Author: White Whale

I took a career profile someone posted on Facebook, and came up with “humanitarian”.  I accept this.  This is what I am trying to be, with qualifications.

When people hear that word, they think someone trying to provide water to people, or to heal or comfort the sick and dislocated.

In my case, though, I think structurally: what IDEAS are floating around that are CAUSING mass suffering?  I look not just to objective poverty and deprivation, but to CULTURAL poverty and deprivation.

Are the Tibetans suffering more from poverty, or from the sustained Chinese assault on everything they value and love?  They were poor before, and I suspect most of them would go back in a HEARTBEAT to the status quo before the Chinese came, even though that would mean many of them living in cold places in yurts (or whatever they call them.)

What are the pervasive American maladies?  I would say sanctimonious indifference to preventable suffering in our midst, materialism fed by a lack of a good alternative, and a complete abandonment of sensitivity to spiritual crisis and growth.  We want to be clocks.  We aspire to be gears in vast machines.  Some gears are bigger and shinier, but qualitatively the same.

This is my principle enemy.  This is the principal problem we face.  We have good tools for economic development: property rights, free markets, and political freedom.  These have always worked and always will work.  Why are they not generalized the world over?  Bad ideas. Horrible ideas, and, again, a sanctimonious indifference to outcome, which is to say preventable human suffering.  It took both the Chinese and the Indians over half a century of mass starvation to adopt free markets, and they have advanced more in 20 years than the previous 1,000.

I am a Humanitarian.  This is why I get pissed so often.  I hate stupidity, and hate it even more when it works to inflict pain on innocents.  As some meme I saw put it, keep in mind that one option for those who aspire to be Christlike is pulling out a bullwhip and running the bastards out of town.

I saw they debated, read a couple highlights, see no need to watch it.

Here is the deal: if you are debating a leftist and you are not dragging them around by their hair with their own words until they cry uncle, your strategy sucks.  You don’t truly understand the difference between true Liberalism and the evils these people embrace daily.

Let us take as an example the so-called Native Americans (who came from Asia, almost certainly).  When the British colonists got here and set up camp, there were likely about 6 million in what became the United States.  Some we killed, many we put into concentration camps that we called reservations.

Here is the question one needs to ask Ayers: is it WRONG to commit mass murder?  Is this a bad thing?  For all people, or just some people?  Is it wrong to take people from their land and forcibly relocate them? If so, why?  Universal human rights?  Does he believe in these?

What the fuck do you think the North Vietnamese did when they won their war of aggression on the South?  Mass murder, mass relocation, destruction of families and traditional ways of living.  It seems likely that far more South Vietnamese died as a direct result of Communist atrocities just in that one conflict than Indians killed directly or indirectly by American force in the century of our expansion.

In the Trail of Tears somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 Indians died.  We all know about the Trail of Tears.  Well guess what?  Some 3,000 Vietnamese (you know the brown people that all look the same to left wingers) were EXECUTED in Hue ALONE just during the 1968 Tet Offensive (which failed so badly).  They were murdered and their bodies hidden, all at the order of TOP Communist officials.

You want atrocity?  Look at what was done by the people Ayers SUPPORTED, whose victory he did everything in his power to help secure.

Let me requote some dialogue–perfectly historically accurate dialogue (I will note that we now also have the testimonies of soldiers from the North; there is no doubt about what happened, at all, period), from the movie “The Green Berets”:

Miss Sutton: Yes, I guess horrible things happen in war, but that doesn’t mean they need us or
even want us.

Doc: I’ll try to answer that question for you. Let me put it in terms we all can understand. If this
same thing happened here in the United States, every mayor in every city would be murdered;
every teacher that you’ve ever known would be tortured and killed; every professor you ever
heard of, every governor, every Senator, every member of the House of Representative and their combined families: all would be tortured and killed, and a like number kidnapped. But in spite of this, there’s always some little fellow out there willing to stand up and take the place of those who have been decimated. They need us, Miss Sutton, and they want us.

Gladys Cooper: Sergeant, I’m Gladys Cooper, a housewife. It’s strange that we’ve never read of this in the newspapers.

Sgt. Muldoon: Well, that’s newspapers for you, ma’am. You could fill volumes with what you
don’t read in them.”

Read here for a very partial listing of NVA terror attacks, starting on Page 8. The terror goes all the way back to the very early days, when Ho Chi Minh was assassinating his rivals.  Diem’s brother was buried alive.

Bill Ayers is a pompous prick.  This was the reality in 1968, and things got worse, before a combination of American skill at arms, and South Vietnamese resolution not to let their nation fall to these sadistic savages enabled a general pacification of the South.  Students of history will recall it was North Vietnamese tanks, not an indigenous uprising, that signaled the fall of Saigon.

None of this is in question historically.  There is no doubt.  I repeat, we have detailed memoirs from North Vietnamese commanders, many of whom have been interviewed. 

Or, to look at the United States, would it have been wrong, given a Communist victory in the United States of the sort Ayers and his fellow sociopaths worked in their incoherent, intellectual and ineffectual way to facilitate (before they realized they needed an Obama), to murder 10 million Americans (to be clear, a number almost certainly larger than the entire population of Indians in the continental United States, most of whom we relocated, and did not kill), which is what a reliable informant claimed was the goal of the Weatherman?  This question still applies if Ayers claims–and if his lips are moving, he is telling some shade of lie–that Larry Grathwohl was lying.  Mass murder of alleged elites, of bourgeoisie and capitalists, is a prominent and ubiquitous feature of Communist coups.  What, if any, moral objection would Ayers have had then if one of those around him raised the question?

Or take voting.  Is it bad to disenfranchise people?  Is it morally wrong to exclude by law some people from the voting process?  If so, why? 

Is it then also wrong that people cannot vote AT ALL, with or without ID, in North Korea, and China, and Cuba?  What about Nicaragua when the Sandinistas were in charge?  What about the pervasive voting fraud under Hugo Chavez? 

Is war wrong?  Was it wrong still when China invaded Tibet, or North Vietnam South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos?  Was it wrong when North Korea invaded South Korea?  Were any of the wars of Communist aggression in Africa wrong, or are mass famine and death perfectly acceptable if one uses an acceptable rhetoric?  In general, are some wars OK and some not?

And if he wants to claim a double standard–it is wrong when we do it, and OK when someone else does it–is he not invoking tribalistic ethics, and if he wants to do that, by what means can he claim that what OUR tribe values is wrong?  All that has to happen is that most of us believe in it, then it becomes, by his process of logic, morally acceptable.  By that logic, every American imperial conquest has been perfectly moral.  By HIS LOGIC, nothing we have done that most of us believed in was wrong.

Basic moral reasoning is not complicated.  Yes, leftists confuse everyone because that is what they do, by going on offense and asking people to justify things which cannot be justified, but who themselves overlook and even endorse MUCH WORSE at the SAME TIME they are criticizing.

Fuck this.  Go on the offense.  Alinsky said “make them adhere to their own standards.”  This works both ways, and frankly much BETTER when WE are attacking THEM.  Go for the balls.  Go for the throat.  Show no mercy, rhetorically, because they sure as fuck will not show us any mercy.  On the contrary: they have been getting away with LITERAL atrocities–rape, torture, murder, political repression–for a century or more, and all of them explained away with verbiage no fool should tolerate for a second.

Look at our inner cities: people like Bill Ayers created them.  Look at the sad faces on every corner in Cuba: this is what Bill Ayers wants.

He wants death.  He wants pain.  He wants poverty.  Make him admit this.

Whereof one cannot speak

It is my good fortune to be able to wander in the process of earning my living.  I often drive aimlessly through strange cities, and wonder about the lives behind the doors.

Today I did a day trip to a city well known to me, and was struck by the absence of feelings I used to have.  I used to feel this sense of absence combined with hope, like salvation was just a woman or experience away.  This longing is what drives people to wander.  It was what drove the hippies, who used drugs both to stoke and calm it.  It is an itch, the scratching of which only drives it further inside.

The Portuguese have an interesting word, which I have posted on before: Saudade.

Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word that has no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or deeply melancholic
longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it
often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will
never return.^[2] A stronger form of saudade
may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown,
such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing. . . .In Portuguese, “Tenho saudades tuas” (European Portuguese) or “Tenho saudades de você” (Brazilian Portuguese), translates as “I have saudade of you” meaning “I miss you”, but carries a much stronger tone. In fact, one can have saudade of someone whom one is with, but have some feeling of loss towards the past or the future.

Saudade with someone you are with.  Ponder that.  Do you not coexist with those with whom you have a history in multiple eras?  Then, now, and what is to come?

Then I got to thinking of a phrase I first ran into when I was about 17, from Novalis:  “Sehnsucht nach dem Tod”, which is also hard to translate, but roughly lust or longing for death, but in at least my understanding meaning with death not extinction, but something else, a point to travel to.

And of course you have to add sadness to all this.  And what I saw was that, say, 10 years ago, some part of me was hoping it could live on the surface of life, float happily, that somehow someone or something would rescue me, that just over THAT hill, and then THAT hill there was salvation.

And what I see now is that my path forward is through.  It has always been through.  I have to look at the mountains of bodies in history, see all the evil, see human life as it IS, and move through it.  I am not afraid.  There is another side, there is a destination.

There is an end to suffering.  It is easy, reading the basics of Buddhism in college or somewhere, to see the Four Noble Truths as facile, simple, easy.  But to end suffering is it not perceptually, conceptually necessary to believe it POSSIBLE?  Is not the very postulation of a solution a bold step when it is first advanced?

So I looked at this city without romantic illusions, and it felt good.

When there is anything you cannot face in this world, are you not chased by it?  Are you not pursued? And can it not always find you?

And I look at the Flower Children of the 1960’s.  Did they not pursue an illusion which had no room for Vietnamese Communists hacking children into pieces, or planting bombs on them and remote detonating them like mines?  They did not have room for shallow graves with thousands of bodies with bullets in the back of their heads.  They did not want to hear about how we might have prevented the horrors in Cambodia, or just what those horrors might have been.

They still don’t.

All of this stems from wanting to live on the surface of life.   This is ignoble.  It is cowardly.  All of us have both good and evil in us, but not all of us admit this.

Somebody had to go pick up the pieces of the bodies, not just of Murphy’s group, but of the SEAL’s and Army guys who crashed in the helicopter.  The need to find and inter fallen soldiers–or what is left of them– is one of the realities of war few want to speak about. In this case, it was done in what might euphemistically be termed “austere” terrain, and under constant threat of attack.

Who are your heroes?  You likely have a list of 5-10 people who come readily enough to mind.  For me, the immediate ones are traditional military heroes. [Sammy Davis is one of my favorites.  Something about getting knocked on your ass 5 times, and getting back up 5 times makes me laugh with admiration.  Then he floats himself, wounded, across a river, even though he can’t swim.  God blesses those who don’t know what they “can’t” do.]

Back on topic, for how many of them is their principal positive attribute tranquility?  Peace of mind?  Calm?

I had said some time ago that I didn’t “get” the seated Buddha, since my life is not spent sitting.  But I think I do now: this figure symbolizes FINALLY getting some rest from the worries and troubles, doubts, hopes, fears, sadnesses, and everything else that come with human life.

Yes, of course this is obvious, and yes of course I am stupid for not getting this.  But I was sitting today, doing my Kum Nye, and just watching all the endless parade of emotions and images, and realizing that behind it all there is rest.

And I would argue that tranquility is perhaps the most important virtue, because without it all other virtues are expressed compulsively, which is to say inauthentically, mechanically.

True love proceeds from tranquility.  It takes an untroubled spirit to offer true empathy without grasping, to give without expectation or need of reciprocation. 

We all want to have a happy, untroubled heart, and you must have one to offer it.  There is no other way.

We would do well to value more this virtue, which is our workaday world has I think come to seem useless, even though with it you can both work harder and longer.

It is odd to contemplate the daily juxtaposition of Base Ten and Base Sixty numbering.  We count time in decades, but we have a dozen months.  We buy a dozen eggs.  We have sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day.  Yet there is no widespread discussing about “metric-alizing” our time.

I looked up the Babylonian numbering system.  If you look at the actual symbols, it looks to me like Base Ten.  Of course, math has never been my strong suit.

It is odd to contemplate what a strange thing it is that it took so long to invent zero.  As I have said often though, it hard enough to see what is THERE, but even harder to see what is not there.  Zero symbolizes what is missing.  This is something.  That is why we have a symbol for it.

Feels appropriate for some reason to post a poem by Bukowski.  Chosen more or less at random:

An Almost Made Up Poem

It just occurred to me today that time has texture. When you are in a hurry, it closes in on you.  When you “have” time, it opens up.  The same outward amount of work can be done within both textural contexts, but the best work is done well with the same feeling of space and openness.

As Tarthang Tulku has explained–at least, as I have understood him–across a number of books, work well done is something you enter in to, it is something which expands.  It is something you participate in, not something you “do to”.

Where else can you be physically, but here and now?  Why not be here and now perceptually as well?  Here and now is the only place you have to become larger and duller, in the sense of being diffused, not sharp.

There is a place for the open blade, but its uses are rare.

Again, not entirely sure what I am saying, but you can print this out, and use the back of the paper for a To Do or grocery list.