Armistice Day

A confusing thing has happened, somewhere between 1918 and 2009. What used to be Armistice Day, a celebration of a treaty to end killing in Western Europe, signed  for the most part by the same rich, smug bastards who sent other people’s kids off to die four years earlier, has been transformed into Veteran’s Day, when instead of mourning the deaths resulting out of war, we commemorate the ‘valor’ and ‘bravery’ of all members of the US military and turn formalized institutions of death, destruction, and misery into something deserving of a few soporific words and a barbecue.

This strikes me as a bit odd, although I suppose it’s in keeping with the trend to portray war as nothing other than valiant, heroic, and necessary, in order to convince people that their kids and their neighbors kids are dying for a good reason in God-knows-what-foreign-country, alone and bleeding under a rock somewhere. The US government protested fairly strongly against the NYT running a body count in its paper, and it continues to be US policy to fire or black-list journalists who take pictures of the American dead. No, coffins and flags aren’t appropriate pictures for a country at war. What we need are those perverted, fetishized pictures of tanks and guns, gleaming steel and desert camo that let people believe that war can really be a lot of fun, if those darn Muslims would just quit shooting back.

I’ve been thinking a little bit about what it means to support the troops. Many leftists in the US, in order to avoid the sort of non-sensical sweeping public condemnation that would surely follow, had to suggest that they supported the troops in Iraq, just not the war. Lest we forget, the United States has (perhaps to our misfortune) a volunteer military, and as such, everyone one of those troops that’s over there signed up for it. Did they all do it hoping to shoot someone? No, likely not, but it seems disingenuous to deny that at least some of them did, and as more photographs of torture, abuse, and war crimes emerge, it begins to strike an absurd note when people continue to insist that the troops are worth supporting. Of course, supporting never means comprehensive college education and health care, nor opportunities that would allow people to serve their government and the world without an M-16; it generally cloaks the insistence that we need bigger and more deadly bullets. I don’t support the troops, but I’m not sure what to do with them, either, because frankly, I’m not convinced that I want the people who would join a volunteer military to live anywhere near me. It would be nice if we could just take all those people who wanted to (pre-emptively) defend their country to the death and put them on an island somewhere to duke it out amongst each other, and leave all the rational people out of it. Unfortunately, that seems to be growing more and more difficult.

I still don’t understand how a holiday that started out commemorating peace ended up valorizing war.

I Hear America Singing

Reflections on patriotism are always puzzling for me – take, for example, Whitman; as a gay man, he was excluded from American society and condemned by the religious beliefs of the majority of the population. Yet the sonofabitch loved America. How do you square that? Semantic debates aside, the guy was all about a whole group of people that thought he was going to hell. Is this a separation of national ideals from the nation (i.e. the people) ?

I’ve been wrestling with the same sorts of questions as I reflect on post-college careers and employment – while I would be intellectually quite interested in work for the State Department or the government in the broader sense, I’m not sure that I can whole-heartedly endorse U.S. policy in a number of areas. Should I be able to? Are these sorts of hesitations normal for people considering this? Perhaps pursuant to my research, perhaps preceding it, perhaps influencing it, I’ve never particularly identified myself with a strong national identity. I suppose that’s part of being an elitist (or a loner) – I enjoy my solitary moments, I love foreign languages, I’m interested in books and writing and abstract considerations. I’m not really interested in your thoughts about whether or not Grey’s Anatomy has gotten better or worse or how jesus changed your life or that crazy dream you had last night. It’s not that these things make me pre-disposed to be against a national identity; they just don’t suggest it in any sort of meaningful way. What’s more, my personal beliefs tend to put me at the extremes of a number of spectrums  - i.e. religious, political, social policy (although I suppose nihilism / post-modern apathy puts you outside of spectrums, which is in many cases worse than being an extremist.)  I’m not terribly prone to compromise, and national interests are always compromise, in the sense that generally powerful people want something that’s really bad for everyone else, so the powerful people pretend like they’re giving up a little bit of something that works entirely in their favor, and people proceed on thinking that Goldman Sachs really gives two flying fucks about American taxpayers (they don’t.) Plus, being a post-structuralist is always bad for going along with other peoples’ belief systems – tends to make you hard to get along with when all you want to do is look for power relationships in any given position.

To lend a little material support, I’ve been debating with one of Joel’s friends who is a strident anti-American dude. I understand the sentiment, although I think it’s much more appropriate to be generally anti-imperialism than anti-American. I suppose the question is however if it’s a matter of Venn diagrams or concentric circles  - a number of permutations are obvious (can you be both anti-american and anti-imperialist? Yes, obviously, it’s called Europe) but can you be anti-imperialist without being anti-American? This is the more difficult question, and one that I’ve been stewing over these past few days. Glenn Greenwald is one of my favorite authors, and he’s an American constitutional rights lawyer who claims to love the old Stars and Stripes (although many people consider him anti-american, he sees himself to be the opposite.) Similarly, America had some really cool movements – Woodstock, Black Power, Womens’ Suffrage, Beat poets, etc., although most of these tend to be counter-culture voices. Maybe the issue isn’t one of nationalities but narratives – I’m generally interested in counter and minority narratives more so than dominant ones, and so it doesn’t particularly interest me to declare a national / hegemonic affiliation – what does that prove to anyone? It’s like saying you feel a strong connection to whiteness or male identity; those aren’t disputed narratives, there’s nothing risked nor ventured in declaring them, and doing so seems more like a dog-pile than any sort of meaningful opinion. In fact, it almost seems like declaring your support for those things is a counter-claim against the things which question them as general or positive narratives. Do people declare themselves to be pro-American as a way of implicitly saying they’re anti-Muslim, or anti-dictatorship, or anti-europe? I honestly don’t understand, because it seems like supporting something automatically assumes that it’s in a competition against something else that threatens it, but being “pro-American” is so hopelessly vague that it doesn’t really seem like anything other than a neat trick to get crotchety white people to vote for you.

All this said, I haven’t really contributed anything meaningful, so I’ll stake out a position that is at least a little bit controversial. I’m pro-American in the sense that I believe the Constitution represents something significant; namely, that big decisions about governance don’t belong in the hands of popular decision making. The Founding Fathers were a select group of highly educated individuals who were (obviously) much more in love with concepts than the Nation itself. They liked what America stood for, not what it was – because it wasn’t anything yet. Thus, if I express patriotism, it’s in a faith that intelligent people can do a little bit of good in the world. That’s not to say they got things all right, as the 3/5ths clause would suggest, but I think they lend credence to the suggestion that important decisions regarding political and legal rights should be made by a small, educated, and progressive group rather than the sort of regressive populism that this country seems to be turning toward. I’m looking at you, Maine Measure 1 and California Prop 8. Is it confusing if by embracing American ideals, I reject the right of Americans to vote on civil rights?

Amusingly, Whitman was elected to the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009. Are you kidding me? That’s like “Best Television Repairman in Amish Country” – it’s not much of a distinction and there’s not a lot of competition.

All Out of Red Ink

This title is a not-terribly-subtle allusion to an old Eastern European joke that Zizek recounts in one of his books, where two Polish comrades are separated, one is sent to the Siberian mines, and before he leaves, he tells his friend: Look, we will establish a code for writing letters, since they are obviously going to be censored. If I want to write you something true, I will write it in blue ink. If it’s false, I’ll write it in red ink. The soldier finally sends a letter out of the Siberian camps, written in blue ink, talking about how wonderful things are there, how great the climate is, etc. with the final provision that the only problem is that they’re all out of red ink.

With that in mind, I’ve been informed that WordPress has “a concern about some of the content” on my blog, and that all of my postings, until this issue is “resolved,” must first be submitted for review. What this means is anyone’s guess – I suppose I’ve long fancied myself a threat to public order, but there’s something mildly discomfiting in having it confirmed by an external order. Were I to take a guess at my alleged transgressions, I would presume that I’ve either simply used too many swear words, which would seem fairly petulant and a bit arbitrary, or that I’ve become too radical, which seems more rational and thus less likely. This second hypothesis strikes me as nearly the worst decision that WordPress could make, and allows me to weave my first paragraph neatly in with my second and third; namely, another Zizek article.

This one is from a book he wrote shortly after 9/11 called “The Desert of the Real,” in which his opening declaration is that offering people Enlightenment-esque freedom of thought and speech is an extremely effective way of enslaving them. Now, to be fair, Zizek is a bit like the M. Night Shamalayan of  popular intellectuals – there is generally an absurd twist, in which he uncovers the paradox or absurd or sometimes just plain opposite at the heart of every seemingly honest proposition. I think I believe these about half the time, but with this one, I’m relatively convinced. Zizek bases his statement on Kant’s explanation of the Enlightenment; Kant writes, “Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!” In short, the offer of the freedom for debate removes the joy of the struggle, the reality of it. Perhaps the best way to keep people enslaved is to emancipate their minds – a criticism that Juergen Habermas would probably be well-served to consider.  Zizek transitions into another story which I think is amusing – he recounts Brecht walking home one day in July 1953, and passing an enormous column of Soviet tanks headed to put down the Worker’s Revolt. He later wrote in his journal that that day, that time, was the first time in his life that he had been tempted to join the Communist Party. Not out of some ideological affinity, that cruelty and death were necessary to bring about the greater gains in the class struggle, but rather because it was simply real, authentic.

I think that this is similar to the sort of post-modern malaise that I’m experiencing now – these multifaceted and somewhat acephalous urges I’m feeling to lash out at something, anything, are an attempt to reach through a symbolic order and access the Real. Of course, Zizek, as an adamant Lacanian, holds that perceiving the Real will drive you mad, but I suppose that everyone suffers for art, right? Even more amusing, Zizek talks about the sort of bizarre wish-fulfillment in the 9/11 attacks, where Americans constantly made films showing New York as the hotbed of some sort of alien attack or natural disaster. And then, when it finally happened, we couldn’t perceive it as anything other than a spectacle – we never registered the real significance of its meaning, and were forced to throw it into these endless loops of television news network mediation.  I, in turn, have written a number of times on this blog about how I’ll eventually be censored, that the things I’m writing are inappropriate or inaccessible to most of the public, that people don’t like to think these things nor be presented with them – and now that I actually have been censored for my material, I’m shocked, in the way that some sort of bizarre fantasy for the Real, for Oppression or Censorship was ultimately rewarding only because of the firm belief that it couldn’t transpire.

Of course, I suppose now that I no longer have the freedom of mind, I do have something to struggle against. Thanks for that, WordPress. I look forward to learning which parts of my content were objectionable.

Postscript: Perhaps most amusingly, it looks like the Submit for Review buttons are strictly for show – they appear to do absolutely nothing.

On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense

I often wondered what the significance of the hyphen in this title indicated – if the word extra was taken to mean simply “outside of morality” or if it implied that truthfully, in an almost meta-moral way, one is being more moral by embracing the sort of non-absolutist Truth that Nietzsche endorses. The distinction is somewhat more clear in German – “aussermoralisch” is the key term – but there remains the possiblity or at least allusion to äußert, meaning most or extremely. So perhaps full disclosure re: moral truths is the most moral thing; I didn’t really believe the argument when I made it, but having seen it, I think a case could indeed be made by which a higher degree of ethics are achieved by exposing the epistemological underpinnings of one’s own morality – and in a broader (or perhaps more constrained sense) that there is a certain politeness in disclosure of how one’s own epistemology affects methodology.

This is all ( I promise ) leading somewhere; namely, towards failure. My first couple posts on this blog were about failure – I had received a couple essays back with poor remarks from the professor, and was basically grasping for a way to reconcile what is an often maddeningly difficult world of pedagogical intent, pragmatism, and humility. This is where I find myself again – recognizing failure, but in a way that at least indicates progress and perhaps the best opportunity to actually learn something. This, I think, is one of the primary difficulties of our grading system – in many ways, the multiple objectives of receiving good grades (earning seems far too reductive) and learning are not always aligned, and occasionally at odds with one another. While perhaps treading into the realm of Chicken Soup novels, one must, occasionally, fail, and fail terribly, to learn. I’m not sure that it implies the failure was a stupid thing, or even that it was necessarily avoidable – sometimes you just have to fuck something up to figure out what you’re doing wrong. This is a bit of an inversion, I think, on the meaning of a failure; when it becomes something you have to do to proceed, it really makes more sense as a success, no? Perhaps that’s too teleological.

Anyway, digressions aside, my most recent failure is that I have a difficult time constructing a hypothesis. This, to be honest, is a problem that has been brewing for a while, and one which I’ve recognized but for the most part been fortuitous enough to avoid, either by getting lucky with professors, linguistic manipulations, or (most crudely) simply avoiding the sort of classes in which one is required to construct a hypothesis in the first place. Unfortunately, my luck appears to have run out, or perhaps more accurately, ran out, because I’ve already gotten the grade and it wasn’t good. My concern, however, isn’t the inability to construct a hypothesis; quite the opposite. I think that most hypotheses, at least as far as undergraduate (or perhaps even graduate) papers are concerned are either so broad as to be hopelessly complex, or so trivial as to be either meaningless or tautological in nature. One of the papers that received a better grade than mine had both the title and as its driving question “How German is Susanne Walters?” This seems like a fairly monumental question, and quite frankly, a bit of a silly one – there are presumably at least a dozen (tongue firmly in cheek) different elements  of “Germanness” that one could choose from, which one would then have to weight in what would undoubtedly contentious manner. Finally, even if one concluded that a (fictional) person was German, what are the implications of this? How would this make the world a better, or even more interesting place?

This is perhaps the part that sticks most significantly in my throat – that even in the most successful conceivable circumstance, one in which the hypothesis is proven beyond any doubt, the reader is offered no agency. If the point were really proven that well, then one would have no recourse but to simply accept the case as presented by the author. That’s not very much fun, nor is it particularly productive. I’m not convinced that there could be a plausible circumstance in which anything of significance is proven beyond a doubt, and as such, attempt to pigeonhole various facts into a framework in which they support the author’s hypothesis is a bit of bad faith – the emphasis in a hypothesis-styled argument is placed upon being either right or wrong, a paradigm which strikes me (perhaps this is just the economist training speaking) as a pretty poor incentive if the actual condition to be sought is the spread or development of knowledge.

I think this suspicion generally holds up in books and professional-level literature as well. If I tried to come up with a hypothesis for, say, Discipline and Punish or Erotics I would be hard-pressed to settle on just one; again, anything sufficiently large enough to cover the variety of points made would presumably also be large enough to wither or break under intense scrutiny. Perhaps it’s best to leave it then as a multiplicity of hypotheses, where the reader is free to pick his own particular agenda and read it with that in mind without feeling as if he’s fighting against the tide of the author’s own opinion. I’m not convinced that Foucault ever explicitly lays out a hypothesis for his book which he will seek to prove, a move which allows him both free-range in the topics which he seeks to address and perhaps an ability to discuss or address issues which don’t work towards whatever particular goal he has in mind.

I realize that is argument, carried ad absurdium, advocates a sort of disinterested author/critic ala Ransom or Matthew Arnold. That’s not something I believe in, nor what I’m going for. What I’m trying to achieve with my writing is something a bit more modest – taking issues and investigating them from what I perceive to be useful or interesting angles, complicating them, maybe picking at a few threads here and there so that, if not unweaving the tapestry, making it not quite as whole as cut and dry as it appeared to be. This is, I think, fundamentally the goal of deconstruction; the injection of multiplicities and difficulty. A sort of “Yes, but had you considered…?” that, if not best suited for arriving at conclusions which are either true or false, is perhaps better suited for fostering discussion and debate.

I’ve been listening to a great series of lectures by a professor named Rick Roderick, who talks (pretty well) on a variety of issues from Critical Theory to post-modern intellectuals to Nietzsche. I often find, while listening to these, that I’ll start to tune out until he hits me with a particular phrase or concept that sets my mind racing for hours at a time. One that I think bears on this quite heavily is Roderick’s allusion to Nietzsche’s opening lines of Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche says  “suppose Truth were a woman.” This statement has to be bookended a little bit by the knowledge that Nietzsche was a little bit sexist and a little bit cynical towards women, and basically means “suppose Truth wasn’t won by the best, most rational argument – suppose truth had to be seduced, wore makeup, crept into one bed and out again the next morning.” Suppose, in short, that Truth were a little bit myth, a little bit makeup. A little bit more nods and winks and furtive glances, and a little bit less treatise. Suppose Truth were fickle.

This is, I think, the difficulty with operating in the hypothesis -> evidence -> conclusion paradigm. It’s not how real life works, and it seems a bit of an anachronism to remain within that framework in an age in which we have already been through post-modernism. It’s not even scientific; in the scientific method, it’s perfectly valid to have your results prove your hypothesis wrong. I’m actually now quite intrigued at the thought of what would happen if I wrote a paper in which I proved my hypothesis wrong. Digression. The difference is, of course, that science already exists within a tautology (perhaps more accurately a system of analytic truths) and it’s OK with that. Science says that there is a method for calculating a P value, and you can determine which one is significant. This is not the case with literature, and as such, I think it demands a certain element of hubris to write a paper in which someone attempts to prove something about a text. Would anyone really claim (particularly as an undergraduate) that he had invoked Nietzsche to prove, successfully, anything significant about the world? I hope not, and I don’t intend to. What I can, perhaps, offer, is a combination of thoughts and critiques that might prompt others to develop their own insights, even if all they managed was to afford someone else the opportunity to realize I was doing it all wrong.

TBC

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I’ve just switched nine time zones and spent most of the day drinking alternately coffee and wine (a good Chianti, if it helps the imagination) , so apologies in advance if this post rambles slightly. But then, you’re used to that.  The title is, of course, not only a bit of a nod and a wink at the sort of people who indulge the sort of meta-humour which is pretending to be pretentious but also, in a more or less roundabout sort of way,  a reference to the the topics of Marshall aid, teaching a foreign language, global capitalism, and the Holocaust. Sounds good so far, right? I like to think of my blog entries as aiming for that particular quality of those oh-so-in fusion restaurants – hit the highlights and provide enough diversity to attract a base, but avoid the phenomenon of being able (or required) to order by number. With that said, off we go.

There was a period last year when I decided that my first step in my own personal film education would be watching the year’s various Oscar winners and nominees. This decision has since been replaced by rummagins through the Criterion Collection, but there was indeed a point where I was frantically researching past award-winners and torrenting them as fast as my little peers would take me. One of the many 2008 highlights which I missed was a film called “The Reader,” a sort of coming-of-age tale of a German youth/lawyer who discovers that his youthful love affair involved an ex-SS prison guard (female). The film was interesting, if not a bit too long, but for the most part relatively commonfare, with one exception – a scene where another German student erupts with “People go on about how much did everyone know. ‘Who knew? What did they know?’ Everyone knew! That isn’t the question. The question is, ‘how could you let this happen? And why didn’t you kill yourself when you found out?’”

I find this quite troubling in its applications to modern-day capitalism, and perhaps even more generally, contemporary life. We know, everyone knows, that millions of people all over the world are starving to death. What’s more, billions of people are living with a quality of life that American citizens would find apalling. Some of these people are even living inside the United States. Yet my family has more cars than it has drivers. What does that say about us? That we, either implicitly or explicity, sanction this sort of injustice? We must. We throw food in the garbage, we spend money on alcohol, we afford ourselves the sort of pleasures that aren’t even really pleasures at all (buying expensive jewely, eating dinner at a restaurant) in full knowledge of the fact that the money we spend could buy meals in east Asia. The same character makes the point that there were 8,000 camp guards, and only 6 of them are on trial – and that’s only because somebody wrote a book about it. This is perhaps a larger metaphor for the Holocaust as a whole; only rarely is it mentioned that most western nations refused Jewish refugees, or that the United States set a quota for the number of Jewish emigrants it would accept between 1938 and 1945, or that the Poles, the French, the Russians all had similarly anti-Semitic sentiments in popular positions.  It’s just that much easier to blame it on the Fascists and the Communists, while places like the School for the Americas fade softly into the background.

This leads me to my current predicament : What on earth I’m going to do with myself after I graduate. Although I suspect the relationship is more exponential than linear, I am 75% of the way done with my undergraduate degree in college, but nowhere near 75% of the way done deciding what I want to do with myself. I’m still sticking by the long term plans to enter academia, but (particulary after a challenging conversation with some people who have done precisely that) find myself still uncertain as to what particular field to make an entrance in. The trouble with comparative is that I don’t really know enough languages, although I suppose this is remediable. Expect to see me learning either Spanish or French in the immediate future, unless I suddenly become quite close to someone who speaks another significant and still relatively easy to learn one. This means, dear Reader, that my plans to attend graduate school will presumably have to include at least a short blip – one which I would love to fill with a government-sponsored post-graduate program. This, however, means that I will either have to agree to teach English in a foreign country or develop a compelling enough research project that it will hold both my and the Marshall Committee’s attention long enough for them to agree to fund me. Now, the idea of doing a research project isn’t one that I’m opposed to – given the right project, I think it could be quite fascinating. That, however, is the difficulty – how does one construct a project that is, at the same time, interesting, within one’s own capabilities, and most importantly, capable of being funded? This in conjunction with the relative scarcity of these grants in comparision to the English teaching ones means that this option seems less attractive right until I get up to my objection against linguistic imperialism.

Here is where we encounter Freire. Sort of. I haven’t actually read his book, so I’m shooting a little bit blind here. But only a little bit here. Part of teaching people English is about teaching them to buy stuff. More than a little bit – what good are Coca-Cola advertisements for people who can’t read? Precisely. Sure, there are other benefits to being able to read – you know, access to tremendous bodies of political, philosophical, educational literature; but let’s be honest, who really reads those things? America is, according to the United Nations, 99% literate. This has done nothing to abet the fact that 50% of America doesn’t believe in global warming, evolution, or the existence of countries outside of North America.  So let’s be honest – are we really trying to teach people how to read to get them to found a democracy? American democracy wasn’t founded by the average Joes, of course not. And we should be thankful for it – people think George Bush would be a great guy to have a beer with. Whether or not this is true has nothing to do with his viability to be a president. Thomas Jefferson may have been the sort of person that most people would hate to have a beer with – this doesn’t alter the fact that he was pretty fucking smart. So no, I don’t think that teaching people to read English is going to result in the outbreak of peace all over the world. I think it’s going to result in more people buying more shit with more money they don’t have. And that’s kind of depressing.

Sorry America, People in Iran Still Fucking Hate You

I like to think of myself as a person who, if not unbiased, is at least aware of his biases. This doesn’t mean that I’m working to overcome them, but at least I know where they are. Part of this system of prejudices is that I generally hate Republicans more than I hate Democrats. This isn’t because I  think that Democrats are necessarily smarter than Republicans – they quite often aren’t, although I suspect averages favor the left wing – but because Democrats are more likely to want the same things I want, and thus less liable to get in my way. I recall being around campus for the presidential “Get out the Vote!” thing this past fall, and couldn’t ever quite decide if the people doing it were disingenuous or terribly naive. I mean, isn’t driving on a national freeway system evidence enough that most people probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote? Dogs chained up in the back of pickups; people eating with one hand and applying makeup with the other; some redneck motherfucker beating his kids and changing the radio at the same time. These people can vote! Why, why, why would you ever want to remind them of that? Maybe it’s the college atmosphere that confuses people – you have to at least be able to write your name and wipe your own ass to go to college (unless you’ve got a jumpshot), so maybe they’ve forgotten that these aren’t the only people voting. Go to a cheap public location some time and listen to the things people are saying. Listen. You wouldn’t let them watch your kid, wash your dog, or remove your tonsils – why the fuck would you let them choose who leads the most powerful country on earth? It’s like all of a sudden, every 4 years, all those people who aren’t expected to know shit about the economy, about healthcare, about international relations get their day. Like “Bring your kids to work!“, except when that day happens, the kids don’t actually get to do anything – they have to fucking sit their quietly and watch. Why? Because they aren’t qualified – they’re children, they have the relative functional intelligence of a monkey. This same analogy applies to democratic voting, except work involves control over enough explosives to turn the planet inside out.

This might be part of why I wasn’t terribly initially excited about this whole Iranian revolution. Now, I like to see civic-sponsored violence as much as the next guy, and I’m not really wild about muslims, so I suppose there’s a certain animalistic pleasure in watching the news coverage. However, a couple things initially turned me off, both on their side and ours, and I’m relatively certain the whole thing isn’t anything like what most Americans think.

First of all – John McCain has all of a sudden got a real fucking boner for getting on Obama’s case about not coming out and supporting “the Iranian people”, whatever that means. This is the same motherfucker who sang “Bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” when asked what his foreign policy towards them was. And now he thinks we should intervene? Which is it, Johnny? Blow them up or save them? A similar attitude seems to be endemic to most Republican commentators, who can’t seem to remember that 2 weeks ago they thought we should invade.

Second, I’m not sure that Americans really understand the Iranian “people” (I use the term under erasure, but this is how pundits and dumb people think, so it’s necessary) as well as they think they do. Most of the latte-sippers who are now all about the revolution here don’t realize that the opposition candidate is only slightly less a controlling fascist than the current one. Iranians aren’t having a revolution for women’s rights, freedom of religion, or capitalism – they already had a revolution, 30 years ago, and they put fucking Khomeini in place – the guy who went into exile and incited riots when the Shah let women vote. They willingly pushed into power the fucking clerics – they made THEIR OWN STATE an Islamic Republic, which as far as I can tell is Arab for no fun at all. Does anyone here really understand the sort of views that Moussavi supports? He approved the taking of hostages, he was responsible for the execution of political prisoners in 1988, and (at least in my book) worst of all, supported the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie. You think the sort of dude who orderered a (brilliant) writer executed and put a price on his head is really about to be a paragon of democracy? Me neither. To even be approved as a candidate for this election, the guy had to be enough of an asshole that Khomeini would let him run in the first place – it’s not an actual democracy, although it would be well served to note that the US did the same thing in Vietnam and the Israelis do the same thing in Palestine.

So yes, they’re rioting in Tehran. Yes, the people have spoken out – and said they want the same damn thing in a different color (namely, green.) Who knows – maybe the system they put into place shooting back at them will remind them that they did a really shitty job the first time and ought to let someone else sort it out the second time.

Love in the time of Cholera, pt. 2: Where it gets all mushy

This part will, with any luck, be the section that the previous one was meant to be. I’ll confess, I chickened out – Dani said that I never write anything personal in my “journal,” and loathe as I am to admit it, she may be right. This entry will be, then, my attempt to come to terms with that and with any luck overcome it – although I’m certain that a good dose of clinical diction will dilute any hint of romance.

I mentioned in the prior entry that my relationships tend to burn out rather quickly, and speculated that this was perhaps not because they were lacking something that I was looking for, but instead because the enjoyment, for me, ensued from the looking for in and of itself; once things become predictable, I tend to (despite my best intentions) check out. Whether this is an entirely unique phenomenon is unclear – while I’m certain there are people who claim to desire stability in a relationship, there are also those who claim that neither money nor looks are important; perhaps what we want and what we think we want don’t always overlap. This happens with somewhat frightening regularity to me; fairly early on in relationships, I tend to experience a particular moment in which I recognize the “fatal flaw”, and some sort of biological switch is flipped which signals what will ultimately result in the parting of ways.

Now, for the mushy. The young, weak at heart, or bitter should probably close their browsers. I’m somewhat taken by a particular young woman right now, who for reasons still somewhat unknown to me has yet to reveal her tragic flaw. I like to think that I do a little better in finding a match every time (I suppose one can’t really use the phrase ‘trading up’ without risking a significant amount of wrath), but even I’m a little bit surprised at this. Best guess: I tend to be a little bit of a personality leech, meaning that I seek out people in life who are better than me at skills I want to have. Normally, this results in the aforementioned overtaking – however, the people who tend to persist in my life are those who generate new information or abilities at a rate equal to or faster than I can catch up to them. These people I like to keep around, because they’re easy to learn from – and quite frankly, because I tend to find most other people become quite boring.

Maybe that’s why I like Dani – she produces new content more quickly than I can dig through the old stuff. I admit that there’s an extremely narcissistic element to the sort of ’searching’ that I do – it’s not the search for a particular quality that I find enjoying, but the ability to search at all. In short, the quality desired exists not in the other person, but in myself. However, this is precisely what makes Dani attractive to me (and perhaps non-tragic, because I suspect that the tragic element is generally one that leads to predictability): I’m never quite certain where she’s going to go next, at least in the metaphorical sense (the real life one is almost always towards candy.) This makes her challenging, and quite possibly a peer. In addition, a tiny part of me, which rarely gets to see the light of day, appreciates the possibility that the sort of challenges she presents me with allow me to wrangle with my own demons a little bit, and for the briefest moments clutch somewhere deep down inside at the possiblity, however minute, that there might be some sort of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness out there to aspire to.

So there. I’m in love with Dani because sometimes she’s better than me at things and I can’t ever figure out what the fuck she’s going to do next, or what she’s thinking. Also, great lay.

Love in the time of Cholera, pt. 1

My response to hearing people use the phrase “in real life” is generally akin to hearing nails screeching on a chalk board. For those of you who don’t have ears, this feeling is bad. I’ve been meaning for quite some time to write about this sort of bucolic, folksy ideal of “common sense” that’s quite often not at all sensible; I find that “in real life” generally conveys a subset of the same sort of blithely self-assured ignorance. Maybe it’s what I perceive to be the ironic condescension of it – “Oh, I’m sure you’ve having fun studying literature/history/philosophy, but what are you going to do with that in real life?” repeated ad nauseum, as if their primary occupation as Rite-Aid checker and professional arm-chair basketball coach had somehow made them uniquely qualified to comment on my future life prospects. This strikes me as particularly amusing because these people tend to be the sort who would be the last to contextualize their personalities within their own jobs; I hardly expect to find any glistening personal insights in the careers of cubicle  monkies, UPS deliverymen, or real estate sales people, nor do I expect them to have a particularly ready quip when asked “So what are you going to do with all of those episodes of Sex and the City in real life?” Perhaps I can take small comfort in the fact that I can read the newspaper without a dictionary handy and understsand mot of the references in Pixar movies.

With all that said, I’ve never had a romantic relationship in “real life.” Now, I know what you jackals are thinking, and I’m sure at some point it will come back to haunt me when this is quoted out of context. I don’t mean that I have a BangBus subscription, nor that troll Eharmony. Quite the opposite – my personal relationships tend to consume large amounts of my “real life” time, and as such, tend to be short lived and mostly revolve around relatively obligation free points of my life – summers, winter breaks, college in general. As to whether I’ve fallen into a trap of assuming correlation = causation, I’m skeptical – perhaps not entirely convinced that the two are related, but the evidence seems to suggest so.

Figuring out why this occurs is slightly more complicated – and carries the added (obvious) risk of reaching those sort of comforting self-analyses that really just reify the things we pretend not to like about ourselves, the things you mention in an interview when someone asks you what your greatest faults are. “Probably that I’m too hard on myself,” you say, with the downward glance of faux-contrition, “I tend to let projects consume me.” But this is precisely the problem I think that I have with relationships – I have a difficult time finding the medium heat setting; things tend to end up boiling over or curdling on the back burner. This is, of course, not the actual problem; my stalwart readers would certainly remind me that this is merely a symptom, not a cause, and that I simply can’t leave them to draw their own conclusions. No, no, that would never do. The author-function persists, and we must be spoon-fed.

So. Why? Why are my relationships so much Fox News (loud, fast, frightening) and so little French cinema (long, slow, boring)? I suppose the obvious answer is that they’re a reflection of my own personality – lots of flash, little substance – although I think that hardly does me justice. The answer, instead, is perhaps the opposite: I tend to consume substance, or at least sift through it, at an all-too-rapid pace, and end up, like some sort of existentialist Bugs Bunny, frantically digging holes through my romantic partners, looking for some sort of metaphysical treasure before I emerge on the other side (Notebook screenings, divorce court, Valentine’s Day – wherever it is that relationships go to die.) This rarely works, because most people tend to have content which I either don’t find particularly valuable or rapidly exhaust, and I find myself reliving the same conversations and awaiting the ensuing breakdown, in which the wheels generally fall off completely and I embarrass myself in front of everyone who works at Applebee’s (again).

Of course, this would be so much easier if I knew what, precisely, I was looking for. I’ve commented on this behavior in a similar manner a few times in the past, mostly pointing out that my intellectual endeavors tend to be streaky and tenuous. Whether or not this is because I abhor the idea that one can’t simply be talented at all things, that it sometimes takes practice to become  good at something is uncertain, although I suspect that my own arrogance plays no small role – “Well, if I can’t figure this out, it’s stupid and not worth my time.” Perhaps (and this is undoubtedly an over-eager application of post-modernism) the difficulty remains in my consistent framing of my personal life within a grand-narrative, in the belief that there really is some sort of unifying thread tying these things together, that I really do (or at least should) have a telos, a center or common goal that lies at the heart of all these thosuands of hours I’m wasting on Iranian revolutions and anti-Tibet movements and intelligent design debates on the internet. Maybe the important part is the questioning part itself – removing the emphasis from the particular content and placing it instead on the search. Of course, this is nothing more than a relocation of the telos onto the method, a move not entirely unlike creating a system out of deconstructionism, but it happens to be one for which society is willing to pay you and let you write books and drink all the coffee your little heart can handle, as a university professor. So yes, that’s what I’m going to do with that in real life; I’m going to ask questions that you never think about and it’s going to be financed by your tax dollars.

It’s Just A Human Life

As far as I can recall, the only significant fight that Dani and I have ever had occurred as we were stumbling (drunk, because normally I’m extremely graceful) down Franklin Street to buy more beer on the evening of some NCAA championship game. Because we’re both fairly intelligent and not total assholes, we were having a conversation about something vaguely intellectual and the subject rolled around to abortion. I’ve learned throughout the years, although perhaps most specifically as a result of PUA stuff, that there are some things you simply don’t talk to women about – particularly ones you’re trying to sleep with. However, as mentioned, I was a little bit drunk and she’s a little bit weird so I thought “Hey, perfect time to let the anti-humanist flag fly.” Big Mistake. She started asking a lot of questions beginning with “What would you do if…”, always a sign of  trouble, and I answered, somewhat provocatively (did I mention I was drunk yet?) that at some point, these sorts of caluclations have to consider that “it’s just a human life.” This produced the (predictable) shit-storm, which I guess is somewhat understandable given that we try and make a baby – or at least replicate the act, if not the goal –   whenever we’re alone (and sometimes when we aren’t – sorry Matt!)

 

The argument sounds cold, but I think it’s one that’s internalized at some level in most of us.  The US Highway Department estimates the marginal cost of saving one human life at around 6-7 million dollars. That’s the amount of money you lose by reducing the speed limit, building more guard rails, straightening out curvy roads, etc – but these things have a cost. If you can only drive 50, it takes trucks longer to move across those life-veins of capitalism, the arterial highway system, to put goods in stores and money in banks and most importantly to put feet in malls. This is unaccceptable – thus, we’re willing to take the risk. This is what strikes me as a little bit silly about the whole pro-choice/pro-life thing: none of them really believe in what they’re saying. Pro-life people drive to rallies in SUVs; the entire wealthy white right wing is avidly pro-life and equally vehemently pro-capitalist. They have millions, often billions of dollars – yet they’re pissed off that a poor person doesn’t want to be saddled with 18 years of accidental hardship? Outrageous – something like 40 million people (real, live, kicking breathing thinking feeling people) die every year of starvation, and what’s more – it’s entirely fixable. According to the UN, it would take $30 billion a year to end world hunger. 30 billion! People spend that on summer houses! On yachts! On fucking artwork! Don’t ever say that abortion doctors are murderers when you drive a Cadillac – when you drive a fucking car at all. Absolutely nauseating. If God has some ace, first class fucking plan for every life that necessitates shooting an educated man in the back, which part of his fucking plan involves the entire population of France starving to death every year? Oh, but wait – those aren’t Christian babies, so it doesn’t count. Fucking hypocrites. If you go to a megachurch whose pastor has a 6 figure salary and you think abortion is a crime, you need to re-evaluate your fucking priorities. 

 

Digressions aside, the point of this post. My last couple entries have been detailing this growing divide I’m feeling, a sort of metaphysical distance from the people around me.  I’m not quite sure what to make of this – I’m honestly certain that it’s a sign that I’m either destined for genius or psychiatric illness. Maybe both. Maybe one and then the other, although that usually doesn’t work as well. This latest experience occurred this evening, as I was sitting in the hot tub at our gym, trying very hard to avoid the swarms of (hopefully) just-barely-potty-trained toddlers storming the spa like it was the west coast of France. Once the little monsters had settled down, I was watching them play and talk amongst one another, and had this very surreal experience of watching some sort of animal – like I was recognizing features of what was certainly a living organism, but not one that I shared any particular traits or commonalities with. The experience was unsettling, to say the least, and while I tried to shake it off, I found myself entirely unable to generate any sort of empathy for anyone in the pool – even adults. It was like being on a human safari. The question occurred to me then, which, try as I might, I was entirely unable to either answer comfortably nor purge from my mind: Given the choice between saving the life of a random child and ten thousand dollars, which would I pick?

Well? Which would you pick? This is the basis for my anti-humanism. That child is one in six billion – contrary to the anti-abortionists’ argument, the chances that he’ll cure cancer, or even do anything nominally “positive” for mankind as a whole are extremely slim. He won’t write the next great American novel, he won’t stop a nuclear detonation. In all likelihood, he will grow up and lead an entirely non-descript life. He will probably lie, he will probably steal, he will probably break hearts and pick on his classmates. He’ll probably believe in God and the American way and that people at the bottom deserve it. He might drink too much, sell drugs; he might even kill someone. All these things are infinitely more likely than a positive impact on the world. It’s just a human life. But, before this turns into a debate of human rights versus statistics, we’ve got to resolve my own moral quandary. What would I do with ten thousand dollars? Nothing special, I assure you – I don’t think that I can save the world, bring peace to the middle east, any of that shit. It’s $10,000. People spend that on dinner. But it would make my life significantly better, at least for a time – which is more than I can say for saving a kid. Christ knows there are enough people on this planet already – it’s not like we’re begging for more polluters and crop consumers. 

That’s not to say this is a universal situation – if it were my kid, or my brother’s kid, or even a close friend of mine’s kid, then it’s an entirely different story. $10,000 isn’t worth family, and what’s more, I have a pretty high estimation of the gene pools around me – the likelihood of killing or suffering as a result of this act decreases significantly.

This thought was (is) depressing to me – I can’t be certain if I’ve alienated myself from the people I know, or if I’m peering through the veil. It’s like I was adopted into the wrong species, and I just found out. Unclear. This is particularly hard for me to reconcile because it’s such a dramatic swing from the sort of transcendental consciousness feelings I used to experience – the kind where you can look around a room and feel an affinity with every face. I’m not sure that it’s entirely indicative of a lack of empathy; I’m still deeply troubled by the thought of suffering on the part of any creature, but I can’t seem to regard humans with the sort of sacro-sanctity that our society requires. This has been a slippery slope for me; I’ve been demolishing most of my meta-religions for almost a year now, and I’m slightly afraid to find out where this will lead.

I wonder if this is the beginning of genius or a breakdown.

Lethal Text

Jeden Tag stirbt ein Teil von dir

jeden Tag schwindet deine Zeit,

jeden Tag einen Tag den du verlierst,

nichts bleibt für die Ewigkeit

I’m feeling alienated now. Not lonely, although that may be a part. Lonely doesn’t particularly bother me, because it’s easy enough to fix. The world is filled with warm bodies, and unless you’re particularly ugly/communicable/obnoxious, chances are you can find another person to hang out with you. But alienation – that’s another thing entirely. I sometimes wonder if pursuing my interests is going to lead me to a point of no return. I don’t think my parents really like talking to me anymore. Of course, I can’t say with any degree of certainty that they ever really liked talking to me before, but it didn’t have that undertone of indifference that makes it particularly difficult. The fact of the matter is that I’m a little too far out there for what people would consider amusing, if also irrelevant, conversation. This is the realm of the analytical philosopher – people will sort of absent-mindedly over dinner ponder whether or not it’s ethical to test shampoo on animals, then shrug and order the lobster. Convincing them that they’ve mostly made up the idea of meaning is going to take at least until dessert. Most people don’t believe in the things I believe in anymore. I wonder if I’ve gone too far. I wonder if I’ve not gone far enough. I hope the damage is reversible. There’s an idea called a ‘lethal text’, which, upon being read, lays bare in the mind of the reader the paradoxes of language and of meaning and makes you go crazy – a little bit like glimpsing the Real.  I wonder if somewhere along the lines I encountered a fatal text. I wish I knew who it was, so I could write the publisher a letter and say “Stop! This book will destroy everything you believe in!” Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good title for a book in and of itself – maybe I’ll use that.

I deleted one of the posts I made on here recently, because it was mostly redundant and mostly unimportant, and most siginficantly, it was expressing, at its core, a sentiment that I wasn’t (and probably still am not) entirely up to dealing with – not quite regret, although I certainly have a deep-seated fear of regrets, but rather one of powerlessness. I suppose that’s not quite the right term – being afraid of being powerless makes me sound like either a third world dictator or a prime candidate for domestic abuse, and that’s not quite what I’m looking for. Adrift, maybe. That’s what I’m afraid of – being a passenger in my own life, although not explicitly a passenger: better, a driver without brakes. The role of agency is important here – the decisions I’m making, the interests I pursue and values I espouse, the friends I keep and the ones I let slip by, all these things are to be certain within my control, but seem to be tracing out a certain inexorable path. 

 

I sometimes re-read this blog and wonder if I’m arrogant. The question is never really one of arrogance (although this probably depends on one’s working definition of arrogance; if it entails a high assessment of skills, perhaps, but if it’s a matter of overestimating capacities,  it also strikes me as slightly silly to think that one could assess one’s own competency in various areas; that in itself smacks of a much greater degree of hubris), but instead one of conflicting aims. My last post was about the fascist within, whatever it is that lends priority to various values and emerges as a consistent self. I may have erred here, because such a statement implies a consistent reign; such is not the case, various libidinal ‘rulers’ emerge at different times, each with their own agendas, goals, estimations of value. Some days I want to be a professor. Some days I want to be famous. Some days I want to be needed. These desires are all well and good, and I’m certain they would make a compelling picture book, but they fail to hit upon the real crux of the matter: I want to have choices. Not opportunities, because it’s not a matter of seizing the right thing at the right time, but the ability to never go down a path that I can’t come back up. This is a bit of a paradox, as I think further about it. When I demand a plurality of choices, I’m not actually asking for a choice at all – I’m asking for an element of non-choice, a parallel existence where being an astronaut doesn’t preclude me from being a porn star nor a physician. I wish that I had lived in the age of the polymath, where you could know everything about everything. I wish that I spoke seven languages. I wish I understood physics. All of these things require a certain investment, a passage of time that simply isn’t reclaimable. This may be my greatest reluctance to getting a job – I’m 20 years old, I cant be employed doing anything that I like.  This is lack. Working is lack – we give up choices to engage further in a now limited number of choices, most of which reside in brain-real estate that’s bought and sold on television commercials and interestate billboards. There seems to be something intrinsically wrong with that sort of a system. People go to work to make money to do what they want in the meager amount of free time they’re allotted. But it’s not really free time anyway, because if not the place you work for, the place someone else works for has a vested interest in convincing you that whatever choices you have remaining are already determined – you just don’t know it.

 

This post is shit. I’m drunk. I was hoping that I would get really fucked up and write something brilliant, but it’s just coming out garbage. Sometimes I re-read my older posts to assess the rate at which my intelligence is decreasing. I think I used to be smarter than I am now. I wonder if alcohol had something to do with it. I wonder if that’s a good trade off.

I notice that I used to believe in things. I don’t, particularly, anymore. Maybe I’m suppressing it. Maybe gleichgueltig is the new black. Maybe this is all a phase. I sure hope so. Someone asked me on the internet today if I thought that being immortal would be worse than dying. I sure hope not, but I think he’s right. I wonder if I have any passions. I hope that I find out about them before it’s too late. I wonder if I’m in love. I think so. I wonder if James Joyce wrote like that on purpose or if it just came out that way. If it just came out that way, why didn’t he decide not to change it? I hope I recognize genius if I ever produce it. I hope I don’t die before I’m ready,  but I hope I don’t live longer than I need to.

I hope I’m happy.