[Note: Written before the other ramblings, but misposted then as a comment]
I'm Dean, and actually I have very little to say. In fact, I have nothing to say. It isn't anywhere until I say it, and after I say it, it's gone. Saying is a losing game. However, having said that, I can now say something else.
Not only have I nothing to say, but I have no one to say it to. That is, I have you, if I invent you to be spoken to. But it is the saying that invents the hearer. After I've said you, you too are gone, unless I continue to create you.
This is not meant to deprive you (if any you be here with me) of your independent identity. The you I create is simply bait (like a pronoun) to hook a "real" you. I like to have an actual someone reading what I write, though it's a dangerous situation, because -- and this is the odd thing -- to communicate to you (real or invented -- if that's a distinction), I still have to create you, and with a real you there, all neatly created beyond my wildest sense of fashion, DNA and embarrassing secrets, it is tempting to rely on that generous co-creation by you and the universe, and not continue to create you myself.
This is not just a writer's dilemma. It happens, for example, when, after a seemingly endless adolescence of courting a dream, a young man meets and loves a real woman, so feels he no longer has to create what is, after all, so solid and impinging. So he stops creating his lover and his love for her, and both leave him.The people we love are with us to the extent we create them there. What we create is a form-fitting niche they fill.If we create it, they will come.
Of course, more often we create monstrous niches to be filled up by all our dearest monsters.
Well, I've said some things, but haven't had a thing to say all day, nor anyone to say anything to, and, I often suspect, no one here to do the saying. I'm just an innocent bystander who happened into this echo-chamber universe and am bemusedly letting some of the echoes pass through me. Some of them tickle me. I hope a few of them tickle doubtfully-existing you.
Of the existence of the tickling I have no doubt.
Fri Dec 09, 01:49:34 PM EST
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Ramblings4
From a discussion with a friend about Jews, Christians and Holidays. It's just me bloviating, and I know many will disagree with me on this stuff. That's OK. I'm not really trying to push an agenda here, just working out and working through some views on the subject:
[Note: I'm Jewish, but minimally observant. That is, when with family, I go with the flow.]
As for duration, Jewish culture is stuck on the subject: how Jews as a people have outlasted all those empires; though I don't know how valid that is, since I'm not sure that most modern Jews are any more connected to 1200 BC Jews (genetically or otherwise) than, say, contemporary Chinese are connected to 1200 BC dynasties.
Certainly there's some truth to it, because Jews were isolated and, for centuries -- really over 1000 years of rapid change elsewhere, while Jews lived in Ghettos -- were culturally reactionary. This is true of any group isolated from other groups. What was odd about it (in the case of Jews and perhaps Gypsies and a few others) was that Jews (until the 18th century and really, for most, the 19th century) managed to remain isolated as a culture while living in and among non-Jews of the mainstream culture and being in commercial and personal contact with it.
That odd combination of being persecuted by and being indispensible to the mainstream culture is unusual. It's partly a result of the stress among Jews on literacy, on being "people of the Book", on each individual reading the Bible him or herself in a world where the Christian ideal was that most people be illiterate so that religion could be explained to them by priests; and where non-clerics who ventured to learn to read scripture were considered a bit dangerous. What's odd is that the Jews, largely isolated in their Ghettos, were, in many ways, provincial compared to their Christian neighbors, but at the same time, because of their stress on literacy, more sophisticated.
The preoccupation with duration seems to me a primitive carry-over, based on biology. The Old Testament God doesn't promise transcendence, seldom hints at it or at anything spiritual (maybe Job has some hints, the Psalms), but nearly always promises that "your children shall be more numerous than the grains of sand on the shore or the stars in the heavens", while blessings stress "may your days be long in the land" and may you have a lot of offspring and good crops and peace in the land.
But duration (lasting through time) is the keynote: arguments about whether sins are remembered only unto the third generation or shall be "on your descendents forever", etc. It's all about offspring (from Abraham and Isaac onwards). No wonder Judaism was so heavily victimized by eugenics! After all, it's not just the Nazis, but orthodox Jews who stressed to such an extent that Judaism was genetic: It's not easy for someone who's mother isn't Jewish to become Jewish, particularly among the most orthodox. Couple that genetic bent with the "chosen people" thing, and Jews historically have given their enemies a wicked sword.
(Yes, I know the standard explanation: That we've been "chosen" to take on responsibilities, that it's an onus, not a gift, etc. But the way the prophets put it goes right into something that, to me, seems as basic as nearly every primitive tribe's name meaning, in their own language, "the people," while their generic word for outsiders suggests that they are not quite people. For example, when one prophet [Amos, I think] scolds the Jewish people for not living up to their convenant with God, he asks them why should God consider them any better than the Ethiopians [the Cushites]? Whatever spin we now put on "chosen", it has always been linked to a "covenant" -- agreement with God -- that says if we live up to it, we'll have lots of descendents, prosperity, peace and DURATION: We'll outlive as a nation (or culture) the empires that abuse us.)
I suppose in the early days of conquest of Canaan, where Joshua's armies wiped out whole city states, Jews used justifications not unlike those of Hitler -- the idea of being a superior people (based on genetics), etc. There were also idols, paganism and other bete noirs to justify this view, but since Jewish theology is almost entirely body-based (including circumcision of males as a sign of the Covenant), it all ties in to a notion of, if not racial, than familial or lineage superiority.
Not to equate us with Nazis, which seems to me far more extreme than what I'm describing above; I'm just stressing the almost-never-mentioned similarities. And the main point is that Jewish superiority is always linked to having lots of offspring and enough material goods to have prosperity for self and offspring, having one's line of descendents extend over time and produce huge numbers, living a long life oneself, etc.
I suppose most of these ideals characterize all agrarian peoples, the struggle for enough to live on, for children to help with crops and hunting and defense, etc. And the preference of one's own family and lineage over "strangers" is nearly universal -- though NOT in some of the religions of our day -- at least not so monolithically.
From my Jewish upbringing I was prepared to be very negative about the New Testament, but when I first sat down to read the Gospels, back in 1966 or 1967, I was amazed (especially in Matthew and John) at how much more spiritual truth I found in it than in the Old Testament. (Note: I'm not speaking of Christianity now, but of Matthew and John. The points I found most impressive in those Gospels have little to do with Christianity as it is practiced, as far as I can see. Reading "Sermon on the Mount" in Matthew, for example, I could understand why Tolstoy had been so shocked by it, to realize that the Christianity delineated in that sermon bore so little resemblance to anything he found in what he knew as Christianity.) (Of course, I'm not an expert on the New OR the Old Testament -- read all or most long ago, but not closely or recently, so it may be that what most impressed me in the New Testament can also be found in the Old, with, perhaps, just a difference in what is emphasized.)
Much of the success of Christianity had to do with Paul's realization that spiritual awareness was far more important than race, birth family, circumcision, etc. Most of the early Christians considered themselves Jews and felt they should restrict their activities to persuading fellow Jews to follow Christ's teachings. They felt that anyone non-Jewish who became a Christian should be converted to Judaism and circumcized. Paul is known to have gone to Jerusalem to argue against this view (with some of the other apostles -- e.g., James -- supporting it). Eventually Paul's view became what we now call Christianity -- a de facto thing, since he went out and spread the word like mad ("preached to the gentiles") and started up churches all over the place and kept nagging them into toeing the line with his epistles (letters), until Christianity had obviously burst its Jewish seams.
[Note: I've read (in a history of Judaism by Paul Johnson) that at that time, many people in Rome were looking for a way out of paganism and considered Judaism -- as known from the many cultivated and assimilated Jews living in Rome and elsewhere in the empire -- a rather attractive, sophisticated religion. Many influential Romans had come to respect it. The point is that what led to the Western world becoming Christian, rather than Jewish, had less to do with differences between Jewish and Christian views of God and morality and ritual than with Paul's radical move in spreading Jewish beliefs and values (for, subtracting the Jewish biological bent, most of Christianity was still a form of Judaism) to the gentile nations via Christianity.]
So what part of Judaism did Paul reject? It isn't that he thought a man could also be a "son of God" (the part some Jews tend to harp on as idolatrous -- and many Christian sects have been troubled by it too), because Jewish sects have had some pretty wild ideas, yet remained Jewish, and even the early Christians, though somewhat persecuted in Jerusalem, were still considered a Jewish group. No, the main thing Paul rejected was the racial side of Judaism, the importance of genetics, of Judaism surviving through the off-spring of Jews, no person being Jewish unless born to a Jewish mother, etc.
The down-side of this was that Christianity became a religion of theology, with theology senior to action. Jews stressed action, but didn't differentiate well, often, between ritual action and love-thy-neighbor action, so that Judaism is a religion where, usually, people can argue theology freely and argue fiercely about the nature of God, etc., without ever coming to blows, but go nuts about whether or not someone holds his pinky finger the wrong way while performing a ritual (though still, not usually, killing each other over it).
While Christians, when they argue about ritual, are not arguing about doing something the traditional way, but about theological implications: Is the bread Christ's body or symbolic of it or something in between or what? In the first 2 or 3 centuries of Christianity, Christians killed 100s of thousands of Christians over such issues -- far more than the Romans martyred during the pagan centuries of the Roman Empire.
This seems to me where Paul lost sight of the ball: He let the concept of spiritual awareness (so clear in John) be altered to something called "faith", a word vague enough to comprehend anything from a rote statement of doctrines to a strong opinion to a certainty that God loves us more than he loves the rest of humanity to knowing one is inspired by God because one is throwing a fit to, in rare cases, some sort of awareness that one is a spiritual being, knowing it as simply one knows one's own face by touching it.
Faith has other drawbacks as a criterian: A Catholic can do all sorts of things wrong if he confesses and if he has the right "faith". This has its pluses (nice to have a way to unload guilt and make amends) and its minuses. One of the big minuses is that you can see action, but testing faith requires prying into a man's thoughts and beliefs, and that is usually done by torture. Also, this means that the qualities in a man that are most basically required to be self-determined to have any spiritual validity are forced on a person. You can force a person to hold a belief. You can't force a person to become more spiritually aware, which is to become more oneself, not more what others would have one be.
Jews confuse right action with right ritual (and include as part of ritual all sorts of genetically oriented things), and Christians confuse spirituality with right beliefs. Of course, Christians can go nuts about ritual differences and Jews can go nuts about theology; I'm just looking at the main thing each stresses.
Islam seems not to stress genetics (Blacks, Chinese -- all are welcome), though they do have that body stress -- for example, circumcision and longevity and offspring -- more than Christianity. But it's hard to look clearly at Islam these days since what we see of it is mainly the most fundamentalist side, something that's always been around, but perhaps is not representative.
Both Jews and Christians have produced very spiritual and wise people, but as religions, overall, seem to me to get stuck in dramatizing their lies. And the main lie in Judaism, from the start, seems to me to be the thread of materialism (the stress on persisting on earth over a long time, the stress on genetic purity), because it tells us that we are bodies. The other side of this is the notion of a God whose beingness has so little to do with our own. It's as if all the spirit in the universe is God's monopoly. He's the big spirit. We're creations. What more can we expect than to persist like well-designed meat. (I'm sure this sounds like heresy to many, but there are numerous respected Jewish and Christian thinkers, prophets, etc., who recognize that the spirit is NOT the body and is immortal. One obvious reference is the opening section of the Gospel of John.)
Most of the day-to-day operation of Judaism's religious leaders in Christ's day involved a huge high-priesthood with thousands of servants operating a giant temple (it covered, probably, several of our current city blocks) where the main activity was handling sacrifices of animals and keeping the priests and their servants well-fed and wealthy. It was basically a huge, incense-sweetened abattoir. It wasn't all rabbis splitting hairs and coming up with humane interpretations of scripture.
Empire after empire falls, but the Jewish people goes on -- as do many rocks.
[Note: I'm Jewish, but minimally observant. That is, when with family, I go with the flow.]
As for duration, Jewish culture is stuck on the subject: how Jews as a people have outlasted all those empires; though I don't know how valid that is, since I'm not sure that most modern Jews are any more connected to 1200 BC Jews (genetically or otherwise) than, say, contemporary Chinese are connected to 1200 BC dynasties.
Certainly there's some truth to it, because Jews were isolated and, for centuries -- really over 1000 years of rapid change elsewhere, while Jews lived in Ghettos -- were culturally reactionary. This is true of any group isolated from other groups. What was odd about it (in the case of Jews and perhaps Gypsies and a few others) was that Jews (until the 18th century and really, for most, the 19th century) managed to remain isolated as a culture while living in and among non-Jews of the mainstream culture and being in commercial and personal contact with it.
That odd combination of being persecuted by and being indispensible to the mainstream culture is unusual. It's partly a result of the stress among Jews on literacy, on being "people of the Book", on each individual reading the Bible him or herself in a world where the Christian ideal was that most people be illiterate so that religion could be explained to them by priests; and where non-clerics who ventured to learn to read scripture were considered a bit dangerous. What's odd is that the Jews, largely isolated in their Ghettos, were, in many ways, provincial compared to their Christian neighbors, but at the same time, because of their stress on literacy, more sophisticated.
The preoccupation with duration seems to me a primitive carry-over, based on biology. The Old Testament God doesn't promise transcendence, seldom hints at it or at anything spiritual (maybe Job has some hints, the Psalms), but nearly always promises that "your children shall be more numerous than the grains of sand on the shore or the stars in the heavens", while blessings stress "may your days be long in the land" and may you have a lot of offspring and good crops and peace in the land.
But duration (lasting through time) is the keynote: arguments about whether sins are remembered only unto the third generation or shall be "on your descendents forever", etc. It's all about offspring (from Abraham and Isaac onwards). No wonder Judaism was so heavily victimized by eugenics! After all, it's not just the Nazis, but orthodox Jews who stressed to such an extent that Judaism was genetic: It's not easy for someone who's mother isn't Jewish to become Jewish, particularly among the most orthodox. Couple that genetic bent with the "chosen people" thing, and Jews historically have given their enemies a wicked sword.
(Yes, I know the standard explanation: That we've been "chosen" to take on responsibilities, that it's an onus, not a gift, etc. But the way the prophets put it goes right into something that, to me, seems as basic as nearly every primitive tribe's name meaning, in their own language, "the people," while their generic word for outsiders suggests that they are not quite people. For example, when one prophet [Amos, I think] scolds the Jewish people for not living up to their convenant with God, he asks them why should God consider them any better than the Ethiopians [the Cushites]? Whatever spin we now put on "chosen", it has always been linked to a "covenant" -- agreement with God -- that says if we live up to it, we'll have lots of descendents, prosperity, peace and DURATION: We'll outlive as a nation (or culture) the empires that abuse us.)
I suppose in the early days of conquest of Canaan, where Joshua's armies wiped out whole city states, Jews used justifications not unlike those of Hitler -- the idea of being a superior people (based on genetics), etc. There were also idols, paganism and other bete noirs to justify this view, but since Jewish theology is almost entirely body-based (including circumcision of males as a sign of the Covenant), it all ties in to a notion of, if not racial, than familial or lineage superiority.
Not to equate us with Nazis, which seems to me far more extreme than what I'm describing above; I'm just stressing the almost-never-mentioned similarities. And the main point is that Jewish superiority is always linked to having lots of offspring and enough material goods to have prosperity for self and offspring, having one's line of descendents extend over time and produce huge numbers, living a long life oneself, etc.
I suppose most of these ideals characterize all agrarian peoples, the struggle for enough to live on, for children to help with crops and hunting and defense, etc. And the preference of one's own family and lineage over "strangers" is nearly universal -- though NOT in some of the religions of our day -- at least not so monolithically.
From my Jewish upbringing I was prepared to be very negative about the New Testament, but when I first sat down to read the Gospels, back in 1966 or 1967, I was amazed (especially in Matthew and John) at how much more spiritual truth I found in it than in the Old Testament. (Note: I'm not speaking of Christianity now, but of Matthew and John. The points I found most impressive in those Gospels have little to do with Christianity as it is practiced, as far as I can see. Reading "Sermon on the Mount" in Matthew, for example, I could understand why Tolstoy had been so shocked by it, to realize that the Christianity delineated in that sermon bore so little resemblance to anything he found in what he knew as Christianity.) (Of course, I'm not an expert on the New OR the Old Testament -- read all or most long ago, but not closely or recently, so it may be that what most impressed me in the New Testament can also be found in the Old, with, perhaps, just a difference in what is emphasized.)
Much of the success of Christianity had to do with Paul's realization that spiritual awareness was far more important than race, birth family, circumcision, etc. Most of the early Christians considered themselves Jews and felt they should restrict their activities to persuading fellow Jews to follow Christ's teachings. They felt that anyone non-Jewish who became a Christian should be converted to Judaism and circumcized. Paul is known to have gone to Jerusalem to argue against this view (with some of the other apostles -- e.g., James -- supporting it). Eventually Paul's view became what we now call Christianity -- a de facto thing, since he went out and spread the word like mad ("preached to the gentiles") and started up churches all over the place and kept nagging them into toeing the line with his epistles (letters), until Christianity had obviously burst its Jewish seams.
[Note: I've read (in a history of Judaism by Paul Johnson) that at that time, many people in Rome were looking for a way out of paganism and considered Judaism -- as known from the many cultivated and assimilated Jews living in Rome and elsewhere in the empire -- a rather attractive, sophisticated religion. Many influential Romans had come to respect it. The point is that what led to the Western world becoming Christian, rather than Jewish, had less to do with differences between Jewish and Christian views of God and morality and ritual than with Paul's radical move in spreading Jewish beliefs and values (for, subtracting the Jewish biological bent, most of Christianity was still a form of Judaism) to the gentile nations via Christianity.]
So what part of Judaism did Paul reject? It isn't that he thought a man could also be a "son of God" (the part some Jews tend to harp on as idolatrous -- and many Christian sects have been troubled by it too), because Jewish sects have had some pretty wild ideas, yet remained Jewish, and even the early Christians, though somewhat persecuted in Jerusalem, were still considered a Jewish group. No, the main thing Paul rejected was the racial side of Judaism, the importance of genetics, of Judaism surviving through the off-spring of Jews, no person being Jewish unless born to a Jewish mother, etc.
The down-side of this was that Christianity became a religion of theology, with theology senior to action. Jews stressed action, but didn't differentiate well, often, between ritual action and love-thy-neighbor action, so that Judaism is a religion where, usually, people can argue theology freely and argue fiercely about the nature of God, etc., without ever coming to blows, but go nuts about whether or not someone holds his pinky finger the wrong way while performing a ritual (though still, not usually, killing each other over it).
While Christians, when they argue about ritual, are not arguing about doing something the traditional way, but about theological implications: Is the bread Christ's body or symbolic of it or something in between or what? In the first 2 or 3 centuries of Christianity, Christians killed 100s of thousands of Christians over such issues -- far more than the Romans martyred during the pagan centuries of the Roman Empire.
This seems to me where Paul lost sight of the ball: He let the concept of spiritual awareness (so clear in John) be altered to something called "faith", a word vague enough to comprehend anything from a rote statement of doctrines to a strong opinion to a certainty that God loves us more than he loves the rest of humanity to knowing one is inspired by God because one is throwing a fit to, in rare cases, some sort of awareness that one is a spiritual being, knowing it as simply one knows one's own face by touching it.
Faith has other drawbacks as a criterian: A Catholic can do all sorts of things wrong if he confesses and if he has the right "faith". This has its pluses (nice to have a way to unload guilt and make amends) and its minuses. One of the big minuses is that you can see action, but testing faith requires prying into a man's thoughts and beliefs, and that is usually done by torture. Also, this means that the qualities in a man that are most basically required to be self-determined to have any spiritual validity are forced on a person. You can force a person to hold a belief. You can't force a person to become more spiritually aware, which is to become more oneself, not more what others would have one be.
Jews confuse right action with right ritual (and include as part of ritual all sorts of genetically oriented things), and Christians confuse spirituality with right beliefs. Of course, Christians can go nuts about ritual differences and Jews can go nuts about theology; I'm just looking at the main thing each stresses.
Islam seems not to stress genetics (Blacks, Chinese -- all are welcome), though they do have that body stress -- for example, circumcision and longevity and offspring -- more than Christianity. But it's hard to look clearly at Islam these days since what we see of it is mainly the most fundamentalist side, something that's always been around, but perhaps is not representative.
Both Jews and Christians have produced very spiritual and wise people, but as religions, overall, seem to me to get stuck in dramatizing their lies. And the main lie in Judaism, from the start, seems to me to be the thread of materialism (the stress on persisting on earth over a long time, the stress on genetic purity), because it tells us that we are bodies. The other side of this is the notion of a God whose beingness has so little to do with our own. It's as if all the spirit in the universe is God's monopoly. He's the big spirit. We're creations. What more can we expect than to persist like well-designed meat. (I'm sure this sounds like heresy to many, but there are numerous respected Jewish and Christian thinkers, prophets, etc., who recognize that the spirit is NOT the body and is immortal. One obvious reference is the opening section of the Gospel of John.)
Most of the day-to-day operation of Judaism's religious leaders in Christ's day involved a huge high-priesthood with thousands of servants operating a giant temple (it covered, probably, several of our current city blocks) where the main activity was handling sacrifices of animals and keeping the priests and their servants well-fed and wealthy. It was basically a huge, incense-sweetened abattoir. It wasn't all rabbis splitting hairs and coming up with humane interpretations of scripture.
Empire after empire falls, but the Jewish people goes on -- as do many rocks.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Ramblings - 3
Recently I did something and knew I'd get told I'd done wrong. I knew who'd tell me; he'd told me before, told me that sort of thing wasn't cool, wasn't tactful, damn him, and I was thoroughly upset with what I expected him to say.
Turned out he didn't say that. In fact, he said, good job, thanks for handling that.
That was a relief, but I was still upset, a minor mystery. Let's see, why was I still feeling peevish about a non-existent upset?
For starters, when I anticipated his disapproval, that pulled up on my mental desktop several earlier times when he disapproved. Then there are all the similar times when others had disapproved of my actions or others had similarly disapproved of the actions of others (didn't my Dad scold my Mom for lack of tact?). Then there are all the times that I'VE scolded others for similar reasons. Then there's my own personal sense that I DID do something wrong that he missed by thanking me -- and being just barely missed is like a toothache, claiming all available attention and not wanting to let go of it. And there's all the earlier times someone disapproved or would have disapproved had he or she known (and maybe he or she did, how can I be sure?). I felt like a pinball machine; one lucky shot has all my lights blazing and bells clanging.
But just my noticing the phenomenon in action made it begin to fade away, like a mist unraveling in the morning sun. [If you were writing this, I'd say, "What does a pinball machine have to do with a mist? Or a toothache? Get your similes straight." But I'm writing it, and you'll just have to be satisfied with knowing that my sloppy writing hurts me more than it hurts you.]
A mere nothing. Mere nothings have a lot of baggage.
Turned out he didn't say that. In fact, he said, good job, thanks for handling that.
That was a relief, but I was still upset, a minor mystery. Let's see, why was I still feeling peevish about a non-existent upset?
For starters, when I anticipated his disapproval, that pulled up on my mental desktop several earlier times when he disapproved. Then there are all the similar times when others had disapproved of my actions or others had similarly disapproved of the actions of others (didn't my Dad scold my Mom for lack of tact?). Then there are all the times that I'VE scolded others for similar reasons. Then there's my own personal sense that I DID do something wrong that he missed by thanking me -- and being just barely missed is like a toothache, claiming all available attention and not wanting to let go of it. And there's all the earlier times someone disapproved or would have disapproved had he or she known (and maybe he or she did, how can I be sure?). I felt like a pinball machine; one lucky shot has all my lights blazing and bells clanging.
But just my noticing the phenomenon in action made it begin to fade away, like a mist unraveling in the morning sun. [If you were writing this, I'd say, "What does a pinball machine have to do with a mist? Or a toothache? Get your similes straight." But I'm writing it, and you'll just have to be satisfied with knowing that my sloppy writing hurts me more than it hurts you.]
A mere nothing. Mere nothings have a lot of baggage.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Ramblings - 2
Like most people capable of reading, writing, and noticing when things don't add up, I sense that our government lies to us and am inclined to consider our "war" in Iraq a mess.
Unlike most people whose opinions swarm around me in the news, on the Internet and in daily encounters, I am -- apart from knowing just enough to know when something doesn't make sense -- extremely ignorant. I have not been to Iraq. I never (or almost never) assume that the things I know after I've read a newspaper or listened to NPR are actually things I know. I do my best not to assume that I know something because it's what everyone knows.
I'm amazed, not only that so many people (who, also, have never been to Iraq) know exactly what is happening there and are able to tally up all the good effects and bad effects of any action taken there and come up with an exact negative -- amazed not only by all this knowing, but also at the desperate urgency that impels so many people to have opinions about things and, therefore, to become suction devices for attracting to themselves the phrases and factoids necessary to present a plausible aura of knowledge to surround those opinions.
(No, I'm not amazed by any of this. But some ghostly authorial persona of me is.)
I have my own agreements with some of these stands. For example, I don't think "we" (or the guys who claim to be our representatives) should have gone into Iraq. But I don't know whether they should get out now or in 6 months or in a year. I don't think a "War on Terrorism" makes sense. It's a stupid misuse of the word "war" (as is "War on Drugs"), a metaphorical use that pretends to be a literal use, so calls for literal solutions, appropriate to a war, but not to a campaign against a rather vague abstraction. After all, it is arguable and, I think, likely that one of the main sources of terrorism in the world over recent decades has been our own government, which trained (I don't KNOW this, but believe the sources I've read on the subject) -- which trained army officers from other nations in techniques of torture at Ft. Bennings, Georgia, School of the Americas, and armed, trained and financed death squads in other nations that killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens (for example, in El Salvador and Guatemala).
It seems obvious to me that the correct handling of murderers (e.g., the guys who planned 9/11) is a police action, while the correct handling of terror is to eliminate the sources of terror, which lie in such basics as the absence of justice in many societies.
And I don't see that a few thousand deaths and even the fear of thousands more are worth throwing out freedoms for which hundreds of thousands of Americans died. Yes, I have my opinions and even some knowledge.
But each day we are faced with headlines that seem to demand that we know. We receive e-mail demands that we sign petitions. We are supposed to tell Bush to get out of Iraq now. And I begin to feel that most of us are no longer able to appreciate the joy of not having to know everything and not having to decide everything.
Perhaps I have expressed this poorly, for it seems to call for irresponsible spectatorism. No, I'm not saying that, as the daily load of wounded and dying ideas arrive, we should ignore them. I'm saying that if we don't practice triage and deal with those most likely within our competence, we will be overwhelmed, and when we are overwhelmed, we search for desperate solutions, big simple solutions that seem to handle everything. (That's what terrorists do.)
My own approach, since I haven't the resources to learn Arabic, visit Iraq, read all that's been written on Iraq, even read all of our administration's pronouncements, is to concentrate on what I know -- or, since knowledge may be considered a spectrum from great certainty to less certainty to no certainty, I try to invest my energy most in those things of which I have the most certainty.
For example, I know that madness on a national level is a composite of individual madnesses, so that anything I can do to increase awareness and aliveness of individuals (including myself) is of use. I know that I can't trust a president who appoints executives of Eli Lilly (the Prozac folks) to high adminstration posts or a defense secretary who helped pay off FDA officials to get Nutrasweet (aspartame) approved. (Here's a point on the certainty spectrum: I have a lot more certainty that Eli Lilly is a destructive force in society and that Nutrasweet -- promoted by Rumsfeld's old company -- is a health disaster than I do that American troops are causing more harm than good in Iraq, so this gives me something about which I know a fair amount to use as a touchstone for reliability.)
I know that creating a lot of hatred for the Bush administration and spending my days in invective is not likely to give us a better world. Revolutions generally lead to chaos, and chaos gets solved by a fiercer tyranny. I know that all the various lies, corruptions, killings and torturing, reported and suspected, are nothing new -- even for America: We are seasoned whores pretending to be outraged virgins. That outrage needs to be led into constructive channels; "constructive", in this context, means that what needs changing is the way human beings operate, the way we think, act, etc. I know that trying to effect such changes by drugging or programming people (as in Skinner's Walden II) simply intensifies the insanity. I know that we change people for the better by helping them become freer, that only slaves are dangerous.
I even know some workable ways of freeing people -- from the tyranny of past horrors, from the generalities of despair, from the grief of past losses, from the numbness of past and present drugs/medications, from the mountains of old decisions beneath which each is buried so that new decisions can be made on fresh data; from inability to confront what is before one; from inability to think clearly or act decisively. These things I know, have experienced, have effected.
(Not to make a mystery of them, I refer you to www.scientology.org.)
I don't know if I could persuade George W. Bush to pull a single troop out of Iraq, but I'll bet I could get a crying child laughing (no tickling allowed) faster than he could.
I'll bet many of you (assuming there are enough of you reading this for a subset of you to constitute a "many") know a lot more about this infestation of Iraq than I do. But I'll bet, also, that if we encountered a fact that didn't fit your knowledge, I'd learn it faster.
Basically, I'm just better than everyone else -- isn't that what I'm saying? God, I hope not.
Unlike most people whose opinions swarm around me in the news, on the Internet and in daily encounters, I am -- apart from knowing just enough to know when something doesn't make sense -- extremely ignorant. I have not been to Iraq. I never (or almost never) assume that the things I know after I've read a newspaper or listened to NPR are actually things I know. I do my best not to assume that I know something because it's what everyone knows.
I'm amazed, not only that so many people (who, also, have never been to Iraq) know exactly what is happening there and are able to tally up all the good effects and bad effects of any action taken there and come up with an exact negative -- amazed not only by all this knowing, but also at the desperate urgency that impels so many people to have opinions about things and, therefore, to become suction devices for attracting to themselves the phrases and factoids necessary to present a plausible aura of knowledge to surround those opinions.
(No, I'm not amazed by any of this. But some ghostly authorial persona of me is.)
I have my own agreements with some of these stands. For example, I don't think "we" (or the guys who claim to be our representatives) should have gone into Iraq. But I don't know whether they should get out now or in 6 months or in a year. I don't think a "War on Terrorism" makes sense. It's a stupid misuse of the word "war" (as is "War on Drugs"), a metaphorical use that pretends to be a literal use, so calls for literal solutions, appropriate to a war, but not to a campaign against a rather vague abstraction. After all, it is arguable and, I think, likely that one of the main sources of terrorism in the world over recent decades has been our own government, which trained (I don't KNOW this, but believe the sources I've read on the subject) -- which trained army officers from other nations in techniques of torture at Ft. Bennings, Georgia, School of the Americas, and armed, trained and financed death squads in other nations that killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens (for example, in El Salvador and Guatemala).
It seems obvious to me that the correct handling of murderers (e.g., the guys who planned 9/11) is a police action, while the correct handling of terror is to eliminate the sources of terror, which lie in such basics as the absence of justice in many societies.
And I don't see that a few thousand deaths and even the fear of thousands more are worth throwing out freedoms for which hundreds of thousands of Americans died. Yes, I have my opinions and even some knowledge.
But each day we are faced with headlines that seem to demand that we know. We receive e-mail demands that we sign petitions. We are supposed to tell Bush to get out of Iraq now. And I begin to feel that most of us are no longer able to appreciate the joy of not having to know everything and not having to decide everything.
Perhaps I have expressed this poorly, for it seems to call for irresponsible spectatorism. No, I'm not saying that, as the daily load of wounded and dying ideas arrive, we should ignore them. I'm saying that if we don't practice triage and deal with those most likely within our competence, we will be overwhelmed, and when we are overwhelmed, we search for desperate solutions, big simple solutions that seem to handle everything. (That's what terrorists do.)
My own approach, since I haven't the resources to learn Arabic, visit Iraq, read all that's been written on Iraq, even read all of our administration's pronouncements, is to concentrate on what I know -- or, since knowledge may be considered a spectrum from great certainty to less certainty to no certainty, I try to invest my energy most in those things of which I have the most certainty.
For example, I know that madness on a national level is a composite of individual madnesses, so that anything I can do to increase awareness and aliveness of individuals (including myself) is of use. I know that I can't trust a president who appoints executives of Eli Lilly (the Prozac folks) to high adminstration posts or a defense secretary who helped pay off FDA officials to get Nutrasweet (aspartame) approved. (Here's a point on the certainty spectrum: I have a lot more certainty that Eli Lilly is a destructive force in society and that Nutrasweet -- promoted by Rumsfeld's old company -- is a health disaster than I do that American troops are causing more harm than good in Iraq, so this gives me something about which I know a fair amount to use as a touchstone for reliability.)
I know that creating a lot of hatred for the Bush administration and spending my days in invective is not likely to give us a better world. Revolutions generally lead to chaos, and chaos gets solved by a fiercer tyranny. I know that all the various lies, corruptions, killings and torturing, reported and suspected, are nothing new -- even for America: We are seasoned whores pretending to be outraged virgins. That outrage needs to be led into constructive channels; "constructive", in this context, means that what needs changing is the way human beings operate, the way we think, act, etc. I know that trying to effect such changes by drugging or programming people (as in Skinner's Walden II) simply intensifies the insanity. I know that we change people for the better by helping them become freer, that only slaves are dangerous.
I even know some workable ways of freeing people -- from the tyranny of past horrors, from the generalities of despair, from the grief of past losses, from the numbness of past and present drugs/medications, from the mountains of old decisions beneath which each is buried so that new decisions can be made on fresh data; from inability to confront what is before one; from inability to think clearly or act decisively. These things I know, have experienced, have effected.
(Not to make a mystery of them, I refer you to www.scientology.org.)
I don't know if I could persuade George W. Bush to pull a single troop out of Iraq, but I'll bet I could get a crying child laughing (no tickling allowed) faster than he could.
I'll bet many of you (assuming there are enough of you reading this for a subset of you to constitute a "many") know a lot more about this infestation of Iraq than I do. But I'll bet, also, that if we encountered a fact that didn't fit your knowledge, I'd learn it faster.
Basically, I'm just better than everyone else -- isn't that what I'm saying? God, I hope not.
Ramblings - 1
Someone mentioned a very heavy acquaintance who'd "lost all of it" -- all the extra, that is. But that would be a fair description of death: A diet where you lose all of it.
Odd, the fear of death. Some years back, with an insane diet and lots of exercise, I lost about 70 pounds. I've since found nearly every one of those pounds. If only all my loses could be so easily repaired!
Just a couple more years, another 175 pounds, and I'd have lost it all. Neat! Even at 175, I felt lighter than air, seemed to waft up flights of stairs. Perhaps, if I'd lost another 100, I'd have needed ropes to pull me back down to earth. Ropes or bread or heavy thoughts ("Heavy, Dude!").
Speaking of death, someone wants to pay us a visit to explain to us (now that we're in our sixties) insurance that covers the expenses of being old. (In case we ever get old.) I will try, for once, to be pleasant and unshocking and not to say what I usually say when someone with a warm, salesmanlike gleam in his eye asks me what I'll do if I'm too weak to get out of bed, need months of hospitalization and/or home care, etc. What I usually say is, "Well, if that occurs, I'll die."
That never seems to go over well. Certainly it is my intention, if I become a burden to myself and others in this body, to leave it behind and find a more operable one. I'm not talking about "suicide". Why be so dramatic? I'd just let the body die. "Give it a rest, will you!" -- that about expresses it. How does one let a body die? It can't be too difficult. We all do it eventually. Probably the simplest way is to go somewhere else: Vote with our spiritual feet.
After all, a body is a service provider -- amplifies sensory input, marks the spot where we pretend to be, etc. Like any service provider, a body must compete with other providers, new ones going into business every minute of every day. When a body takes all one's attention and gives little service (can't see well, can't hear well, aches, refuses to move, etc.), one should take one's business elsewhere.
I don't think it will be hard to do. I've had some practice (won't go into details -- might be charged with negligence of a body or contributing to the delinquency of a spiritual being). After all, the questions presuppose that I've gotten myself in terrible shape, fixed up my body so that it can hardly move -- just enough to breathe. If I can do all that, the rest should be easy.
Imagine the savings to Medicare and Health Insurance premiums if more of us had this attitude: What do you do when your body is a mess and you can't do the things you'd like to do and your systems are all shutting down? Hey, you die! But wait, you say, that's too simple! With the miracles of modern medicine, we can be kept barely alive until the next miracle drug is available to make us nearly as healthy as a constipated zombie for another 2 years!
Hell, by the time modern medicine has able able to sit up in bed long enough to puke and operate the TV remote again (to see reruns of Law & Order SVU), I'll be in a fierce, healthy 5-year-old body, kicking over piles of building blocks. And I'll be a bright kid, because I won't have moved from lifetime to lifetime in a haze of modern medical miracle drugs. (They affect more than just bodies.)
Medicos and other "experts" (a word for which, if we didn't already have them, we would have to invent sarcastic quotation marks) assure us that the will to live is vital (that's redundant, given the meaning of vital), that people die when they lose their will to live. Imagine how much quicker we'll die when we simply decide to die. I don' t mean to be negative or anti-life. I have nothing against living other than some of the people one has to live with, the taxes, psychiatrists, lawyers...well, I have a lot against living, but not against life. But I see no benefit to me or others in keeping a dying body going. Why stay in the trap once the cheese is used up?
The body is primarily a communications device. When it can neither give nor receive (nor hope ever again to give nor receive) communications, junk it. Perhaps I should qualify that: When it can no longer giver nor receive communications of interest to self and others, junk it.
The nicest thing about this attitude is that I don't worry about all the terrible things waiting for me in my golden years. (Gold doesn't tarnish. We should call them the silver years.) What if this, what if that? What would I do then? All those woulds that are dark and deep and unlovely. What I'd do then is die. Wouldn't you?
Getting born is probably considerably rougher than dying, but we've all managed it. And will again.
Odd, the fear of death. Some years back, with an insane diet and lots of exercise, I lost about 70 pounds. I've since found nearly every one of those pounds. If only all my loses could be so easily repaired!
Just a couple more years, another 175 pounds, and I'd have lost it all. Neat! Even at 175, I felt lighter than air, seemed to waft up flights of stairs. Perhaps, if I'd lost another 100, I'd have needed ropes to pull me back down to earth. Ropes or bread or heavy thoughts ("Heavy, Dude!").
Speaking of death, someone wants to pay us a visit to explain to us (now that we're in our sixties) insurance that covers the expenses of being old. (In case we ever get old.) I will try, for once, to be pleasant and unshocking and not to say what I usually say when someone with a warm, salesmanlike gleam in his eye asks me what I'll do if I'm too weak to get out of bed, need months of hospitalization and/or home care, etc. What I usually say is, "Well, if that occurs, I'll die."
That never seems to go over well. Certainly it is my intention, if I become a burden to myself and others in this body, to leave it behind and find a more operable one. I'm not talking about "suicide". Why be so dramatic? I'd just let the body die. "Give it a rest, will you!" -- that about expresses it. How does one let a body die? It can't be too difficult. We all do it eventually. Probably the simplest way is to go somewhere else: Vote with our spiritual feet.
After all, a body is a service provider -- amplifies sensory input, marks the spot where we pretend to be, etc. Like any service provider, a body must compete with other providers, new ones going into business every minute of every day. When a body takes all one's attention and gives little service (can't see well, can't hear well, aches, refuses to move, etc.), one should take one's business elsewhere.
I don't think it will be hard to do. I've had some practice (won't go into details -- might be charged with negligence of a body or contributing to the delinquency of a spiritual being). After all, the questions presuppose that I've gotten myself in terrible shape, fixed up my body so that it can hardly move -- just enough to breathe. If I can do all that, the rest should be easy.
Imagine the savings to Medicare and Health Insurance premiums if more of us had this attitude: What do you do when your body is a mess and you can't do the things you'd like to do and your systems are all shutting down? Hey, you die! But wait, you say, that's too simple! With the miracles of modern medicine, we can be kept barely alive until the next miracle drug is available to make us nearly as healthy as a constipated zombie for another 2 years!
Hell, by the time modern medicine has able able to sit up in bed long enough to puke and operate the TV remote again (to see reruns of Law & Order SVU), I'll be in a fierce, healthy 5-year-old body, kicking over piles of building blocks. And I'll be a bright kid, because I won't have moved from lifetime to lifetime in a haze of modern medical miracle drugs. (They affect more than just bodies.)
Medicos and other "experts" (a word for which, if we didn't already have them, we would have to invent sarcastic quotation marks) assure us that the will to live is vital (that's redundant, given the meaning of vital), that people die when they lose their will to live. Imagine how much quicker we'll die when we simply decide to die. I don' t mean to be negative or anti-life. I have nothing against living other than some of the people one has to live with, the taxes, psychiatrists, lawyers...well, I have a lot against living, but not against life. But I see no benefit to me or others in keeping a dying body going. Why stay in the trap once the cheese is used up?
The body is primarily a communications device. When it can neither give nor receive (nor hope ever again to give nor receive) communications, junk it. Perhaps I should qualify that: When it can no longer giver nor receive communications of interest to self and others, junk it.
The nicest thing about this attitude is that I don't worry about all the terrible things waiting for me in my golden years. (Gold doesn't tarnish. We should call them the silver years.) What if this, what if that? What would I do then? All those woulds that are dark and deep and unlovely. What I'd do then is die. Wouldn't you?
Getting born is probably considerably rougher than dying, but we've all managed it. And will again.
Friday, December 09, 2005
Why must there be a title?
I walk up to you and start to say "hello", but you put out a hand to silence me and say, "Title?" I say "Casual Greeting", and you say, "Greeter name?" I say, "Dean", and you say "Password?"
But this isn't a ridiculous scenario. In fact, it happens so often we don't notice it -- not in those exact words, but in quick exchanges of glances, frowns and smiles as we approach one another.
Lovemaking is pretty simple for an old married guy (I'm being that these days), but I remember when it seemed an unattainable dream. I could see being where I was (a horny kid) and I could see being where I wanted to be (with a woman who loved me and wanted to take what I wanted to give and to give what I wanted to take), but I had no idea how to get from here to there. It wasn't "there" that was unreal to me, but how it could be created out of the scraps around me, the aloof girls, my fat belly, my bad puns, my boredom with the hip small talk of my generation, my uncombable hair, the entirely unnatural fact that the girls I saw were always covered with clothing -- and even wore girdles in those days. (So far was I from touching intimate flesh other than my own that just the idea of a girdle and all it contained gave me a hard-on.)
If only I could have called a live tech. support number and said, "Look, I have this system, and I've got my input device working just fine, but how do I interface with other systems?"
A smart-assed Tech Support guy might have said, "Read the manual," to which smart-assed me would have said, "Hey, the only sex I'm getting is manual!" A wiser techie might have said, "What have you tried?"
I hadn't tried much. Asked for a date, been turned down, decided no one would want to date someone like me (and I wonder what someone like me would be like?). But there's the similarity: I feel that way (though with less desperation) about the Internet, swore off Yahoo for months after one impossible go-'round in which every password I entered or -- following screen instructions -- created was rejected.
I have no idea where this posting is going (posting o'er land and sea). One moral it might be pointed towards is that the maze of internet restrictions is good training for courtship and other barrier-strewn arenas. Another might be that this explains why computer geeks are geeks: Who needs a sex life (with its elaborate sense of a rigid protocol that is known to everyone but you, despite which you are expected, always, to make the exact right moves) when one has the Internet to solve?
But this isn't a ridiculous scenario. In fact, it happens so often we don't notice it -- not in those exact words, but in quick exchanges of glances, frowns and smiles as we approach one another.
Lovemaking is pretty simple for an old married guy (I'm being that these days), but I remember when it seemed an unattainable dream. I could see being where I was (a horny kid) and I could see being where I wanted to be (with a woman who loved me and wanted to take what I wanted to give and to give what I wanted to take), but I had no idea how to get from here to there. It wasn't "there" that was unreal to me, but how it could be created out of the scraps around me, the aloof girls, my fat belly, my bad puns, my boredom with the hip small talk of my generation, my uncombable hair, the entirely unnatural fact that the girls I saw were always covered with clothing -- and even wore girdles in those days. (So far was I from touching intimate flesh other than my own that just the idea of a girdle and all it contained gave me a hard-on.)
If only I could have called a live tech. support number and said, "Look, I have this system, and I've got my input device working just fine, but how do I interface with other systems?"
A smart-assed Tech Support guy might have said, "Read the manual," to which smart-assed me would have said, "Hey, the only sex I'm getting is manual!" A wiser techie might have said, "What have you tried?"
I hadn't tried much. Asked for a date, been turned down, decided no one would want to date someone like me (and I wonder what someone like me would be like?). But there's the similarity: I feel that way (though with less desperation) about the Internet, swore off Yahoo for months after one impossible go-'round in which every password I entered or -- following screen instructions -- created was rejected.
I have no idea where this posting is going (posting o'er land and sea). One moral it might be pointed towards is that the maze of internet restrictions is good training for courtship and other barrier-strewn arenas. Another might be that this explains why computer geeks are geeks: Who needs a sex life (with its elaborate sense of a rigid protocol that is known to everyone but you, despite which you are expected, always, to make the exact right moves) when one has the Internet to solve?
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
