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 ‘character’ Category.
I’ve just been realizing how easy it is to imagine I’m being funny after my sense of humor turns acidic and petty. At such times I’m only making fun of people instead of exploiting situational and attitudinal distinctions. The latter is something that requires empathy (without which no human understanding is even possible, and what is the good of a brand of humor that doesn’t induce understanding?), honesty and diligence.
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.
If you trust the words of people who say “I tell it like it is,” you not only don’t trust your own judgment, you don’t have any judgment to trust.
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.
The way a child grows into adulthood is by having his good-natured sense of humor, his sly mischievousness, his adoring loyalty and his fine companionship discouraged and devalued systematically until he’s liberated to become a spirit-stunted prick like the rest of us.
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.
That our politicians are self-advancing amoral opportunists is disheartening; that they are imbeciles is downright embarrassing.
The people I hold in greatest contempt are those who hurt others because, and only because, they have the power and opportunity to do so.
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.
If you want to know what sort of partisan dirty tricks the Democrats have been playing, just pay attention to the wrongs they accuse the Republicans of committing; the two are infallibly the same, because when their gamesmanship is flushed into the light the Democrats want to say, “They do it, too,” invoking the exculpatory principle of moral equivalency. They get away with this brazen transparency because Americans as a people possess a matched pair of civic defects deriving from their mental lassitude: the compulsion (a) to latch onto the first explanation (as long as it is superficial and simple) for any disturbance of the Sea of Unknowing; in order (b) to avoid doing what Americans hate to do, i.e., decide that “somebody just like me” has acted villainously.
A mind-set manifests itself in different ways in different circumstances. Psychologically, there is no difference between the 1920s small-town reverend and the head of a contemporary women’s studies department. They are both authoritarian Puritan fanatics.
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?
One of the ways a hack differs from an artist is by not wanting to put out anything there isn’t already an audience for.
I’ve heard about moderation all my life, but I’ve never seen one.
Endlessly repeated assertion of the alcoholic on the mend: “I used to spill more than most people drink.” As a badge of honor, this is pathetic. But it indicates that pride is still kicking and for that reason reclamation is still a possibility.
Some of the bravest people I have known I met in Alcoholics Anonymous. It requires more courage to face yourself truthfully than to stand before a firing squad.
In the following quotation from my father, “big” means great-spirited: “A big man can take an infinite amount of shit.”
A lawyer and a Hollywood talent agent had a child. The little tyke grew up to be a congressman.
Every spring, going through the newspaper, I come across the double-page spread of Star Student listings, column after column after column of names in tiny print. The sight makes my heart clinch. The country has done just about everything it can to throttle the spirit and enterprise of our children, yet we still haven’t extinguished these precious pilot lights. Where does anybody, let alone a kid, find the grit to excel in an age like this?