Category: Absurdity

Absurdity

Poor Misunderstood Right Wing Nut Job

Some people seem to dissolve into their worst attributes over time.  There is a seige mentality that develops, it seems, and from within the bastions and barricades the fever dreams of the misunderstood and disillusioned take root and grow into horrible, twisted things.

I don’t care much for people who are constantly running around trying to scare the rest of us with apocalyptic prognostications.  The sky is falling, yes it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it.  Who can hold up the sky or keep the stars from falling?  Not me and it would appear a waste of what life might be left to spend my time fretting over it and ruining other people’s day telling them to not enjoy themselves because the impending catastrophe is of such significance that to ignore it in any way is to cheapen all human history.  Having a good time in the face of Doom is being, somehow, rude to the awesome relevance of said Doom.

Everyone needs a hobby.

Conspiracy theorists have found the X-Box of their desires within the serpentine confines of a world delimited by the constant back-stabbing one-up-manship of imagined black ops, coups, assassinations, and creeping ideological subversion.  I wish them good times playing with their toys.

But occasionally they decide to rewrite history to justify their paranoia and depending on what it is they’re trying to sell by doing so, I get a bit less tolerant.

A grand master of New Spin is Pat Buchanan.  He’s been misinterpreting reality since before his failed bid for the presidency.  In retrospect he is the ideal speech writer for Richard Nixon, for he must have shared Nixon’s conviction that the game is rigged and the Lefties are out to get us all from the beginning.  Do right by all those bleeding heart liberals and all they do is spit on you.  Open up China, establish the EPA, expand health care, and what do you get for all your efforts?  They pillory you for a little wire tap and the construction of a shadow government that could do end runs around Congress.  Ingrates!

Pat has become more strident and marginalized since Reagan took office.  The tough American school of foreign diplomacy combined with the Minute Man ideal of self-sufficiency and rugged independence came to the fore, nurtured by an age that declared that all victims were just whiners and the only difference between a rich man and a poor man is plain hard work.  Pat blossomed.

What fruit has this mutant liberty tree borne?  Well, he’s now ready to revisit Hitler and tell us how Adolph was just misunderstood after all, that he didn’t want world conquest (which is possible—he mainly wanted Europe and Russia) but peace and a strong Germany.  He makes his argument here.

It is one of those things which one reads with  awe at the sheer balls of the premise. Clearly, Pat has taken Mein Kampf to heart as the heart-warming, desperate revelation of a tortured peacemaker who has been maligned and misunderstood by any and all.

He claims in this article that Hitler sued for peace with Britain two years before the first trains rolled toward the concentration camps.  This is a deceptive claim.  But the specifics are less important than the overall argument.  Pat claims Germany invaded Poland in a dispute over Danzig.  One must then ask why one of the first acts after Poland fell was the construction of the camps.

But the actual problem here is a complete and utterly ridiculous misreading of Hitler himself.  Hitler made it clear in many speeches, and in Mein Kampf, that his aims were for a militantly ascendent Germany.  The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935.  People were already leaving the country because they understood what Hitler was.  Berlin in 1936 had to be “made over” for the Olympics—antisemitic posters taken down, the presence of brown shirts and their ilk removed, and the camps placed off-limits for even official visits.  Oh, yes, there were camps them, around the major cities, but they had not quite yet become the exclusive depository of Jews—gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs of various ethnic backgrounds, and certainly politically questionable types filled them in stinking, horrid conditions that only foretold of what was to come.

Hitler’s Reich in fact violated every single treaty it signed but one: its treaty with Japan that demanded it declare war on the United States in the event of war between the U.S. and Japan.

I don’t follow the logic behind Buchanan’s reinterpretation.  I don’t know what he’s doing here unless there’s a latent holocaust denier lurking beneath all the other reactionary dross he’s acquired over the years.

There is, however, an interesting point brought out in some of the comments appended to Buchanan’s post—that of Stalin’s somewhat “lighter” treatment at the hands of posterity.  As if by claiming that we don’t hold Stalin to the same standard of denunciation of revulsion, that somehow the opprobrium heaped upon Herr Hitler is, well, unfair.

Well.  Stalin was as big a monster, perhaps bigger, than Hitler.  The only thing that makes them different is their nationalist aims.  Stalin seemed content to remain within the borders of the Soviet Union.  He slaughtered his own people, and he played no favorites in that regard—he was an equal opportunity murderer.  He did not invade Poland.  He did not start a world war.  Considering the wall of silence placed around his regime, without that war we might still not know what was going on inside the Soviet Union.  Stalin’s sociopathology was constrained, methodical, even in some sense rational insofar as he recognized limits.  Hitler was different.  Hitler was more than just a sociopath and as the war progressed it became more obvious.  It is appropriate that Hitler’s favorite composer was Wagner, for what do most of Wagner’s operas end with?  Gotterdammerung!  The end of everything.

We’re catching up with regards to Uncle Joe, as Truman called him.  We’re finding out.  His atrocities were on such a scale, though, as to almost dwarf what the Nazis did.  But that’s a deceptive way to look at it as well.  What difference the numbers?  Eleven or eleven million?

Even so, I don’t quite grasp the point of trying to rehabilitate Hitler.  Is Buchanan trying to lay blame on the Brits for jumping the gun?  Is he trying to point out the flaws in systems and networks of treaties that seem to draw us into disaster time and again?  Is he practicing moral relativism?  That would be a first for him.

Whatever is going on, I think it behooves us to pay attention to the Nut Jobbery going on in our midst.

We do live in interesting times.

Absurdity

A Question…or Two…or More…

Just a couple of what seem to me like obvious questions.  (I know, I’ve been writing a bit on the health care debate, and I’ll try to do some other things after this, don’t want to bore anyone, especially myself.)

I see a lot of protesters waving signs that contain something like this:  HEALTHCARE REFORM YES, GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER NO.  TORT REFORM NOW!

Something about that doesn’t quite add up.  If health care is to be reformed, who is going to do it?  The industry isn’t without that there is a threat.  Which means there will have to be something outside the industry doing the threatening.  What might that be?

Hmm.  The government?

And the nature of the reform, if it isn’t to be entirely self-serving on the part of the industry, will have to be devised by a somewhat disinterested party.  Who might that be?

The government?

And tort law…well, that’s, as it says, Law.  Which is legislation.  Which is—wait for it!— the government!

So what is being asked for here?

That the government enact reforms that do not involve the government, do not make use of government authority, do not engage government offices, and will not grant the government any power to enforce.

So how will that work exactly?

Or is there some third party out there we haven’t been told about capable of doing all this reforming?

Oh, the market!  Which basically is consumers, which is, well, all of us.  The people.

But wait…isn’t the government supposed to be the duly elected voice of the people?  So if the people are demanding reform, how are the people supposed to both express such a desire and then implement said reforms?

I guess, through their duly elected voice—the government.

But if the government is not to be trusted, I guess that means the people aren’t to be trusted.  The people don’t know what they want, what is good for them, or how to go about managing the reforms they’ve demanded and, somehow, achieved.  So there will have to be an appointed body of presumed experts who do know how to manage all this to act on the people’s behalf…

Who might that be?

The industry?  Hmm.  Well, since it’s the industry that needs reforming and the people who have demanded reform, handing management of the reform over to the very thing that needs the reform would seem, well, not to put to fine a point on it, stupid.

So I guess we’d have to elect a representative body to manage the reforms.

Oh, wait, don’t we already have such a body?

Yeah, it’s the government.  So by demanding reform of an industry, it would seem reasonable that we not trust the industry (that already doesn’t do what we want it to do) to reform itself.  It would be silly to create a whole other body to oversee all this when one already exists that has over two centuries of expertise in doing exactly this sort of thing.

So how is anything is going to change otherwise?

Just wondering, you know, because some of the demands sort of don’t make any sense.

Absurdity

The Madman In The Auditorium

I like Barney Frank.  He says what he feels, usually in a way that makes his argument better.  But it’s almost a no-brainer to do a comeback on the idiocy with which he was faced in Dartmouth, Massachussetts this past week.  I mean, what do you say to someone who thinks it’s a valid statement to compare Obama to Hitler?

A woman carrying a poster with Obama’s image modified with a Hitlerian mustache stepped up to the microphone to ask why Frank supports a Nazi policy.

There are so many things wrong with this it boggles the mind where to begin.  Frank’s response was probably the most effective.

“On what planet do you spend most of your time?” he asked.  Then:  “Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table.”

He then commented that her freedom to carry that poster and make such lamebrained statements was a tribute to the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech.  I salute his restraint.

To  compare any president of the United States to Hitler is a stretch, even with the likes of Obama’s predecessor.  (I might consider it for Cheney, but even he does not match the level of malignancy achieved by Adolph, nor does our system allow for such people to act with unrestrained impunity, hard as that might be for some to accept.)  But to compare Barack Obama to the mad man of the 20th Century is such a profoundly ignorant mischaracterization that it is tempting to write off this whole experiment in potential civilization as a failure.

Where does this shit come from?

The Republican Party, what is left of it, is grasping at straws, sinking in the quicksand of its own inanity.  We must take care to not be pulled into the quagmire in some misguided attempt to rescue it through well-intentioned but doomed bipartisan sentiments.  The Republican Party has devolved into a nasty cadre of ideologues, a shrinking room of hydrophobic screechers who claw and scratch at anyone who tries to do this country a service by bringing it back to some semblance of decency.  They have fed on their own conspiracy-fevered viscera for so long that they cannot even hear the words much less the sentences of opposing viewpoints.  We should perhaps let them sink and drown.  It would be a kindness.

The fear-mongering is reminiscent of everything we’ve seen since 2000.  Rachel Maddow, who is one of the most able of contemporary analysts on television, shows the process and the connections here.

Shouting, screaming, inane blather—noise filling the spaces in which rational discourse might take place if only the decibel level could be reduced.  Platitudes, sloganeering, slander, and lies are flooding these so-called town hall meetings and shoving aside reason and discovery and thought.  These are not people who are interested in understanding anything, they are people bent on stopping something they’ve been told—been told—they should not allow.

Why?  because for the last almost three decades we have been regularly told that the government is bad.  That anything the government touches turns to dross.  Because when the government tells you it is there to help, you should run away.

Why?

Because corporate America is a competing government and will not surrender power.

There is a scene in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locusts where the head of the movie studio talks about the demands of the writer’s union.  They want control over their scripts, input int he process of filmmaking, a say in what gets cut, rewritten, changed.  The mogul tells his crony “Uh uh.  I’ll give them money, but I’ll never give them control.”

I’m paraphrasing, I don’t have the book in front of me.  What has this to do with the current debate?  (And I ask in all seriousness, What debate?)  It’s the same thing:  corporate America will give discounts, new services, it will spend money through lobbyists on politicians, it will spend money shipping professional protesters around the country, but it will never give up control.

Well, if only it worked that way.  If corporate America got together and and actually did something about the health care issue, then all this might be worth it.

There are simple facts that need to be addressed.  We all know what they are.

Health care is pricing itself out of the the reach of the lower middle class.  It has already done so with the working poor.  It’s becoming too expensive for the middle class.

Ah, the critic says, those people do have access!  Yes, emergency room care, which is not the best and not a fix.  It’s a maintenance system whereby band-aids get applied that keep people going but do not give them health.

Costs.  Technologically, we have the best medical system in the world.  The problem is, we can’t afford to use it on everyone.

Simple problem.  Where do you start to address it?

The publicly owned insurance companies posted profits of between three and five percent in the last few years.  On volumes in the tens to hundreds of billions, that can add up to a lot of money, but direct redistribution of those profits toward cutting costs will do very, very little.  We can assume the privately held companies are making about the same profit.  Sorry, but stripping away three percent profit margins isn’t going to lower overall premiums at all.

Hospitals scramble to make ends meet because the insurance companies can bargain down the prices hospitals charge.  I witnessed that personally a few years ago and was amazed at the size of the bill initially written and the amount the insurance company actually paid.  I was not billed the difference.  The shortfall had to be made up somewhere, you’d think, and it is—through Medicare.

The government already subsidizes the system.  And Medicare works pretty well, but in terms of lowering the overall cost of national health care, its hands are tied.

The fact remains, our tax dollars are already paying a good part of the freight.  How come no one is complaining about that?

Probably because most people don’t make the connection.  And because the government appears to have little say in how the system operates.  (This isn’t true, but no one has bothered to find out.)  What the government does not have any say in is how much all this actually costs.  Supposedly the market takes care of that and it is assumed—generally by people who have health insurance and good care—that the price paid is just what it costs.

It’s like a room into which all the stuff we’d rather not pay attention gets tossed.  Like Fibber McGee’s closet, we can’t afford to open it lest all that stuff explode all over us.

The system is headed for a breakdown, and I imagine that some in the industry are likely trying to figure out how to fix it before it does become like the automobile industry and collapses.

None of which has anything to do with those people comparing Barack Obama to Hitler.  They had internalized the faith that the government must be kept out at all costs, that the government will hurt us, that the government will destroy, that the government cannot do anything right.

They hold these views even while they depend on that same government for all the things they’re not complaining about.  This is very much a religious psychology, which holds two conflicting viewpoints in the mind simultaneously and sees no contradiction.  These folks are incapable of rational discourse because they’ve accepted a premise which is false from the start but which they cannot abandon because it is the foundation of their patriotism.

Yes, I said patriotism.  For they see themselves that way.  They are “saving America” from the Socialists, the Communists, the Liberals.  If universal health care comes to pass, they will have lost their country, because….

Why?  What is it they think will happen?

I do not know.  I can guess, but even that may be off-base.

But one thing I do know—if they win, they will have damaged the political process once again.  They will have made it impossible to hold a rational conversation on a national level.  They will have proved one more time that rather than argue, reasonable people will go home and say nothing.  Because reasonable people usually have difficulty acknowledging irrationality in individuals—functional insanity.  We have a hard time seeing someone as being utterly devoid of a single worthwhile thing to say on a given topic.  We are reasonable, we know they can be if only given a chance, and we have such faith in reason that we won’t accept its opposite in others.  We can’t understand why reason won’t win.

Barney Frank doesn’t seem to have much trouble with that, though.  He nailed it.  The woman with the poster, to him, had no more intelligence than the dining room table.  It would be a good thing right now if all the rational people would start getting a little more impatient, a little less tolerant of idiocy, and little louder.  We’re supposed to be smarter than them, but we are loathe to pick up a cudgel even when the madman is running around with scissors and hurting people.  Time maybe to get over that.

Absurdity

Dante’s HMO

Now for something less sturm und drang (which is ironic, since just now it is thundering and raining outside) and more reflective.

We’re still attending the Dante reading group.  Yesterday we did Canto XIV of Purgatorio and indulged some lively conversation over the meaning and intent.  It’s become fairly obvious (long ago, back in  Inferno it was obvious) that Dante was not talking about the afterlife, not in any serious way.  All of this is a critique of the world and its denizens.  It is a thoroughgoing strafing and scourging of the component parts of the world through which he moved.  He was doing what science fiction does, talking about the present world through the distorting lens of the fantastic.

There are equivalent personalities in Inferno and Purgatory.  There seems to be a question of degree, however, and an additional component of self awareness that has put the denizens of Purgatory—the Purgs in our group shorthand—and the Infernals where they are.  We have just completed Pride and are in the midst of Envy, and certainly there are those in Inferno who suffer from the same faults.  The difference is the Purgs know they have a failing, the Infernals embrace their flaw as if it is only right and natural.  The person of Chaco for one is convinced he’s heaven-bound just as soon as the bureaucratic cock-up that’s put him where he is gets cleared up.  The Infernals, you realize, are exactly where they want to be.

This is a point I think Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle missed in their otherwise delightful take, Inferno.  They portrayed the denizens of hell as people being punished and are aware of being punished, unable to do anything about it.  But it becomes clear with close reading of Dante that this is precisely not the case.  Chaco, and his ilk, like the way they are, they have no problem with themselves, it is the world that they see as the problem.  They would tear down creation to make it conform to their view of how things should be.

Whereas the Purgs have no such conviction.  They are flawed and feel incapable of doing anything about it.  They know there is a problem, but can’t seem to identify it, or feel powerless to effect change.  Theirs is a more complex dysfunction, and it is compounded by a confusion with the systems they have lived and worked within.  They are loathe to drop the forms they have grown both comfortable and diseased embracing.

And Virgil, who is outside this entire construct being a pagan, pre-Christian, tells Dante:

That was the iron bit meant to hold man within his proper bound.  But you men swallow bait and hook and all, and then your ancient enemy yanks you in—small profit to you then, the rein or call.

Stepping outside for a moment, which is Virgil’s freedom, this suggests that mankind has been sold a bill of goods, a slick salesman has had his way with us, and we bought it.  Bought into it.  And we’re stuck with it.  There are wonders enough in life and elsewhere, but we’re too busy tending the Great Machine to pay attention—or to think we can abandon what doesn’t work in the hope of finding…better.

If Dante hadn’t written this in the 13th century, one might see it as an almost modern critique of the corporate system.  But why not?  The same flaws inform modern institutions, drive people to ignore their own best interests, create the same monsters of singular obessive control.

Seen from this perspective, I have to say—I can’t resist saying—that the entire health care debate seems custom tailored for a Dante-esque interpretation.  Kind of fitting.  And frightening.

Absurdity

Can’t Get No Women So I’ll Die Blues: An Absurdity

George Sodini never got it right, apparently.  He posted a kind of diary entry on the web explaining how not right he got it.  “The biggest problem of all is not having relationships or friends,” he wrote.

According to his confession on the web, he hadn’t had a girlfriend since 1984 or a date since May of 2008.  Hadn’t had sex for 19 years.

“Women just don’t like me,” he wrote.

So he came up with a solution.  If he couldn’t get his life the way he wanted it, he would end it.  He acquired firearms, ammunition, he set down a plan.  He intended to off himself and end his pain.

Only problem with that is, he decided to take a bunch of women with him.

He was 48.  So the last time he’d had a girlfriend, he’d been (roughly) 23.  You can see images of him on his webpage if you choose to look.  He wasn’t bad looking, he kept himself fit, he looked every bit the so-called “Eligible Bachelor.”

So what went wrong?  Or, more probably, what never went right?

And, finally, do we care?

We might have if he had done himself in at home, alone.  Bullet in the brainpan, up through the mouth by way of the soft palate.  Days would pass, someone would notice that he hadn’t shown up.  If he’d truly been without friends, maybe the smell would have alerted someone.  Body found, the notice on the website as explanation.  Sympathetic pondering by people who may have thought he’d had so much to live for.  The irony of such deaths is that those people around the victim who really did care come forward and he would never know.

But instead, he goes out like a kamikaze, gunning down women he did not know—knew of, perhaps—in a fitness class.  Vengeance for his unchallengable loneliness.  All merit for sympathy gone.  Gutless wonder till the end.

Do I have any sympathy?

Let’s see…

Until I met Donna, almost none of my girlfriends stayed with me more than three months, the vast majority less than one month.  I called somewhere around 86 girls to ask to go to my senior prom, and not one accepted, so I didn’t go.  86.  (I found out later that there were 4 I didn’t call who would have gone, but I either lost staying power by number 86 or they weren’t on my list to begin with, it’s hard to remember.)  Sex?  Problematic.  I actually did have sex with a number of girls who then refused to go out with me.  Not because of bad sex (though, frankly, how good could it have been?) but because I was a Nobody, a Nonentity.  They did not want to be seen with me.  Had nothing to do with me, I know, it was a status thing and let’s face it, teenagers can be brutal.

I was frustrated enough after the end of what till then had been my most serious relationship—a woman I had asked to marry me, who subsequently (after initially accepting) trashed our relationship in the most thorough and humiliating manner—to consider suicide.  Not to worry, obviously I didn’t do it, nor has it ever crossed my mind again, no matter how bad things have gotten.

It is very difficult to be optimistic with a track record like I had.  But all things are relative.  I did have dates, I did manage to have something of a sex life, I always had female friends, and I for damn sure always had very good friends in general.  Not many, but this is something in which quality is the only determining factor.

In the middle of your self-pity, such benefits don’t register.

Mainly, my major problem was a matter of communication.  I didn’t know how to do that with females.  The whole idea that I could talk to girls the way I talked to guys was completely and totally alien to my experience—I’d tried that and it didn’t work.   (I wasn’t really doing a great jobh talking to guys, either—when you have a communications problem, it tends to be all-encompassing, but if you have a couple of good buddies it just seems like the problem in uni-dimensional.)

Yeah, I wanted to have sex with every girl I tried to talk to.  It got in the way.  They wanted to talk  (perfectly reasonable) and get to know me, and then maybe there would be some activity.  I couldn’t stop obsessing on all the stuff I wanted but couldn’t have, so all my conversation was stilted and artificial.

Did I know that at the time?  Not really.  I mean, someone could explain it to me, but did it really register in a way that would have changed my behavior?  No.

It was something I needed to learn to do.  And internalize.  And I needed to get past the stereotypes.

Stereotypes?  From where?  Oh, movies and television, of course.  Those guys talked cool and made witty remarks, why couldn’t I?  Well, I could.  But it was artificial.  All I got was rolled eyes and see-ya-laters.

But you learn.  You pay attention.  You try and try again, not in the same way, but in the different ways suggested by the information you get from listening!  ‘Cause, like, it’s not about you.

But it took me a long time to figure this out and yes, it was frustrating to watch all these other guys my age making out all right and being completely unable to figure out what I was doing wrong.  But I figured it out.  Eventually.

And I didn’t shoot one woman.  Ever.  I didn’t even shoot myself.

Why do I tell you all this?

Because frustration is no excuse.  Because I can sympathize with someone who just keeps trying and failing.  Because I’ve been there, feeling unloved, unwanted, a self-pitying lump of despair, staring in the mirror and wondering where the boils are that keep turning all the women off.  But mainly to say that with Mr. Sodini, no matter what he proclaimed on his website, it wasn’t what he claimed it to be that tipped him over the edge.  That was just the excuse.

One of his neighbors told police  “He was so antisocial we really didn’t learn anything about him.”

He was the man who had bought the expensive suit, got the fashionable haircut, wore expensive cologne, went to the party and stood there waiting for people to notice how wonderful he was.  But he never talked to anyone.  And when everyone pretty much went on doing what they’d been doing all along and ignoring him, he went away miffed.

He was broken in more ways than an inability to keep a girlfriend.  It would interesting to find out why his girlfriends left and why he rarely dated anyone long enough to develop a relationship.  We might find that he was too self-centered.  Too disinterested in anyone else.  Because usually, when people aren’t interested in you, it’s because you’re not interested in them.

But I come back to the fact that after all the frustrations in my life, all the slights, stabs in the back, insults, chronic disregard, and general shittiness with which so many people trreated me, I never killed a one of them.  It never even occurred to me to do that.

By the words on George Sodini’s confessional, he had apparently had enough of living the way he’d been living and decided to commit suicide.  But like some ancient warlord, he wasn’t going to ride the death barque by himself—he needed an entourage.

I find nothing sympathetic in the man.  His response to life’s basic ambivalence was one more wrong thing done.  “If you don’t date me I’ll kill some strangers!”  Very attractive, I’m sure that will turn it around for you.  “It’s all women’s fault and to prove it I’m going to shoot a bunch of women who don’t know me and won’t sleep with me!”  Yeah, that’ll make your luck change, I’m sure.

Killing someone else because you can’t get your act together renders you pretty much unfit for any consideration other than as an example of the ultimate loser, the epitome of a screw-up, the zenith of denial that you are the architect of your own life.  Sure, you have to obey the zoning laws, but otherwise how that structure looks is all up to you.  If it’s a ramshackle wreck when you’re done, you can’t blame anyone else.

The thing about being young and awkward is, you learn.  You grow up, you learn, you get over it.  No one is born with the ability to do all right, we all learn it.  Some faster than others, level of ability varies…

The only failure is to quit.  And the surest way to ignominy is to quit by destroying others.

Men are killing women all over the globe, for all manner of excuse.  But mainly because the women left.  They left these men, their families, their villages, towns, cities, countries, because they couldn’t stand the adolescent neediness and control, because they are hnuman beings who want something better.  Women leave.  Men hate it when they do.  And some men will kill them rather than give them the option of leaving.

But none of these men ever seem to consider that they are the reason these women are leaving and if they want it to change, they must change.  If they can.

Blaming someone else for your shortcomings is an ageless game.  It is pathetic.  It deserves no sympathy, but it is, indeed, pathetic.

Absurdity

Readingless Writers—Not Right

I’ve heard of this phenomenon, but never before encountered it directly.  Excuse me, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the utter vapidity of this…

I have a MySpace page.  Admittedly, I pay less attention to it these days in lieu of my Facebook page  (all these Pages…for such a functional Luddite, it amazes me I navigate these strange seas), but I do check it at least once a week.  I post a short blog there.  And I collect Friend Requests.

I received such a request the other day from someone whose name I will not use.  Unless it’s from someone or something I recognize, I go to the requester’s page to check them out.  Saves on a small amount of embarrassment.  This person had a legit page.  Aspiring writer.  Claimed to be working on several short stories and a novel.  Great.  I’m all about supporting other writers.  Sometimes we’re all we’ve got.  But I scrolled down to the section where he lists his interests and find under BOOKS this:

I actually don’t read to much but I do like a few. Twilight, Harry Potter, Impulse, Dead on Town Line, etc.

I sat back and stared at that and the question ran through my head like a neon billboard, “How does that work?  Just how the hell do you want to be a writer and not like to read?”

So I sent this person a message and asked.  I told him that to be a writer you have to love words, love stories…

Well, here’s the exchange, sans names:

Okay, you sent me a friend request, so I looked at your profile. It says you want to be a writer, but then under Books you say you don’t read much.

How does that work? You want to be a writer you have to love words, you have to love stories, you have to love it on the page, and that means reading A LOT.

You might just blow this off, but don’t. If you really want to be a writer, you must read. That’s where you learn your craft, sure, but more importantly that’s where you nurture the love of what you say you want to do.

Either that, or you’re a poser.

Apologies for the bluntness, but I am a writer and before that I was a reader. You can’t have one without the other.

Mark

REPLY:

You don’t have to like both to be a writer. That’s a ridiculous thesis to be honest. That’s like saying that you have to like listening to someone else to you how their day was in order to tell them how your day was. It’s just true. Reading bores me, and prefer to witness a story as a much faster pace, eg. a Movie. Writing, however, doesn’t bore me. It’s as simple as that. I don’t know why people always over complicate simple things like that.

MY RESPONSE

Well, good luck with that. It’s like being an auto mechanic and not liking cars. Or being a musician who doesn’t listen to anyone else’s music.

Maybe someday you’ll get it.

Mark

You don’t have to like both to be a writer?

Well, I suppose in the absolute strict sense of wanting to write things while disliking going through other people’s work, he’s right.  But that, it seems to me, is legitimate only insofar as a narcissistic indulgence.

But a ridiculous thesis?  How do you even come to a notion of what it means to be A Writer without some affection for the product in general?  This is so alien to my experience, my way of thinking, that I’m still struggling to make sense of it.

It only scans in one of two ways.  (A), it’s not that you want to be a writer.  Being a writer is hard work, it’s paying attention to all manner of triviality that goes into the making of Life, sorting it into piles of Meaning and Dross, and from that compiling and elucidating an observation that is relevant to strangers, because if you publish you have no idea who will read your words, and the viability of what you do must find a resonance with people you do not and will never know.  Being a writer is living through the word, through the paragraph, the scene, the story.  The way in which story operates—how it comes to be, how it is constructed, how it moves—can only be learned by responding to it yourself, both in life and on the page, but on the page is where the art happens, and you cannot learn how to do that unless you read, widely and deeply.  So it is not that you want to be a writer, you want to be an Author, someone with titles strewn beneath your name, who is adulated by the public, respected for what wisdom may be found in works you presumably did by some mechanism (but not, apparently, by actually being a writer).  You like the idea of being a writer, but having no idea what the purpose of it is, you cannot be one, only, if you learn the trick, an Author.

Or (B) you are simply in love with the sound and look of your own voice on the page.  Nothing wrong with that, but unless you have some external input what you write will only be relevant to yourself.  It will be indulgent.  And it will have resonance to others only by accident—not because you are so different from anyone else, but because you have no notion how to convey your commonality.  It is a form of masturbation, and while that is legitimate, it is done in isolation, born out of a fantasy of connection and, in time, if it is all you do, an inability to touch anyone outside yourself.

But what genuinely troubles me is the whole disregard—the blind ignorance—of what writing is all about.  It is an art and if you cannot respond to the art you cannot do it, not so that it means much to anyone else.  It is, to stretch a metaphor from the previous sentence, like having sex with someone you don’t much care to spend any time with.  You like the orgasm, but you don’t want to be bothered with other people and their desires and needs.  It’s selfish, true, but it’s also tragic, especially if you then go and pose as a Great Lover.

We do have a generation (and I’m using that term to define an age bracket—this group includes people from 10 to 50) that is enamored of film.  That’s where it is for them.  But a lot of flawed and failed films get made and often—not every time—but often the failure is because someone doesn’t read and has no idea what it is that good writing conveys.  It begins with the word, but they want to bypass that.

Why?  I have a theory, of course.  Because it’s hard work to make the translation from words on a page to images in the mind.  Most of the people I know who do not read for pleasure—read fiction for pleasure, I should say—seem incapable of running the story in their imagination.  The words do not make pictures for them, do not open vistas of the imagination, do not convey the essence of character.  They’re just words on a page.  This is sad and I think a failure of education on a basic level.

But it’s sadder still when these sorts then try to do film.  Or fail to do film.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it till I have no more breath with which to say it—reading is fundamentally different from almost any other form of entertainment (the closest is radio drama) because it is interactive and participatory.  You must do the work of creating the images suggested on the page in your own mind.  It is a trick best learned young, but it is a trick that will give us the stars, because the imagination is a living thing that must be nourished from both within and without. If you cannot envision, you cannot build.

There are many reasons to read and I was encouraged more this year than ever before to learn, via and NEA report, that reading in America had increased substantially for the first time since they’ve been keeping track in 1982.

But you run across these bizarre confluences from time to time and you wonder how this happened?  I can live with the idea that there are people bored by reading.  But then to be told that these same people want to be writers baffles.  If reading bores them one can only assume that what they write will be boring—because they’ll have no clue how it can be otherwise.

Absurdity

On Knowing Your Limits

Something that annoys me no end is people who make promises they don’t keep.  Not people who are prevented from keeping them or due to circumstances beyond their control find they simply cannot do it.  No, as aggravating as that might be, life happens.  The circumstances deserve our ire, not the people—not if they’ve made an honest effort.  No, what I’m talking about are people who can do something, know how, but as they make the promise know they probably won’t.  Bad scheduling, bad planning, bad whatever—or just lack of real interest.  Or the habit traditionally known as Biting Off More Than You Can Chew.

Many years ago—decades, really—a local youth activist tried to draft me into service by writing a comic he intended to locally produce and distributed.  He knew I wrote, I was just beginning to garner a bit of a reputation, he thought it would be a good fit.  I demurred.

“I don’t want to commit to something I might not have the time or inclination to do,” I said.

He understood.  In fact, “I wish more people would be that honest about their limits.”

I knew what he meant, but had no idea it would become part of my own personal landscape of trials and tribulations.  But I remembered that and I’ve been scrupulous about not making unfullfillable commitments.

What happens is, of course, that someone says “I’ll do that” and you then feed the information to that person, get him or her set up enough to take the ball, and you go pay attention to all the other thousand to million details demanding your attention.  But all of sudden one day you turn around and discover that nothing has been done by this person.  They have completely dropped the ball and you then are left scrambling to repair the damage, build the bridge, make the call, write the report, and so forth.  The arrangements you’ve made based on their commitment fall apart because now you’re over-scheduled.  It’s a mess.

It would have been better had that person said “I don’t think I can do that.”

I don’t have a problem either saying that or hearing it.  The inability to do something, for whatever reason, honestly admitted up front before any time or resource is wasted does not offend me at all.  What offends is the unwillingness or inability to state that up front and said individual makes an unkeepable promise.  That promise did not happen in a vacuum.  Things get built around it and based on it.  So when the promise is broken, that section crumbles and everything else is put at risk.

(Yes, I have right now a particular something in mind, but I won’t air that laundry here.)

Sure, you disappoint someone by saying no.  For about a minute.  The disappointment that comes later when you can’t fulfill your promise lasts a bit more than a minute.  It can last a lifetime.

Now, there are all manner of external reasons why promises get derailed and the person who made those promises ought not be held accountable.  If they take on the responsibility and make an honest attempt at fulfilling it and Other Shit gets in their way and renders their task impossible, that’s not on them.  You might get angry and argue that they should have found a way, but that doesn’t bear on the issue of whether or not they broke a promise.  They showed up, ready to play, and then it rained.  Or  someone else didn’t bring the tools.  Or they got hit by a bus.  Or their best friend did, and that commitment trumps yours.  You can work with that if you know it’s happening.  What I’m talking about is the person who steps up and says “I can do that” and then goes off and doesn’t do it.  Because.

Because they really didn’t have the time or they really didn’t know how to do it or they simply lacked interest.

So why did they make the promise to begin with?  Because they didn’t want to look like a bad person.  They hate saying no, they wanted to impress you, or, worse, they didn’t really think it was that important.  Any number of reasons, most of them boiling down to a statement something like  “Oh, you really wanted that done?  Sorry, I didn’t realize you were serious.”

As a corollary to this, the next most annoying thing is to be told “I’ll get back to you” and then never, ever hear back.  It’s a species of Being Ignored that drives me personally right up a telephone pole.  Just exactly what is so damn difficult about picking up the phone, making a call, and saying “I really can’t/don’t want to/won’t do that?”  It’s polite.  Maybe there’s an aversion to saying No, as above, but this manifests as evasion rather than flat out honesty.

But plans get ruined by such inconsiderate failures of self-knowledge and integrity.  Sometimes plans involving many other people.  Telling me you can’t, or won’t, is infinitely better than promising me to do something and then not showing up.  I can shrug off the first.  The latter has a flypaper tackiness that takes years to peel off.

Granted, sometimes it’s hard to know your limits.  It’s hard to know that you really don’t want to do some things until you get into them and see what they are.  But as time and life hand you experience, you should get a clue.  Then it’s just a matter of acting on that knowledge.

Learn your limits,  Know them.  Then let others know.  It’s polite.  And it saves a tremendous amount of clean-up later.

Absurdity

Comments

Because I am a computer doofus, it takes me forever to figure out the simplest things.  Sometimes.  Like, for instance, activating the Comments function on this blog.  I’ve been getting complaints from a few people for some time that they’ve been unable to post comments here for some reason.  I’d go into the guts of the blog, make sure the right stuff was checked—especially the one that says Allow People to Comment?—and still, no go.

Well, there was a pre-registration function apparently which I’d set so only authorized Users could register and comment.  Well, hell, I’m the only authorized user besides my webmaster.  A small difference in nomenclature.  I opted for the Everyone Can Comment thing…or is Everyone Can Register To Comment?…don’t know, don’t know.

Well, I may be a doofus but I learn.  Click enough buttons and eventually you hit the right combination.  The Comments function is now enabled and you all can start inundating me with your wisdom.  Or what have you.

Thank you, Nicola, for testing it again.  We are up and running.

Absurdity

Life Sometimes Takes You…

Mind you, I am not defending Governor Sanford, not really.  But I have to admit to be pleasantly surprised at his current stance, vis a vis his affair.

“I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate,” he said in an interview.

So many public figures indulge in affairs, get caught, and then drag the whole thing out in a back yard lot, pour gasoline on it, and set it ablaze in a spasm of self-loathing apologetics.  I suppose the most dramatic was Jimmy Swaggart, weeping openly on television, going through a self-flagellation of Medieval proportions, at least psychologically.

And he was “forgiven” by his followers.

It seemed for a time that Sanford’s supporters were getting set to forgive him.  “Okay,” they seemed to say, “you have a fling, it could happen to anybody, but now you’re back, you’ve abased yourself, your wife is going to forgive you, we can go on.”

But wait.  Now he has come out a gone off-script.  He was in love with  Maria Belen Chapur, and still is.  They met in 2001, at the onset of our eight-year-long Republican convulsion over public morality and national meltdown in global politics.  The Republican Party named for itself the “high ground” of moral probity, condemning liberalism as somehow not only fiscal irresponbsible but the ideology of license and promiscuity.

Democrats have been caught in extramarital affairs, no question.  But most of them did not sign on to any puritanical anti-sex purgation program.  The Republicans, who stand foursquare in opposition to gay marriage, sex education, pre-marital sex, contraception, divorce, pornography, and just about anything that suggests an embrace of physical pleasure outside the narrow parameters of a biblical prescription for wedded bliss (all without obviously understanding just what biblical standards actually are) seem to be having more than their share of revelatory faux pas in this area.  They are the party now of “Do What I Say Not What I Do”—a parenting stance that has long since lost any credibility.

Polls and surveys and studies suggest that conservatives generally have a bigger problem with pornography than do liberals.  Likewise, it seems conservative men of power screw around a lot more than do liberals in similar positions.

I think this is because there is an unspoken assumption among conservatives in power having to do with “perks.”  You can see this extending all the way back in history.  The man with the power gets to play more.  In fact, they might suggest to colleagues in the know that a little “extracurricular action” is necessary to keep things sane.

John Edwards, for all his faults, is more typical of liberals/democrats.  He screwed up.  But he didn’t go out in public crying his eyes out about how he’d lost his way.  He said he intended to try to patch things up with his wife, sorry if the public is disappointed, and I’m outta here.  Crass as it seems, his wife has been very ill.  Say what you want about marital commitment, the stress cancer puts on a relationship is not something most people understand and if the man indulged inadvisedly in sex outside his marriage, well, that’s between him and his wife.  End of story.  We can condemn, understand, forget, forgive, or deal with it as we will, it is no longer any of our business.

It’s not like Newt Gingrich, who (planned or not) had his sick wife served with divorce papers in the hospital so he could marry his mistress.

But Sanford now…he’s gone off-script as I say.  He’s owning up.  He’s not really apologizing for the affair.  He’s sorry it came out, he’s sorry the situation is what it is, but frankly, he isn’t sorry it happened.

And honestly?  That’s a bit refreshing.

We indulge a myth in this culture about True Love that’s pretty unsupportable in real life.  It happens.  But it’s almost never—almost—the way we tell ourselves it’s supposed to be.  Falling in love with your high school sweetheart, marrying, and being happy in that relationship till we die…it does happen.  But it is not the norm and it’s not fair to hold it up as the Gold Standard, because you just can’t know where life will sometimes take you.

Besides, a big part of that myth is that we can only ever fall in love with one other person.  An ancillary part of that is that we can only ever be in love with one person at a time.  It’s not true.  Maybe it would be better if it were.

But standing up acting like a victim—which is what most of these people like Sanford and Swaggert and the rest do—and throwing themselves on the mercy of the public, a public that can have no real idea what was going on in these people’s lives, is worse in my opinion than the initial indiscretion.  Because when you do that, you throw your lover on a bonfire and make him or her out to be a terrible thing.

Sanford’s not doing that.  Sanford is basically saying “You know, I don’t like it that my life is about to explode over this, but I met someone and we have a connection, and I’m not sorry about it.”

What?!?  How can you say that?

Because—out of everything else he might have said or done—it’s the truth.  And for that, I applaud the man.

The dirty secret about the Republican mindset regarding this, with a few exceptions, is that they’re not nearly so angry with him for having done it as they are for getting caught.

And he didn’t actually get caught.  He took a week off to go see someone he loves.  Very publicly.  Maybe the press was sniffing around, maybe not, but if so he stole their thunder.

Molly Ivans,who was such a breath of fresh air and common sense in a realm where neither is in any great supply, once responded to a question about sexual misconduct and the performance of civic duty more or less this way.  I’m paraphrasing.

“It would be nice to think there’s a connection between private sexual conduct and the ability to do your duty in public office, but there just isn’t.  Some of the most lecherous men have been great politicians.”

Should Sanford resign over this?   If it were me, I’d fight it.  I’d look at my detractors and say “How dare you judge me for something a significant number of you would either like to do, have done, or are doing.”  But it seems unlikely he’ll be allowed to be effective now.

It’s a small thing, perhaps, this one spot of honesty in all this mess, but I think it’s an important one because for once it’s not feeding into the self-deceptive self righteousness that is our national myth about True Love.

There is True Love.  But it doesn’t always come along at a convenient time and it doesn’t only happen just once.  And—this is the most important thing—it is not reducable to a consumer package to be paraded and auctioned for Air Time and Ratings.

Just sayin’, you know?

Absurdity

Who I Am Is No One Else’s Business!

As this just happened, I thought I’d come right home and write about it.  I just had one of those customer service incidents that sends me over the moon.

I walked into a store to find something.  I was in a frame of mind to buy.  I found the something and asked the sales person “How much is that?”  Back at her desk, she sat down, I sat down, and I expected her to punch up the price on her computer and tell me.

Instead:  “What’s your name?”

“Private individual,” I replied, a bit nonplussed.

“I need a name for the quote,” she said.

“You have to have it?”

“Yes.”

“Have a nice day.”

And I walked out.

Now, this was perhaps petty of me.  What, after all, is the big deal?  She needed to punch a name into her computer to open the dialogue box to ask for the price.

Here’s the big deal:  IT’S NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS WHO I AM UNTIL I DECIDE TO BUY FROM YOU!

This is a persistent and infuriating condition in our present society that causes me no end of irritation because so few people think it is a problem that I end up looking like a weirdo because I choose not to hand out private information for free.

It has crept up on us.  Decades ago, when chain stores began compiling mailing lists by which they could send updates and sale notices to their client base.  Then they discovered they could sell those lists to other concerns for marketing.  Now we have a plague of telemarketers, junk mail, spam, and cold calls and a new social category with which to look askance at people who would prefer not to play.  Like me.

In itself, it is an innocent enough thing.  But it is offensive, and what offends me the most is my fellow citizens failing to see how it is offensive and how it on a deep level adds to our current crisis.

Look:  if telemarketing didn’t work, no one would do it.  A certain percentage of those unwanted calls actually hook somebody into buying something.  Direct mail campaigns have an expected positive return rate of two percent. That is considered normal response and constitutes grounds to continue the practice.  Economies of scale work that way.  So if only two to five percent of the public respond favorably to the intrusions of these uninvited pests, they have reason to persist.

I think it might be fair to say that people with money and education don’t respond  as readily as poorer, less educated folks who are always on the lookout for bargains—and often find bargains they don’t understand and probably end up costing them too much, like sub prime mortgages.

We are too free with our personal information.  Maybe you or you or you find nothing wrong with always giving out your phone number or your zip code or even your name and address when asked, in Pavlovian response to the ringing bell behind the counter, but what has happened is that we have made available a vast pool of data that makes it easy to be imposed upon and that has aided and abetted a consumer culture that has gotten out of hand.

And made those of us who choose not to participate in this look like some form of misanthropic libertarian goofballs.

How hard is this?  If I choose to buy from someone, then I have agreed to have a relationship, however tenuous, with them.  Unless I pay cash, they are entitled to know with whom they are dealing.  But if I’m not buying, they have no right to know who I am.  And I can’t know if I’m going to buy if I don’t know how much the object in question is.  Trying to establish the buying relationship in advance of MY decision to buy is…rude.

I have walked out of many stores when confronted with a request for personal information.  I’ve had a few shouting matches with managers over it.  In some instances, the unfortunate salesperson is as much a victim, because some software programs these days have as a necessary rerequisite for accessing the system the entry of all this data.  The corporation won’t even let the employee make the call whether it’s worth irritating someone over collecting all this information.

Concerns and worries over Big Brother have a certain validity, but it is largely unremarked that the foundation of such a system will not be imposed on us—rather we will hand the powers that be what they ask for because we can’t muster up enough sense of ourselves to say, consistently, “None of your damn business!”

There.  I feel better.  I needed to get that out.  This rant has been brought to you by  Consumer Culture LTD.