Author: White Whale

Socialism is the politics of codependence.  It stems from an intrapersonally unhealthy place, fosters poor mental health generally, and being rooted in psychopathology, is unable to recognize its own economic inefficiency and abusiveness, which is to say that as a general rule, it promotes the opposite of what it claims to value.  Socialist policies promote poverty, inequality, injustice, and the absolute opposite of democracy.

I’ve said all this, of course, but perhaps not quite in this way.

I watched “Showboat” for the first time last night, and could not but but think that Ava Gardner was playing a semi-autobiographical role.  And I think I was right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ava_Gardner

 “Nobody wanted to know Daddy when he was dying. He was so alone. He was scared. I could see the fear in his eyes when he was smiling. I went to see the preacher, the guy who’d baptized me. I begged him to come and visit Daddy, just to talk to him, you know? Give him a blessing or something. But he never did. He never came. God, I hated him. Cold-ass bastards like that ought to … I don’t know … they should be in some other racket, I know that. I had no time for religion after that. I never prayed. I never said another prayer.”

Her own death was preceded by a serious fall, after which she lay alone for some time until her housekeeper found her.  It does not say how long this was.  Her last words were: “I’m so tired.”  I can’t help but think the look in her fathers eyes haunted her all her life.  It was a vision of humanity, through the view of someone who felt abandoned by it.

I was feeling this energy already in Showboat.  Her character is a sad one, but she inhabited that role a bit too well.  If it is true that “your life is the only Bible some people will ever read”, many Christians have turned their backs on the Bible, ignored it, perverted it.  They would be more honest and more virtuous as chicken sacrificing “heathens” who never mouth the word love at all.  As I think about it, the likely reason that the preacher never came to see Gardner’s father was that he was a “nobody”, precisely the sort of person Jesus would have cared most for.

And I was watching all this, trying to decide who I am supposed to be.  I feel compassion sometimes, and certainly in the abstract.  Sometimes I am kind in person, although usually I am too afraid.  The feeling of being burned alive emotionally is something I am still trying to calm.

But I feel we are meant to feel love for one another, but in a paradoxical way not get stuck in the love. Feel love, but don’t identify with it.  Feel love, but allow its pain to dissolve in God somehow.  Most of what I feel are my most important insight come to me by the figurative corner of my eye.  I was not quite sure what I was feeling, but I have had the sense for some months that some subterranean growth is happening in me, something working which is above my ability to perceive.  Perhaps it might most usefully be called God’s Plan.

As you might expect, though, that soulful rendition of Old Man River affected me.

The Pentagon Papers only covered the period until 1968–when the fact is the war was won between 1968 and 1972, under Creighton Abrams–yet they have been used to justify for a half century, at least in part, our decision to abandon the South Vietnamese to an enemy they feared, an enemy which ripped millions of people from their homes and families, which killed outright several hundred thousand people, which physically and psychologically tortured most of the entire country in ways which no doubt continue to resonate in nearly home even today.

And the same policy which led us to abandon the South to their enemy caused us to abandon the entire region.  Not only South Vietnam suffered, but a case can readily be made that the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge would not have happened if we had remained staunch in our support of Lon Nol, rather than abandoning him, and his people, to a holocaust worse, proportionately, than that committed by the Nazis.  And not even the Nazis felt so morally superior that they felt the need to literally torture to death tens of thousands of people, electrocuting them in, oh I don’t know, the way John Kerry claimed, falsely, our own troops did.  They put electrodes on their genitals, but not to get information.  They simply shocked them over and over and over until they died.  Then they took their pictures.  If you look on the internet, and certainly relevant books, there are plenty of pictures of dead bodies.  They were proud of what they did, just as Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, the media, and left wing lunatics everywhere are proud to justify the “heroic” decision to publish classified information in war time, in an effort to vitiate all the efforts of all our troops, and to surrender to the North.  Which is what happened.  They got what they wanted.

Fuck all these self righteous, ignorant pricks.  Fuck all these historically illiterate bastards and bitches.  Fuck all of the people who posture in front of us, but fail to read history, fail to learn from history, fail to admit their mistakes, and fail to realize the ROLE THEY HAVE PLAYED FOR HALF A CENTURY IN SUPPORTING HORRORS BEYOND IMAGINING.

I hate to do it, but I am going to throw out the 2 movies with Tom Hanks in them I own–Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan–and boycott him and Meryl Streep forever.  Fuck these people.  They may not realize it, certainly don’t want to realize it, but they have blood on their hands.  They are continuing the cover-up of what really happened in Vietnam, where nearly 60,000 brave Americans gave their lives, for nothing.  For absolutely nothing, and for nothing, because of the treasons of the Democrats, the Washington Post, and the anti-war Left, which is to say Communist patsies.  We KNOW from the published memoirs of the NVA Generals what happened.  The history is utterly unambiguous. 

Edit: I noticed Steven Spielberg was the Director.  I looked for movies of his too, but I don’t own any, other than Saving Private Ryan. He does pop films well enough, but has never created anything that was of more than passing interest to me.

Hollywood is really starting to disgust me at a visceral level.  Their complicity in violence, injustice, horror, and human misery is absolutely unbelievable. I like movies, but most of their output I can ignore easily enough.  They were not always completely batshit insane.  There are plenty of old movies I have yet to see, and a great many foreign movies as well.

Well, I made it through another Kieslowski film.  They are hard work for me.  I always wind up bawling my eyes out, and this one was no different.  I am going to take a long break.  They always hurt me, but I always feel like I have become more human in some way.

I’m sitting here drinking coffee, watching the rain, which it is my privilege to be able to do, while still paying my bills, and my mind wandered onto sex.  I’m far from hypersexualized, but I’m also normal. I  don’t like porn, in general, but I do own a few old Playboys.  It’s odd that we’ve reached a time where magazines full of pictures of naked women is old school, and even perhaps vaguely reactionary.

In any event, I was reading about some sex lab, I think at Indiana University, which is where I think Kinsey worked, and they have found that women can orgasm through any of five different nerve plexuses: the clitoris, the G Spot, the cervix, the nipples, and the earlobes.

As far as effective sex, the main advantage, then, of a very long penis, is the ability to stimulate the cervix.  There perhaps exists some sex toy you stuff up in there so shorter men can create that feeling.  I don’t know.  I’m no sex scholar.  But pretty much everyone can reach the G spot and clitoris.  The motion of the ocean is all about figuring out how to bring the right amount of pressure on these two spots.  This is perhaps obvious to everyone, but I don’t think so.  I think most–or in any event many–men, just do whatever worked for them the first time they gave a woman an orgasm.

Nipple stimulation, of course, I think everyone has figured out, but what I wanted to comment was that when you are copulating, there are logistical constraints.  What I was wondering, though, is if some sort of device could be created to stimulate the earlobes during sex.  Something like vibrating earrings.

To my mind, given women’s sexual capacity, the average man should aim not for one, but 2-3 orgasms in an average session, and this might help.  If you do that, she is not going to cheat on you–not most women, in any event.  And it is very likely she will be much warmer and kind, and more understanding when you fuck up, as all men do regularly.  And I don’t mean philandering, but forgetting her birthday, your anniversary, to bring home milk, to clean up, and all the other things couples fight about.

Edit: women could also use this for masturbation.  There’s nothing wrong with a happy smile on your face, and some stress relief.  We need to welcome and accept all the gifts God gave us.

I was watching cars racing by yesterday, thinking I’m in a modern, strange age, and it hit me that this is a very interesting time to exist.  I don’t have a fucking clue what will happen, but things like this have already happened.  There is a Buddhadharma which we know has been preached, and which we can study.

I am told continually in my Kum Nye teaching that even bad things can come to seem interesting, can come to seem enjoyable even, and I am slowly, slowly, slowly starting to feel it.

You can feel continual anxiety in the age of nukes (and biologicals, and AI, and some fucking powerful chemicals, and plenty of powerful psychopaths), but for moments–and moments can add to years, and even lifetimes–it is all very interesting.

Where is it all going?  If you can separate a need to know, and a need to be sure you will be OK (you won’t: you die.  Sorry), then it is fascinating.

I got stuck in a traffic jam tonight and found it interesting.  Surely this is good.

I will admit to having had 5-6 beers, but for me, this is good.  I have cut my drinking by at least 90%.  That is a good thing.  I won’t drink tomorrow.

My oldest has taken an interest in “dark matter/energy”, and it occurred to me that–to the extent I understand the problem as a non-mathematician–it could likely be solved if we simply posit that the Zero Point Field is not distributed evenly throughout the universe.  And why would it be?  Could “space” not be “thicker” in some places than others, at least as seen from the perspective of being in the precipitated, material part of it?

My gut instinct is that physicists are terrified of the Zero Point Field/Quantum Vacuum, because some form of determinism is as close to a God as most of them want to get.  They want to BE gods, not learn about one.  And incorporating indeterminacy/randomness into the core of physical theories as an inescapable fact cuts them down from demiurges to technicians.

Arrogance.  If you want the answer to why people do stupid fucking things, the two answers are actual stupidity, which is much rarer than one might suppose, and arrogance in some form, some refusal to accommodate oneself to what is.

It might be appropriate here, too, to follow up on my post about assuming moral imperfection as necessary.  Here is the thing: if you keep in your own mind your own failings, brought about because you do not believe in perfection, brought about because you believe notions of perfection must inherently be based on the limitation of accurate perception (which is to say the willful suppression of wisdom), then you cannot judge others with a clear conscience either.

And this is not to say you should not judge, but it is to say that this, too, is quite often a sin.  Everything good begins with accurate perception.  It does not flow from ideas.  Not even this idea, because sometimes you need principles.

What is the essence of a dance?  Flow.  Movement.  This is why I made Perceptual Movement a core principle, with curiosity the simplest way of expressing this idea.

If you aspire to be a genuinely moral being, there is no way around a guilty conscience. The world is not simple and rarely gives us the simple choices which we emotionally crave. Most of the time, we are offered two bad options, where’re neither option is acceptable, but a decision still must be made.

This is how the world works. To avoid facing this fact, the only two obvious alternatives are building an artificial world where all is simple, and self deception.  Most people chose self deception, because they cannot tolerate the idea of being bad people. And in lying, they make much worse evil possible, and usually inevitable. Very few people are capable otherwise of the cruelty which moral certitude makes possible. What can be beyond the pale, when you are “saving the world”?

Yeah, so right after posting about how deep and shit I am, I got overwhelmed watching Andrei Rublev.  It was making me want to drink.  So I spent the rest of the day playing Call of Duty: World at War (the first one, the 360 one).  Yes, I am a hypocrite.  Yes, I do deserve to be laughed at sometimes.

I did want to comment, though, that this is a really interesting history lesson.  It follows the campaigns of a Russian in what I think was called the 3rd Shock Army, and a Marine in the 1st Division.  I forget the details of the Russian, although it ends in the Reichstag, in what was likely something not too different from what actually happened.  They really do create the feeling in the game of the world ending, and they really do give you some sense of the SIZE of that war, which was unbelievable.  They say World War 2 cost 60 million lives in all.  The Japanese killed large numbers of Chinese, particularly.  All sides lost many, many soldiers.  I want to say I read the Soviets lost some 20 million people alone.  The Nazis starved the Ukrainians, again.  You have the Holocaust, and pervasive hunger among hundreds of millions of people, perhaps even a billion or more.

The Marine fights in Peleliu and Okinawa, in what was also likely reasonably realistic.  Playing the Marine, particularly, it becomes very obvious very quickly how crazy in some ways you had to be to fight that war.  Death is everywhere.  Death is random.  And you can’t be 100% alert 100% of the time.  It’s impossible.  They say 12,000 men died, I believe in those two battles.  You only had a 1 in 5 chance of making it through the war in the Pacific alive, and it is easy to see why.  You can do everything right: use cover, fire accurately, and somebody you missed, a random grenade or mortar attack, or lucky or accurate fire from a distance can end your life in an instant.

And it becomes obvious very quickly too how easy it is to shoot your friends and fellow Marines in what is sometimes the literal fog of battle.  A moments hesitation can get you killed, but sometimes it takes a moment’s hesitation to avoid a fatal mistake.  More than once–OK, quite a few times–I shot the wrong people, and it struck me how hard that would be to live with, even if you knew their chances otherwise of making it through were slim.  And it must have happened many times.  Friendly fire is not something anybody wants to talk about, but it must happen often in all wars.

So yes, I played video games.  No, I did not pursue the Buddhadharma today.  But I did still choose to learn from it, a bit, at any rate.

For some time, the burden of life felt to me like Frodo’s ring.  For a time, I actually had Sam’s speech at the end of the Two Towers on my mirror where I could see it each morning, along with a picture of Gandalf fighting the Balrog.

I rewatched those movies a month or so ago and it affected me for several weeks.  Images from the movie kept coming back to me.  And it continues.  Earlier this week I was pondering Galadriel saying to Frodo, approximately: “the task of being a Ring-Bearer has fallen to you.  If you do not find a way, no one will.”

This is what I have long felt.  I can tell you psychodynamically why this is likely so, but it remains a reality.  But then it occurred to me this applies to all of us.  All of us are ring-bearers.  All of us have been given tasks to fulfill.  All of us were born to a purpose, a purpose which will be difficult, which will cause us moments of doubt and fear.  All of us were born to at least the potential for heroism, for going far beyond what we thought possible.  Somewhere in our hearts, I think everyone feels this, and I think mythically this is why Lord of the Rings has resonated so strongly through the souls of so many sensitive people.

Too many of us feel the opportunities for heroism are few and far between.  That opportunities for greatness are behind us, that all is settled, or will in any event be settled for us, and that our voices count for nothing, our actions count for nothing.

I of course am powerless to predict the future of the world, but I am not powerless to predict my own actions, what I choose to do, how I choose to live my life, the commitments I choose to take on, the responsibilities I choose to shoulder and advance as well as I can.

So, in important respects, we can all predict the future.  We can control what we control, and if this spirit is generalized sufficiently, that WILL make a difference.  It cannot but make a difference.  The best offense any enemy can marshal is the ability to convince his enemy he has no chance.

To take a concrete example, as I will never tire of pointing out until the truth is proclaimed generally, the American people were convinced, AFTER we won the Vietnam War, that it could not be won, and this belief, and this belief alone–as embodied in what has rightly been termed an Imperial Congress–cost the South Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Laotians their freedom, and incalculable suffering.

And the way is, at some point, always down the Paths of the Dead, another metaphor from Lord of the Rings.  How do each of us walk into our own internal “deaths”?  How do we confront what is within us, but not living, not blossoming, which is hidden in fear and abandonment? How do we face fear itself, naked, uncloaked, unavoidable?  How do we find and master the many monsters each of us hides even in the bright light of day?

What did Aragorn do?  He walked into a dark place, filled with inchoate, ineffable terrors, and confronted them.  He mastered them.  And he took their energy to achieve concrete goods, then allowed them to dissipate fully.

I look at my own life, and it often seems I do little.  I don’t socialize that often. I can talk to anyone about anything, but most people get frightened when I “get deep”.  This is partly my own fault.  I have not mastered my demons.  My touch is coarse.  I am indelicate.  Emotionally, it is sometimes like trying to paint with kitchen mitts on.
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But it is also easy to see the entirety of our world as engineered to prevent the emergence of deep truths, to foster and feed self serving lies.  You cannot speak deep truths without reminding people of the demonic, of everything they fear, of everything they would give anything to bury forever.

Now, this is the place where the Good lies too.  You cannot separate them easily.  The Earth touches the Sky through us.  This is a Kum Nye metaphor, or at least I have appropriated a specific visualization for this purpose.

I am watching Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev again, and as always with his films, am having “things” emerge continually.  Back to it.

I will add that I was watching an interview with one of Kieslowski’s friends a couple weeks ago, after watching Camera Buff (which felt vaguely autobiographical, although that was not mentioned), and he commented that Kieslowski’s belief was that art–good art–was supposed to be work.  It was not entertainment.  It was conscious work.  It takes effort.  But what do you get with any effort, any work?  Something new.  Working is building, and building, for me, is Life.