Posted on 12/31/2005 2:18:58 PM PST by vanderleun
Did you ever have to make up your mind Pick up on one and leave the other behind? It's not often easy and not often kind. Did you ever have to make up your mind? -- The Loving Spoonful
BACK AT THE BEGINNING of this whole mess in the early 60s, Mario Savio got a lot of things wrong, but he got one big thing right. Mario peaked when he stood on the Sproul Hall steps in Berkeley in December of 1964 and said to me and a few thousand others, "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part..."
Now I'm pretty sure that if Mario were alive today he'd be among all those other Berkeley lifers who no longer speak to me other than to police my brain at a distance, while contemplating perfect organic vegetables in a perfect world where all the bongs have brimming bowls and cats and dogs sleep together in perfect harmony and all is, at last and finally, really copacetic in the world; that world where everyone gets a big fat check from the government, unless you are oppressed -- in which case you get two.
Ah, well, that was all long ago and all their town and colleges are all a crapulous shambles so let them go, let them go, God bless them. I come not to bury them, but to take inventory.
For here on the last day of a shabby year, it comes to me that I have passed, probably long ago, the "point of fulcrum" that John Fowles speaks of in The Magus: There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
It is my habit to take an inventory of my life on the last day of the year. Sometimes it is just a mumbled conversation with myself, other times it assumes more concrete lineaments. It is usually in two parts, the public and the private and, as is the nature of such things, the public is both more superficial and more interesting. This is that section of this years testament. The private may or may not be along later.
I find, in processing the superficial portion of this annual inventory, that there are a number of "burning social and political issues" that no longer burn in me. It is not that they don't raise my hackles and push my buttons, but that I'm pretty much beyond the "point of re-persuasion."
These are the items that make this year's list, triggered as they usually are by a popular catch phrase that just won't die.
1. IS IT ART? This was once stated as "It's pretty but is it art?" No more. There is almost nothing created today by 99.99999% of the talentless American citizens that have the hutzpah to call themselves artists that even begins to ooze into the "pretty" unless it is the "pretty ugly." As for beauty found in the kind of American contemporary art celebrated by the Art Mafia, you can forget about it. They hate beauty and love "edginess" since their need for novelty and cheap stimulation far exceeds their need for beauty. The reintroduction of beauty as a predominant value in American art at this point would only expose how base and ugly the decades since the classic abstract expressionist period have been.
As John Cage so succinctly summed up the art of our day, "We no longer have time for the good, the beautiful or whether or not something is true. We have only time for conversation." And that conversation, such as it has become, is only about the vapid and the coarse.
I take the time and the trouble to see a lot of what passes for new art and it is almost invariably depressing and disgusting and forgettable in varying degrees. In the last year, I have seen only one show of one artist (out of dozens of visits to exhibitions) in which beauty and feeling and form and the sublime triumph. That was the William Cumming Life Retrospective at the Frye Museum in Seattle. (William Cumming: The Image of Consequence)
Discovering the work of William Cumming, now into his 80s, was like walking into a undiscovered universe filled with sunlight. Amazing and enthralling as you see how, no matter what hard corners gouged this artist in his life (and they were myriad), the talent and the vision and the unquenchable drive to create real art and an always deepening beauty trumped everything else.
I know quite a bit about the major painters of the 20th century, but I'd missed William Cumming until I walked into the Frye on the advice from a friend. I went back to see it again before it closed a few days ago and it was even more splendid.
Cumming himself was in the museum, an old man with a cane and thick glasses, a well-worn cap on his head and a face in which a long life could be read. I spoke to him for a few minutes and then walked on. He stood for a bit in the middle of the large white room displaying his "works and days of hands" and then, I imagine, went back to his studio to continue the work of tomorrow.
2. HEY, DON'T YOU KNOW THERE'S A WAR ON? As in so many other things, the Bush administration has shown itself to be unable to wield real power, to act rather than react. It may be that decades in the wilderness have left the Republicans without the real moral fiber and deep determination to finally use electoral power to effect real change. It may be that internal advisors counsel softer words and a smaller stick. Or it may well be that, canny as always to the mood of the public, the administration too is waiting for our enemy to make the one serious mistake it can still make -- an attack on the homeland.
If it is the latter reason, that would be as craven a motive as one can imagine, but not, knowing the internal souls of politicians, a motive that cannot be imagined.
So, in the final analysis, what will it take for America to wake up and to stay awake, and to finally and at last, "know there is a war on?"
Quite obviously and without a doubt, it will take thousands of dead American civilians: men, women and this time our children too. They will die here on our soil because we did not have the will, the policies, and the guts to pursue this war as a war, using all the terrible power that we command. The dead will be your family and your friends and your neighbors. They will be the cost of the current administration's vapid policies coupled with the unremitting agenda of the Fifth Estate.
That is precisely what it will take. Not one body more. Not one body less. And although our enemy will be at fault, we will have nobody but our own weak and fat souls to blame. After all, we won't be able to say we didn't see it coming this time.
First noted in The Fifth Estate's Agenda: No, We Don't Know There's A War On
3. THE DEEPENING DEMOCRATIC DEMENTIA What is there to left to say, really, about this once proud and historic political party of which I was once a card-carrying member, and that is now a crazy-quilt of rabid interest groups and stultifying Bush derangement without a whiff of a plan, a ghost of a clue, or a pinch of purpose? Very little that they don't say and prove on a daily basis. And it is not so much that I'm over the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party is over and what we are seeing now are merely post-mortem effect.
Roger Simon is more eloquent that I am when he notes, The truth, as I gradually learned, is there is no "back" to go back to, even if I so desired. The left n'existe pas. It's over. There's no there there, as Gertrude famously said - only a boring and aging social club trying to preserve their perks.
And Neo is much more moving when she writes: To speak or not to speak: coming out as a neocon The idea is that I can't keep as a deep dark secret something so important and basic to my way of thinking from people I consider my friends. Painful though it may be, if the friendship can't handle it, I'm willing to kiss the friendship goodbye. Because what sort of a friendship is it, if it's based on something so very fragile?
My own epiphany came inside The Well, an online community that I'd been a member of for over 10 years, in late 2001. Within weeks after 9/11, the infantile leftists that infested the system were bold enough to come out with the standard palaver and drivel we now here daily. I pushed back so hard that at one point another member of the system asked me, "Don't you see that this isn't the sort of thing that it is worth losing friends over?" To which I had to answer that this was exactly the sort of thing worth losing friends over.
I lost a lot but gained others as well. Others that were, at least for me, much better and more trustworthy friends. As for the left and the Democratic Party that is more and more the standard bearer for failed regimes and religions, well, they've yet to bottom and admit they are powerless over powerlessness. Perhaps they will and, in time, come to admit their ideology has become unmanageable but I don't want to hang around for that ride.
4. THE AMAZINGLY ASSININE REPUBLICANS When listening to Bush or other Republican "leaders," why is it that I'm always reminded of that guy in the Got Wood commercial. It seems that they simply cannot get comfortable with using power once they get power. Probably the result of decades of living with powerholic Democrats who still haven't bottomed. They haven't learned to Let Go and Let God. Instead, they too bumble about look towards the next election, the next check from a lobbyist, the next free trip to some god-awful backwater in the 3rd world, the next time their name is in the paper. Everything, in short, that doesn't involve hard decisions and harder policies. It proves that just because the Democrats long ago lost their cojones, the Republican party didn't find them or grow a pair of their own.
5. THE ETERNAL UNELECTIBILITY OF THE LIBERTARIAN MIND That's not to say that I look for the party with a philosophy closest to mine to amount to anything other than a minor gadfly on the backside of the electorate anytime soon. Sad in a way to see the idealism needed in the other parties to be so overwhelmingly present in this one that it fails, time after time, to thrive in the world of realpolitik. I guess its adherents need purity more than power. Too bad. They've got some nice ideals.
6. GASOLINE COSTS TOO MUCH Repeat after me. It doesn't. It wouldn't even at $5.00 a gallon. We aren't burning too much. We aren't burning enough. Hybrids and other attempts to cut down on foreign oil dependency are just so much bollocks and blather. Anyone who understands the nature of petroleum as a fungible global commodity knows that a gallon not used here is used elsewhere. Anyone who knows a scintilla of a jot about human nature knows that alternate, sustainable energy solutions will come to pass on the day that the last gallon of gasoline on the planet is burned and not one second before. So the more we drive the closer we get to energy independence. Gentlemen, rev your engines.
7. THE "NUCLEAR OPTION" USED FOR ANYTHING EXCEPT, MAYBE, TEHRAN, NORTH KOREA AND CONGRESS. See "Republicans, limp and sans cojones" above.
8. THE AMERICAN MAGINOT LINE CALLED HOMELAND "SECURITY" We knew it was going to go wrong, terribly wrong, when the name echoed, ever so faintly, "Der Vaderland" with all the overtones of Fascist over-reaching that entails. It has, in every way, lived up to its name. Everything done by this vast new Federal jobs-for-life program gives off the whiff of half-measures, insecurity, and is subject to frequent panic attacks. Hard measures are not taken, but its easy to strip search an 80 year old Norwegian farmer in a walker with a metal hip, so who is complaining? You all want to get on your plane, no matter what, don't you?
9. WHEN THE JUDGE ENTERS THE COURTROOM "ALL RISE" Before the robe, they were all sleazy lawyers since lawyers partake of sleaze by definition. After taking the robe, they somehow take on the mystic embodiment of "THE LAW" in all its august majesty. To show respect for this, all are required to rise upon the entry of this dwarf on stilts into a courtroom. This is a tradition that could easily be assigned to the ash-bin of history. If, in fact, the judge did not have the power to send you to jail for contempt if you do not stand, this little custom would have ended long ago. As it stands it doesn't betoken "respect" for the law since, by the actions of our contemporary judges again and again, there is less and less of the law left to respect. Instead, people stand out of fear and to curry favor. That alone should tell you that there is little in the law left to respect.
10. MAKING AN ARGUMENT, WINNING AN ARGUMENT, OR EVEN HAVING AN ARGUMENT ON ALL THE "IMPORTANT NEWS OF THE DAY" ONLINE Trolls, fools, sycophants, psychopaths, ignoramuses, and those who in any other era would be institutionalized with their drool cups emptied five times a day are by and larger those who show up in online forums. You wouldn't answer your door if any one of them rang the bell, yet you let them push your buttons over and over again online. File under, "Life, Get One."
11. JOINING IN "THE CONVERSATION" ONLINE The current convention of "joining the conversation" -- whipped up, I believe, by that least dependable of Web appliances, Technorati.com -- is just the latest, damper equivalent of the 90s dumbest metaphor "the virtual community." Whatever it is that goes on online has zero resemblance to an actual conversation or a real community. Those things are what people really yearn for, the online behaviors are just weak and non-commensurate replacements. Even at their best, these conventions only underscore that absolute lack of the world dimensional to be found there. Most people, when given the choice between, online chat and real pillow talk would head to the pillow. God knows I should have.
12. ADJUSTING MY BEHAVIOR WHENEVER IT MAKES YOU THE LEAST LITTLE BIT "UNCOMFORTABLE" "Uncomfortable" is the present decade's place holder for the 90s most idiotic word, "inappropriate." My first wife used to revel in "inappropriate" whenever her nearly constant condition of "anusmouth" was about to set in. It signaled that, no matter what you thought or did or were, it was just wrong, awful, stupid and immoral and no dissension was to be tolerated. "Uncomfortable" in the Oughts does all that or more. It is now used not as a mere prelude to condemnation, but as a pretext for passing laws and regulations to be sure, absolutely sure, that nobody you don't know is going to be offended. Canada is taking the lead here when it comes to people not agreeing, like the drinking bird over the glass, with the latest party line on the infinite goodness of gay. America is not far behind with the various endless and draconian anti-smoker laws since America always needs some class to oppress and all the usual suspects have been raised into heaven. Given the new political power of "uncomfortable," people who declare it and ask you to reach for your wallet or a modification of the Constitution should make you very, well, uncomfortable.
13. SUPPORTING OR VOTING FOR ANY POLITICIAN WHO SHOWS, BY WORD OR DEED, AND REGARDLESS OF PARTY AFFILIATION, THAT HE OR SHE IS A MEMBER OF THE RECENTLY FORMED BI-PARTISAN "BUTTINSKY" PARTY. You shall know them by their unrelenting impulse to take what is private and personal and send in a government bureau to sit in your house and make sure you are talking and doing only correct behavior as defined by "those values that everyone knows and agrees on at my house." Rules and regulations governing what can be said and done in our public spaces are slowly starting to invade our personal spaces and lives. Soon they will come to your house not only to count your spoons, but to cause you to count them again after they leave. Through fines, fees or taxes you will pay them to do this.
14. IS THERE A HOUSING BUBBLE? Yes, there is. Pop goes the weasel. Start saving now for much cheaper houses in 2007 when cash will again be king.
15. NEW CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS REGARDING ANY LIFESTYLE ISSUE. This tendency is the worst knee-jerk reaction of The Buttinsky Party. Case in point: An amendment forbidding Gay Marriage. In case you have been sleeping, gay marriage is a done deal and a de-facto state. It's been decided by your children's generation and your children's children's generation. Yes, it's queer, but yes it's here, and the compulsion to staple something on to the Constitution to forbid it is like shoveling seaweed against the tide with a Jello pitchfork. The Constitution is supposed to be more than just an ad hoc collection of Post-It notes tacked on and taken off depending on the whim of the year.
But if we must, I propose a trade. Conservatives drop all efforts for an amendment forbidding gay marriage if Liberals will support the repeal of the 22nd Amendment so that George W. Bush can run for office two or three more times. Any takers on either side? I thought not.
Okay, a compromise. We'll shoot Michael Savage on the air in mid-mental meltdown if you'll garrote Al Franken in mid-flatulation at the same time. Okay?
Good. Now we can get back to speaking to each other in a civil tone in an atmosphere devoid of their poisoning stenches.
16. THE DOWNWARD SPIRALING STUPIDITY OF GHETTO YOUTH STYLES -- AND THAT MEANS YOU TOO, WHITEY While we're on the subject of civility and cultural stenches, can we all agree to just stop allowing our children to dress like the most woebegone cross between a Balkan Refugee and the jewelry counter at Penny's? And can we remind the white kids that MF this and MF that doesn't have the grindingly disgusting quality of the black kids spouting the N-word with equal frequency and ignorant intensity. And they can back off the technicolor tats and the gigantic metal spikes hammered through every limb and orifice while they're at it.
And, as we read in the Holy Book of Forrest Gump, "That's all I have to say about that."
This year.
I was just wanting a day on FR where I could avoid serious discussion. Not wanting to make a big deal out of such a sweet, simple lyric.
Most days I'm quite happy to look for the hidden or broader applications.
Yes, I still love the song and the lyrics with their simple, direct meaning. I really enjoyed The Lovin' Spoonful's music.
Dear Jack,
You might reflect that deep down you're being quite shallow. The attitude that FreeR is the default meeting ground of "thinking people" reveals that you need to think more deeply about what thinking actually is. Is it kneejerk agreement with some unwritten but 'widely understood' set of attitudes about what is kosher to think and say here? I don't think so but your milage obviously varies.
I would adjur you not to attribute every little thing that doesn't map to your inner self as something out of the DU. You'll miss the opportunity to expand and will find you shrink instead.
I don't think you want to parallel the goose stepping of DU with lock stepping at FR. Do you?
Good piece. Thanks.
I don't know why people are getting katty here. I enjoyed your peace and laughed out loud a few times. I didn'rt agree with everything but I enjoyed it. God bless.
Excellent column!
The only part I disagree with is the simplistic take on "gay marriage", since "gay marriage" simply cannot exist any more than "bright darkness" can exist. But other than getting sucked into feeling it necessary to even comment about a such a red-herring impossibility, I thoroughly enjoyed this rant.
I agree with you.
Cripes, it's New Year's Eve/Day and this writer took the time to compose a lengthy, thoughtful, interesting and mostly well-written column. I sure enjoyed it, even though I was certainly not in full agreement with everything. I don't get why some people feel it necessary to be critical in a mean way. Oh well.
Look forward to reading this.
By all means keep trying.
But spend some time with a good dictionary and spellcheck, okay?
More properly speaking, homosexual monogamy...
Two homosexuals cannot be "monogamous" because the word denotes a biological procreation they are not capable of together; human reproductive biology is an obvious secular standard.
Marriage is a religious "rite," not a civil "right;" a secular standard of human reproductive biology united with the Judaic Adam and Eve model of monogamy in creationist belief.
All adults have privilege to marry one consenting adult of opposite gender; therefore, Fourteenth Amendment "equal protection" argument about "privileges and immunities" for homosexual marriage is invalid. Driving, marriage, legal and medical practices are not enumerated rights; they are privileged practices that require statutory license. Nothing that requires a license is a right.
It was landmark U.S. Supreme Court precedent Reynolds v. United States in 1878 that made "separation of church and state" a dubiously legitimate point of case law, but more importantly; it confirmed the Constitutionality in statutory regulation of marriage practices. Congress, state legislatures and public referenda have statutorily determined polygamous, pederast, homosexual, and incestuous marriages are unlawful. No Constitutional Amendment restricting marriage is required to regulate "practice" according to the Reynolds decision.
"Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices..."Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145, 8 Otto 145, 24 L. Ed. 244 (1878).]
See also: Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States, 136 U.S. 1, 10 S.Ct. 792, 34 L. Ed. 478 (1890). Revised as 140 U.S. 665, 11 S.Ct. 884, 35 L. Ed. 592 (1891).
Homosexual monogamy advocates are a cult of perversion seeking ceremonious sanctification for voluntary deviancy with anatomical function and desperately pursuing esoteric absolution to justify their guilt-ridden egos. This has no secular standard; it is an idolatrous fetish. Why not properly apply the adjudicated Reynolds 'separation of church and state' here?
No person can logically say that carnal practices engaged by homosexuals are consistent with human anatomical function. It is obvious, and an impervious secular argument to say that biology is a standard by which we can measure. The hormonal drive to mate is biologically heterosexual. Either homosexuality is a choice, a birth defect, or it is a mental illness. Take your pick.
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But other than getting sucked into feeling it necessary to even comment about a such a red-herring impossibility,...
I'm not sure if that red-herring wasn't really the whole point of it with everything else gratuitously and sloppily constructed around it...
macamadamia's tagline says it well: “The great dangerous non-sequitur du jour”
Pay special attention to the mention of the “Nuclear Option.”
The left is frothing at the prospect of losing their stranglehold on the Supreme Court and fear their holy grail of homosexual monogamy will go down in flames...
* little jeremiah - - psychological dynamics ping...* they will do anything to slip the homosexual agenda into any story...
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The Nuclear Option
If you want to be added to this list, please notify me...
Originally, the Nuclear Option Ping List started out as a practical joke. With all the vitriolic response I received from certain un-named individuals, I figured it would be a great idea to do it for real...
I have observed here on Free Republic, a never ending flaming of religious folks and conservatives by people who promote things such as drug abuse, homosexuality, the ritual murder of abortion and other garbage.
Not being an orthodox or ecumenical atheist, it has really stretched my patience. I do not think policemen are jack-booted thugs, nor do I look at people who want to protect their families from filthy scum as brownshirts.
The purpose of this is to alert people to the cultural Marxism run amok... Drugs, sex perverts, pornography (in film and in music), marijuana, liquor, bashing the religious people, destroying social institutions (like marriage and the Boy Scouts), etc., etc.,... ad nausea...
The druggies like the sex perverts can only perpetuate an ever increasing market for their filth by molesting the minds and bodies of the young ones... this is the only way they get new Demo-rat voters... CHEMICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE!
It is no coincidence Islamic pagans hate Israel, Jews, Christians and Western Civilization. The entire basis of Western Civilization is Mosaic Law, something both the Neo-Pagan Left and the pagan Islamic thugs cannot abide and wish to destroy.
The very idea that human beings have individual rights not subject to the whims of a monarch, but subject to the laws of Yahweh, is directly from Moses.
Historically, this is proven over and over again with the succsessive conflicts between the forces of paganism and the Judaic culture. It is being played out here and all over the world today...
Observing this as an atheist, I prefer the paradigm of a Judaic culture to the chaotic death cult of New Age neo-pagan absurdity.
Well, he could at least use my name.
Nice. Thanks.
And Happy New Year.
Good thinking points in the mix.
Thanks
The idea that "gay marriage" is inevitable, so we should just accept it, is like the advice that used to be given to women if a rapist attacked - just lie back and take it, since it's inevitable.
Fight evil, without stopping; it's the right thing to do. I wish I could remember Churchill's statement about fighting evil if it we lose.
I agree with some stuff; but why that "gay" promotion?
It was the sole purpose of the whole thing.
The psychological dynamic here is to get you to agree with as much as possible (sort of like a sales pressure tactic), then hit you with something else...
Actually your take on marriage is demonstrably wrong in historical terms: Roman civil marriage was also monogamous and owed nothing to Jewish Scripture. It was Roman civil marriage, not Jewish marriage, which became the basis for Christian marriage. Marriages between Christians were Roman civil marriages undertaken with the blessing of the bishop until at least the time of Justinian (whose novellas permit either priests or notaries to conclude marriages), and were not a strictly religious affair until the transfer of all marriages between free citizens to the Church by Leo VI in the 9th century, and all marriages by Alexis I in the late 11th century.
How the transition from civil to Church marriage was handled in the lands which ceased to be under Imperial control thanks to barbarian invasions, I don not know: perhaps one of our knowledgable Latins can fill in.
Marriage is a natural institution, Church (or other religious) marriage is the sanctification of that institution, and civil marriage its acknowledgment by the state. The baleful effects of 'gay marriage' in our already debauched culture lie primarily in the redefinition of the natural institution as the content of its state recognition so that the natural institution is abolished and replaced with a statist construct.
Christianity came from Judaism, which was long before the Romans were even a ‘shot in the dark.’ Yeshua was a Jew and there is a reference to marriage in the Gospel (forgive me, I'm not a Christian and cannot recall the text).
Now, you may make the argument that the basis for Roman Catholic marriage (which some Christians would argue is of a pagan nature) is from the Roman pagan culture.
Adultery was certainly condoned and sanctioned for the male in Rome and in Greece, something the Judaic culture had forbid, despite their history of polygyny.
But, even so, the nature of marriage is biological, establishing who the parents were for inheritance. It is a creationist model nevertheless, as even the pagan Romans, pagan Greeks and other ancient pagan cultures were. It just so happens that marriage in this country is based on the Judaic model, otherwise we would not have adultery as legal grounds for a woman seeking a divorce.
Words for an American to live by.
And now a word about my party, poised dramatically to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
HE AMAZINGLY ASSININE REPUBLICANS .... prove that just because the Democrats long ago lost their cojones, the Republican party didn't find them or grow a pair of their own.
Happy New Year!
Yes, Christianity came from Judaism, but Christian marriage came from Roman marriage. There was no Christian marriage rite copied or adapted from the Jewish rite. Indeed within the Empire the Church had no specific rite for marriage until the 9th century (again I don't know what the Latins outside the Empire did about this). Until then Christian marriages were as I described them: Roman civil marriages undertaken with the blessing of the bishop.
Christ's reference to marriage is not bounded or conditioned on the Jewish notion either--Jews were permitted both multiple wives and concubines, while Roman marriages were monogamous, albeit with the defect of concubinage as in institution--rather Christ refers to the natural institution in its ideal form.
Nor is there any point in separating 'Roman Catholic' from Christian here: I am discussing the state of Christian marriage before even the schism of the Nestorians from the Church, and even the institution of the 'rite of crowning' and the transfer of the registration of marriages to the Church took place before the schism of the Roman patriarchate from the Church.
Christian marriage came from Judaism - - Adam and Eve. The Bible says so...
Marriage was long established in Judaism before Rome ever existed. Rome is not the center of Christianity - - Yeshua was born into the House of David.
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Christ refers to the natural institution in its ideal form.
No, he was referring to Genesis 1:18, Yahweh and Yeshua are one in the same...
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