It is a rainy day outside, I am without transport of the private kind so instead I am waiting at the bus stop with my raincoat doing wonderfully to keep the wet and cold outside, I am most happy, I like rainy days, the bus will more or less arrive on time, it doesn’t matter, I don’t expect it to be on time, I am in a pleasant contemplative state, levitation being one of the topics my head is musing, when I hear a screeching hard breaking sound, the slippery wet, the unclenching rubber, the imposing red light, a card skidding sideways, and in seconds, a collision is avoided by oncoming traffic, while the car that crossed in red captures its composure, the driver, perhaps startled, after clearing the intersection, parks at the edge. Surprisingly seconds withheld a police car was just around the corner and quickly lights a Christmas tree of lights. I feel the wave of subsided panics that must have gone through the unlucky driver’s gut, levitation harshly forgone.
As I watch the emergency lights chatter the air, I ponder what I would do were I that police officer? From the breaking you could tell that the driver hadn’t meant to cross the red light illegally but had instead found a surprising red light; intent in trespassing the law was obviously none. The car was not a new model car, while I could not place the year it was obvious that the driver was of limited financial means, a ticket was the last thing this person needed. No one was hurt, sure the oncoming traffic had been obstructed but they had adequately, taken evasive maneuvers and continued on appropriately, it all transpired so quickly and smoothly, for such an event, that no one even bothered to use their horns. Concluding that, an unfortunately absent-minded driver had made a mistake, I as the police officer, would not have given the subject a traffic ticket, I would have said, “just be more careful next time.” The officer in charge of this event didn’t feel the same way, a ticket was issued at the scene.
But that act would be a violation of the police officer’s code ethic, “to enforce the law without personal judgment.” In our society rules are not suppose to be broken thus even if they are broken without intent, they then have to be punished. This is considered “reasonable” and it is based on the assumption that punishment is a deterrent and serves to maintain alertness within the common civic mindedness. The assumption being fewer people will run red lights as long as we enforce the law regardless of the particular circumstances.
That is to say, we will not look at the individual nor offer a personalize judgment of an event, in that manner we may remain objective and serve our community’s civic mindedness well.
After a while I started to wonder if the police officer went home and felt bad about giving this particular driver a ticket, but then I figured than an experienced officer could depersonalize the situation and distance himself enough from it so that the good sleep would not be interrupted. But then it occurred to me, “what if it was his wife running that red light, what if by coincidence the person running that light were indeed his wife or even his brother, or even his best buddy,” then I kind of thought that perhaps the officer would become more humane and personalize his judgment of the event, and let them each go without a fine. Sure I think there is any number of police officers that would still have given their best friend a ticket while saying something like, “I am doing this for your own good, I want you alive and safe…” But I think the majority, observing the very uniqueness of the situation: no one was hurt, traffic automatically restored itself to normal flow, the person had not intended to run the light, then the officer would have told his buddy or his wife: “hey, your lucky it was me that caught you, be more careful or next time you might not be so lucky.” And let it go at that.
But then I think the officer might get pissed-off too if, for instance, it were his wife or his buddy with children in the car. The officer might then feel possible personal pain nearer as caused by the loss of a loved one, and thus personalizing hurt issue a ticket in anger that someone carrying children could be so careless.
Regardless the point is that the depersonalization of this event, by justice logic, causes indifference between the officer on duty and the absentminded driver. Neither is allowed to connect with the other, the officer begins to judge the situation more accurately when it is a loved one, but is more sterile in his judgment when it is an unknown person. And the intercourse of the encounter between officer and absent minded driver is one intended not to emotionally touch either one of them, it is almost as if they had put plastic gloves on their minds, for the driver is probably thinking the following: “What was I thinking…” … “How stupid of me…” … “I am lucky to be alive, the officer is just doing his job, I should have been paying attention…” Contextually the absentminded driver will merely justify the legal actions and expect a well-deserved fine, the incident was/is against the law, and for good reason it should have never taken place. The fine will hurt but it could all have been worse.
What both characters in this play fail to do is to connect to one another and they fail to do that because the secular character of their society does not allow it, that is to say that the police officer and the driver agree that the normalization of their relationship has to remain secular and depersonalized so that the system can work, that individual circumstances must be ignored which is why the situation should be judge on its most basic principles, the light was red, you are suppose to stop at a red light, the driver didn’t, there is a fine, that is the law.
This is hard knowledge, this is a fact of life, traffic laws are not very forgiving, thousands of people lose their lives and are maimed in traffic accidents per day, per year, it is a harsh reality that has to be kept to a minimum as transport for us all is not an option but a necessity of the distances between work, home and the shopping center, the three pillars of our existence.
The rain decides to increase, my very nice and lovable olive Sanyo raincoat is beginning to personalize the existing rain, it isn’t keeping out the cold as well, the bus hasn’t arrived, I fancy it will soon, but then I fancy something else more, I fancy that all those empty seats that are passing by, SUVs that can sit 8 people pass me by, endless cars with 3 empty seats pass me by, all that tonnage and energy, with heating inside, not far from me is an untenable option for a ride, even as some of them if not many of them are going near to where I am heading, and could easily offer a lift but don’t and wont.
The reason they don’t offer me a lift its because they too have depersonalized me, if I was their wife, or their buddy I would have been picked up long ago, but I am someone that they don’t know, they would rather not be bothered with helping me out of the rain, besides that there are so many bad people out there that I could be one of them, better not to take a chance, even as most people tend to be honest, and most people are not criminals, and most people waiting for a bus are probably the least likely to be aggressive types, it requires patience and a certain degree of docility to take public transport, still it is too dangerous to pick up a stranger, the probability of picking up a weirdo or a serial killer might be .000000001 percent specially as most aggressors are driving BMWs and SUVs; but the nightly news from all over the world floods us with threats from everywhere, we are logically or should I say reasonably scared, and as such distrustful of strangers, so I fancy no one is going to want to chat with me, at least part of their lonely way to somewhere.
Still I harbor this strange belief that maybe that driver that run the red light might not have run it had she or he given me a ride, as their passenger I might a said, “hey watch out there is a red light.” And then I think if all those empty seats, passing me by, were filled with people going in the same direction pooling riders together, there would be fewer accidents and fewer cars on the road, but that would require so much personalization of our world, and besides that, my bus has arrived.
Ricardo ©
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Saturday, November 18, 2006
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC THINK CHANGE
Now the democrats are high on the hog with their enchanting victories, not only did they do well by winning congress but also the senate, control of both houses was unexpected, the American public however felt it necessary to create a balance that has apparently been voided by a strong White House. Thus the overcorrection but what has taken place is fascinating only in so far as boring can be fascinating.
Generally speaking the idea of checks and balances was that an independent supreme court, a strong legislature and executive, would benefit from power struggles between all three and keep them honest till the end of days. It hasn’t, it didn’t work, it is one of the aspects of our time honored constitution that ought to be revised however it isn’t going to happen until death do as apart. This is because when you fall in love with your constitution it equally becomes an unchanging premise. Thus congress, the executive and judicial will have to corner themselves indefinitely, they being the bulk of the constitution, which might explain why they don’t want to change it.
Consider our current situation, the voters have made leaders of the democrats but the democrats have amply shown that they don’t have the genius or the guts to stop the president. Still the voters figured that someone needed to send a message to the Whitehouse that its “anything goes one way forever” war strategy wasn’t working, being that the president does not have any self correcting abilities, this was necessary, it wasn’t an option, the voters didn’t have a choice, they had to mandate change not through process but by ousting the republicans from the podium. It shouldn’t be that way, the process of checks and balances ought to work, it very well didn’t.
Why it didn’t work is actually as pretty as how pretty it would have been if it had. The reason the process didn’t work its because America has been in decline since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ever since then America has been going through some severe psychological changes at every level, cultural, political, religious, and specially in the case of labor, labor has been going through a massive surge in productivity unequaled everywhere in the world.
Part of the reason for the change is obvious, the Soviet Union was a strategic enemy to have, it was “the perfect” enemy to divvy up the world with, it knew where its turf was and it did not frequent into American claimed territory, which is why the wars fought between the USSR and the USA were mere skirmishes fought through proxy, no one with any real sense of history will consider American losses in Vietnam or Korea significant in the context of two global and critically nuclear empires budding heads. However the collapse of the USSR created a huge hole where their interdependencies mattered. Defense, strategic and global hegemony, economic superiority, and good guy bad guy schematics.
America could no longer, for instance, be the only good guy, in a world where there was no Soviet Union American superiority moral or economic or even militarily could be challenged. As is the case with China and the European Union today challenging America for economic might and military autonomy. NATO has died and it is only true on paper, the EU is a mighty economic power, and the Euro is accreting EU integrity through a fresh supra-national sense of citizenship, the EU is showing that countries and borders do not pose a burden towards integration; counter that with America that is instead securing and fencing its territories from any country South of its borders. America the country that integrated autonomous states to form a successful union does not lead in creating united citizenship nationals or even in global monetary unification.
Through its actions in the Middle East where its interest cannot be seriously disguised America has vanquished moral superiority, the overthrowing of what was mostly an incompetent dictator and even a, like us secularists, instead we have placed the Middle East in grater turmoil and allows Syria and Iran to act with a certain degree of moral immunity, everyone is doing it, pushing their ways, stratifying their extremism, if the Americans can wield their sword at anyone, anywhere it creates a world of nomads, or at least gives a green light in that direction.
As is the case with Nuclear proliferation where America seems to favors India’s nuclear program but not North Korea’s or Iran’s, where you can assert who can make nuclear bombs and who can’t, you cannot!
Defense is another matter, no one likes an aggressor, America always seemed the one that would attack only as a matter of last resort, the rhetoric during the cold war was not to strike first but to strike in retaliation hitting hardest then. Today the policy on defense is twice removed from that, it is not about retaliation, it is not even about a first rapid strike, it is beyond all that, the new policy is of preemptive strike, that is to kill America’s enemies while they are still in the womb, as soon as you can hear their heart beat like beasts. America is confident that it is sensitive enough to realize friend from foe, collateral damage will be kept to a minimum; freedom however must be safeguarded at any cost to international laws, treaties or human rights. In some ways America is right, terrorist do lose their rights by tying the knot on them can ripple senselessly through money trails, communications tapping and detention without a public forum.
American productivity has risen to astonishing levels since the fall of the Soviet Union. Economist will have any number of reasons for this, I have a couple of my own, consider that after the Soviet Union fell there was nothing that could stand in the way of American success, in short if the fall of the USSR proved that America was right then the question was how much right it could further be, and that would lead to a logical extremism of the American way.
The manifestation of that extremism started with the American people, whatever doubts they may have had that they lived in the best country in the world were now eliminated, as the USSR collapsed it proved how bankrupt it was, this was a matter of finance, the USSR had failed to finance it self, it could not loan money to it self the rubble became unrubbled. Americans could then rightly or wrongly feel that they were superior, that there was now physical evidence that their system was indeed the best of all possible systems, further evidence of which could be found by the acceptance of capitalism by China, in other words Chinese and Russian acceptance of capitalism implied that capitalism was not only right but also that it was the guiding principle of economic truth. As such the American workers, capitalists, marketers, bankers, financiers, professionals, now knew for sure that it was up to them to fully exploit the power of capitalism to their own advantage, now it was just a matter of working a little harder, of producing a little more, or taking a risk on that new business venture, there was no naught on the road to wealth and happiness, there was a lot of hard work in between, but the conclusion here is this, the American peoples mindset was hardwired to think that the only way to fail was if the failed to try harder, they had all the right stuff, and so productivity skyrocketed.
Religiously America could then turn to the right and administer moral conservatism, if American values had won in the world then it stood to faith to keep them sacred, and sacred meant unchanging, marriage, the family, the fetus, had to be defended against any new ideas that could corrupt it, gay marriage, lack of prayer in schools, evolution, etc., thus there was a right wing religious uprising to preserve what was right about America and to logically, if fanatically, eliminate what was wrong, as a result a whole evangelical Christian movement surged throughout the country and became something rather unfaithful, that is to say political.
The political activism of a nationalistic religiosity put the secular constitution through an ordeal, to what degree could freedoms be granted and still be considered freedoms? Could you for instance teach “creation” in public schools, and still say that there was a separation of church and state? And what would you tell the Buddhists if the republican president was willing to hand out tax dollars to Christian do gooders but not to their monks and monasteries.
But then the idea that there has been a separation form state of any type is of course a fleece, America’s beef industry is as tied to Washington as the cows existence is tied to meat eaters, as we have seen recently even Indian casinos are part of the constituency of congress, and Enron created and wrote energy policy as much as it wrote off stocks, but then if capitalism is good and it has been proven good beyond belief, then it stands to reason that it is ok to logic that businesses have to lobby Washington and in the process absentmindedly make Washington, a government entity and thus not naturally given to capitalism. Governments cannot at any fundamental level be capitalistic, governement is about control, taxation, regulation, and so businesses have to lobby so that they can convince the government that capitalism is good and that it should be left alone and given maximum freedoms so it can produce jobs and taxes which is what the government actually cares about.
Which is why the constitution is sort of bankrupt, though a pretty document no lesser to any other greater, but it is bankrupt in that it doesn’t acknowledge that the first and foremost constituency is not the people but rather the beholden interest of business which wields power through its ability to create jobs and pay taxes which as far as superior to any of the people or for that matter any individual. I will not send my jet to pick up the president any time soon, equally I don’t think the president is going to come and stay in my spare bedroom, in fact I doubt that I could ever be the presidents friend, or even Nancy Pelosi’s friend, I mean Nancy is probably a nice person but Nancy is also a person of power and power that is not gotten cheaply nor easily, what makes a president also makes a speaker of the house, sorry Pelosi, the filtering process for democrats that make it to the top of the nation’s stage is the same, by the time the process has sifted through the rut, what is left is a political process beholden to moneyed interest. The constitution doesn’t address this matter, the constitution doesn’t address the matter that campaigning is expensive and that the people, or individual freedom, cannot pay for it. Today’s mightiest democracy is elected “by institutions.”
Recently the leading economist for the free hand of capitalism died, Milton Friedman was the man who tied Keynes’s belief that government had a right and a duty to interfere in the economic process, and fanatically promulgated the idea that the government that governs best governs least. There might be some truth in that, but since the fall of Keynesian economics and the rice of Milton Friedman there has only been more government and more regulation, and more laws and more taxes and so even as Milton would have liked to convince us that he could convince Reganomics and the republicans that government was generally a bad thing, he forgot one key thing, politicians are based on government foundations, regardless of what anyone thinks, a bureaucrat isn’t going to think like a businessmen any time soon! Nor is a business friendly president or congress going to successfully operate a country like a CEO, instead politicians will always do what is the politically right thing to do, “agree with their times.” As such we must be somewhat relief that Friedman is not with us anymore, for as one who undid Keynes, we can only assume that in passing he has at least undone himself and his times.
In the mean time, enjoy your riches.
Ricardo ©
Generally speaking the idea of checks and balances was that an independent supreme court, a strong legislature and executive, would benefit from power struggles between all three and keep them honest till the end of days. It hasn’t, it didn’t work, it is one of the aspects of our time honored constitution that ought to be revised however it isn’t going to happen until death do as apart. This is because when you fall in love with your constitution it equally becomes an unchanging premise. Thus congress, the executive and judicial will have to corner themselves indefinitely, they being the bulk of the constitution, which might explain why they don’t want to change it.
Consider our current situation, the voters have made leaders of the democrats but the democrats have amply shown that they don’t have the genius or the guts to stop the president. Still the voters figured that someone needed to send a message to the Whitehouse that its “anything goes one way forever” war strategy wasn’t working, being that the president does not have any self correcting abilities, this was necessary, it wasn’t an option, the voters didn’t have a choice, they had to mandate change not through process but by ousting the republicans from the podium. It shouldn’t be that way, the process of checks and balances ought to work, it very well didn’t.
Why it didn’t work is actually as pretty as how pretty it would have been if it had. The reason the process didn’t work its because America has been in decline since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ever since then America has been going through some severe psychological changes at every level, cultural, political, religious, and specially in the case of labor, labor has been going through a massive surge in productivity unequaled everywhere in the world.
Part of the reason for the change is obvious, the Soviet Union was a strategic enemy to have, it was “the perfect” enemy to divvy up the world with, it knew where its turf was and it did not frequent into American claimed territory, which is why the wars fought between the USSR and the USA were mere skirmishes fought through proxy, no one with any real sense of history will consider American losses in Vietnam or Korea significant in the context of two global and critically nuclear empires budding heads. However the collapse of the USSR created a huge hole where their interdependencies mattered. Defense, strategic and global hegemony, economic superiority, and good guy bad guy schematics.
America could no longer, for instance, be the only good guy, in a world where there was no Soviet Union American superiority moral or economic or even militarily could be challenged. As is the case with China and the European Union today challenging America for economic might and military autonomy. NATO has died and it is only true on paper, the EU is a mighty economic power, and the Euro is accreting EU integrity through a fresh supra-national sense of citizenship, the EU is showing that countries and borders do not pose a burden towards integration; counter that with America that is instead securing and fencing its territories from any country South of its borders. America the country that integrated autonomous states to form a successful union does not lead in creating united citizenship nationals or even in global monetary unification.
Through its actions in the Middle East where its interest cannot be seriously disguised America has vanquished moral superiority, the overthrowing of what was mostly an incompetent dictator and even a, like us secularists, instead we have placed the Middle East in grater turmoil and allows Syria and Iran to act with a certain degree of moral immunity, everyone is doing it, pushing their ways, stratifying their extremism, if the Americans can wield their sword at anyone, anywhere it creates a world of nomads, or at least gives a green light in that direction.
As is the case with Nuclear proliferation where America seems to favors India’s nuclear program but not North Korea’s or Iran’s, where you can assert who can make nuclear bombs and who can’t, you cannot!
Defense is another matter, no one likes an aggressor, America always seemed the one that would attack only as a matter of last resort, the rhetoric during the cold war was not to strike first but to strike in retaliation hitting hardest then. Today the policy on defense is twice removed from that, it is not about retaliation, it is not even about a first rapid strike, it is beyond all that, the new policy is of preemptive strike, that is to kill America’s enemies while they are still in the womb, as soon as you can hear their heart beat like beasts. America is confident that it is sensitive enough to realize friend from foe, collateral damage will be kept to a minimum; freedom however must be safeguarded at any cost to international laws, treaties or human rights. In some ways America is right, terrorist do lose their rights by tying the knot on them can ripple senselessly through money trails, communications tapping and detention without a public forum.
American productivity has risen to astonishing levels since the fall of the Soviet Union. Economist will have any number of reasons for this, I have a couple of my own, consider that after the Soviet Union fell there was nothing that could stand in the way of American success, in short if the fall of the USSR proved that America was right then the question was how much right it could further be, and that would lead to a logical extremism of the American way.
The manifestation of that extremism started with the American people, whatever doubts they may have had that they lived in the best country in the world were now eliminated, as the USSR collapsed it proved how bankrupt it was, this was a matter of finance, the USSR had failed to finance it self, it could not loan money to it self the rubble became unrubbled. Americans could then rightly or wrongly feel that they were superior, that there was now physical evidence that their system was indeed the best of all possible systems, further evidence of which could be found by the acceptance of capitalism by China, in other words Chinese and Russian acceptance of capitalism implied that capitalism was not only right but also that it was the guiding principle of economic truth. As such the American workers, capitalists, marketers, bankers, financiers, professionals, now knew for sure that it was up to them to fully exploit the power of capitalism to their own advantage, now it was just a matter of working a little harder, of producing a little more, or taking a risk on that new business venture, there was no naught on the road to wealth and happiness, there was a lot of hard work in between, but the conclusion here is this, the American peoples mindset was hardwired to think that the only way to fail was if the failed to try harder, they had all the right stuff, and so productivity skyrocketed.
Religiously America could then turn to the right and administer moral conservatism, if American values had won in the world then it stood to faith to keep them sacred, and sacred meant unchanging, marriage, the family, the fetus, had to be defended against any new ideas that could corrupt it, gay marriage, lack of prayer in schools, evolution, etc., thus there was a right wing religious uprising to preserve what was right about America and to logically, if fanatically, eliminate what was wrong, as a result a whole evangelical Christian movement surged throughout the country and became something rather unfaithful, that is to say political.
The political activism of a nationalistic religiosity put the secular constitution through an ordeal, to what degree could freedoms be granted and still be considered freedoms? Could you for instance teach “creation” in public schools, and still say that there was a separation of church and state? And what would you tell the Buddhists if the republican president was willing to hand out tax dollars to Christian do gooders but not to their monks and monasteries.
But then the idea that there has been a separation form state of any type is of course a fleece, America’s beef industry is as tied to Washington as the cows existence is tied to meat eaters, as we have seen recently even Indian casinos are part of the constituency of congress, and Enron created and wrote energy policy as much as it wrote off stocks, but then if capitalism is good and it has been proven good beyond belief, then it stands to reason that it is ok to logic that businesses have to lobby Washington and in the process absentmindedly make Washington, a government entity and thus not naturally given to capitalism. Governments cannot at any fundamental level be capitalistic, governement is about control, taxation, regulation, and so businesses have to lobby so that they can convince the government that capitalism is good and that it should be left alone and given maximum freedoms so it can produce jobs and taxes which is what the government actually cares about.
Which is why the constitution is sort of bankrupt, though a pretty document no lesser to any other greater, but it is bankrupt in that it doesn’t acknowledge that the first and foremost constituency is not the people but rather the beholden interest of business which wields power through its ability to create jobs and pay taxes which as far as superior to any of the people or for that matter any individual. I will not send my jet to pick up the president any time soon, equally I don’t think the president is going to come and stay in my spare bedroom, in fact I doubt that I could ever be the presidents friend, or even Nancy Pelosi’s friend, I mean Nancy is probably a nice person but Nancy is also a person of power and power that is not gotten cheaply nor easily, what makes a president also makes a speaker of the house, sorry Pelosi, the filtering process for democrats that make it to the top of the nation’s stage is the same, by the time the process has sifted through the rut, what is left is a political process beholden to moneyed interest. The constitution doesn’t address this matter, the constitution doesn’t address the matter that campaigning is expensive and that the people, or individual freedom, cannot pay for it. Today’s mightiest democracy is elected “by institutions.”
Recently the leading economist for the free hand of capitalism died, Milton Friedman was the man who tied Keynes’s belief that government had a right and a duty to interfere in the economic process, and fanatically promulgated the idea that the government that governs best governs least. There might be some truth in that, but since the fall of Keynesian economics and the rice of Milton Friedman there has only been more government and more regulation, and more laws and more taxes and so even as Milton would have liked to convince us that he could convince Reganomics and the republicans that government was generally a bad thing, he forgot one key thing, politicians are based on government foundations, regardless of what anyone thinks, a bureaucrat isn’t going to think like a businessmen any time soon! Nor is a business friendly president or congress going to successfully operate a country like a CEO, instead politicians will always do what is the politically right thing to do, “agree with their times.” As such we must be somewhat relief that Friedman is not with us anymore, for as one who undid Keynes, we can only assume that in passing he has at least undone himself and his times.
In the mean time, enjoy your riches.
Ricardo ©
Sunday, November 12, 2006
FREEDOM, ITS JUST NOT FOR EVERYONE
Could you ever imagine a dog saying, "hmmm... I don't like the way that smells."
One of the more difficult tasks ahead for America is to get out of the war with Iraq, it will be difficult because it wasn’t easy to get into the war in the first place, reasons for the war had to be created in order to justify it. The enemy had to be created, Saddam Hussein it now turns out was more of an illusionist and more a danger to his own people than to the outside world; but still the American presidency, against the unwilling will of congress, was able to turn him into: Hitler II. He had weapons of mass destruction, he used illegal chemicals, he was working on a dirty bomb, he tortured and gassed people, he didn’t allow for freedom of speech, this latter being particularly offensive to the American people, and so on, till there was naught else to do but do the right thing, take him out.
There was however an uncomfortable problem, first the Americans had supported Saddam’s regime in its early years and so he sort of had some insight into how Americans think, I read somewhere that he feared the ethnic and religious factions within Iraq more than he feared the Americans. But also there was the fact that while America was boycotting Iraq the French and the Russians had generated some substantial rivers of moneyed interests building infrastructures, adding a generator or a power plant and selling them weapons thus creating a symbiotically beneficial relationship, and of course this gave the French and the Russians an interest in fascist stability in Iraq.
Fortunately America has always been very good at marketing even if the product is missing some fundamentals, a war could always be lobbied and sold through a fear mongering marketing campaign that would shame even New York’s top ten marketing agencies. Satellites produced detailed photos of mobile labs that were brewing chemical malice, intelligence read that there were mobile missiles that could possibly reach Israel, and the Continent of Africa had provided Uranium while from somewhere else they had centrifuges. But more critical, Russian scientists that had not fared well since the fall of the Soviet Union, were selling dirty bomb schematics to Saddam. And then one day with the honorable Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, a trusted spokes person, the war was sold but not so well that everyone wanted to join the invading army. And so America did what any child does when it doesn’t get its way, it went at it alone. Besides that would work out better, for as everyone knows the United Nations is controlled by the third world and NATO and the European Union fight wars through a bureaucratic committee process that is paralyzing and America, the can do kid, is better off without those anchors.
And so we went to war.
But as with all things here this one was to be based on everything that had been learnt in the Civil War, WW I & II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, plus with added insight from the first battle with Iraq as done by Bush Senior, that liberated Kuwait’s oil fields from the invading tribal cousins. America also had the valuable advantage of video games and artificial reality, at any given moment Americans, very much like Roman gladiators trained in their on backyards, but at any given moment there are millions of Americans training for war through video games that realistically engage their participants in real world war scenarios, where fighter jets and tanks and soldiers are constantly being strategically engaged, all while in suburbia, to destroy the known foe. But also there are the surrealistic games which also create hyper scenarios of super beings that are able to travel through grave danger to acquire immortal powers, magical potions, double tipped whips and jewel studded daggers, and a plethora of specialize weapons that could scurry battalions of anythings anywhere; and so in general America has always been at the ready not only to go at it alone, but also to be imaginative and ready in the battle front by administering the un-conscripted maximum amount of training to civilians, the national guard and active soldiers even when they are off duty, through realistic sims.
And behind all this, almost as if sent by god was Rumsfeld the Secretary of War, he was a peculiar character in this historic times in that he understood the fog of war could be lifted through the internet of war, if you could know where every soldier was through magic dust, and know if he or she was still beating a heart, and if this soldier could feed real time battle information back to headquarters, then our army would have a greater advantage over that of the enemy’s, specially if our army were smaller, lighter and could be moved on a moments notice, and so we were ready to fight the war of the future today, with the centurion Rumsfeld at the helm.
Sold then by the nice Secretary of State that was himself a former soldier-general but overall a man of peace, who believed that war should be a weapon of last resort but if used should then be one of absolute maximum killing force, we had no choice then, having all means at our disposal, having to rescue the world from terrorists, and from Islamist fanatics, and from dictatorships, our leader, President George W. Bush told us that there would now be a campaign to spread democratic values and free market values to free the peoples of the middle east, and there was naught to do but that or forsake our turn at history.
Tony Blair, a Prime Minister with socialist leanings was whiling to go to it too, because in part he understood one thing above all others, America would win that war. I mean I don’t know how bookies do odds, but I think anyone could see that regardless of how powerful and mighty Saddam was, he could not bankroll a 300 billion dollar war, in the end his psycho babble would collapse because it didn’t have adequate financing, and so I think Tony Blair being the labor minister, crunched some numbers and saw that the math projected inadequate financing in Mesopotamia, and he figured that after the destruction along the Tigres river there would be plenty of construction contracts and he, if he stood by Bush, would be rewarded with the spoils of war and the Unions would see this as an astute labor campaign, after all British truck drivers and British mercenaries are making easy six figure salaries in Iraq. Power to labor.
Towing his good friend behind him to give legitimacy to the cause, Mr. Bush had now no choice but to go to war, he had to prove his mettle, and this he did, Mr. Saddam was recently sentenced for Crimes Against Humanity, and he will hang for it, undoubtedly this is a step in the right direction, the inquisitors made right when they used to do the same, however this is not meant to fix everything, Saddam being choked to death is only part of the way to democracy in Iraq.
Now part of this newly installed government in Iraq, is working day and night, with the American military command, to introduce a professional army, a disciplined police force, and there are any number of American and British companies rebuilding the entire country, its going to look pretty when they are done, however there is just one thing, the ethnic violence, 150 thousand dead in an undeclared civil war. These tribes will just not get along, they are trying to kill one another, brother against brother, mano a mano and the bloodshed is staining the introduction of democracy, freedom and the right to drive a car and cover your face with makeup, and to show your booty.
And where do we find ourselves? Back to square one, we cannot liberate these peoples from themselves, they just don’t want to be free, they love the fray, tragedy is married to them, they don’t want to work together for the common good and no matter how much our good will wants to triumph there, to allow them to be Mormons if they want to be Mormons, to allow them to speak freely against their government if they want to, to allow them the privilege of voting plus a Western style education, to give them the benefits that knowledge and the more important that "reason" has brought us, we can give them all these things but they just don’t want them, they don’t want to practice constitutional rights, hence why things are not working out.
We will probably have to pull out of Iraq, but after spending 300 billion dollars, 3000 American casualties no one, least of all Tony Blair, will be able to say that we didn’t try, that we didn’t give it our best, those peoples over there, they just want to do things their own way, shame to see all the suffering that cost them.
But where does that leave us, a good portion of us didn’t want the war in Iraq, but we support the troops, and we support our president, no one can say anything bad about our mother or our sense of patriotism. Now we are in a perplexing situation, if we say we are against the war does that mean we are being critical of the office of the president and unsupportive of our troops? Of course it does, it is no longer Bush’s war it is now The Nation’s War! Bush might have gotten us there but it is now our war, all of us are now in it, frustrated and perplexed but it is now our war, and it doesn’t matter one bit that Rumsfeld, a leading proponent of testing his theories on defense in real war scenarios, is out and now there is a, use the cross walk please, Mr. Gates. It doesn’t matter the country is now engaged in a war of international proportions and because we went at it alone and didn’t share the reconstruction contracts the French and the Russians are just going to sit by idly amusing themselves. “We told you so.”
And of course we have to support our troops as much as we have to support the defense department and the defense industry jobs. Or we could do the brave thing, and admit that our country was wrong, that we made a mistake, that we have to pull out and that we have added to the instability of the middle east, we could do that, but we are not going to do that, because that kind of valor is suicidal, we will have to tow the line, and the democrats, now in control of senate and congress are not going to stop it, they are not going to because they cannot and suffer not from the will power to do it, in the same manner that they didn’t suffer the brilliant thoughts required to prevent the war in the first place.
The new approach is simpler than admitting defeat, it is to allow the peoples of Iraq to fail them selves, we will keep sending money and troops till they prove beyond all doubt that they cannot be helped because they are not whiling to participate in their own rescue operation. There is already ample evidence of this as they don’t want to end sectarian violence, the national police has been infiltrated by the infidels and they are carrying out poorly disguised massacres. They will fail because they are just not us, they are not like us, they don’t care about freedom and voting and separation of church and state, they don’t, if anyone has given them the chance it is us, Europe was not willing to rescue them from themselves, China has kept mostly quiet, the only ones that dared to care for them was us, and now we have to watch all our efforts come to naught.
A few years from now we will leave Iraq, the bookies surely knew we would win the war, no one said anything about winning hearts and minds, bookies, ever wise, wouldn’t have given odds on that.
Ricardo ©
One of the more difficult tasks ahead for America is to get out of the war with Iraq, it will be difficult because it wasn’t easy to get into the war in the first place, reasons for the war had to be created in order to justify it. The enemy had to be created, Saddam Hussein it now turns out was more of an illusionist and more a danger to his own people than to the outside world; but still the American presidency, against the unwilling will of congress, was able to turn him into: Hitler II. He had weapons of mass destruction, he used illegal chemicals, he was working on a dirty bomb, he tortured and gassed people, he didn’t allow for freedom of speech, this latter being particularly offensive to the American people, and so on, till there was naught else to do but do the right thing, take him out.
There was however an uncomfortable problem, first the Americans had supported Saddam’s regime in its early years and so he sort of had some insight into how Americans think, I read somewhere that he feared the ethnic and religious factions within Iraq more than he feared the Americans. But also there was the fact that while America was boycotting Iraq the French and the Russians had generated some substantial rivers of moneyed interests building infrastructures, adding a generator or a power plant and selling them weapons thus creating a symbiotically beneficial relationship, and of course this gave the French and the Russians an interest in fascist stability in Iraq.
Fortunately America has always been very good at marketing even if the product is missing some fundamentals, a war could always be lobbied and sold through a fear mongering marketing campaign that would shame even New York’s top ten marketing agencies. Satellites produced detailed photos of mobile labs that were brewing chemical malice, intelligence read that there were mobile missiles that could possibly reach Israel, and the Continent of Africa had provided Uranium while from somewhere else they had centrifuges. But more critical, Russian scientists that had not fared well since the fall of the Soviet Union, were selling dirty bomb schematics to Saddam. And then one day with the honorable Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, a trusted spokes person, the war was sold but not so well that everyone wanted to join the invading army. And so America did what any child does when it doesn’t get its way, it went at it alone. Besides that would work out better, for as everyone knows the United Nations is controlled by the third world and NATO and the European Union fight wars through a bureaucratic committee process that is paralyzing and America, the can do kid, is better off without those anchors.
And so we went to war.
But as with all things here this one was to be based on everything that had been learnt in the Civil War, WW I & II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, plus with added insight from the first battle with Iraq as done by Bush Senior, that liberated Kuwait’s oil fields from the invading tribal cousins. America also had the valuable advantage of video games and artificial reality, at any given moment Americans, very much like Roman gladiators trained in their on backyards, but at any given moment there are millions of Americans training for war through video games that realistically engage their participants in real world war scenarios, where fighter jets and tanks and soldiers are constantly being strategically engaged, all while in suburbia, to destroy the known foe. But also there are the surrealistic games which also create hyper scenarios of super beings that are able to travel through grave danger to acquire immortal powers, magical potions, double tipped whips and jewel studded daggers, and a plethora of specialize weapons that could scurry battalions of anythings anywhere; and so in general America has always been at the ready not only to go at it alone, but also to be imaginative and ready in the battle front by administering the un-conscripted maximum amount of training to civilians, the national guard and active soldiers even when they are off duty, through realistic sims.
And behind all this, almost as if sent by god was Rumsfeld the Secretary of War, he was a peculiar character in this historic times in that he understood the fog of war could be lifted through the internet of war, if you could know where every soldier was through magic dust, and know if he or she was still beating a heart, and if this soldier could feed real time battle information back to headquarters, then our army would have a greater advantage over that of the enemy’s, specially if our army were smaller, lighter and could be moved on a moments notice, and so we were ready to fight the war of the future today, with the centurion Rumsfeld at the helm.
Sold then by the nice Secretary of State that was himself a former soldier-general but overall a man of peace, who believed that war should be a weapon of last resort but if used should then be one of absolute maximum killing force, we had no choice then, having all means at our disposal, having to rescue the world from terrorists, and from Islamist fanatics, and from dictatorships, our leader, President George W. Bush told us that there would now be a campaign to spread democratic values and free market values to free the peoples of the middle east, and there was naught to do but that or forsake our turn at history.
Tony Blair, a Prime Minister with socialist leanings was whiling to go to it too, because in part he understood one thing above all others, America would win that war. I mean I don’t know how bookies do odds, but I think anyone could see that regardless of how powerful and mighty Saddam was, he could not bankroll a 300 billion dollar war, in the end his psycho babble would collapse because it didn’t have adequate financing, and so I think Tony Blair being the labor minister, crunched some numbers and saw that the math projected inadequate financing in Mesopotamia, and he figured that after the destruction along the Tigres river there would be plenty of construction contracts and he, if he stood by Bush, would be rewarded with the spoils of war and the Unions would see this as an astute labor campaign, after all British truck drivers and British mercenaries are making easy six figure salaries in Iraq. Power to labor.
Towing his good friend behind him to give legitimacy to the cause, Mr. Bush had now no choice but to go to war, he had to prove his mettle, and this he did, Mr. Saddam was recently sentenced for Crimes Against Humanity, and he will hang for it, undoubtedly this is a step in the right direction, the inquisitors made right when they used to do the same, however this is not meant to fix everything, Saddam being choked to death is only part of the way to democracy in Iraq.
Now part of this newly installed government in Iraq, is working day and night, with the American military command, to introduce a professional army, a disciplined police force, and there are any number of American and British companies rebuilding the entire country, its going to look pretty when they are done, however there is just one thing, the ethnic violence, 150 thousand dead in an undeclared civil war. These tribes will just not get along, they are trying to kill one another, brother against brother, mano a mano and the bloodshed is staining the introduction of democracy, freedom and the right to drive a car and cover your face with makeup, and to show your booty.
And where do we find ourselves? Back to square one, we cannot liberate these peoples from themselves, they just don’t want to be free, they love the fray, tragedy is married to them, they don’t want to work together for the common good and no matter how much our good will wants to triumph there, to allow them to be Mormons if they want to be Mormons, to allow them to speak freely against their government if they want to, to allow them the privilege of voting plus a Western style education, to give them the benefits that knowledge and the more important that "reason" has brought us, we can give them all these things but they just don’t want them, they don’t want to practice constitutional rights, hence why things are not working out.
We will probably have to pull out of Iraq, but after spending 300 billion dollars, 3000 American casualties no one, least of all Tony Blair, will be able to say that we didn’t try, that we didn’t give it our best, those peoples over there, they just want to do things their own way, shame to see all the suffering that cost them.
But where does that leave us, a good portion of us didn’t want the war in Iraq, but we support the troops, and we support our president, no one can say anything bad about our mother or our sense of patriotism. Now we are in a perplexing situation, if we say we are against the war does that mean we are being critical of the office of the president and unsupportive of our troops? Of course it does, it is no longer Bush’s war it is now The Nation’s War! Bush might have gotten us there but it is now our war, all of us are now in it, frustrated and perplexed but it is now our war, and it doesn’t matter one bit that Rumsfeld, a leading proponent of testing his theories on defense in real war scenarios, is out and now there is a, use the cross walk please, Mr. Gates. It doesn’t matter the country is now engaged in a war of international proportions and because we went at it alone and didn’t share the reconstruction contracts the French and the Russians are just going to sit by idly amusing themselves. “We told you so.”
And of course we have to support our troops as much as we have to support the defense department and the defense industry jobs. Or we could do the brave thing, and admit that our country was wrong, that we made a mistake, that we have to pull out and that we have added to the instability of the middle east, we could do that, but we are not going to do that, because that kind of valor is suicidal, we will have to tow the line, and the democrats, now in control of senate and congress are not going to stop it, they are not going to because they cannot and suffer not from the will power to do it, in the same manner that they didn’t suffer the brilliant thoughts required to prevent the war in the first place.
The new approach is simpler than admitting defeat, it is to allow the peoples of Iraq to fail them selves, we will keep sending money and troops till they prove beyond all doubt that they cannot be helped because they are not whiling to participate in their own rescue operation. There is already ample evidence of this as they don’t want to end sectarian violence, the national police has been infiltrated by the infidels and they are carrying out poorly disguised massacres. They will fail because they are just not us, they are not like us, they don’t care about freedom and voting and separation of church and state, they don’t, if anyone has given them the chance it is us, Europe was not willing to rescue them from themselves, China has kept mostly quiet, the only ones that dared to care for them was us, and now we have to watch all our efforts come to naught.
A few years from now we will leave Iraq, the bookies surely knew we would win the war, no one said anything about winning hearts and minds, bookies, ever wise, wouldn’t have given odds on that.
Ricardo ©
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Hillary La Loca For President
Hillary La Loca For President
I think because male labor is generally considered the more expensive and technical and that it has been easier to demonstrate the cooking talents of a male, thus that made it easier for males to colonize the upper echelons of the food industry. This is because male talent is demonstrative, remember that males externalize, for men make a big deal out of anything that they do and know, when a woman does a good teriyaki, though there might not be such thing as far as I am concerned, she doesn’t brag about it, and more she doesn’t cook by metrics she cooks largely by intuition, as I do too, and so the technique of male gets processed more in the context of intellect and system, and that is why not only are male chefs more defined in the context of the task but so are male waiters. Which is why expensive restaurants will not have women as wait staff, sooner they will have them washing dishes.
I still don’t like her but Maureen Dowd that asked why it was that when a man cooked everyone had to pay attention as if he were accomplishing some great feat and yet everyone ignores it when its a woman doing cooking.
The key factor here is that male elements gather there strength from social and system recognition, that is why titles are so important to males, males need careers and education and actions to define them because they feed and feed the external; women however have an internal guidance system and since they are the progenitors of society haven’t the need or want to belong to the system as a way to personify their character. Again here the critical part is that women is inward looking she knows herself and is aware of her inner desires and generally will intuitively be aware of what she wants and this does not require external approbation, a woman is fundamentally satisfied with her self, a man is fundamentally unaware of anything that he is, and generally he cannot support more than one view of himself as this is very energy intensive because he doesn’t intuit himself, that is he has to make himself into someone of relevance.
Camille Paglia, one of those philosophers that I do not like because she is too much like a man, but then philosophy is wholly masculine as it is descriptive, to the point that you could positively say that philosophy is the superbowl of intellect, anyways Camille, she is still a woman if by name only, wrote a wonderful and mentally stimulating book title Sexual Personae, I couldn’t stop laughing the whole reading, and in a couple of chapters she completely neuters males and naturally empowers women, and it would be very difficult to disagree with much of what she says.
It basically boils down to the fact that male is the artifice of life and female is what is natural or endemic to nature, she ties this in many ways, explaining such things as the beauty of the male penis as it searches to penetrate which is an outward looking function and how too vagina, which she considers an ugly monstrosity, is this thing sitting there waiting to be penetrated and equally she notes that the vagina engulfs.
Again she did a hilarious job though I don’t think much of Paglia should be taken seriously as she has become masculine and thus has dismembered her intuition.
The problem with the feminist view of the world, as I see it, is that the feminist think that men are powerful creatures and that their power leads them to dominance and that dominance is good and so good that it has undermined women and their potential contribution in the context of systems and society.
After making such glorified assumption, and it does require a certain degree of analytic suspension, they then go on to prescribe that females adopt male characteristics in order to take back the world that was stolen from under their skirts. Ha!
What I find fantastic about this is that it makes the assumption that nature was from the get go against women, that is it gave males the upper hand by making them stronger in a cavemen’s world, that is to say that species can play favoritism within the context of its endemic gender biology.
The assumption further assumes that only contributions that are observable count in the context of systems and societies. This even as we already know that 90% of the Universe is not observable, but of course feminists are just male minds within female bodies and so they are looking for evidence of woman’s historical actions in the observable economic and systemic aspect of civilization; this is perhaps the wrong place to look.
I have always said and it think you have heard me say it, that a bullfight represents the perfect critical review of male and female interaction in the process of civilization and so I will use such accordingly, though it is not limited to that, you can see it in less aesthetic formats such as American Football, and the Executives Office where a greater bull than the CEO there isn’t.
First I don’t think that women are weak, I think that they are stronger than us males, second I don’t think that they have been shorted by history, and third I think that they do indeed control the world as indeed they must as it is in their interest that there be a civilization; and Paglia doesn’t make any mistakes here, she correctly notes that it was in woman’s interest to civilize man because in civilized society there are less rapes, in fact according to Paglia and myself, we both agree wholeheartedly here, it is woman that tempers men thorugh a civilizing process! Paglia correctly assumes that women will suffer greater the less civilized the society. And while I think that the culling of male aggression through civilizing education does have its side effects, perversion being one of them, there is still a far greater accomplishment to the benefit of female, and that is that it makes society feminine in gender.
This is a very subtle reality but as I watch my male cats fight each other to secure a territory and to show that they are stronger and mightier than the other macho and I watch the females rush to watch the fight between Loki and Pacho, I know precisely where the motivation is for the fight, it is the feminine that demands an aggressive male, and those males are doing what has been pre approved as the proper way to win a female and win reproduction rights. It will not hurt us any to further note here that African tribal women refuse to have sex with the men that don’t bring meat home.
Further we cannot, even in our wildest dreams, ignore the fact that 90 percent of all species reproduce without males within their lot. Nature as a whole only produces males where the environment and conditions are so extenuating that they need someone who has been short-circuited of feelings to come and react in such environment.
However the paramount contribution of the feminine are in fact greater than that of any male or group of males, the problem is that they are not observable because it is subconscious in its representation; men perform at the conscious level, and probably don’t have much subconscious to speak of, they may indeed live and operate only in surfaces, but women operate at great subconscious levels, and males that are properly married acquire their civil guidance as it radiates from wife or mate, if either of those representations are missing then the male will default to mother and if mother is not present male will default to sister for guidance.
It has been said a thousand times, man alone is destructive and out of control, man with wife is prone to discipline, to adopt social norms, to go to church and to perform better at his job, and this has all been documented in study after study, and finally something I don’t have to make up. Ha!
The problem is that the feminists cannot see but the overt and thus they have become envious of men, and funny enough this doesn’t work against males, instead it favors them and thus feminism does it’s worse harm to women, and more detrimental to us all it does a greater harm to society because it breaks the natural equilibrium between males and females, and their dominance over society because when you have masculinated females you have lost a portion of that critical balance that nature has deigned and reigned throughout countries, with a remarkable precision of 51% females 49% males. Even nature knows enough to give the majority of the vote to the women. Further the greater the number of women cannot be overlooked from another perspective, male aggression cannot be diffused by fewer females, it can only thus increase, the fewer feminine traits in a given society the more externally and internationally aggressive and destructive that society will become, and as that society becomes more aggressive it will further masculinate its women too so that they too cannot feel the pain, for an ability to tolerate pain is a unique male ability and that becomes a terror; as your women become tough too and thus desensitized.
The society suffers as a result, think what it means that in China and in India mothers prefer to have little boys so they condone the killing of baby girls, think what it means that in Latin America parents wish their first born to be a boy, and in America think what it means that the seductive woman has been turned into an open minded coffin of ideas. Where there is no sacredness in her body, no hidden treasures, where her intense mystery has been nullified through the categorical knowledge that she can now brag of possessing.
What is a burka? A burka is a way to curve female power, man is made shameful when he spots his weakness against female might, man is always in the position of being rejected, while woman is always in the position of accepting, the pretty women watching the bullfighter are impressed by him and he will have his pick of them when he puts down the bull; his red cape is however a dress for teasing the bull, and our bullfighter is really representative of the female with his fancy jeweled golden suit, delicately tailored so that one would think he was going to an evening dance instead of a bullfight, he is not dressed for the violence of this occasion, and in a sense he is saying to the bull I am going to show you that refinement and aesthetics win over raw brute force. The bull of course doesn’t see the bullfighter as a formidable opponent, he looks smaller, weaker, dainty and he doesn’t have horns, and so that only gives the bull greater confidence to keep on ramming into that dancing red dress; till unfortunately behind the teasing dress a sword discovers bull’s mid center shoulder blades and tears at his insides, thus from his own barbarous recoiling movement the bull’s death is made.
The matador represents psychological power, the bull represents the power of action, action will always be at a disadvantage to psychological might because it is largely invisible, hidden behind an aura of beauty and tenderness and apparent harmlessness. The dance between the bull and the matador makes society and civil society at that. The Burka like the chastity belt give men a false sense of control over the feminine might, however man must live according to her bible and its righteous commands, which though written by men are against male attributes and have nothing of his interest in mind but rather to curve his brute force and use it for social purposes instead. The problem is that when males are made to wear burkas it is not obvious, today’s greater feeling sensitive male is a bull with a burka.
The process by which this comes about emasculates males because the feminine is dominant in any realm she enters and the emasculated males become this docile little creatures that don’t even know themselves as part of the curriculum mandates that they hate what its male in order to make contact with the liberated feminine; now they have to be sensitive and caring and nurses and loving and tender, and that is not technically male and so they are lost, lost from their personality, but unlike women these males don’t have the inner resource of character to manage their situation thus they have to depend on the self-help society, they will go out there and reconstruct themselves, they will make themselves sensitive, they will somehow make themselves right, and why not, surely they can, they come from a male history of can do, and so they will fix themselves, and in the end they will look like those women that make themselves ever prettier in their heads with just one more facelift!
Today women can be president I suppose we can thank the feminist movement for that, and so in 2008 Hillary Clinton will be president, ask me however if I needed that and I will tell you never! Because that first female American president is now a man! Because she could calmly stand by her man when she should have given him hell for being a lying cheat womanizer, but Hillary didn’t care about her personal life, she didn’t care about the little world, the bricks didn’t matter, she was now living in big social ideas and handling large systemic issues, ephemeral things that matter no doubt but the little thing, keeping her house in order didn’t matter, and when we care more about the ephemeral ideas the neighborhood collapses which is why subconsciously we love the Midwest because it keeps giving the national heart localize certainty. What happen was that Hillary didn’t go ballistic because she cared about her profession, she was no longer working for self and edifying self, she is edifying a system and honoring it by being respectful to it, she wasn’t going to make a mess in the Whitehouse, she wasn’t going to indignantly turn the Whitehouse into an insane asylum, Hillary la loca! La loca walking her spirit though the Lincoln bedroom eternally counting all the trespasses, La Loca Hillary wrenching her suffering on the Whitehouse lawn, La Loca destroying her family because of the derailed character of her man!
That day I would have preferred to have the country singer that stood by her man but would surely chop off his gonads if he cheated on her. I wanted to see passion, instead in Hillary I saw a bureaucrat and a bureaucrats wife all in one; Clinton himself, the little boy that is in fact not capable of loving a woman because he is a sensitive little boy, could not have felt better, he got away even as caught with his hands in the cookie jar, and it was in fact the system than reproved him, it, the god damned system reproach went berserk on him, costing millions of passionate and zealous investigation dollars, and the system did in fact impeached him! And for what? Well it had to be for cheating on his wife. Thus Hillary is vindicated in the context of system, the system protected her by acting irate on her behalf, by going berserk on her behalf, by showing feelings and illogic and passion!
And it cannot escape one how her impressive self control locks her down, it cannot escape us how we will know that as our future first lady president she will keep a level and cool head under the most difficult of situations, we can thus trust her because she is not going to be Hillary la loca!
ricardo (c)
I think because male labor is generally considered the more expensive and technical and that it has been easier to demonstrate the cooking talents of a male, thus that made it easier for males to colonize the upper echelons of the food industry. This is because male talent is demonstrative, remember that males externalize, for men make a big deal out of anything that they do and know, when a woman does a good teriyaki, though there might not be such thing as far as I am concerned, she doesn’t brag about it, and more she doesn’t cook by metrics she cooks largely by intuition, as I do too, and so the technique of male gets processed more in the context of intellect and system, and that is why not only are male chefs more defined in the context of the task but so are male waiters. Which is why expensive restaurants will not have women as wait staff, sooner they will have them washing dishes.
I still don’t like her but Maureen Dowd that asked why it was that when a man cooked everyone had to pay attention as if he were accomplishing some great feat and yet everyone ignores it when its a woman doing cooking.
The key factor here is that male elements gather there strength from social and system recognition, that is why titles are so important to males, males need careers and education and actions to define them because they feed and feed the external; women however have an internal guidance system and since they are the progenitors of society haven’t the need or want to belong to the system as a way to personify their character. Again here the critical part is that women is inward looking she knows herself and is aware of her inner desires and generally will intuitively be aware of what she wants and this does not require external approbation, a woman is fundamentally satisfied with her self, a man is fundamentally unaware of anything that he is, and generally he cannot support more than one view of himself as this is very energy intensive because he doesn’t intuit himself, that is he has to make himself into someone of relevance.
Camille Paglia, one of those philosophers that I do not like because she is too much like a man, but then philosophy is wholly masculine as it is descriptive, to the point that you could positively say that philosophy is the superbowl of intellect, anyways Camille, she is still a woman if by name only, wrote a wonderful and mentally stimulating book title Sexual Personae, I couldn’t stop laughing the whole reading, and in a couple of chapters she completely neuters males and naturally empowers women, and it would be very difficult to disagree with much of what she says.
It basically boils down to the fact that male is the artifice of life and female is what is natural or endemic to nature, she ties this in many ways, explaining such things as the beauty of the male penis as it searches to penetrate which is an outward looking function and how too vagina, which she considers an ugly monstrosity, is this thing sitting there waiting to be penetrated and equally she notes that the vagina engulfs.
Again she did a hilarious job though I don’t think much of Paglia should be taken seriously as she has become masculine and thus has dismembered her intuition.
The problem with the feminist view of the world, as I see it, is that the feminist think that men are powerful creatures and that their power leads them to dominance and that dominance is good and so good that it has undermined women and their potential contribution in the context of systems and society.
After making such glorified assumption, and it does require a certain degree of analytic suspension, they then go on to prescribe that females adopt male characteristics in order to take back the world that was stolen from under their skirts. Ha!
What I find fantastic about this is that it makes the assumption that nature was from the get go against women, that is it gave males the upper hand by making them stronger in a cavemen’s world, that is to say that species can play favoritism within the context of its endemic gender biology.
The assumption further assumes that only contributions that are observable count in the context of systems and societies. This even as we already know that 90% of the Universe is not observable, but of course feminists are just male minds within female bodies and so they are looking for evidence of woman’s historical actions in the observable economic and systemic aspect of civilization; this is perhaps the wrong place to look.
I have always said and it think you have heard me say it, that a bullfight represents the perfect critical review of male and female interaction in the process of civilization and so I will use such accordingly, though it is not limited to that, you can see it in less aesthetic formats such as American Football, and the Executives Office where a greater bull than the CEO there isn’t.
First I don’t think that women are weak, I think that they are stronger than us males, second I don’t think that they have been shorted by history, and third I think that they do indeed control the world as indeed they must as it is in their interest that there be a civilization; and Paglia doesn’t make any mistakes here, she correctly notes that it was in woman’s interest to civilize man because in civilized society there are less rapes, in fact according to Paglia and myself, we both agree wholeheartedly here, it is woman that tempers men thorugh a civilizing process! Paglia correctly assumes that women will suffer greater the less civilized the society. And while I think that the culling of male aggression through civilizing education does have its side effects, perversion being one of them, there is still a far greater accomplishment to the benefit of female, and that is that it makes society feminine in gender.
This is a very subtle reality but as I watch my male cats fight each other to secure a territory and to show that they are stronger and mightier than the other macho and I watch the females rush to watch the fight between Loki and Pacho, I know precisely where the motivation is for the fight, it is the feminine that demands an aggressive male, and those males are doing what has been pre approved as the proper way to win a female and win reproduction rights. It will not hurt us any to further note here that African tribal women refuse to have sex with the men that don’t bring meat home.
Further we cannot, even in our wildest dreams, ignore the fact that 90 percent of all species reproduce without males within their lot. Nature as a whole only produces males where the environment and conditions are so extenuating that they need someone who has been short-circuited of feelings to come and react in such environment.
However the paramount contribution of the feminine are in fact greater than that of any male or group of males, the problem is that they are not observable because it is subconscious in its representation; men perform at the conscious level, and probably don’t have much subconscious to speak of, they may indeed live and operate only in surfaces, but women operate at great subconscious levels, and males that are properly married acquire their civil guidance as it radiates from wife or mate, if either of those representations are missing then the male will default to mother and if mother is not present male will default to sister for guidance.
It has been said a thousand times, man alone is destructive and out of control, man with wife is prone to discipline, to adopt social norms, to go to church and to perform better at his job, and this has all been documented in study after study, and finally something I don’t have to make up. Ha!
The problem is that the feminists cannot see but the overt and thus they have become envious of men, and funny enough this doesn’t work against males, instead it favors them and thus feminism does it’s worse harm to women, and more detrimental to us all it does a greater harm to society because it breaks the natural equilibrium between males and females, and their dominance over society because when you have masculinated females you have lost a portion of that critical balance that nature has deigned and reigned throughout countries, with a remarkable precision of 51% females 49% males. Even nature knows enough to give the majority of the vote to the women. Further the greater the number of women cannot be overlooked from another perspective, male aggression cannot be diffused by fewer females, it can only thus increase, the fewer feminine traits in a given society the more externally and internationally aggressive and destructive that society will become, and as that society becomes more aggressive it will further masculinate its women too so that they too cannot feel the pain, for an ability to tolerate pain is a unique male ability and that becomes a terror; as your women become tough too and thus desensitized.
The society suffers as a result, think what it means that in China and in India mothers prefer to have little boys so they condone the killing of baby girls, think what it means that in Latin America parents wish their first born to be a boy, and in America think what it means that the seductive woman has been turned into an open minded coffin of ideas. Where there is no sacredness in her body, no hidden treasures, where her intense mystery has been nullified through the categorical knowledge that she can now brag of possessing.
What is a burka? A burka is a way to curve female power, man is made shameful when he spots his weakness against female might, man is always in the position of being rejected, while woman is always in the position of accepting, the pretty women watching the bullfighter are impressed by him and he will have his pick of them when he puts down the bull; his red cape is however a dress for teasing the bull, and our bullfighter is really representative of the female with his fancy jeweled golden suit, delicately tailored so that one would think he was going to an evening dance instead of a bullfight, he is not dressed for the violence of this occasion, and in a sense he is saying to the bull I am going to show you that refinement and aesthetics win over raw brute force. The bull of course doesn’t see the bullfighter as a formidable opponent, he looks smaller, weaker, dainty and he doesn’t have horns, and so that only gives the bull greater confidence to keep on ramming into that dancing red dress; till unfortunately behind the teasing dress a sword discovers bull’s mid center shoulder blades and tears at his insides, thus from his own barbarous recoiling movement the bull’s death is made.
The matador represents psychological power, the bull represents the power of action, action will always be at a disadvantage to psychological might because it is largely invisible, hidden behind an aura of beauty and tenderness and apparent harmlessness. The dance between the bull and the matador makes society and civil society at that. The Burka like the chastity belt give men a false sense of control over the feminine might, however man must live according to her bible and its righteous commands, which though written by men are against male attributes and have nothing of his interest in mind but rather to curve his brute force and use it for social purposes instead. The problem is that when males are made to wear burkas it is not obvious, today’s greater feeling sensitive male is a bull with a burka.
The process by which this comes about emasculates males because the feminine is dominant in any realm she enters and the emasculated males become this docile little creatures that don’t even know themselves as part of the curriculum mandates that they hate what its male in order to make contact with the liberated feminine; now they have to be sensitive and caring and nurses and loving and tender, and that is not technically male and so they are lost, lost from their personality, but unlike women these males don’t have the inner resource of character to manage their situation thus they have to depend on the self-help society, they will go out there and reconstruct themselves, they will make themselves sensitive, they will somehow make themselves right, and why not, surely they can, they come from a male history of can do, and so they will fix themselves, and in the end they will look like those women that make themselves ever prettier in their heads with just one more facelift!
Today women can be president I suppose we can thank the feminist movement for that, and so in 2008 Hillary Clinton will be president, ask me however if I needed that and I will tell you never! Because that first female American president is now a man! Because she could calmly stand by her man when she should have given him hell for being a lying cheat womanizer, but Hillary didn’t care about her personal life, she didn’t care about the little world, the bricks didn’t matter, she was now living in big social ideas and handling large systemic issues, ephemeral things that matter no doubt but the little thing, keeping her house in order didn’t matter, and when we care more about the ephemeral ideas the neighborhood collapses which is why subconsciously we love the Midwest because it keeps giving the national heart localize certainty. What happen was that Hillary didn’t go ballistic because she cared about her profession, she was no longer working for self and edifying self, she is edifying a system and honoring it by being respectful to it, she wasn’t going to make a mess in the Whitehouse, she wasn’t going to indignantly turn the Whitehouse into an insane asylum, Hillary la loca! La loca walking her spirit though the Lincoln bedroom eternally counting all the trespasses, La Loca Hillary wrenching her suffering on the Whitehouse lawn, La Loca destroying her family because of the derailed character of her man!
That day I would have preferred to have the country singer that stood by her man but would surely chop off his gonads if he cheated on her. I wanted to see passion, instead in Hillary I saw a bureaucrat and a bureaucrats wife all in one; Clinton himself, the little boy that is in fact not capable of loving a woman because he is a sensitive little boy, could not have felt better, he got away even as caught with his hands in the cookie jar, and it was in fact the system than reproved him, it, the god damned system reproach went berserk on him, costing millions of passionate and zealous investigation dollars, and the system did in fact impeached him! And for what? Well it had to be for cheating on his wife. Thus Hillary is vindicated in the context of system, the system protected her by acting irate on her behalf, by going berserk on her behalf, by showing feelings and illogic and passion!
And it cannot escape one how her impressive self control locks her down, it cannot escape us how we will know that as our future first lady president she will keep a level and cool head under the most difficult of situations, we can thus trust her because she is not going to be Hillary la loca!
ricardo (c)
Sunday, March 05, 2006
My thoughts on GUT
I don’t think that any Grand Unified Theory of physics could survive a person levitating.
RC
RC
Democracies Are Everywhere
From my point of view I don’t like any particular country or government, in that regard my compatriots here in Colombia can amply testify to that, as they constantly ask me: “Why are you here if you don’t like it?”
The answer to that is simple, I am in life, I am a change agent, I am not here to like what is here I am here to change it if I can. Futility is a possible consequence of my endeavor, probably the most likely scenario, but I will persist in attempting to change this place because it bothers me the way it is.
Now let me explain what my beef is with American democracy, in that it believes that at least it is some what more just or at least that it allows more freedom of expression, or more so than other systems.
The matter is that to me, a system is composed of the general assumptions of its peoples. All systems regardless of their morality or civic stance, are the product of the conduct, aspiration and self definition of their peoples.
As the self definitions cross each other over the social medium they are altered and reach a third party identity, a sort of objective composition of all the national subjectives - recombined to make a national psyche, that ought to satisfy no one in particular but is in the end result the most likely possible accord, or more precisely the most simmering point of agglomerated subjectivism.
That silent social accord is what generates the, or any, system, and with it the gamut of intolerances or tolerances that will define its institutions.
My friend Bob once recently found himself being helped from a treacherous excursion in Africa by a tribe that fed him milk and blood and offered him a virgin for a bride if he hunted down a lion. Bob was then living in a world very difficult for him to understand, specially because his potential bride had had her clitoris removed; Bob probably enjoys more satisfying a woman than being himself satisfied and so that certainly put a damper on the matter of killing the lion.
Now you would not know it from our understanding of culture but the girls and women of that tribe unite to serve up the practice of clitoris clipping. It is a right of passage, as I assume a circumcision is for Jews or even for the medical profession which for many decades approved and practically, through the auspices of hygiene, mandated the practice. Fortunately I escaped it unscathed.
To be an American you have to be many silent things, I was one for a time, I still hold many American values and I contributed to the national psyche of the country, my taxes paid, certainly bought bullets, my considerate amount of attention to National politics have contributed valuable energy to that system.
Upon my return to Colombia I attempted to transfer the American work ethic values to this country, my fellow compatriots won out on that one and today I am grateful that I have lost my ability to work efficiently and with much dedication.
My point is that what I was when I was in America, how I melted into that culture, was mandated not only by my circumstances but equally by what the system needed from me and how that triangulated with the contrived national psyche. At some point it became unbearable for me, the militancy of the national psyche was too much, I cowered under, I begun to fail at my work and in my personal relationships because I wasn’t synchronized to the professional discipline of the American national psyche.
Upon my move to Colombia I found all the inadequacies of a third world country frustrating but equally I realized that I was disengaged from the machine, that Colombia could not churn out anything efficiently, that there was plenty of indifference, and that complied, at least for now, with what I needed, I didn’t want the world staring at me as it does the United States, I didn’t want to be the center of attention, I didn’t want to improve myself every year, I didn’t want to take any more tests, I didn’t want to be defending my job from the litany of aspirants; the world slowed down, a lot, almost to a stand still.
Of course with being a Colombian come many terrible things, children are abused, people are shot, farmers are destitute, peoples lives are constantly in turmoil, there is no organization, there is little hope, no one is going to rescue anyone, everyone is out to protect the little self and by process our national psyche is small, little, insignificant, I don’t expect contributions from us to the greater world, I don’t think we are going to get out of our inner beings, we are still adolescents.
All societies have these sort of unwritten consequences, America consumes the world, 60 percent of its resources, and its politics are largely based on that horror, in some way America is always gobbling something, it has to, you cannot be so huge and powerful and not, it is that which makes it all so super-size for those of us that think little, that cannot muster the energies and concentrations to gobble things up. Colombians are self destructive, I prefer that, and that is a consequence of being in Colombia or a Colombian.
To me all nation-states are democratic, either silently or not, it is the mass aggregate will with its subconscious-simmering-psyche that makes it all happen, the final agreement that holds a nation together is that, a little bit of everyone represented as none of them in particular.
As such when you see the apparent horrors of any given government, it must also be obvious that the overall society is willing to pay that price, either to reinforce a national psyche or as a sad or fatal by product of the embroidery that is a civilization.
I admire the catholic church, 2006 year old institution, I am obviously not a Catholic but that is a supra-global psyche, the rituals seem so pointless, the priest so perverted, and yet the institution has lasted the times. There is something to be said for that.
America is a young country, as such a rouge state, so goes the book, and so has been the history of most world powers, Britain was an ass in its hay day and so we should not expect anything different of America. Unlike most I do believe that America is just a phase in human history, we are not going to be dominated by capitalism and democracy, the new world will perhaps be ruled by some metaphysical divination, a sort of -“I am aware and I comprehend…”- mind and heart set.
Of course when America fades into the sunset many things that come with it will fade too, the concept of “marketing” might go extinct, the idea that profit is a prerequisite for someone to act, might fade away as well. I expect the field of knowledge to be the first to suffer, knowledge will undoubtedly suffer, MIT and Harvard might fail as well it should be as these are institutions that have their basis on the American mind set.
Grant you none of these things were invented by America, nor is America the only one afflicted by them, it is simply that America has bought into them and perfected them unlike anyone else.
Marx did get one thing right, economy drives the essence of the thing, you look at Americas economic logistics and it is the only proper way to understand its behavior pattern.
Now I don’t blame America for being what it is, that is a world condition, America is just good at it, no more.
The problem is one of civilization and contribution to the world in general. America is still young enough, as far as countries are concerned that we don’t know what its actual contribution to humanity will be in the end, for all we know, and I rather think it so, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Hollywood could be a blink in human history. The terracotta soldiers are 2300 years old, Chinese civilization was going through a Jade age 6000 years ago, Indian society has well over 5000 years behind it, that in itself is a very amazing thing, but see I admire things that last a long time, that establish continuity, that form foundations that linger throughout the ages.
America to me seems more like a fad, something based on spontaneity, capriciousness, a desire to be in a sort of hedonistic postponement, that is to say America is always working on the next nearest thing, and is always planning for the next event and dully postponing its enjoyment while absorbing a child like happiness of the moment.
There have been plenty of 300 year old countries that never lasted the ages. They are in fact the norm. One only needs to go back to the 19th century to see that the map makers have been busy. America’s immediate necessity is to live for the moment, and I will argue that that is why it is so able in the here and now!
This is because most people are living a cultural event, most of India is, they are not living for the immediacy of the moment, that is why they don’t see the transgressions that we witness in India. By an large they are living a movement, most of India is not living the current love affair with Western ways, most of India is like Iran when America imposed their dictator of choice the Shah; but Iran’s cultural clock ticks slowly but eventually it strikes an hour of regressive change, boom!
Culture as atomic bomb.
People that live in culture take a while to realize what’s happening, because the beauty of culture is that you don’t have to think all the time and be on the alert, that is the beauty of culture, it is also why American political strategists have so little patience with it, and equally why they think they can change it all within a year. Those people in Iraq don’t look very smart from afar, they don’t look very complicated, they look largely like savages with their contradictory and illogical ways; but what the Harvard and Chicago schools don’t measure is how those societies have clicked throughout the centuries, and that is no small accomplishment and as such it isn’t going to be undone unless it is annihilated.
The problem is that America’s youth, the lack of its own predefined culture is also what makes it appear superior, light on its feet, able to change at a moments notice, Americans can change jobs, homes, cars, friendships and location on a moments notice, just show them where the opportune horizon stretches and they will head in that direction; that real time adjustment to world events makes them winners, first to get there types; equally such looseness does not favor culture because culture is based on the locking-down of traditions. Culture doesn’t change overnight it changes over the centuries and flowery horizons are mistrusted.
If you look at all of civilization as a singular entity, and I do, then you can imagine that we needed our impetuous child explorer, America, to go out there and find out what else could be out there, in a way it had to be an isolationist, few could brave the rub that change would imply to those living in culture, America went at it alone, and perhaps it found something, only history will tell; that India and China and Russia are finally listening makes an interesting case, but then we must hope it is not the fringes of those societies, the aggressive types that are making their adoptions of the American way. Because if it is only them, then it will not last, somehow those cultures must emblematize and absorb the work ethic, the professionalism, the delusion that a career defines self, the mastery of the moment, all those things with logistical precision must be adopted wholly, else they will only reek and the clock of tradition will reach yet another hour of boom.
India, what is India to me? Nothing, I don’t know it, I am reading the Buddhist bible, it’s a translation, it was written by a man with Western values, I slept with an Indian girl once, her name was Rita, I doubt that that was her name in India, but I do think that sleeping with someone from that culture brings you all the energies that have harbored her essence, and that could be a lot. Beyond that is the cuisine which shows an amazing level of gorgeousness and essence at the same time, or maybe is the fact that they have 1700 or so plus Gods, you have to be very spiritual to have all those gods, the West is practical it only likes to maintain monotheism, but India I would guess has a lot of devout to maintain that colossal religiosity. Maybe too it is the mystics, the transcendentalists that somehow offer a different path that doesn’t seem caught up in the Tarot and the Zodiac. Or maybe it is the fact that cows are sacred and can roam free, why one of them could be the next Dali Lama.
But I really don’t know what India signifies to me except that it has lasted 5000 years and this even as their main religions are anointing inaction, the nothingness and indifference to the self.
When my nephew went to New York city, he didn’t like it. I love New York, it amply demonstrates that we can live in purely artificial environments and relationships, and that loneliness can be ignored indefinitely through fatigueless entertainment. When we go to conquer the other planets, we will need that kind of indifference to tolerate the more indifferent environment; I just love New York!
RC
The answer to that is simple, I am in life, I am a change agent, I am not here to like what is here I am here to change it if I can. Futility is a possible consequence of my endeavor, probably the most likely scenario, but I will persist in attempting to change this place because it bothers me the way it is.
Now let me explain what my beef is with American democracy, in that it believes that at least it is some what more just or at least that it allows more freedom of expression, or more so than other systems.
The matter is that to me, a system is composed of the general assumptions of its peoples. All systems regardless of their morality or civic stance, are the product of the conduct, aspiration and self definition of their peoples.
As the self definitions cross each other over the social medium they are altered and reach a third party identity, a sort of objective composition of all the national subjectives - recombined to make a national psyche, that ought to satisfy no one in particular but is in the end result the most likely possible accord, or more precisely the most simmering point of agglomerated subjectivism.
That silent social accord is what generates the, or any, system, and with it the gamut of intolerances or tolerances that will define its institutions.
My friend Bob once recently found himself being helped from a treacherous excursion in Africa by a tribe that fed him milk and blood and offered him a virgin for a bride if he hunted down a lion. Bob was then living in a world very difficult for him to understand, specially because his potential bride had had her clitoris removed; Bob probably enjoys more satisfying a woman than being himself satisfied and so that certainly put a damper on the matter of killing the lion.
Now you would not know it from our understanding of culture but the girls and women of that tribe unite to serve up the practice of clitoris clipping. It is a right of passage, as I assume a circumcision is for Jews or even for the medical profession which for many decades approved and practically, through the auspices of hygiene, mandated the practice. Fortunately I escaped it unscathed.
To be an American you have to be many silent things, I was one for a time, I still hold many American values and I contributed to the national psyche of the country, my taxes paid, certainly bought bullets, my considerate amount of attention to National politics have contributed valuable energy to that system.
Upon my return to Colombia I attempted to transfer the American work ethic values to this country, my fellow compatriots won out on that one and today I am grateful that I have lost my ability to work efficiently and with much dedication.
My point is that what I was when I was in America, how I melted into that culture, was mandated not only by my circumstances but equally by what the system needed from me and how that triangulated with the contrived national psyche. At some point it became unbearable for me, the militancy of the national psyche was too much, I cowered under, I begun to fail at my work and in my personal relationships because I wasn’t synchronized to the professional discipline of the American national psyche.
Upon my move to Colombia I found all the inadequacies of a third world country frustrating but equally I realized that I was disengaged from the machine, that Colombia could not churn out anything efficiently, that there was plenty of indifference, and that complied, at least for now, with what I needed, I didn’t want the world staring at me as it does the United States, I didn’t want to be the center of attention, I didn’t want to improve myself every year, I didn’t want to take any more tests, I didn’t want to be defending my job from the litany of aspirants; the world slowed down, a lot, almost to a stand still.
Of course with being a Colombian come many terrible things, children are abused, people are shot, farmers are destitute, peoples lives are constantly in turmoil, there is no organization, there is little hope, no one is going to rescue anyone, everyone is out to protect the little self and by process our national psyche is small, little, insignificant, I don’t expect contributions from us to the greater world, I don’t think we are going to get out of our inner beings, we are still adolescents.
All societies have these sort of unwritten consequences, America consumes the world, 60 percent of its resources, and its politics are largely based on that horror, in some way America is always gobbling something, it has to, you cannot be so huge and powerful and not, it is that which makes it all so super-size for those of us that think little, that cannot muster the energies and concentrations to gobble things up. Colombians are self destructive, I prefer that, and that is a consequence of being in Colombia or a Colombian.
To me all nation-states are democratic, either silently or not, it is the mass aggregate will with its subconscious-simmering-psyche that makes it all happen, the final agreement that holds a nation together is that, a little bit of everyone represented as none of them in particular.
As such when you see the apparent horrors of any given government, it must also be obvious that the overall society is willing to pay that price, either to reinforce a national psyche or as a sad or fatal by product of the embroidery that is a civilization.
I admire the catholic church, 2006 year old institution, I am obviously not a Catholic but that is a supra-global psyche, the rituals seem so pointless, the priest so perverted, and yet the institution has lasted the times. There is something to be said for that.
America is a young country, as such a rouge state, so goes the book, and so has been the history of most world powers, Britain was an ass in its hay day and so we should not expect anything different of America. Unlike most I do believe that America is just a phase in human history, we are not going to be dominated by capitalism and democracy, the new world will perhaps be ruled by some metaphysical divination, a sort of -“I am aware and I comprehend…”- mind and heart set.
Of course when America fades into the sunset many things that come with it will fade too, the concept of “marketing” might go extinct, the idea that profit is a prerequisite for someone to act, might fade away as well. I expect the field of knowledge to be the first to suffer, knowledge will undoubtedly suffer, MIT and Harvard might fail as well it should be as these are institutions that have their basis on the American mind set.
Grant you none of these things were invented by America, nor is America the only one afflicted by them, it is simply that America has bought into them and perfected them unlike anyone else.
Marx did get one thing right, economy drives the essence of the thing, you look at Americas economic logistics and it is the only proper way to understand its behavior pattern.
Now I don’t blame America for being what it is, that is a world condition, America is just good at it, no more.
The problem is one of civilization and contribution to the world in general. America is still young enough, as far as countries are concerned that we don’t know what its actual contribution to humanity will be in the end, for all we know, and I rather think it so, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Hollywood could be a blink in human history. The terracotta soldiers are 2300 years old, Chinese civilization was going through a Jade age 6000 years ago, Indian society has well over 5000 years behind it, that in itself is a very amazing thing, but see I admire things that last a long time, that establish continuity, that form foundations that linger throughout the ages.
America to me seems more like a fad, something based on spontaneity, capriciousness, a desire to be in a sort of hedonistic postponement, that is to say America is always working on the next nearest thing, and is always planning for the next event and dully postponing its enjoyment while absorbing a child like happiness of the moment.
There have been plenty of 300 year old countries that never lasted the ages. They are in fact the norm. One only needs to go back to the 19th century to see that the map makers have been busy. America’s immediate necessity is to live for the moment, and I will argue that that is why it is so able in the here and now!
This is because most people are living a cultural event, most of India is, they are not living for the immediacy of the moment, that is why they don’t see the transgressions that we witness in India. By an large they are living a movement, most of India is not living the current love affair with Western ways, most of India is like Iran when America imposed their dictator of choice the Shah; but Iran’s cultural clock ticks slowly but eventually it strikes an hour of regressive change, boom!
Culture as atomic bomb.
People that live in culture take a while to realize what’s happening, because the beauty of culture is that you don’t have to think all the time and be on the alert, that is the beauty of culture, it is also why American political strategists have so little patience with it, and equally why they think they can change it all within a year. Those people in Iraq don’t look very smart from afar, they don’t look very complicated, they look largely like savages with their contradictory and illogical ways; but what the Harvard and Chicago schools don’t measure is how those societies have clicked throughout the centuries, and that is no small accomplishment and as such it isn’t going to be undone unless it is annihilated.
The problem is that America’s youth, the lack of its own predefined culture is also what makes it appear superior, light on its feet, able to change at a moments notice, Americans can change jobs, homes, cars, friendships and location on a moments notice, just show them where the opportune horizon stretches and they will head in that direction; that real time adjustment to world events makes them winners, first to get there types; equally such looseness does not favor culture because culture is based on the locking-down of traditions. Culture doesn’t change overnight it changes over the centuries and flowery horizons are mistrusted.
If you look at all of civilization as a singular entity, and I do, then you can imagine that we needed our impetuous child explorer, America, to go out there and find out what else could be out there, in a way it had to be an isolationist, few could brave the rub that change would imply to those living in culture, America went at it alone, and perhaps it found something, only history will tell; that India and China and Russia are finally listening makes an interesting case, but then we must hope it is not the fringes of those societies, the aggressive types that are making their adoptions of the American way. Because if it is only them, then it will not last, somehow those cultures must emblematize and absorb the work ethic, the professionalism, the delusion that a career defines self, the mastery of the moment, all those things with logistical precision must be adopted wholly, else they will only reek and the clock of tradition will reach yet another hour of boom.
India, what is India to me? Nothing, I don’t know it, I am reading the Buddhist bible, it’s a translation, it was written by a man with Western values, I slept with an Indian girl once, her name was Rita, I doubt that that was her name in India, but I do think that sleeping with someone from that culture brings you all the energies that have harbored her essence, and that could be a lot. Beyond that is the cuisine which shows an amazing level of gorgeousness and essence at the same time, or maybe is the fact that they have 1700 or so plus Gods, you have to be very spiritual to have all those gods, the West is practical it only likes to maintain monotheism, but India I would guess has a lot of devout to maintain that colossal religiosity. Maybe too it is the mystics, the transcendentalists that somehow offer a different path that doesn’t seem caught up in the Tarot and the Zodiac. Or maybe it is the fact that cows are sacred and can roam free, why one of them could be the next Dali Lama.
But I really don’t know what India signifies to me except that it has lasted 5000 years and this even as their main religions are anointing inaction, the nothingness and indifference to the self.
When my nephew went to New York city, he didn’t like it. I love New York, it amply demonstrates that we can live in purely artificial environments and relationships, and that loneliness can be ignored indefinitely through fatigueless entertainment. When we go to conquer the other planets, we will need that kind of indifference to tolerate the more indifferent environment; I just love New York!
RC
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