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.

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

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!

The vital intellectual component of humanity issues from the ability to objectify, interpret and analyze the features of our array of contexts and our subjective reactions to the contexts’ properties and dynamics.  When we reject the basis of objectification, therefore, as by abandoning confidence in the existence of uniformly occurring verities and their methods of operation, and as by substituting feeling for thinking as our singular instrument of “understanding,” we not only disable our intellect, we undo our selves.

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.

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

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.

Values and principles are like socks and underwear.  People change them daily.

The child who has to wait until you finish what you’re doing will still be waiting when you’re no longer too busy for her, that is, when you’re dead.

Obligations don’t mean anything today.  They have become tactical ploys instead of strategic parameters.

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?

On the Idea of Perfection. II: If the purpose of the concept of perfection as a component of man’s consciousness were literally to inspire humanity to achieve perfection, Evolution would have bred it out of us several hundred thousand years ago.  (The first caveman would have starved to death decades before producing a perfect axe head.)  Instead, the idea of perfection exists to encourage us to attempt a little more than we believe we can accomplish.  By trying to outdistance your expectations, you might not reach your goal, but you’ll be further along towards it than you would have been otherwise.  Precisely the same principle applies to efforts made to overcome adversity.  Success doesn’t matter nearly so much as the lessons we learn in the process of making the effort that we can use to our advantage in the next go around.

I once drove from Dallas to Houston with a business associate named Gene who hailed from Forth Worth.  His family had been dirt poor, and Gene had had to work at the famous local stockyards from his ninth year until he graduated from high school.  On our way down the state, we were overtaken by a lean young Urban Cowboy in a whistle-clean silverado pickup truck; he severely wore a Stetson hat and carried a .30-0-.30 in the gun rack.  I asked Gene, “How much does a new Stetson cost these days?”  His answer was, “Don, I done shoveled so much horseshit, cow shit, pig shit and sheep shit that I don’t give a shit about no cowboy shit.”  No one else sees the world as being as stark and hard-edged as many of the Texans I have met.  They find the harshness to be clarifying rather than disquieting.

Our abandonment of evaluative and behavioral standards has brought to light a previously esoteric principle of human behavior: In a nation of 300 million individuals enjoying unlimited freedom there may well be more than 600 million definitions of freedom, the discrepancy in numbers being explained by perpetually emerging new ideas for fun and games, America’s patented indecisiveness, and ad hoc “guesstimations”.

Ambitions of the Young.  III: If you think a kid has the talent necessary for a life in art, don’t warn him or her about the odds being wretchedly against even geniuses making a hand-to-mouth living, or how great a role is played by sheer idiot luck.  Instead, tell them this: “If you go ahead, do it because you love it, not because you want to see your name up there.  Do it because you have to have it so freaking much that you can’t do anything else.  Because if that’s why you’re in it, whether you succeed or not, at least you’ll be happy and fulfilled.”

Whether publicly or privately, on the job or on the make, if you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong.

In the following quotation from my father, “big” means great-spirited: “A big man can take an infinite amount of shit.”

I think a statistical survey would show that Democrats are first or only children (extroverted sophisticates and glamour boys), whereas Republicans are middle children (offense-sensitive introverts who clamp a tight lid on their emotions), with the exception of the hereditary elites of both parties, who are the babies of the families.

Let’s form a Society for the Prevention of Slandering Propaganda (or SPSP).  Propaganda is arguably the most maligned, misunderstood and undervalued communications tool in the media workshop.  The art consists merely in presenting an idea (in politics, public relations, indoctrination) or commercial product (in advertising and sales) so beguilingly that the beholder wants to have it for his own.  When bad people propagandize, the consequences are evil; but when good people propagandize, everybody gains something of value.  Now after this corrective nudge, do you still turn your nose up at the idea of suasion?  Well ask yourself this: The last time you met a beautiful woman you wanted to see again, did you tell her the absolute truth about how far you went in school, the grades you made therein, how much salary you earn, your exploits backpacking in the Andes, your bungee-jump record, and your marital status?  And if she gave you a date, did you choose your clothing with extra special care and get the car washed before you picked her up?  Did you try to make a better impression than you ordinarily make? You were practicing propaganda, weren’t you, you little devil?

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.