Knifethrust of Thought

“Authentic” celebrity is never the product only of the efforts of the person who is celebrated.  The actor commanding $10 million a picture is able to do so because in his second appearance in a film the screenplay was written by a genius, the director was a wizard, the producer kept his eye on the ball, the studio cut a hell of a distribution deal, or his co-star was a $15 million a picture celebrity whose notoriety (always a career booster) led to a record-breaking opening weekend.   Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of never-will-be’s  strive and sacrifice, “prepare” themselves and writhe with desire and hope until their intestines cycle into spin/dry, yet never get a call-back.  The predicament is too humanly destructive for a glib or frivolous comment about being in the right place at the right time (however apt that may be).  It’s just the way things are.  It’s the luck of the draw.  The only consolation the multitude of disappointed might savor is the knowledge that after that first big success, the celebrity in question gets his choice of five or six of all the good parts on offer at the moment and, more often than not, either exercises terrible judgment or never again receives a smidgen of the good fortune he enjoyed his second time out.  Bye, bye, happiness.  Still, there is a difference in being a 45-year-old car salesman who never delivered a line on screen, and a no-longer-employable leading man with fifty million dollars in the bank and a Gulfstream jet.  That is an irony that calls for sarcasm, but I am sorry—I just can’t seem to find it in me.

People who consider it in their interest that no rules inhibit or limit their behavior find the pleasures of their excesses short-lived and incomplete. Why else would they keep repeating them so neurotically?

Egos today are like those huge balloons floating bland-faced and with absurd solemnity above the crowds in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, except the balloons are tethered to the reality of tow-trucks navigating a complex course through congested streets.

Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat.  Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles.  Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.

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.

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?

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.

A fair-sized industry has arisen to pay tribute justly to the generation of World War II.  But the heroics of that generation did not emerge from a vacuum. They were gestated in the soul-scalding forge of the Great Depression.  America’s not ready to listen to that story yet.

The artist and the intellectual ought to fear decadence more than ignorance.  Ignorance is a quality that enlightenment may ameliorate, whereas decadence is a condition curable only by despair following a catastrophe.

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.

The problem with self-delusion is not that you are hiding shameful actions and qualities from other people (simple lying and deception take care of that) or even from yourself (a sense of mounting dread prevents this from occurring) but rather that your unwillingness to see yourself for what you are eliminates the only means whereby you might regain your bearings before that sense of mounting dread drives you into outright insanity in order for you to escape conclusively the truth about yourself.

Anthropologists say the human race became the dominant species on the planet because it’s the most adaptive species; if this is true, it carries the corollary that we learn by our mistakes.  But I have seen so many cases indicating the contrary that I can’t help doubting the proposition—until I think about money, specifically about how the glee of having a surplus of it or the fear of not having enough short-circuits man’s psyche.  What else might explain why a heretofore successful businessman would purchase an acclaimed restaurant, then proceed to amortize his investment by reducing the cost—-and thereby the quality—of precisely those amenities that made the restaurant popular to begin with?

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.

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.

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.

Hatred is the magma erupting from a personal volcano fueled by the hater’s irate frustration at not being able to resolve his own emotional difficulties; the target of the hatred is therefore merely a surrogate of the hater’s fractured ego.  But hatred does serve a beneficial purpose: it lets us know that we should stay the hell away from such incensed creeps.

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.

Can it be surprising that a people who allow appearances to govern their opinions and existence should always be addressing the symptom rather than the disease?