Moderates United

I’ve always liked AC/DC, like most.  They play simple, hard, effective rock.  I have three of their albums.

Whenever they got big, I was in junior high, and I recall someone telling me that one of the Young’s–maybe both–dressed up as schoolboys, with the hats, and shorts, and sweaters, with the salient different that the back of their pants was cut out.  They would regularly moon the audience, I heard.  Crazy stuff.  Hard rock and roll.

But it occurred to me today that a schoolboy with his pants cut out would be to a homosexual pedophile roughly what Brittany Spears in her bubble-gum phase was to creepy old men.  From what I read, 13-14 year old boys are a routine fantasy for many older homosexuals. That was definitely the age the Spartans recruited their boys, and they were each assigned to one older man, with whom homosexual contact presumably occurred [not topical, but it is interesting that when the Thebans finally defeated the Spartans, it was with a modified line, with a salient–on the right, if memory serves–filled with 150 pairs of homosexual lovers, called the Sacred Band, again if memory serves.  They were their best fighters, and the idea was that they would turn the corner, and enable a flanking maneuver, which they did.  Alexander later used this technique, albeit not with a Sacred Band.]

Think this through, look at it from that perspective.  It is completely foreign to me, but does the logic not stand?

It has always made sense to me that AC/DC was a reference to bisexuality, but it never occurred to me what was actually being presented on stage.

What this means, what message they were trying to communicate, I don’t know, and they may not have known themselves.

My point here is that it is so hard to see what is in front of you.  As usual, Mary Poppins has this spot on. 

Granted, that was an odd segue.

Read this lyric, and ponder it, if you never have:

You got problems in your life of love
You got a broken heart
He’s double dealin’ with your best friend
That’s when the teardrops star fella
Pick up the phone, I’m here alone
Or make a social call
Come right in, forget ’bout him
We’ll have ourselves a ball hey

My word of the day is seemingly “Liberal”.  It’s a good word, even if it has been corrupted by awful people for use in anti-Liberal propaganda.

As I have more or less stated, or at least implied, my long term goal is to create what could be called a religion.  I have called it a church.

But as I ponder it, what I want, at the very heart of the thing, is a mechanism for evolving, for changing, and for changing without contradicting the core of the “creed”, to extent I have one.

Provisionally, I like my three “Goodness” principles, of rejecting self pity, persisting, and continually moving perceptually.

But other precipitates are likely, given a group.  What I want to build into this cultural system, and this belief system, is the same flexibility that true Liberalism–when deployed by sober (in the good sense), well intentioned, sensible people–allows.

When you look at historical religions, they are relatively inflexible.  There is only so far you can get from the Torah in Judaism, the New Testament in Christianity, the Koran in Islam.  There is only so far you can depart from the teachings of the Buddha, the Tripitaka, the 12-fold path.

What we need for the future is something which can grow over time, which can take on an organizational thirst for ever-increasing efficacy, as oriented around the goals of human well-being understood in the deepest possible senses.

Can Science and Belief not dance?  I think they can.

I think it worth saying that Liberalism as I define it below was developed by white Europeans, and their descendants in North America.  No other culture has anything like it, of which I am aware.  Certainly, most major nations have had periods of relative tolerance, in which diverse behaviors and creeds coexisted peacefully, but everywhere else one group has had dominant social status IN PRINCIPLE, and normally by law.  Almost all nations historically have had slavery, with most slaves in white nations having been white, and most slaves in black nations having been black.

As I said earlier, America is the only nation to have rejected slavery in principle to such an extent that it was willing to wage an enormously destructive war over it (and yes, I know the pedantic quibbles that can be made with this statement).

Does this make whites superior to other races?  No, but it makes our cultural history more benign than that of other races.  We of course are also the only ones to have waged global wars, to have developed weapons capable of destroying the human race, and of course to have conquered and colonized most of the planet.  With great capability comes great potential both for good and evil.  Had we not so much as invented the wheel, we would have remained capable of death and destruction.

From my other website, here is my treatment of Liberalism as I conceive it:

It occurred to me the other day that leftists–true leftists, of the sort tending towards the Cultural Sadeist variety (and I want to be clear that I don’t consider people like Nancy Pelosi necessarily to be sadists in a formal sense, but rather empty at their core of sincere belief, sincere feeling, sincere humanity) never speak for their own group.

Lenin was not a worker; nor were his Bolsheviks (whose very name “majority” party, was itself a lie): they were intellectuals, far more educated, far more able to earn good livings, than most Russians. 

Most of those wanting to speak for blacks in this country are rich white people, and those who are black do not live in ghettos, and most of them become rich in the process of “sympathizing” with the poor.  Where did Jesse Jackson, Jr. go to school?

Most of the architects of the “War on Poverty”, then and now, are rich.  Obama is rich.  Harry Reid is rich.  Ted Kennedy was rich.  Sargent Shriver was rich.

Fidel Castro’s family was relatively rich, and his father was more or less a moral equal of Batista in his cynicism and lust for ill gotten wealth.  I read some time ago that he had someone killed he owed money to, and who was asking for his money back.

Everywhere you look, you find almost no examples of people speaking for THEIR OWN group.  You see people speaking for other groups, for other tribes.

This point is subtle, and I’m not quite sure I am even yet able to make it quite correctly, but I am going to try: these people pursued “universal” principles precisely because they lacked any actual affection for any actual living people.

The defining trait of the narcissist is to mistake ones own emotions for those of others, to confuse what one wants for oneself, with what others actually need.

It is quite possible to pursue ones own psychological liberation through work conducted purely upon abstractions.  To be clear, this is not a “liberation”, but rather a way of enduring, of avoiding deep-seated terrors and inner demons, and conflicts.  You become “moral” in the act of welding your sense of self with an abstraction, one unanchored by any possible outside referents, any outside being, any outside real, true, living reality.

Thus, death-dealing becomes a moral act, if tied to the correct inner lies.  Torture becomes liberation, if framed in a way which protects the fragile ego from the emotional reality of horror.

And I see this process promulgated throughout the minds–not hearts–of those who want to define for us our culture, who want to tell us what is right and what is wrong, but who in so doing NEVER ask themselves if what they are pursuing is actually, in aggregate, helping or hurting those they claim to care about.

Jesse Jackon–unlike Martin Luther King, Jr.–has never ached for black Americans.  He has never truly internalized and felt the pain and suffering they feel; or at least not for many, many years.

Obama cares nothing for the hell-holes in Philadelphia, the boys crying out for their fathers, the girls seeking love in all the wrong places, having babies because they are too undeveloped to know that babies don’t give love, but demand it.  He doesn’t care about all the petty viciousness that attends poverty, attends wanting more but not knowing how to get it.

This is the truth.  This is why leftists NEVER pursue policies which actually work to end poverty, to end racism, to end the hopelessness that inheres in large segments of our population, that inheres in the heart of the richest nation on  Earth and in history.  They quite literally conflate their stated intentions with their own inner realities.  They believe that because they claim to care, that they actually care.  They believe that because they take actions to end abuses, that they actually sincerely want those actions to succeed.

This is not Liberalism.  This is savagery.  This is bestiality, cloaked thinly by false rhetoric.  This is emotional deformity, given a high platform.

Can we not see Obama as a high priest in a demonic cult, tossing the weakest among us into the flames?

History is clear that yes, we can.  This is a horrible truth, but truth it is.

What we need is a resurrection of tribalism, where people at least belong SOMEWHERE, where they feel sincere, true affections, for actual, living, breathing, suffering and celebrating human beings.

This is the root of Fascism, of course–which is a refuge for the utterly lost–but pursued with wisdom and a genuine Liberal intent, it is in my view the ONLY path to a desirable future, and world worth living in.

Something good seems to be happening to me.  I’m losing the urge to drink entirely.  For some reason watching the Buck Owens Show is helping me, but from the middle I felt the need to look up Bukowski quotes.  I am in that middle somewhere.

“those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.”

“Find what you love and let it kill you.” 

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire” 

“I’ve never been lonely. I’ve been in a room — I’ve felt suicidal. I’ve
been depressed. I’ve felt awful — awful beyond all — but I never felt
that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering
me…or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words,
loneliness is something I’ve never been bothered with because I’ve
always had this terrible itch for solitude. It’s being at a party, or at
a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel
loneliness. I’ll quote Ibsen, “The strongest men are the most alone.”
I’ve never thought, “Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and
give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I’ll feel good.” No, that won’t
help. You know the typical crowd, “Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you
going to do? Just sit there?” Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out
there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let
them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to
rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn’t want to hide in
factories. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been
lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. Let’s
drink more wine!”

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should
make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened
by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

Bukowski is my kind of people.

But I look at Buck Owens, too, and I see courage.  This is the show I’m watching at the moment, that I have on pause.  He, too, had a rough life in his own way.  He went hungry as a child, was moved away from his home in Texas.  Despite the conventional need for smiling, he does not do it very well.  He tries, but he can’t quite pull it off.  And his guitarist, his best friend Don Rich (whose death in 1974 shattered him) smiles too much.

People lived in smaller houses then, led much more modest lives.  True poverty was still quite common.  The Catholic Church was still effectively facilitating pedophilia, and men could still demand sex of women at the work place without much risk of censure.

Owens music seems innocent.  I think to myself that Jimmy Hendrix was warming up in 1966. The whole culture was getting ready for a rupture from which it still has not recovered.

I see on the one side, the wholesomeness of Owens music.  Looked at more carefully, though, it is quite often about heartbreak and difficulty, too, with the important element that it aims to transcend heartbreak, to transform emotions, to help people carry on.

Owens himself, though, was married 4 times.  Quite often, it seems country music is not so much cathartic as descriptive. 

Here is a, to me, very interesting interview with George Jones, in which he freely admits his cocaine habit, that he nearly killed himself, that his promoters took out a life insurance policy on him (using a complicit doctor to commit fraud in the application) and that one of his big backers was killed by the mob: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJoQZRbbYr0

So often it is easy to sentimentalize the “good old days”.  We see human stupidity, evil, laziness, corruption, greed, lust, and the thought that human life has ALWAYS been like this–and in fact for most of history has been far, far worse–is really hard for us, in our easy living conditions, to accept.  It is hard for us to accept how hard the physical–and often cultural–living conditions are in much of the world.  We find it hard to accept that in the Islamic world men can beat their women with impunity.  We find it hard to accept the open pedophilia often on display there.

Just yesterday, I was reading about a man put into a labor camp in China, after being blinded in one eye trying to stop the rape of a woman by Communist Party connected sadists.  I had a dream some time ago about the atmosphere of fear in Cuba, where women are regularly raped by Party officials, and for which there is no remedy, no justice.  Think about it: how could there be, when “truth” is controlled centrally, and sadistic prisons (which among other things contain cages the size of dog crates) prisons exist where people can disappear indefinitely?

Can we not look forward?  Can we not take the idea of Liberalism, and continue to try to actually bring it into being, to generalize it?

For me, I take comfort in Buck Owens.  I don’t remember, but I suspect he was on the TV when I was very little.  But I agree with Bukowski that we need madness, too, and not the sort seen in alcoholic binges.  His alcoholism was only part of his character.  Countless people drink their lives away and create nothing.  He had a creative core.

I am rambling, as I do.  I am thinking aloud, as I do.  Perhaps there is something useful here, perhaps not.  But in my own way, I am trying the ENGAGE with the contents of my consciousness, to connect in a syncratic (idiosyncratic minus the idio) various threads of thought and meaning.

Can I not ask, of the wider world, more of this?  From all of you?

Compassion is an outcome, not a method.  It is an effect, not a cause.

I spoke of Hemingway and Kerouac as cultural icons in a previous post.  By this, I mean they are taught in our centers of acculturation, which is to say our schools.

Ask yourself: where in your high school education did you learn anything useful about transcendence, the mythic, the numinous? 

What was it mostly filled with?  Psychology–perhaps–and a bunch of books about screwed up people who had very few positive, useful lessons to convey. 

Our “ordinary” culture is of course defined by TV, radio, movies.  It consists in the magazines you see checking out at the grocery store.  That, and for many a weekly trip to church, to learn about ideas that are otherwise largely ignored.

What is problematic in our society is that our allegedly higher culture has nothing to teach us.  The best professors of philosophy, and even psychology, really have no good answers to the meaning of life, to the purpose of suffering.

Certainly, so-called Positive Psychology is preferred to the creed of “we’re all screwed up then we die”, but if you want to create a one-to-one layering of cultural and genetic inputs and the sense of self, then you have failed to provide good answers to very basic questions.

Hence the pervasive confusion we see; hence the valorization of hate through the rhetoric of love; hence the many minds twisted into a permanent project of subverting human freedom.

In one Buddhist compassion meditation, we are supposed to view all souls–even those who do us harm–as having once been our mother.   This may work for some, but for me, my thought is: “what the fuck happened?”  How did you slide so far down that you are now oppressing me, hurting me?  Why should I forgive now the crimes you commit simply because at some point in the infinitely distant past you were loving?  Why should I not have the right, now, to defend myself emotionally from your assaults?

Here is my version: imagine that you yourself have in the past committed every sin imaginable, across thousands of lifetimes.  You have killed and raped, tortured, maimed, stolen, lied.  You were a pedophile, committed bestiality, performed human sacrifices.

But you suffered, learned and grew.  You passed beyond that ignorance to your present condition of mostly not sucking as a human being, and trying to do better. In this life, versus the past, you have committed few acts of cruelty, have been mostly honest,and done your best as a parent.

Look at all the evil in the world, the viciousness, the stupidity, the unnecessary suffering, and realize you, too, have been the perpetrator.  You, too, were there, and you grew beyond it.  So, too, can those who are evil today.

This helps me, at any rate.  As I said in the previous post, I am in an odd mood, for specific reasons, but dealing with old emotions in, I hope, new ways.

I will add that it is odd that most of us want to have been kings in the past.  We want, at a minimum, to have been average.  But if in some primordial way we all rise from the spiritual muck, why not assume the worst of ourselves?  We are not like that any longer.  We have done our time, paid for our sins.  And so, too, will those around us.

I am having an odd day, but because I am seemingly in a heightened state of awareness, it is pushing me in interesting directions. I am not resisting it, but rather trying to integrate it into my breath, as I train to do in Kum Nye.

At this moment it seems to me I would be hard pressed to trust anyone I cannot visualize taking up a blade and taking blood to defend something, or more importantly someone, they loved.  I cannot see myself trusting anyone who is unwilling to defend causes that matter to them.  I cannot allow into my tribe anyone who rejects tribes.

Now, we see constantly that tribalism is the source of all violence, where violence is assumed to be the principle evil in the world.  This idea is bullshit.

First, the essence of Liberalism is recourse both to universal ideals, and specific, contextual tolerance as expressed in a political system which permits wide arrays of behavior and law.  Within a truly Liberal context, differences are not suppressed or ignored, but actively explored by the parties concerned in mutually beneficial and instructive ways.  Both grow as a result of exposure to difference.

But we do not live in a Liberal society, by and large.  We live in a society in which the dominant culture is suppressed by the dominant culture, and difference not explored, but lionized, making one party feel superior with no justification, and the other inferior, also without justification.

There have been no civil wars in any other nations over the issue of slavery, which continues unabated to this day in many Islamic nations, since they see nothing wrong with it.  It continues unabated in Cuba, and North Korea, and to a great extent China (even though they claimed within the past few days to have closed their slave camps).

Secondly, violence as an evil is vastly inferior to moral vacuity, meaninglessness, an addiction to the sopophorics mouthed by those who truly believe nothing.  We all die, but is it not worse to die having done nothing meaningful after a long life, than to live a short, but connected life?  That is my view.  Better a day as a lion than a thousand as a sheep.

I am doing some emotional house-cleaning–as well as some very literal, very physical house-cleaning–and I want to say something many won’t like: I don’t trust the Dalai Lama.  I have sensed in my meditations that he has more or less directly cut a deal with the Chinese not to make trouble for them.

We watch him smile compassionately.  His embrace of ahimsa seems genuine.  He has told the Tibetan people that their sufferings will be rewarded with greater virtue.

But I call bullshit.  There are campaigns that could be waged against property.  There are sit-down strikes that they could do.  They could sit on train tracks.  There are many things the Tibetans could do to make things so hard for the Chinese that they would cease their de facto war against the culture of the Tibetan people.  He could have called for guerilla war long ago.  The Tibetans are tough, and their terrain would likely make it hard to resist a long insurgency.  Certainly, it would slow the pace at which the Chinese are moving in, and forcing Tibetans out of their own cultural centers.

I may not know what I am talking about.  I don’t know the details of the mass rebellions that happened several years ago and which were brutally suppressed.  All I know is that Tibet is disappearing: what once was will be no more; and as the only leader they have (few know that the Panchen Lama was identified as a child decades ago, and promptly disappeared into Chinese custody, never to be heard from again), more is possible.

Again, specifically, it irks me to see compassion lauded without placing equal emphasis on wisdom.  Compassion is an easy virtue.  It can and often is the virtue of cowards, who believe nothing. All of the emotions we were born equipped to feel have uses.  Hate has a place and a time, even for the wise, in my view.  You cannot permanently suppress any emotion in this world and not lose some part of your efficacy, your utility, your full humanity.

Rumi once said, roughly, that there was no place in his hall for those with no evil in them, and this is what he meant, in my view.  He sought men, not machines.

Our culture in many ways seems turned to the negative.  We valorize–to use an academic term–people like Ernest Hemingway, or Jack Kerouac, who are basically screw-ups, who have little to offer in the way of the sort of deep myth which enables individual and cultural transformation in positive ways, and whose principle contributions are aesthetic.  Having failed in the mythic realm, our more talented minds are quite frequently led to Scientism, which deals with myth by rejecting it, by rejecting subjectivity, by rejecting direct experience, by rejecting agency and the “first person”.

Small wonder that our model for aging sees youth as superior to age: how can age matter when wisdom is a chimera, and personal growth impossible?  So we pack our parents away in government funded asylums, and more or less assign them to one controlled compartment in our lives.  We can see them or not see them as we see fit, as they accord with our convenience or sense of duty, or–to be sure–in some cases with love and affection offered sincerely, although I think in most of those cases Mom and Dad live at home until truly impossible.  The wife working, of course, makes this happen sooner and more often.  It is culturally destructive in many ways, as is the erosion of the extended family.

Within this milieu we have the myth, the institution, the known “happening”, of the mid-life crisis.  You get to 40 or 50 and realize that you have been living someone else’s life, perhaps that of Madison Avenue, more likely that brought on by our cultures superficiality, and dependence on people not asking too many questions.  You go along to get along, until you can’t get along, and in the stereotype you buy a motorcycle, or grow a pony-tail, get a young girl-friend, dye your hair, etc.  This is both a way of rejecting aging, and of granting that your own behavior to this point has been tepid and lacking in audacity.

So in the classic formulation, you look forward to old age and senescence, and react by embracing the things of youth.

What I would suggest, though, is that the opposite is also possible: you can conquer old wounds, grow beyond old limitations, finish unfinished business.  You can look back and finally find reconciliation, peace, and look forward to continued growth across the rest of your life.  You can look forward to the back half of your life, not living it like some kid, not rejecting the process of becoming wise, but rather embracing it and welcoming it.  You do not need a motorcycle: you can buy a paintbrush, paints, and canvas.  You can take up that hobby which you have always dreamed of.  You can go more deeply into experience.

Oh, we have problems.  But they all have solutions.