Knifethrust of Thought

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.

Oxymoron: new movie

I would kill my own children before I’d see them become Show-Biz journalists—I’d go absolutely berserk if the words “starlicious makeover” ever left their lips or keyboards.  There are individual days when I would kill them before I’d see them become “mainstream” journalists, too, as that adjective now implies nearly as great a degree of meretriciousness in respect of professional ethics (except the phrase “journalistic ethics” is already an oxymoron) as Show-Biz, Sports and—close enough to Show-Biz in being heinous as to carry an automatic death penalty of its own—“political”.  But if they were Sports journalists I would keep them breathing for the sake of getting complimentary tickets.

“Wasting time” is an impossibility unless you waste it bitching that you don’t have anything to do; but even then you’re only misusing time, not wasting it.  “Wasted space” is any volume of air containing Michael Moore.  “Wasted breath” applies to anything said by Andy Rooney.  “Wasted resources” is the DNA of Terry McCauliffe.  “Wasted away” describes whatever potential for decency might ever have been possessed by Rosie O’Donnell.  “Wasted effort” is an oxymoron.

The first business of any regime is to secure its own preservation.  In this specific sense, the Bush administration is a failure—unless Bill Kristol’s interpretation of the situation remains valid throughout the [2004] election season: “Bush is weak but Kerry is weaker.” [The interpretation did remain valid.]  Bush has not failed in the matters of vision, strategically viable policy ideas, or even of wholesale politics as in the mid-term elections of 2002; although he’s currently more than just a featured player in the infuriating and implosive Washington burlesque of covering up the self-serving inertia of the federal bureaucracy, and he is dilettantishly mixing and matching politics with military imperatives in the War on Terror.  But in the America of today the key to political domination lies in beating the media at their own unwholesome game, which is not to influence public behavior directly (as was traditionally the case) but actually to manipulate the public sensibility and through that the public mind (oxymoron alert!) on the cynical but prevailing principle immortalized by Billary as “perception is reality.”  Bush’s failure is particularly embarrassing for a Conservative to witness inasmuch as he has not only not followed Clinton’s leadership into the new promised land of audience-friendly propaganda (no doubt for politically misguided ethical concerns as well as probably a patrician nasty taste in the mouth for the Clintons’ Herbalife-type jumped up self-aggrandizement) but he hasn’t even gone so far as to imitate Harry Truman’s example of furiously stumping the country to make the administration’s case from the proverbial bully pulpit.  G.W.’s campaign blather more resembles doses of verbal Nytol than raise-hell-screw-the-bastards-get-our-people-to-the-polls goosings of the voter’s sleeping butt.  Just this week [5/3/04] the international media went nuclear with photographs of our military police harassing prisoners in Iraq.  This morning we learned that the Pentagon received the pictures last January.  So how did this infamy occur and who’s been punished for it?  Well…the administration hasn’t quite made its mind up what it wants to say about this mess in spite of having had five months to figure it out and to prepare the public for the enunciation of the Official Word.  You are proud of the Spanglish you so populistically learned how to tawk down there on the Rio Grandy, ain’t you, Don Hor Hay?.  Okay, I reckon this here is it, amigo.  Vaya con dios.

The term “academic standards” is only an oxymoron if by “standards” is meant the disinterested examination and evaluation of ideas and the implementation of this ideal as an operative principle in the academic’s professional conduct.  Academics do, in fact, have standards, although they are different from the ones just described.  The first is the substitution of Marxist-socialist ideology for thought, and the second is the demonization and persecution of anyone who questions or disagrees with that ideology; the third standard (forgive the numerological confusion) is the free employment of the double standard.  University recruitment committees have rejected candidates for being variously “too religious” and “too much of a family man” (!) while hiring incompetent leftists saying they will do fine “with nurturing.”  Ironically, the nation’s saving grace in this situation is that college students are so poorly educated in the primary and secondary schools, and so apathetic vis-a-vis the process of learning per se, that they not only don’t actually learn any of the garbage taught at college, but present the faculties with minds that are tabulae rasae on which no known implement has ever left a mark.

Oxymoron (for me): pleasant dreams

Oxymoron: good grief

Oxymoron: history lesson

Oxymoron: American character

Another Oxymoron: popular taste.

“Folk wisdom” is not an oxymoron. The masses collectively learn, but in any given area of interest they appear to limit the amount they learn by their uncanny collective ability to formulate their initial knowledge with a recognitional aptness so felicitous and Delphic that it seems to be completely comprehensive : Snail mail, masterbatone, BFD*, etc., in other words slang.   Our cognition is generated from without though it is crystallized within and transferred over to our formulative capacity, calling upon pre-existing resources to mix-and-match with the incoming data, and then bounce back out.  Manifestly, a diversity of people may uniformly imbibe rainwater, but each person will spit it out differently, in different directions, at different instances and with varying velocities of expectoration.  This does not however signify that the masses can’t express something uniformly. They can, but it is negative.  They can say, shout and yell No! If their No! is not well and adequately answered, they will next start screaming and running around, and they will also begin to attune this behavior to intensifying violence and mayhem until the poor benighted unwashed masses stomp to smithereensthe thing they originally wanted to preserve.  As I listened to a semi-drunk American say in Paris one night, “C’est la fucking vie!

*Respectively: postal correspondence; muscle development as a result of masturbation; acronym for “big f*****g deal.”

Oxymoron: Obama presidency.

Oxymoron: American Values

Personal Assistant:  “Are you ready to face them?”

Chief Executive Officer: “Can’t you see?  New suit, new shirt, new tie, new socks, new shoes, new cuff-links.”

PA:  “But are you ready to counter their complaints?”

CEO:  “I’ll just wing it.  I don’t really have to be informative, Bert.  I only have to sound plausible. So—how do you do you like the image I present?”

Oxymoron: Wise Liberal  (A Liberal may be smart, but smart is not wise, because a smart man become wise has already ceased to be—by definition—a dishonest ideologue. )

Oxymoron: wasted manhours*

*”manhour” is the very definition of “waste”

Oxymoron: Knifethrust addict.

Oxymoron: pensive teenager