Saturday Night Radio Drama Plus - Malachy McKenna - The Quiet Land

 

The Quiet  Land

 

In the hidden Ireland off the new EU infrastructure of motorway and ring-road, two elderly farmers lean on a fence and talk in the low-key code of near neighbours; and the transcript of their talk, which is the text of this year’s outright winner in the annual PJ O’Connor competition, is a little masterpiece of hint and intimation, for these men are more vulnerable than venerable in a country where old age has no cachet.

The Quiet Land is also a master-class, served as it is by a brace of actors - Kevin Flood and Barry Cassin - who’ve accumulated between them a hundred and thirty years of rich theatrical experience. It’s authored by Malachy McKenna, a player-turned-playwright, who’s best known for his film Tillsonberg. The play is his first piece for radio.

Producer Aidan Mathews

There's a little bit of an introduction with Kevin Flood on the occasion of his 90th birthday that gives a little bit of an idea of what being a professional radio actor was like.  

I'll remind you that there are a lot of available plays at the podcast tab, some of them are better than others but most of those I've heard are worth the time.  How much of TV can you say that about? 

Update:  Meet The Author

Malachy McKenna in what I guess could be considered a five minute play:

Someone Objects To My Modest Proposal - Hate Mail

ANYONE WHO WOULD NOT WANT to see what a musical based on Titus Andronicus in which the Trump family and its lackeys were substituted for the characters in the play would be like has no soul and no sense of theater nor of fun.  I would certainly encourage Randy Rainbow to consider the project, though I would avoid any of the current Broadway composers for the music, their music sucks.   Just think of the staging possibilities, I've mentioned Melania's blood Christmas set.  And instead of baking them into a pie you could turn Donny jr. and Eric into cheese burgers and have Trump preside over the feast like this:

At this point I'd have a hard time calling a re-tread of something done to death as much as West Side Story has been a "revival."   It might be one in the same sense that you could call them pumping who knows what chemicals into the remains of Lenin one too. 

I Am Asked

. . .  what I think of Milo Yiannopolous announcing that he's an ex-gay "ex-sodomite" to which I say I haven't thought about that piece of white-supremacist detritus from England in years.   If he's gone straight all I can say is he's your problem now.  

I will take the opportunity to ask why he or Gavin McGinnis are allowed in the United States, they should be deported if they are still here and permanently barred from entry.   You can include Andrew Sullivan on that list, as far as I'm concerned, too.   Let the UK shatter, let an egalitarian, democratic Celtic confederation rise,  let England live with the garbage it has produced (McGinnis included, Canada should deport him for the same reason).   The Americas should be a fascism-free zone.  If we start the campaign now maybe in three generations we can have wiped it out.  Start by getting rid of whatever white supremacists have migrated here and are deportable.

Hate Mail

SOMEONE DEMANDS I tell them what I'd have them teach instead of Romeo and Juliet, to which I might suggest All's Well That Ends Well or The Dream or any number of other ones. I think I'd have paid better attention to Twelfth Night than I did the sappy love story in which a good majority of the participants would count as criminally insane today.  Fodder for an even dumber musical.   As I recall they taught us R&J in ninth grade, Freshman year in high school - I doubt even today they would dare to give an explanation of the meaning of lots of the words in it and the controversy those would bring.  It's kind of counter-productive when you are supposed to be teaching literature but don't dare define the words.  And I don't mean just the near ubiquitous error of thinking the question "wherefore" means the besought girl is wondering where he is - an error even Roger Ebert made, as I recall.  It's a good example of how the meaning of one of the most famous speeches in the English language is so easily overlooked by not understanding one word.

I'm not sure that teaching 16th century literature to brats in the throes of puberty is the most efficient use of their time. Not to mention verse drama, but, well, they should be encouraged to read it, eventually.

Actually, if it were me, I'd choose Robinson Jeffers' Medea which I think would probably have been more engaging.  The language of Jeffers is a lot clearer, requiring less of footnotes which a large percentage of the class won't look at and, so, think the silly bint is asking the absent Romeo where he is.   Jeffers' use of a chorus of three women is better than most translations of the original Greek drama gets it.   The messages of the evil that comes from breaking faith and how seeking revenge is bottomless in its toll are probably more useful than young love stupidly doing stuff and feeling sorry for itself and suicide given as a remedy.    I wouldn't teach The Crucible - I think they gave that to us in tenth grade - without pointing out that Arthur Miller totally lied about the actual event to make his play, the same with Inherit the Wind - which they gave us in eleventh grade.   If there's one thing I hate in literature, it's lying about actual events and people because even those with PhDs are too stupid to understand that movies aren't real - or plays.   The less close to pretending to deal with real history and real people the drama gets, the safer it is.

The Roberts Court Making Sure We Won't Even Be Able To Save Democracy Through The Ballot

WITH THE ROBERT'S COURT'S ATTACKS ON DEMOCRACY, on voting rights, on the rights of us all to honest government from the Ivy-League Bush II duo of John Roberts and Samuel Alito issued yesterday, the Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court has cemented in place voter suppression by white-supremacists, by Republican-fascists for who knows how long.  With that, clearly what they're doing to try to rat-fuck the 2022 election to hand the Senate back to Republican-fascist control and the House as well - what they're doing while biding their time to overturn Roe - which isn't in the cards until they have gotten back 100% Republican-fascist control because it will lead to a voter backlash that they want to suppress possibly endangering Republican-fascist control.   They're nothing if not long-term planners, just as those who put them on the court were.  Here's what I said about that in June, 2006

EVERYONE IN THE ROOM KNEW THEY WERE LYING

Molly Ivins' most enduring statement might turn out to be her observation that everyone in Washington DC ends up saying the same things. One of the same things today is that the Senate Judiciary hearings for Supreme Court Justices have become a Kabuki dance. What do you think the chances are that even three of the parrots of the DC press corps knows anything about the high art of Kabuki? Given that within the past year we have been witness to two of these shows and what those were like I'd like to suggest we pass up the obvious "theater of the absurd" designation and go straight to "charades".

But charades isn't the right word either. In charades while the player says nothing they make gestures that are designed to get the audience to say what the player is thinking. In these hearings there were a flood of words and few gestures, give or take a staged bout of tears, and the exercise was to make the audience NOT say what everyone in the room and beyond knew was the subject of the play.

Roberts and Alito lied every single time they verbally mimed the pose of not having made up their minds before hearing a case. These kobe cattle were bred and hand raised to provide the most predictable results. They were nominated into the entirely predictable and safe Republican hands to be put on the court to join Scalia and Thomas to gut the Bill of Rights and Civil Rights amendments and to continue the Republican handover of the country to the oligarchs and their corporate properties.

Everyone in the room knew they were lying. Such press as had any knowledge of the Court and things judicial knew they were lying though I'm prepared to concede that the cabloid clack might not have even known what the Court was. The large majority of us who listened to the entire farce knew they were lying. And now the lies will continue as they do exactly what everyone knew they would do. The very rare times that one of them has a bit of a woozy stomach and does something slightly unpredictable will be held onto like a life raft to prove the myth of judicial independence but that won't happen very often.

The lesson for the left is that Earl Warren is dead. He's been dead a good long while now. We can stop pretending that the Supreme Court is going to be anything but the hand maiden of the corporate oligarchy. If we are going to fight this its going to be through the ballot and if not there God save us.

Simple And Easy Are A Curse On Both Their Houses

If you aren’t struggling with the text, you aren’t engaging the text.

Hosea was a hard read then. No reason it shouldn’t be now, too.

RMJ

To which I say , Amen.   And to add that a large part of religion and anti-religion in the English speaking people, the French, almost as much, not as much with the German (I'm totally ignorant of  anti-religion in other languages) is exactly that kind of refusal to struggle with the text, to engage it seriously, dealing with the difficulties, the hard to believe, the impossible to believe, the clearly brilliantly insightful, what in it leads me to believe that large parts of it are, for want of a better concept of them "the Word of God" certainly more impressive and shockingly clear than anything I'd guess people would come up with on their own, unaided.   As I've pointed out any number of times, while science can come up with blindingly clear thinking about its legitimate subject matter, at times, the subject matter of real science is minutely focused and specific and limited, the subject matter of religion, of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition, is far more complex and far from the ability of science to use its method on it.  Complexity is baked into the scope of religion in a way that it is removed from science by design, by common agreement and, if they are exercised with honesty and wisdom, by the methods of science.  

There is no better way of discerning the catestrophic reality of human-caused global warming or the dire necessity of social distancing and masking in the current pandemic (which are still necessary if this thing isn't to kill even more than needs to) than science, there is nothing else that will come up with a prevention or, maybe, someday a cure.   But it can't tell you why it is immoral to not do everything possible to prevent its spread or to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere - one of the idiocies of making science the last authority in the law and politics is that it can't do that, the experts doing that have to rely on morality being commonly held by an effective majority of people.  And people are notoriously bad at discerning that moral truth and notoriously easy to gull into doing the opposite.   

And if you think I'm holding that out as a guarantee if you follow a religious path, well, think again because so many taken as religious figures in the United States, Canada, elsewhere, have been some of the most immoral in that regard, people like the incumbent head of the Archdiocese of New York, like various Orthodox Rabbis, slews of TV preachers prove that is no less a difficult claim to make - and a dishonest one - than claiming that being a professional scientist will guarantee of it. 

------------------------

In one of my responses last night, i brought up the condemnation of the neo-integralist vulgarian, director Franco Zeffirelli's slam against Martin Scorsese for his direction of The Last Temptation of Christ "that Jewish cultural scum of Los Angeles which is always spoiling for a chance to attack the Christian world."  No doubt something the idiot who provoked me into mentioning it never heard of as he sentimentally recalled his introduction to Romeo and Juliet watching the 1968 extravaganza that Zeffirelli made of it.  Which especially romanticized the suicides in the typical cinematic manner.

What is especially funny to me about that is that the ultra-conservative Catholic Zeffirelli was in every way an example of de-Christianized Catholicism of a type that Vatican II tried to steer the church away from and, though I have no idea what his profession of religion might be, Scorsese in his hard complexity is, to my thinking, a far better example of Christian thinking than the easy show of easy piety that the other might make.  I also don't know what he does other than his directing and interviews, so I have no idea the extent to which he does it.

The book and film of The Last Temptation shows one thing about the point that RMJ so excellently made, that writing a novel or making a movie of the novel is probably not a very effective way to precisely get across what you are thinking unless your thoughts are slight, superficial and unimportant in a way that religion cannot get away with being without that religion being damaged by it.  To bring up the things that someone like the author and director do in the movies is a way to try to imagine what the Crucifixion of Jesus was like for how they imagine Jesus as being.  Which is, by the way, in none of our thinking of Jesus, guaranteed to be much like the truth of it - something that religious authorities and figures should realize applies to their imagined Jesuses as well.   I do, though, think that when you do think about it within the confines of a novel or a movie you're asking for that kind of trouble and, given the popularity of the movies and, to a far lesser extent novels, the potential for getting a strong reaction to your conception is far greater.    As somewhere in this series, I believe it is, Walter Brueggemann points out the people putting together the canon of the New Testament included four different, hardly uniform views of Jesus in the four Gospels - not to mention the differences in the other books so chosen and the differences in those have led to all kinds of difficulties.   Science has those too as the various schools of legitimate science and illegitimate sciences proves too.

I won't go on piling up examples of complexity and difficulties in various areas of thinking - it would be never ending.   But to reject something because it has those, as it generates heated and, in opposition to the teachings of Jesus, violent conflict, if applied evenly in all of life would lead you to be as insipid and stupid as the choice to be an insouciant. superficial person of fashion will lead you to being. No one's going to stop you from being a superficial fop, you'll no doubt be as happy as you choose to be stupid and to focus on the stupid.   But you should be glad that not everyone chooses that route.   I have not recently noted something that I early on noticed in engaging with other college-credentialed people of the English speaking world when first going online, how they figured that the often heard freshman style whine "But that's haaarrrrrrd!" sufficed as a means of rejecting something.  It should be the slogan of secular, popular culture and easy, facile piety, too.

He's Not The Stupidest Troll But He Might Be The Biggest A-Hole Online

WHETHER IT IS DYSLEXIA  or dementia or just parents who let the idiot brat watch too much TV and to not do his homework, I'm not the one who called the song the
"stupidest song ever" that was the request of the man who commissioned the song, Robert Altman an order which the song writer said he could fill:

While “Suicide Is Painless” has dark lyrics, its has a pretty melody. Oddly enough, composer Johnny Mandel told NPR the song was supposed to be stupid. Why? Director Robert Altman wanted it that way.

“‘It should be the stupidest song ever written,'” Mandel recalls Altman saying. “I said, ‘Well, I can do stupid.’ He says, ‘The song should be called ‘Suicide Is Painless.’”

Altman felt his version of the song was insufficient. Mandel recalled “[Altman] said, ‘Ah, but all is not lost. I’ve got a 15-year-old kid who’s a gibbering idiot. He’s got a guitar. He’ll run through this thing like a dose of salts.'” Ultimately, Altman’s teenage son, Mike Altman, earned $1 million from writing the song. Meanwhile, his father only made $700,000 for directing the film.

As for the accusation that I said the song made people commit suicide, that's just Simels' lying about something I didn't say anywhere in the piece I wrote about an hour after hearing the news this morning.  Just to show you the kind of shit I've been dealing with for the past twelve or so years coming out of the self-appointed merry prankster of Duncan Black's blog.  It's been pretty much constant for that time.

The Text Can Die As Much From Unthinking UnChallenging Agreement As Easily As It Can From Pat Refusal To Consider It

ONE OF THE INTERESTING things that happened during Walter Breuggmann's second lecture on Jeremiah, talking about the "plucking up and tearing down" part of Jeremiah's commission was when he pointed out the similarities between that and the book of Hosea from a century earlier.   Specifically at this point he focused on the metaphor of Israel's relationship to God in terms of infidelity to a marriage vow that conditions a husband's support for the wife on her fidelity.  Brueggemann's careful at letting his audience know that he knows what is wrong with the metaphor from our, current understanding and thinking all through his presentation of it.  But that didn't stop a member of the group from strenuously complaining about him citing the language of the text.   In her favor I'll point out that at the start of the short Q&A at that point he joked that they were like seminarians avoiding eye contact with him.  I will also note that later in the course of revisiting it later in the session, he thanked her for bringing it up.

I won't go into this except to point out that her objection, to which Brueggemann says there are lots of ways to deal with that including just refusing to read the text of talk about it - which he said was OK with him - is one of the problems with why the current culture refuses to deal with much of anything that it doesn't find pleasant and easy.   I certainly agree with her objection to the image, which Brueggemann notes he shares with her too, but the exchange is a great example of the kind of thing that has to be overcome to go over these texts and find what is useful about them for us now.   She probably would have said some of the things she said better if she'd had a chance to do it in writing.  My preference is always for written texts that are reviewed and considered by the writer to say what they mean, impromptu interviews and Q&A, the talk-show style that has so damaged our politics (frickin' presidential "debates"!)  on the stupid assumption that they are more sincere than careful use of words.  I think she and Brueggemann  were on the same side something which the language that he, as a scholar, had to use to discuss the words of Hosea may confuse some.   I hope she realized the value of the discussion because it's something that needs to happen or the texts die of agreement or pat rejection.

Suicide Is Not Merely A Matter Of "Rights"

SINCE I'VE NEVER had the experience of not being from a large, very close family I don't know how often one of the down sides of that comes for those who aren't from a family like mine.  The down side is that you are far more likely to experience things that may never happen in a smaller, less closely connected family, addiction of those you love and are obligated to try to help, addiction leading to long prison terms, deaths from terrible diseases of those you have an obligation to care for and now in my family the suicide by a young person whose motive was depression.  I got that news this morning.

Despite what that "stupidest song ever written" claims, suicide isn't painless, it isn't victimless, I would count many of those who go through with it or try to were likely victims of the romanticization and, yes, promotion of it through literature, through pop culture, through the idiocy that has peddled it as some kind of political cause, a "right" - I may try to discern the history of that promotion as a modern cause and virtue, testing my suspicion that it may largely be yet another distortion of "liberalism" under secularism, just to say what I will have to overcome in order to tell the truth if it doesn't turn out to be that.  I've mentioned before one of those Fred Friendly round table things in which a congressman I admire, Barney Frank got into it with one I despised and still do, Henry Hyde, in which Barney Frank responded to Hyde's "right to life" language by asking where that "right" resided if not in the individual who wanted to end his own life.  Which is an excellent political and legal and logical argument if you want to argue for the decriminalization of suicide, which I'm neither entirely against nor for, nor easy about as it is happening in various places.  I can easily see the "right" to end your life being turned into an obligation under economic or other coercive force or through the encouragement of commercial "culture".  

The matter of an "obligation" of those who are expensive through their needs to live or through inconvenience to other people who need to care for them has given me another issue that, much as I respect Frank and much as I despise the memory of Hyde, might be a more moral and responsible way to address it.  Far from being an individual right exercised by an autonomous individual, the results of suicide, especially that of a young person, a young adult in this case, is not confined to that person.  One of my brothers asked me not to let his children know because one of them is very depressed and stressed right now and he worries about the effect of the news on her - perhaps those in a small family who are not close wouldn't get that.  It is known that one suicide in a community, at a school, will lead to others.  The most famous literary double-suicide of Romeo and Juliette is an example of that - I fucking hate that play and not only because I've read and seen it too often.  I think teaching that in school is a big mistake, West Side Story is an even stupider replacement because it lacks any literary merit contained in the play. The depravity of online life has led to evil people setting up others for suicide for the gratification of those who set them up when they carry through on it and a myriad of other depraved expressions of "freedom" "liberty" and "The fucking First Amendment" as the depravity that "rights" talk can easily turn to.

I think considering suicide in terms of the pain, the possible life ending pain that it causes to others, considering THAT as a real life consequence of a suicide should be stressed at least as much as the "right" to autonomy imagined by the champions of suicide, though how you gain or exercise autonomy by ending your possibility of autonomy is something I'd like to ask them to explain.   The obligation that the suicide has to other people who they will harm by the act should at least be fully discussed and popularized as a way of thinking about it. 

Dusan Bogdanovic, Chromatic Prelude and Fugue (with a Cloud), Judicael Perroy, Guitar

 

Back To Brueggemann With A Side Journey

LEST ANYONE think that I've given up on the Brueggemann lectures on Jeremiah, I haven't.  I would recommend a free resource to that book so caught up in the invasion and exile of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires an old but useful book, Assyrian and Babylonian Literature: Selected Translations by Robert Francis Harper, including the introductory material.  I don't know the extent to which his thinking and research may have been overtaken by more recent scholarship - we're all at the mercy of what the experts of a given time think about things we don't know much about but it's bound to be more informed about it than I am.  One of the things I've concluded is that sometimes the old, old-fashioned experts are no more and in some cases less biased than the newer ones, sometimes that is reversed and it's hard to know which is which until you've read a lot more than I'm ever going to be able to dedicate to this side-issue.  My habit of looking for supplementary material can turn into a bad habit of getting side tracked if not derailed entirely.  Especially when I've got work in the garden to do.  I refuse to take Voltaire's advice of tending my own garden while the world burns.  He can go to hell on that one. 

I have decided to list links to the four lecture-sermon-Q&As for those who want to listen ahead of where I'm getting with them. 

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

 

I would also recommend you read commentaries on Jeremiah from a number of sources.  I'm finding the one in the Christian Community Bible, from a 1970s liberation theological point of view to be congenial and interesting in both its agreements with Brueggemann and its differences.   I am finding the book to be as complex as he warned it was in his first lecture, going through five kings into a central catastrophe around which the entire Old Testament was consolidated and expanded into the enormously complex and varied entity we have now.  I think it is one of the most useful things I've read in relation to the American and democratic catastrophe we are in the midst of even as our natural world is catastrophically altered and perhaps destroyed at our own hands, our own prophets suppressed by the last four Republican-fascist presidents, from Reagan, the Democrats unable to do much about it due to the corruption of our democracy mentioned here earlier today. 

On The Week Before The 4th of July

JOE AND MIKA are not two MSNBC figures I much listen to much but I listened to their discussion with Adam Serwer talking about his book that just came out pointing out that the cruelty of Trump's regime was the point of it, the key to his success, the key to the haters putting a repulsive figure like Trump into the American presidency.   Serwer said several interesting things, pointing out that there was an appetite for Trump's level of hate politics even before Trump ran for the presidency.  Given that the GOP absorbed figures like Jesse Helms and Strom Thermond with no difficulty,  that it has been the home of racists, goons, thugs and actual neo-Nazis,  that it had produced the Nixon presidency and that others like Reagan, Bush I, even Mitt Romney (whose anti-Latino punch line figures in the discussion) who tried and succeeded by practicing the worst of racist politics, that's not news to anyone who pays attention to the news.  And he pointed out something that's extremely important and unmentionable in America's myth-based politics, that Republicans took advantage of the structure of our politics, the "cooked-in" aspects of it that allow one party to rule even when they lose elections and represent a minority of voters.  

I've held all along that the Republicans knew what they were doing because what they did was done by the slave-owners during legal slavery and during the de-facto slavery of the Jim Crow era, something we'd all be better off if we admitted it was the old "slave power" identified by the abolitionists clutching victory from the jaws of their defeat in the Civil War and imposing a modified slave system on a large part of the country up till the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed and became law, up till the Rehnquist and Roberts courts started dismantling those in favor of the white supremacists who have exercised out-sized power in American politics from the time of the Second Continental Congress which wrote our Constitution, putting that power into the hands of the slave owners, by plan, by intention and with full knowledge that what they were doing would insure that the potential of a racist, self-serving, cleptocracy to do what the Republican-fascists have done could do it as long as those structures put into place to do that persisted.  THAT is the real story of the Founders, the framing of the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution to which Barbara Jordan famously put her entire faith in even as everyone forgets that as a prelude to that ringing declaration, the changes to the Constitution and by laws such as those very Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were included in it.   

Her endorsement was contingent on the non-continuance of that power given by the Constitution, through the anti-democratic structure of the Senate, with their power to confirm "Justices" to a Supreme Court which was designed to be unanswerable to The People, with their power to give a minority the ability to thwart the will of the majority and through the various powers to corrupt elections and the delegates to the House of Representatives and the presidency through the Electoral College ALL OF WHICH ARE THERE AT THE INSISTENCE OF AND FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE SLAVE POWER AND AT THE EXPENSE OF, FIRST BLACK PEOPLE, BUT ULTIMATELY ANY MAJORITY THAT WAS NOT FRIENDLY TO SLAVERY AND THEIR OTHER PRIVILEGES.   That's the problem of writing a good line that can have the impact that Barbara Jordan's famous declaration of total confidence in the Constitution can be, that if it cuts off a larger and more complex conditioning of the catch phrase, that slogan can be turned into its own worst enemy.   

I have thought of writing about the chasm between the language of the Constitution and the atrocious government it has given us and the Declaration of Independence which will be read out by various hacks and flacks and talking heads on NPR on the 4th of July.  I have recently focused on the infamous lapse between Jefferson's declaration that All men are created equal and his vile character as a slave holder whose devotion to slavery grew and grew even as that of some of his fellow slave owning founders diminished.  I have come to the conclusion that when he was looking for a foundation for his claims of the right of all men to live, liberty and the pursuit of happiness he, in his undoubted brilliance could not find any such foundation except through it being the desire of God, there being no such thing that can be discerned by science or mathematics, the gods of his slave-friendly enlightenment. If he had been able to identify a secular source of what he certainly wanted to be held self-evident about HIS rights and those of his fellow aristocrats, he wouldn't have made others like John Adams and James Madison squirm a bit at the mention of God in terms of politics.

I think the fact that that Declaration was the thing identified by The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. as an unfulfilled promissory note to the future is the most important thing about it and that the anti-democratic governmental structure that is used by the Republican-fascists, the Roberts Court, lower courts to return us to a de facto Jim Crow era in which that payment will be continually deferred is the most important thing to understand about it.  And the reason they have not been made to pay, even as a majority of Americans want equality is found exactly in those anti-democratic features of the Constitution.   If we are not going to overturn those atrocities, the Electoral College, the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate, the life-termed, Supreme Court relieved of being answerable to The People, which has, except in the briefest of eras, been a bulwark of first slavery, then Jim Crow, now neo-Jim Crow, the gerrymandering, voter-suppressing state governments, etc. then we should at least be fully aware of what we face and why our best efforts are so easily thwarted by Republican-fascists and their lying minions of the media.  

That's what we should be thinking of in this week before the 4th and on the 5th and beyond.   The haters have always had a friend in the Constitutionally set-up system.  That is by intent.  I would recommend everyone read the great abolitionist Wendell Phillips' book on that, The Constitution A Pro-Slavery Compact  which is free for the reading and whose substance is, with the fewest of amendments, as relevant today as it was when he published it.   The abolition of slavery was important though easily gotten around, especially with the help of the Court and the Senate.  Especially as Rutherford Hayes used the Electoral College to enable the newly defeated slave power.  As, no doubt, Madison and the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia planned they would be able to. 

And More Hate Mail Answered

I CAN'T SAY that it is the best way to discern that a huge swath of college-credentialed culture is decadent that so many of them buy into the ideological demotion of minds that is an absolute imperative of their atheism, their materialism, their scientism but it has to be among the most absolute expressions of that decadence that they, in their lofty pursuit of the activity of their minds insist on that.

While it's obvious from their activity as well as their words that they certainly don't want anyone to take such claims seriously as they say what they do - CERTAINLY NOT IN REGARD TO THEM AND THEIR IDEOLOGICAL PREFERENCES WHICH ARE AS MUCH A PRODUCT OF THEIR SELF-DEBUNKED MINDS AS THE WORST OF RELIGIOUS OR POLITICAL FANATICISM - their claims not only should but must be held to apply to them.   That their materialist-scientistic-atheist claims are totalizing in their claims, which flow out of an ideological monism far more confining than any reasoned belief in monotheism, means that they cannot be allowed to cut themselves and their ideology any leeway, if they do that or even insist that their own ideology doesn't fall into the same insignificance that they claim all other products of the demoted minds of humans do, then their own ideology has to be false.   It must degrade their own claims or it cannot be true.  The same is not true of monotheism in which there is real truth and real falseness, real right and real wrong, real importance with consequences to it attached and real insignificance which is foolishness of the sort that has so enthralled modern academia as atheism, materialism and scientism have become so common to it.  When people wonder how so many modernists were supporters of fascism, such local variants of that as Nazism, the Marxist cults which in reality have such similar results in oppression and violence and enormous body counts of those murdered by them found so many devotees among those with college credentials, that is the modern atheist equivalent to those who committed evil in the name of Christianity.   The difference is that those who committed evil in the name of that religion had to do so in violation of the teachings of Jesus, of Paul, or the others who wrote the scriptures of the New Testament, they also violated the Prophets and the Law of the Old Testament, the new fanatics who cling to materialism, atheism and scientism have no problem squaring their depravity with their amoral, depraved and ultimately anti-intellectual ideology.  Though I wouldn't hold that that form of integrity is any kind of a virtue in that case. 

It could be that the willingness of the college-credentialed world, the academic world to harbor those who supported Stalin or Mussolini, Hitler or Mao even as the world discovered their mass murders is a better clue as to the decadence of modernism as the concordat between Mussolini or Hitler and the Vatican is used to discredit the Catholic church.  Only the Vatican quickly realized that their diplomatic agreement with the Nazis their first year in power was not like the ones it made with older political regimes - as so many others quickly discovered that the Nazis, a modern political regime based in their understanding of biological science and without any notion of morality - was not like doing business with the Austrian Emperor or some 19th century monarch and the same Pope, Pius XI issued one of the earliest governmental condemnations of Nazism.   I would compare that to the notion common among college-credentialed folk these days that we MUST allow Nazis to have another bite at the apple under modern notions of free speech.  Thought I'd just throw that in as an example of current modernistic decadence of pretending there is no real distinction worth being really made among the products of human minds.   I would hold that any ideology that has the body count Nazism or Marxism has racked up has earned itself extinction not a right to free expression.  Like I said below, a summer drought makes me ornery.

It's Not Exactly Method But It Might Explain Some Of The Madness

IN CASE ANYONE is under the impression that when I talked about my garden taking up a lot of time that I meant a hobby or post stamp sized garden,  I'm not. My gardening is far more a matter of subsistence than that.  I'd never have been able to maintain myself in my chosen work if I didn't also fill a freezer and lots of canning jars during the summer, something which the terrible drought that human caused global warming has made far harder this as also last year.  I can't manage to water everything in my garden but what I must takes up a couple of hours every day.  And then there's the weeding, dealing with pests (neither of which seems to have suffered much from the drought.  If I could eat crab grass and rag weed I wouldn't have any trouble.  I don't know the nutritional value of aphids, squash and bean beetles, cut worms but I'm not going to turn to insect eating.  Though I can understand  why so many human cultures do eat them, especially species that infest human crops.  These things are why things here have the shape they do during the summer.   Makes me more ornery too.  I do think it helps me to imagine how a drought or famine as encountered by people in the ancient near-east might have said some of the things they did.  So there's something in it for my topics here there as well.

How Cute, He's Trying To Make Me Feel Embarassed

I cannot write in English, because of the treacherous spelling. When I am reading, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like.

Albert Einstein

I have better things to remember than that Pop Eye is written as one word, I'm not in the slightest bit embarrassed about that.  If I were writing about you I assume I'd type out "dumb ass" not caring about the conventional spelling.  I don't worry overmuch about it.  Especially names of make believe people.

Did you catch the time he claimed that Little Milton played harp?  Mr. Pop Music expert (he wrote for an ad flyer) thought Little Milton played harp, I just let him make a total fool of himself after a while. 

Update:  I'd say let's make a deal,  I'll be wrong in typing it "Pop Eye" without thinking about it, you continue to be wrong about everything else, as you are now.   I'd rather be wrong about something that doesn't matter.  You prefer to be right about nothing that matters.   I'd say that but I know you can't keep your word.   You know, every time you type "Shakespeare" you are misspelling it as in all the six ways he drew the letters to be his name that was one way he never drew it.   

Update 2:  After lying about me for a decade he still thinks my name is "Andrew."  I don't care, it's just a reminder that he's always had the kind of reading disability that watching too much TV gives you.  I doubt he's read a book cover to cover since they expected him to start on chapter books.

Haven't Heard The Theme Song That Came Back As An Ear Worm Since I Was About Seven

 

 

 

 

I was weeding onions at the time.  I don't think it's how I see myself these days.  I'm not that spry right now, for one thing. I didn't know they kept making them.   Now all I can think of is Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred The Wonder Dog.  Think I'll weed carrots for a while, maybe it'll make me think of Pop Eye.

Yeah, I Knew There'd Be Hate Mail - There Always Is When You Upset Their World

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that atheists demand people stop believing in, God, the Resurrection, The Virgin Birth, six-day creation, etc. that they don't insist that peoples' day to day experience refutes what they don't like as a possibility.    All through the ideological assertion of atheism, whether in scientism, materialism, (also pushed under the aliases for that of "physicalism" or "naturalism" which are the same things with implausible deniability attached) or even of the anti-intellectual, barroom big-mouthed (not in-often inebriated) village atheist and free will denying "free thinker" variety makes appeals and even ultimate arguments based on peoples' experience of life. 

It's one of the more blatantly dishonest aspects of that that, as in the materialist atheist insistence that free-will or free-thought is an impossibility due to their ideological reliance on physical causation, they never-the-less insist that THEY are "free-thinkers,"  they will both insist that personal experience is a valid criterion of deciding those questions when they like the result but reject that same method of making a decision when they don't like the result.   

There is no human experience or, in fact, any highly regarded activity of the mind which is prior to, more basic than, more fundamentally real in every possible way to a person than their own experience of the reality and presence of their own consciousness.  Any person who had no experience or awareness of their own consciousness as real would have to have one of the most rare if even possible mental defects.  Trying to imagine what that might be like is certainly a perilous and almost certainly inaccurate thing because anyone trying to do that would have to have such experiences and be trying to imagine a condition of being they have never experienced.  I can only imagine it would have to include total non-communication, total lack of control, more profound non-sentience than I've ever witnessed in someone judged to be profoundly retarded or severely "autistic".  But I don't think it's possible for me to even imagine what it would be like. 

Yet many philosophers at well regarded universities, scientists in alleged sciences dealing with minds and many others will insist everything from the non-reality of consciousness, to its demotion to insignificant automation of our bodies and lives, to its total unreliability and insignificance (except when they want to insist on its reliability and significance, when it suits them) which leads me to my conclusion that as decadent and degenerate as past epochs of intellectualism may have been, none has sunk to the lows that modernist-materialist-scientistic-atheism has.  I think that it accounts for a percentage of the loss of respect that is suffered by academia and, tragically, science, these days.   Modernism, as the word most often used today has been an intentional pursuit of decadence pretty much from the late 19th century but it had been set on that road for well over a century before that.  That may well have been unintentionally baked into things by the early ideological formation of science,  I think Descartes was in many ways responsible for that though he was hardly alone in it.  He, of course, would certainly have rejected the decadence of what his ideas descended into, certainly the denial or demotion of individual consciousness which he turned into the key-stone of his method.  But his insistence that animals were mindless automatons was part of his legacy too, he certainly must have seen the potential of others demoting human beings to that same status, he was hardly stupid enough to have not considered that possibility coming out of his claims.  At any rate, it did.

No, there's another thing no one has to buy, people with PhDs in the sciences who insist on having it both ways when it suits them and that is the status of any scientist, any philosopher, any loud-mouthed barroom atheist who demotes consciousness and the reliability of our minds to discern truth about the external world and, even more so, its internal experience.   Nothing they do in proclaiming their ideology would make any sense if they really believed what they claim to.  Their actions prove they don't really believe it themselves, certainly not when it comes to their right to get paid to produce their bull shit.  

I can't take anyone who entertains the possibility that such deniers of consciousness are right seriously or that we are to pretend we don't know bull shit when we hear it coming from someone who obviously doesn't want it to apply to them.  From the Churchlands and Daniel Dennett right down to the former Oxford Chair For The Public Understanding of Science, they're all lying bull shitters whose ideology can't support itself because it can't survive the very existence of the minds that hold that bull shit or those who they are trying to dupe, gull or coerce into agreeing with them.   Pretty much the entirety of the "behavioral sciences" fall into that category and the shitty quality of their science proves it.