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.

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.

We’ve only got a little over 900,000 years to get it right.  The anthropologists say a dominant species of mammal endures for a million years.  Our prognosis is not very bright for dying with our integrity intact.

The surest indication that you need to pause and ponder right now is the feeling that you ought to wait until you’re better able to think.

Why do we most need exercise when we least feel like doing it?  Knowing that the answer is “accumulated stress” has never yet prompted me to put a book down or get up from the couch and cut the DVD player off.  I didn’t prefigure this, but it looks as though I’d rather be fat and edified than lean and bored.

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.

The ritualistic courtesy of the Chinese and Japanese stems from their societies being overcrowded; absent an objectified code of personal interaction their countries would descend into violent chaos.  America’s not overpopulated, but we have a much lower threshold for angry and irrational resentment than the Orientals, thanks to our having become infantile after 40 years of unrestricted self-indulgence, the evaporation of our educational process and the aberrant notion that we can heal our spiritual malaise by purchasing high-profile merchandise.  There are simply no spurs to empathetic understanding in a nation whose religious worship consists of thanking God for easy credit and whose standard greeting runs, “Get out of my face, you fucking asshole.”

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.

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.

Race against Time: As science strives to produce humanoid machines, we humans independently strive to convert ourselves into automatons, that is, creatures that respond to stimulation wholly without considering what they’re doing.  There is every chance that authentic humanity is going to be more faithfully perpetuated into the future by computerized robotics than by us.

Despite appearances, most people’s behavior is not irrational; it’s neurotic, i.e., dysfunctional in rational ways.  But because we imagine that certain people—most of them, in fact–are irrational, we solicitously counter their bizarreness with our light-wand of rationality, to no avail, because their maladjustment is spawned not in the intellectual faculty but in the awful chaotic swirl of modern life. I think we ought to reverse the terms of the process and purposely act irrationally in order to snap such people out of their neuroses.  The next time you run into that smarmy little self-deprecator who works down the hall, ask, “Why did you dye your hair blue?” and instantly leave the room. The baffled neurotic, imploding with uncertainty and doubt, will then take a couple of baby steps along the path to eventual normalcy by hastening to find a mirror so he can verify his hair color, then wondering why you might have spoken so strangely.  (Point #1: Your insanity acts like a cattle prod, shocking his malady into the open.)  The second time you see the patient, offer this assurance: “I don’t blame you for killing your wife.  Your secret is safe with me”; and then go away again.  After this encounter, the subject will begin to objectify his thinking as he tries to figure out what in the hell your problem is. (Point #2: Objectification is the sine qua non of emotional salubrity.) Keep this going, and the day will come when you two collide at the water cooler and the former human ant colony says, “You don’t play badminton, do you?  I just took it up and it looks like I’ve got a real talent for it!”

If you want to have some good, uncomplicated slack time, cultivate an amoral scoundrel as your companion.  He’ll be very entertaining, introduce you to some fascinating people, and catch most of the checks out of vanity.  Warning him you don’t trust him with your woman or your wallet will take the pressure off both of you, erasing ambiguity from the relationship.

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.

Ideological feminists promulgate gender-suicide.

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?

Every corporation faces three debilitating dangers: careerist politics among the executives and managers; bureaucratic intransigence and self-aggrandizement; and mutually reinforcing incompetence up and down the line (e.g., “I can’t report her shortcomings because if I do, she’ll report mine”).  Among the evils resulting from these factors, the most elemental is the diversion of human energy from the actual conduct of the business.

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”.

A surprising number of mature American women have started talking like little girls, childishly and coyly, while a majority of mature American males fail to speak coherently in any voice-persona.  Perhaps the term “mature” is misapplied in this connection.

Americans are rife with unacknowledged contradictions, and they validate the principle that irony is wasted on the unaware.  If one is going to be materialistic he should at least be able to define materiality then identify it, rather than accept appearances as his touchstone.  An alert person would easily recognize the disparity implicit in the concept of a materialist in thrall to insubstantiality.

I would never have survived in a completely natural habitat.  I have the coward’s instinct to say, “It’s just not worth it,” and walk away rather than instantly pounce on an aggressor.  My consolation is that I wouldn’t have lived long enough to father a similarly afflicted and doomed offspring, although it is also true that you would not now be subjected to my bullshit.