Egos today are like those huge balloons floating bland-faced and with absurd solemnity above the crowds in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, except the balloons are tethered to the reality of tow-trucks navigating a complex course through congested streets.
Archive for the ‘today’ Category.
Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.
Depriving a teenager of idealism is like not charging the battery of a car before you turn the ignition key and step on the gas. The car can’t go anywhere, and you flood the engine.
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?
How often does a commodity prove as satisfying as the packaging and hype compel you to imagine it is?
A young girl coarsened through preoccupation with adolescent sex lowers the value to the species of Natural Selection.
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.
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.
Anthropologists say the human race became the dominant species on the planet because it’s the most adaptive species; if this is true, it carries the corollary that we learn by our mistakes. But I have seen so many cases indicating the contrary that I can’t help doubting the proposition—until I think about money, specifically about how the glee of having a surplus of it or the fear of not having enough short-circuits man’s psyche. What else might explain why a heretofore successful businessman would purchase an acclaimed restaurant, then proceed to amortize his investment by reducing the cost—-and thereby the quality—of precisely those amenities that made the restaurant popular to begin with?
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.
I wonder how many realize that the way we view reality is governed by the technical and logistical demands of television coverage, with even greater distortion effected by a truncated presentation format and by story-juggling editors keeping an eye on the ratings. Any event that can’t be shoehorned into this Procrustean mould—such as, oh let me see, the 7 year-long, 200- billion-dollar Savings and Loan scandals (“We could never figure out how to do the graphics”)—simply stays beneath the water gathering force and fury until one day it blasts to the surface like the Great White Whale, swamping the little Pequot and sending its crazed and visionary captain to the bottom.
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.
Race against Time: As science strives to produce humanoid machines, we humans independently strive to convert ourselves into automatons, that is, creatures that respond to stimulation wholly without considering what they’re doing. There is every chance that authentic humanity is going to be more faithfully perpetuated into the future by computerized robotics than by us.
Despite appearances, most people’s behavior is not irrational; it’s neurotic, i.e., dysfunctional in rational ways. But because we imagine that certain people—most of them, in fact–are irrational, we solicitously counter their bizarreness with our light-wand of rationality, to no avail, because their maladjustment is spawned not in the intellectual faculty but in the awful chaotic swirl of modern life. I think we ought to reverse the terms of the process and purposely act irrationally in order to snap such people out of their neuroses. The next time you run into that smarmy little self-deprecator who works down the hall, ask, “Why did you dye your hair blue?” and instantly leave the room. The baffled neurotic, imploding with uncertainty and doubt, will then take a couple of baby steps along the path to eventual normalcy by hastening to find a mirror so he can verify his hair color, then wondering why you might have spoken so strangely. (Point #1: Your insanity acts like a cattle prod, shocking his malady into the open.) The second time you see the patient, offer this assurance: “I don’t blame you for killing your wife. Your secret is safe with me”; and then go away again. After this encounter, the subject will begin to objectify his thinking as he tries to figure out what in the hell your problem is. (Point #2: Objectification is the sine qua non of emotional salubrity.) Keep this going, and the day will come when you two collide at the water cooler and the former human ant colony says, “You don’t play badminton, do you? I just took it up and it looks like I’ve got a real talent for it!”
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.
Based on current trends, the following await us in the future:
Sports
Blowball (an antipersonnel device implanted in the ball is timed to explode randomly during play; object: not to have the ball when this occurs)
Movies
Nailing Your Sweet Booty (date flick; “a real hand-holder”)
Lord Rocky Potter and the Star Wars Spidermen in Black
Untitled (affecting band of aging and career-challenged actresses dispense wisdom of the womb; Alan Arkin plays the caustic handyman)
TV
America’s Funniest Videos of Making People Die Sadistically
Values and principles are like socks and underwear. People change them daily.
Now It Can Be Revealed: Al Gore is the very first animatronic replica of a human being to have been publicly circulated as an autonomous personage. We may from this vantage point detect that the genius of the experiment lay in releasing it/ him into the realm of politics during the Age of Media.
Today’s vast multitude of ideological polemicists are the descendants of the Greek Sophists (5th century BC) who corrupted the purest and most creative strain of intellection the world has ever experienced for the paltry sake of personal gain. Today the gain for the ideologues is the indoctrination of young people and other unwary souls. These people are Sophists, as I said. But where is our Socrates?