People who react to experience not spontaneously, but rather by first considering how the reaction might “play” for them—or in the case of our crusading intellectuals, how they might use it in the prosecution of their pet sociocultural narratives—and what its corresponding value will be, worry the hell out of me because interposing anything that is arbitrary between reality and our awareness of reality, which is to say, preconditioning our consciousness, is an ego defense that makes me wonder what’s wrong with them that they don’t want revealed through inadequate, inappropriate or inept behavior. I put them in the psychodynamic category that contains socio- and psychopaths, junkies maddened by desperation and rabid ideologues of all denominations.
Archive for the ‘attitudes’ Category.
Madness as Sanity, Reality as Madness: These were popular terms in the nineteen-seventies, a time when the twinning of opposites seemed profoundly philosophical and concepts such as these were intensely meaningful to someone with an armful of horse.
People who consider it in their interest that no rules inhibit or limit their behavior find the pleasures of their excesses short-lived and incomplete. Why else would they keep repeating them so neurotically?
People who say they want to be entertained, as opposed to being edified, really mean they want to have their senses stimulated. Their minds never occupy their thinking, and thinking never occupies their minds.
Educators seem pretty ignorant to me. They want to keep little Johnny from knowing anything that might upset him. And stupid me, here I always thought the purpose of education was to teach little Johnny how to handle problems, which include being upset, yes?
Whatever happened to harmonic dissonance? People seem oblivious to their not even having tried to merit the lofty attributes their egos require them to ascribe to themselves.
We may confidently assume that those who lack curiosity are also “non-judgmental”. People who fear being wrongly definite repress all their instincts.
It’s not how a Southerner speaks that distinguishes him, it’s what he says. A few years back I stood at an intersection in Atlanta’s legal and financial district. Beside me stood a trim erect gentleman with feather-cut silver hair wearing, I estimated, a $1200 blazer, a pair of $400 slacks, and $300 loafers. I might just as well have been in Wall Street. Before the light changed, the elegant gentleman turned to the man on the other side of him and said, “Bubba’s comin’ to Mama’s house Sunday.”
Two people are talking about wine, jazz. Postmodernism and cinema with striking knowledgeability. One is actually sophisticated and the other is a phony. How do we tell which is which? The phony regards his lore as a possession and is always compelled to uphold and defend its validity. The true sophisticate thinks of learning as discovery; he often changes his opinion and is absolutely the antithesis of egocentric.
People who lack intelligence but consider themselves to be “players” self-identify by flagrantly accentuating their sexual characteristics, as though a fabulous distinction accrued to them by virtue of possessing the primary appendages of the species.
The ritualistic courtesy of the Chinese and Japanese stems from their societies being overcrowded; absent an objectified code of personal interaction their countries would descend into violent chaos. America’s not overpopulated, but we have a much lower threshold for angry and irrational resentment than the Orientals, thanks to our having become infantile after 40 years of unrestricted self-indulgence, the evaporation of our educational process and the aberrant notion that we can heal our spiritual malaise by purchasing high-profile merchandise. There are simply no spurs to empathetic understanding in a nation whose religious worship consists of thanking God for easy credit and whose standard greeting runs, “Get out of my face, you fucking asshole.”
A mentality so lame that it’s disarming: A man who wants to appear a cut above his pals employs the French word “forte” (strongpoint), ignorantly mispronouncing it as fortay. When corrected by a friend, he objects: “Everybody says fortay. If I say it differently, they’ll think I’m showing off.”
Political correctness is not about acceptance of the other, tolerance, affirmative action, doing the right thing or any other cultural or social issue. It’s a moral salve for the consciences of people who refuse to endure the strictures on behavior of a personal moral code. Imagine a woman who breaks her arm and goes to work as a municipal plasterer instead of seeing a doctor, on the grounds that “confining my limb to a plaster cast infringes on my individual freedom.” The more unbearable her pain becomes, the more civic wall-space she slathers with her featureless goo, crippled but convinced that she is beautifying the city.
People’s insistence on being respected appears to be proportional to their inability to earn respect.
By its rigidity and its disconcerting intensity, we understand that political correctness is an ideology, and we note that it has been adopted universally by the country’s intellectual elites. It is quite literally senseless to try to reason with these people; and not just because they’re arrogant and self-righteous, but because their irrational poppycock disguises a cold-eyed determination to eviscerate American culture by incapacitating our children for becoming free-standing individualists. Political correctness is tyrannical to the core— the only form of diversity it refuses to embrace is diversity of opinion. From kindergarten to graduate school the sons and daughters of Gramsci are busy every day indoctrinating our young people in the lexicography of drivel, while flying squads of scholar-poseurs are equally diligent in bolstering the claptrap by filling journal after journal with unscientific absurdities. The politically correct apparatchiki are bole weevils masquerading as butterflies. They thrive because of our lazy self-absorption and our misplaced trust in institutions we have let run amok, and they are killing the crops beneath our very eyes. If we permit them to continue, the civilization they have been subverting for the last forty years will eventually not be able to perpetuate itself.
Whatever Happened to Harmonic Dissonance? II: That a person could even utter a statement like, “I don’t need to read the newspaper because nothing in it interests me,” or, “I’ve never eaten Korean food because I know I wouldn’t like it,” betokens a breakdown of the speaker’s most basic associative operations (his mind “throwing a rod”); and it yields a proposition that is ridiculous—that we can judge the value or utility of an experience without having tried it. I remember when this fallacy typified the thinking of teenagers in the early Eighties. Now we hear it from adults every day. The disconnect occurs to people who haven’t managed to objectify, assimilate and conceptualize the elements and forces of contemporary existence; coping in desperation with incessant shotgun blasts of minutiae stresses them so completely that their minds simply shut down rather than entertain the thought of taking on something new and different. Neglecting one’s mental capacities is not the wisest preparation for life inside a kaleidoscope.
An expert is a person who believes there is no middle ground between expertise and ignorance.
Today the “ideal neighbor” is one you never have to see or hear, whose vehicles cost less than yours but are presentable and in good condition, whom the police don’t visit periodically, who keeps his lawn up to neighborhood standards, and who doesn’t have teenage boys practicing basketball in the driveway for five hours straight every night.
When the ladies of Wall Street torched their brassieres in the late 1960s, inaugurating the age of feminism, the preponderance of men were not the chauvinistic beasts the women’s spokespeople labeled them as being. However, when the feminists objected to being treated “demeaningly” by fellows who stood up when they entered the room and made a habit of opening doors for them, then announced not only did they have the right to be promiscuous “just like you,” but had taken to regarding men strictly as sex objects, guys began to think, “You know what? This suits the hell out of me.” In the space of five or six years the feminists reversed fully three million years of the evolutionary trend affiliating men to women as post-mating husbands and fathers, a behavior not originally inherent in the anthropoid male. Consequently, most men today, if they had their druthers, would fuck at least one fresh woman every day of the week, no strings attached; and if the women didn’t like it, they could kiss the men’s asses as they left the bedroom. Did I hear somebody say Mondo Cane?
The lack of a sense of responsibility leads to self-deception, and this is one of a slew of contemporary American “behaviors” (i.e., behavioral syndromes) against which the sweet-reason approach is powerless to effect change and therefore pointless to employ; others are depression (resulting from the long-term repression of impulses), addiction (escapism masquerading as courageous self-discovery or outrageous self-expression), the chronic inability to keep a promise (“I lied,” “things change,” “I’m moving on”), blaming someone or something other than oneself, saying that one has a disease in order to show that “I couldn’t help it.” The problem is that these sad and threadbare devices are defensive mechanisms applied when people actually need to assert themselves to overcome the fear arising from the insecurity that typifies society so conspicuously. The rising popularity of “extreme sports,” in which people fling themselves off thousand-foot cliffs, for example, with no great assurance that they’re going to land on the ground as anything but a splat, signals the severity of our anxiety. Those of us who don’t leap experience the right impulse (close your eyes and jump) but are afraid to act on it lest we wimp out or look stupid, which we really are for not responding; but we’re not in a condition to appreciate that. And because of our own insecurity we want to cut the clearly maladjusted plenty of slack—we “empower” them, to use another current catch phrase. Unfortunately, the dysfunctional syndrome we adopt metastasizes along with our unabated insecurity until we’re offering even greater slack to those guilty of committing actual crimes; fully crediting them for any of those blame-deflecting excuses cited above they care to indicate, because we believe (however absurdly) that we could well stand in their shoes some day and be in need of all the slack that we can get. The moral of this unhappy exposition is that society is crippled for everybody when a large enough number of its members refuse to accept the discomfort and inconvenience of self-investigation and behavior change as the price of putting an end to the pathology. America’s prosperity, which makes it easy to dissociate cause and effect, insures that this is going to be the way things are for a long time to come.