Sunday Sermon

Post formerly in this space (of 11/22, "Deconstructing Barry") removed by author (update 12/1: reprinted above). Thanks to the commenters here and the few over at AmCon (where it has also been deleted, by me) who got it and were intelligent and fair in either criticism or praise. To the style-critics, I'll let you know when I tire of my usual shtick and start crafting punchy two-paragraph missives on what Blogopundit said in reaction to Instablogger's critique of Snarkette's refutation of Blogopundit's...etc. I'll have to get over my shyness and revulsion regarding circle-jerks, both real and analogous.

The blog environment is wonderful in a lot of ways; in others it is profoundly depressing. It's beyond me how any idea, small or large, ingenious or insipid, being instantly pounced on by the glib attentions of the mob, will survive in the future. Everyone checking in with their opinion, mistaking the right to it with the need for it; as if everything is to be put to an immediate referendum, and thus quickly approved or dispensed with. My God, how we disdain doubt and cower before the merest hint of contradiction. Stray, dissident thoughts are pounced on like fumbles, disappearing beneath the desperate mass of converging egos. I'm rambling, but suffice it to say: not everything has to be neat, practical, clear-cut and promptly resolved. That first impulse is always less thoughtful than what comes in time. But we all behave now as if time is nearly out--even though, or perhaps because, technological innovation gives us more and more of it. This leisure of time and freedom is new to humanity, and we sometimes embarrass ourselves. We need to start acting like we've been in the end zone before.

The transitory nature of the blog post, and the rapid, coalescing migrations of the internet's vast audience, with its here-today gone-tomorrow attentions, makes for writing both too glib and too plain. Above all it's introduced an element of desperation into our discourse. The blogosphere resembles a depression-era dance marathon.

It's also created a whole new reader; he who mistakes his lack of concentration for authorial incoherence, his shortened attention span for your long-windedness, his inflexible and unsubtle intellect for conviction. Do not humor him. Taunt him mercilessly until he shapes up or ships out for whatever dull, reassuring confines he may find among his like-minded.
As for the piece that was here originally, its only real flaw was in being over-edited, not overwritten; it was about half as long as it should have been. My sin was self-consciously editing it down, and cross-posting it where it didn't fit. It will be back, longer and bellicose as ever. What can I say? If you want someone to write for you the way a military unit marches, the blogosphere is overrun with this sort of thing. Several such authors are two clicks out by way of the blogroll to the right. But if this trend keeps up we'll all be communicating in monosyllabic grunts before long. I understand the elegance of minimalism in fiction, but there is no real place for it in the essay. That's not to say that a piece shouldn't be properly lean; this isn't the same thing.

As for military drill, I've done it. It has a certain appeal, especially for someone who's always felt awkward and ill-suited for society. "One big heel" our drill instructor used to enthuse, compelling us to stay in step. Sometimes we marched right up onto the sealed concrete between two barracks, and that big heel would echo off all of that cool, flat stone about us in a positively intoxicating fashion. You don't need me to tell you how dangerous a thing that is, how much it says about us. The converse of safety in numbers is danger outside of them.

Every profession, George Bernard Shaw said, is a conspiracy against the laity. Likewise, every organization is a conspiracy against the individual. Conspiracies we engage in against our autonomy. Necessary, but no less destructive (not always necessary, and rarely as necessary as any proposal to organize shrieks). If there's to be any benefit for you and I in this gut-wrenching levelling of culture and society that now passes for modernity, this mindless, ongoing demolition project for which respectable opinion is forever scrambling to fashion rationales and contrive pretexts, it should be that we claim our rights as individual men in relation to the State and all those quasi-states and aspiring tyrannies--"movements", organizations, activists. If we can't keep them from pulling the rug of tradition and custom out from under us, if we can't keep from doing it to ourselves in our infinite capacity for greed and blindness, at least perhaps we can resist the new hierarchies and oppressions the ambitious are fashioning for us. This is a salvage operation.

Never lament the state of this or that "movement"; it's all a farce, a ruse for organizing us rubes. I have a few colorful suggestions for your various "movements."

Contrary to our instinct, the result of democratization is not necessarily liberating. Quite the opposite. First ideas will be given no time or room to breathe, then they will simply start expiring in the womb. There is no true or lasting wisdom in mass opinion or consensus, just coercion of one sort or another. Only in solitude and reflection can one see beneath the sometimes mesmerizing reflection on the surface, to the murk beneath. There's no guarantee of anything but satisfaction at having had the courage to look.
"Strike me, but listen!" Thucydides is said to have cried to a general who had raised his hand in outrage at an inconvenient truth. Well, curse yourself for doing it, but look.

Like mom used to say, having two ears and only one mouth means one should listen twice as much as he speaks; we all need to read more and write less.

Cinematic for the People

That Home, The Cinematic Orchestra

The Man With the Movie Camera, The Cinematic Orchestra

Nostalgia for the Lost City of Angels

DJ Numark & Chali 2na, Comin' Thru

note: the picture above is of RZA from the Wu Tang. I don't know what the YouTube poster was thinking.

Forgotten But Not Gone

He gives orders
which no one hears
King's hat fits over their ears...
--Eno

I'm still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah...
--Elton John

You're enjoying your day
Everything's going your way
Then along comes Debbie Downer
--The Debbie Downer Theme

January 20 is a long way off. A certain overly proud man still stalks the halls in the White House, self-conscious under the august gazes of those imposing portraits on the wall (oh to know the content of the imaginary dialogues), ruefully retracing his dizzying rise and humiliating fall. We've all been there, when trying to fathom failure or heartbreak: obsessively revisiting events in one's mind over and over again, searching for some gap, some logical inconsistency that will reveal reality anew, altered and made compliant, or at least bearable. Altogether an unhealthy process when done in isolation.

The Family's hired narrative help in the media have been reassuring, or threatening, us that he cares not a whit for how we appraise him, confident in history's judgement. Well, no sober perspective regarding popular opinion was on display when we were treated to a glib, cinema-age version of a Roman triumph, vulgarized to the point of sacrilege, stripped of solemnity and verging on camp. When I recall him prancing about for the cameras on a warship, decked out in battle gear with strategically placed sock, I shudder, plotting on the graph in my mind the egomaniacal crash that should follow such--let's call it irrational exuberance.
So let's hope that those still in power, whether nursing wounds or hangovers this morning, recuperate quickly and heed the admonition that nothing is so dangerous as a humiliated lame-duck president preparing to hand over power to the opposition. Perhaps there was at least one timely Debbie Downer at Obama HQ last night. At this point I'd like to say something optimistic. Which would no doubt prompt Debbie to offer, "has anyone seen Dick Cheney lately?"

Election Coverage

John McCain's Base Base

Perhaps you‘ve seen it, the near-precise moment when John McCain lost control of his campaign. The scene is a now familiar one, the bogus “town-hall meeting.” He’s passing the microphone around like a decrepit Donahue, standing before a woman who starts by saying she “can't trust" Obama; McCain is nodding along, intimately engaged for the moment in manipulating the neurotic angst that is the dwindling lifeblood of his campaign. About the time she says her fear is due to what she’s been reading, a look of worry creases his trademark frown of condescending concern; he’s contemplating preemptively snatching the microphone back from her, when she lays it on him: Obama is “an Arab”. She's managed to confuse her slander (assuming there isn‘t an “Obama is an Arab” email careening about the internet), but it matters not.

Election 2008: Bile vs. Guile

Regarding George Will's welcome broadside on the Straight-Jacket Express that Leon Hadar brought up over at the AmCon blog, even when Will's right, he's wrong:

It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency.

Some of us believe McCain is clearly unsuited for the presidency and no more due to "moralism", boiling or tepid, than to "bottomless" certitude, unless we're referring to a morality that places John McCain's advancement above all else and the ensuing certainty that anyone and anything getting in its way are fair game. It's ambition unrestrained by a modest or measured temperament, and the subsequent lack of morality, preachy or otherwise, that McCain displays, despite the fatuous theme of "service".

I'm reminded of Will misreading the minor controversy regarding Jim Webb's snub of President Bush at a White House reception for newly elected congressman. You'll remember Webb tried to avoid shaking hands with the president, only to be confronted and asked, "how's your boy?" Will, perhaps due to his own basic decency, was quaintly clueless as to what had actually happened:

...disregarding many hard things Webb had said about him during the campaign, [President Bush] asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another.

Will mistook the hostility of the president's disingenuous question, which was nothing more than an attempt to force an intransigent Webb to submit to the protocol of their power arrangement--to knuckle under--sharpening his attack with the indecency of bringing the man's son (who, it shouldn't be lost on us, was carrying a rifle and facing peril under the command of President Bush) into it. It was about as civil and caring as a mafia boss asking a recalcitrant union leader "how's the family?"

We should be able to discount personality, seeing as it's not only subjective but subject to the artistic mythologizing so nauseatingly on display in the current campaign. We'd all like to think our mature and advanced democracy guards against the vanity and jealousies of petty men--with the outsized power of the executive branch, make that one petty man--but the Bush administration is depressing evidence that personality and temperament are as operative as ever. And this year we choose between aged choleric and youthful melancholic. I don't know what is more depressing, the dismal choice or the fact that the latter is clearly superior. If irreconcilable misanthropes had slogans mine would be: Refuse to Choose.