Author: White Whale

Is there ever a day they AREN’T calling for Trump to be impeached?  If he ever does something actually impeachable, nobody will still be listening, at least not the people who matter.  EVERYBODY has to be getting tired of this nonsense.

And I can’t honestly believe that anyone with a grade school education and an IQ above room temperature is still holding out hope that somehow Mueller is going to get him removed from office.

Getting Trump fired was his JOB.  It is why he was hired.  He wasn’t hired to investigate anything.  The Democrats CREATED the fucking dossier.  They knew their claims were bullshit before they made them.  And Trump, for his part, even if he did something wrong, was obviously not stupid enough to leave a trail, or to walk into any of their traps.

Can we just hope the screaming ends soon, and those who retain some semblance of intellectual sovereignty start to notice publicly and vocally that Trump is actually doing a pretty good job?  Certainly, he is making a much more honest attempt to keep his campaign promises than Obama or Bush, and doing so in the face of a continual hurricane force headwind.

And Trump gets a lot of style points for firing McCabe at the last minute.  How I would interpret this is that they have decided not to prosecute him for political reasons, but this says “fuck you, you traitorous, criminal piece of shit.  We’re letting you go, but we are not forgiving or forgetting.  And you might want to watch your six, because we might change our mind.”

When I look deep into our current cultural life, I have to admit the kids are confused because the parents are confused.  The parents are confused because our “leaders” have been self satisfied idiots for far too long. Wisdom, when it has the courage to break the silence with regard to what is important, is shouted down out of habit.  I am quite sure Christ would be crucified again.  He certainly could never be elected to political office, at least as a Republican. 

I’ve been saying for some time Mother Teresa–who believed in private charity and presumably had orthodox Catholic views on abortion–would have been dragged through the mud if she had had the nerve to run as a Republican.  Why not up the ante?

And of course the logical path of confusion is false certainty.  That is how you break that spell.  Most human misery comes from an inability to tolerate confusion, which is to say, to neither say there is no truth, nor to say that many differing accounts cannot simultaneously have some, if not final, validity.

We could say that valid critiques of what might be termed the Western Project can be made of the notion of One Universal Truth.  At the same time, No Universal Truth, as a final answer, is even worse.  Much worse.

Time and place matter.  Concrete tasks require concrete ideas.  But most of us are operating from a sort of spasm most of the time.

It is odd to contemplate, but animals have vastly less capacity for suffering.  I say this because I am finding I cannot adopt vegetarianism.  I don’t know why.  It doesn’t feel right in my heart, for me, right now.

But think about it: if you lock an animal in a cage it clearly suffers.  It grunts and groans and wants out.  But it lacks the abstract ability to lament its situation abstractly.  And it lacks the ability to fear things which have not happened yet.

Humans, on the other hand, can suffer slings and arrows of their own making continually.  They can develop mental habits which make them sick with fear and worry.  They can live lifetimes filled with emotional suffering, without anything bad actually happening to them at all.  This opioid epidemic is happening in the middle of the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen.

We, the immodest and extremely ignorant but arrogant children of America have three core, non-negotiable demands:

1) We DEMAND that the world be simple.  If it isn’t simple, it needs to be made so as quickly as possible.

2) We DEMAND that all problems have simple solutions.

3) We DEMAND that the world respond immediately whenever we wake from a nap and require something.

If you fail to meet these demands, we will hold our breath, shout, and not talk to you.

These are not idle threats.

In all seriousness, this whole thing represents in microcosm nearly everything wrong with both our political and social world.  Well funded groups run by biological adults organized all this.  The intent is to prevent rational dialogue, and to demonize all dissenters.  The solutions proposed in no way address the underlying cultural issues which the Left is uniquely UNABLE to address to even the slightest, most superficial extent.

So what you have are well organized initiative intended to implement solutions which WILL NOT WORK; which increase social division; which make life less calm, less pleasant, and more nerve-wracking and mean; and which make the ACTUAL addressing of real problems nearly impossible.

All bad, no good.  Lather, rinse and repeat enough times–as the Left has–and you get a planned paralysis.  You get useful, good people afraid to speak up, useless, bad, ignorant people shouting from every rooftop, and considerable rancor between the groups which is not bridgeable by the means of genuinely Liberal tolerance and rational debate which have enabled our nation to incorporate peacefully so many different and disparate groups.

As I slowly wake up, it feels like I have been under a magic spell, cast by all the electronic elements of our culture.  I don’t like the amount of time I spend alone sometimes, but I think that, for me, the most coherent act of love I could offer the human race is trying my best to become sane, in a world where insanity has become the norm.

I was dreaming last night about how our kids are now being indoctrinated to be fascinated with death and murder.  Atavistic elements occur in their media, and fascinate them.  Their parents are no longer parents.  They say yes and no to them sometimes, but there is no true bond, in all too many cases, of genuine respect and affection.

Look at all these kids demanding gun control.  Why are so many adults so eager to kowtow to them?  It is a neurological FACT that brains don’t stop developing until some time in the 20’s.  They are literally, from a developmental perspective, half baked.

And actually, would it not make sense to raise the voting age to the approximate age where most developmental neurologists agree that most people are fully developed?  We could grant the right to vote early for everyone who serves in the military, because in any event such people are given a structure and sense of respect and honor, at least ideally, which emotionally make them fit to vote intelligently.

But we can’t let kids rule the roost.  What I think far too many fail to see is that this is a cultural failure.  It implies we see no real value in what is given in the air and water.  We see no value in our own history, in the values our parents imparted to us (if any).  It implies that it is smarter to start over and reinvent everything ex nihilo, generation after generation, than to listen to the combined wisdom of many thousands of years.  This is both stupid and suicidal.  Do you really want to place the future of humanity on a series of dice rolls, which will eventually come out ruinously?

We have a long history of brilliant minds.  We have a long history of cultural habits that work.  Children treating their parents with respect is one of the most important of these.

What I saw last night is that children who do not respect someone older and wiser than themselves can never fully mature into adults themselves.  There is no model.  They remain half baked.  It is one thing to offer respect for a long time, before eventually doing things one’s own way.  This respects the system itself, and we all need to live in systems.  It is another entirely to begin throwing down something one doesn’t understand to begin with, in order to build something one is making up as one goes along.  That is more of less what, in the purest form, the Khmer Rouge attempted.  If you are not a complete fucking imbecile, you recall what happened there.  It was filled with kids.  13,14,15 year old kids.  Middle and High School age kids.  Same thing with the Cultural Revolution, where kids were torturing and murdering their teachers, in a purely Satanic inversion of the social order.

It is certainly possible to posit, philosophically, many purposes and meanings for life.  But to my mind, one of the most obvious is psychological maturation.  This would apply whether you are “spiritual”, religious, or an atheist or agnostic.  Maturing means to develop emotional control, interpersonal skills, knowledge of ones self and emotions, and in the end the capacity both to realize dreams, and to develop contentment and inner peace in nearly all circumstances.  These are obviously desirable outcomes.  It is really not up to discussion if one can remain physically a child all one’s life, so it is equally not up for discussion if one can or should remain so emotionally.

But in our present world, all of this is confused.

Sooner or later I usually get a vision of the true inner reality of the Presidents.  I have since Bill Clinton (whose dominant inner emotion is rage, with sex being, I suppose, the only thing that he has ever found to calm it).

I got my Trump vision last night, in a turbulent sleep, that was actually better than most nights when I don’t drink.

Here is the thing with him: he is slowly winning admirers even among his enemies.  People have been trying to lay traps for him literally since he walked in the White House, and he has not only avoided most of them, but laid counter-traps.

And what we call the Deep State has, until now, actually included many actual patriots who simply thought Trump was an idiot.  But he is schooling them.

Trump, with his demeanor, his hair, his history: he uses all this to his advantage.  He actually is as smart as he says he is, but people look at him and see bluster. He could actually say “I’m going to throw a right hook in 2.5 seconds to your temple” and still be able to do it, because they would think he was bluffing.  He can’t be serious, they think.

Trump’s salient characteristic actually is his intelligence.  No really.  No, REALLY.  I didn’t see this either.  I liked him because he had the balls to tell the truth that Barack Obama never produced a birth certificate that would have been allowed by any court of law in the country (or for that matter, most other countries with robust records systems).  This never implied he was born in Kenya. It simply was a CERTAINTY that he never complied with a most basic aspect of law.  He never even proved he was legally eligible to draw a paycheck in the United States.  His social security number was from a State he had literally no connection with.  Asking that of a President is not asking much.  It is farcical that that issue was made to disappear so completely and with such confidence.

But returning to Trump, this is his favorite game: watching people take him for an idiot, then beating them over and over and over, because THEY DON”T LEARN.  They don’t ever learn that his successes are not accidents, that it is not dumb luck.  It’s like Charlie Brown and the football.  All the information is there, but nobody WANTS to see it, nobody WANTS to admit that this blustering serial philanderer with inexplicable hair is smarter than them.

And for his part, he enjoys it thoroughly.  One can ask how someone could enjoy several years of being attacked by everyone–the press, his own party, the opposing party, then the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, and most of our government apparatus–and having fun.  Most people would find this a nightmare.  They would be aging rapidly.

But in a peculiar way, Trump is the BEST QUALIFIED President, for this moment in time, we have elected in a very, very long time.  It is not inapt for him to compare himself to George Washington.  On the one level, it feeds into people’s views that he is a narcissistic idiot, helping him play his favorite game; but on the other George Washington, too, was the man of the hour.  He was the perfect match for America at that moment in time.  He would be destroyed completely and forced to drop out in a political race today, but then, what he was best at–staying above partisan frays, wielding power with restraint, preserving a deserved reputation for absolute integrity–was absolutely necessary.  If we had had an Aaron Burr in there, or even an Alexander Hamilton, we would have failed.

Someone with Trumps long term practice dealing with countless enemies is exactly who we need right now.  Our nation is being slowly destroyed from within.  Most of our Federal agencies have been politicized, seemingly for some time.  The FBI lies to us and to those it reports to.  The CIA is treating governments it doesn’t like as enemy states to be overthrown, in an absolute vitiation of its mission, the law, and common moral decency.  The IRS has still faced no real consequences for an organized regimen of law breaking.  Europe is under attack by organized nihilists who want to overturn Western civilization itself.  The list goes on.

I recall with gratitude how terrified I was that Hillary would win.  I literally wanted to leave the country, not in a Hollywood movie star way, but in a securing a job overseas and getting a work visa kind of way.  Everything she needed to begin censoring opposing views, using the power of government to harass political opponents, and even to start ruinous wars, was in place.  It was put there by Obama, whose job it had been to push this process as far as he could.

Now, the future is up for grabs.  There is still a lot to be determined, countless ways things could get fucked up.  But at least we have a man who is not only determined to fix things, but who ENJOYS the process, and who is good at it.

After a year of facing one ambush after another, from all sides, it is amazing what Trump has STILL been able to accomplish, and at that with a smile.

So, I sold all my violent movies and video games, with the exception of Battle: Los Angeles, which remains one of my favorite films, because it’s about perseverance in the face of impossible odds, perseverance because perseverance is what Marines do.  That, and Thin Red Line, which hardly romanticizes violence, and which deals with most of the harsh realities of war, at least as it seems to me from the outside.  You have incompetent commanders, physical pain and misery, cheating women, stupid mistakes, the randomness of death and much more.  That is also one of my favorite movies.

But with the money I just bought a book on porn, titled Pornified.  It’s some ten years old, but it seems likely what we needed to know, we knew then. I know my book “Viewing Violence” was written some twenty years ago.  The findings it reported have never been invalidated or, for that matter, systematically studied in the way you would think something threatening to radically alter our social order permanently would be by “experts”.

So: sex and violence.  Are you old enough to remember when people worried about those?  What was it, perhaps back in the 1980’s?  When Alan Alda types fretted, at least with regard to violence, that it might lead to violence?  We were told by the Alan Alda types, back then, that PBS was civilized, and much of the rest, not. I remember this.

Is it not astonishing that all this disappeared?  It’s gone, by and large, is it not?  If I want to watch porn–and I do on occasion, although certainly not daily–I don’t even have to put in my age.  ALL the barriers to pretty much anyone, of any age, watching it any time, have vanished.

Who, anymore, has time for cultural criticism?  Is this not the POINT of the Fed and its allied bankers vitiating the value of our labor by destroying the value of our money?  And where the fuck is the Left on this issue?  Absent.  If it requires brains, judgement, and the capacity for historical contextualizing, they are “away on business”, like Churchill’s God and father in “The Darkest Hour”. (or Tom Wait’s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9mhsW5aWJM )

But where the fuck is most of the right?  Yes, free markets, contract law, and property rights build prosperity, but is it really so damn hard to understand that a stable currency helps everyone?  If we are at 50% of what is possible, why not chase 100%?

Well, I have no good answer there, but here is my thing: I’m going to remove violent movies from my life for a time. I’m going to read more, things like Pornified, but also things like Walt Whitman’s novel (which one of my kids got me for Christmas), poetry, and other stuff.

Who would we all be if we did not swim in this sea of depersonalizing sex, alienating violence, and solitude supporting media? It’s a Satanic soup.

And–and I forgot this point chasing squirrels–I think porn will turn out, in the end, to be very much like violence in media.  It doesn’t make people addicts, inherently.  It doesn’t turn them into sex fiends.

What I think it does, ALSO, is decrease levels of trust.  Here is the thing: if you are thinking, as a man, with every women you meet and make love to, “somebody out there is better”, then you have inhibited the amount of intimacy possible with whoever you are with.  If you know you might leave her, you have to pull back or, if you are sociopath, tell her what she wants to hear without conscience.

In the first case, she will feel it, if she is not committed to lying to herself, and in the second case you will fuck her up for a very long time.   I once went on one date with a It’s Just Lunch date who had a man insinuate himself into her life, and that of her child.  This man had a kid who became friends with her child.  He asked her to marry him and she accepted.  Then one day he and his kid just disappeared.  Turned out he was already married to someone else, somewhere else.  I have heard a lot of fucked up stories in my life.  That is one of them.  That’s actually not the worst.

In any event, the point before–SQUIRREL!!!!–was that subtle effects matter.  If the light in your eyes dims even a little, that matters.  If your joy in life diminishes even a little, that matters.  In the social realm, if people start thinking “people suck” even a little more, that matters.  If you start looking at other people as objects even a little bit, that matters.

I think most of us–certainly this applies to me in spades–find it difficult or impossible to remember or imagine a world before all of “this”.  It is given, now.  It is there, now.  There are very few pay per view porn movies in hotels now, since it is all free on the internet.  Everything is there, all the time, no matter the cost to our sense of integrity, capacity for trust, and even our capacity for authentically enjoyable sex and cuddling.

Ponder: for every actual school shooter, how many kids are contemplating it?  The pool from which we would draw such kids would include, I would suspect, about half the boys in every high school who play first person shooter games ten hours or more a week.  And half might be low.   As far as I can tell, EVERYONE plays these games.  This includes, of course, girls, but we have never had a girl shooter that I can recall.

Are the aspiring shooters now to be redirected into hatred for the NRA and the 2nd Amendment?  Rene Girard had this phrase “violent unanimity” I always liked.  A crowd has a hive-mind, but a hive, of course, is a place to live and belong.  A group mind is not your mind particularly, but you are also a co-owner.

We need to be clear that the primary concern should not be school shootings.  This is merely the last manifestation of a sickness which is endemic.  It is the crystalization of something in the water, something in the air.

It is this sickness, this anti-social, alienated sickness, which should be our concern.  This sickness will inform these kids as they age.  It will suck life from their days, and joy from their hearts.  It will twist their minds, making truly Liberal thought difficult when not outright impossible.

We live in an era with simply competing propagandas.  This is, in large measure, what the long term effort by the Left to eradicate open dialogue and genuinely critical thinking has bought us.  Video games feed into social isolation and alienation, and alienation in turn makes integrative propaganda more effective, but the whole things stems from psychotic intellectuals, who continue to inhabit our universities sending out messages of darkness, violence and death, all in the name of justice, peace, and prosperity.

I think a valid comparison CAN be made between the mass protests, the intolerance of dissent (I saw one principal threaten to arrest a kid for having a sign saying “guns don’t kill people; people kill people), and the sheer mass CONFORMITY and lack of independent thought, and the mass movements of both the Nazis and the Maoist Cultural Revolutionaries.  You see in all these cases lots of kids, utterly and absolutely convinced of the absolute correctness of their ideas (despite having been fed those ideas only recently, and despite the fact that had they been fed the opposite ideas they would be shouting them just as enthusiastically), marching about in lockstep, and ready and willing to scream down all dissent.

And it occurs to me that what we might call the failure of integration and failure of empathy which drives all school shooters is now on wider display.  These students are not so very different from the kids who take up arms against the slings and arrows of a world which comes to feel like it hates them.  They are not unwilling to tell the “world” to go fuck itself.  They are not unwilling to use powerful social violence against anyone who dares stand against them.  I would not want to be a kid in any of these schools with known NRA parents, at least in the bluer areas of the country.

This video game world is pervasive.  This violent movie world is pervasive.  They are all marinated in the same ritual experiences, which teach them to denigrate others, to depersonalize them, and at the same time to fail to properly individuate and acculturate to a world where they are not just allowed but required to think for themselves, and form their own opinions.  The facts are that they are not taught to think critically–in far too many cases–and that they face social violence if and when they form unpopular conclusions.

I can’t know what we are building as a society, but I think the achievement of generalized mental health is a vastly more important project than flying or self driving cars, better computers, or a trip to Mars.

I think truly deep relaxation might be defined as “having forgotten fear”.

I got “attacked” by what I am calling a “demon” again last night.  As always seems to happen, it had a different energetic quality than the others.  This one felt like a chicken, with me as the meal worm.  It pecked at me for a long time.  It was a long time, because I no longer feel the need to escape. I  won’t say I wasn’t scared, but it is something I am trying to figure out, and I know by now they can’t–or in any event have not, yet–hurt me.

But it does seem to me that as you go down the rabbit hole of your deepest fears, both as an individual and as a member of a species with a collective unconscious, many of them will get magnified.  As you focus, what you had been able to keep in the periphery inserts itself into the middle, and looms large.  This is all to the good, even if it is also unpleasant to some extent (but also interesting).

And obviously some of us just have a lot more to process than others.

My work continues.  That is a useful definition of deep relaxation though, in my opinion.

It was hard to miss the picture of Drew Barrymore, her mouth dripping with blood, on the back of my Men’s Health.  I assumed rightly the topic was cannibalism, and the “humor” the juxtaposition of fake friendliness, fake happiness, with authentic emotional hunger and inexhaustible rage.

I have felt, in times of extreme tension, the urge to bite someone.  I know the feeling.

And the Bay Area is fucking psychotic.  It was bad when I was there several decades ago, and I’m sure it has gotten worse.  You might have seen the picture of some home in Oakland with most of the roof missing that was for sale for $367,000 or something like that.

When you crowd rats into a cage, they get mean.  They get nasty.  Fights which would not happen with space become continual.

So mythically, they are expressing something real.

The question remains, though: how do we best build and support mental health in all circumstances?  More concretely, how do we build and support authentic, deep relaxation?  India is overcrowded to a much greater extent, but they deal with it.  They do not feel, I don’t think, the need to kill and eat each other most of the time in most places.  They have an intact–or largely intact–culture.  They have meaningful family relations.  Everyone has a place and a role, at least in theory.  They are not, yet, on this manic American quest for authenticity, permanent happiness, and material plenty.

Look around you.  Learn.  It is a start.

Edit: I seem to have confused Santa Clarita with Santa Clara. My point remains. LA is if anything worse. And all that mess is LA as far as I am concerned.