Political correctness, 18 October 2015

First I’d like to acknowledge the wonderful article written by Cracked writer J.F. Sargent, whose article can be found here. And point out, that’s generally a more intelligent and insightful argument. That is all.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, THE BOOGIE MAN, THE CENSORS WAITING IN THE DARK, JUST, WAITING, WAITING ON YOU TO SAY… SOMETHING… OFFENSIVE. MUST…NOT…SATIRE.

I’d also be remiss to acknowledge the state of this dead horse before I proceed to fucking beat it. (Because it’s dead… what is easier to beat? A living horse will fucking destroy you. Horses are the worst. But don’t tell Mr. Ed, he’s way too PC. And also dead. Which is slightly worse. Slightly, amirite?)

Political correctness, oh my god. Right? Right? 
I know.
Dude, I know.
DUDE.

Everybody and their biologically oriented life-giver, in-vitro, biological, or cesarean, has their personally distinct and worthwhile opinions on whether or not people have become overly sensitive. or — now, bear with me — if the response is less to someone saying something insensitive and more of a response to someone being an asshole or otherwise deliberately antagonistic, saying something not in service of a joke, or a story, but something which has one purpose: to intentionally insult or disparage someone or a group of people for the purpose of advocating something: their brand’s betterness, their political brand’s betterness, or their notion of general progress towards being as good as them, which, for some reason, must always be at the expense of others. The response isn’t overly sensitive liberals being too delicate, while I’m sure somewhere, right now perhaps, someone is beginning an article with shit like ‘biologically oriented life-giver’ to avoid saying something like mother … only to hide their hatred of in-vitro fertilization. IT COULD BE THIS VERY PAGE.

It’s not that. It is the response of those who balk at the idea that whoever is saying this “non PC friendly” shit, or the group to which that person belongs is inherently above or better than their intended target, simply because they’re not that target. The response is not one of overt-sensitivity, but of a group saying: you are not better by virtue of what you were born. The Internet has made it very, very hard to distinguish between someone’s merit and ability based on their sex/race, so when someone is being called out because of that, and that alone, the response is the response of those who believe in an idea: You know, they call this democracy. And it’s not a deviant sex act some French-y developed… But it is close. Democracy is an objection to inherited worth, status, or value. 

The idea that some things are inherently offensive, while certainly true, the criticism, the criticism of the politically correct sensibility is invariably made by someone who has said something inflammatory, and intentionally so, from a position of influence and power–which seems to consist primarily of rich/famous white people who think the concept of democracy is something to define, to the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others, for them and those who believe as they do, which is coincidentally the way the law was written by (surprise!) people like them, wealthy, white, heterosexual males – as other minority groups were for some wild, crazy reason, not allowed to vote; thus perpetuating the freedom of this group to the exclusion of that group, which were all groups, minorities and women (yep! All inclusive exclusion!) while at the same time making it illegal for anyone who has broken the law to vote someone who might represent their needs.

When women and minorities were finally given the god damn right to vote, the elected representatives – surprise! – began to become more diverse and the fight  against institutional prejudice began – and with same sex marriage only recently becoming legal in all of the US, and the remaining resistance comes from that same group struggling to stay true to rules that were very much written by people like them, voted for by people like them, to keep those liberties very much in the hands of that same, homogeneous group: wealthy, white, heterosexual males, betraying the very core of democracy; that everyone should be, by birth, afforded the same freedoms and protections under the law.

Democracy is either absolute or not democracy.

The greatest achievements of America have been, with exception of course, the reversal of earlier, less inclusive institutionalized standards. Greatest moments in political history? The American revolution? Overthrowing … taxes and tea, something like that. The Emancipation Proclamation? As wonderful as that was, it was the eventual overturn of the casual attitude towards slavery. The million-man march? A protest against prejudicial practices in Jim Crow-era south. The greatest achievements of America are those moments when the establishment finally goes, Fuck it, other people can have freedoms too. It’s great to have figures like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr… but to need them is horrifying by implication. And, it didn’t end well for either. Go ahead, guess what happened. This isn’t uniquely American, either. Anyone vocally against systems set in motion to benefit the few at the expense of the many, historically speaking, have been fucking killed.

And now, the criticism of political correctness is used as a means to brush aside – sometimes legitimate – accusations of racism or sexism. But the accusation of political correctness leading to censorship, or that people are being too sensitive, is only used when someone has been genuinely sexist, genuinely racist, xenophobic, or otherwise intentionally hurtful – for the sole purpose of being inflammatory, as a way to be provocative without being thoughtful or insightful, or even interesting. It’s less about overly sensitive liberals and their quivering antennae when someone isn’t PC, and more about a sexless, colorless culture recognizing bad manners and assholes – and making them know, ‘Hey, you’re a fucking asshole. And we know it.’ If you were to fart at a dinner table, you wouldn’t accuse your dinner guess of being too sensitive for saying nobody wanted to smell your asshole at lunch. Put it in the right story, or in the right context, and we’ll laugh right along. Conservative, liberal, communist.

Fuck the French!

Don’t shoot, French friends!

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Theatre and Culture, 10 October 2015

Theatre may have started as an organizing force, an excuse for fellowship and ritual in the ancient world, such as what we know of its development in Ancient Greece. At first, it was just for men – and even when there were female characters, they were portrayed by men. Even so, it was a way for a community of shared interests, leading to more than a collection of individuals – culture. That’s a small word, culture. And vague, and hard to use in its broadest sense, in the full scope of what it offers (and what it takes).

It is the sum total of a people, their hopes and values, their fears and regrets. It does more than tie a people together. It forms the basis of a collected consciousness; it gives us heroes to admire and attempt to follow, and villains to despise and, shamefully, get a measure and bit of understanding about the darker side of human nature and ourselves. The collected mythology of a culture is a projection of their unconscious, and through that we get a glimpse into who they were. You can get a better sense of who the English were at the turn of the 16th century through the works of Shakespeare than you can from historians, since historians recount the deeds of the extraordinary, and writers recount the deeds of the ordinary as well and, ironically, it is more extraordinary to read. Shakespeare was able to use the past as a lens to focus on the very real religious schism of his age, something Kip Marlowe would do also do in his Satanic drama in Dr Faustus.

In plundering the more traditional histories recounted in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, Shakespeare was able to create an anatomy of the era, examining the lowborn and the high and mighty, giving the newly excommunicated England a sense of who they were and what their stories would be. ‘An island unto itself’ is vaguely reminiscent of Richard III’s line in Act V, Scene VI of Henry VI: ‘I am myself alone.’ Shakespeare did this in a way that Holinshed never could, by making history into something poetic and resonant, and–most importantly–entertaining. This is not to discredit Holinshed; I just couldn’t imagine a crowd of theatre patrons thrilling at the recitation of the following as a dramatic soliloquy:
“The situation of our region, lieng ne’ere unto the north, dooth cause the heate of our stomaches to be of somewhat greater force: therefore our bodies doo crave a little more ample nourishment, than the inhabitants of the hotter regions are accustomed withall, whose digestive force is not altogether so vehement.”
Always makes me choke up, that bit about the stomaches.

The same is true of Homer and Virgil, whose characters and struggles are as revealing as Livy’s formal histories.

Future historians will learn more about the character of Americans in the early 21st century from the books of Jacopo della Quercia than traditional historians, as he is a historian Robot. He is a friend, but I say this not to kiss his ass but, as Socrates said, Game recognize game.[citation needed]. His articles and works, such as The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy and License to Quill, afford us a perspective not possible through traditional histories, and succeed as history and entertainment, offering a unique, rare insight into the character of the modern world–by using the past to look into the character of the age and toward the future, in a manner very analogous to Shakespeare; and in doing so manages to reveal the intrigue and obsessions of the modern world–in an age where we look for the truth in fiction and for the fiction in popular accounts of truth, which is often the case in a culture of conspiracy. Compared to Virgil’s Aeneid, Ab Urbe Condita Libri ain’t shit. (I apologize to any sincere Livy fan who may be reading, and Livy personally, if you’re haunting the internet looking for mentions of yourself. Egomaniac. Got nothing against you, Petronious.)

These pieces may exist outside of our influence, and are ultimately beyond our control, but when we put those pieces together, from history and entertainment and culture, the end result is a reflection of who we are; it is the building of the mirror, and it is in this reflection, these glimpses into our motivations and desires, our fears and neuroses, the impulses behind our thoughts and beliefs–this is what literally defines us. It is the microcosm, the smaller creature in contrast to the macrocosm, the larger organism that is the culture. Like life it starts with ‘I’ and ends with ‘Y’? (see what I did there? High five!) It is identity.

You gonna leave me hanging? Guys?

…Guys?

*High five*
Thanks, Livy!

Bite Sized Philosophy, 24 July 2015: Writing

Big questions, small answers: Bite Sized Philosophy for 24 July 2015: Writing

(A little late on this one, was lulled to sleep by the dulcet tones of a Jack the Ripper documentary before posting.)

To be a writer is not a conscious choice I remember making. I liked rhyming words together as far back as I could hold a pen. Just stringing same-sounding words together as a 5 year old, that’s how I started. Original stories wouldn’t be finished until I was 11 or 12. Nothing that I would be consider properly written stories. I made the choice to write for a living after selling a science-fiction stories when I was 17. It was craft, from that point, and to be good at any given craft, you have to see the craft done well. I’ve read a lot, and extensively. Seeing a thing done well helps an aspiring writer, to help them understand what makes great books great books and how to tell one’s own stories well.

To be genuine is as important as it is to be talented, as it is to be hardworking. The quality of hard work is as important as talent because without hard work, none of that talent comes out; it is of no use. I don’t know why I continue writing. It takes forever to do something substantive, and the research and revisions and drafting — this is all laborsome stuff, none of it tremendously fun. When I don’t get something down, however, I feel like a day is wasted. So I feel that I must get something done every day, and I always do; there are on-going projects, one-off essays and – what I still enjoy – writing down words that rhyme, things we in the biz refer to as ‘poems.’

It has a higher calling, that of art, of course, and the literature of a culture greatly shapes and help define that culture. And it is a great source of catharsis for the stereotypical tortured artists of the world. It is one of the most persistent, long running traditions in sedentary human culture, that of chronicling, since the early epic of Gilgamesh and Holisheads chronicles of the English, a source of history from which Shakespeare took ideas for plays and poetry.

If it gives you a purpose, to write, to partake in the creation of art, of whatever form it takes, then it is a profession of nobility and purpose. It is to me personally, and in aggregate, historically. For me, the restlessness of needing to write is like the persistence of having to take a shit. It is a great motivational feeling, leaves you feeling nauseous and uncomfortable, and it’s uncomfortable when you can’t find somewhere to get it done. It is sometimes a long and painful process. You can feel great relief, even if you’re not always proud of the result. After all, sometimes it’s just shit.

Siamese Solution – short, 22 July 2015

Marie and Jean were conjoined twins born into a society that had never before seen such an oddity: Marie was in control of all physical function, hand-movement, motor-control, and, though Jean had ambitions and desires of her own, as she could feel all of the same sensations as her twin, she could not act on them independently; they had the unusual arrangement that when Marie was feeling kind, she’d let her twin, head poised to the side – on her left shoulder – she’d do what Jean found exciting and pleasurable, but only to the extent to which she found it pleasurable as well. If Marie held a flame to the palm of a hand Jean couldn’t control, she still felt the fire; if Marie had indigestion, Jean felt it in her stomach, the nausea. Though they shared the same physical receptors, their responses to pain and pleasure, what one would love the other would hate, were sometimes wildly inconsistent. As were their attitudes towards the murder of another person.

One night as Jean slept, unaware that Marie was moving through the night – a barely lit figure, a cape and cowl disguising the sleeping head that rested on her shoulder – she had uncomfortable thoughts, images of a woman shouting out and suddenly being silenced. She woke to find herself beneath the cape and desperately trying to move the hands she felt but could not control, as her sister Marie stabbed their mother repeatedly; Jean’s shouting woke their sleeping father, who had been drugged. Marie stuffed the linen cape into Jean’s mouth to stop her shouting, but she was too late to stop her father from over-powering them both, locking them in a small closet, and calling the authorities.

They were put in jail, trial arraigned, and all along – Jean was there beside her, suffering the effects of malnutrition from the prison food, the traumatic stress of being locked away from human contact, and Marie, talking to her jovially at first before, soon tired of Jean’s cries and, finally, refused to write the letters to their father, to say the things Jean most desperately wanted to say; to apologize, to ask for forgiveness. At long last, Marie, annoyed with Jean’s struggles to attempt to take control, began to make a series of cuts along Jean’s mouth, stopping her from speaking; she threatened her inside their cell, threatening to cut the head from her shoulders. So she went quiet until her voice got softer and softer still, and finally her vocal-chords atrophied, leaving her unable to speak.

When the trial came along, Jean was unable to protest the sentencing of her sister – despite what a sentence would due to her, as a feeling, thoughtful human being – as Marie was unrepetant in her mother’s death, and she was unable to speak on her behalf. Her father appealed to the conscience of the jury, asking them to consider the ‘mostly’ silent suffering of Jean, who could not speak, control her sister’s movements, or those actions:

‘Should she – dear, sweet Jean – be put to death along with her sister, cruel Marie? She had no control over the death of her mother and my wife and had she not screamed, I surely would have died as well. I urge you to not put her to death to revenge the death of my wife through the death of my Marie. Is this justice?’

Bite Sized Philosophy, 22 July 2016: Identity

Bite Sized Philosophy: Large questions, small answers: after some failed attempts to get a concise and coherent article together on this topic, I decided to (best) portray it as it best reflects my identity: scattered, disjointed, all-over-the-place, and poorly edited

Bite Sized Philosophy, 16 July 2015: Happiness

A subject about which I know very little, but as an American, I’m perfectly comfortable discussing shit I don’t quite understand.

How brief our joy, how long our sorrows. Today I’ll be discussing something I know very little about: celebration and happiness.

Happiness is the moment, or a series of moments, punctuated, for me, by longer, more boring stretches of reality, when there are no story arcs, no great movements or performances, no lasting impact or appreciation. For me, the moments of happiness that I’ve had have been mostly of the chemically induced variety. But I’d like to think I get it. I’ve been happy before. I’m sure of that. We have this abstract idea in our minds that happiness is an insoluable mystery, something that can’t really be quantified or labeled with precision. Maybe it can’t. Maybe it’s like love, and like love it does more to service fountains of bad poetry and song than anything, but we celebrate our happiness because of its brevity, because it strips away the bars of our civilization and lets us return to a more innocent time, a time where we didn’t have a multitude of different threads going on in our heads, when we didn’t have schedules and due dates and deadlines, when the moment was all there was and, for what we knew, the moment was all there’d be. I’m sure I thought that once, that what I felt like in the moment could somehow be preserved, either by continuing in the indulgence that brought the feeling to me, by loving and feeling loved in return, by making music and sharing it with friends, making love and sharing it with friends. By writing stories, a long and arduous process, and sharing it with friends.

To me, the happiest moments of my life have been moments shared, since they, in their rarity, are made more punctuated by that novelty, the novelty of unfamiliarity. What becomes the every day, the common, the grind, whenever something you love to do turns into that, a common drudgery, it loses the spark of the moment, the happy isolation in a self-deceived state of well-being. If you have sorrow in your heart and on your mind, it tends to embue everything you touch. It is a type of muck, a slime that clings to the ink of the stained person whose imagination calls it out. And the words of happy people are trembling and ecstatic, embodying the moments, celebrating their brevity, and when we read of these moments, of any moments of intensity, whether sorrowful or happy, when we reflect on them, when we think about how large they loom in mind after years and years have passed, there is a diminishment of the melancholy they might have held, and a celebration to be sure that, for one moment, we were together, and in that moment together, we were, if briefly, happy, whatever it meant, if it meant nothing, we could say, as Eric Idle sang in The Life of Brian: Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it. Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true. You’ll see it’s all a show, keep ’em laughing as you go, just remember that the last laugh is on you.

Bite Sized Philosophy: 14 July 2015: Philosophers

 

A philosopher holds a unique, almost exalted position in academia, a position distinct from that of the other sciences, the hard sciences; such as physics, math, engineering, and biology; as well as other, similar branches, psychology and theology. It is the discipline of questions and inquiry. The willingness to question, while now applauded and admired, was once quite dangerous. This is also the reason for the enduring popularity of famous philosophers. Another is their willingness to answer, or attempt to answer, questions in matters science has yet to discover.

The dangerous part of being a philosopher is to question long-held traditional, religious, and spiritual beliefs. This has cost philosophers their lives and livelihood. Socrates was sentenced to death; Galileo was put on house-arrest for being a proponent for the Copernican model of the solar system, and he was kind of being a dick about it.

There are countries in the modern world where questioning religious or political beliefs can get you sentenced to death. No person in the history of the world has brought pain upon anyone by being curious except for the pain imposed upon them by those who think it is dangerous. The impulse to ask the kind of questions philosophers normally ask seems to be a uniquely human impulse. While I am sure that how factors into an animal’s rationale in nature, such as How can I get to the food? I doubt, however, Why do I need food?  is a question considered by River Bison. (I apologize for any thinking River Bison I may have offended.)

Douglas Adams said there are three stages of civilization: the how, why, and where stages: How do I eat? Why do I eat? and Where shall we have lunch?

What makes a philosopher? How is someone given the title of philosopher? What does it mean?

In Charles Darwin’s era, before we split the atom and mapped the human genome, biology was natural philosophy. This label was applied to those who offered theories regarding long-standing, unsolved questions in regards to our knowledge about nature and the universe.

 

____

 

The choice one makes when becoming a philosopher or studying philosophy, knowing it to be a thankless profession of challenging beliefs and institutions upon which millions depend, for one reason or another, for purpose, or meaning, for comfort.

Philosophical and theological institutions cater to a unique human need, perhaps a pertinent expression of our genes to survive at all costs and because of our higher brain functions, capable of expressing our resistance to mortality. The system of philosophy arose to facilitate the existential resistance to our own non-existence: to cultivate the idea that purpose feeds worth to what is fleeting, allowing a sort of compromise between mortality and immortality through what we think of as our legacy, an acceptance of our inevitable end if, we can put purpose to chaos, which gave rise to our oldest mythological beliefs. It was a way for us to explain the inexplicable in a time where the systems we now take for granted didn’t exist. It is a unique and storied branch of academia put in place to ennoble the highest aspirations of our creativity, intelligence, and patience.

To explain lightning, we had Zeus; for the explanation of winter, we had the story of Demeter’s sadness regarding Hades’ kidnapping of her daughter. We now know that lightning is caused by positive and negative charges built within cloud-banks, producing a spark when the two clouds collide. Well, there goes Zeus. We know that winter and all of the seasons are caused by the Earth’s 23 degree axial tilt. So, there goes Demeter, Persephone, and Hades.  The Norse believed that Thor was the God of Thunder and that winter was caused by Ice Giants. The philosophy of the Norse culture is more pessimistic than The World as Will and Idea by the pessimist: Arthur Schopenhauer. Even the Gods are killed in Norse mythology–by the Midgaard serpent.

The skeleton key for understanding a civilization is their mythology; it represents their fear, desire, their psychosexual and subconscious urges towards the profane and taboo; the characters representative of these attributes are the externalization of a rich, curious culture, representing the collective unconscious of an entire civilization, and it allows a unique glimpse into the mind of ancient thinking peoples. Looking at the way past civilizations are described and the way we learn of them, and what we learn, affords us an idea of how we may be remembered someday, either by analyzing our heroes and villains, as it has been with Greek and Roman mythology, or the teachers and their schools of thought, which is more a type of ancestor-reverence than mythology in China and East-Asia, or by the histories embedded into their religious traditions, as it is with many cultures in the Middle East. The value of philosophy is, more than anything, despite its pretentiousness and abuses, an invitation to think. The brain, like our muscles, becomes stronger the more you use it, and it is the most powerful weapon we have. We may not have the speed to outrun a cheetah or a tiger, but based on precepts developed by philosophers, such as the scientific method, and techniques of measurement and engineering developed by Greeks, we can build machines that can get us the hell away from animals that would have caught and enjoyed the greater majority of our ancestry, the strongest as easily as the weak. Philosophy is systematized questioning, whose answers are not always either right or wrong: rather useful an individual or not. It is a system that sets us apart from animals, figuratively and literally, as anyone who has had to flee a rampaging T-Rex would attest.