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 ‘hedonism’ Category.
Hollywood, Cradle of the Gold-Plated Castrato: A semi-tropical desert become a verdant fantasy park despite the absence of actual weather through the beguiling sorcery of agricultural irrigation. The altar of tasteless excess on which the carcass of Integrity has long since blanched in the sun. A hyperbolic monument of strident vibrating neon to all the cheap souls exterminated by the treacheries of art commerce. Accurate to the smallest detail, faithful only to the spirit of rapine. The town where no means, “Offer me some more money,” and yes means, “But I get to fuck you first.” Where people walk backwards in order to see the knives coming. Where egos drift serenely across the empyrean like dirigibles. Where slack-jawed women enthrall themselves from the looking-glass above the bed while their hairy-backed producers seek to elude their own perfidy by stuffing their entire bodies into the crevice of the Rotting Goddess. Where chicken-liver shakes its booty at Giorgio, and Rolls takes a dump on Mercedes. Where “opportunity missed” means a body is still on its feet. Where the values in the screenplays are guessed at by the self-mutilated eunuchs who not only can’t get their values up anymore, but can’t remember how it ever felt to have values. Where minimal self-respect requires the bloody abolition of all the other sleazoids doing business in this town. And where the Nine Muses alighted from the train in 1939 to get a feel for the place, but within the hour reentered the train and departed, never to grace these inhospitable precincts again.
The essential precept of Baby Boomerism boils down to this: “The rules are made for everybody else. They’re certainly not going to get in my way.”
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.
Sic semper homo hominis: Our great prosperity leads us to believe we no longer need to discipline our behavior or our minds. But that very prosperity also brings about the corruption and inutility of our reinforcing institutions, with the result that our continued well-being depends on whether we have the courage to see and think clearly at the moment when we have lost the capability of even rationally buying groceries.
Some of the Hippie boys were so pretty that after they explained that I had mistaken their gender, I almost said, “I don’t care.”
The tagline of a series of fast-food commercials running now should be adopted as America’s motto, because it epitomizes the end-result of forty years of the unrestricted self-indulgence that began in the late ‘60s with the valiant admonition, If it feels good do it (till it hurts). It was seriously believed that what was needed by the most pampered generation in the country’s history—a generation that had already long-since placed its pleasure and comfort ahead of everything else— was even more pleasure. Not unpredictably, pleasure-seeking as the object of behavior soon devolved into simple appetite-satiation, but it took more than a quarter century for the socio-cultural consequences fully to manifest themselves. The ego’s descent into abject self-absorption and the consequent lack of consideration for others has ultimately metamorphosed into the universal, violent, infantile and gut-wrenching incivility we endure today. The tagline of the commercials goes: Don’t bother me, I’m eating.
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.
Commercial advertising is one of our principal nemeses. As consumerist materialism saps our essence by diverting us from our needful concerns and authentic self-interest, the advertisers step up the intensity of the imagery and phrases that evoke our former normalcy to goad us into buying some new dingus or other while preventing us from understanding what we’re doing to ourselves. How many thousands of nuclear families have gone into hock buying presents this Christmas, imperiling everything they live for and on, from next-month’s electric bill to Sissy’s college fund, because they were lured into doing so by soft-focused images of idyllic nuclear families? We are moths to the flame, the kamikaze consumers. To paraphrase the exquisite Vietnam-era tagline: We are destroying the village in our very effort to preserve it.
In a sense not intended by the liberals or the Demonbats, Iraq has become another Vietnam. The ultimate lesson deriving from that politico-military abortion was itself merely a restatement of the lesson that we didn’t learn from the Korean “conflict”: NEVER ALLOW POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS TO INTERFERE WITH THE MILITARY PROSECUTION OF THE FIGHTING IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM FOR ANY REASON PERIOD END OF MESSAGE. I say that I am a Conservative instead of a Republican mainly because Retardicans never learn not only from anyone’s (their own or others’) mistakes but also from anyone’s successes, either. Just as if LBJ and Tricky Dick had never governed and goofed, Bush has—I hate to say it—moronically commingled the two orders of affairs, political and military. Moreover, since the tragic results of his lapse in acumen have begun coming to light, no one in the president’s camp has figured out how to spin events and motives that doesn’t involve Bush confessing, “I reckon I blew it sky high, folks.” He really needs to go ahead and do that, and then he needs to do what the Intolerable Grinning Hedonist Clinton would have done and say: “Golly. I guess I’m gonna have to fix that sucker,” because if George would only say that, the people would go back to sleep, and the media wouldn’t have a story to massage into a disaster for the administration. Soon the public would not even remember there had been a hubbub. They would have gone back to their usual occupation of getting or staying high and chasing tail. The conclusion following from the argument: War is not merely a component of our comprehensive Middle East policy. Until we win, it is our comprehensive policy.
Gainsay Me If You Can: Be advised that I am going to compare an intangible societal process with a mechanical device in order to make a point about morality in a conceptually graphic way; consider the device to be metaphorical, in something like the way the intangible process is tangible in its consequences, except in reverse. Let’s say morality, which occurs at the intersection of private and public concerns, is a conventional timepiece, and then let us remind ourselves that the watch is driven by a mainspring. If the watch “runs down,” it may be rewound by tightening the spring; but if the spring breaks, then the watch stops telling time. The mainspring of American morality was broken forty years ago, and the ultimate consequences, as opposed to the innocuous and even rather enjoyable immediate effects, are now growing starkly apparent. When the fate of a society remains in doubt, its members must not only work hard to survive as individuals, but also work together to survive collectively; and the basis of working together is mutual trust and reliability. When the fate of a nation is in doubt, the consequences of lapses and mistakes are immediate, always crippling and sometimes lethal, and therefore the maintenance of public and private discipline is the sine qua non of the nation’s existence. But when the staunchly maintained discipline has resulted in victory over enemy and circumstance, then a measure of prosperity ensues, and with it a false sense of security that tempts the human being to relax both self-discipline and communal/institutional discipline. As the consequences of error and laxity are not immediately adverse during the flush of prosperity, people ask why the dreary and laborious maintenance of discipline is still necessary, and then they decide that it is not. At that point a very few people retain their disciplined behavior believing that right is right and wrong is wrong, while the vast bulk conclude that if no punishment ensues then no behavior is criminal or sinful, or if it is criminal or sinful nothing adverse is going to come of it, and so everything is permitted. That is the point at which the mainspring of American morality was broken. And now we approach the time when the enemies and circumstances we have been discounting when we haven’t been ignoring them are going to make us pay the price for our dissolution. If we reward children with food, we should not be surprised when they make pigs of themselves. When we spare children punishment for their misdeeds, we should not be surprised when they grow up to be scofflaws. When we deprive children of love, we should not be surprised when they grow up to be sociopaths. When we abuse children psychologically or sexually, we should not be surprised when they abuse their children in the same ways. We shall know the tree by its fruit. If a people comes to feel that satisfying their appetites is the highest priority and legitimize any means deemed useful in achieving that goal, then we should not be surprised when sheriffs guard or even operate their county vice rings, when judges sell decisions, when lawyers trick juries into freeing hardened criminals, when politicians lie to those whose fate depends on their leaders’ honesty, when educators deliberately disaffect students from their heritage and civic identity, and when journalists distort the facts in order to present reality to the citizenry through an ideological lens. None of this should surprise us in the least because the mainspring of morality is broken and the mutually reinforcing interaction between the Self and the Other is broken with it. The self-involved self cannot be “socially aware,” in spite of what the liberals preach. The broken mainspring cannot be repaired. It has to be replaced.
For the majority of Americans, the phrase “higher learning” applies to the revelations that occur when one is stoned. Certainly that is the only form of higher learning most Americans experience, including a great percentage of those who attend the drinking academies and holding pens for youth called colleges and universities.
History through the Classroom Window: The American teenager today may acquire all the condoms he desires from his high-school nurse’s station, but he’s forbidden by that very institution to have a burger for lunch or crack a cold Diet Coke to slake his thirst. To understand what has become of our educational system and its “clients”—our kids—we must go back in time to the fall of 1945. The generation that persevered through the rigors of the Great Depression, then slogged and battled their way to victory in World War II, had spent an average of three to nine years in school before necessity compelled them to take up the duties and responsibilities of adulthood. They liked to say their real education occurred in the school of hard knocks, and they were not wrong in thinking that. On the other hand, the ultimate vindication and success these provincial young men and women wrung from global conflict after a decade and a half of poverty and grim travail unlocked America’s long-restrained human energy the way the Manhattan Project had recently unlocked the power of the atom. The G I Bill of Rights and the post-war continuation of the government’s awarding of research grants to universities gigantically expanded the country’s educational apparatus just as the rise of the big corporation and evolving science and technology as well as the understandable desire to experience something better than a subsistence-level existence impelled the returning soldiers to enter the halls of ivy for a “college education.” In another decade and a half, America’s revitalized educational system in conjunction with our spectacular prosperity (for the energies of our industrial base had also been liberated) had converted our population from credulous hard-scrabble pluggers into skeptical-to-cynical sophisticates perusing their navels in the lap of luxury and security even as The Readers’ Digest tapered off in popularity while Playboy and Esquire became the periodicals du jour. It amazingly occurred that a generation of men and women who had become adults by the age of thirteen raised a generation of young people who remained adolescent deep into their twenties, as often as not displaying their superior cultivation by cruelly mocking the tastes and attitudes of the parents who had made possible their lives of idle frivolity. Meanwhile, the expansive and dynamic post-war culture also transformed the population, from practitioners of frugal and prudent self-restraint, sacrifice and head-down hard work into easy-credit no-sweat narcissistic hedonists. These big metamorphoses were facilitated by a class of teachers who evinced more interest in their professional status and political influence than they did in educating the young (a boring, crude, obsolete and trivial notion to be sure); very soon there emerged a phalanx of radical academics to provide the teachers with rigorous focus and direction. These were the militant disciples of Antonio Gramsci who proceeded to disaffect the younger students from their traditional values and heritage in order to inculcate into them as they matured an ideology of personally amoral secularism and collectivism—under their tender care the fundamental value of American life ceased to be the freedom of the individual and became uniform equality, the better to manipulate you with, my dears. And as if that were not sufficient to burn away the heritage bequeathed us by the Greatest Generation, commercial advertising as transmitted first and foremost by television converted the population into robotic consumers of merchandise, excitement and sensation—the Me-Pepsi-Now Generation. The 60’s academic radicals, who might never have remained in the universities to work their evil had the Anti-War Movement not encouraged them to hole up on campus during the Vietnam War, are the specific treacherous agents of our disastrous values revolution—disastrous to good order, that is, and as regards the replacement of ideals motivating constructive activity by appetitive self-indulgence—, but they never could have succeeded in their mischief if those admirable and heroic veterans had known the critical importance of and taught their progeny the value of knowledge for its own sake instead of perpetuating their forefathers’ conviction that education is the strictly utilitarian agency that endows the young with the rudimentary skills and knowledge they need to earn a living. This crucial concept of knowledge (and of art, too, as long as we’re on the subject) as a human birthright to be appreciated and desired intrinsically—this missing complement of liberty itself and free enterprise—is as alien to American life and popular thought as eating horsemeat and snails, and our forfeiture of it has done as much as or more than any other factor to cause us to “lose” the country to a belief system founded on tossing dollars out and shoveling stuff back in and not giving a damn for the ultimate costs or consequences, because that is now the government’s responsibility. And yet the guys who forged our victory in the Battle of the Bulge and on the island fortress of Okinawa with their blood and sweat and valor are telling us now (I can hear them even if you can’t) that it is time to quit our bellyaching and our scape-goating of others for the troubles we have made for ourselves; it is time to suck it up and to shoulder our responsibilities. They are right. That is what I’m going to do from here on out, and as far as I’m concerned the journey towards truth and a wholesome productive life for everybody begins with the right naming of names.
untitled, Zeus Bascon, 2010, International Hotel Manilatown Center
Lost Amidst the Smoke And Mirrors. In the millions of words written about the various stakes riding on the impending election, the most significant issue has never even been hinted at. In the fourth century BC, Alexander the Great’s father, Philip of Macedon, determined to consolidate the unruly Greek city-states into a single polity under his command. Athens was of course the cradle of democracy, the defender of the West against the Persians, not merely the beacon but the progenitor of Western culture, the world’s greatest naval power, and the headquarters of a far-ranging colonial empire. So prosperous and unchallenged were the Athenian aristocracy and upper middle-class, indeed, that they had become thoroughly corrupted by materialism and hedonism, and when Philip had defeated the Athenian-Theban armies at Chaeronea, the fathers of Athens, rather than fight further for their patrimony and their civilization, said to the monarch, in so many words: We will surrender our liberty to you if you allow us to continue to behave freely among ourselves. (By contrast, some years earlier, when Philip sought to subdue Sparta, he sent them this proclamation: “You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.” The Spartans returned a one-word reply: “If”. Thereupon the king of Macedon turned away and never bothered Sparta again.) The similarly materialistically and hedonistically unproud citizens of the United States of America were all lusting after 9/11 payback when they thought it was going to be an antiseptic process lasting fifteen minutes, but now it’s still dragging on and it’s gotten all messy and inconvenient and…yes, irritating bordering on aggravating, and, well, it’s just a drag, okay? It makes our heads swim with all these confusing and painful thoughts and stuff, and anyway our president can’t even talk right, and aren’t we just as bad as the terrorists anyway?, so who are we to be telling other people how to live?, and…. Let’s get rid of this half-witted cowboy who got us into this crap. Thus George Bush is likely to pay a stiff price for having had the courage to be a leader—for having bravely and intelligently (if only, in the end, partially) acted in the country’s best interest, at the same time trying to make America an instrument of liberty for the earth’s benighted masses. Those same craven city elders of Athens had already murdered Socrates for having illuminated their self-destructive hypocrisy and truth-evasion, so he was no longer available even for intellectual commentary. Were Socrates alive today, he would ram this thought into our skulls with the force of a driven nail: “President Bush hasn’t been aggressive enough!” It was said of the attack on Pearl Harbor by Admiral Yamamoto that by bombing our battleships Japan had “aroused a sleeping giant.” By striking and melancholy contrast, President Bush has aroused a wealthy and powerful nation one half of whose citizens is partaking of an erotic juke-out while the other half is drifting through life in a drug-induced coma, and for his having done that we are going to f—k him up, dude! We want another president like Bill Clinton who coddles his leading little head and who never actually does anything presidential with his big head—except tell us what we want to hear. As long as we’re into quotations, heed this one from the 18th-century Catholic apologist and Counter-Enlightenment theorist Joseph de Maistre: “Every nation has the government that it deserves.” Precisely in the manner of the late 4th-century Athenians, as a nation we have founded our existence on politics, not liberty. What do I mean by that? As one observer of the political circus, Ernest Benn, appositely remarked, in a quotation sometimes attributed to Groucho Marx: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” Whereas liberty as the sine qua non of democracy was characterized by Benjamin Franklin when he wrote: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” He further cautioned something we had best be mindful of: “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.
DEMOSTHENES
The Get-Real Guide of the American People: (1) If nobody saw you, it didn’t happen. (2) You can cop a great feel in the back of an elevator. (3) Everybody likes the smell of his own farts. (3) Arabs suck. (4) Bosses suck. (5) There ought to be a law that makes my girlfriend suck.
We made a serious wrong turn when, as a society, we equated happiness with pleasure.
The nation understandably took a break after its long trying ordeal. But that was sixty years ago. It’s time to stop temporizing and go back to the work of constructive citizenship.
We know from the way people spend their money that the simple possession of funds in no way implies possession of good taste. Similarly, intelligence, talent and cultivation do not imply the existence of good character.
By the mid-sixties our prosperity seemed assured for centuries to come; we felt that we produced enough wealth for everyone on earth to benefit from it regardless of individual productivity. We also believed that we were obligated to make such a bestowal, for we thought that we had not truly earned our superiority but had been the beneficiaries of fortunate geographical and historical happenstances. The truth was that decades of effort based on yearning after a dream was in the sixties paying off in numerous ways, some of them unexpected, especially in sociocultural affairs. Enjoying the rewards of the sod-busting done by hard-working predecessors, the majority of Americans forsook—they were in a position to forsake—the tilling of the fields, and many ceased to embrace the values that had underlain the spadework. To take just one example, earlier generations had rooted their values in the family. The prosperity of the sixties and the changes it brought about, facilitated by the Pill, made it not only possible and feasible but desirable for couples to separate who would never have done so previously. Either the values the family embodied faded for lack of maintenance, or they were discarded “bravely” (by people in no danger of suffering adverse consequences) as part of the post-facto justifications typical of such actions. “The old things no longer apply in a contemporary context,” people said. The contraceptive pill is a more than adequate symbol of what took place in that decade (at the beginning of which we watched Doris Day movies, whereas by the end we flocked to see Deep Throat), along with one of its earliest dispensing mechanisms, easily portable in a woman’s purse. The Pill was a purchased commodity that altered our biology and thereby our ethos. That’s as good a way as any to summarize the Me Decade, during which our transformation into a materialist culture was completed by the advances the media made in mass persuasion and by the universal adoption of credit cards, promoting “easy credit” and thereby robbing our purchases of any notion of value except as regards status. Most of the revolutions that occurred at that time, whatever their impetus and focus, had in common a propensity for attacking the Middle Class as a primary source of the evil plaguing our nation. Whatever you wanted to do or be, some perfidious aspect of the Middle Class stood in your way. So down with the stifling bastards and all they represent. At its basis, this rebellion was a function of prosperity, which leads people to imagine they can safely jettison prudence and self-restraint. All the poor Middle Class ever did, in fact, was serve as the nursery for its critics while they sought to attain a haven from which to fire their broadsides without the fear of reprisal. I have personal reasons for believing that doing something for another person is the surest way to earn his enmity; he is afterwards driven to prove he could have succeeded without you, even if the proof involves your downfall—once you’ve helped him grow strong enough to wield the necessary force to accomplish this. Ironies abound in the situation. Without intending to belittle the physical labor of the working class, I think it reasonable to assert that the middle-class values of thrift, sacrifice, forethought and dedicatory zeal are essential if physical labor is going to result in the abundance that fosters what we think of as civilization; without such values, physical labor becomes brutalizing and dreary, a dead hand on life. In any case, the sixties prosperity furnished livelihoods for an endlessly expanding professional corps whose meal ticket was a college or graduate-school degree. Removed from the middle-class “loop” linking effort and sacrifice to consequences, and making enough money to support themselves without help from home, the new professionals went to rather unnatural lengths to thumb their noses at their elders and to sever their cultural ties to the past, while in terms of psychodynamics—I mean specifically as regards self-indulgence—their “novel” mores simply duplicated past syndromes associated with personal behavior detached from the daily grind. Not only did they have to pillory the Middle Class to free themselves from it, but in order to do so they first had to falsify it, painting it as something it wasn’t. For the Middle Class doesn’t constrict energy—it releases it. And as for Philistinism, what tomfoolery could possibly top the cheerleading performed on behalf of a compassion industry based on public funding? No class on earth is free of charlatans, hypocrites, exploiters, Babbits and fringe-dwelling extremists. If these were the grounds on which our Middle Class was devastated, then to be logically consistent we should eliminate every human institution in existence.
This paragraph concerns a “typical” experience; but if you’re an atypical person, read it anyway, because the information it conveys will shed light on why your coworkers are the kind of people they are. The typical American divides his existence into three roughly equal parts. The first is occupied by sleeping. The second part the average person labels Real Life and consists of all the forms of self-indulgence he cultivates single-mindedly including primarily sensory stimulation, nervous excitement, appetite satisfaction and liberation from any concerted effort not directly associated with these pursuits. The remaining part of his existence (which is by extension “unreal”) the average American calls Work. The purpose of Work is to pay for all the pleasures enjoyed in Real Life. Typically, Work is regarded as a form of punishment for said pleasures. The average person has to arise from his natural or narcotized slumber in order to commute through antagonizing traffic to an abhorrent place where he wears stupid clothes, does the bidding of a pugnacious idiot, interacts with people he would never otherwise consider associating with except possibly for their sexual potential, and is always performing some infuriating activity that is mindless and devoid of purpose. Yet this same average person has at least the capacity to understand, should he ever stop revving his engine long enough to reflect upon the nature of his behavior, that he doesn’t dread and resist Work because it’s pissy. Rather, Work is pissy because he dreads and resists it.