Saturday, May 30, 2020
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Hugh Costello - Personal Shopper
A topical drama about how living in enforced isolation can lead to the forging of new relationships, and to the revitalisation of old ones.
It starts with a skinny slip of paper posted through Nina’s letter box:
Dear Neighbour. My name is Max. I am almost 15 years old and I live at number 76 of this road. My school has been shut and I am free to do shopping for anyone who needs it. Just ring me on the number below.
Nina’s first instinct is to bin the note. She’s not hugely bothered about the neighbours. The younger people who’ve moved onto the street in recent years are very different from her. They’re smarter, richer. They have well-spoken kids with names like Max.
But life is tricky in isolation. Nina’s husband Frank is ill. Maybe it’s the virus, maybe’s it’s just a bad cold, they can’t really tell.
Nina knows the rule is that she must stay indoors. And they don’t have anyone else. So Nina gives Max a call. The next day, he leaves a first bag of shopping outside her hall door.
Told through phone calls and an audio diary that Nina is updating daily, the drama follows the relationship that develops between Max and Nina through the first weeks of enforced isolation.
As the story unfolds, we come to realise that Nina is making the audio diary for a particular, special person.
CAST
Nina .......... Monica Dolan
Frank ........ Phil Davis
Max .......... Tom Glenister
Sarah ....... Jane Slavin
Written by Hugh Costello
Produced and Directed by Eoin O'Callaghan
A Big Fish Radio production for BBC Radio 4
Interesting what you can do over the phone when it's radio drama.
Update: This is my last notice. If you want to engage with me on things I won't post here, you can do it at my other blog which will not have moderated comments, for the time being. If you don't take advantage of that, <meh>. In the meantime, you can read me having fun at a liars expense.
Clearly, Twain Wanted To Be More Of A Writer Than He Was Allowed To Be
Can't let this go, just yet.
Looking at the history of the book which was called "The Mysterious Stranger" it is a product from after Twain died, he having written several quite different versions of it, finishing none of them, over a number of years. One is clearly him wanting to recycle his most successful characters, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher all appear in one of the fragments unused by the characters who pasted together what was sold to the world as Twain's book during the period I read it. I can't imagine that that version "Schoolhouse Hill" would have been much better, it's clear that none of them interested or pleased Twain enough for him to finish them.
There was, apparently some controversy over the version that the world knew as the novel, especially when Bernard Devoto released all of Twain's unpublished manuscripts which the guy behind that cut and paste job, Albert Bigelow Paine had concealed. Paine had kept the manuscripts private till his death. It is clear that he pasted the ending of one story onto the version he published, changing the names of the characters to fit. If Twain would have approved of that is doubtful, as can be seen in the history of his own revisions that led to The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, he'd certainly have done the grafting job himself if he'd wanted to.
The main selling-point of the book is its very conventional anti-religious content, which you'd think would get tiresome but that assumes what isn't in evidence, that the fans of that do much in the way of thinking. I might, might go back to look at Twain, the anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-Catholic might have said by way of clues that account for his holding the finished, published, well prepared and carefully written book about Joan of Arc as the one of his that he was proudest of and held in the highest esteem.
It's clear that he longed to be more than the writer of cynical or sentimental humor but that he didn't know how to do it. I don't blame him, if I was reduced to writing the same stuff over and over again to sell to magazines over that length of time, I'd long for more, too. I think that accounts for him reporting that he did twelve years of preparation for writing it and two years writing the book. He was trying to do something he hadn't done before because he was essentially repeating stuff - as can be seen in how many times he tried to re-write the Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn bunch into new books. I'm surprised he didn't send them over Reichenbach Falls or have that hot air balloon he had them in crash into the ocean.
The hostility of the critics to the book is more telling about why they might value a piece of tripe like Pudd'nhead or Mysterious Stranger entirely more than the content those books as published merit. I think it's exactly the anti-religious and generally cynical content of those books that both account for the reputation of those books and for the hostility towards Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Every fault I've read them cite in that book - "sentimentality" "mawkishness" etc. are present in practically every single other thing he wrote, including sections of Huckleberry Finn. He seldom presented women and their thinking in other terms that I recall. I would have to go back and re-read the book but I think they are most absent in the one book of his I like the best, Life on the Mississippi. But that wasn't supposed to be fiction, though it's clear there are tall tales included. I don't recall much in the way of anti-religious content in it, though I don't think I've picked it up in a decade except to move it on the book shelf.
Update: Comment withheld here posted at commented on here.
Looking at the history of the book which was called "The Mysterious Stranger" it is a product from after Twain died, he having written several quite different versions of it, finishing none of them, over a number of years. One is clearly him wanting to recycle his most successful characters, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher all appear in one of the fragments unused by the characters who pasted together what was sold to the world as Twain's book during the period I read it. I can't imagine that that version "Schoolhouse Hill" would have been much better, it's clear that none of them interested or pleased Twain enough for him to finish them.
There was, apparently some controversy over the version that the world knew as the novel, especially when Bernard Devoto released all of Twain's unpublished manuscripts which the guy behind that cut and paste job, Albert Bigelow Paine had concealed. Paine had kept the manuscripts private till his death. It is clear that he pasted the ending of one story onto the version he published, changing the names of the characters to fit. If Twain would have approved of that is doubtful, as can be seen in the history of his own revisions that led to The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, he'd certainly have done the grafting job himself if he'd wanted to.
The main selling-point of the book is its very conventional anti-religious content, which you'd think would get tiresome but that assumes what isn't in evidence, that the fans of that do much in the way of thinking. I might, might go back to look at Twain, the anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-Catholic might have said by way of clues that account for his holding the finished, published, well prepared and carefully written book about Joan of Arc as the one of his that he was proudest of and held in the highest esteem.
It's clear that he longed to be more than the writer of cynical or sentimental humor but that he didn't know how to do it. I don't blame him, if I was reduced to writing the same stuff over and over again to sell to magazines over that length of time, I'd long for more, too. I think that accounts for him reporting that he did twelve years of preparation for writing it and two years writing the book. He was trying to do something he hadn't done before because he was essentially repeating stuff - as can be seen in how many times he tried to re-write the Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn bunch into new books. I'm surprised he didn't send them over Reichenbach Falls or have that hot air balloon he had them in crash into the ocean.
The hostility of the critics to the book is more telling about why they might value a piece of tripe like Pudd'nhead or Mysterious Stranger entirely more than the content those books as published merit. I think it's exactly the anti-religious and generally cynical content of those books that both account for the reputation of those books and for the hostility towards Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Every fault I've read them cite in that book - "sentimentality" "mawkishness" etc. are present in practically every single other thing he wrote, including sections of Huckleberry Finn. He seldom presented women and their thinking in other terms that I recall. I would have to go back and re-read the book but I think they are most absent in the one book of his I like the best, Life on the Mississippi. But that wasn't supposed to be fiction, though it's clear there are tall tales included. I don't recall much in the way of anti-religious content in it, though I don't think I've picked it up in a decade except to move it on the book shelf.
Update: Comment withheld here posted at commented on here.
How Next To Upset Their World?
Let's see, in trying to entertain the Covid shut ins with something other than cooking or exercising to try to counteract the effects of the mountains of food so cooked . . .
I've suggested do-it-yourself audio theater using cheap recording and editing devices and programs. Even doing two-handers over the phone where you don't even have to risk infection. Probably most controversially, advocating practicing it to see if you really want to make an effort before you spend any money on equipment.
Then it was amusingly as it was surprisingly aggravating international communication on dirt cheap micro-powered transceivers in Morse code, I'm entirely in favor of doing the most with the least, especially if it's home made and you learn something while trying it.
Then it would have to be when I pissed off the champions of the officially sacrosanct by pointing out that Mark Twain wrote a lot of crap (something I will bet you he would be the first to admit if he were here today, he'd make a comic piece for sale from it).
What should I try next? Something novel, not something done to death. I think that's what pissed off those who got their pinafores in a twist over Morse code, it was something slightly out of their very limited ordinary. They are the champions of the typical and the ordinary. That's what they like about TV and the movies, easily consumed junk unchallenging to the accustomed and well practiced avenues of presented, approved experience. I'm bored with that.
I am coming along with the Morse, by the way. Maybe when I can't afford to be online anymore that'll be the only way you can get my content. At least I can promise there will be content, content that will upset the contented cows of the conventional. Though cows are more curious than they are. Better natured, too.
I am relegating any discussion of the champions of convention to my other blog, where comments are, for now, unmoderated.
I've suggested do-it-yourself audio theater using cheap recording and editing devices and programs. Even doing two-handers over the phone where you don't even have to risk infection. Probably most controversially, advocating practicing it to see if you really want to make an effort before you spend any money on equipment.
Then it was amusingly as it was surprisingly aggravating international communication on dirt cheap micro-powered transceivers in Morse code, I'm entirely in favor of doing the most with the least, especially if it's home made and you learn something while trying it.
Then it would have to be when I pissed off the champions of the officially sacrosanct by pointing out that Mark Twain wrote a lot of crap (something I will bet you he would be the first to admit if he were here today, he'd make a comic piece for sale from it).
What should I try next? Something novel, not something done to death. I think that's what pissed off those who got their pinafores in a twist over Morse code, it was something slightly out of their very limited ordinary. They are the champions of the typical and the ordinary. That's what they like about TV and the movies, easily consumed junk unchallenging to the accustomed and well practiced avenues of presented, approved experience. I'm bored with that.
I am coming along with the Morse, by the way. Maybe when I can't afford to be online anymore that'll be the only way you can get my content. At least I can promise there will be content, content that will upset the contented cows of the conventional. Though cows are more curious than they are. Better natured, too.
I am relegating any discussion of the champions of convention to my other blog, where comments are, for now, unmoderated.
The Choice For All Media Are To Be Arbiters Of Truth Or To Be Marketers Of Lies
The moral abyss which is Mark Zuckerburg was on display the other day when in reaction to the tiniest, tiniest act of moral responsibility on the part of Twitter's Jack Dorsey when he feigned horror at the idea that he might have to take a moral stand against Trump's lies that get thousands and more killed, and declared in the kind of pose that libertarians love, that his Facebook will never be an "arbiter of the truth." It was as if he needed to fall on the fainting couch and have smelling salts wafted under his nose at the thought. That is the ridiculous pose of scrupulosity common among media types when the idea is raised that media has moral responsibility, generally around its responsibility to not lie. That has replaced the cartoon images of blue-hairs fainting at mentions of sex or dirty words in books and it's far more ridiculous than that stock image of b-grade comedy presentations.
Well, it's no shock, morality is not generally healthy for a corporate bottom line, especially a corporation that makes money by selling eye/hours to advertisers, flagrant amorality is what brings in those bucks or why else would our media be so morally degraded. Where your heart is, there will your treasure be and their heart is on money, nothing more deserving of devotion.
Because of that fact media that refuses to be an "arbiter of truth" will inevitably be a shopper of lies which is certainly just fine with the Zuckerberg going on as it has been for Jack Dorsey up till the time when we found out that he has an extremely high threshold of moral responsibility but he has one that will lead to him taking the tiniest of steps. It's clear that the whey-faced slime ball of Facebook doesn't have one and has no intention of developing even the appearance of having one for PR purposes.
It's obvious that democracy, egalitarian democracy conducted to produce maximal possible decency in the lives of People is incompatible with the media we have, especially the "social media" a phrase that should have about the same status as the phrase "social disease" had in my youth. Those were what STDs were called back then, in case there are any younger people reading this.
If Democrats win the election they will have daunting tasks ahead of them, de-Nazifying the federal judiciary one of the most daunting, including the Supreme Court. But as important as that will be to break up the internet based cartels and corporate monsters that are destroying not only democracy but even the very sense of morality and reality - which it is becoming obvious are entirely and intimately interconnected. Without a sense of morality capacious enough to include the idea that truth is good and lies are bad it is clear from the Trump phenomeon, as with the other Murdoch media, Sinclair promoted Republican-fascism that even a knowledge of reality is forfeited and disaster follows on like a wheel behind a draft ox.
That last simile was due to the fact that Zuckerberg has - no doubt for PR purposes, claimed to be an admirer of Buddhism. Or maybe he's sincerely influenced by his wife. He is quoted as calling it "an amazing religion." and was photographed keeling and bowing at a Buddhist shrine. He should read the first verse of the most widely cited and proclaimed text of Buddhism, the Dhammapada.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.
True, obviously true. And when billions speak and act out of evil thoughts, not least of which by lying and spreading gossip and false witness as on the thing that made him a billionaire, that effect is magnified and destroys everything. And the next of the twin-verses states that if you speak or act morally pain stops as the ox heads in that direction. That is the direction not taken by the "Buddhist" Zuckerberg in his lofty declaration that he will not be "an arbiter of truth."
Democrats are going to need to break up Facebook and Twitter and the rest of it, they are going to have to do one of the hardest things of all, overturn the disastrous decisions of the Supreme Court that allowed lies to be broadcast in the mass media with impunity if democracy and the possibility of a decent life is to continue. That was how we got here from the point where we were almost making progress in the mid-1960s. That went sour almost immediately after those rulings began. I think if they had gone the other way that start at progress towards true egalitarian democracy and a decent life might have continued instead of stalling and then reversing direction. That ox cart got turned around by lies.
Well, it's no shock, morality is not generally healthy for a corporate bottom line, especially a corporation that makes money by selling eye/hours to advertisers, flagrant amorality is what brings in those bucks or why else would our media be so morally degraded. Where your heart is, there will your treasure be and their heart is on money, nothing more deserving of devotion.
Because of that fact media that refuses to be an "arbiter of truth" will inevitably be a shopper of lies which is certainly just fine with the Zuckerberg going on as it has been for Jack Dorsey up till the time when we found out that he has an extremely high threshold of moral responsibility but he has one that will lead to him taking the tiniest of steps. It's clear that the whey-faced slime ball of Facebook doesn't have one and has no intention of developing even the appearance of having one for PR purposes.
It's obvious that democracy, egalitarian democracy conducted to produce maximal possible decency in the lives of People is incompatible with the media we have, especially the "social media" a phrase that should have about the same status as the phrase "social disease" had in my youth. Those were what STDs were called back then, in case there are any younger people reading this.
If Democrats win the election they will have daunting tasks ahead of them, de-Nazifying the federal judiciary one of the most daunting, including the Supreme Court. But as important as that will be to break up the internet based cartels and corporate monsters that are destroying not only democracy but even the very sense of morality and reality - which it is becoming obvious are entirely and intimately interconnected. Without a sense of morality capacious enough to include the idea that truth is good and lies are bad it is clear from the Trump phenomeon, as with the other Murdoch media, Sinclair promoted Republican-fascism that even a knowledge of reality is forfeited and disaster follows on like a wheel behind a draft ox.
That last simile was due to the fact that Zuckerberg has - no doubt for PR purposes, claimed to be an admirer of Buddhism. Or maybe he's sincerely influenced by his wife. He is quoted as calling it "an amazing religion." and was photographed keeling and bowing at a Buddhist shrine. He should read the first verse of the most widely cited and proclaimed text of Buddhism, the Dhammapada.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.
True, obviously true. And when billions speak and act out of evil thoughts, not least of which by lying and spreading gossip and false witness as on the thing that made him a billionaire, that effect is magnified and destroys everything. And the next of the twin-verses states that if you speak or act morally pain stops as the ox heads in that direction. That is the direction not taken by the "Buddhist" Zuckerberg in his lofty declaration that he will not be "an arbiter of truth."
Democrats are going to need to break up Facebook and Twitter and the rest of it, they are going to have to do one of the hardest things of all, overturn the disastrous decisions of the Supreme Court that allowed lies to be broadcast in the mass media with impunity if democracy and the possibility of a decent life is to continue. That was how we got here from the point where we were almost making progress in the mid-1960s. That went sour almost immediately after those rulings began. I think if they had gone the other way that start at progress towards true egalitarian democracy and a decent life might have continued instead of stalling and then reversing direction. That ox cart got turned around by lies.
Friday, May 29, 2020
I would bet that easily 950 out of 1000 high school and college graduates have not read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or The Mysterious Stranger. I have, neither of them are great books. I doubt Simps has, though I'm sure he saw Bing in the movie if not the musical of the one and that PBS made for TV movie of the other.
Oh, wait, I should be posting this on the blog I have for haphazardous waste.
Update: I never said those things, it was one of my early clues that the rump of regulars at Baby Blue were lazy slacker geezers when they believed his lies instead of finding out if they were true. Unlike Simps and his buddies, I read books including books by those authors and many others who Simps doesn't know about. He's only the most attention seeking of the attention seeking TV addled old people who frequent that den of dopes.
Oh, wait, I should be posting this on the blog I have for haphazardous waste.
Update: I never said those things, it was one of my early clues that the rump of regulars at Baby Blue were lazy slacker geezers when they believed his lies instead of finding out if they were true. Unlike Simps and his buddies, I read books including books by those authors and many others who Simps doesn't know about. He's only the most attention seeking of the attention seeking TV addled old people who frequent that den of dopes.
Before Putting Twain Away For Another Decade
Re-read it, it's a pretty bad book. Pudd'nhead Wilson is a good book that got ruined by sticking it inside a bad book or, as is claimed by some, a good book gone bad. It would have been better if he'd left out the title character, completely, though I think he wanted him mostly for the "Calendar" aphorisms he began the chapters with. I have to wonder if Benjamin Franklin, who is famous mostly for his Poor Richard sayings than any of his serious writing had anything to do with Twain's science tinkerer-"free thinker".
If Twain had just used the story of Roxy and the two boys and given it a more realistic narrative conclusion and relegated Pudd'nhead Wilson to his own book he might have produced a book that was better than Huckleberry Finn. Roxy, even in that bad book, might be the fullest female character Twain ever invented or imagined, though he could have cut down on the dialect to better effect. I have never been able to warm up to his treatment of Joan of Arc though he, himself, considered it his finest book.
From what I read in this paper by Anne P Wigger (inventing my own "institution" in order to get Jstor access, I'm sure Twain would have done it if he were in my position) I was right that his ridiculous fingerprint plot device was inspired by him reading Galton's book on fingerprints. The concluding court scene for which he used it is some of Twain's worst writing, it was pretty clear to me that he wanted to get the thing done and dusted as expeditiously as possible - he claimed writing the first draft was easy, the revision almost killed him. The idea that fingerprint evidence would have been produced in a court in a murder trial in the period of the story is absurd enough, the idea that untrained judges, lawyers and jurors would have been able to discern their individuality as described in the story even so absurd that Twain must have known that even as he rushed to be rid of it so he could use Pudd'nhead and his cynical aphorisms.
The paper notes that the book began as a planned farce on the topical topic of a pair of Italian conjoined twins who had toured the United States and as Twain found that topic to be less useful for a book length treatment he expanded the two stories of Roxy and the switched babies and David Wilson and Judge Driscoll gluing together bits of all three to sell in serial form to a magazine even as he, as he said himself, "pulled the twins apart". The first book form of Pudd'nhead was, at Twain's direction, published with the story of the conjoined twins "Those Extraordinary Twins."
The paper is very interesting in that it notes that Twain's correspondence with his publisher and others about the novel as well as the manuscripts and published versions of the two works the first draft became gives an extensive insight into how Twain was writing in his later years.
Twain's carelessness in his final revision is notable, in the published version of Pudd'nhead Wilson, for instance, the twins are still described as "side-show riff-raff, dime museum freaks" - terminology which is meaningless once the twins have en separated. The twins are in fact, superfluous to the plot, and a more suitable character could have been introduced to serve as the murder suspect. Leslie Fiedler, in an article on Pudd'head Wilson, attributes these remnants of the earlier story to Twain's reluctance to separate the two stores. Lamenting that the "most extraordinary book in American literature" does not exist as a whole, Fiedler argues that Twain, on the verge of creating a "monstrous poem on duplicity," lost his nerve and separated the Siamese twins farce from Puddn'head's story, the vestiges of the earlier story pointing to his "lack of conviction" about the revision. But twain could have suffered no loss of never, for not only did he finish the "monstrous poem," which is, of course, the Morgan manuscript, but he also attempted to publish it. It is relevant here to remember that Twain, particularly during the 1880's and 1890's was motivated by financial as well as artistic considerations, and his desire for a profitable sale from Pudd'nhead Wilson runs like a refrain through his letters during the period in which Pudd'nhead was being written.
I think as extraordinary and evidence that Twain, himself, must have felt like he had to explain the mess he produced, was his introduction to Extraordinary Twins and the post script is an attempt at exoneration.
Looking at a list of the literary product of Mark Twain it is remarkable how much of it there is and how little of it has lasted in common culture. I doubt much more than the original Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Prince and the Pauper and a few of the short works are read in their entirety except by Twain Scholars. The later books in which Tom and Huck and Jim appear - such little read things as Tom Sawyer Detective, Tom Sawyer Abroad - did nothing to make me look more kindly on the original.
I have read that Twain left a number of unfinished books in which Huck was to have appeared - I've never read the existing fragments - which pretty much indicates that he was trying to recycle them for some purpose, probably hoping to repeat the success he had with them. Perhaps in terms of money as well as inspiration. Looking at the chronology of his published work, I think it's pretty clear that after Life on the Mississippi (1883) his best years were behind him.
I can't think of a single piece, book length or short, that stands up in full. Huckleberry Finn almost does till Tom Sawyer reappears - the beginning with him isn't the best part of the book, either. And that's his best novel. Some of it is great writing, there are some great chapters, perhaps, there are some good stories but most of the best of it lasts the length of an aphorism.
There are certainly better American writers. I'd rather read the writing, particularly the non-fiction, of Black authors to get Twain's main theme directly from them. It is a pretty disgusting scandal how much of the academic, literary discussion of Black experience and history rests on the fictitious character of Jim written by a white man when real people and THEIR ACCOUNTS OF THEIR REAL LIVES could have taken up that time.
One of the most interesting things about Pudd'nhead Wilson is that the switched babies, one born to the slave Roxy the other to the Judge's slave owning brother's wife (who as so many mothers in American fiction, then conveniently dies) looked almost identical (as the Italian twins are almost identical) which certainly must have indicated to all but the dullest readers that they were half-brothers, perhaps closer than that considering the liklihood that Roxy was more closely related to the father of the white baby as so many slaves raped by their owners, the fathers, brothers, grandfathers and uncles of the owner rapists, would have been. But I doubt Twain could have gotten away with writing too explicitly on that theme in Jim Crow America. If I could write and I was a Black American writer, I'd certainly be tempted to take the material that Twain left in that book and tell a truer story than he managed to tell with it. I'd leave out the Pudd'nhead stuff, entirely and the Extraordinary Twins. I'd try to make it truer to the period than Twain did with that fingerprint trickery. If he hadn't shoved that into the story he could have saved himself the embarrassment of having written that awful writing of the courtroom scene. Sometimes the junk in that book reminds me of nothing so much as the incoherent improvisation of an Ed Wood movie.
------------------------
In looking more at the idea that his inability to come to a view of Christianity that got past the unreconstructed Presbyterian Calvinism of his youth colored everything he said about religion in general and Christianity in particular and, as it is with Calvinism, it was the extreme form of eternal damnation doctrine mixed with predestination to eternal damnation that was the central issue with Twain. It is a shame that in his extensive reading - Twain was a great reader - he didn't read the Greek theologians who were being translated and published in such volume in English during those years, especially Gregory of Nyssa.
I don't recall him talking about the Universalist Church which had been one of the stronger Protestant sects in 19th century America but which was probably fairly considered to be in decline by the early 20th century, They could have steered him to the texts that refuted the ideas Twain found so difficult, though I think by that time it was probably more a matter of how to be seen as manly.
There's always a struggle between Twain the moralist - his anti-racism, anti-sexism (understanding he maintained a rather romantic view of women) anti-imperialism and pro-unionism prove that he had a sincere and deep moral sense - and Twain the barroom cynic and agnostic.
Certainly the organized churches earned a lot of the derision he gave them, it's not as if there isn't a constant history of internal self-criticism, struggle and division even within sects and denominations. But I think Twain thought of religion as more properly women stuff and an opportunity for a man to reveal himself as an easily conned fool. He certainly knew that there was more to Christianity than that - one of the problems with the "social safety net" of his time was that it was mostly the work of Christian churches, not the secular government or institutions. And it was certain that like Pudd'nhead Wilson, he could get easy laughs and the approval of those he wanted to think well of him among men by ripping off cynically about pretty much everything. I think a lot of his work is more damaged by his humor - much of which is more than just dated, a lot of it was never very good to start with - than helped by it, there is more dross among those gems than there are gems.
Update: Oh, sorry, I intended to include this as a footnote:
A young boy approached Mark Twain one day, after spotting the famous author standing alone on a stone bridge in Redding, Conn. Twain was a familiar presence in the community, and the boy had awaited such a chance to express his admiration. “I was glad that he was alone,” Coley Taylor recalled years later in an article in American Heritage. “I had wanted to tell him how much I had enjoyed Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.”
But Twain’s response to the young boy’s praise was shocking. “I had never seen him so cross. I can see him yet, shaking that long forefinger at me,” Taylor recalled. “You shouldn’t read those books about bad boys!” the author scolded. “Now listen to what an old man tells you. My best book is my Recollections of Joan of Arc. You are too young to understand and enjoy it now, but read it when you are older. Remember then what I tell you now. Joan of Arc is my very best book.”
Twain made similar comments in other settings. “I like Joan of Arc best of all my books,” he wrote shortly before his death, “and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.”
If Twain had just used the story of Roxy and the two boys and given it a more realistic narrative conclusion and relegated Pudd'nhead Wilson to his own book he might have produced a book that was better than Huckleberry Finn. Roxy, even in that bad book, might be the fullest female character Twain ever invented or imagined, though he could have cut down on the dialect to better effect. I have never been able to warm up to his treatment of Joan of Arc though he, himself, considered it his finest book.
From what I read in this paper by Anne P Wigger (inventing my own "institution" in order to get Jstor access, I'm sure Twain would have done it if he were in my position) I was right that his ridiculous fingerprint plot device was inspired by him reading Galton's book on fingerprints. The concluding court scene for which he used it is some of Twain's worst writing, it was pretty clear to me that he wanted to get the thing done and dusted as expeditiously as possible - he claimed writing the first draft was easy, the revision almost killed him. The idea that fingerprint evidence would have been produced in a court in a murder trial in the period of the story is absurd enough, the idea that untrained judges, lawyers and jurors would have been able to discern their individuality as described in the story even so absurd that Twain must have known that even as he rushed to be rid of it so he could use Pudd'nhead and his cynical aphorisms.
The paper notes that the book began as a planned farce on the topical topic of a pair of Italian conjoined twins who had toured the United States and as Twain found that topic to be less useful for a book length treatment he expanded the two stories of Roxy and the switched babies and David Wilson and Judge Driscoll gluing together bits of all three to sell in serial form to a magazine even as he, as he said himself, "pulled the twins apart". The first book form of Pudd'nhead was, at Twain's direction, published with the story of the conjoined twins "Those Extraordinary Twins."
The paper is very interesting in that it notes that Twain's correspondence with his publisher and others about the novel as well as the manuscripts and published versions of the two works the first draft became gives an extensive insight into how Twain was writing in his later years.
Twain's carelessness in his final revision is notable, in the published version of Pudd'nhead Wilson, for instance, the twins are still described as "side-show riff-raff, dime museum freaks" - terminology which is meaningless once the twins have en separated. The twins are in fact, superfluous to the plot, and a more suitable character could have been introduced to serve as the murder suspect. Leslie Fiedler, in an article on Pudd'head Wilson, attributes these remnants of the earlier story to Twain's reluctance to separate the two stores. Lamenting that the "most extraordinary book in American literature" does not exist as a whole, Fiedler argues that Twain, on the verge of creating a "monstrous poem on duplicity," lost his nerve and separated the Siamese twins farce from Puddn'head's story, the vestiges of the earlier story pointing to his "lack of conviction" about the revision. But twain could have suffered no loss of never, for not only did he finish the "monstrous poem," which is, of course, the Morgan manuscript, but he also attempted to publish it. It is relevant here to remember that Twain, particularly during the 1880's and 1890's was motivated by financial as well as artistic considerations, and his desire for a profitable sale from Pudd'nhead Wilson runs like a refrain through his letters during the period in which Pudd'nhead was being written.
I think as extraordinary and evidence that Twain, himself, must have felt like he had to explain the mess he produced, was his introduction to Extraordinary Twins and the post script is an attempt at exoneration.
Looking at a list of the literary product of Mark Twain it is remarkable how much of it there is and how little of it has lasted in common culture. I doubt much more than the original Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Prince and the Pauper and a few of the short works are read in their entirety except by Twain Scholars. The later books in which Tom and Huck and Jim appear - such little read things as Tom Sawyer Detective, Tom Sawyer Abroad - did nothing to make me look more kindly on the original.
I have read that Twain left a number of unfinished books in which Huck was to have appeared - I've never read the existing fragments - which pretty much indicates that he was trying to recycle them for some purpose, probably hoping to repeat the success he had with them. Perhaps in terms of money as well as inspiration. Looking at the chronology of his published work, I think it's pretty clear that after Life on the Mississippi (1883) his best years were behind him.
I can't think of a single piece, book length or short, that stands up in full. Huckleberry Finn almost does till Tom Sawyer reappears - the beginning with him isn't the best part of the book, either. And that's his best novel. Some of it is great writing, there are some great chapters, perhaps, there are some good stories but most of the best of it lasts the length of an aphorism.
There are certainly better American writers. I'd rather read the writing, particularly the non-fiction, of Black authors to get Twain's main theme directly from them. It is a pretty disgusting scandal how much of the academic, literary discussion of Black experience and history rests on the fictitious character of Jim written by a white man when real people and THEIR ACCOUNTS OF THEIR REAL LIVES could have taken up that time.
One of the most interesting things about Pudd'nhead Wilson is that the switched babies, one born to the slave Roxy the other to the Judge's slave owning brother's wife (who as so many mothers in American fiction, then conveniently dies) looked almost identical (as the Italian twins are almost identical) which certainly must have indicated to all but the dullest readers that they were half-brothers, perhaps closer than that considering the liklihood that Roxy was more closely related to the father of the white baby as so many slaves raped by their owners, the fathers, brothers, grandfathers and uncles of the owner rapists, would have been. But I doubt Twain could have gotten away with writing too explicitly on that theme in Jim Crow America. If I could write and I was a Black American writer, I'd certainly be tempted to take the material that Twain left in that book and tell a truer story than he managed to tell with it. I'd leave out the Pudd'nhead stuff, entirely and the Extraordinary Twins. I'd try to make it truer to the period than Twain did with that fingerprint trickery. If he hadn't shoved that into the story he could have saved himself the embarrassment of having written that awful writing of the courtroom scene. Sometimes the junk in that book reminds me of nothing so much as the incoherent improvisation of an Ed Wood movie.
------------------------
In looking more at the idea that his inability to come to a view of Christianity that got past the unreconstructed Presbyterian Calvinism of his youth colored everything he said about religion in general and Christianity in particular and, as it is with Calvinism, it was the extreme form of eternal damnation doctrine mixed with predestination to eternal damnation that was the central issue with Twain. It is a shame that in his extensive reading - Twain was a great reader - he didn't read the Greek theologians who were being translated and published in such volume in English during those years, especially Gregory of Nyssa.
I don't recall him talking about the Universalist Church which had been one of the stronger Protestant sects in 19th century America but which was probably fairly considered to be in decline by the early 20th century, They could have steered him to the texts that refuted the ideas Twain found so difficult, though I think by that time it was probably more a matter of how to be seen as manly.
There's always a struggle between Twain the moralist - his anti-racism, anti-sexism (understanding he maintained a rather romantic view of women) anti-imperialism and pro-unionism prove that he had a sincere and deep moral sense - and Twain the barroom cynic and agnostic.
Certainly the organized churches earned a lot of the derision he gave them, it's not as if there isn't a constant history of internal self-criticism, struggle and division even within sects and denominations. But I think Twain thought of religion as more properly women stuff and an opportunity for a man to reveal himself as an easily conned fool. He certainly knew that there was more to Christianity than that - one of the problems with the "social safety net" of his time was that it was mostly the work of Christian churches, not the secular government or institutions. And it was certain that like Pudd'nhead Wilson, he could get easy laughs and the approval of those he wanted to think well of him among men by ripping off cynically about pretty much everything. I think a lot of his work is more damaged by his humor - much of which is more than just dated, a lot of it was never very good to start with - than helped by it, there is more dross among those gems than there are gems.
Update: Oh, sorry, I intended to include this as a footnote:
A young boy approached Mark Twain one day, after spotting the famous author standing alone on a stone bridge in Redding, Conn. Twain was a familiar presence in the community, and the boy had awaited such a chance to express his admiration. “I was glad that he was alone,” Coley Taylor recalled years later in an article in American Heritage. “I had wanted to tell him how much I had enjoyed Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.”
But Twain’s response to the young boy’s praise was shocking. “I had never seen him so cross. I can see him yet, shaking that long forefinger at me,” Taylor recalled. “You shouldn’t read those books about bad boys!” the author scolded. “Now listen to what an old man tells you. My best book is my Recollections of Joan of Arc. You are too young to understand and enjoy it now, but read it when you are older. Remember then what I tell you now. Joan of Arc is my very best book.”
Twain made similar comments in other settings. “I like Joan of Arc best of all my books,” he wrote shortly before his death, “and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.”
As True Here As It Is There
We can't return to normal because the normal that we had was precisely the problem.
Graffiti posted in Hong Kong
Graffiti posted in Hong Kong
Going Back To Plan B
I suppose it could be taken as a compliment that the "professional writer" with college credentials so regularly mistakes the passages I so obviously quote from far better writers as being things I've said. Though it's not my purpose to represent other peoples' work for my own, that's his shtick.
But he's always had a problem of not knowing how quotes work, even when, as I said, I ALWAYS give citations, always set off quotes as quotes in standard ways EVEN ENHANCING THEM AS ECHIDNE SUGGESTED TO ME ONCE and even as I typically give links to the original source of what I quote when those are available.
It's not as if I don't do everything possible, from giving author and source citations to setting quotes off in bold italic or in quotation marks for short quote. I guess the methods for indicating that learned in my primitive, resource starved rural grammar school weren't taught in more affluent, urban schools in his area.
Yeah, I think I will post this at one of those blogs and maybe post his comments there, too. It'll help contain it. Crush Seth Macfarlane's Nuts is the one I set up when that minor Bobby Darrin imitator was such a puerile pig as he hosted the Oscars and his online boy-posse reacted badly to the condemnation of him and those who backed him up. I wrote about it here at the time, a bit, though the piece I posted there was far more vulgar than the ones I post here (it was called "We Saw Your Assholes") and it got taken down during a period of remorse for having too much fun making fun of him and his ilk there. I wonder if I'd do that now.
For how bad it was for those who don't remember, Macfarlane made a sexist, racist pedophile content joke about a 9-year-old actress and it was picked up on at another source of puerile assholishness, The Onion before someone there realized they'd gone past even their bottom scraping standards and took it down. And one of the funnest things about it was that even with that name, the idiot thought it was about him instead of Macfarlane being an asshole.
But he's always had a problem of not knowing how quotes work, even when, as I said, I ALWAYS give citations, always set off quotes as quotes in standard ways EVEN ENHANCING THEM AS ECHIDNE SUGGESTED TO ME ONCE and even as I typically give links to the original source of what I quote when those are available.
It's not as if I don't do everything possible, from giving author and source citations to setting quotes off in bold italic or in quotation marks for short quote. I guess the methods for indicating that learned in my primitive, resource starved rural grammar school weren't taught in more affluent, urban schools in his area.
Yeah, I think I will post this at one of those blogs and maybe post his comments there, too. It'll help contain it. Crush Seth Macfarlane's Nuts is the one I set up when that minor Bobby Darrin imitator was such a puerile pig as he hosted the Oscars and his online boy-posse reacted badly to the condemnation of him and those who backed him up. I wrote about it here at the time, a bit, though the piece I posted there was far more vulgar than the ones I post here (it was called "We Saw Your Assholes") and it got taken down during a period of remorse for having too much fun making fun of him and his ilk there. I wonder if I'd do that now.
For how bad it was for those who don't remember, Macfarlane made a sexist, racist pedophile content joke about a 9-year-old actress and it was picked up on at another source of puerile assholishness, The Onion before someone there realized they'd gone past even their bottom scraping standards and took it down. And one of the funnest things about it was that even with that name, the idiot thought it was about him instead of Macfarlane being an asshole.
Thursday, May 28, 2020
"Senior" In That Sense I Suppose
Unlike the idiots who troll me, I have no problem with people having different taste in music from me. I figure that's their prerogative, the trolls' accusations, prevaracative.
I see the college-credentialed "professional writer" still can't figure out how quotes work.
Maybe I should revive one of the blogs I put up to mock him on so as not to cheapen this one. They're still up, they made me feel cheap at the time and I removed the content though maybe I'm over that.
I see the college-credentialed "professional writer" still can't figure out how quotes work.
Maybe I should revive one of the blogs I put up to mock him on so as not to cheapen this one. They're still up, they made me feel cheap at the time and I removed the content though maybe I'm over that.
The Total Degeneracy Of Normalcy
More on the decay of what survives of morality stemming from the Calvinist interpretation of The Law as could be found in the migration from New England into the fabled Mid-West and as it impinges on the Republican-fascist-media attack on a sense of reality, see this disgusting performance by Kim Reynolds the incumbent Governor of Iowa at about 2:30 and, as the reporter presses her slightly, in her hand off to a "public health" flack.
Total degeneracy, total amorality among those smugly self-righteous and "good people" as pumped up by media and movie mythology. I really hate media invented, media pushed regionalist mythology, it's all bullshit. Degenerates are everywhere. We've got as bad if not worse in New England, I say as I see yet another Sununu in New Hampshire and as I know Maine could vote in another LePage or Jock McKernan.
Update: NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT. My rejection of regional stereotype wasn't born of disdain for the South or for the Mid-West, my rejection of regional virtue and vice was born in being a witness to the viciously racist, anti-integration riots in mid-1970s Boston, Massachusetts, aka "The Cradle of Liberty" which had the national reputation as being practically Vatican City for "liberals". I have always known that the reputation of New England as a bastion of liberalism was nonsense, growing up in a rather reactionary, very Republican area of my state which, even today, many dopes believe is some liberal bastion. And don't get me started on New York City and its rather putrid history of mayors and a number of members of its congressional delegations.
Total degeneracy, total amorality among those smugly self-righteous and "good people" as pumped up by media and movie mythology. I really hate media invented, media pushed regionalist mythology, it's all bullshit. Degenerates are everywhere. We've got as bad if not worse in New England, I say as I see yet another Sununu in New Hampshire and as I know Maine could vote in another LePage or Jock McKernan.
Update: NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT. My rejection of regional stereotype wasn't born of disdain for the South or for the Mid-West, my rejection of regional virtue and vice was born in being a witness to the viciously racist, anti-integration riots in mid-1970s Boston, Massachusetts, aka "The Cradle of Liberty" which had the national reputation as being practically Vatican City for "liberals". I have always known that the reputation of New England as a bastion of liberalism was nonsense, growing up in a rather reactionary, very Republican area of my state which, even today, many dopes believe is some liberal bastion. And don't get me started on New York City and its rather putrid history of mayors and a number of members of its congressional delegations.
No, Mr. James, Today It It Does Not "seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being modifiable at will"
Yet again I need to thank RMJ for steering my attention to William James using the same quote that I wrote about yesterday, about the school boy's definition of faith as believing in what you know ain't true, which the barroom atheist type will take as an obvious truth as they don't consider what any of the terms in the statement actually mean or that their understanding of those, if they bothered to consider such a thing as terms in their argument, would have to be considered in more detail that an immature schoolboy or a barroom atheist (these days so many of them holding PhDs, whether in STEMs or that debased thing called "the humanities" these days) would consider doing. Which is tempting to go into. But re-reading the essay, The Will To Believe, it early on contains these paragraphs:
THE next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion. When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had once said its say. Let us take the latter facts up first.
Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else? Can we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of these things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in made up, --matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any action of our own.
Only, today, in 2020, with what we're seeing in the Trump phenomenon, similar phenomena in Europe and Britain and elsewhere under the influence of modern culture, no, people choose to believe all kinds of things they want to believe even with the most obvious of evidence right there in front of them. They've been trained to disregard their experience of reality in favor of unreality as given to them on screens.
I think of the many things that the c. 40% of the American People claim to believe in regard to Trump and his Republican supporters even as the evidence that those are not true is right there, in plain sight, sometimes in immediate memory - often that belief comes in the form of immediately choosing to believe Trump didn't say something immediately after he said it as he chooses to pretend he didn't say it. It is clear from the broadcast testimony of so many of Trump's cabinet members, other hires of his, his nominees for the judiciary and other posts that they have been coached if not trained to do that in sworn testimony and the Republicans in Congress, House and Senate, those in the mass media will reflexively act as if the "matters of fact" which couldn't possibly be more immediate to their experience of minutes or seconds ago, are not there for not only themselves to have seen but for millions to have seen simultaneously.
That very sense of reality, what seems is an ever more quaintly experienced thing in a quickly fading past, a lost age of not only the possibility of something being true but also of it being real, has dissolved as a reliable feature of human culture and human experience.
I can't believe that is unrelated to the enormous percentage of the time of the average American spent in televised or broadcast or online or sitting in front of some screen non-reality, in the chopped up magical rearrangement of scenes and acts and locations and special effects.
I have mentioned the rather extraordinary phenomenon of us having now had two Republican presidents who were products of Hollywood, both of them pretty awful presidents, both of them adored by a fandom that surpassed the stage of irrational adulation, both of them with the support of the "news" media in ways that the most popular and even admirable Democratic presidents and politicians are never the subject of.
I remember the Kennedy mania of his administration, most of us will remember the faint echo of that for the first months of the Obama administration, but it was nothing like the enduring support that the legend of Reagan was and still is given.
With Trump, admittedly, more of the media, or at least some of the reporters and onscreen figures, have reacted to his destruction of the fabric of reality as the chickens they, or, rather, their corporate owners hatched have come home to roost, but the fact that that revolt against the Hitlerian-Stalinist manipulations of not only the truth but reality itself isn't close to 100% is as obvious as the thing Trump or his insider press and media whores deny he said less than a minute ago. The excuse that they don't want to upset the 40% of those who do, every day, what to William James and David Hume was unimaginable, is just an excuse. They know that the owners of the media, the advertisers, etc. are in on the theft and pillaging that is the motive for the entire thing and they know they will be crushed if their support of reality goes too far.
One of the things that has helped me to understand this is the fact that none of what we believe we know objectively, even the most primitive facts of arithmetic have to be believed as an act of willful acceptance on the basis of our experience. When that experience is superseded by a constant diet of televised or online unreality, that unreality will be the basis of what we choose to believe. As I've mentioned before, the schoolboy Bertrand Russell eager to discover the path to absolute truth he'd heard Geometry was was appalled to find out that in order to take that road, you had to just believe in the primitive axioms of it and he spent a fruitless number of years along with his teacher trying to find an absolute and objective truth on which to build mathematics only to have a more gifted logician demonstrate that such a thing is not to be had. I think we all, before we considered it or thought about it to then be remembered, recapitulate that needed step in our own lives.
But the sense of reality that could do that was a reality formed by our direct experience of the real, of what really happened around us, that is clearly damaged by a modern media environment and a large percentage of people will not successfully work around it. In the United States, the age of Trump shows that about 40% of the population cannot work around it to discover a reality that they will or can will to believe.
-----------------------
And then there are those for whom "reality" is a brand name. As seen on TV and online.
As I've said many times here, the pop-atheist hankering after "objective truth" is really only a notional club slogan than something they really pursue. I don't think most of them have any idea of what such an "objective reality" would have to be. I don't think they'd care to think about that too hard else they fall into the despised activilty they derisively disdain as "philosophy". Most often "objective reality" as advocated today means the common received point of view of the modern, secular, scientistic materialists - and such it has been since the so-called "enlightenment" and its decay into late 18th and 19th materialism and a stream of often ahistorical myths and bromides. The pages of Skeptical Inquirer and the rest of the claptrap that the huckster, the late Paul Kurtz published or promoted is a good place to find an inclusive, though not necessarily exhaustive list of those. If you're typically lazy as the TV and media trained champions of that "reality" are and don't care about even much of a pretense of scholarship, you can go to The James Randi "Educational" Foundation and that most misnamed of things, "The Skeptic's Dictionary". Such "skeptics" are not ever in doubt of anything and they never investigate anything. In a way they're not that much different from Trump's dangerous 40%.
That's the kind of thinking the cynical aphorisms of Pudd'nhead Wilson presaged, that Twain promoted in his support of "free thinking" as mentioned here yesterday. I suppose we can't fault Twain for not being able to understand what those would become as the minds that contained them were trained by TV, Hollywood and the commercial hucksters of pop culture - though he had a really good handle on its pre-electronic forms as seen on the shores and riverboats of his youth, he, himself, fell for it when he put all his money in that invention.
THE next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion. When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had once said its say. Let us take the latter facts up first.
Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else? Can we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of these things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in made up, --matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any action of our own.
Only, today, in 2020, with what we're seeing in the Trump phenomenon, similar phenomena in Europe and Britain and elsewhere under the influence of modern culture, no, people choose to believe all kinds of things they want to believe even with the most obvious of evidence right there in front of them. They've been trained to disregard their experience of reality in favor of unreality as given to them on screens.
I think of the many things that the c. 40% of the American People claim to believe in regard to Trump and his Republican supporters even as the evidence that those are not true is right there, in plain sight, sometimes in immediate memory - often that belief comes in the form of immediately choosing to believe Trump didn't say something immediately after he said it as he chooses to pretend he didn't say it. It is clear from the broadcast testimony of so many of Trump's cabinet members, other hires of his, his nominees for the judiciary and other posts that they have been coached if not trained to do that in sworn testimony and the Republicans in Congress, House and Senate, those in the mass media will reflexively act as if the "matters of fact" which couldn't possibly be more immediate to their experience of minutes or seconds ago, are not there for not only themselves to have seen but for millions to have seen simultaneously.
That very sense of reality, what seems is an ever more quaintly experienced thing in a quickly fading past, a lost age of not only the possibility of something being true but also of it being real, has dissolved as a reliable feature of human culture and human experience.
I can't believe that is unrelated to the enormous percentage of the time of the average American spent in televised or broadcast or online or sitting in front of some screen non-reality, in the chopped up magical rearrangement of scenes and acts and locations and special effects.
I have mentioned the rather extraordinary phenomenon of us having now had two Republican presidents who were products of Hollywood, both of them pretty awful presidents, both of them adored by a fandom that surpassed the stage of irrational adulation, both of them with the support of the "news" media in ways that the most popular and even admirable Democratic presidents and politicians are never the subject of.
I remember the Kennedy mania of his administration, most of us will remember the faint echo of that for the first months of the Obama administration, but it was nothing like the enduring support that the legend of Reagan was and still is given.
With Trump, admittedly, more of the media, or at least some of the reporters and onscreen figures, have reacted to his destruction of the fabric of reality as the chickens they, or, rather, their corporate owners hatched have come home to roost, but the fact that that revolt against the Hitlerian-Stalinist manipulations of not only the truth but reality itself isn't close to 100% is as obvious as the thing Trump or his insider press and media whores deny he said less than a minute ago. The excuse that they don't want to upset the 40% of those who do, every day, what to William James and David Hume was unimaginable, is just an excuse. They know that the owners of the media, the advertisers, etc. are in on the theft and pillaging that is the motive for the entire thing and they know they will be crushed if their support of reality goes too far.
One of the things that has helped me to understand this is the fact that none of what we believe we know objectively, even the most primitive facts of arithmetic have to be believed as an act of willful acceptance on the basis of our experience. When that experience is superseded by a constant diet of televised or online unreality, that unreality will be the basis of what we choose to believe. As I've mentioned before, the schoolboy Bertrand Russell eager to discover the path to absolute truth he'd heard Geometry was was appalled to find out that in order to take that road, you had to just believe in the primitive axioms of it and he spent a fruitless number of years along with his teacher trying to find an absolute and objective truth on which to build mathematics only to have a more gifted logician demonstrate that such a thing is not to be had. I think we all, before we considered it or thought about it to then be remembered, recapitulate that needed step in our own lives.
But the sense of reality that could do that was a reality formed by our direct experience of the real, of what really happened around us, that is clearly damaged by a modern media environment and a large percentage of people will not successfully work around it. In the United States, the age of Trump shows that about 40% of the population cannot work around it to discover a reality that they will or can will to believe.
-----------------------
And then there are those for whom "reality" is a brand name. As seen on TV and online.
As I've said many times here, the pop-atheist hankering after "objective truth" is really only a notional club slogan than something they really pursue. I don't think most of them have any idea of what such an "objective reality" would have to be. I don't think they'd care to think about that too hard else they fall into the despised activilty they derisively disdain as "philosophy". Most often "objective reality" as advocated today means the common received point of view of the modern, secular, scientistic materialists - and such it has been since the so-called "enlightenment" and its decay into late 18th and 19th materialism and a stream of often ahistorical myths and bromides. The pages of Skeptical Inquirer and the rest of the claptrap that the huckster, the late Paul Kurtz published or promoted is a good place to find an inclusive, though not necessarily exhaustive list of those. If you're typically lazy as the TV and media trained champions of that "reality" are and don't care about even much of a pretense of scholarship, you can go to The James Randi "Educational" Foundation and that most misnamed of things, "The Skeptic's Dictionary". Such "skeptics" are not ever in doubt of anything and they never investigate anything. In a way they're not that much different from Trump's dangerous 40%.
That's the kind of thinking the cynical aphorisms of Pudd'nhead Wilson presaged, that Twain promoted in his support of "free thinking" as mentioned here yesterday. I suppose we can't fault Twain for not being able to understand what those would become as the minds that contained them were trained by TV, Hollywood and the commercial hucksters of pop culture - though he had a really good handle on its pre-electronic forms as seen on the shores and riverboats of his youth, he, himself, fell for it when he put all his money in that invention.
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Hey, Your Bike's A Pig!
Someone informs me that Brando rode his own Triumph motorcycle in the movies, not a Harley, which I can't say I'd ever have noticed the difference or would have thought was worth the research time. But it's kind of funny if that's true.
I remember about, oh, it must be about twenty or twenty five years ago, going with one of my brothers and his family to the Oxford Fair and seeing really old bikers in their leathers strutting around, even then in their early senescence if not older - though it could be the biker lifestyle that made them look like that. Biker life is no fountain of youth, you know. "Hells Grannies" I said then, thinking how ridiculous they looked. Those are the guys and their gals who Harley-Davidson was marketing to. I doubt they're buying many from the grave, these days.
I don't know, are the Triumph bikes the same company that made the shitty cars that were notorious for being off the road and in the shop more than they were on the road? I knew a guy who in his middle age bought a "classic Triumph" which was a heap - he bought it "for his wife," don't you know. Let's just say it was a rather icy ending to the birthday party - put huge amounts of money into the thing. had it painted to a mirror finish and I doubt they drove it more than a few dozen times before they unloaded the perpetual oil leaker. I've heard Harleys are notorious for that, too. Not that I care.
I'd rather have a moped, much more fun. Though these days I'd rather have a 3-speed bike old enough so I wouldn't care if someone stole it. My near miss of a late mid-life crisis on wheels was thinking of buying a cargo trike with a box in case I had to sell fast food at the farmer's market. It didn't come to that. Not yet. Imagine me peddling pretzels or muffins.
I remember about, oh, it must be about twenty or twenty five years ago, going with one of my brothers and his family to the Oxford Fair and seeing really old bikers in their leathers strutting around, even then in their early senescence if not older - though it could be the biker lifestyle that made them look like that. Biker life is no fountain of youth, you know. "Hells Grannies" I said then, thinking how ridiculous they looked. Those are the guys and their gals who Harley-Davidson was marketing to. I doubt they're buying many from the grave, these days.
I don't know, are the Triumph bikes the same company that made the shitty cars that were notorious for being off the road and in the shop more than they were on the road? I knew a guy who in his middle age bought a "classic Triumph" which was a heap - he bought it "for his wife," don't you know. Let's just say it was a rather icy ending to the birthday party - put huge amounts of money into the thing. had it painted to a mirror finish and I doubt they drove it more than a few dozen times before they unloaded the perpetual oil leaker. I've heard Harleys are notorious for that, too. Not that I care.
I'd rather have a moped, much more fun. Though these days I'd rather have a 3-speed bike old enough so I wouldn't care if someone stole it. My near miss of a late mid-life crisis on wheels was thinking of buying a cargo trike with a box in case I had to sell fast food at the farmer's market. It didn't come to that. Not yet. Imagine me peddling pretzels or muffins.
Hot Afternoon
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar.
I'm tempted to go over the Trump v Twitter war but it's friggin' hot here and I should be out in the garden or asleep with a fan blowing on me. I've been waking up at three in the morning and not falling back asleep wondering how terrible the Trump pandemic is going to be this summer into fall. Trump, his billionaire backers and Republican-fascists are killing tens of thousands with lies, that's already literally been documented for Trump's lies, mostly told on Twitter which won't really do anything to keep him from getting more tens of thousands killed, if not hundreds of thousands or more.
I will note that when Pudd'nhead Wilson was around, public figures could sue for libel and they'd have to do it unamplified or on paper. He'd have to expand the thought to what happens in mass electronic media.
Just can't remember how Twain spelt it.
I'm tempted to go over the Trump v Twitter war but it's friggin' hot here and I should be out in the garden or asleep with a fan blowing on me. I've been waking up at three in the morning and not falling back asleep wondering how terrible the Trump pandemic is going to be this summer into fall. Trump, his billionaire backers and Republican-fascists are killing tens of thousands with lies, that's already literally been documented for Trump's lies, mostly told on Twitter which won't really do anything to keep him from getting more tens of thousands killed, if not hundreds of thousands or more.
I will note that when Pudd'nhead Wilson was around, public figures could sue for libel and they'd have to do it unamplified or on paper. He'd have to expand the thought to what happens in mass electronic media.
Just can't remember how Twain spelt it.
Walter Brueggemann - Time
Another of the recent interview segments with Walter Brueggemann. It's a different view of the same topics that Hans Kung dealt with in some of the things I excerpted during this Easter Season, which ends Sunday. I especially like what he said, "God loves us to eternity". I have to admit that I misunderstood Brueggemann's thinking about the idea of life after death which doesn't seem to be far from Kung's (and Rahner's, I believe) idea of us dying into God's eternity, not a naive view of heaven as commonly conceived of as a continuation of our present life with benefits. And that the idea of that is not an excuse for ignoring justice in this life but a reason for all the more striving for it. The interviewer talks about "getting in on eternal love now." Which is certainly the same thing as any mature concept of justice, it's what the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition has been about since the time The Law was written.
Post Memorial Day Idyll
Tell the truth or trump - but get the trick.
Calendar of Puddin'head Wilson From the novel of the same name.
I found that nothing reduced my esteem for Mark Twain more than attempting to read his complete works. There are real gems in it but much, perhaps most of it is pretty bad. Of all of his books, and I believe I read all of them, I like Life on the Mississippi the best. I detest Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper and never thought the frog story that made him famous as a humorist was funny, not at all when I was assigned to read it in 6th grade. Like much of his humor, especially that delivered as narrative instead of off the cuff remarks by mostly callow minds, it was forced.
Which brings me to the worst thing about Twain, he wrote out of the minds of children. Even Puddin'head Wilson, an intelligent small town intellectual is more a boy-man tinkerer science sleuth. He's almost not important to the story which, as whenever Twain deals with racial discrimination, is him at his best. His discovery of the tragic truth through fingerprints is anachronistic in the extreme for antebellum Missouri. No doubt Twain had seen Galton's book on fingerprints of a year or two before he wrote the book. It's sort of riverboat steam-punk of its time.
That writing tactic of elevating childish thinking inevitably leads into nostalgic sentimentalism, wallowing in romanticized memories of childhood as we would like it to have been. It's remarkable how many of the most esteemed books in the canon have that feature, that they present the thinking of children as some kind of perfection, even when they deal with terrible things in reality. It'll lead you to produce best sellers and get you fame and even some enduring celebrity but it's never going to be useful to grownups for much. Nowadays I doubt most children ever get more of it than Hollywood might bring their way. I know college-credentialed young'uns who never read anything by him. And why should they have? It's not as if they're missing vital life lessons from it. They could get more from reading, especially, the non-fiction literature produced by Black writers of his time and learn a lot more than he's going to give them. Not to mention women - it's remarkable how few women there are in most of his stuff.
I've pissed off some by pointing out something others have noticed, that his most esteemed book, Huckleberry Finn totally falls apart at the end when he and Jim get washed up at just the right place for them to meet up with Tom Sawyer and after some truly awful writing about their days at Sawyer's relatives place, Jim finds out he's been freed, not by his own initiative but by the nobility of the white woman who held him in bondage. It's like Twain didn't plan on how to end the book with any kind of realism once he ran out of river and so he just reverted to the same bilge he had success with in Tom Sawyer.
That quote you throw at me, "Faith is making believe you know what you know ain't true (sic)", you got it wrong as so many online seem to have, and as you no doubt got from those on line who made the same mistake, it wasn't from Huckleberry Finn, it's from Puddin'head Wilson's New Calendar, the humorous "quotes" with which Twain prefaced the chapters in Following The Equator. Which has a number of virtues even as it is a mess of a book which he wrote to get himself out of debt from making a really dumb bad investment which he also involved a number of others in. It was his most cynical period which doesn't wear well. I think he never had a mature reaction against the rather dreadful unreconstructed Calvinism of his youth. As any number of intelligent believers who have had much interaction with barroom style atheists and agnostics - certainly the style that Twain affected - they find very quickly that the God such atheists don't believe in is a God they never believed in to start with. I would conclude that the inability of such people to imagine a God of mature faith is probably the reason they are rather callow in their atheism.
In looking at the sources for this, I thought I might go back and re-read Puddin'head Wilson to see if it was any better than I thought in the 1980s, when I did my Complete Twain project. I found the first chapter of the book started out with the quote I started with up top which is oddly appropriate for 2020 for its juxtaposition of truth and trump. It's the reason I decided to write this.
By the way, the full quote goes:
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
As I said, an elevation of the thinking of children sentimentally taken as profundity. So many an atheist proudly proclaims that he made up his mind when he was nine or ten and hasn't changed it ever since. Which doesn't surprise me after this past two decades of the "new atheism" and my review of the old stuff, too.
Calendar of Puddin'head Wilson From the novel of the same name.
I found that nothing reduced my esteem for Mark Twain more than attempting to read his complete works. There are real gems in it but much, perhaps most of it is pretty bad. Of all of his books, and I believe I read all of them, I like Life on the Mississippi the best. I detest Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper and never thought the frog story that made him famous as a humorist was funny, not at all when I was assigned to read it in 6th grade. Like much of his humor, especially that delivered as narrative instead of off the cuff remarks by mostly callow minds, it was forced.
Which brings me to the worst thing about Twain, he wrote out of the minds of children. Even Puddin'head Wilson, an intelligent small town intellectual is more a boy-man tinkerer science sleuth. He's almost not important to the story which, as whenever Twain deals with racial discrimination, is him at his best. His discovery of the tragic truth through fingerprints is anachronistic in the extreme for antebellum Missouri. No doubt Twain had seen Galton's book on fingerprints of a year or two before he wrote the book. It's sort of riverboat steam-punk of its time.
That writing tactic of elevating childish thinking inevitably leads into nostalgic sentimentalism, wallowing in romanticized memories of childhood as we would like it to have been. It's remarkable how many of the most esteemed books in the canon have that feature, that they present the thinking of children as some kind of perfection, even when they deal with terrible things in reality. It'll lead you to produce best sellers and get you fame and even some enduring celebrity but it's never going to be useful to grownups for much. Nowadays I doubt most children ever get more of it than Hollywood might bring their way. I know college-credentialed young'uns who never read anything by him. And why should they have? It's not as if they're missing vital life lessons from it. They could get more from reading, especially, the non-fiction literature produced by Black writers of his time and learn a lot more than he's going to give them. Not to mention women - it's remarkable how few women there are in most of his stuff.
I've pissed off some by pointing out something others have noticed, that his most esteemed book, Huckleberry Finn totally falls apart at the end when he and Jim get washed up at just the right place for them to meet up with Tom Sawyer and after some truly awful writing about their days at Sawyer's relatives place, Jim finds out he's been freed, not by his own initiative but by the nobility of the white woman who held him in bondage. It's like Twain didn't plan on how to end the book with any kind of realism once he ran out of river and so he just reverted to the same bilge he had success with in Tom Sawyer.
That quote you throw at me, "Faith is making believe you know what you know ain't true (sic)", you got it wrong as so many online seem to have, and as you no doubt got from those on line who made the same mistake, it wasn't from Huckleberry Finn, it's from Puddin'head Wilson's New Calendar, the humorous "quotes" with which Twain prefaced the chapters in Following The Equator. Which has a number of virtues even as it is a mess of a book which he wrote to get himself out of debt from making a really dumb bad investment which he also involved a number of others in. It was his most cynical period which doesn't wear well. I think he never had a mature reaction against the rather dreadful unreconstructed Calvinism of his youth. As any number of intelligent believers who have had much interaction with barroom style atheists and agnostics - certainly the style that Twain affected - they find very quickly that the God such atheists don't believe in is a God they never believed in to start with. I would conclude that the inability of such people to imagine a God of mature faith is probably the reason they are rather callow in their atheism.
In looking at the sources for this, I thought I might go back and re-read Puddin'head Wilson to see if it was any better than I thought in the 1980s, when I did my Complete Twain project. I found the first chapter of the book started out with the quote I started with up top which is oddly appropriate for 2020 for its juxtaposition of truth and trump. It's the reason I decided to write this.
By the way, the full quote goes:
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
As I said, an elevation of the thinking of children sentimentally taken as profundity. So many an atheist proudly proclaims that he made up his mind when he was nine or ten and hasn't changed it ever since. Which doesn't surprise me after this past two decades of the "new atheism" and my review of the old stuff, too.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Walter Brueggemann - Money
When I read the announcement that Walter Brueggemann was giving up his public appearances, I was afraid that that constant source of inspiration and incitement to further thinking was going to go away. But there has been more.
I think this is a fairly recently made video, though I haven't looked to see when it was made. The content is timeless.
All Flash No Class
I am asked what I think of Yuval Noah Harari's rejection of free will. I don't know much about Harari and the little I've seen of him I think he's a rather superficial, rather unimportant and uninteresting pop-scholar who, while maybe a few steps up from the fading Jordan Peterson (what is that U of T phony up to these days, anyway?) he is of that type.
I have not read his rejection of free will but the little I have seen about it since you asked me makes me think it's the typical materialist-atheist-secularist stuff that materialism will always lead to because it makes material causation the only admissible reality. I think it's always bound to devolve into some kind of gangsterism.
One of the claims he makes is that people who believe in free will will be the ones who are most vulnerable to manipulation by corporate-state oppression but that is nonsense. While there are many naive and self-contradictory ways to talk about free will, free thought, there are more naive and self-contradictory ways to reject free will, worrying about robot-people being oppressed is one of the most obvious of those.
I'm not tempted to read more of him or about him, I don't think he'll flash soon like Peterson has but he's not going to endure long enough to worry about. He might sucker some people of fashion or a while but those idiots are nothing if not fickle and attention deficient.
It's nice that he's a vegan, I suppose. I'm not impressed with his mindfulness practice. I've come to be deeply skeptical of the mindfulness crowd.
I have not read his rejection of free will but the little I have seen about it since you asked me makes me think it's the typical materialist-atheist-secularist stuff that materialism will always lead to because it makes material causation the only admissible reality. I think it's always bound to devolve into some kind of gangsterism.
One of the claims he makes is that people who believe in free will will be the ones who are most vulnerable to manipulation by corporate-state oppression but that is nonsense. While there are many naive and self-contradictory ways to talk about free will, free thought, there are more naive and self-contradictory ways to reject free will, worrying about robot-people being oppressed is one of the most obvious of those.
I'm not tempted to read more of him or about him, I don't think he'll flash soon like Peterson has but he's not going to endure long enough to worry about. He might sucker some people of fashion or a while but those idiots are nothing if not fickle and attention deficient.
It's nice that he's a vegan, I suppose. I'm not impressed with his mindfulness practice. I've come to be deeply skeptical of the mindfulness crowd.
A Short Piece Coming Up To Pentecost
Listening to a mass setting a while back, one by Orlando di Lasso, and it occurred to me that there is a word notably missing from every one of the official Christian creeds that I knew of, a word that was central to the one and only creed Jesus is recorded as having endorsed, the Jewish Shema Yisrael, the word "love". That God is one, that we are to love God with all of our heart, mind, strength and soul, and to love others as you love yourself. That last part is an abbreviation in the manner of Hillel saying to follow The Law. With the constantly given commandments of Jesus to love, you'd think that any Christian credo would at least mention the idea, but it's not in any of the various ones that spring to my mind.
The exception to that among Christian creeds that I've read - I haven't read them all - is the Maasai Creed from the Congregation of the Holy Ghost* in east Nigeria in the early 1960s that Jaroslav Pelikan wrote about in his book about Creeds,
We believe in one high God, who out of love created the beautiful world. We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, and showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by His people, tortured and nailed, hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch Him, and on the third day He rose from the grave.
As Pelikan noted in an old interview that Krista Tippet did with him, the official creeds of Eastern and Western Christianity generally go from the birth narrative to the death narrative and totally ignore the public life of Jesus in which he preached, among other things, that the two great things to believe and practice were the Shema and the commandment to love other people. You have to wonder what the history of Christianity in Europe and elsewhere would have been like if the contents of the Maasai creed had been recited at every Mass and every Divine Liturgy instead of the ones which are mostly assertions against theological theories common in the early centuries after Christianity gained official status with secular governments at the insistence of uniformity by the secular rulers and with the force of arms of some pretty ruthless emperors and Bishops with a share of that secular power.
* I don't know what, if any, connection it has with the European Congregation of the Holy Spirit but if it had any, I have to say I can't imagine such a Creed coming out of that group.
The exception to that among Christian creeds that I've read - I haven't read them all - is the Maasai Creed from the Congregation of the Holy Ghost* in east Nigeria in the early 1960s that Jaroslav Pelikan wrote about in his book about Creeds,
We believe in one high God, who out of love created the beautiful world. We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, and showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by His people, tortured and nailed, hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch Him, and on the third day He rose from the grave.
As Pelikan noted in an old interview that Krista Tippet did with him, the official creeds of Eastern and Western Christianity generally go from the birth narrative to the death narrative and totally ignore the public life of Jesus in which he preached, among other things, that the two great things to believe and practice were the Shema and the commandment to love other people. You have to wonder what the history of Christianity in Europe and elsewhere would have been like if the contents of the Maasai creed had been recited at every Mass and every Divine Liturgy instead of the ones which are mostly assertions against theological theories common in the early centuries after Christianity gained official status with secular governments at the insistence of uniformity by the secular rulers and with the force of arms of some pretty ruthless emperors and Bishops with a share of that secular power.
* I don't know what, if any, connection it has with the European Congregation of the Holy Spirit but if it had any, I have to say I can't imagine such a Creed coming out of that group.
"KFC hole" that's what a big fat free speecher-presser told me to shut yesterday. See what I said? There are none more ready to tell an a real liberal to shut up than proponents of free speech. Some of them have made it a career to tell liberals to shut up, they were some of the few "leftists" to get on TV doing that. Nat Hentoff did, when he wasn't endlessly rehashing that one TV gig he was involved in getting her after Billie Holiday lost her cabaret license for being a dope addict.
But mostly they love to get paid to strike a pose. playing Voltaire for the liberty of Nazis and Stalinists and billionaire gangsters to get them an even chance to destroy the lives and freedoms of other people, mostly in other places from where they live.
Only since they're facile liars exploiting human vice and weakness, often with the backing of billionaires foreign but more so domestic, the facists, Nazis and other gangsters have more than an even playing field, already. As I said, the "First Amendment" absolutists figure they deserve a chance to make it happen again and again and again . . .
No doubt Hentoff, sitting in NYC, seldom felt that HIS safety was at issue. And it's not as if HIS loved ones were in much danger of getting destroyed by the sex industry who largely funded the "free press, free speech" racket. Is there a bigger bunch of big donor whores than the civil liberties industry?
As someone who has been a vegetarian since the 1960s, I believe before it had appeared in New England and someone who didn't watch much commercial TV, I didn't remember what "KFC" meant for about 20 seconds before I remembered the acronym from watching Steve Colbert's description of Donald Trump's diet. Nope, don't have one of those to shut. And I wouldn't, in any case.
I would guess that it's his attempt at an inaptly placed class-regional put-down, he's a NYC kind of guy. Which is typical of the geographic ignorance of that type from the hemisphere's most overrated locus.
Update: Well, to block all comments here, I've concluded I have a choice to disable the "scan on boot" option of my malware program and the crap cleaner I use to block all of the comments but I don't think I want to take that option. It would be like going shopping without a mask, these days. I don't want to mess directly with Blogger anymore than I have. It kept reverting to my friend's account after he borrowed my computer to do something.
But mostly they love to get paid to strike a pose. playing Voltaire for the liberty of Nazis and Stalinists and billionaire gangsters to get them an even chance to destroy the lives and freedoms of other people, mostly in other places from where they live.
Only since they're facile liars exploiting human vice and weakness, often with the backing of billionaires foreign but more so domestic, the facists, Nazis and other gangsters have more than an even playing field, already. As I said, the "First Amendment" absolutists figure they deserve a chance to make it happen again and again and again . . .
No doubt Hentoff, sitting in NYC, seldom felt that HIS safety was at issue. And it's not as if HIS loved ones were in much danger of getting destroyed by the sex industry who largely funded the "free press, free speech" racket. Is there a bigger bunch of big donor whores than the civil liberties industry?
As someone who has been a vegetarian since the 1960s, I believe before it had appeared in New England and someone who didn't watch much commercial TV, I didn't remember what "KFC" meant for about 20 seconds before I remembered the acronym from watching Steve Colbert's description of Donald Trump's diet. Nope, don't have one of those to shut. And I wouldn't, in any case.
I would guess that it's his attempt at an inaptly placed class-regional put-down, he's a NYC kind of guy. Which is typical of the geographic ignorance of that type from the hemisphere's most overrated locus.
Update: Well, to block all comments here, I've concluded I have a choice to disable the "scan on boot" option of my malware program and the crap cleaner I use to block all of the comments but I don't think I want to take that option. It would be like going shopping without a mask, these days. I don't want to mess directly with Blogger anymore than I have. It kept reverting to my friend's account after he borrowed my computer to do something.
Monday, May 25, 2020
Troll Scat
Don't get your hopes up. If I take after my longest lived direct ancestors I might have as much of a quarter of my life ahead of me.
Update: Let someone use my computer and the thing's messed up. I can't get it back to my settings. Blogger is not user friendly.
Update: Let someone use my computer and the thing's messed up. I can't get it back to my settings. Blogger is not user friendly.
Cut Off The Source Of Trump's Regurgitated Malignity
FOX propagandist, Steve Hilton should be deported back to Britland along with his fellow Brit-Hungarian fascist, the Nazi Seb Gorka because they are a present danger to the health and life of the American People. Trump the world's most malignant Furby* parroted his call to reopen schools, the better to get lots of children sick and killing some of them, not to mention teachers (no doubt Trump figures the more teachers he can get killed the fewer of them will vote against him) and others.
I'm tired of taking in foreign fascists so they can work in the American media, especially that owned by international fascists like Murdoch. We should deport all of them.
* A perfect description of Trump's verbal process. "Furbish", a language with short words, simple syllables, and various other sounds. They are programmed, however, to speak less and less Furbish and more and more English as they "grow". Trump is a Furby who learned his language from his Klansman father, and developed from what he heard from FOX and other TV and hate-speech radio.
Never When I Clicked On This Biker Video Did I Ever Believe It Would Be This Informative
It can't be unrelated to the marketing as a product for macho-men that Harley Davidson's leadership was so immune from looking self-critically at what was wrong and changing it. It's one of the central features of toxic masculinity that it is a betrayal of "manliness" to do that and it guarantees that making that your brand will make you brittle and breakable and unable to adapt. It's rather hilarious that Trump's xenophobic racism was the occasion of him saying something that might have almost been right. Broken clocks telling the right time twice or once a day.
Hollywood features heavily in this. Is there anything that has aged less well than those biker movies? Though I regretted the minutes I spent on Easy Rider as soon as the opening credits were through. Piece of shit.
Update: It's a business, it's no more than that. Those who pretend it's an art, I think, are misguided.
Marlon Brando on the movies
I had wanted to find a clip of Bullwinkle Moose doing his Brando imitation but I couldn't. I think it was living up the the bullshit of Harley cultism in the movies is as much of a reason that the company history is so full of funny stuff like them bawling and crying to Reagan for protectionism as smarter companies unencumbered with that macho nonsense ate their lunch and Reagan, the movie-cowboy capitalist rugged individualist (there are no milieus more violently demanding rigid conformity than the macho man ones, at least not outside of Pyongyang) giving it to them.
Update: I can't get the damned comments to stay off, every time my malware program functions it seems to kick them back on. Needless to say the idiot who was temporarily cowed by finding out he'd called his hero, ol' Charles Darwin an idiot is back because it's apparently news to him that hours are made of minutes. I regretted all of the minutes in Easy Rider as I knew I would as the opening credits ended. It is Hollywood crap, a "counter culture" that is not counter to anything important, a lifestyle movie that challenged nothing except hair styles and costume. It went no deeper than that. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was in every way a more daring movie.
Update 2: Brando was a world-weary 49 when he said that on the Dick Cavett show, he'd already been in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris and had refused the Best Actor Oscar, he was hardly a beatnik. It's not as if he didn't know the business better than an ass whose ignorant mind and concept of "art" was formed by the movies. The idea that Marlon Brando was ever a beatnik is ridiculous but that someone whose every idea is a product of Hollywood crap and the ass end of commercial pop would think so isn't surprising.
Stuck In The Same Maze While Believing They've Escaped It
In the past two decades it's become apparent to me that though we stick them together there is a real, mutually exclusive difference between traditional American style liberalism and the various secular sects that are (generally wrongly) denominated "the left". Any similarities between the two are in some cases based in preferences, not intellectual foundations though in many cases I think they are a tactical scheme of trying to gain power through appeals to "the masses" on the basis of a claim to care about their welfare - such as in Marxism - I think the history of such "leftists" when they gain power has shown that the results will be a gangster regime which has more in common with fascism or capitalism empowered politically.
No traditional American liberalism, based in a higher view of human beings beyond material and economic utility but as possessing a status higher than that by the will of God should be confused for the same thing as Marxism or the various anarchisms which, even more absurdly, are considered to be close to it in a linear graph of relatedness. Though not a few traditional American style liberals have made that mistake, I think Eugene Debs did, so did many who got swayed over to the materialist, atheist, scientistic ideologies that led so many an otherwise liberal astray - often during their college years when they hankered after repute more than they did the pursuit of justice.
I don't know why I've been feeling so inclined to look over the results of this publicly shared writing I've been doing for the past two decades and the extreme changes in my thinking that the fact checking of my previous beliefs have forced me to accept, driving me, as an old man, farther in the direction of that American style liberalism than I was as a secular, agnostic, socialist. Maybe its the result of the Covid 19 pandemic reminding me of the imminence of mortality.
Looking critically at the political left, criticism forced by seeing its decades of impotent failure has not been popular with lefties. But it's stupid for the American left to refuse to make that self criticism. Something is obviously wrong with the American left, the left which, though it has advocated many policies that should ensure its widespread approval has been so abjectly a failure.
It's not as if those decades of failure are unrelated to our habits of thought and action, which in the case of the American left is often inaction. And its certainly not as if the critique of us from outside, from the right, that we give up those positions of egalitarianism, of redistribution of wealth as a part of that equality, of protecting the environment, etc. that we become like them, are going to be helpful to our purposes. It's not as if anyone else is in a position to make the changes to the left that are going to make us more effective in achieving more equality, more economic and civil justice, a more livable, sustainable environment. If we reject a rigorous internal criticism and the changes necessary to do that, it's just a continuation of what got us into this political wilderness to start with. WE DID IT TO OURSELVES, GOD DIDN'T BRING US INTO THE WILDERNESS, WHICH IS WHY WE'VE BEEN IN IT LONGER THAN THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL WERE AFTER THEY GOT OUT OF SLAVERY IN EGYPT.
I didn't expect that the neo-atheist campaign would become important to my criticism of the left when I started, I resisted getting involved with it for as long as I could avoid it but it became apparent to me that that was not only typical of the self-imposed guarantees of failure, adopting ballot box poison positions and, worse, attitudes, but that materialist atheist scientism was probably the largest contributor to that failure. And that that ideology was not only unpopular, it acted as an acid corroding and eroding the very basis on which egalitarian democracy rest, that ideology inevitably leads to a debasement of the human animal into an object, one which has no transcendent nature above any object which is there for use and exploitation. Indeed, the logical necessities of materialist,atheist, scientism, in order to maintain its insistence on the material monist nature of morality will inevitably deny the reality of morality and, in the fullness of time and the necessity of academic scribblers making a name and career for themselves, leads to such self-contradictory absurdities as eliminative materialism which denies the reality of consciousness, itself. The new atheist fad of the 2000s forced a confrontation of that fact which was, I now see, essential to understanding the difference between American style liberalism and the secular, materialist, scientistic, atheistic ideologies that it was damaged by.
You can't have both. Both cannot work yoked together, they are at cross purposes in their most essential essences, the left has been a house divided and like a dysfunctional family, they have not even understood the most basic reasons for their fall.
In looking into the new atheist fad, the longer history of atheist ideological assertion, I have come to the conclusion that they have merely recapitulated in atheist scientistic terms all of the features of religious follies that atheists have used to attack religion among the shallow and ignorant. Not a few of those self-identified opponents of such things as the assertion of rightness through authority have been among its most flagrant floggers of such authority. I was reminded of that the other day when listening to the pirated online Rachel Maddow show when the Freedom From Religion Foundation had on that eminent thinker, Ron Reagan to promote atheism, the same family business that endlessly promotes atheism through fame fucking, not infrequently attributing atheism to someone who not only never advocated atheism but who actively opposed it (the research pieces I did on the death of Mozart is some of the most personally satisfying to me).
More generally the absurdity of the atheist snobs who call themselves "free thinkers" as their ideology leads so many, perhaps most of them to insist that free thought is a material impossibility completes the argument that they are no less at cross purposes in their self-contradictory claims than the worst of religious orthodoxy has been. That includes the claim that their all too human thought allows them access to a pure, unfiltered view of ultimate reality, whether through something like the Catholic integralist insistence on the character of the Magisterium as discerned by official fiat or the insistence of atheists that science is such an oracle of absolute infallibility unmitigated by the fact that all of all of this is a human interpretation of human experience as humanly processed by those minds the materialists insist aren't there. That "freedom from religion" is not a freedom from religion, it's the recreation of all of those things which religion got wrong in terms of secular, materialist scientism. It is like they're stuck in the same maze and they can't unlearn it.
But religion should never have made that mistake because as early as the book of Exodus there are warnings against the folly of thinking human beings have that kind of immediate discernment of the ultimate reality. God warns Moses that in the form of a human being, he cannot see the face of God and live (Exodus 33:18-30), though he can see the back of God. That's what he was doing while the others were getting up to mischief with a golden calf.
Human beings are able to see lots of things, they cannot, in material form have an unmitigated view of ultimate reality unfiltered through human experience and understanding. Which should lead us to humbly understand we are, none of us, supreme, we are equals. I have absolute confidence that the radical economic leveling of The Law is related to that and an expression of that humility. Which humility is so widely despised by the arrogant confidence of modernism but which is the source of egalitarian democracy and justice, most of all economic justice.
Materialist, scientistic atheism makes moon-calves of us all. It isn't the way out of that maze.
No traditional American liberalism, based in a higher view of human beings beyond material and economic utility but as possessing a status higher than that by the will of God should be confused for the same thing as Marxism or the various anarchisms which, even more absurdly, are considered to be close to it in a linear graph of relatedness. Though not a few traditional American style liberals have made that mistake, I think Eugene Debs did, so did many who got swayed over to the materialist, atheist, scientistic ideologies that led so many an otherwise liberal astray - often during their college years when they hankered after repute more than they did the pursuit of justice.
I don't know why I've been feeling so inclined to look over the results of this publicly shared writing I've been doing for the past two decades and the extreme changes in my thinking that the fact checking of my previous beliefs have forced me to accept, driving me, as an old man, farther in the direction of that American style liberalism than I was as a secular, agnostic, socialist. Maybe its the result of the Covid 19 pandemic reminding me of the imminence of mortality.
Looking critically at the political left, criticism forced by seeing its decades of impotent failure has not been popular with lefties. But it's stupid for the American left to refuse to make that self criticism. Something is obviously wrong with the American left, the left which, though it has advocated many policies that should ensure its widespread approval has been so abjectly a failure.
It's not as if those decades of failure are unrelated to our habits of thought and action, which in the case of the American left is often inaction. And its certainly not as if the critique of us from outside, from the right, that we give up those positions of egalitarianism, of redistribution of wealth as a part of that equality, of protecting the environment, etc. that we become like them, are going to be helpful to our purposes. It's not as if anyone else is in a position to make the changes to the left that are going to make us more effective in achieving more equality, more economic and civil justice, a more livable, sustainable environment. If we reject a rigorous internal criticism and the changes necessary to do that, it's just a continuation of what got us into this political wilderness to start with. WE DID IT TO OURSELVES, GOD DIDN'T BRING US INTO THE WILDERNESS, WHICH IS WHY WE'VE BEEN IN IT LONGER THAN THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL WERE AFTER THEY GOT OUT OF SLAVERY IN EGYPT.
I didn't expect that the neo-atheist campaign would become important to my criticism of the left when I started, I resisted getting involved with it for as long as I could avoid it but it became apparent to me that that was not only typical of the self-imposed guarantees of failure, adopting ballot box poison positions and, worse, attitudes, but that materialist atheist scientism was probably the largest contributor to that failure. And that that ideology was not only unpopular, it acted as an acid corroding and eroding the very basis on which egalitarian democracy rest, that ideology inevitably leads to a debasement of the human animal into an object, one which has no transcendent nature above any object which is there for use and exploitation. Indeed, the logical necessities of materialist,atheist, scientism, in order to maintain its insistence on the material monist nature of morality will inevitably deny the reality of morality and, in the fullness of time and the necessity of academic scribblers making a name and career for themselves, leads to such self-contradictory absurdities as eliminative materialism which denies the reality of consciousness, itself. The new atheist fad of the 2000s forced a confrontation of that fact which was, I now see, essential to understanding the difference between American style liberalism and the secular, materialist, scientistic, atheistic ideologies that it was damaged by.
You can't have both. Both cannot work yoked together, they are at cross purposes in their most essential essences, the left has been a house divided and like a dysfunctional family, they have not even understood the most basic reasons for their fall.
In looking into the new atheist fad, the longer history of atheist ideological assertion, I have come to the conclusion that they have merely recapitulated in atheist scientistic terms all of the features of religious follies that atheists have used to attack religion among the shallow and ignorant. Not a few of those self-identified opponents of such things as the assertion of rightness through authority have been among its most flagrant floggers of such authority. I was reminded of that the other day when listening to the pirated online Rachel Maddow show when the Freedom From Religion Foundation had on that eminent thinker, Ron Reagan to promote atheism, the same family business that endlessly promotes atheism through fame fucking, not infrequently attributing atheism to someone who not only never advocated atheism but who actively opposed it (the research pieces I did on the death of Mozart is some of the most personally satisfying to me).
More generally the absurdity of the atheist snobs who call themselves "free thinkers" as their ideology leads so many, perhaps most of them to insist that free thought is a material impossibility completes the argument that they are no less at cross purposes in their self-contradictory claims than the worst of religious orthodoxy has been. That includes the claim that their all too human thought allows them access to a pure, unfiltered view of ultimate reality, whether through something like the Catholic integralist insistence on the character of the Magisterium as discerned by official fiat or the insistence of atheists that science is such an oracle of absolute infallibility unmitigated by the fact that all of all of this is a human interpretation of human experience as humanly processed by those minds the materialists insist aren't there. That "freedom from religion" is not a freedom from religion, it's the recreation of all of those things which religion got wrong in terms of secular, materialist scientism. It is like they're stuck in the same maze and they can't unlearn it.
But religion should never have made that mistake because as early as the book of Exodus there are warnings against the folly of thinking human beings have that kind of immediate discernment of the ultimate reality. God warns Moses that in the form of a human being, he cannot see the face of God and live (Exodus 33:18-30), though he can see the back of God. That's what he was doing while the others were getting up to mischief with a golden calf.
Human beings are able to see lots of things, they cannot, in material form have an unmitigated view of ultimate reality unfiltered through human experience and understanding. Which should lead us to humbly understand we are, none of us, supreme, we are equals. I have absolute confidence that the radical economic leveling of The Law is related to that and an expression of that humility. Which humility is so widely despised by the arrogant confidence of modernism but which is the source of egalitarian democracy and justice, most of all economic justice.
Materialist, scientistic atheism makes moon-calves of us all. It isn't the way out of that maze.