You've heard of Cleopatra
who lived down along the Nile
she made a "Mark" of Anthony
And won him with her smile.
They say she was Egyptian
But I've reason to construe
She was Jewish and Hawaiian
with a dash of Irish too.
When she strolled with bold Mark Anthony
on Egypt's yellow sands
you could see that she was Jewish
by the motion of her hands.
By Al Jolson
"It will all end by killing Jews."
From: "The Thanatos Syndrome" by Walker Percy
Over lunch today I was discussing the movie "It's a Beautiful Life," (an Italian comedy about German concentration camps!) with a couple of the workers from the free clinic. And how the supposedly most civilized nation on earth that time managed to give itself completely over to "blood and iron." I think that the death wish or Thanatos is something that women generally find incomprehensible in spite of the fact that they manage to participate in their own way over the centuries in terms of bloodletting. I think that the male brain finds war very natural without any particular conditioning. This is also what Freud observed among other peculiarities of my particular half of the human race. Attempts to suppress this are all very well-intentioned but like certain weeds with underground roots, they keep popping up in other areas. Milton Caniff was sort of a artist philosopher who wrote a famous serial -a comic strip without the humor -- about war in the Pacific. It was one of the forerunners of what we would now call the graphic novel. Mad Magazine once asked him to write a strip explaining his views of humanity and he was quite upfront about it. It was his theory that cultures/civilizations required periodic bloodlettings. History certainly seems to be on his side.
Whether war is inevitable or not, the idea of requiring a blood sacrifice is extremely deep in virtually all cultures whether one looks at the Middle East, the Orient, or the various Native American cultures many of which required human sacrifice as well as constant warfare against their neighbors. I would contend that it is more biological/carnal than cultural. It can be emphasized or deemphasized but the idea that one can be too sophisticated and leave all this behind is naïve in the extreme. In fact I would assert that the more sophisticated a person is, the more he can escape the weak leadership of civil moralities or transcendent ones such as the 10 Commandments; and either rationalize that he is superior to such common stuff or suppose that a person can simply sublimate until the cows come home. (These would be the "Security Cows" who guard the privacy of Gary Larson.)
Thus we have the continuing spectacle of the battle between right and left which never resolves partly because both sides insist on the absolute necessity of the shedding of someone's blood. It seems very odd, does it not, that in either case it is young people who are put on the chopping block? Republicans seem to okay with sending young people away to war to kill and be killed; Democrats and Libertarians insist on an absolute right to abortion on demand. In either case the rights of young people are either temporarily or permanently suspended. And the older people remain safe behind their desks, books, lawyers, and entertainment media. There are at minimum two components to this: advocacy and passive permissiveness i.e. looking the other way.
What are these? Sacraments? And if so, to which god or idol or abstract ideal? We are good at recruiting. We talk a lot about "deconstructing." Try deconstructing this!
The Jews of course are no strangers to requiring blood sacrifices. Even though the Temple has long since been destroyed, it can be argued that there is still no end in sight. This of course was the point of "The Man in the Glass Booth". But there is also no way that Jews in particular can escape unreasoning passionate persecution which may wax and wane but never goes away. The danger has never been greater with the rise of Wahhabi Islam. Much of this is not explainable from any type of rational or scientific point of view. But it would certainly seem that the Jews in many countries even still in Europe will not be free of the challenges faced by Queen Esther and Mordecai. Both Hitler and Haman are dead, hoisted by their own petards: but starting in Egypt, radical Islam has vowed to carry out their juggernaughts. Then it will be too late to resort to cleverness, rationalism, intellectualism, sophism or even technology and "the bomb."
There is a strange illusion in the Western world as long as we produce entertainment, Coca-Cola, and provocative media, we will be safe; because no one wants to cut off the amusements we provide. The Jews of course, including Jolson and so many others, have used entertainment and self -- deprecating humor for centuries to defuse the bomb of anti-Semitism and to sublimate through artistic and other means what I presume would be the same impulses shared by men around the world.
It would seem that "original sin," is making a comeback; even/especially in environmental circles. However that is not all and I have alluded to the other side of the story in my previous entries. I do not have a conclusion as such since this is an ongoing nasty nest of problems but let me say this: Spring has sprung and clues are everywhere; which make the claims of foolish parties and partisans inconsequential, even our worst impulses. Dancing can be far more than entertainment, hint, hint.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
miscellany
The usual practice, when our inane betrayals begin to surface, is to make everything generic.
We gave the world our children. (This may be a large part of "enough.")
What the world does with our children is another matter. But at the last, our children will have more choices than the world can see, know, acknowledge, or honor. And so it will be up to them, not to the world as pertains to the fruits borne.
We gave the world our children. (This may be a large part of "enough.")
What the world does with our children is another matter. But at the last, our children will have more choices than the world can see, know, acknowledge, or honor. And so it will be up to them, not to the world as pertains to the fruits borne.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Milledgeville Revisited
"Obscurity is common to human intelligence, because intelligence can only perceive what has taken place in its own experience, not that which makes it what it is."
-- Oswald Chambers
To answer the riddle about the visitor to Milledgeville, the visitor was the quarterback for the world champion Pit Bull Stealers, Ben Roethlisberger. I don't think he came to this largely girls college town to deliver a message, although a strong message was certainly delivered by his actions. He was in fact accused of sexual assault on a college student. Of course, the presumed stature of the assailant will probably protect him well from any consequences. In fact, it is one of the privileges of power that one can call forth only the best lawyers to basically turn back any counter- assault in court. We have already seen what happens to famous football players when accused, which results in a show trial in which murder is basically gotten away with -- not wishing to end with a preposition of course! How good a lawyer, do you think, this girl's parents can afford?
The same of course is true of the kings of the earth, and the multitudes who consider themselves kings in their own little bubble. Certainly however this subject would have been worthy of treatment by Flannery O'Connor who was a student at the same college. We had the privilege of walking around the campus and picking up the student newspaper, "The Colonnade," in which the subject above was covered. Until very recently this was a women's college only and still the vast majority of students walking around seem to be female. I had the privilege also of being able to view copies of all the cartoons Miss O'Connor did for this paper for three years running, all linoleum cuts and some of them quite funny but generally not as sardonic as her writing would later be.
Over the past month or so I have had some time to look further into the nature and prominence of evil. While it is difficult to get anyone to agree about what is evil and what is not, there are some things in what CS Lewis called the Tao, that tend toward universality. Probably because of the universality of crude raw human impulses. Not too many people will aver that sexual assault without consent is anything but evil; but the continued common occurrence of this in "civilized society," does suggest that these impulses have to be dealt with, but dealing with them from some kind of hypothetical neutrality does stretch probably even beyond the absurd. Of course, there is no wrong action or attitude in the human world that does not have its proponents; many of these in secret of course but more among what the songwriter called, "A Small Circle of Friends." Also much of the obscurity of the mind noted by Mr. Chambers is self -designed and self-induced and really deliberate in spite of being kept subconscious or unconscious.
Of course there IS the matter of brain size. Perhaps it does matter! It does weigh only about 3 pounds. While it is, according to Isaac Asimov, the most complex thing that we have discovered in the known universe; it is still much more limited in scope than we imagine. In the latest issue of The New Yorker there is a cartoon of a physician looking into a patient's ear with an otoscope while commenting, "I'm always amazed at how small brains are." (I continually wonder at the mythology that doctors can look at the brain through the ear ha ha) This of course poses a universe of difficulties for the scientist and even for Mr. Darwin, who had a nagging doubt that a human brain -- coming so biologically recently from a monkey -- would possess the competence to be in charge of, much less come up with, a theory so all-encompassing as his own. And still have have a one-to-one correspondence with objective reality.
(Scope in the morning, anyone? Scope plural?)
I suppose my point is that, yes, Virginia, we do have a choice or should I say choices. And yes, I am in that sense, "pro-choice." How many people do you think are antichoice? Certainly God and Christ say to us, "Choose this day whom you will serve..." but the other inherently good phrase is, "pro-life." So God is "both/and", not "either/or". As so often is the case making it humanly impossible to comprehend His overwhelmingly universal point/s of view about almost anything or anyone.
Existence/life is certainly pointless if the word "choice" is meaningless, which most certainly it is in a purely materialistic universe which of course is a completely hypothetical construct. There are a few "honest atheists," who do say that we have no meaningful choices, no free will, etc. However the vertical and empirical evidences certainly do suggest that we have way too little information or mental capacity to rule out any possibility of things well beyond our five senses and logical abilities. Issac Asimov himself admitted that, but then said that he did not have enough interest to pursue it. Certainly none of us have, or can, pursue metaphysics to the nth degree but we still come up with Absolutes no matter who we are or how much we protest against them. Postmodernism is another variant of denial which goes back to the Greeks and has always been with us in one form or another. As one other commentator said, "Man does not live by bread alone."
To be continued....
-- Oswald Chambers
To answer the riddle about the visitor to Milledgeville, the visitor was the quarterback for the world champion Pit Bull Stealers, Ben Roethlisberger. I don't think he came to this largely girls college town to deliver a message, although a strong message was certainly delivered by his actions. He was in fact accused of sexual assault on a college student. Of course, the presumed stature of the assailant will probably protect him well from any consequences. In fact, it is one of the privileges of power that one can call forth only the best lawyers to basically turn back any counter- assault in court. We have already seen what happens to famous football players when accused, which results in a show trial in which murder is basically gotten away with -- not wishing to end with a preposition of course! How good a lawyer, do you think, this girl's parents can afford?
The same of course is true of the kings of the earth, and the multitudes who consider themselves kings in their own little bubble. Certainly however this subject would have been worthy of treatment by Flannery O'Connor who was a student at the same college. We had the privilege of walking around the campus and picking up the student newspaper, "The Colonnade," in which the subject above was covered. Until very recently this was a women's college only and still the vast majority of students walking around seem to be female. I had the privilege also of being able to view copies of all the cartoons Miss O'Connor did for this paper for three years running, all linoleum cuts and some of them quite funny but generally not as sardonic as her writing would later be.
Over the past month or so I have had some time to look further into the nature and prominence of evil. While it is difficult to get anyone to agree about what is evil and what is not, there are some things in what CS Lewis called the Tao, that tend toward universality. Probably because of the universality of crude raw human impulses. Not too many people will aver that sexual assault without consent is anything but evil; but the continued common occurrence of this in "civilized society," does suggest that these impulses have to be dealt with, but dealing with them from some kind of hypothetical neutrality does stretch probably even beyond the absurd. Of course, there is no wrong action or attitude in the human world that does not have its proponents; many of these in secret of course but more among what the songwriter called, "A Small Circle of Friends." Also much of the obscurity of the mind noted by Mr. Chambers is self -designed and self-induced and really deliberate in spite of being kept subconscious or unconscious.
Of course there IS the matter of brain size. Perhaps it does matter! It does weigh only about 3 pounds. While it is, according to Isaac Asimov, the most complex thing that we have discovered in the known universe; it is still much more limited in scope than we imagine. In the latest issue of The New Yorker there is a cartoon of a physician looking into a patient's ear with an otoscope while commenting, "I'm always amazed at how small brains are." (I continually wonder at the mythology that doctors can look at the brain through the ear ha ha) This of course poses a universe of difficulties for the scientist and even for Mr. Darwin, who had a nagging doubt that a human brain -- coming so biologically recently from a monkey -- would possess the competence to be in charge of, much less come up with, a theory so all-encompassing as his own. And still have have a one-to-one correspondence with objective reality.
(Scope in the morning, anyone? Scope plural?)
I suppose my point is that, yes, Virginia, we do have a choice or should I say choices. And yes, I am in that sense, "pro-choice." How many people do you think are antichoice? Certainly God and Christ say to us, "Choose this day whom you will serve..." but the other inherently good phrase is, "pro-life." So God is "both/and", not "either/or". As so often is the case making it humanly impossible to comprehend His overwhelmingly universal point/s of view about almost anything or anyone.
Existence/life is certainly pointless if the word "choice" is meaningless, which most certainly it is in a purely materialistic universe which of course is a completely hypothetical construct. There are a few "honest atheists," who do say that we have no meaningful choices, no free will, etc. However the vertical and empirical evidences certainly do suggest that we have way too little information or mental capacity to rule out any possibility of things well beyond our five senses and logical abilities. Issac Asimov himself admitted that, but then said that he did not have enough interest to pursue it. Certainly none of us have, or can, pursue metaphysics to the nth degree but we still come up with Absolutes no matter who we are or how much we protest against them. Postmodernism is another variant of denial which goes back to the Greeks and has always been with us in one form or another. As one other commentator said, "Man does not live by bread alone."
To be continued....
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Ste. Peter, arriving in the Old Nick of time...
Rat: So do I get into heaven?
St. Peter: No.
Rat: why not?
St. Peter: You were bad.
Rat: Hooey.
I include the above since it is about the level of discourse I have come to expect, whether it pertains to basic human relationships or to God (Jehovah --Elohim). To go beyond this is to encounter extremely stiff resistance which usually takes the form of premeditated ignorance and complete avoidance of taking the matter to any other level no matter how superficial. Metaphysics for Dummies, indeed! Yet this is so ingrained that it is found in virtually everyone regardless of culture, religion, education, and so forth -- which would account for its persistence in the face of facts to the contrary and even contrary to other basic human needs. People indeed will sacrifice almost anything and anyone to maintain their own self perception of being something vaguely designated as, "good."
Please note that in these St. Peter jokes, Jesus never makes an appearance, and he is never referred to even peripherally. For one thing, it would probably cease to be a joke.
Also note that when called, "good teacher," Jesus asked, "Why do you call me good?" How often do we dare ask ourselves this question? No, we are content to put our own "goodness" neatly into the category of assumables along with our basic basket 'o axioms 'o life.
Accompanying this assumption of, "I'm basically a good person!", Is the corollary that we can live without forgiveness because there's nothing to forgive. This allows us to self-justify pretty much all of our lives. When we think about that, however, one must admit that such thinking is not only out of touch with reality but is frankly infantile. This is what the baby assumes. Because he is by nature completely self-centered. By the way this certainly does describe the persona of Rat. A baby quickly gets over his idea that the world is a basically a good place; but he also quickly performs ego defense mechanisms that are basically just like everyone else's, in order to preserve our egotism but we practice our id-isms.
Apparently we think that we can live an entire lifetime with no need to be forgiven. Much less to forgive. When we are forgiven, we are superficially happy because we got out of some immediate predicament; but we do not accept responsibility and do not accept the fact that we actually needed forgiveness. Ask almost anyone in prison if he or she deserves to be there. This is what makes Camus' novel, "The Fall," so striking in that it strips away our pretenses that we are being good and kind and thoughtful for the sake of virtue being its own reward . Virtue properly defined is the result of judgment, not of self -- conceit. Virtue subjectively defined is probably oxymoronic. And besides, psychologically speaking, unless we can get at least one other person to agree with us about our being virtuous, what's the point?
Einstein once said that if he wanted real answers to real questions he generally turned to Dostoyevsky, not to scientists or science itself. Whether Einstein actually understood the essence of Dostoyevsky is another matter entirely; but there's no question that Dostoyevsky portrayed sin wearing its true colors. And was not afraid to call it by its real name. (Ironically, I had to train the Dragonspeak to type the word, "sin." It apparently is not included in its otherwise extensive vocabulary. Please see the book by Carl Menninger, "Whatever Happened to Sin?")
Rationalism and intellectualism, identified by Dr. Freud as defense mechanisms and little else, seem to be ever more popular and ever more irrational and anti-intellectual by stressing reductionism and erasing all moral distinctions, so that we may more comfortably live, as in, "Brave New World." Our chosen dystopia/anti--universe has arrived and it is a far cry from, "1984"!
I am in the middle of reading, "The Missing", by Tim Gautreaux, the closest thing I can find to Flannery O'Connor among living authors. Like most Dostoyevsky works it concentrates on guilt, grief, and the matter of forgiveness. So I will probably continue to explore this and the reader is as always welcome to contribute from their own reading and/or experiences.
St. Peter: No.
Rat: why not?
St. Peter: You were bad.
Rat: Hooey.
I include the above since it is about the level of discourse I have come to expect, whether it pertains to basic human relationships or to God (Jehovah --Elohim). To go beyond this is to encounter extremely stiff resistance which usually takes the form of premeditated ignorance and complete avoidance of taking the matter to any other level no matter how superficial. Metaphysics for Dummies, indeed! Yet this is so ingrained that it is found in virtually everyone regardless of culture, religion, education, and so forth -- which would account for its persistence in the face of facts to the contrary and even contrary to other basic human needs. People indeed will sacrifice almost anything and anyone to maintain their own self perception of being something vaguely designated as, "good."
Please note that in these St. Peter jokes, Jesus never makes an appearance, and he is never referred to even peripherally. For one thing, it would probably cease to be a joke.
Also note that when called, "good teacher," Jesus asked, "Why do you call me good?" How often do we dare ask ourselves this question? No, we are content to put our own "goodness" neatly into the category of assumables along with our basic basket 'o axioms 'o life.
Accompanying this assumption of, "I'm basically a good person!", Is the corollary that we can live without forgiveness because there's nothing to forgive. This allows us to self-justify pretty much all of our lives. When we think about that, however, one must admit that such thinking is not only out of touch with reality but is frankly infantile. This is what the baby assumes. Because he is by nature completely self-centered. By the way this certainly does describe the persona of Rat. A baby quickly gets over his idea that the world is a basically a good place; but he also quickly performs ego defense mechanisms that are basically just like everyone else's, in order to preserve our egotism but we practice our id-isms.
Apparently we think that we can live an entire lifetime with no need to be forgiven. Much less to forgive. When we are forgiven, we are superficially happy because we got out of some immediate predicament; but we do not accept responsibility and do not accept the fact that we actually needed forgiveness. Ask almost anyone in prison if he or she deserves to be there. This is what makes Camus' novel, "The Fall," so striking in that it strips away our pretenses that we are being good and kind and thoughtful for the sake of virtue being its own reward . Virtue properly defined is the result of judgment, not of self -- conceit. Virtue subjectively defined is probably oxymoronic. And besides, psychologically speaking, unless we can get at least one other person to agree with us about our being virtuous, what's the point?
Einstein once said that if he wanted real answers to real questions he generally turned to Dostoyevsky, not to scientists or science itself. Whether Einstein actually understood the essence of Dostoyevsky is another matter entirely; but there's no question that Dostoyevsky portrayed sin wearing its true colors. And was not afraid to call it by its real name. (Ironically, I had to train the Dragonspeak to type the word, "sin." It apparently is not included in its otherwise extensive vocabulary. Please see the book by Carl Menninger, "Whatever Happened to Sin?")
Rationalism and intellectualism, identified by Dr. Freud as defense mechanisms and little else, seem to be ever more popular and ever more irrational and anti-intellectual by stressing reductionism and erasing all moral distinctions, so that we may more comfortably live, as in, "Brave New World." Our chosen dystopia/anti--universe has arrived and it is a far cry from, "1984"!
I am in the middle of reading, "The Missing", by Tim Gautreaux, the closest thing I can find to Flannery O'Connor among living authors. Like most Dostoyevsky works it concentrates on guilt, grief, and the matter of forgiveness. So I will probably continue to explore this and the reader is as always welcome to contribute from their own reading and/or experiences.
Friday, April 9, 2010
THE MISSING PEACE
"Waiters found two brawlers unconscious under the piano and propped them against a bulkhead near four women who were sitting drunk and weeping at their tables. Sam told a waiter to bring them sodas and then surveyed the room, walking from bow to stern scanning the floor for broken glass and dropped cigarettes, wondering how much time was spent in the world protecting people from one another, folks who had no reason to fight, no reason at all."
from, "The Missing" by Tim Gatreaux
from, "The Missing" by Tim Gatreaux
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Beast, slouching
Quiz Question:
Flo and I made our first visit to Milledgeville GA, home of Flannery O'Connor, on March 18. What famous personage visited this "village" the prior weekend and made national news? What was his "mission"?
And why is this relevant to Good Friday through Easter?
Flo and I made our first visit to Milledgeville GA, home of Flannery O'Connor, on March 18. What famous personage visited this "village" the prior weekend and made national news? What was his "mission"?
And why is this relevant to Good Friday through Easter?
Monday, March 1, 2010
CLOSED FUR REPAIRS
Proposed reopening date on the Ides of The Cruellest Month unless there are cost overruns.
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