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 ‘appearances’ Category.
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.
Now It Can Be Revealed: Al Gore is the very first animatronic replica of a human being to have been publicly circulated as an autonomous personage. We may from this vantage point detect that the genius of the experiment lay in releasing it/ him into the realm of politics during the Age of Media.
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?
If I sound as though I think I’m superior to the average American, then the real Don Thompson is not getting through, because I’m not superior to anybody. It’s just that in today’s mental climate, putting together sentences that are formally correct and coherent in thought inevitably yields that impression. (But at my age I’m not going to write down, nor will I build paragraphs by sticking buzzwords together like Lego blocks). For that matter, I suppose that trying to be incisive in communicating what I think I’ve learned about things must lead readers, supposing there are any left in this country, to conclude that I am also a sarcastic son of a bitch.
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.
“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.]
Wouldn’t it be terrific if the world were the way children imagine it to be?
Given how our culture has devolved—i.e., into narcissistic appearance-ism— a man whose psychology prompts him to seek the presidency is the very man we least need to have serving in that position.
A Story of God’s Bounty to Man
There came a time (so to speak) when the Lord God perceived that the plan He’d laid out for us was a mite severe. We were responding to His call well enough, but the forces He’d arrayed to test our mettle overtaxed our stress deflectors. We were languishing in bafflement, chagrin and profound exhaustion both physical and spiritual. Taking notice of our plight, God put on His thinking cloud. I was off about six generations right there in the outskirts of Babylon, and the consequences have mushroomed algebraically instead of only growing arithmetically as I had intended, He concluded. But looking at the big picture, there’s not a lot that I can do about it now without unraveling 687 million years of evolution, and that’s out of the question. It was out of the question because the upshot would have been a finer model of Man than the one (you and me) God had actually created, and the Lord found that He had grown tenderhearted regarding our multitude of follies and frailties. He rather enjoyed this new unGodly aspect of Himself, and He decided to retain it, which entailed retaining us as we had theretofore developed. I just wouldn’t be happy with a batch of charmless little automatons, fishlike monkeys, or a new species of sloth. It’s Man’s vulnerability and stupidity that make him so endearing. Therefore if I’m not going to retrovert them, I’ll have to compensate them by providing something to relieve their long-suffering and travail. Something good. But not something overly pleasant for that will just become another temptation, and isn’t that the poor buggers’ problem now? It has to be something that will illumine for my frisky little pups the difference between pleasure and contentment. And something that is modest—no, actually humble—in its appearance to instruct them not to be deceived by surfaces, while on the positive side letting them know that magnificent beauty may arise from nondescript and paltry origins. I’ll not send them manna itself, but rather manna in effect, manna in principle, ur-manna—the eternally nourishing foodstuff—so that they’ll refrain from idolizing it falsely as they are wont so often to do. And that is how God, who unlike His human progeny always learns from His errors, bestowed upon our unworthy though authentically needy selves the epochal celestial boon that the wisest among us acknowledge as the human race’s own proprietary manna because it restores our spirits as it replenishes our bodies to a degree of efficacy that nothing else on earth can even come close to approximating. I’m giving them something to make them feel as good and sweet and whole as they have made me feel, sighed Jehovah, relaxing from His extracurricular labor. Which the Good Book says is the way in which God came to give us the POTATO.
The most insidious crime a politician can commit is to say that the law he wants to enact is for the purpose of protecting children, whereas he’s only—I did not say “primarily”— interested in the next election and the focus groups have told him that suburban and working mothers comprise the swing vote. Children must be placed off-limits to these bastards instead of continuing to be exploited by them under the thin and oily pretense of compassion.
Transcript of Hollywood Story Conference: Armani Suit: “Has anybody read this thing?” T-Shirt Saying “Burritoville: “Bad third act.” Levis and $1000 Sports Jacket: “Weak arc.” Armani Suit: “Fix it.” Levis and $1,000 Sports Jacket: “I’ll have tuna fish on rye.”
What do adults look like to children? Compared to them, we are purposeful in bursts, alert, quick to change directions, vocally expressive, emotionally volatile, quick to forget immediate minutiae, and often preoccupied to the point of oblivion. So for a child to enter the house from a palmy bout of play and find itself in the midst of a social gathering must be rather like a Mongolian nomad being snatched from his horse, telekinetically beamed into the underground of New York and then shoved up through a manhole into the center of Times Square.
Why is irony such an effective tool for taking us from appearances to substance? Because it opens the process, compelling us to see that people and events are not as their wrappings indicate, necessarily.
What did the Hippie Era mean to me? It meant that when I drove along the street and approached a slender young person sporting a puffball of frizzy hair, walking in the same direction I was going in, I had to wait until I passed it to determine whether it was male or female.
Some of the Hippie boys were so pretty that after they explained that I had mistaken their gender, I almost said, “I don’t care.”
Responsible Discussion:
Government Bureaucrat: “Sir, what are we going to do about the aircraft carrier that appeared in the lobby this morning?”
Department Head: “Nothing, Forbush. We elect not to draw attention to it.”
“Busy” does not mean never resolving anything so that you are always out of time and breath, under the gun, harried and hot, in order to turn people off from asking you to do something else while at the same time enhancing your image of being heroically overtaxed. “Busy” means having more legitimate chores to take care of than you have the time to do them in, as distinct from acting as though you’re doing them.
The Cell Phone’s Connected to the Self-Image Bone. [2002] Just about everything people do in public these days is intended to “send a message” or “make a statement.” The first generation of cell phone users, whipping the little chirping gadget out of their shoulder bags, purses and jacket side-pockets, were saying to the world, “Look how damned important I am!” Today’s cell-phoner takes a different approach, because more people own cell phones now, and consequently everybody’s getting more calls. This enables the user to announce on the whip-out, via body language and facial expression, that, “I’m connected to such a far-flung elaborate network of contacts that one or another of them always needs to check in with me!” Incidentally, the cell phone today is perhaps only half the size it was during the first generation, and with that in mind we may propose the following theorem: Thompson’s Law of Cell Phones: Egos have ballooned in volume in direct proportion as cell phones have shrunk.
If you go to a 4-stop intersection in a Yuppie neighborhood, you’ll think you’ve found Courtesy Central, for you will see all four drivers spending minute after minute flapping their hands vehemently from the wrist at each other, signaling for somebody to come on out. Appearances, however, can often be deceiving. In reality Yuppies are paranoid materialists who experience a chip the size of a mosquito feeler in the Jaguar’s paintjob about the way Hamlet experienced the tragedy of matricide. Every overdressed bitch at the intersection is mortally afraid that none of the other overdressed bitches has the ability to navigate the X without totaling her precious high-performance foreign engineering marvel and probably killing her in the impact, depriving her of untold years of acquisitiveness.