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 ‘currents’ 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.
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.
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.
Speaking of Gore Vidal, he didn’t look like a wretched old Queen until he started launching the little bee bees that are all he has remaining from his blunderbuss days as the pinup girl of Marxian polemics. Oddly enough, I met him in 1990 at a fundraiser during his surreal—it could have been directed by Fellini—Senatorial campaign in California, and he never looked me in the eye, though all I said to him was, “How are you?” On the other hand, his sulky lips and aristocratic jaw worked perpetually as though he’d got some peanut particles lodged inside the crevices of his teeth. Aha, I thought. A man who’s not comfortable with his masquerade. (When they asked me, “What about the money?”, on my way out, I replied, “I’m the wrong flavor, friend. I bleed red. I was just here to see the bon vivant and litterateur, not the hard-charging candidate.”)
I was a phenomenon of rather far-fetched notability when I was thirteen: a pubescent white boy residing in a middling suburb of a fair-to-middling city in the South in the early 1950s whose ardently embraced role model, hero and highest god was the ever-laughing black musician and performer Louis Armstrong, the self-taught (musically and every other way) son of a prostitute plying the night-side of New Orleans, the greatest musical improviser since Beethoven, the most important figure in American music in the 20th century (rivaled probably only by Stravinsky in the world), a cultural revolutionary, a marijuana devotee and laxative-consumer extraordinaire. So what did I know, right? Well I knew this: What I loved about Satchmo as a young teen, and I do mean loved, I later confirmed to be the sine qua non of the greatest art man produces—-the joyous making of something new, brilliant and affecting from the nondescript raw materials of everyday existence. Pops’ bucket didn’t have a hole in it.
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.
A fair-sized industry has arisen to pay tribute justly to the generation of World War II. But the heroics of that generation did not emerge from a vacuum. They were gestated in the soul-scalding forge of the Great Depression. America’s not ready to listen to that story yet.
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.”
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?
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.
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.
The vital intellectual component of humanity issues from the ability to objectify, interpret and analyze the features of our array of contexts and our subjective reactions to the contexts’ properties and dynamics. When we reject the basis of objectification, therefore, as by abandoning confidence in the existence of uniformly occurring verities and their methods of operation, and as by substituting feeling for thinking as our singular instrument of “understanding,” we not only disable our intellect, we undo our selves.
The mainstream media act collectively, though not in concert. Its practitioners don’t need to conspire. They all hail from the same general background (the higher ranges of the middle-class), went to the same schools when those schools were being radicalized, practically form an age brigade, and cover a lot of stories indicating that the poor don’t live as comfortably as the wealthy. Corporately they consider the left to be the center and the right as the domain of Nazi boobs and pinheads. What is not apparent is why they feel compelled to demolish the values of the social class that brought them into a safe and good existence, promoted their idealism, and funded their miseducation. You’d think they’d offer those values to the hallowed disadvantaged whose incentive to improve has been eradicated by the media’s insistence that the government needs to rescue them. Do you think the journalists feel they don’t deserve their good fortune because they did nothing to earn it? Self-disgust would certainly account for the irrational fury of their denunciations.
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