently, in a happy way.

It is possible both to enjoy a sunset, or a beautiful day, and to enjoy sex, but the way we do it nowadays, the first seemingly is largely lost, and the second compulsive, and all about an explosive release of tension accumulated in the course of a day of not feeling anything otherwise pleasant, otherwise enjoyable, otherwise relaxed and easy.

I like women.  Given my druthers, I always prefer hanging out with women to men.   And I was just feeling that there is this large subtle circle around sex which most men miss.  It is like they are looking for a target in the middle of a circle, which the woman is too, but there are all these shades of feelings, all these places between the line of first contact, and coitus that so often remain unexplored.

Hand holding.  As John Mellencamp sang, that used to mean everything.  I suspect more pleasure was had in the 50’s walking around holding hands than is had nowadays having group blowjob parties.  That is why kids nowadays like Horror movies so much.  They don’t know why, but it matches their emotional world.

Sex is so much of who you are, who you become, and it just doesn’t seem like kids take the time to mature in it, to grow into it, to learn empathy and connection, and yes love, true love.  So many people grow into adulthood emotionally unsatisfied, with superficial relationships not just with the woman or man they marry, but with themselves.  That is where superficiality starts–by denying your own emotions, and that in turn begins with being forced prematurely into social situations–sex–for which you are emotionally undeveloped.

In some respects the development of torture porn was inevitable, since normal pornography is already emotionally violent.  It already requires the suppression of normal forms of affection, and emotionally valid bonding.  It already makes of both partners objects.  It is already a master/slave relationship.

I was just thinking I want more for these women.  It is not impossible.

I remember reading in “The Way of the Peaceful Warrior” that anger is stronger than sadness, as it leads to action.  I have decided I disagree.  Sadness is deeper and wiser than anger.

You can get things done with anger.  You become filled with rage, and forget fear, pain, indecision and caution entirely.  Tactically, no doubt, this can save lives.  Over short periods, it can be invaluable.

Over the course of a lifetime, though, it cannot be productively maintained.  It is a blistering, a swelling, an out-of-kilterness, a wounding that is simply blocked from awareness.

I cannot find the exact quote I want, but did find one close, from “Trauma and Recovery”:

The second stage of recovery has a timeless quality that is frightening.  The reconstruction of the trauma requires immersion in a past experience of frozen time; the descent into mourning feels like a surrender to tears that are endless.

This notion of timelessness is interesting, as that has been my own experience.  I have often visualized that force which leads to evil as converting people into wax figures, motionless, timeless. (It is for this reason, I suspect, that wax figures have been made use of many times in horror movies).  I threw the book away, viewing it as pollution, my purpose having been served, but Simone de Beavoir makes the same observation of Sade: his images are just that: image.  They have relatively little motion, or development.  One travels from one diorama to another.

What are these wax figures?  They are souls confined, constrained.  They are emotional flows that stopped at a moment in time.  They are betrayed innocence, an openness punished with deep grief and betrayal.

How can you free them?  Only with tears.  Only with sadness.  All anger does is keep you alive, but it also forces you to run, to keep running, to pursue someone, anyone, a cause or a vicious vision.

And to the point, it is perfectly consistent with the continuation of emotional stasis.  Anger does not facilitate emotional growth.  Some of the most childish self absorbed people out there are angry all the time.

Sadness–mourning, specifically–is the path forward.  It enables all the frozen figures to take a breath.  And sadness, in my view, is the path to genuine compassion and love.  To be tender is to understand you can be hurt, but also to KNOW that you can survive wounding.

I cry often.  I am the guy that cries when Aunt Mae gives Peter the great speech in Spider Man 2 about how heroes sometimes have to sacrifice what they want to do what is right.  I cry when Captain America decides to put the plane into the ocean.  I cry when Sam delivers his magnificent speech at the end of the Two Towers.

Sentimentality, no doubt., you may say.  I am after all describing two comic books and a fantasy novel.  I would argue, though, that the very childishness, the simplicity of these works is what makes them most real.  Some people claim to be sophisticated.  Externally, this may be true.  But I think all of us, at heart, react most to comic book sorts of sentiments.  Communism, when it is seducing future thralls, sells utopia, peace, and justice.  

In America, we pride ourselves on being the City on the Hill.  I am a patriot.  I believe in the vision.  But at the same time, could not hundreds of Indian tribes look at us as not all that different in our relationship with them, as Panem with the Districts in the Hunger Games?  American Indians–who were not native, by the way, only here a long time before us–were very heterogeneous.  Some tribes were unquestionably our moral superiors, in my view, and some warranted little but what they got.

I’m wandering.  Net: every time I cry, I feel stronger.  I feel better able to negotiate the currents of this world openly.  Now, I have what I call my blast shield.  I can be stone when it comes to emotion whenever I choose to be.  I am very confident I could deal effectively with ANY  task I was presented with.  I just turn my emotions off.

But on a deeper level, I am quite prepared to march into hell to meet the enemies of grief and hatred and anger, and viciousness.  I see them.  I monitor them.  I am not afraid of seeing what is in front of me.  I fail often, am weak often, but when I look in the mirror I really do see someone willing to take the Devil on his own turf and win.

Finally saw the movie.  As I suspected, I have a number of reactions.  I may have more in a day or two.

My first reaction was emotional: sadness.  It makes me sad that this sort of horrific violence, this vicarious delight in cruelty has become so mainstream that I saw kids in the theater that could not have been older than ten.  As I periodically do, I think (can’t remember what I post where), I like to recommend the book Viewing Violence.  As it states in the review “Graphic, gratuitous depictions of violence on television and in the
movies, she concludes, encourage young viewers to act more aggressively,
desensitizes them to real-world violence and instills a distorted,
pessimistic worldview. Media violence also makes children more restless,
more fearful and less creative.”

Or take this summary, a bit longer, from here:

We now know a lot about the effects of media violence. Study after
study has found that children often behave more violently after watching
media violence. The violence they engage in ranges from trivial
aggressive play to injurious behavior with serious medical consequences.
Children also show higher levels of hostility after viewing violence,
and the effects of this hostility range from being in a nasty mood to an
increased tendency to interpret a neutral comment or action as an
attack. In addition, children can be desensitized by media violence,
becoming less distressed by real violence and less likely to sympathize
with victims. Finally, media violence makes children fearful, and these
effects range from a general sense that the world is dangerous, to
full-blown anxieties, nightmares, sleep disturbances, and other trauma
symptoms.

The evidence about these effects of media violence has accumulated
over the last few decades. Meta-analyses, which statistically combine
all the findings in a particular area, demonstrate that there is a
consensus on the negative effects of media violence. They also show that
the effects are strong – stronger than the well-known relationship
between children’s exposure to lead and low I.Q. scores, for example.
These effects cannot be ignored as inconclusive or inconsequential.

Even more alarming, recent research confirms that these effects are
long lasting. A study from the University of Michigan shows that TV
viewing between the ages of 6 and 10 predicts antisocial behavior as a
young adult. In this study, both males and females who were heavy
TV-violence viewers as children were significantly more likely to engage
in serious physical aggression and criminal behavior later in life; in
addition, the heavy violence viewers were twice as likely as the others
to engage in spousal abuse when they became adults. This analysis
controlled for other potential contributors to antisocial behavior,
including socioeconomic status and parenting practices.”

Now, I want to be clear: I have mentioned this to both my children, neither of whom is particularly fond of violent movies, but both of whose friends routinely watch movies like 300, Halloween, and who knows what else.  Both my kids reacted by stating that they would not go out and hurt someone as a result of watching the movies.  I don’t doubt this, and feel it obvious that this applies to the overwhelming majority of kids out there.

That is not the point.  The point is that subtle but real and important psychological changes come about from becoming inured to the emotional pain the psycholocially normal feel in empathy for those in pain on the screen.  This is our natural inheritance, and a valuable one at that.

It is GOOD to be sensitized.  There is no value in learning not to react when some horrific act is performed on some other human being.  And learning to laugh, to find humor in horror, is literally training evil.

Take the teenaged kids who formed the pack in the movie. They were laughing at the deaths of others.  They found killing FUN.  Obviously, they were portrayed as bad guys, there, but are they not there as potential role models nonetheless?  Does it seem so unlikely that some kids, perhaps from abusive and/or emotional frozen homes, could not watch the sadistic violence on there and wish they could kill someone?

Read the plot to Hostel 3, or as much as you can stomach.  They call this torture porn.  It is literally teaching people to react to cruelty with pleasure.  You could not create a worse cultural pattern if your actual goal was to generalize emotional alienation and fragmentation.

My youngest child, in junior high, has been assigned a book in which not only are the original Grimm’s fairy tales told accurately, but the book is filled with commentary on how exciting and wonderful the blood soaked pages are.  Two children have their heads cut off by their father.  A young girl has her soul pulled from her throat and imprisoned to die in a cage, and her body is hacked into pieces and eaten.  This is the sort of thing they are assigning young teenagers.

It’s too much.  Did they really have to kill that beautiful young black girl, Rue?  Did they have to show it on screen?  Teenagers killing teenagers, and teenagers not just watching it, but participating in it vicariously. 

You see, there is a very thin psychological line between watching people watching people dying, and simply being the people watching.  We all have learned to consume media.  We have seen Big Brother, and any number of other reality shows where people are followed everywhere but the bathroom. (and I had not thought about it, but there’s no reason the Games viewers would not also have seen the kids answering the call of nature).  We are used to it.

What the violent Panem culture did was in principle not different than what we have already learned to do: consume the lives of others, live through others.

Panem et Circenses: the dominant culture already had bread, did it not?  The Games were not just a means of distraction, but amounted to the sacred center of the entire culture.  The Games location, the killing fields, was the locus, the epicenter of a post-cultural elite, whose ritual of violence sustained them in their morbid, sick lives.

I spent some time in graduate school studying sacrifice (sacre fice: act of the sacred).  My conclusion was that sacrifice, per se, was ENTIRELY cultural.  It is in fact the outcome of religions that do NOT value the truly sacred, the truly spiritual.  They are, rather, the outcome of inefficient meaning systems, which is to say violence dispersion systems, which is to say ways of reaching love, contentment, joy and connection.

We intuitively sense sacrifice as Satanic in some way.  We forget, of course, that the Jews for a very long time ritually killed actual animals on shines which must have always smelt of blood.  Christ, himself, has in received theology been compared to such animals, as if an omnipotent being needed blood to sustain himself or forgive anyone.  I will say this: that interpretation of Christ’s sacrifice is entirely wrong, in my own view.  I have argued this at some length in my Grand Inquisitor piece.

I have defined Goodness as taking pleasure in the successes and happiness of others, and the ability to live happily oneself.  You must be capable of generating your own sense of meaning and place and purpose and joy, and you should be capable of sharing that of others.

If you cannot generate your own happiness, you are bound, are you not?  You are stuck.  You cannot move, and remaining still is painful.  This is the root of the dialectic of the demonic crowd and the sacrificial victim.  Their pain, they cannot feel, so they feel it through the pain of others, and that releases them, for a time.  I have said this many times.  I can see it so clearly.

In a very real sense, though, the victim exists for a time FIRST.  Your emotions are tied to theirs.  The crowds at the Panem circus wanted to get to know the lives of their victims, making the necessary fact of the deaths of most of them all the more objectionable, but necessary, given their cultural system.

In this sense, I found the symbol of the mockingbird interesting.  She creates a sound, then it echoes.  She goes first.  She sets the pattern.  Others can only follow.  All eyes were on her, and not in places of conscious freedom.  The author must have intuited some element of this, even if it was not placed in words.

Are we modern Romans?  Are we ready for Coliseums, mass pandemonium, and ritual death?

I honestly don’t know.  I wish I did.  I will keep at it; that is all I can do.

It occurs to me that in one sense, and one sense only, Sade retained some life in him.  His writing was an outpouring of the need to create, but he could only create through destruction.  He tortured himself by simultaneously wanting to build something, but being unable to do so within the parameters he allowed himself. This is why he went mad.

This will be a bit scattered, as I am trying to connect some dots.

I was reading an interesting piece on LSD, which makes a case for relegalizing it for some genuinely medical purposes, including treatment of alcoholism, PTSD, some forms of depression, and for enhancing creativity.  I had not realized it, but Francis Crick–who has always said the double helix came to him in a dream–was actually tripping on acid.  Apparently, a great many Silicon Valley zip code breakthroughs happened on acid.

Now, I’ve known my share of people who were permanently screwed up as a result of taking LSD.  But I have also known some very normal, creative people who did it once or twice and found it very, very useful.  Steve Jobs said it was one of the two or three experiences most influential with respect to who he became as a person.  As the article says:

Most people enrolled in his study have reported that a single
psychedelic session substantially reduced their anxieties related to
death, while also qualifying as one of their most spiritual experiences.

Now, let’s talk about playgrounds. 

That research centers once were permitted to explore the further
frontiers of consciousness seems surprising to those of us who came of
age when a strongly enforced psychedelic prohibition was the norm. They
seem not unlike the last generation of children’s playgrounds, mostly
eradicated during the ’90s, that were higher and riskier than today’s
soft-plastic labyrinths. (Interestingly, a growing number of child
psychologists now defend these playgrounds, saying they provided kids
with both thrills and profound life lessons that simply can’t be had
close to the ground.)

I see people from time to time ask “what freedoms have we lost?”  Well, the freedom to determine our own level of risk, for one.  In a nanny state, you breed depressed people because they lack the courage of freedom.  You can’t handle freedom if you can’t handle deciding how to handle risk, how to make decisions in dynamic non-controlled environments.  The less freedom people have, in conditions of safety, the less they value their freedom, and the more dependent and infantile they become.

Here is an interesting article from the New York Times:

“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology
at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall
slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are
some of the few features that still can give children thrilling
experiences with heights and high speed.”

“Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too
boring in the long run,” Dr. Sandseter said. “Children approach thrills
and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to
climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing
is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and
they will then progressively learn to master them through their play
over the years.”

Sometimes, of course, their mastery fails, and falls are the common form
of playground injury. But these rarely cause permanent damage, either
physically or emotionally. While some psychologists
— and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall
would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite
pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely
as a teenager to have a fear of heights.

It has been my practice for some years to congratulate my kids whenever they skin their knees or fall down.  I tell them periodically skinning their knees is their job as kids, and a sign they are doing their job properly.  This is how you condition children for freedom and responsibility.

Finally, running shoes.  I just finished listening to the well told story of a race in Mexico in Christopher MacDougall’s “Born to Run”.  In it, he points out that padding in running shoes only came into being in the 1980’s, with Nike. Our great marathoners of the 1970’s wore almost no “protection”, but ran extremely well.
In a study done in Switzerland, there was found to be a very high correlation between the cost of running shoes and injury.  The more expensive the shoes, the more injuries.

What they also found was that the more the padding, the HARDER the foot impact.  What was theorized was that our nervous system instinctively wants to feel the stability of hard ground.  If it encounters a soft surface, it pushes through, hitting with more force.  If you take the padding away, it gets that sensation much more directly.

We need risk, and to the extent it is taken away, we suffer.

Why do the comfortable products of very safe suburban lives get so many tattoos and piercings?  Why does so much music focus on pain?  When people had objectively hard lives, no air conditioning, long hours, limited choices in food, they listened to happy, even sappy music.  Now we have reversed.

Ponder all this.

I ate at Chick Fil A tonight.  It was packed.

What I think is happening here is compassion fatigue.  Well meaning people tend to react in predictable ways when confronted with the accusation of bigotry.  They deny it–since in almost all cases nowadays it is a false accusation–and then generally react by trying to prove their innocence.  This is Pavlovian reflex among decent human beings that the awful human beings on the Left have very consciously abused for many decades now.  It was a core element in the Alinskyan version of Leninism that our President had such a fondness for that he became an instructor in it.

But this controversy is over a Christian, in effect, admitting in public that he believes what’s in the Bible, and tries to live by its rules.  For that, he gets vilified, Mayors want to reject his building permits, University Presidents say they will boycott his restaurant, etc.

With Obama all this has been in overdrive.  They use the same words, the same violent tactics,  the same HATRED over and over and over.  As I have been arguing for some time, you can’t keep this stuff on a high boil for a long period of time without it backfiring.

People cannot stand feeling like they can’t speak their minds in public indefinitely.  There is a breaking point. There is a point where they just stop CARING what the assholes on the left are saying.  “You want to call me a racist?  Fine.  You want to call me a homophobe?  Fine.  I just don’t give a shit any more.”

And when this happens, virtually all the illusory “progress” that the left thinks it has made will come tumbling down.  They will realize that they have not convinced anyone to change deeply held views.  How could they have?  There was no debate.  There was no attempt to find common ground.  There was yelling and screaming, picketing and protesting, and a lot of people who just learned to keep their mouths shut.  That’s all.  That is not social change.

Yes, left wingers control our universities and media.  Both are powerful platforms for brainwashing.  But the simple reality is that REALITY itself is unavoidable once you leave college.  People know you can’t spend more than you earn forever.  They intuitively understand that, whatever the legal arguments for gay marriage, that gay marriage is not marriage in any commonsense way.  No children are produced.  Whatever the word is–and I will readily grant it may be love–it is not marriage.  Voters have said this over and over.

It will be interesting to see what happens this fall.  I could not think of a less promising start to the campaign season for Obama.  Frankly, though, it is astonishing ANYONE still thinks well of him, so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

It occurs to me you become USEFUL when you can accept the world as it is, in its entirety, and then envision gradualistic work to improve it.  Manias of various sorts, the sense of compulsion and urgency brought about by a failure to accept what is: often they make things worse.  They lead to ill considered actions, an unwillingness to admit defeat when it should be admitted, and a constant sense of tension and unease that makes rational thought difficult.

This is a strange, perhaps stupid example, but my home has many, shall we say, problem areas–areas that need tidying, but that I just somehow manage to overlook.  I’m not sloppy, but I’m sure as hell not particularly orderly either.  I was looking at these areas today, and thinking: “it’s OK.  It’s not that bad”, and at the very same time feeling empowered to take care of them.

There are an infinite number of problems in the world.  You could work 24 hours a day for the rest of your life and scarcely make a dent.  Somehow, on some level, you MUST accept some of them, at least, or you will fritter what useful energy you have away, and end up doing something close to nothing, all at full steam.

Relaxation, I am increasingly realizing, is a fundamental trait of people who know how to work well.  When work of any sort is done with great skill it looks easy, in no small measure because it IS easy for that person, since they are not trying to drive with one foot on the brake.