Knifethrust of Thought

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.

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.

How often does a commodity prove as satisfying as the packaging and hype compel you to imagine it is?

A young girl coarsened through preoccupation with adolescent sex lowers the value to the species of Natural Selection.

If you believe that Liberals stand in the center while Conservatives occupy the far distant fringes of the right, reflect on this: Thinking “Hitler” all the time and never thinking “Stalin” when the subject is political orientation is like evaluating the humor of Laurel and Hardy without Hardy.

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 20^th 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.

Perhaps the multiculturalists have a point.  What entitles us to the arrogant belief that Western Civilization is the way to go?  We ought always to seek to better our condition by learning how other cultures do things.  Let’s adopt the educational standards of the Ivory Coast, the culinary hygiene of New Guinea, the judicial-system fairness of Saudi Arabia, the religious tolerance of Sri Lanka, the imaginative television programming of Mongolia, the political liberties of Myanmar, the urban sciences of India, the high-tech infrastructure of Tajikistan, the after-school programs in Brazil, the foreign affairs genius of North Korea, the child-labor policies of Bangladesh, the social justice of Zimbabwe, the common-ground ethnic togetherness of Cyprus, the engineering ingenuity of Samoa, the freedom of dissent of Iran, the sell-your-daughter-into-prostitution ethos of Thailand, the marital relations of Pakistan, the pollution-control zeal of Mexico, the table manners of Micronesia, the philosophy of the Eskimos, the University-studies rationale of Azerbaijan, the cinema of Malaysia, the musical sophistication of Easter Island, the anti-corruption policies of the Philippines, the comedy sketches of Somalia, the legislative shrewdness of Rarotonga, the contemplative politics of South Korea and Taiwan, the relaxed code of leisure of Japan, the public defecation facilities of China, the rationalized traffic control of Ecuador, the fine art of Borneo, the literary distinctions of Tierra del Fuego, the prisoner-rehabilitation policies of Turkey, the pluralistic harmony of Rwanda, plus clitorectomy, and we’ll see how it goes.

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.”

Hollywood celebrities who “make statements on politics” resemble fart-cushions.

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 must have come from another galaxy.  I happen to enjoy fruitcake.

Training a camera on a politician yields the same effect as when you add milk to Rice Krispies, including the post-crepitational sogginess.

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.

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

When the ladies of Wall Street torched their brassieres in the late 1960s, inaugurating the age of feminism, the preponderance of men were not the chauvinistic beasts the women’s spokespeople labeled them as being.  However, when the feminists objected to being treated “demeaningly” by fellows who stood up when they entered the room and made a habit of opening doors for them, then announced not only did they have the right to be promiscuous “just like you,” but had taken to regarding men strictly as sex objects, guys began to think, “You know what?  This suits the hell out of me.”  In the space of five or six years the feminists reversed fully three million years of the evolutionary trend affiliating men to women as post-mating husbands and fathers, a behavior not originally inherent in the anthropoid male. Consequently, most men today, if they had their druthers, would fuck at least one fresh woman every day of the week, no strings attached; and if the women didn’t like it, they could kiss the men’s asses as they left the bedroom.  Did I hear somebody say Mondo Cane?

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.

The Ideational Wild Boar: Some tragic ironies are all-pervasive and therefore unperceived.  In the nation founded on and dedicated to the primacy of the individual, the very last thing a modern American wants to do is “stand out”.