Author: White Whale

I was listening to the Rolling Stones song “No Expectations”, and thought about the lyric “once I was a rich man/now I’m so poor. Never in my sweet, charmed life have I felt like this before.”

I got to thinking: it’s unclear if his “wealth” was literal or figurative, but if he was a typical hippy, it was both.

Then I got to thinking about Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”. “You went to all the best schools, but you know you only used to get juiced in it”. Something like that. Rich girl, who gave it all up to wander, and wound up having to in effect sell her body to get by.

Look at the social wastelands generated by the 60’s. Was there really hope? What happened to them? Some were permanently damaged by drugs or died–I’ve known several people who had no idea why they were still alive–but most of them just sort of stopped wandering at some point, and settled down–petulantly, no doubt, at first–then started living more or less ordinary, bourgeois lives after a ten year or so gap.

What did they get in that period? You’ve all heard the old saying: if you can remember the 60’s (70’s), you weren’t there. David Bowie supposedly lost an entire year of his life. Is that really living?

I think it is past time to recognize that the 60’s, far from being a period of deep creativity, were in fact characterized by a profound neglect of social responsibilities–to the future, to the present–and the hauteur with which former drop-outs looked at those who failed to sympathize with them does nothing to mitigate this.

Urban blight is a product of the socialism of the 60’s. The inability of wide swathes of our youth to achieve a sense of belonging and “ennestedness” is a product of the 60’s. The essence of Conservatism is to try and protect what is useful in human life, and the most important of this is extending to our children a place in the world, and a sense of belonging there, and the capacity to be happy there.

A trap, you say? Nothing doing, you say? Normality is for fools. It is for saps. It is for cowardly conformist losers. The true “life” is on the road, in the winds of passion, not stuck in some 3 bedroom suburban home raising kids.

Before you insist on that riff, look at the world we actually live in, not the fantasy you can imagine. Millions of kids hit the road in the 60’s. Did it do them any good, on balance? Are they happier? Most of the ex-hippies I know are neurotic and maladjusted. A high percentage of them have or have had to overcome substance abuse problems. People who are happy don’t feel the need to anesthetize themselves, which is all drugs do. That is why you voluntarily lose long periods of your life. That is not living.

Living is having useful work to do, and people around you who understand you, care about you, and are loyal to you. Vagrants do not have useful work, and they cannot rely on most of those around them. Deadheads are notoriously flaky. They love one another when they are high–I’ve seen it–but I’ve also noticed that long term LSD use makes people irritable, and lacking in even the most basic emotional self control.

There are so many examples–we are surrounded by them–but take this song, by Green Day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8krdLDuEx3U

Listen both to the quality of the music–the mechanical dullness, the dissonance–and listen to the lyrics. He is probably singing about trying to sleep while stoned, but a clear element in this is almost certainly clinical depression. He is sad. He has no point or purpose.

And his parents were likely hippies. They likely didn’t discipline him, and probably taught him that much of America is “bullshit”, and that the spontaneous arrogance of youth is superior to the time-honored truisms of the old and the dead.

And this is what you get.

A wicked wind blew through here in the 60’s/70’s. All of this is the result of only PARTIAL rejection of God and American ideals. This is a hint of socialism, only a hint. Much worse is possible.

At the same time, much better is possible, if we can look at this era and its aftermath with unjaundiced and new eyes.

It has seemed to me more than once that the stubbornness with which former hippies hold their political views–in the face of all evidence continuing to argue they have merit–is in no small measure related to a desire for that apparently wasted part of their lives to have actually MEANT something, when in reality they were just running–and not finding–in almost all cases.

As I use the term, it is “An Emergent Property of any social or individual system in motion defined by:

Self Pity/Resentment
Perceptual rigidity
A lack of the ability to directly control internal states, making that person or group entirely vulnerable to whatever happens outside. This in turn leads to a need for power.

This basic complex, of course, leads to hatred, to the rationalization, as needed, of actions taken to gain power; and quite often to the full rejection of any conceptions of shared humanity–outside, perhaps, of a small group.

Take the Iranian Mullahs. They are evil. They beat women that dress inappropriately, in their view. In so doing, they are operating from a very ridgid system of thought, and rejecting as relevant in any way the humanity and feelings of those women.

Undergirding the enterprise is a constantly stirred up resentment of Israel. One would think that if only Israel were destroyed, then paradise itself would ensue. This is a stupid and childlike idea, but it is one that is emotionally effective with the disenfranchised and uneducated.

I think this basic thought pattern is close to the truth.

Someone said to me that hate and fear are related. I think the connection is in that last aspect of the definition. Weak people fear change, since they doubt their ability to cope with it. This leads to a fear of change. This can, in turn, lead to a fear of any person or group who does things differently, since the public display of nonconformity could lead–such people fear–to change. Historically, this has both enabled and encouraged the conquest of differing cultures. First, you get their stuff, which is sufficient reason for the non-fearful; but second, you gain control of their lives, and no longer have to coutenance difference.

Islam was perhaps the first system of thought whose conquests were based exclusively on the elimination of cultural difference. Prior to them, most conquests were just for booty and land, and cultural conditioned imposed solely for bureaucratic efficiency. After the Muslims set the example, though, you did see similiar things in the New World, particularly the parts upon which the Spanish afflicted themselves.

Is such conquest evil? Yes, I think it is. Does that make religion evil? No. Islam spread throughout Central Asia without conquest. Buddhism, of course, went from India to Japan without a single shot fired.

In all this my logic is simple: if I define Goodness as the Emergent Property of the interactions with matter of the rejection-of-self-pity, perseverance, and Perceptual movement/Breathing, then Evil would be the opposite. They are self pitiers, quitters, and dogmatists or indifferent outright to higher perception.

I use these terms since I think they have value, but I want to emphasize that there is never in this world one to one congruence between either term and any human being, group, or institution. Where we want to have a little white ball opposed to a little black ball, the reality is that if–we an example–visualize them as crumpled up bits of paper, describing everything about that, say, person, then we will see both good and bad. We will see more writing/facts/opinions that tend towards hate in the black ball, and more than tend towards a sense of common humanity and love in the other, but both will have blots. None of our saints have been perfect, even by our own standards. Perfection, per se, is only possible in limited areas, and then only at the cost of rigidity in some other area.

Two quotes I offer up often: “Renounce sainthood: it will be a thousand times better for everyone”, from Lao Tzu; and “Perfect goodness is crooked”, by Chuang Tzu.

Take Egypt. A useful way to unroll this is to look at the economic system, as decribed here (you have to pay $8 a month to get the whole thing, which shouldn’t break anybody’s bank; I read the original in the paper edition).

What he describes is a system where it is almost impossible to get title to anything. If you want to open a generic business, the paperwork takes five years. So what do people do? They just set up wherever they can, whenever they want to. But this is a shaky, unsecure way of doing things. It also happens outside the taxable economy, and since it represent an amount of activity equal to or greater than “legitimate” business activity, it needs to be factored in strongly in any policy discussion.

In most developing nations, the simple act of defining and protecting property rights would go a long way towards both economic development and political stability. This should be the goal, and it is an eminently reasonable goal.

Socialists, being Romantics temperamentally, want to see mass uprising in the street, coupled by VICTORY over THE MAN. It would be like their side won. They foolishly conflate Liberal ideals with anyone who rises against an autocratic state. This is of course historically impossible to defend. Even in the paradigmatic Leftist revolution, the French Revolution, they wound up with a tyranny that made Louis XVI look like a model of temperance and moderation. Same with Lenin. Both killed more political prisoners in their first year in power than the regimes they overthrew had killed in the previous 100. This is a universal pattern. You easily add North Korea, China, Cuba, Iran, and others.

Mubarak, in sum, is neither good nor evil. He is a combination. The Muslim Brotherhood, likewise, is mostly evil, but they have done good things. They have provided charity, and the other sorts of social services that even American gangsters were known for.

The question, on Egypt, is this: given that the overarching task is to move in the direction of global peace, prosperity, liberty, and contentment, what policy best moves us, however slowly, in that direction? And if we can’t move IN that direction, which policy causes us to diverge from that goal the least quickly?

That is how I think we need to address these things.

There is a system of movement, both emotional and physical, that has long been a part of the Tibetan system of ritual practice, and which was codified in a usable form for Americans by Tarthang Tulku. The books I have are out of print, but I think this is the reprint here.

It’s not really yoga. You get to move around, and rather than emptying your mind, you focus on your body, and the sensations you are feeling. I seem to be a kinesthetic person, on balance, and this system works for me.

Structurally, I see it as the antidote to the false dichotomy people draw between a life of passion and life of duty. I used the metaphor earlier of living between two goal posts. This helps you float up, emotionally, and spiritually. It is the antidote to feeling trapped. It helps you draw nurturing feelings from even the most common experiences.

I would go so far as to say that if one truly “gets” what is possible here, you don’t really need to travel, to roam the world, or to live an exciting life. If you can make ALL experiences larger, then the small becomes large, larger even than the exotic is for those with neither a talent nor training for experience.

Kum Nye is a way of engendering individually useful emotional movement, in socially useful and constructive ways. This is absolutely not an athletic system. It is a system for unlocking emotions that have been trapped somewhere.

It has been immensely useful for me, so I thought I would pass this along. I feel I have mentioned it before, but who knows where or how long ago. As a general rule, I try never to discuss problems for which I have no solution. This is my recommended solution to the Romantic impulse.

Romanticism is the pursuit of tragedy, yet is characterized neither by catharsis nor the cultivation of empathy. It is ritualistic, even compulsive, and awakens no sleeping giants, except in the end those of despair. The grand passion is ephemeral, but the effects of the actions guided by someone under the thrall of such a grand passion linger.

Romanticism is a sickness, for which the cure is emotional maturity.

These are a few broad stroke comments. I’m not sure even I agree with them. I will have to think about it.

This is the title of one of the more intelligent and practical Sales books I’ve read. My own method is complete directness, making it obvious I am trying to sell something, but only if it makes sense for the client. People who have problems that need solving always appreciate help, if it is competent and well intentioned.

When it comes to debate, it seems to me that broadly speaking–and there are infinite local variations possible–there are two types: efforts at persuasion, and efforts at learning. We get them confused.

In general, my interest is in learning. I am not always kind and gentle with people I debate, if I perceive them as being more or less consciously obstructionistic and obtuse. This is because I like pushing, and getting push-back. This has been a reliable method for me over the years of generating new insights, and new perspectives on old ideas. This is not, however, persuasion.

In persuading, the very first task is determining if the person you are talking with CAN be persuaded. Are they conscious of a gap or defect, or do they suspect one may be there? Are they trying to solve a problem, that they will appreciate competent and well intentioned help on? If not, there is no point in talking with that person.

If so, then the first thing you have to do is demonstrate empathy and understanding, such that they will listen to you. Where there is no connection, there is no useful communication, and there can be no connection where there is no openness.

This is a suggestion I am making publicly to myself, but I think it is always worth devoting a bit of time to determining what type of discussion is happening, and a bit more to what type of discussion is POSSIBLE, in any given context.

With respect to Faulkner’s home, named Rowan Oak, I found it interesting that there is plainly what I would assume to be a Druidic circle in his very large front yard. There is a tree in the middle of several circles of stones, with a circle of trees–a la Stonehenge–on the outside. The tree in the middle does not appear to be an oak. It is quite small, and appears non-deciduous (doesn’t lose its leaves; my botanical knowledge leaves much to be desired).

Clearly, Faulkner would not have been a druid. Wiccanism is a recent creation, sparked it seems in no small measure by the inordinate amount of time many of its practitioners seem to spend in front of computers.

Yet, this myth may have appealed to him. The Rowan tree was sacred to the druids, and he plainly drew from this myth in renaming his home.

An interesting historical fact about the Druids was that they practiced human sacrifice. They hung their victims from the trees, strangling them. So did the Vikings, who seem to have been influenced by them.

One wonders what actual mythical complex he was accessing, and to what extent it was conscious. I feel, perhaps erroneously, that he felt some need for something old, some old structure or form, that could anchor him in his modern formlessness. Something readily observable on a daily basis–such as his home, and a symbol of his home.

I had intended this for another post, but will say it here. It seems to me that there is a fundamental conflict in our world between love–the coming together of souls–and sacrifice, which creates meat out of death. Literal sacrifice–of chickens or goats or sheep or other animals–is still practiced by Muslims, by some Hindus, by some Africans, and others. What is the purpose of this?

It seems to me there is an evil in this world, which is recognized and temporarily marginalized by acts of violence. Sacrifice–act of the sacred–is a socially sanctioned outlet for violence.

In Judaism, you had priests in robes and funny hats slitting the throats of sheep on altars built for the purpose, while chanting to Yahweh.

To assume a social role is to submit to violence, to some extent, particularly to the extent you were not able to choose that role. Social activists point this out, such as gender roles, marital roles, the differences between classes in access to opportunities, the difference between nations in power and capabilities. They see this, and call, in effect, for violence against those roles. They say you should be able to do whatever you want, whenever you want, if it doesn’t hurt someone else.

Yet something is missing. It seems to me our primitive minds and souls need violence. We need to be led, by traditions; and if not by traditions by people. We need that submergence in something larger, some oceanic field. This is the root of Nazism, which created for its adherents a sense of paradoxical freedom in their conformity. They were free from solitude, from the anxiety of freedom, and free to exercise violence against others.

Communism does not work quite the same way. It is access to violence, but the violence does not have a redemptive quality, since it is always justified. The Nazis just said “we are the best, and we deserve more stuff”. This is an old social message, for which we are genetically ready.

Communists sublimate (I don’t like Freud, but will use one of his words here) hate while preaching love. The Big Lie is at the very heart of their activity. This means that they cannot acknowledge openly their own aggressive impulses. That means they never do get that oceanic feeling, in an actually Communistic society.

Where they get it is in FREE societies, that they are trying to subvert. In that case, they can imagine utopias, they can pretend they are not acting out of violence and hate, and can without immediate cognitive dissonance speak of love and revolution in the same breath.

But this is a romantic instinct, and as such trending to death. Such cannot be said of Nazism. Had Hitler won, he would have built the cities in the Russian plains he imagined. The Germans would have lived lives of luxury, waited on hand and foot by slaves. One can readily label this as evil, but it is not a lie. Communism is always a lie. The Nazis never claimed to be helping anyone but themselves. Communists do, yet they kill more people.

What is this evil that underlies all of this? It is a wind, blowing through our world. The countervailing wind is that of love or Goodness. It is like the two are in a wind tunnel, blowing at one another. Or a good mythic metaphor would be in the Harry Potter books, when Harry’s wand connects with Voldemort. Their relative wills meet, and go back and forth.

I feel this in me sometimes. I have interesting dreams, which I can generally control fairly well. I feel there is a battle in this world. This is a Manichean outlook, but certainly one that comports well with Christianity and Islam, at least.

Clearly, there is evil in this world, that I represent as sacrifice, as intentionally killing things to avoid larger violence, and to reinforce rigid social institutions. Christ himself may have been implicitly recognizing this in offering himself as a final sacrifice, to be commemorated with ritual cannibalism. He may have seen that in the fallen world he was looking at, the people who spred his Gospel may have needed that as a crutch. On the plus side, you introduce the idea of unconditional Love, even for cultural Others. On the minus side, you have to keep a link with the evil of the past.

Few thoughts. I’ve taken too long already. How I manage to pay my bills is anybody’s guess.

Postscript: it is interesting to speculate, too, on whether Faulkner had in mind, too, the lost colony of Roanoke. As someone whose life was taken up with language, the homophone–or close to it, depending on how one said it–clearly would not have escaped him. Faulkner himself may have spoken about this, but I’m not going to take the time to research it.

I don’t always know where my ideas come from. I often just sit silently–virtually or actually–and watch my thoughts. Things just pop into my head sometimes. The title of this post just popped into my head this morning.

I was thinking about William Faulkner. I got to visit his home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, a week or two ago. I went an hour or two out of my way to make it happen. For whatever reason, I have long had a somewhat romantic idea of him, in some grass covered small town in the Deep South, sitting down and writing great novels.

At the same time, in recent years, I have wondered about the failure of the artists of the World War One era to really write works that would have helped us process that tragedy, that cataclysm. Faulkner is not so much known, in my understanding, for telling great stories, but for telling good stories in structurally, morphologically distinct ways. He is known for sentences that go on forever.

It seems to me there is a difference between the task of telling universally relevant stories in better ways, and of telling what amount to prosaic–if dramatic–stories in what I would term quantitatively unique ways. The words are arranged differently, but any difference in the affects thereby created are strictly aesthetic, generally superficial and intellectual, and non-mythic.

This may or may not be true of Faulkner particularly. I’ve only read one book by him, “Absolom, Absolom”.

More generally, though, this is the point I want to make, and it does appear to apply to Faulkner: the role of art, in my view, is to integrate us into a larger meaning system, which is to say a reason for living, for enduring pain, for stoically bearing “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”; any art which does not set this as the PRIMARY task is in my view decadent.

Consider the epics of the Vikings. They had a system by which the stories of their old heroes could be told in innovative ways by innovative people, but without ever losing the basic points of the stories: the courage, the betrayals, the loyalty–the expression of virtues they thereby learned to value.

Shakespeare is great because he both created great prose,but also great opportunities to deepen one’s life experience. Read, really READ, and pay attention to, Hamlet’s justly famous soliliquy:

To be, or not to be–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! — Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

Faulkner, in my understanding, was if I may put it this way, a generic intellectual of the Paris of the 1920’s. He was part of what is sometimes called cultural ferment, and what I would term articulate cultural and self-destructiveness. What good came out of all that? When you think of Hemingway, you think of muscular sentences. Do you think of a man who lived happily, or who was able to teach others how to do so? He put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe.

You get into that melancholic mood in high school, reading all this stuff. I was long ago given Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech as an antidote, by an English teacher.

As I read it as an adult, it still sounds good: man is not doomed; writers suffer to tell stories about authentic human emotions and conflicts; that the writers job is to help people endure and prevail.

Faulkner deserved the Nobel Prize, but I have to ask if his words ring true. Was his own life dedicated to writing about transcendance, or simply about endurance? Can a life philosophy whose pinnacle is getting by inspire us to the heroism that characterizes healthy cultures? I don’t think so. We need more.

These writers had a chance to help us process the horror of World War One, and they skipped it. They themselves seem to have been traumatized, and simply expressed that trauma. We need builders, not cultural journalists.

This brings me to the title. As it came to me, a “Sullivan” is simply someone who does their job quietly, lives a normal, pedestrian life, and dies and is buried in a plot somewhere not far from where they lived their entire life.

A “Homeby”, a word I invented, is someone who is plain, not particularly clever or creative, who lives in a slot in the world that they never leave. It combines “homely” with a focus on Home.

True cultural creativity is rare. This is the realm of myth, and generative myths are hard to come by. Destructive myths are quite easy–we are surrounded by them in our modern world.

In important respects, Faulkner was actually a Sullivan who was talented with words the same way some stone-masons are talented with stone. He has a brick walkway in front of his home. Had that work been done superlatively, in my view it would not have been in any respect inferior to the work of Faulkner, except to the extent that it was lesser known. Writing as a “trade” is in no qualitative respect superior to any other trade, such as plumbing, carpentry, architecture, elecrical work, etc.

Cultural creation is. This is what enables people to self organize in new and better ways. This is what Shakespeare did. Most of our cannon we read in high school and college English classes is the equivalent of brickwork. It is not important, and not worth reading except for aesthetic purposes.

The story of “It’s a Wonderful Life” is culturally creative: it helps support ordinary people in living ordinary lives, happily. Would-be cultural elites like to attack the bourgeois, the ordinary. These are the people by whom terms like “Sullivan” are applied.

Yet as I thought about it, those who oppose Jimmy Stewart’s character and lifestyle would logically be on the side of Potter. Nonsense, you say: they would be the free spirited, enlightened, freed bohemians.

But where do such people typically wind up politically? If they are, approximately, Libertarians, they are simply individualists, with whom I have no problem. But if they wind up as typical leftists–who are normally the people speaking in contempt of normality–then they want power, just like Potter.

Seeking unified, undiluted power is the enterprise of the Left. It has no other. It does not try to help anyone. Nobody is drawing, for an example, the obvious lesson from the failures of Detroit and Washington, D.C., that social spending often accomplishes the opposite result of that stated as intended. To draw this lesson would require drawing the further lesson that moral choices matter, that families are an important institution economically, and that in the end we choose our lives, approximately.

Bit rambling, as often, but about what I wanted to say. There may be some contradictions in here. So be it. I’ll keep moving.

Edit: this is more or less a stream of consciousness post, as I read it, having once posted it. This will have to do. I could have done this privately, but felt it might be useful to someone like this, so here it is. I am trying to survey a landscape, and what you will see are frequent transitions in perspective and elevation.

This will be the first in what I foresee will be 3-4 posts oriented loosely around romanticism, the radicalism in the cinematic careers of Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp, and some ideas I want to develop about what I think I will call the “sacrificial ethos”.

This is a large arena. The ideas are formed in my head, but they exist as a whole, as a Gestalt, that is somewhat synesthetic, which is how I process things. I have feeling pictures, that are there, then I start typing, and sometimes something approaching what I had in mind appears as I type. Writing and reading are not only two dimensional, but they are necessary linear. You can jump around from place to place, but those jumps happen in the same sequence every time.

I have actually thought it would be interesting–if difficult or impossible to achieve practically–to have texts which move around randomly like the stairs at Hogwarts. I don’t know if this is postmodernism, or what the label would be. It’s just that life is change, and our art needs to reflect that. Thinking about that: how could you achieve narrative unity in a text that evolves? What algorithym would you use? Principle, it seems to me.

If life–defined as our internal experience and following understandings of what we do and what happens to us–is a chaotic system defined by our chosen perceptual and behavioral parameters, then logically there are two levels of emergent order: apparent order, as defined by the perceptual prism we use; and measurable order, as seen in consistencies in behavior and outlook. That’s actually an interesting point, which may be as clear as mud to any readers I may have.

A self evolving text, then, would integrate a perceptual order–a meaning system–whose deployment alone varied. I can imagine self evolving visual art, too. Or drama: that is done today, as improvisational theater. That is enough on that, though. I’m thinking out loud.

The big theme I intend is “From love to skulls”. Much of this will be free form, and if and when I get it sorted, I will write something formal, and post it on my other site.

To the posted topic, Titanic. Key phrase: “It doesn’t make any sense. That’s why I trust it.” Hearing this line, I sensed instinctively that her character–with whom Winslett plainly sympathized–was going, in coming years, to be attracted to radical causes. When DiCaprio and her made a movie called “Revolutionary Road”, it didn’t surprise me in the slightest. What was it about? The discomforts and trials of normalcy. Winslett played a role in a sympathetic portrayal of the life of the Marquis de Sade. DiCaprio plans, in the next year or two, to make a movie about the life of serial killer H.H. Holmes, who in many cases killed his victims by suffocating them slowly, then filleted them and sold their skeletons to medical schools, and their organs to whoever paid for them.

All of this was prefigured in that ethos: it makes no sense, but it feels right. This is the hippy ethos. It is the Bohemian ethos. It was the ethos of the Fifties radicals like Frank Marshall, author of Sex Rebel:black, where among other things he brags about seducing a young girl, 13 I believe, 14 certainly, with whom he had group sex with another woman.

If it feels good, then it is OK, we are told. This starts out simply enough. You can run away from social obligations, like Rose did. They painted her mother as quite petty and mean-spirited. Her suitor, of course, was capable of cruelty. You see why she would run away with Jack.

Yet, if you think about it, what happened was her mother did wind up living a poor, lonely life as a worker in New York’s Garment District, if she didn’t kill herself. She mentions the fate of her suitor, but not her mother, with whom she presumably never reestablished contact. Her mother spent years of her life tending to her, and caring for her. She had plainly been through tough times after her father had died, and it was her vanity and her concern for her daughter that kept her going. Rose would have been able to paint, or ride horses, or any number of other things, had she married what’s-his-name. She might even have been able to divorce him eventually. Her mother would have been cared for.

But instead she followed her “passion”. We see this word all the time. What does it mean? Can it be controlled? What it means, is that some wind has blown into the life of a lost person, filling them with meaning in an unpredictable way. It cannot be controlled. People fall in and out of love.

As I visualize it, in an intact society, you have goal posts on either side of you. You can move within those goal posts, and you can move UP infinitely, but you cannot go beyond those boundaries. Those boundaries serve both to limit your action, but also to define WHO YOU ARE.

In the Romantic spirit–and you can hardly call it a creed–you have unlimited freedom of movement. You can go wherever you like. You can pursue whatever “muse”, or creative endeavor, or evanescent emotion, or sensation you want. You can follow the wind. Nothing needs to make sense, or be reducible to cognitive structures, provided it creates in you a sensation you find desirable.

To my mind, a part of Reason is evaluating the connection between a chosen path of living, and the outcome. The very point of reason is that you stand back from what you WANT to be true, and look as dispassionately as you can, and ask yourself what IS true.

What I see with Romantics–and I have taken several courses on the actual literary and philosophical movements in England and Germany–is in the end an obsession with death. Novalis called it the “Sehnsucht nach dem Tod”–Lust for Death. In his case, he had lost the love of his life, and wanted to reunited with her, as I recall.

But more generally, what happens, in my view, is that you get this freedom, to pursue whatever you want. What do you pursue? Well, art, that’s always a good choice. You paint or compose or write. You express yourself. But it never feels quite as good as it’s supposed to. You get high moments, but they don’t last. You always feel like a “sinner” if you are not getting continual new highs.

This in turn leads to a thirst for sensations, of various sorts. Some call this a “lust for life”. I call it Qualitative Consumerism. There is in my view no foundational difference between collecting cars, and collecting experiences, if they are not encapsulized within a meaning system.

You meet these people in San Francisco, and New York, and college towns around the country. They just got back from Nepal, or Tanzania, or India. Tres romantique. Tres merveilleux.

To be clear, I am not condemning seeking life experience, per se. My criticism is doing it FOR IT’S OWN SAKE. Experience for experience. L’Art pour L’Art.

Our foundational task in this life, in my view, is building beautiful souls. What makes us more loving, more understanding, braver, tougher, more sensible–or any of a host of desirable character traits–is desirable. This can be done in a small town. The metaphor of George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” is useful in this regard. He wanted to build giant skyscrapers. He wanted to travel around the world, work on tramp steamers, meet exotic people, and maybe never return to his humdrum existence in Bedford Falls. He is unable to do any of that, but finds himself overflowing with fulfillment in the end. This is a counter-Romantic narrative. It is a valorization (academic for “finding good”, roughly) of normality, of the normal workaday life that most people ACTUALLY are able to lead.

Contrast this with Revolutionary Road, where suburbia is a trap, and where, yes, the “heroine” dies in the end, reminding us that abortion must remain legal.

Here is what the author had to say about it:

I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.[3]

Can I point out that roughly a quarter million Americans lost their lives in WW2, many more came home physically and emotionally wounded. and that virtually everyone was affected by the war in substantial ways? After massive national traumas, is it so unreasonable to want to live something other than a Bohemian, commitment-free life? Can I point out that throughout the 1950’s, the threat of nuclear war loomed large in our collective consciousness, or that we fought another war in Korea? Do we need to ask Yates’ politics?

Where do the “protagonists” of Revolutionary Road want to go? Where else? Paris. French is the “language of love”, right? Paris is the home of romanticism, of passion, of a commitment to LIVING.

It is also the home of Communism, the most murderous creed ever introduced to the Planet Earth. My lineage on this is pretty simple: Communism is named after the Paris Commune, and the Communistic ethos–including large scale, State-initiated Terror–that of the French Revolution. I see Sergei Nechayev as the intellectual Godfather (in both senses of the term) of Lenin, and Robespierre that of Nechayev.

Obviously, on close analysis doctrinal differences on the order of the difference between Trotsky and Lenin may emerge, but that is a pedantic discussion that doesn’t interest me. The big picture idea is this: you have to destroy the old world to create the new world. There is to be no gradualism. Your impatience and rage are to be indulged at every turn, once you are able to seize power.

This raises a point: if the point of life is sensation, is there a moral difference between love and hate? Is there? Is there a point in discussing morality, when sensation is the arbiter of good and evil? Further: if sensation is the sole good, then lacking sensation is the sole evil. This means you need to seize whatever STRONG sensations present themselves.

Human psychology being what it is, hate is a far easier path to follow than love. It is far easier to indulge childish impulses than to feed and clothe your adult impulses towards order, restraint, and gradualism–particularly if you can get others to indulge the same impulses at the same time, thereby socially validating them.

This is how love turns to hate: it is EASIER, in a landscape denuded of absolute moral and social laws. Waking up every day trying to feel grand passions is exhausting. Most days, for most people, are ORDINARY, and if ordinary is the enemy, then REVOLUTION is in order.

This thirst for sensation anchors the durability of the Marquis de Sade. As already mentioned, Winslett–with Geoffrey Rush–made a sympathetic movie about Sade titled Quills.

Sade was not a rock star. He was not just a “pornographer”. The project he set himself, more or less, was imagining every act of gratuitous cruelty and perversion possible. Torturing children. Cannibalism of the same children. Necrophilia. One cannot read Sade and fail to grasp that his was a mind that sought to attack the very possibility of moral coherence. As I have said before, this is the most profound act of evil possible, in my view. Committing acts of evil is one thing, but actively seeking to destroy the meaning systems of others is as vicious as it gets.

So we have Winslett in Titanic, saying “this makes no sense, so it makes sense”, deeply in very superficial love with Jack. The contradiction there, of course, is that love is not something you fall into, but something you do. Had they stayed together, odds are quite good Jack would have bored of Rose sooner or later. Certainly, absent some growing up of both of them, their marriage would not have worked. It was to Rose’s advantage that she only remembered the happy moments of “love’s” first bloom, and not the troubles that would have come inevitably, and been overcome or not, as their characters dictated.

Then we add Rose/Winslett to a movie about a man dedicated to the elevation of raw sensation above all possible moral restraints. Then we see her stuck in the suburbs. Jack we see in all sorts of movies, that I will discuss in a post of its own, but the logical end of which is a movie glorifying sadism. What catharsis can there be in a movie about a man who got away with his crimes for a very long time? None that I can see.

Emotions have logic. Rejected love turns to hate, at least for the vain. What I have been trying to do here is show the emotional progression inherent in the life gestalts–let me use a different word–morphogenesis that flows from the basic principle that sensation is King.

In France, the King represented not just a power structure, but a metaphysical one as well, in which God favored the King and his Church. Whose diamond did Rose toss into the ocean–symbol of turbulent and deep emotion–implicitly rejecting in the end all it stood for, except for Jack? Louis the Sixteenth. This was not an accident, although Cameron no doubt figured few would catch that reference. She could have given it to them. They were decent people. She chose not to, in one final act of self indulgence.

That will have to do for now. This is trending about right, but far from complete.

I think I can say that, on balance, this epithet has worked against those who have used it. It is nasty, and really not interpretable in any way except that of being a mean spirited attack, and symptom of a deep-seated anger, which usually passes well into the terrain of outright hatred. Many ordinary people, seeing it repeated over and over, realize that it originates not with moderate people who simply differ from them on tactics, but people who are really very different from them: people who do not share their values, their tendency towards civility, and who reject outright the olive branch of reasoned, ad hominem-free debate on matters of great concern to all of us.

For their part, Leftists have simply deployed an old tactic–demonization–without the slightest bit of thought. It is a reflex with them, and from their perspective, it works. Everyone around them is using it. They are attacking the right people. How could anything be wrong with it?

Clearly, use of this epithet is a synchronizing signal for the faithful, telling them their cause is just, and that of their foes venal, nasty, and–worst of all–deviant (as seen from the position of the perfectly candid and always wonderful, even if ever-changing, Left). Deviancy, for the conformist, is the worst of all possible crimes. If you doubt this, look at how anyone who failed to conform perfectly was treated in any Communist nation. Take Doan Van Toai: he questioned, legitimately, the behavior of a superior, and found himself in a concentration camp, in a cage, eating rice with sand in it. This happened to someone who had actively supported the Communist cause for years.

What I think Obama and the Left have failed to grasp–they are still giggling among themselves about the gullibility of the American electorate–is that this wave of conservatism is not like any that has happened before. The stakes are higher than they have ever been. We have never elected a Communist before. We have never ran deficits in peacetime like this before. We have never had a major network willing to question the Leftist orthodoxy with “boldness”.

The people whose minds are turning against Obama, and by extension the Democrats generally, will not be turned back by a few speeches. They will not be turned back by a few apparently moderate gestures, that mean nothing. They have changed qualitatively. They have learned history. They have studied the issues. No amount of Leftist leveling propaganda will undermine this, among those who have woken up and begun to think for themselves.

Yes, there remain many stupid and ignorant people out there, who will remain as an audience for the networks which dish out the unbalanced treatments of all the major issues of the day. But Fox will not do anything but continue to grow. It is the only source for many important news events. It is the only place both sides are given equal treatment. And Glenn Beck is the only one offering up contextualizing history, to help understand the events of the day.

And obviously Leftists hate him for this.

My question for any reading this is: why not debate him, if he is wrong? As far as I can tell, he open to all takers. Certainly I am. Pick any topic. If I have a strong opinion, I will defend it. I have tested my ideas in open debate hundreds of times. My faith is not shaky in the slightest.

Calling people names only convinces them of your moral and intellectual bankruptcy. It’s a cute little inside joke, but if the goal is to change minds, it changes them in the direction one would think you were trying to avoid. But that is a rational analysis, isn’t it? That is why Leftists can’t use this commentary. They can take this one point, and stop using that word. But to take the larger point would be to open themselves up to the possibility of change, of the notion they could be wrong. Those who do that will rapidly find they are no longer Leftists. And those who don’t, as I said, will be unable to grasp the abstract idea here.