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.
Archive for the ‘self-delusion’ 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.
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 problem with self-delusion is not that you are hiding shameful actions and qualities from other people (simple lying and deception take care of that) or even from yourself (a sense of mounting dread prevents this from occurring) but rather that your unwillingness to see yourself for what you are eliminates the only means whereby you might regain your bearings before that sense of mounting dread drives you into outright insanity in order for you to escape conclusively the truth about yourself.
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.
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.
No one deserves more scorn than the professional person dumping on middle class values, while extolling the virtues of Bohemianism and/or the proletariat, from the grandeur of his East Side Manhattan apartment between the time he finishes managing his portfolio for the day and the time he has to pick his children up at their private academy. Be advised that, whatever you do for a living, if you have some money left over after paying your bills every month, and if you don’t fuck your own kids, then you are squarely in the middle class, old buddy. At the most, you are distinguishable by your nontraditional tastes; yet on your wall, too, hangs the psychological equivalent of the photographic studio portrait of the family, colorized by hand. And wasn’t that a black turtleneck jersey that I glimpsed in your closet?
“Deer in the headlights” scarcely does justice to the paralyzed expressions of the cable-news anchors (hired because they’re dynamite babes if they’re females, and “personable” if they’re men) when they attempt to interview guests who know their stuff: “What do you think is you-know going to happen, Major, if the prime minister premier or is it president whatever doesn’t go along you-know with the stuff our guys are saying? What’s your take on it-this, Major? Are we going to put our boots on the ground er ah in the sand so to speak?”
At a minimum, 90% of the people who call themselves “film critics” are nothing more than journeyman reviewers, likely to praise one movie and dispraise another for the same set of reasons; that’s if they’re not just flacks. Reviewers tell us why they like or don’t like a movie, but the title of critic should be reserved for those who explicate what they perceive as working or going wrong in a film as measured against the filmmaker’s intentions, in terms of technical methodology, narrative art, imagery and the actors’ performances (as distinct from their picturesqueness). The actual function of reviewers is to help potential audience members decide if they want to see a movie, so the personal orientation is not at all out of place. I only object to them when they overreach as far as their job descriptions are concerned. Tell it like it is, brother. If I can’t trust you to be honest about yourself, why would I listen to anything you have to say about a film?
Whatever Happened To Harmonic Dissonance? III. Industry reporters in the fields of Show Business, Pro Sports and the financial sectors have been pretty much defanged by the power, money and celebrity wielded by their subjects; the most abased of the ex-aces have progressed beyond flackhood to the status of cheerleader. They typically justify their “soft reporting” with this lament: “If we file negative stories, we’ll lose our entrée. Our sources will dry up. We won’t be able to function then at all.” Hello? This amounts to saying, “We can’t practice journalism if we want to continue not practicing journalism.” The straight truth is hardly to be expected from a group of people who have deluded themselves into thinking that they haven’t sold out. Enjoy your comps and perks, guys.
The Baby Boomers were our first generation to wreck a whole ethos because of perceived parental overkill. First they were required to work for their allowance at the abusive rate of half an hour a week. Later on they had to do some homework. They were even forced to come downstairs and intermingle with the family on Thanksgiving. What with the TV and stereo blasting away in perpetuity, the message just didn’t get through that after adolescence they would be expected to take the reins and fund their own existence. Ultimately their folks refused to buy a Stingray for them on the occasion of their extrusion from high school, and that broke the camel’s back. They hit the road in high dudgeon, only to discover that Dad kept the allowance coming anyway. For the first time in their lives, the Babes were faced with making strategic decisions. They opted to spend their money purchasing 80% of the world’s drug supply. Everything after that was a psychedelic pisshaze with vagrant bouts of sexual activity and sloganeering attended by wine, incense and fingernails-on-the-blackboard music until they woke up in college, still siphoning their parents’ bucks yet acknowledging that the old farts had steered them right all along: the better the grades they made, the more money they would earn to finance their ongoing self-indulgence crusade. Additionally they were pleased to learn that they had Changed the World, a source of immense pride and distinction which they duly acknowledged by still wearing their hair long, growing mutton chops and ‘staches, and not wearing anything special to class. Viva la revolucion.
We squander, I would say, 30% of our lives trying to “understand” our difficulties, thrashing them out, telling people about them, worrying ourselves silly, wearing ourselves down. If we actually wanted to know the truth about ourselves, we wouldn’t do any of that crap.
What do you call a defunct zombie? When a relationship is over, admit it and throw your energy into your next new start. Don’t drag the corpse around, don’t try to revive it. The kids will be dandy unless the two of you eviscerate each other; and you’ll soon get used to a five-room pad. Meanwhile, you know what they call a resurrected corpse, don’t you—it’s a zombie. You ought to acknowledge and confess that what you really want—to go back to the pastel-marshmallow time before you royally screwed the pooch—is simply not an option. Let’s say you hang in long enough to cobble up a brand new relationship post-mortem. Neither the lady’s passions nor yours are ever again going to leap to the ecstatic pitch of your original We-Are-the-Greatest-Lovers marathon, because there’s nothing left to discover about each other. Every glance that passes between you will remind you how incredibly fabulous it was the first time, and how pallid and hollow and grotesque it is now. There you two will be, a couple of zombies chained together in the bone yard, though only for a time, because the bitterness and resentment that will corrode your souls are already seeping into your breasts.
The truth is not relative. It is, however, subject to what I call “perspective-distortion,” and this is what I mean: When I was drinking, I always said I didn’t suffer from hangovers, believing that I was telling the truth. Then I quit drinking, and after awhile I realized I’d been telling lies all those years, albeit unintentionally.
Nobody beats Americans for coming up with self-serving bromides for their psycho-emotional cowardice. “She’s not what I thought she was, but I’m not going to leave her because I don’t want to hurt her feelings.” Yes, it’s much better for her when you chronically get drunk rather than spend time with her, stay out playing with the boys five nights a week, never take her anywhere, screw every other female who will lie still for you, and beat the living shit out of her when you come home and realize you’re “stuck” with this woman. That way you don’t have to test whether you’re capable of inveigling a more desirable and self-respecting female to take up residence with you and tolerate your violently disintegrating personality.
“I carry an amulet of exotic Mayan derivation and I watch art or foreign movies on my DVD player whenever I have some free time. My father wears the same go-to-hell hat everywhere and he never lets a day go by without doing a crossword puzzle. I sure am glad I’m not like him. We just don’t have anything in common.”
“Discussing health never seems frivolous. It disguises narcissism with an aura of serious concern.” (Tina Brown) I am old enough to have recognized from experience that the rise of the health and fitness craze to universal prominence among the professional upper middle-class is exactly contemporaneous (along with the smoking-galls-my-ass movement) with the Baby Boomers’ arrival in their 30s, exuding trendoid sophistication and affluence; the whole thing started in the mid-1970s. What those designer-outfitted joggers (especially when they pose heroically at intersections), those Predator-head-shaped-helmet-wearing bicyclists, those pastel-leotarded gym fanatics, and those aerobicizing video prancers are really saying is, “Don’t just look at me. ADMIRE me!” And consult your own experience: Doesn’t the undisguised narcissist yammering about her broken fingernail, her disastrous trip to the deli, her family’s complement of turdballs, how much she likes the new Madonna CD, her received (“two thumbs up!”) opinion of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, even her cat’s stool, for Christ’s sake, look merely childish and petulant beside the pale-faced, aggrieved-voiced, solemn, graphic and detailed complainer of chronic colitis and the complicated curative course they’ve got her on? Whenever I hear this sick crap, what I really hear is: “You were in danger there of losing focus on me and I can’t afford to let that happen—how can you not empathize with me when you see that I am nearly not well?” It’s one of the many forms of emotional blackmail today practiced by the warped on the bored.
Americans are hedonistic but they will never be Epicurean because they have conveniently overlooked the great philosophy’s cardinal tenet: moderation is indispensible to preventing pleasure from either cloying or becoming destructive.