Here’s some news that you can use, so don’t snooze, ‘cause you might lose. Beware of exceptionalism in all of its forms, because nothing good can come of it.
If one group is exceptional, it makes it too easy to define down the rights of members of other groups, and then to deprive them of those rights. We can see some of this going on already, if we are in the mood to be honest.
There’s a lot of talk these days about how America is a very special place, and it is too, in its way. America has a lot to recommend it, that much is true. For one thing, it’s one of the few countries in the world where being a citizen fails to inform the listener in the slightest regarding the racial and ethnic information of the citizen. That’s a wonderful thing. It allows anyone in the whole, wide world to come to America and become a citizen within five or eight years, and once they get that paperwork in hand they are as much a citizen of America as Thomas Jefferson’s descendants (Black or White). Remember though, there comes a time to draw the line.
Some people are insisting that America was ordained by God for some unique, higher purpose, usually a purpose that is connected somehow to their own agenda. The idea is that America has a special relationship with the mysterious supernatural entity. Some of these people are politicians, some are religious leaders. I don’t know about you, but I don’t put much stock in either group. This beloved-of-God thing is where I would suggest drawing the line.
Mostly it just smacks of elitism, the idea that one particular country is better than the others. I say country, but you could just as easily say race, nationality, religion, culture, or language group, or you could separate out by height, hair color, fashion sense, or musical ability. There are all kinds of groups that get this oh! so special feeling about themselves. They have in common that they are all wrong.
It’s okay to feel this feeling in your own heart, but it’s never a good idea to go shooting your mouth off about how different you are from other people, or how much better you are. “In your heart,” that’s the ticket! Keep it to yourself.
It is possible that the Irish have a secret hunch that they are the people, of all of the earth’s people, that are the most beloved of God, but they are not demonstrative about it, generally. There’s a fine joke that I believe illustrates the Irish character regarding their particular take on exceptionalism. It’s a Pat and Mike joke from the days of the great ethnic Vaudeville comedians:
Pat was walking down the street and he ran into his friend Mike. “So Mike,” says Pat, “I hear you were at Flanagan’s wedding.” Mike says, “sure and I was.” “And,” says Pat, “I heard that you were the Best Man!” Mike stiffens up and says, “that’s a lie!” Relaxing a little bit he adds, “but I was as good as any man there.”
That would be a good attitude for Americans to adopt towards the world. It would be a great attitude for each of the racial groups in America to adopt towards the other groups, that would be a cool breeze right there. We’re not better than anyone else, but we’re as good as anyone. I could subscribe to that.
The Twentieth Century was full of countries that thought that they were so far superior to other countries that they felt thereby entitled to subject the other countries to their will, permanently was the goal, and they actually tried it and it got a lot of people killed, sometimes just to be rid of them and make room for more of the superior group. Exceptionalism led quickly to eliminationalism. That was some of the wrongest shit in the long history of the world, and that’s a tough list to top.
So maybe that’s not a good road to start down.
Last Word
Many of the people who are telling America these days that Americans are somehow exceptional and that we have a God ordained duty to spread our philosophy all over the world are big-time, evangelical Christians. While you Americans are being flattered by them in this way, you should recall that these are the same people who think that only a small number of people who are totally devoted to their particular narrow stripe of the religious spectrum are going to ever get to that Heaven that they aspire to. They believe that almost everybody that ever lived, and damn near every single person now alive, will go to hell for being insufficiently like themselves.
So while they’re flattering you with all of this exceptionalist talk, bear in mind that they are much more exceptional than you, and that you’re going to hell. You’ll be lucky if they say thanks after they have what they want from you, probably your vote.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Nirvana - Son of a gun
A cover version, I never heard the original.
Nirvana, love them or hate them, made art, musical art, and very musical at that. My favorite definition of art is "the creation and resolution of tension." These guys created musical landscapes, and then manipulated them very professionally.
Maybe it's not Mozart, but it's music, and it's art, and I'm pretty sure that Mozart would have liked it.
Nirvana, love them or hate them, made art, musical art, and very musical at that. My favorite definition of art is "the creation and resolution of tension." These guys created musical landscapes, and then manipulated them very professionally.
Maybe it's not Mozart, but it's music, and it's art, and I'm pretty sure that Mozart would have liked it.
Wimbledon Roll Models
Roger Federer beat Novak Djokavic in four sets to advance to the final against Andy Murray at Wimbledon. It was a pleasure to watch.
It was a pleasure because these two guys are among the most sportsmanlike individuals working in any sport today. I mean in the manner of good, old-fashioned good-sportsmanship. There was no exulting at every point won, no cursing line calls that went against them, and certainly no bumping each other on the turnarounds. These guys are gentlemen, pure and simple. I love these guys.
Andy Murray has learned slightly better manners in the last year or so, but he has a long, long way to go. I hope that it's not too much of a contrast in the final, although I wouldn't be above taking some guilty pleasure in watching the English get embarrassed, at their own game, so to speak. (How the English got a reputation for gentlemanliness is beyond me, I just don't see it.)
Congratulations Roger, and don't worry Novak. You've got a future in this tennis business.
It was a pleasure because these two guys are among the most sportsmanlike individuals working in any sport today. I mean in the manner of good, old-fashioned good-sportsmanship. There was no exulting at every point won, no cursing line calls that went against them, and certainly no bumping each other on the turnarounds. These guys are gentlemen, pure and simple. I love these guys.
Andy Murray has learned slightly better manners in the last year or so, but he has a long, long way to go. I hope that it's not too much of a contrast in the final, although I wouldn't be above taking some guilty pleasure in watching the English get embarrassed, at their own game, so to speak. (How the English got a reputation for gentlemanliness is beyond me, I just don't see it.)
Congratulations Roger, and don't worry Novak. You've got a future in this tennis business.
Cognitive Dissonance And The Damage Done
I write in a serious mood. I am distressed about the state of my country, and my society, less so but still distressed about the state of the entire world as we know it. The major reason for all of the interlocking directorate of problems that plague us is that people are believing what they are told, and not thinking for themselves.
No less of a great man than Dung Chow Ping once advised the Chinese people to “discover truth from facts.” It was good advice then, and it served the Chinese people well, as they were waking up from the hypnotic phantasm that was Maoism. It’s still good advice.
Modern American Politics
In our benighted epoch of history, otherwise intelligent Americans are drinking the Kool-Aid of their choice and turning themselves into credulous robots. Any meme that enters the political discourse, from whatever side of the battle, becomes tomorrows firmly held belief among great masses of people. Many of these beliefs are deeply antagonistic to the best interests of the people who hold them.
I love the Internet, and I love to read people’s comments on matters great and small. I do not only frequent sites that mirror my own point of view, I take great pleasure in reading a great variety of the opinions of ordinary Americans. I regularly read progressive news sites and blogs, but I also read, semi-regularly lets say, the Breitbart sites and Weasel Zippers, among others.
The Leftie sites have their own Kool-Aid of course, knee-jerk Liberalism is alive and well. So is the phony Liberalism, the “Not-In-My-Back-Yard” Liberalism that was so prevalent in my youth. Phony anti-racism, don’t even get me started. The Rightie sites take the cake though, in matters of the monolithic adoption of weird, counterintuitive, destructive ideas, hook, line and sinker, by people whose real interests lie elsewhere. The new Conservative media, and its adherents, represents the full flowering of cognitive dissonance in American politics.
Take Willard Romney, Please
The truth about American politics is out there, you don’t need to be an ivy league PhD to discover it. Most people ignore it though, most sign up for voluntary ignorance, preferring to stick with the talking points issued by their echo-chamber of choice.
I’m not here to explain it all to you, but let’s look at a prime example in the person of one Willard “Mitt” Romney. Willard is an obnoxious rich-kid with a weird sense of entitlement, a man who accumulated a king’s ransom in the private sector through dubious financial chicanery. He tells colossal lies on a daily basis. (Don’t believe me? Google “Romney” “lies.”) He runs away from any of the political successes that he can point too, there are a few, because they do not align properly with the new Conservative orthodoxy. He provides no descriptions of his plans for the country or the economy, sticking instead to generalities like “lowering regulation of business,” “cutting taxes,” and “restoring America.” He offers nothing but a more mean spirited version of the policies of the Bush years, now famously understood to have been profoundly destructive. He does this down to the last details, like school vouchers and the privatization of this and that. Oh, and “on my first day as president, I will take steps to repeal Obamacare.” Which of course the president has virtually no power to do, there is no mechanism for him to use to accomplish the banishment of a law that was passed by both houses of congress, signed by the acting president, and then validated by the Supreme Court. Maybe he plans to immediately declare a state of emergency? You couldn’t tell by him, he’s not talking. Oh, and flip-flopping, etc. And no one likes the guy. And his wife says crazy shit like “Obama wants to kill my husband.” She also keeps million dollar horses as an investment. It’s quite a list of what-not-to-like.
But, somehow, he’s running close to the current president in “the polls,” which themselves are a challenge for any thinking person to take seriously. And people repeat these silly things as good ideas. As might a parrot, after careful training.
Going To Canada
Does anyone believe that people are thinking for themselves? What is your evidence? Certainly not the rash of “I’m going to Canada!” comments that followed the recent Supreme Court decision in the ACA case.
Some misguidedly admired pseudo-conservative or other must have Tweeted that as a result of the decision he couldn’t stand it anymore, he was moving to Canada. This idea caught on like those Colorado wildfires, and suddenly the old Intertubes were full of comments and Tweets parroting the sentiment.
Think about it for just a moment: America (read: the Black President) is taking away my freedom! I can’t live in this new Socialist America! I’m going to Canada! Which of course is a genuinely Socialist country, with fully realized socialized healthcare. Which works, by the way.
“I hate Socialism!/I’m going to a Socialist Country!” “I hate Mitt Romney/I’m voting for Mitt Romney.” Or, if you ask me, “I hate losing my freedoms!/I’m voting for someone who will limit my freedoms!” Cognitive dissonance.
The Various Myths Of Jesus
This willful ignorance, this credulous preference for received truth, is not some new thing under the sun. It is nowhere more apparent than in the modern Christian religion, in its thousands of conflicting versions.
There is no doubt that Jesus was an interesting guy, and worth remembering fondly. If you focus on the things that he is credited with actually having said, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, the record is full of good ideas. He was a good teacher at the very least, and rates as a genuine prophet of social progress and tolerance. In this, he was in the mainstream of Jewish prophets, continuing an expansion of social consciousness that had been going on already for a thousand years.
Then he died, a very conventional human death due to blood loss, asphyxiation and shock, a typical crucifixion death. A wealth of literature grew up around him in the period that followed. The big question initially was whether Jesus was a Jew or was he some new thing, some other thing. Jewish officialdom lost interest, the Romans were tearing up the place, and the “some other thing” argument carried the day.
The divinity question arose later, and took on increasing significance. Within three hundred years, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire and Jesus had been declared divine, probably following the long standing tradition of Rome in the honoring of its great men. Of the early Christian writings, examples that were useful to this mythologizing were declared to be official; marginal or inconvenient texts became anathema and were forbidden, and where possible, destroyed.
Jesus then spent one thousand plus years mostly as a sword of power for the controlling elite. Since the Reformation, Jesus has become all things to all people, depending upon whom you ask. The good works and progressive ideas of a decent, straightforward, intelligent man were thusly co-opted and corrupted, mostly by men who’s prosperity depended on telling the masses of people what to believe, and then enforcing that belief.
By now the concept of “Christianity” is so malleable that the name of Jesus can be used to justify anything from helping the poor to demonizing the poor; from mere intolerance to murder and torture; from Brotherhood to Ethnic Cleansing. Those who accept these far ranging positions almost all do so on the word of someone else, without independent consideration. “Jesus hates Fags!” In a pig’s eye. “Jesus wept,” indeed.
Thus Endeth The Lesson
So my advice, whether you are choosing a religion or deciding whom to vote for, is to think for yourself. As that Chinese fellow said, “discover truth from facts.” You can do it! If you are in the guilty majority, please stop taking directions from unscrupulous, self-serving people who probably have their hands in your pockets as we speak.
No less of a great man than Dung Chow Ping once advised the Chinese people to “discover truth from facts.” It was good advice then, and it served the Chinese people well, as they were waking up from the hypnotic phantasm that was Maoism. It’s still good advice.
Modern American Politics
In our benighted epoch of history, otherwise intelligent Americans are drinking the Kool-Aid of their choice and turning themselves into credulous robots. Any meme that enters the political discourse, from whatever side of the battle, becomes tomorrows firmly held belief among great masses of people. Many of these beliefs are deeply antagonistic to the best interests of the people who hold them.
I love the Internet, and I love to read people’s comments on matters great and small. I do not only frequent sites that mirror my own point of view, I take great pleasure in reading a great variety of the opinions of ordinary Americans. I regularly read progressive news sites and blogs, but I also read, semi-regularly lets say, the Breitbart sites and Weasel Zippers, among others.
The Leftie sites have their own Kool-Aid of course, knee-jerk Liberalism is alive and well. So is the phony Liberalism, the “Not-In-My-Back-Yard” Liberalism that was so prevalent in my youth. Phony anti-racism, don’t even get me started. The Rightie sites take the cake though, in matters of the monolithic adoption of weird, counterintuitive, destructive ideas, hook, line and sinker, by people whose real interests lie elsewhere. The new Conservative media, and its adherents, represents the full flowering of cognitive dissonance in American politics.
Take Willard Romney, Please
The truth about American politics is out there, you don’t need to be an ivy league PhD to discover it. Most people ignore it though, most sign up for voluntary ignorance, preferring to stick with the talking points issued by their echo-chamber of choice.
I’m not here to explain it all to you, but let’s look at a prime example in the person of one Willard “Mitt” Romney. Willard is an obnoxious rich-kid with a weird sense of entitlement, a man who accumulated a king’s ransom in the private sector through dubious financial chicanery. He tells colossal lies on a daily basis. (Don’t believe me? Google “Romney” “lies.”) He runs away from any of the political successes that he can point too, there are a few, because they do not align properly with the new Conservative orthodoxy. He provides no descriptions of his plans for the country or the economy, sticking instead to generalities like “lowering regulation of business,” “cutting taxes,” and “restoring America.” He offers nothing but a more mean spirited version of the policies of the Bush years, now famously understood to have been profoundly destructive. He does this down to the last details, like school vouchers and the privatization of this and that. Oh, and “on my first day as president, I will take steps to repeal Obamacare.” Which of course the president has virtually no power to do, there is no mechanism for him to use to accomplish the banishment of a law that was passed by both houses of congress, signed by the acting president, and then validated by the Supreme Court. Maybe he plans to immediately declare a state of emergency? You couldn’t tell by him, he’s not talking. Oh, and flip-flopping, etc. And no one likes the guy. And his wife says crazy shit like “Obama wants to kill my husband.” She also keeps million dollar horses as an investment. It’s quite a list of what-not-to-like.
But, somehow, he’s running close to the current president in “the polls,” which themselves are a challenge for any thinking person to take seriously. And people repeat these silly things as good ideas. As might a parrot, after careful training.
Going To Canada
Does anyone believe that people are thinking for themselves? What is your evidence? Certainly not the rash of “I’m going to Canada!” comments that followed the recent Supreme Court decision in the ACA case.
Some misguidedly admired pseudo-conservative or other must have Tweeted that as a result of the decision he couldn’t stand it anymore, he was moving to Canada. This idea caught on like those Colorado wildfires, and suddenly the old Intertubes were full of comments and Tweets parroting the sentiment.
Think about it for just a moment: America (read: the Black President) is taking away my freedom! I can’t live in this new Socialist America! I’m going to Canada! Which of course is a genuinely Socialist country, with fully realized socialized healthcare. Which works, by the way.
“I hate Socialism!/I’m going to a Socialist Country!” “I hate Mitt Romney/I’m voting for Mitt Romney.” Or, if you ask me, “I hate losing my freedoms!/I’m voting for someone who will limit my freedoms!” Cognitive dissonance.
The Various Myths Of Jesus
This willful ignorance, this credulous preference for received truth, is not some new thing under the sun. It is nowhere more apparent than in the modern Christian religion, in its thousands of conflicting versions.
There is no doubt that Jesus was an interesting guy, and worth remembering fondly. If you focus on the things that he is credited with actually having said, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, the record is full of good ideas. He was a good teacher at the very least, and rates as a genuine prophet of social progress and tolerance. In this, he was in the mainstream of Jewish prophets, continuing an expansion of social consciousness that had been going on already for a thousand years.
Then he died, a very conventional human death due to blood loss, asphyxiation and shock, a typical crucifixion death. A wealth of literature grew up around him in the period that followed. The big question initially was whether Jesus was a Jew or was he some new thing, some other thing. Jewish officialdom lost interest, the Romans were tearing up the place, and the “some other thing” argument carried the day.
The divinity question arose later, and took on increasing significance. Within three hundred years, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire and Jesus had been declared divine, probably following the long standing tradition of Rome in the honoring of its great men. Of the early Christian writings, examples that were useful to this mythologizing were declared to be official; marginal or inconvenient texts became anathema and were forbidden, and where possible, destroyed.
Jesus then spent one thousand plus years mostly as a sword of power for the controlling elite. Since the Reformation, Jesus has become all things to all people, depending upon whom you ask. The good works and progressive ideas of a decent, straightforward, intelligent man were thusly co-opted and corrupted, mostly by men who’s prosperity depended on telling the masses of people what to believe, and then enforcing that belief.
By now the concept of “Christianity” is so malleable that the name of Jesus can be used to justify anything from helping the poor to demonizing the poor; from mere intolerance to murder and torture; from Brotherhood to Ethnic Cleansing. Those who accept these far ranging positions almost all do so on the word of someone else, without independent consideration. “Jesus hates Fags!” In a pig’s eye. “Jesus wept,” indeed.
Thus Endeth The Lesson
So my advice, whether you are choosing a religion or deciding whom to vote for, is to think for yourself. As that Chinese fellow said, “discover truth from facts.” You can do it! If you are in the guilty majority, please stop taking directions from unscrupulous, self-serving people who probably have their hands in your pockets as we speak.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Adrian Belew I Am What I Am
Here's more Adrian Belew for you, the boy can play. Great narative, but I wish the guy would make up his mind. Are you what you are, or are you what you think you are?
Cold War Nostalgia And "The Bedford Incident"
There is these days a murmur among the pundit class regarding the passing of the Soviet Union from the world scene. There is a wondering whether this passing was in truth a bad thing, rather than being a good thing as had been previously supposed. I was way ahead of the curve on this attitude. To me, from the first, the demise of the Soviets was a thing to be mourned, not celebrated.
The Cold War was, on balance, a good thing, its tensions created stability and clarity. Any perceived threat to world peace was very abstract at best, and was a small price to pay for the benefit conferred. I trusted the Soviet leadership to remain cool-headed and cost-benefit minded, much more so than I trust many current world leaders with their fingers on buttons, nuclear and otherwise.
In those days, the two great powers faced each other solemnly across the chess table, and all of the pieces obeyed the directions of their masters’ hands, and the pawns quietly awaited their fates, as it should be. This beautiful order of things had been disturbed in the years leading up to the final dissolution, but for several decades the hypnotic specter of Mutually Assured Destruction had kept the entire world frozen in a peaceful, not unpleasant embrace.
The Bedford Incident
“The Bedford Incident” is a lovely movie made in 1965, the height of the Cold War. The movie was directed by James B. Harris. The screenplay was adopted from a novel by James Bascowich. That book was one of many written during the period which exploited the exquisite fear that some unfortunate human error would break the spell of peace with a substantial, unanticipated explosion.
It is the story of an American destroyer and a Russian submarine that engage in a game of cat and mouse in the frozen ocean between Greenland and Iceland. The destroyer’s captain (Richard Widmark) has an Ahab like obsession with Russian submarines. The only one who seems to be made anxious by this is a Kriegsmarine Commodore on board as a NATO technical advisor. This former U-boat captain serves as the voice of reason here, a prudent advocate of caution in a sea of monomania.
James MacArthur plays a junior officer who is eager to please and wants to get ahead. He tries very hard to please the captain, but can’t seem to make it work. The captain is very hard on him, disliking his “quarterback most likely to succeed” profile. That the captain rides him hard enough to make him erratic when exhausted becomes abundantly clear at the end of the movie, when his equilibrium is upset and the inevitable disaster is precipitated.
There are many nice touches:
One scene features the six or seven Filipino commissarymen. This is accurate. During the mid-Sixties, naval officers were served by dedicated Filipino servants in nice, white jackets, as presented here. Regular commissarymen, cooks for the general crew, were still mostly Black at the time. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that most Blacks in the Navy at the time were commissarymen. This was just beginning to change in the mid-Sixties. (Yes, I was an enlisted sailor at the time.)
Sidney Poitier plays a photographer for a magazine on assignment to do a story about the ship. (Probably “Life” magazine.) This is an admirable bit of casting, because there is nothing Black-specific about the role, and the screenplay never makes reference to the photographer’s race. Top marks to somebody for that.
Yes, nuclear drama ensues. “If he fires one, I’ll fire one.” The young officer hears this and says, “fire one!” And he does too, he fires one, and the sub does too, and the sub is destroyed while the destroyer is left to listen to the ping of the sub’s torpedo getting louder and closer. Cue the mushroom cloud.
We were luckier in real life. Lucky that the bad luck in real life, and I assume that it happened, was not as serious as the bad luck in the movie. Lucky, too, to live in the peace of that wonderful era.
The Cold War was, on balance, a good thing, its tensions created stability and clarity. Any perceived threat to world peace was very abstract at best, and was a small price to pay for the benefit conferred. I trusted the Soviet leadership to remain cool-headed and cost-benefit minded, much more so than I trust many current world leaders with their fingers on buttons, nuclear and otherwise.
In those days, the two great powers faced each other solemnly across the chess table, and all of the pieces obeyed the directions of their masters’ hands, and the pawns quietly awaited their fates, as it should be. This beautiful order of things had been disturbed in the years leading up to the final dissolution, but for several decades the hypnotic specter of Mutually Assured Destruction had kept the entire world frozen in a peaceful, not unpleasant embrace.
The Bedford Incident
“The Bedford Incident” is a lovely movie made in 1965, the height of the Cold War. The movie was directed by James B. Harris. The screenplay was adopted from a novel by James Bascowich. That book was one of many written during the period which exploited the exquisite fear that some unfortunate human error would break the spell of peace with a substantial, unanticipated explosion.
It is the story of an American destroyer and a Russian submarine that engage in a game of cat and mouse in the frozen ocean between Greenland and Iceland. The destroyer’s captain (Richard Widmark) has an Ahab like obsession with Russian submarines. The only one who seems to be made anxious by this is a Kriegsmarine Commodore on board as a NATO technical advisor. This former U-boat captain serves as the voice of reason here, a prudent advocate of caution in a sea of monomania.
James MacArthur plays a junior officer who is eager to please and wants to get ahead. He tries very hard to please the captain, but can’t seem to make it work. The captain is very hard on him, disliking his “quarterback most likely to succeed” profile. That the captain rides him hard enough to make him erratic when exhausted becomes abundantly clear at the end of the movie, when his equilibrium is upset and the inevitable disaster is precipitated.
There are many nice touches:
One scene features the six or seven Filipino commissarymen. This is accurate. During the mid-Sixties, naval officers were served by dedicated Filipino servants in nice, white jackets, as presented here. Regular commissarymen, cooks for the general crew, were still mostly Black at the time. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that most Blacks in the Navy at the time were commissarymen. This was just beginning to change in the mid-Sixties. (Yes, I was an enlisted sailor at the time.)
Sidney Poitier plays a photographer for a magazine on assignment to do a story about the ship. (Probably “Life” magazine.) This is an admirable bit of casting, because there is nothing Black-specific about the role, and the screenplay never makes reference to the photographer’s race. Top marks to somebody for that.
Yes, nuclear drama ensues. “If he fires one, I’ll fire one.” The young officer hears this and says, “fire one!” And he does too, he fires one, and the sub does too, and the sub is destroyed while the destroyer is left to listen to the ping of the sub’s torpedo getting louder and closer. Cue the mushroom cloud.
We were luckier in real life. Lucky that the bad luck in real life, and I assume that it happened, was not as serious as the bad luck in the movie. Lucky, too, to live in the peace of that wonderful era.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Adrian Belew Gunman
Bet you've never heard this one. And it stomps ass too, LAMF. Cool video, even. You can say thank you now.
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