Month: October 2018

If you are going to be greedy, be greedy for understanding.

Understanding leads to compassion, but this is only a start.  Compassion, as I can’t emphasize enough, is merely a posture for fools, but only a beginning for the wise.  It must lead somewhere.  It must lead to efforts at either alleviating actual, concrete human suffering, and/or to a thirst to build in others a desire to heal themselves, and a belief that this is possible.  You must show them a way.  This is what I continue to strive to do.

But I have not healed myself yet.  I continue to pay in blood, tears, and terror, and I will continue to do so as long as it takes.  I do not want the easy road.  I want the correct road.

Right here, with wider eyes, and a keener nose.

The miracle is everywhere.  What is possible with me, is possible everywhere.  Here being a part of everywhere, what I need to move is my ability to perceive.  You can place roots in existence itself.

I am watching the very interesting documentary “The Salt of the Earth”, which is a play on the name of Brazilian born photographer Sebastiao Salgado, with “Salgado” meaning “salty” or “salted”.

I cannot resist, at this moment, the sense that what I try to do here is also to take photographs, but with my mind.  I attempt to use language to convey pieces of ideas, bits, flashes of a deeper reality.

A photographer shows what exists, what can be seen, with the eyes.  A thought workers shows what exists, what can be seen, with the mind.  This, at any rate, is the ideal.  Sometimes, of course, we are blind and simply lack the perspicacity to realize it.  This is why all perceptions must be seen as contingent, and never final.  We must always strive to open as many channels as possible, to allow the water of life to flow through.

Speaking of our seemingly kind old hippy.  I can hear younger kids whispering from the sidelines: “he’s the real deal, man, he was at Woodstock.”

Placing myself imaginatively there, I have to wonder if there were not thousands of semi-rapes of semi-conscious women at Woodstock.

Kids nowadays want to project their present values backwards.  But this is impossible, and it is impossible for me to believe hippy men were any less slimy than men generally.  Granted a “free love” ethos, what could be wrong with as much fucking as possible? 

Here, I found this:

And Woodstock was not all peace and love anyway. There was at least one rape reported following the event in 1969 and probably a great deal more that went unreported, given the approach to dealing with rape at the time. And rape could be a very challenging area when intersected with the “free love” movement. It is notable that, by the 1980s, some women viewed their experiences with “free love” and the sexual revolution somewhat skeptically. While there was an undoubted change in the way women dealt with sex during the Sixties, the perspective that many women took by the 1980s was far from a total endorsement their sexual lives from the time. For example, Lillian Rubin interviewed one woman who argued that the revolution, which had freed them to say yes, also disabled them from saying no. “It was weird; it was so hard to say no,” said 38-year-old Paula…“The guys just took it for granted that you’d go to bed with them, and you felt like you had to explain it if you didn’t want to. Then if you tried, you couldn’t think of a good reason why not to, so you did it.” A number of other women interviewed by Rubin repeat this theme. Rubin herself notes that “it was the coercive force of a movement that, in fact, had wide appeal to women, while it also rested on a deeply entrenched structure of roles and relationships that was bound to corrupt the ideals on which it was founded.” Thus free love without sexual equality could lead to coercive expectations on women around sex.

So, as a stoned hippy man, you stumble across a stoned hippy female, and you say “let’s fuck”, and she doesn’t actively say no, so you lay her down, pull down her pants, and do your thing, then say “Groovy” and move on to watch more of the show. 

Can you doubt this happened thousands of times?

That link actually has some other good points:

Paul Lyons writes about how he sends his undergraduates out each year to interview people who lived during the Sixties. 

He describes the reaction of students who are sent to interview baby boomers about their experiences during the decade. Inevitably these students complain that they are “not finding the right people” and that those they interviewed “weren’t really part of the Sixties.” This is because their subjects do not confirm to the tropic understanding of the Sixties held by these students: that the Sixties involved Woodstock, hippies, civil rights and the Vietnam War.  

So, in the case of Lyons’ students, they are so fixated on the tropes of the Sixties – the sex, drugs, protest and rock and roll aspect of it – that they are unable to understand that in fact, that isn’t what constituted the experience of most people during the period. And by then denying the voice of the non-tropic recollections of history, the idea that those things constituted the decade becomes further reinforced.

You will probably find that, if you asked, most baby boomers have been to a hell of a lot less protest marches, taken less drugs, had sex with fewer people than most people 20 years younger than them. But not in all cases of course. Someone the other day was saying it would have been exciting to be young in the Sixties. Maybe – if you came from the socio-economic class where you could afford a higher education, where you might, maybe, at university have engaged with political movements. For the majority of young people growing up at the time, it was nothing like that. There is as much excitement and change and pioneering going on nowadays.

Most kids now do not realize that the Vietnam War enjoyed popular support for a very long time.  Our country was conservative enough to elect Richard Nixon in 1968, and again in 1972.  It took what amounted to a legislative coup to remove him from office. That coup, in turn, revolved around efforts Nixon was making–with the wrong men, to be sure, as became subsequently obvious–to reduce the amount of treason taking place within his government, oriented around ending the Vietnam War on a note of failure, rather than the victory on the ground our troops achieved at great cost, and with unimaginable sacrifice.

As I will never tire of pointing out, until it becomes general knowledge, as it should be, we won the war on the ground.  We decimated the VC and NVA in the South Vietnam.  They had no bases of operations.  They were militarily defeated.   That is why they signed the Peace Treaty everyone has forgotten.   In 1972 South Vietnam was as safe as America.  It fell to successive conventional invasions, not different in kind from the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslavakia by the Soviets, or for that matter, the invasion of Poland by the Nazis.  They led with tanks and conventional arms and tactics.  They won in the precise domain where America excelled.  But we were gone, and we were gone because a small cadre of lunatics, backed by the media, convinced Congress that the war was lost, or ignoble.  John Kerry played a large role in that latter narrative.  The media, of course, has since always played Vietnam as a hopeless, lost war.  This is a naked and demonstrable lie.

Fuck John Kerry.  And Fuck the hippies.

Most of the time, my trauma manifests in my body.  I do have, though, quite a few dreams of being stuck in a totalitarian world, and trying to escape, often with a companion.

Last night, I was dreaming of some super secret, invitation only conference of Democrats where people were giving speeches and there was a general air of desperation.

Some avuncular old man–the old hippy type with kind eyes, gray hair, and brown sports jacket, who you will find is quite capable of instantaneous rage if you cross him by being a conservative, a type I have met and tested in this way more than once–checked my ID, and it didn’t match the database, so they sent me off to get one.  I tricked the Asian woman who was vetting the ID’s–I wonder if that is a reference to Chinese involvement in all this–and managed to con her into granting me one, although I knew she would double check it after I left, so I needed to leave soon.

It devolved, as it always does.  I was spotted and denounced, and ran.  I was eventually shot.  The last scene is I was hiding and they sent in my dog to identify me.  My DOG recognized me instantly, but hesitated, because it loved me.  It, unlike the people, did not want to do the dirty work of evil people.

This is why dogs could not do the work of totalitarians, of the Democrats as they exist today: they are specifically loyal.  Each dog on every block has a specific master, and while they may be friendly to others, they have one set of owners, one set of human persons to whom they feel loyal, people who have individual scents, who can be instantly and perfectly identified.

People, in contradistinction, can be made to feel loyal to an IDEA, an idea which can survive any number of masters, and which can cause them to reject any number of actual human persons, including their families, friends, country, community, and their own history.

You will see, in Communist history, periods of nationalism.  Stalin called World War 2–for which he left the Soviet Union completely unprepared and which he personally and unmistakable bungled in the early days because of his love for and fondness for Adolph Hitler–“The Great Patriotic War”.  The Chinese, too, after destroying countless relics of Chinese culture in the “Cultural Revolution”, have returned, I think, to valuing some aspects of Chinese history and culture.

But this is just propaganda.  There is no love for anything but obedience in such political orders, and the patriotism can be turned off just like it is turned on.

Interpreting this dream, first of all, I think such meetings are happening.  The old hippies NEED to believe it was not all for nothing, that they have not lived their lives on a lie, that getting the US to withdraw from Vietnam was a good thing, that doing their best to destroy our traditional cultural order was a good thing.  They need this, like all of us need oxygen.  They cannot end their frivolous and self absorbed lives in a repentance and reckoning they have been avoiding like the plague since their youths.

The costs are lower for those they have seduced, but high nonetheless.  What was presented was a coherent and colorful alternative to a life of work, duty, sacrifice, piety, patriotism, eventual old age, and death.  What was promised was a world which never arrrives for most, but one filled with excitement, passion, compassion, goodness, decency, love, and deep spirituality.  To learn this world is based largely on lies and self congratulation would be a shock to them too.  So they want, with all the ardor of young hearts, to BELIEVE in all of it.

For myself, I am split.  This is what dissociation is.  And the thing with numbness is you can’t feel numbness, so the process of waking up actually feels like falling asleep.  It feels like becoming a different person, which in important respects you are. It feels like being a stranger.  This of course is what Camus was writing about.  He had been through a great trauma, World War 2, but as I have said often, I think adult traumas linger often because of deep, childhood traumas.  Perhaps his mother secretly hated and resented his father.  Why not covertly take it out on the son?  No one would see this, and he would not remember it.  But “life” would feel empty to him.

So, seemingly paradoxically, I think entering these dream worlds of terror and flight and evasion is healthy for me.  If I can raise the feelings in my body up to the dream world, that is  progress.  That way I can see them, and seeing is always distancing from feeling.

And I have to ACCEPT the anomie of this modern world, its insanity, its disconnection from everything real.

And the “world”, of course, results from the operation of countless individual consciences and patterns of behavior.  What I feel is in me, but it is also generalized.

At root, I feel totalitarian behavior rests upon the unconscious impulse to avoid the darkness in the soul.  People who want to avoid what is bad and dark in them avoid it, and thus feed it.  If you refuse to name it, it can grow and attach itself to anything, including the rhetorics of compassion and justice.

Christianity, in important respects, provides an excellent cover for evil, in marrying itself to the concept of Love.  This means that anything it does is “For Love”, even if it is evil.  This is made particularly easy when the Church and the religion are conflated, as in Catholicism.  If a priest does it, he does it for the Church, which is for Christianity, which is for love.  This, even if he is anally fucking a terrified young boy. This thought world exists, somewhere in our sometimes terrifying universe.  And it exists now.  The Pope certainly seems to value the Church over protecting the innocent, or revealing and punishing the crimes of the guilty.  This, because the Church, overall, “represents” love.

I have said before that true morality rests upon decisions which are local, necessary, and imperfect. True morality rests on fuzzy logic, itself rooted in emotional maturity, which implies mature perception and following emotionally logical compassion.

I might supplement it to call it the “dog test”.  Are you close enough that you can smell the other person?  Is the stimulus sufficiently strong that some active behavior is required?  And will love and devotion still be in your heart at the end?

No Leftist politics meet these criteria.  As I keep saying, rhetorics of compassion and justice can be EASILY  subverted merely by making the group claiming those as values synonymous with the work itself.  Simple.  Poof.  You have Goodness in a bottle, a “get out of the necessity of thinking for free” card. You have Boolean Logic.  You one side and the other, and logically, if one side is completely right, the other side must be completely wrong.

At the end of the day, we cannot solve our political problems without emotional growth among all the members of our society, without, specifically, people recognizing that life can be inherently and unavoidably hard, and that all of us have darkness in our hearts, and need to do the work of processing it.  Being “nice” is not good enough.  Being politically active for “the good guys” is not enough.  Feeling anger at injustice, both real and imagined, is not enough.

You have to see what is in front of you, feel it, hear it, taste it, smell it, touch it.  You have to be in connection with it.


And it CHANGES.  Perceptions are not objects.  They are dance moves.  What was good enough yesterday has lost its freshness today, and will be wilted in two weeks.  People want to create perceptions, frame them, hang them on their walls, and be forever after forgiven the necessity of forming new ones.

Life, and perception, are coterminous.  They are the same thing.  To be alive is to be open to new experience.  Living is not trying to see the same things in the same ways, but to see old things in new ways.  This is growth.  This process makes emotional and spiritual growth inevitable, unstoppable.

Well, this will do for this morning.  I need some coffee, and I’m out, so I need to go get some.

Edit: this is not a metaphor: I really am out of coffee.  I’m a Peets partisan, and use the pour over method, because it is a fantastically easy way of making one (large) cup of coffee.  When I used to make pots, I would drink the whole damn thing, and that’s no good.

I’ve been feeling the past few days like I am almost ready to being learning.  I’ve been stuck for so long, but I feel like something in me is like a monk ready to begin honest training.

And I will add, perhaps pretentiously–I don’t know how I come across, since I have no feedback–that I think many people who claim they are “spiritually accomplished” have not hit first base yet.  The world is simply filled with imbeciles.

No: the world is filled with confused people, con artists, and psychopaths.  And we’re all lonely, even those who pretend otherwise.

I may just wake up one day.  That’s the goal. 

I have said for years that I am capable of 12 cylinder performance, but limited to 4.  I think I’m up to six.  That means I can do twice as well as I’m doing.  That sounds about right.  I believe that.

I FEEL my stupidity.  That is not false humility.  I have no one to impress.  That is what I feel.  I am limited, dampened, stupidified.

Ponder for a moment that they caught Anderson Cooper red-handed, or wet footed, standing in an indentation in the ground to make the water look deeper than it was.  He showed himself the journalistic equivalent of a used car salesman in a bad neighborhood.

But nothing happened.  He’s still on air.  It didn’t matter, seemingly, to anyone.

Do you think that would have been true 50 years ago?  I don’t.

I called this blog “Moderates United” some time ago in the hope of creating a fertile middle ground between the whack jobs on the true right, as I measure it, which is the people who want no government at all, and both the soft and hard Left, who I label Sybaritic Left and the Cultural Sadeists.

As far as the crazy Right, as I have been saying for some time, there is no point in a Constitution if there is to be no government.  I will also underscore the arguments that Thomas Paine made in Common Sense that, although all governments are to be feared, they are in nearly all cases preferable to formally lawless societies.

On the Left, of course, you have moral suicide, suicide by government, suicide by creating and fanning the flames of an entity which will control your life from cradle to grave, which might impoverish you, which might even kill you, but which will never ask you to do any hard thinking.

As I see the current landscape, you have two competing sets of existential fears.

Within what I might term Moderate America, which is everything from the Far Left–aka currently “Mainstream Democrats”–on to the right, which includes all people who think the Constitution is a good thing, there is the fear that all our heritage, all our wealth and yes generalized privilege–which certainly includes blacks, as compared to the rest of the world– is under attack by lunatics.  In my view this is a valid fear.

On the Left, you have the more subtle but more maddening fear that, in rejecting everything they have known, in rejecting their own culture, their own people, their own history, they have done it all for NOTHING.  They sold their birthright, and did not even get a crust of bread.

That is the sort of angst which causes you to double down, to go harder, to get even crazier.  And as the gap widens, so too does the difficulty of coming back home.  It becomes much easier to leap from “one person alleged Kavanaugh held her down against her will, although the witnesses she alleged were there would not corroborate her account, and even though she contradicted herself, seems to have lied about some details, and was plainly partisan”, to KAVANAUGH IS A PROVEN RAPIST.  Which, in fact, is what the Left has done.  No boundaries remain, where Ideological Others are concerned.

Fear.  It is fear which governs this whole thing.  Fear of the future, fear of loneliness, fear of being wrong, fear of contradiction, fear of the violence they themselves carry in their hearts.  Fear it is all for nothing.  Fear even, perhaps, that everything conservatives–conservators–say about them is true after all.  Fear they have wasted their lives.  Fear the New Revelation isn’t.  Fear that hucksters have sold them a bill of goods.  Fear that the spirit of meanness resides in them.  Fear of the darkness they project all around them.

Fear that the fear within them has made them small and ignoble.

I wonder if Trump can flip him into a supporter.  After all, when Trump first took office, Rosenstein had no idea what to expect.  But what has HAPPENED, empirically, is that Trump has done an outstanding job.

Many people who were skeptics have reported, after spending time with him, that they have changed their minds.

And tactically and strategically, it would be brilliant to bring Rosenstein around.  Rosenstein can order Mueller to bring this whole nonsense to an end without being seen as a naked Trump partisan.  Hell, he allegedly tried to foment what would have amounted to a coup.

And obviously, Mueller’s work needs to end.  The only evidence of wrong-doing points to the Democrats.  Mueller needs to put an end to this, and Rosenstein or whatever that guys name is who in theory runs the Justice Department, then need to launch criminal probes into Fusion GPS and the Democrats.

And this would be a way for Mueller to get out with his reputation intact.  It’s wins all around.  Rosenstein keeps his job, and maybe even gets a promotion when Sessions steps down after the election, and nobody has to point out the whole thing was ridiculous.

Democrats lose, of course, but people who lie, cheat and steal SHOULD lose.

It popped in my head last night that “my mother loved me, but only as an object.”

I think this is true.  You can value your beer can collection, your antique cars, and you can value people in your life whose place and purpose you seek to define for them.

This is my problem: I lost the ability to look into my mothers eyes and feel seen long ago.  What she sees, what she needs to see, what she demands of me emotionally to give her, is who I was when I was obedient, quiet, and when I belonged to her.  I feel this pressure when I am with her.  She has no idea she is doing it.  Almost nothing she does is conscious.  It’s all impulse, papered over with very soothing self conceits and deceptions.

Life is fragile, uncertain, risky.  Not everyone can deal with this.  Many people seek to make of everything a routine, a certainty, a known, a given, an integer between 1 and 7.

And people are the least certain, the most risky.  The solution?  Control them.  Force them to be as they were, to not change, to not evolve, to “blossom”, if they are to do so, in ways which are material and not spiritual.

And as my own children grow, I realize that soon they will have full and rich lives quite apart from me.  What was, will be no more.  I need a new purpose.

Controlling others is a way of governing ones own unprocessed fear and uncertainty. It is a way of reducing the world to a box which is known.

The more fear in the world, the more certain this impulse is to take root and grow.

For me, this insight brings me comfort.  It explains, in better language than I have yet been able to use, why things are the way they are.

It is rare to look into someone else’s eyes and feel seen.  Most people hide, and then wonder why they feel alone.  When you do feel seen, this is so rare you call it love.

Perhaps the Buddhist path is about making a friend of the world, and of all humanity, because you have nothing to hide, and so can be seen by everyone, and can see others as they are.  You are nourished and nurtured everywhere you go, and everywhere you look.

I feel like a cat dropping rodents off at the front porch in the night.  I hope this blog is read, and that it is useful, but regardless, my instincts propel me forward.

I go out into the dark, and return with what I find.