It's all around you, like smog. This train isn't bound for glory.
Background by Deak Ferrand, who pwnz.
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There may actually be nothing more persistently compelling than Shane Watson's various endeavors on these here tubes. His whole Oeuvre is almost like an ARG whose goal turns out to be finding the meaning of life. Or, perhaps, he's simply a tremendous artist pioneering a new art form previously impossible, working off of the tattered remnants of performance art, non-commodifiable art of the Fluxus type, mail art, corpse-humping killer robot art and f-art. Perhaps he is a utopian driving toward a sort of situationist redemption through an upheaval of mind and of everydaylife. Or, possibly, he is simply an apocalyptic subculture DJ on the most complicated radio station ever devised. Whatever he is, one thing is certain - nothing.
Check out the most recent iteration of Silverladder. If possible, try to also find archives of the previous iterations of Silverladder, and his earlier work at the Bad Scary Place. If you haven't found the Morse code, you don't understand in the slightest what's going on here. Once you find the Morse code, you won't understand in the slightest what's going on here. And this is a Good Thing in a Bad, Scary World.
Really stop and think about this: it has been absolutely impossible to get elected president of the United States without at least professing to believe that intelligent demons are out to corrupt your soul.
There was recently a lucid think piece in, of all places,the New Yorker, reviewing several current books touching on crime and violence in America - the place what I am in. Many of these try to devise a plausible story about why our badness quotient is so murderously high. As the author, Jill Lepore, points out:
The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany.
That's right - we're more murderous than the Germans and the English put together. (Unless, of course, they are facing off in the World Cup.) And let's be candid - those are some messed-up motherfuckers. Well, good for us. Bragging rights are bragging rights.
Doctor Lepore earns her prof. props by reminding us that telling a causal story - especially one about historical changes (in murder rates, in this case) - is pretty well a fool's errand. Those of us who would prefer that Americans not get any stupider than they already are are happy about this - though the people who most need to hear this are of course the least likely to read it. So, please, class, repeat after me: "Correlation does not imply causation." Yes, this will be on the test.
To be honest, though, I'm not in a very rigorous mood. So, since these authors, who are apparently serious enough to be reviewed in the New Yorker (of all places), aren't bothering with Critical Thinking 101, why should I? Allow me then, a bit of a speculative meander. Come along, if you aren't alreay bored out of your mind - I promise there will be lots of violence and cussing.
Let's ask first what else - aside from murdering each other a lot, and not caring about soccer (Hi, Steve!) - is unusual about the U.S. of stop-lookin'-at-me-or-I'll-cut-you-man? How about the following: We're ga-ga about the death penalty (and heavy sentencing generally), love guns slightly more than sex (and yowsa! if you can get both at once), and are, at best, just barely getting over our long infatuation with corporal punishment. (By the way, "corporal punishment" is not actually the name of a professional wrestler; this term actually refers to beating up children. Because, you know, what the fuck are they going to do about it, huh?) Most of our movies involve a hero (or anti-hero) killing people who presumably deserve it, and another fair chunk of them involve a villain killing people who more or less don't deserve it.
Like us, it's simple, really. We have kept the faith that others have lost. We still believe in personal violence as a means of resolving conflict.
Other "first world" nations have long since seen this power, as so many others, arrogated by the state. But I recall, growing up, that some people's horror of having the cops called on a neighbor who was thought to have done wrong was nearly as great as their horror at what the neighbor may have done. The proper route was to take it up with them personally - and I believe that violence was not off the table in such cases. I wonder, however, if this was so inappropriate, so barbaric, as some seem to think. If this is, as some of the sources cited by Dr. Lepore suggest, a case of Americans having missed a civilizing influence due to the earlier development of the modern state apparatus in Europe, then perhaps, like Diogenes of Sinope, or like Huck Finn, we ought to question whether we wish to be civilized. It seems entirely like breaking a horse - the animal is less trouble, but it loses its virility, and its haecceity. Real horses laugh at it behind its back.
There is something dishonorable, and rather pissant, about running to the state whenever our lives become unmanageable. Lawsuits, small claims court, human resources departments, the chain of command, blah blah blah. Why not just be honest and direct about your concerns, and start, you know, a dialogue with those who have harshed your sacred mellow? Possibly, a dialogue involving carving your name into someone's ass.
America, I think, is a nation principally of moonshiners, hobos, bikers, beatniks, guttersnipes, fugitives, cats with fraudulent diplomas, carnies, and other unruly, semi-feral types. We like it that way. So we kill people a little more often than you do? Well, so what? You got a problem with that?Freedom isn't free, you know. Or, as the old saw goes:
Or, what I should have said on the last day of my last class:
Never stop. Philosophy is a discipline, and it is imperative that you keep it up, and deepen the discipline. Otherwise, as the saying goes, your life, unexamined, will not be truly worth living. Indeed, a life with no philosophy in it is only half-led.
Keep studying; and learn some logic, if you dare. It's a hard master, and it will make you harder. Keep reading - with a skeptical eye! - the best authors you can understand; and keep reading the impossible ones until you begin to understand them as well.
Above all, observe the world, and introspect - look within.
Your mind is the most amazing philosophical laboratory conceivable, with ready access to the most remarkable phenomena of Nature: consciousness, perception and representation, decision and value, memory and identity, knowledge and opinion, virtue, and even wisdom. This world inside you is a spectacle of amazing scope. The fact that such things can be is one of the most profound problems of philosophy and a source of limitless wonder.
And keep an eye on the world outside you. God or no God, Nature - including the human mind - is the principal self-revelation of the ultimate ground of being, whatever that may be. If that ground is God, then Nature is the only scripture that all faiths recognize. If not, then it is the only field on which universal truth expresses itself. And among the sacred mysteries of nature, we find each other. These, your fellow beings - what are they? What do you owe them, and to which do you owe it? Those who pay no attention here may become monsters while believing they are saints.
Never cut yourself any slack. Question every belief you have, and force yourself to be answerable for the basis on which you believe - is it conventional, based on fear of belieiving what others would reject? Do you hold a belief solely or mostly out of loyalty to your parents or your community? Cast it away, or force it to account for itself on better grounds. Search yourself for unraised questions, for hidden assumptions, for inconsistencies, for failures to live up to your own principles - and search yourself for principles that you have, but should not, or should have, but do not.
Never stop pushing yourself beyond what you are, toward what you could be.
It always cackles the shackles of my puny little heart to see my fellow ordinary Americans getting ready to overthrow the gummint, and, you know, Kill Whitey - or whatever the (overwhelmingly) white equivalent of "Kill Whitey" is. I even like the idea of millions of them being heavily armed and paranoid. At this stage of my life, I favor guns over butter, in a tight spot. I believe that people who are skeptical about the government's motives in limiting the rights of free speech, free assembly, privacy, reproductive freedom, and so on, ought to be even more interested in the government's interest in limiting access by the masses to the only kind of discourse a bad government understands. If 1984 ever comes, or even Red Dawn, an army of Woody Harrelsons'll do us some good.
It used to give me some pleasure to rankle my Commie buddies (yes, literally) by conceding that, yes, the American working class were the natural revolutionary class, and even the proles specifically, but, oh yeah - they're overwhelmingly conservative. Oops - sorry Karl. I'm no reactionary - in fact, my "progressive" credentials are in good order - but I certainly have spent enough time (much of it wasted) with my good buddies in the lumpenproleKISS Army to observe that they are neither fools nor proto-fascists, but mostly want to be left the fuck alone, and not pay taxes. Many of them, however, also like the Baby Jesus a lot, so fuck those guys. (See, I told you I was a liberal.)
It's fun to watch the brand-new New Right fume and fuss - I suggest, of all places, the Google Finance Dow Jones Index Forum as particularly amusing. However, Oath Keepers are a little scary. When these folks say "...from my cold, dead hands", they really, really, ultra-not-kidding mean it. One gets the impression they might just start shooting now, before the jack-booted thugs even show up at their doors - you know, just in case. As with much of the radical right, one gets the occasional sense that they are in a snit, in part, because (hate to break it to you) there's a Spade in charge. Everyday panic! Not that they're racist, of course. They're just misunderstood - kind of like Pat Buchanan, who gets regularly abused as if he were some kind of Nazi, just because he talks and thinks like one.
While one should not advocate kicking an old man in the nuts, neither should one advocate not kicking an old man in the nuts. Especially when that old man is Pat Buchanan. For surely, some great, karmic justice would be fulfilled if somebody walked onto the set during one of the 28 hours a day Buchanan's on as an analyst on MSNBC and used a steel-toed boot to just swiftly kick his pendulous balls into his gelatinous gut, if only to hear him cry out as he curled onto the floor and vomited.
Nut up or shut up indeed.
In unrelated news, there are, like, Hella Shriners around here.
The Olympic Games are apparently coming to Vancouver, and since Seattle - presumably due to its putative moral superiority and boundless smugness - seems to consider itself Canadian, there is some buzz on local TV. Mostly, there are amateurish spots hyping local athletes who are bound for parts north in 2010. Inevitably, they are referred to, in climax, as "local heroes".
This is an incredibly debased usage.
I admit that, for example, to become an excellent skier is difficult, and in some limited sense admirable. It requires hours of diligent practice, improving one's art and refining it, studying all the nuances of skiing. Of course, one could say the same thing about one who was excellent at skateboarding, horseshoes, cribbage, farting in tune, or serial murder. Nonetheless, persistence and discipline, though kind of square, are generally conceded as virtues.
But is a life lived in such a focussed way heroic? These hours spent in single-minded pursuit of skiing, this devotion to the exclusion of the ordinary elements of life like, say, a job, do not so much make for a hero, as... a bum.
This was, I admit with some embarrassment, an epiphany. I have a job, and I'm earning money, but I want time. We sell our time for money, but whoever has time has more than someone who has traded the same time for any amount of money. So they are not members of the same valuation - contra capitalism.
Capitalism exists in many senses - as a legal arrangement, as a form of activity, as an economic or as a political theory, but also, perhaps especially, as a culture, with its particular mores and taboos, and its proper dogmata. The dogma at hand: that all values are mutually convertible, one for the other on a single scale of exchange, which we express in terms of the simplest to track - that of money. For this reason, slavery and prostitution are the natural expression of capitalism - and perhaps their antiquity suggests that capitalism is not entirely a modern creation.
Antique or not, however, it is naďve - how much would we pay for others to care about us, and what forms of care would we spend more for? Similarly, the notion of a "job" is a modern superstition. We have all bought the notion that life works this way: to live, you must give up part of your time in service to priorities not your own, to follow rules and schedules and limitations not your own, to fill the only thing you own - your time - with experiences that are not your own, and which are not members of your soul. All life is, for each of us, simply our particular field of consciousness through which flows the stream of experience. And we believe we must yield title to our field and stream to another so that we may simply live.
Certainly, though, not all do this - from hobos to authors to preachers and artists... For this reason, I have no patience with those who condemn artists for being in it "for the money". They are in it for the time - to sweeten the time, to keep it uncluttered and pristine. I don't care much what sort of work they do, ultimately - I simply applaud their success. "Con artist" is a redundancy - but they have time. And so with other varieties of grifters, from professors to pundits. One must work out a suitable scam - and yet, this possibility is barely acknowledged.
And so: Time. And so: The SubGenius must have Slack!
I remain very interested in persuasion as a mode of power, and as one of the engines of history. For the moment, I have little of my own to offer on this topic, but I am persuaded that like-minded souls may appreciate this psychological warfare site.
I particularly enjoyed the psyops blunders page, including the brilliant Nazi plan to demoralize American GIs by giving them free porn - wait, what?
Read and learn, and then - we take over the world! (Because, you know, propaganda worked out so brilliantly for the Soviets, the Nazis, and in Viet Nam... and, uh... ) Well, have fun, anyway.
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