"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Another post and run so no listed credits, I'm afraid. They give pretty full ones at the end of the recording.
I was thinking it was a long time since I'd posted any of one of my favorite radio actors, the late Ed Bishop and I remembered this one. I'd rather be posting an MP3 but this is what I found. It's an adaptation from 1971 and in some ways I think better than the famous movie.
Life for the hipster is breezy,
When everything's held to be cheesy,
Talent-less, so why strive,
To do something alive?
Being cynical's kewl 'cause it's easy.
Update: Maybe I Should Publish A Collection Of These
An elderly pop music critic,
His columns, all copies, eidetic,
When seeing alternative
Thoughts, new, not derivative
Became quite unhinged and splenetic.
IF YOU READ A LOT of the commentary on Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, you'll find one scholar after another after another who draws parallels between this saying or that one or the principle on which it's supposed to lie and Christian moral teachings. I mentioned that having those who hold Christianity in such disdain, as does, in fact, Katha Pollitt, holdup a book the entirety of which we know of and have any text of due to the copying of it by Christian religious - monks, bishops, etc. - you have to wonder how it escaped all of the same criticisms heaped on the Gospels and Epistles, the discrediting of the text and its contents their supposed "inauthenticity" or falseness because their existence, now, is through those same agencies so suspected of dishonesty and their eagerness to corrupt texts like the Gospels or near contemporary authors such as Josephus.
It could be that all of the virtue in the text was due to the Christianization of it by monks copying it, any coherence found there the product of the kind of tampering to obtain internal harmony that is not infrequently speculated to have been done in the case of Christian Scripture.
There are other problems with holding up the "Meditations" in the way Pollitt did, one of those things atheists hold up to diminish and so discredit the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, along with other things they haven't really read like the Analects of Confucius or the Code of Hammurabi. I will assert that there is no way to derive any notions of virtue, such as are contained in the assertions of the text from the materialism the Stoics are said to have had as the basis for their philosophy, there simply is no means of even distinguishing something as being better than something else in materialism, things just are as they are in themselves, that's as far as materialism can get you.
But, then, there is just about no system of materialism that is consistent with the logical necesssities of their basis in the claim that the material stuff of the universe is the only thing there is. There isn't even, really, any way to deduce the truth of that claim in the claim, itself, as it demotes the mind that would have to deduce such a truth to the status of inconsequential motion of physical objects by forces that would create an illusion of that truth in some cases and some other illusion of the opposite truth in other cases, leaving no way to judge the difference between them that wasn't, as well, the mere actions of the particular atoms or molecules that just happened to have come together by random chance only to dissolve back into the physical universe. There was certainly nothing in materialism that would give Marcus Aurelius anything like a "right" to be the Emperor of Rome or for any of the moral positions that a Katha Pollitt and I might agree on. In my case, believing in the God of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the Prophets, including Moses and Israel and Abraham, I've got a basis for holding the rightness of those positions true based on the belief that God so created things. Materialism has no such basis and holds any such beliefs in opposition to their central holding which, if they wanted to be consistent, they couldn't call the truth.
Fats Navarro and his Thin Men: Leo Parker (bars), Tadd Dameron (p), Gene Ramey (b), Denzil Best (d). Recorded in New York, January 1947.
COULDN'T DECIDE WHAT to post as the 10,000th post on this blog is, so I decided to go back to the beginning of my blogging. Here's what I posted on the eleventh day of my first blog, noting that a lot about who I was then has changed now, Noam Chomsky isn't as big a hero to me now as he was then being one of them. Though I do respect him. And I am much more skeptical about the Sandinistas now, especially their leadership in the years after I wrote this. Those have changed but not the conclusion which I am glad to remind myself of as things are even more discouraging now. Neither has my view of the Reagan terror war against the Nicaraguan People and the puppet regime that that brought in.
---------------------------
AGAINST DISCOURAGEMENT
When that stooge of the first Bush regime, Violetta Chamorro, was elected by the defeated population of Nicaragua in 1990 I had one of those crises that plague leftists. Nicaragua had successfully overthrown fascism for a government which instituted literacy and child nutrition programs, abolished the death penalty and began to give the country back to its citizens. They had known that they were going to be targeted by the Government of the United States which had never been able to stand a good example springing up in Latin America. They knew they were in for a long struggle against the most powerful country on Earth. It being the Reagan-Bush I administration, a covert campaign of terror against the people of Nicaragua was as certain as the sunset. After a decade of heroic resistance they were forced into accepting an aristocrat with no governing experience, the figurehead for people who were openly in league with a foreign government which had waged a campaign of terror against them. The Reagan-Bush terrorism campaign had worked.
I mention in passing that Violetta Chamorro is the matriarch of a family of journalists. So much for that guarantee of the peoples' freedom.
In my depression that followed, I heard Noam Chomsky talking about it. He pointed out that a tiny, impoverished population had held out against terrorism longer than the population of the United States would in a similar situation. Prophetic words, as the reaction to Sept. 11th has shown.
I wondered how he did it. How did he keep up the fight decade after decade. I wrote to him asking him how he did do it, apologizing for taking up his time and excusing him from answering, if he didn't have the time. An answer came in less than a week. It wasn't a secret at all. There wasn't a remedy. He said:
"I don't have any right to become discouraged".
That was the totally unexpected and entirely appropriate answer. Discouragement is a self-indulgence as much as it is a reaction to bad news. And it is one that makes the leftist's mind into a tool of the right. Dwelling on my state of mind was not going to help and as a citizen of the United States I had a responsibility to do something useful. I will always be greatful to Chomsky for that kind slap in the face.
To this advice I'll add two more pieces. After M. Ivins. Action, deliberate, practical, effective and unself-interested action is the best remedy to discouragement. It can take as many forms as you can think up but the most practical ones will be the most therapeutic. Everything from writing letters to your representatives to those much less promising ones to NPR. Unglamorous labor, as most of the really important work is, such as working on a voter list or working the phones will do more to fix the hole in your heart than dwelling on it. But you can't get your hopes up too high, you will often fail. That's just the way it is but as a leftist you don't have a choice but to take the chance. If you need comfort, a lot of important change is incremental and the progress is often too small to notice. If that isn't enough, then comfort yourself that at least you're fighting fascism.
The other piece of advice comes from me. Take up meditation. Breath counting is a good place to start. Get a good pair of hearing protectors if you can't find somewhere quiet enough. Cover those with clean socks if you sweat a lot. Metta mediation is after that.
But it's the action that will really change things.
Udate 2021: I'd suggest praying instead. My two go-to prayers are short, mantra like, even, "Love God" and "You should be good to each other." I find those are far more help than some nonsense phrase. Meaning is so meaningful.
CURIOUS TO SEE what the lefty magazines were saying to do what they almost instinctively seem to do,* tearing down Democrats and stupidly enabling Republicans, I saw that Katha Pollitt has a short review of the crackpot kook cult figure, Jordan Peterson's new book which she apparently has read so I don't have to. Not that I had any intention of doing so. Having heard Peterson and knowing that he's a total fraud of the kind who mine the ignorance of the college-credentialed numbskulls (absurd entymological claims about lobsters, Darwinism and a cartoonish, cable-TV Flintstones level ignorance of evolution and biology are his bread and butter) I'm not interested in laying out money for his book or spending anymore of my time reading him.
I am, actually, more interested in Pollitt who is smarter and more honest than the University of Toronto pseudo-scientist (psych prof) and huckster. She is capable of saying some really intelligent things as well as some extremely stupid ones, most of the stupidest things she has said are due to her hatred of religion. It was interesting to see her idea of an alternative to the Incel-boys' meat-headed guru.
When it comes to stern and sober life advice, the best book is still Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which has been guiding people through the struggles of life for at least a thousand years and is, moreover, well-written and short. Its advice can be summarized as follows. Rule 1: Try as hard as you can to be a good, responsible, serious person. Rule 2: Be aware that much of life is out of your control. Rule 3: In any case, soon you will be dead.
My first reaction is to doubt that there has ever been anyone, including Marcus Aurelius who has been able to conduct their lives according to it. I rather doubt that apart from an aphorism here and there, it holds together as a coherent program and a lot of it self-contradictory and certainly not advice that a Roman emperor lived by.
What is most ironic in it being the anti-religious Pollitt who gives that advice is that both what we have as the book, even its name, is due to the efforts of Christians. I don't know the extent to which Pollitt indulges in the atheist discrediting of the Christian gospels due to the absence of a hand-written first-hand manuscript of any of it being available until those fragments and the first full copies but that's entirely closer to the original than we get with the "Meditations" which are not mentioned in any available source until the 10th century when Arethas of Caesarea a Greek bishop in Cappadocia had his old and tattered copy of it copied. We know of it first because he recommended it to the Byzantine Emperor, Leo the Wise, along with one of a large number of classical Greek texts that survive, likely due to this one Bishop among many who preserved much of classical literature.
You can go looking through the text as is translated by various translators and find all kinds of ambiguous advice. In my reading of it, you're both to love and care for your children and be remarkably uninterested in them at the same time. You are apparently supposed to both love them and be indifferent to them. And apparently you're to take every day as if you have no experience to draw on. Here in what's given as #47
XLVII. Keep thyself to the first bare and naked apprehensions of things, as they present themselves unto thee, and add not unto them. It is reported unto thee, that such a one speaketh ill of thee. Well; that he speaketh ill of thee, so much is reported. But that thou art hurt thereby, is not reported: that is the addition of opinion, which thou must exclude.
Which proved to be such a stupid attitude on the part of that cool guy, Barack Obama when he was under attack. I have a feeling that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius never really took that route as he survived a relatively long time in the snake pit of Roman politics.
I see that my child is sick. That he is sick, I see, but that he is in danger of his life also, I see it not.
So, no trips to the emergency room? I can't imagine anyone responsible advising that during this pandemic if your child came down with what were, at first, mild symptoms. This is not good child-rearing advice and seems to me to be more interested in the parents emotional detachment than in the child's welfare.
Thus thou must use to keep thyself to the first motions and apprehensions of things, as they present themselves outwardly; and add not unto them from within thyself through mere conceit and opinion. Or rather add unto them: but as one that understandeth the true nature of all things that happen in the world.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, doublespeak. You're not to bring your life's experience to bear on things? What does he think he's doing in writing his bromides and aphorisms and handy-hints?
While it's my experience of life that it's just the ones who are most conceited and opinionated to believe themselves to be "one that understandeth the true nature of all things," it's also possible for someone to take such advice to stand in cowardly indecision as things fall apart around them. Does anyone believe Trump didn't think he was the smartest person in the country? Or that the stoic granitic monument Robert Mueller took every opportunity he could to not hold him accountable, striking that disgusting pose in front of the Congressional oversight committees when he finally deigned to appear before them?
It's tempting to go through more of the famous advice and it would be fun to subject it to reality testing, something which I would guess such as have advised letting the Meditations rule your life have never started to do. I have to wonder if Katha Pollitt, like most such people, have never really read it.
I can tell you one thing, if I were Marcus's kids and needed some advice from an older, more experienced person, he wouldn't have been someone I'd expect to get it from.
What Peterson's cultists, the Incel boys need isn't some Marcus Aurelius, it's some hard, physical labor in their lives, get them away from all the screens and each others' whining self-pitying tantrums. Hard work that wears you out enough to sleep and a cold shower when you start getting horny, Grow up and maybe someone will want to put up with you and even have sex with you. And if you want to see someone who is seriously fucked up, that would be Jordan Peterson who wanting to push his dopey daughter's meat diet scheme got into some seriously screwed up stuff.
What has, presumably, ruled Jordan Peterson's life, psychology is a pseudo-scientific superstition of the materialist-atheist "enlightenment" as it rots into the kind of thing I noted a week or so back Bertrand Russell predicted was coming as the real science of physics came up against the limits of human possibility. My first piece of advice apart from that is to be skeptical of anything any university psychology teacher claims. Any advice that they give will be sound on a purely chance basis.
IS THERE ANYTHING more amusing than that Mr. Hip NYC c. 1962's got real issues with trans people and he's attacking his fellow straight "brain trusters" because they don't have his issues with them? He's got a real fixation on it, apparently. One of them pointed out he was a cis-gendered straight white male and he went full straight white male in Trump's age cohort over it. Just can't take it that his wagon's done broke down and it was never that good to start with.
And with that, I'll announce I've reinstalled my filters.
Posting this early today because I'm going to be busy for a while.
I WILL NEVER forgive pop music for the ear worm of Tompall Glaser's one-hit wonder which keeps going through my head. Though I should blame the idiot I worked with who played the radio all day the month it charted, even more. I got more crap in my memory by accident than ever got in there intentionally. I can hear a song once and get it in my ear, if I hear it from a month of top 40 radio it stays there forever to recur like a cold sore. Why was he attracted to that pretentious California girl in the first place? Though the song writer did, in fact, identify some of the most ludicrous pretension of my generation in the lyric, maybe that's why it's going through my head as I've got the cheap, street hawker knock-off version of that thrown at me. Geesh! what a bunch of suckers we were for that sales pitch. Maybe if more of us had actually read Thoreau we might have been more sales resistant. Maybe it's the piece mocking the myth of self-reliance I've been avoiding writing because it means I'll have to dip into the transcendentalists, again.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, count yourself as lucky to have avoided a really awful song.
Update: The endless division of crap pop music into sub genres is one of the pretensions to have come into it with the profession of "pop criticism." To talk about the pretensions of my generation and the 3rd rate scribblers who got jobs in what were essentially ad flyers for the industry. I remember when one of those in jazz insisted on nothing that wasn't in 4/4 time and holding to a rigid early 20th century style of harmony could be jazz. He never played or sang a note of jazz but he was an expert, don't ya know. He did write an early book about ragtime but, like jazz, even the revivalists didn't have any intention of staying in his pseudo-academic definitions. Those who can't and never could write almost all of the "criticism" of the commercial type.
Update 2: Oh, for pity sake, I played plenty of rock, I got lots of laughs with my parodies of In a gadda da vida and Norwegian Wood. I couldn't take that crap seriously but I could play it.
I spend a lot of time pointing out the dishonesty and corruption of Harvard Law School products that I feel it's honest to point out that they also produce a few people like the wonderful, great Katie Porter. Though I think Harvard Law doesn't deserve the credit for what makes her wonderful, I think that's down to her character and sense of morality, fairness being a product of morality.
CAN'T WRITE? The first month of my blogging in 2006 I said, "Pursue the possible, eschew the unobtainable." Tell me the left wouldn't have won if that had been its motto for the entire 20th century.
My writing teacher said anyone who writes something is a writer. Works for me. I say everyone who writes isn't a thinker, works with you. Those are the right prepositions.
AS I'VE POINTED OUT before, there really needs to be a word for lying by pretending someone said something they didn't say because it's one of the most common tactics of liars. I mean other than lying about what someone said. Maybe something like disimlesating.
I never realized how common it was till I went online. I think the dissimelsators believe they're being clever. Of course, it could just be reading deficiency among the TV formed and so deformed minds of my generation and later. They really hate it when you diss movie stars, which is why I seldom lose an opportunity to do it.
IF YOU HAVEN'T HEARD IT yet, I'd recommend you go to MSNBC and, or YouTube and listen to Rachel Maddow's reporting about the scandals in the Secret Service. I'd give a link but for some reason that's not working so well for me, today. I hadn't remembered or had never learned the extent to which Richard Nixon corrupted the agency during his crime spree. It's always worth remembering how far back the corruption of the Republican-fascist party goes and how obvious it was and how the media, those watch-dogs of democracy (as they'll never fail to assert themselves to be) have let the fascists get away with stuff to an incredible extent.
That today's Secret Service is apparently little to nothing to do with the Hollywood bullshit propaganda about them shouldn't be a surprise. Hollywood is the capital city of lies, well, apart from New York City and DC, the locus where the "news" part of the media operates. But Hollywood and its bull shit like that Eastwood movie is what misinforms the majority of Americans, producing memorable lies that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with propaganda promoted by those with an interest in lying.
I'm thinking of turning this into a regular thing, only if I tried to make it comprehensive it would take over the entire blog. There should be something like the great and ever important Retraction Watch for exposing the lies that come out of the entertainment media because that's what most people watch and consume and are manipulated by and which packages lies most successfully for easy consumption. If I were young I might try it. But, as I said, it would be a full time job.
IF STUPY KNEW ANYTHING about the Boswell Sisters he'd know that Connie Boswell, the only one of them who continued with a singing career into the 1950s, was one of those popular singers of the big band era who went into eclipse due to the pop music industry going pretty much rock 'n roll. Pop music follows the money. None of her songs that I've ever heard is remotely rock and roll, it's pretty much of an earlier inspiration. This is the last song she did that charted in 1954:
Doesn't sound like she was trying to fit in with the young'uns, much.
That 1930s cut from the Boswell Sisters he claims led to rock uses a pre-existing blues slang term for "sex" cleaning that up by relating it to the movement of a boat on the water. It has little to do with what happened when the white boys watered down the blues taking everything interesting out of it. I don't know if that mid-western DJ who attached the term to white boy bastardized blues knew that when he popularized the term for commercial pop music from the 50s.
And he the pop music "critic."
TYPING TENS OF thousands of words a week, I've found that the part of speech that is most likely to go wrong is the preposition. It might be mildly interesting to ask professional editors if that's their experience but too mild for me to ask. I think I'll leave that one there since it's annoying the guy who trolls me. If I cared I'd go over his and Duncan's typing to see what that might show. I did notice a pretty serious gaff in Duncan's the other day but figured it wasn't worth pointing out.
They don't seem to be hiring a lot of professional editors these days. If they figure that writers can do that in the age of computers, HA! I find that the second largest problem is f verbs no longer agreeing with their subjects and similar non-agreement relics of incomplete and incompetent writer-editing. Me being the incompetent editor. If I won the lottery I'd hire an editor to go over my stuff but not the tireless little meter-maid of orthography and other mechanical tasks who seems to be auditioning for a job that doesn't exist and for which he would never be considered. I'd require an editor not be a compulsive liar, to start with.
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that the Palestinian-Israeli war is going to end, there are gangsters in charge of both sides, fascists in power in Israel and armed cults on the other side. It is a chronic disaster and the People suffer, more the Palestinian People because its side has less power, organization and outside support than the Israeli side does. The only prospect for ending it would be if all external powers on all sides stopped supporting the side they are supporting and that is not going to happen. It was a disaster that was predicted more than seventy years ago by a lot of very smart people before I ever heard of either side and their predictions have proven to be quite accurate. Unless that funding of the sides stops, both in money and military hardware, there is every reason for both sides to continue with the killing, Israel has tried to bomb Palestinians into surrender for decades and it has not happened. Palestine has tried to bomb Israel for just as long, giving the gangsters in Israel an excuse to steal more land - this go-round started with Israeli gangsters driving Palestinians out of Jerusalem from what I can figure from what I have read. Not that it's easy to figure out, the multi-party politics of Israel is only the beginning of things, mixing in various Heredi political-religious cults, the Chief Rabbinate (they should drop the pretense that that political-Mafia entity is religious anymore) etc. etc. etc. The predictable turn of things in Israel, from aspiring egalitarian democracy to military fascism is matched by what has happened to the Palestinian side of things. Generations of war leads ever away from democracy and to gangster rule. There is something almost irresistible in a militarized mindset that drives democratic inclinations out, those military officers who resist that habit of thought must rank as some of the most idealistic of all public officials. Political science is a pseudo-science but that formulated as a rule is probably more reliable than the standard they're using in much of physics and the genuine life sciences, these days.
If there's one thing Americans can learn from this, it's the calls for smaller political parties to wield power here are begging for a whole host of problems, as if one of the two isn't enough of that, now. Third parties as an ideal solution for political problems is a romantic myth and a delusion.
I don't remember who it was I heard say recently that even with the re-emergence of the troubles in Northern Ireland due to the English-fascist buffoons' Brexit, he had faith that the so-called sectarian divide in Northern Ireland had a prospect of ending* but he had no reason to believe the one between the Palestinian and Israeli sides could be solved. I would point out that it was the fascists in London who reignited the problem there.
The only way I can see for the Israelis and Palestinians to come to a peaceful resolution is for all sides to simultaneously stop sending money and arms and military aid to both sides. And that's not going to happen. The interests of the governments and individuals who don't live there are too entrenched to change things. Watch how it is used to try to undermine the Biden administration. I'd say watch how he doesn't manage to navigate his way through it, though if there's one thing I've been pleasantly surprised at, it is that I have underestimated Joe Biden repeatedly. If he can find a way to make progress, even if it's the kind that Jimmy Carter managed, he'll have done something I never thought was possible. I'd love to see that happen but I'm not expecting it.
And that's just the beginning of why I haven't written anything about it. I am increasingly angry at the effect it has on American politics.
* I hope it ends in Northern Ireland and Scotland leaving the UK and forming an economically beneficial egalitarian Celtic confederation with the Republic of Ireland in which equality is a legal guarantee for all of the citizens of all three countries. If that happened I think it's likely that Wales might opt to join it, leaving the English to stew in their rigid caste based inequality. But that's just another pipe dream that no one else I know of is talking about. I'm past the point of mistaking romantic notions for reality. Romantic notions get people killed, too.
More and more I think that the real basis of moral governance isn't found in democracy, it's found in egalitarianism.
BEEN MISSING A LOT OF SLEEP lately, yesterday wasn't a very successful catch up day. Sometimes you just can't force yourself to do things. And I also decided to do some work on my computer, after feeling so proud about navigating the upgrade to my operating system. Bad combination of pride and fall which I should have known about if I hadn't been so sleep deprived. I won't be attempting anything like that for at least a few days.