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 ‘integrity’ Category.
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?
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.
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.
Values are principles that control behavior. They derive from a twin pair of evolutionary imperatives: the self-assertive need to achieve goals that are measurable, promoting the self-esteem necessary to continue achieving goals; and the self-protective need to assert oneself without fatally antagonizing other people asserting themselves. Convictions, on the other hand, are intellectual formulations of values as they relate to the fundamental aspects of external reality at a given time. Here’s the tricky part: The fundamentals of external reality (i.e., circumstances) are always in the process of altering as time persists. Maladapted people hang on to their obsolete convictions with the ferocity of a downing man clinging for his life to an anvil. Well-adjusted people know that dropping old convictions and adopting new ones as circumstances mandate is the only way their values can be preserved. Soi brave, mon enfant!
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.
That our politicians are self-advancing amoral opportunists is disheartening; that they are imbeciles is downright embarrassing.
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.
Providing yourself with an admirable self-image is only half the deal. You also have to match it in reality. The “true you” is not an icon.
Salesmanship consists of convincing a person that he needs to buy something. Good salesmanship consists of ensuring that the need is a legitimate one. Selling is just a technique. Whether its use is good or bad depends on the character of the salesman.
“Objectivity is impossible to achieve. We don’t even try to be objective anymore. The whole idea is boring.” Spoken by a nationally known journalist on C-Span. I would say that as it relates to journalism, objectivity means not a perfect renovation of the journalist’s psyche, but simply balanced reporting—honestly balanced reporting that represents accurately and adequately the issues involved in a story. Taking my cue from Jefferson, I have always thought the function of journalism is to report the relevant facts of an event so the reader/viewer can judge for himself what they mean. But the prominent journalist on C-Span said (I quote from memory):“The average person isn’t competent to judge for himself. Today’s journalists have all been to graduate school. [!] The people need to acknowledge us as their interpreters of events.” If the people aren’t competent to judge for themselves (and they probably aren’t, really, thanks to our imploding educational system), why haven’t journalists made it their affair to help their audience reacquire this basic civic capability? I hardly believe the Constitution safeguards the press’ freedom of speech in order for it to tell us what to think. [Note: There is a fault line in the gentleman’s argument. If he can’t objectify factual matters, on what grounds does he base the contention that objectification is, speaking objectively, impossible? He has no trouble objectifying the negative.]
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.
The Idea of Phart: An amalgam of “phony” plus “art”, this term designates the exhibitions of the little nothing self-promoting charlatans who lack even the minimal artistry necessary to make it in the art-is-a-major-investment sweepstakes. Their “work” may also be described as “tabloid art” because the little preening suck-ass nothings vie for the public’s attention on the basis of sensationalism. Artistically, on the other hand, they operate on the basis of anti-imagination: 42-miles of fuchsia-tinted Saran Wrap unspooling across the highlands of Bulgaria; Jesus in a bottle of piss together with the Virgin Mary sculpted out of dogshit; 36 amputated titties in eleven rows of three plus another three on the ceiling; the actual corpse of an obese grandmother asphyxiated by the action of her support-hose cutting off her circulation; six little boys dressed as nuns throwing darts at The Artist Himself while the latter creates profane tattoos out of his flesh wounds; a python in a maze wriggling its way towards a day-old puppy at the terminus. Speaking qualitatively, what is the difference between this bathetic junk and a freak show at the local fairground or, for that matter, Ripley’s Believe It or Not? In our great land it’s not what you do that counts, it’s what you call what you do.
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.
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?
My instinct is to speak reasonably with people, especially those who disagree with me. I empathize with everybody who undertakes the passion-rousing quest I think of as the never-ending (because chronology persists and circumstances change) search for what is best for us all. But the Liberals with their moral certitude and giddy pretension to intellectual probity refuse to clasp my open hand. They assume irremediably that we Conservatives are jackbooted zealots who want to waste civilization in an operatic (Wagnerian, of course) orgy of butchering bloodlust, and that we consequently deserve to be dismissed contemptuously—and also snidely—from their circle-jerk of self-appointed philosopher-kings. Well on this day I dismiss them, and with a lot more contempt than I can adequately express. I also hereby renounce all further effort to reason with these people as though they were actually well-disposed brokers of the intellect and culture. What they are is thought-police, tyrannical oligarchs, micromanaging nannies and unprincipled polemicists, and from now on I am going to deal with them as they deserve. Ich kann nicht anders. If any say I’m not being fair to “honest” Liberals who don’t bear a likeness to the portrait I have limned, my reply is: let them move away from what their creed has metamorphosed into and publicly denounce its pathology. Christopher Hitchens did this, and they can follow suit.
Deception of the Century: The branch of Philosophy known as “Ethics”, which has nothing remotely to do with right and wrong actions or intentions, and everything to do with the minute ins and outs of logical argumentation; so true is this that the crowning glory of the discipline is the endlessly elaborated study of “meta-ethics,” which is to say, a systematic analysis of the logical veracity of the forms of argumentation. With just as much relevancy, they could have called the course "Cat Litter".
Having sex without ardently affirming the rhapsodic beauty of the other person’s self, yearningly joining your whole sensibility with the other as well as your genitals, is like slam-banging down the street in just the chassis of a car; though perhaps, getting your rocks off, you don’t particularly mind how foolish and self-involved you might appear to bystanders. Of course I’d never deny the pleasure, for what’s its worth, of the little electric jitter that is what you have at the end if sex is all you’re after.
A reminder: The object of a discussion is not to establish who is right and wrong, but to advance closer to the truth.