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)
Thursday, August 03, 2006
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
Friday, November 04, 2005
Truly Liberal Radicalism
Nothing is more harmful to the radical liberal movement than its stance against capitalism and globalization. Thus I propose the following:
-It is obvious that capitalism is its own worst enemy.
-It is obvious that a market-driven humanity is not sustainable or humane.
-The marginalization of all human activity based on productive and economic measure is a self-collapsing proposition.
Thus I will urge all the liberals, the radicals, the socialists to cease fighting against capitalism and globalization, as antagonism only serves to moderate the effects of capitalism on our humanity and thus increase the longevity of its life span.
Capitalism is a phase in the contextual history of humanity, inevitably it will come to pass but it will come to pass much faster, that is humanity will get capitalism out of its system sooner if liberals participate in it rather than fight against it.
I propose that the inherent instability of capitalism, its callousness towards the human spirit can be radically magnified through participation, so that it becomes a case against itself and thus an unsustainable proposition.
What liberal forces must weigh is what has the greatest probability of defeating capitalism, being for it or against it?
I conclude that being for and pro and working for capitalism is most likely to cause the very thing to implode upon the fallacy of its premises. By becoming more capitalistic liberal forces would prove their point beyond all doubt.
One must have faith enough to believe that if one has a truth it has the potential to become painfully obvious.
RC
-It is obvious that capitalism is its own worst enemy.
-It is obvious that a market-driven humanity is not sustainable or humane.
-The marginalization of all human activity based on productive and economic measure is a self-collapsing proposition.
Thus I will urge all the liberals, the radicals, the socialists to cease fighting against capitalism and globalization, as antagonism only serves to moderate the effects of capitalism on our humanity and thus increase the longevity of its life span.
Capitalism is a phase in the contextual history of humanity, inevitably it will come to pass but it will come to pass much faster, that is humanity will get capitalism out of its system sooner if liberals participate in it rather than fight against it.
I propose that the inherent instability of capitalism, its callousness towards the human spirit can be radically magnified through participation, so that it becomes a case against itself and thus an unsustainable proposition.
What liberal forces must weigh is what has the greatest probability of defeating capitalism, being for it or against it?
I conclude that being for and pro and working for capitalism is most likely to cause the very thing to implode upon the fallacy of its premises. By becoming more capitalistic liberal forces would prove their point beyond all doubt.
One must have faith enough to believe that if one has a truth it has the potential to become painfully obvious.
RC
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
The Great Mall of the Americas
I could not find my way back to my truck, it was there, at the Great Mall of the Americas. I don’t feel too bad about it, that is about losing my truck at the Great Mall of the Americas, anything that huge had to be a challenge for someone little like me to remember; I was diminutively speaking a small man, 5 feet 3 inches, most people are now taller than that, Lucy the ancestor of human kind was only 3 feet 6 inches, and Lucy, of the Lucy and Ricky Ricardo show was certainly taller, at 5 feet 7 inches, taller than even Ricky, her Cuban husband. Like wise the mall of the Americas dwarfs me and I lost my truck in it.
I didn't expect to lose my truck, I am more likely to lose my keys, but this time I lost my truck. I thought I might lose my notebook but I didn’t lose my notebook though I have nightmares about losing my notebook I lost my truck instead. My truck weighs in at 4300 pounds, my notebook weights in at 4.3 pounds, most soldiers have to carry fifty pound backpacks, me 4.3 pounds and a couple more, and I am ok with that for I never walk very far, I don’t like walking. I don’t like walking long distances, it seems pointless; I don’t like cars, I don’t like being in cars for more than fifteen minutes, I don’t like plane travel for more than 45 minutes, I am a short distance person, the American continent would have never been discovered by me; I don’t have the urge to travel, the travel industry would have never materialized nor would have the international marketing industry if my genes predominated the human species, they don’t. I am but an antler within the human species, a nail of deciduous layered growth, so as to create a bony structure that intimidates yet a pair of nail clippers would cut it off.
My name is Davit Nutt, from Albarsperk, a small town in the Dacoma territories that used to belong to the Dacoma Indians but then they signed it over to the white men, and now they just operate the casinos. I am not however an Indian, I am a white man, and I don’t own the greatest mall in the Americas, I am just there now because we had a business meeting, I am a shoe salesman. I work for Longer and More Comfortable Molly’s. We specialize in shoes for people that are made larger by the culmination of their appendages.
We call them Molly shoes, I don’t know why we call them that, but I suppose Alph Parks, the owner of the company probably had a fat girlfriend named, perhaps Molly and he married Ethel Swarny and probably wanted to remember Molly instead, at least when he went to work and so there you have us, we are Molly Shoes Inc.
I am a catalog salesman, I go from door to door and sell shoes to people that are challenged by the size of their foot. This year, I made it to the list of top ten sales reps within the company; that is damn right I am the sixth most successful sales rep nationwide, frankly it is an honor. But equally I cannot brag, it isn’t that hard to sell shoes that are larger and more comfortable for larger people. And it isn’t hard because shoes of our size, large, extra large and wider and extra wider, (the secret of our design success,) large and cushy, well where else are you going to get that if not at Molly’s Shoes!
You have to give credit to big Alph, he saw the market coming, he predicted that America, as it became a bigger nation, would need bigger hamburgers, bigger malls and bigger steaks and consequently bigger cows, and bigger sex toys and logically it followed that Americans would get bigger, as success breeds size and their bigger size would make them not fit into their shoes; and thus Alph, a former hotdog salesman from Romaine Kansas opted to match the opportunity with the shoe and he begun to design shoes that are bigger and cushier and more comfortable and he hired me as his first salesman.
Why he hired me is still mesmerizing to me, the good lord cares for us in mysterious ways, I was at a greyhound bus stop, waiting for a bus to go nowhere, my wife had left me, precisely because she was not impressed by me, she once said that I could inspire a poem about yawning. When she left she took our daughter Nancy with her, Nancy ate a lot of cornflakes, and had grown where now she could use Molly Shoes but I don’t know where they are. They also took Henry with them, gosh when I think about it why even our children had sort of fat names, maybe that had something to do with it, or could it have been the chili-fries?
Ah what is a father to know, I don’t even know when we made those kids, maybe they are not even mine, frankly I wish I had greater paternal sentiments but I am more proud of having been invited to the Top Ten Molly Salesmen of the Year reunion, than I am of fathering Henry and Nancy; though they are harmless both and nice kids too. Still, as I hate to admit it, Nancy is nothing more than some kind of gum consumption machine that I am afraid will reproduce by happenstance; and Henry is a Video game fanatic consumer, where the games can never keep up with him, there is even a sweat spot on the carpeting right where he sits in front of his video game player to slaughter civilization over and over again. All this while our pooch Darwin, perhaps the most evolved member of the former family sits and muses over a bone shaped biscuit.
Davit Nutt, that is me, I am skinny, no more flesh on me than is required to cover up them bones, you can see my veins and arteries fluctuate in size with the ambient temperature, I am deathly afraid of the cold, I might be a mammal but my blood gets cold at the sight of a shadow, I am always looking for heat, maybe that is why I was attracted to my wife, she had layers of flesh. I am naturally attracted to heft, and so it is easy for me to sell oversized shoes, really I don’t understand how the other salesmen got ahead of me, they might have lied on their sales reports, maybe their managers bought some of the shoes to earn bonus points, maybe they faked sales, or maybe they overstuffed the inventory, because really I doubt that someone could beat me at the art of selling oversize Molly shoes.
I get into a house and I go in there and I say, “Look it here you see this here shoe, it will support all aspects of your lovely leg, (eighty percent of my customers are women,) and see how we have constructed the support structure to mimic how grass cushions a foot, why there are hundreds of thousands of invisible grass hairs growing right out of our shoes, and they use this new and exclusive and patented nano-organic technique where, by recovering the humidity produced by the sole of your feet, they will regenerate the grass like follicles in our shoes, so as to create a fresh grass sole supporting turf, where you will never notice you are wearing shoes, you might even feel your lovely feet naked.”
Then they sniffle and say, “But what about smells?”
“Oh nothing to that, don’t even mention it, because our nano-organic shoes have self reproducing soles they are also, impressively, self refreshing and so you go on and enjoy them as you might the morning dew under your naked feet.”
Of course I don’t use our shoes and they notice this and ask, “Why don’t you use them if they are so good?”
“Oh gosh” I flush red, “I wish I could use them, I have asked Alph to make them my size but as you can see a skinny fellow like me has not the frame to support a naturally growing sole environment shoe underneath his feet; there is not the necessary pressured conditions to create the ambient temperatures and chemical cataclysms to regenerate new soles, a process that is usually bi-monthly, for anyone offering two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch.”
The buyers do seem a little confused by all the science and so I reassure them, “But Alph keeps working at it, that guy he doesn’t give up, he knows that there is a huge market potential for his shoes and he doesn’t want to stay just a niche shoe, he wants to branch into the Olympics and Wimbledon. Why just imagine if the tennis stars could feel the grass underneath their feet, it be a whole different game; we at Molly Shoes realize the responsibility of the experience that we need share with our sole mates.”
I think it is because I am skinny that they think they have to take me under their arms, but when I smell underarm perspiration I know that I have made another sale, and there you have it, that is why I am here today, at the biggest mall of the Americas celebrating the biggest shoe success story of all time. Only I had a few wines, I normally don’t drink wine but since the boss has gotten a little rich he now feels that he has to drink wine and so he orders wine for us all too and you just cannot say no to the boss, he has this way of convincing you that you should drink wine and sell his shoes and so I do both, only the wine doesn’t sit well for me; I think us men of skin and bones should really stay away from any kind of liquor and so now because I didn’t follow that rule I am searching for my truck.
My truck doesn’t have an alarm, I get tired of alarms going off without reason, cars screaming smog are bad enough we don’t need them being obnoxious too. I never got the alarm option even as my insurance company was willing to give me a 10 percent discount off of the insurance bill if I added the alarm, apparently thieves are scared off by alarms, I refused that; and I also refused the 3 percent discount if I took the model without an ashtray, apparently smokers get into accidents three percent more than non-smokers; I also got the yellow paint job even though there was a 1 percent discount on that as well; but the truth is that I like yellow even though yellow crashes and clashes with red cars more often than not, and besides that I do smoke and so I figured what is the difference, I have a 3 percent greater probability of crashing and that probably buries that other 1 percent for having an attractive paint scheme.
And even with the attractive paint scheme I cant find my truck, damn. And if that were not enough I think the alcohol is having some effect, this I think because I have good reason to believe that at the Great Mall of the Americas I keep on going up the same stairs and the same ramp at least five times, and unless I get sober fast I might not find my truck.
Now in the old days it was easy, if you lost your vehicle at the mall you could just sit it out till about 10 pm where everyone had gone home and then the only car on the parking lot would be your yellow truck, but today the malls are open twenty four hours per day, and the people too are open twenty four hours per day, and so there is no way to empty out the parking lot.
Of course I hadn’t given up the faith, I figured I could find my truck, either by waiting for a sober memory or by ending the number of parking slots available for parking, I am an optimist, I think. And so I get into this mammoth elevator, I think it could house 30 people, and it goes straight up fast, I am going to explore the upper levels of the super parking complex, the elevator doors open like a portal into another dimension, slowly so as not to rip a little girl’s fingers off, slowly so that if there are thirty people in the elevator they can all witness with each other the industrial might of the great mall. I walk off into the ninth floor, I think it is the last one, I don’t dare to assume that I know how wide this mall is or how tall, I am on the ninth floor, ok.
Immediately as I step off I am elated at finding a Mall Cop in a white scooter type mobile with blue warning lights all over, the young man in it is a healthy fellow, well built but not robust, just good looking, he could have been in a golf cart without that blue uniform and looked the part of a wealthy country chap, I yelled with my voice while reaching him with wild armed signals.
“Hey there fellow, have you seen a yellow truck with red stripes running through the side and a chrome step, there are no two alike.”
“Well maybe yours is yours sir and with all due respect that makes it unique but here I see Ferraris by the half dozen.”
And with that he punctured the gas pedal on that electric kart gizmo and sped off, where I operated to catch him with my legs.
“No, no, just wait a minute; ok maybe there are others like mine, ok, (I was gasping for air,) but could you just be so kind as to give me a ride around this floor to see if it is here?”
The young man, I must say, was all proper, “Hey Mr. I sure would if I could but company policy doesn’t allow me, you might sue us if we get into an accident and I could lose my job,”
I paused him, “Yeah, yeah don’t worry I know and your girlfriend is pregnant and you really need this job, lets leave it at that and I will just walk on.”
With that we both signaled a mutual salute of professional attention and he purred off in his electric gizmo.
I scratched my head, I felt silly being lost, but I felt more silly for being drunk on the wine, still I went off to review the cars on the ninth floor. Not mine, not mine, Ferrari, not mine, Ferrari, not mine, not mine, Lamborghini, not mine, till I came up to a large concrete wall with the number nine on it; I had completed all the rows, I didn’t, anyway remember driving up nine levels, four maximum, I was afraid of heights. As I stood in front of the wall as if I were peeing like a Frenchman, I realized that I was in front of a door, I opened the door, and before me stood a clown in a huge ruffled yellow dress with white gloves, red cheeks and a falsely welcoming smile.
“Hey, hey Mr., you are our one millionth customer to the ride of the cytoplasm, you get to get on for free, put your money away, your money is not good here, (he was patting my back) your money is not good here, you are on us today, Mr., free suite, free food, free rides all day long and you get to start here, this is the get go point; (his happiness and incessant jolliness contagious but in a must way), you just get right on here, right on here. (guiding me with that charming force of a clown that hinders none.)”
“But I am not here to ride your ride, sorry I was just looking for my truck.”
“Yes, yes adults always have some fancy excuse as to why they don’t really want to ride our rides, but you dint come to the ninth because you dint know we were here, obviously you got here and you didn’t get here by accident right!”
“No, no you don’t understand Mr. Clown, what is your name, I am sorry what is your name?”
“Me, (his hand confirming towards his lapel,) “me, I am The Clown of the Mall of the Americas!” And with that he let lose a huge sarcophagus laughter, and repeated it for my enjoyment and any near-by listener, “The Clown of the Mall of the Americas!, that is me sir.”
“Well Mr. Clown of the Mall of the Americas, may I just walk by you, and sorry to have gotten caught in your life line.”
While I was saying that a huge squelching sound irked my ears and ended audibility within the vicinity, it was the sound of a huge mechanical machine on rail road tracks coming into its station; the cart however was little, tiny, a pure black pure metal contraption huge enough for one tiny person, but it had amplified sounds, and an amplified personage and what was more interesting was that the rails were on top so that its wheel carriage was hanging from its roof. The whole contraption, cart for one, was accompanied by a child’s song blurting out so loud that you could not hear what was audible.
“The crash cart, the cart of carts, the steroid of carts, is here to take you away, away, away you will slim into other worlds, you will hide behind the buttons of giants, you will skim the surface of milk waffles, and aid us in adding cherries to the supper chocolate sundae engine, and when we run out of cherries, which we will, you will help us push the last mile into the station. Hop, hop yourself and hop on board you all, we are on the cherry train, on the cherry train to the spiral, the black and white spiral awaits hurry on board for this train is ready to depart.” The music jostling the train and my ears, the clown pushed me onboard and locked the little black door tightly shut.
The cart as I tell you was no larger than I was, I felt like a man with a funny hat in a silent film, awkward and unaccountable. The cart whisked off at about ten miles per hour, a silence whisked in. Clouds started forming over the track, the cart began to feel, as indeed it was, too small for me. I could not make myself comfortable as an inch of something, bolts, rods, levers, pullies, wheels, springs would inch into me from all angles; my head barely cleared the metal ceiling, there were fortunately no windows so I could breath fine fresh air, but beyond that it was very claustrophobic and now I was in the plenitude of pure flight, on a track moving somewhere, but where?” I scratched any part of my body that I could scratch, I looked for moving parts on the cart, there were none, helpless, I ducked the clouds, frowning at parrots, seagulls and condors.
I don’t know why but at some point I started feeling comfortable when the thing sped up, wow, sped faster, I thought for sure it would come off the track, then it did a 360 track route, and swung downwards, I banged my head several times, my arms bruised too, I covered my eyes to prevent injury and then the thing flattened out after a remarkable screw entrance into a tunnel, and stopped; as if its passenger were not human the whole contraption swung and sprung open as if a dump truck, and thus unleashed me into the pavement. A sweet voice arrived over the intercom.
“You have arrived at the spiral tour, you do not need a ticket, you have been properly identified as our one millionth customer, your rides with us are free for the rest of your life and consecutive life times there after, please sit and wait, please sit and wait, we will be loading you into the spiral very soon, you need not get anxious, enjoy some drinks and food on us, don’t eat too much the spiral can make you a little dizzy, if you are pregnant or on your period we don’t recommend that you ride the spiral.”
I got up and scrubbed myself off while taking notice of a food stand and went right to it. A young lady, short, full of tightly straightened blond hair and dressed in a cheerleader outfit, came up to me before I could reach the counter; she was on roller skates, and made sure to halt me. “Don’t go to the bar sir, please, if you go there they don’t give me credit for your service, and if you tip while there I have to then share the tip.”
I was flustered but I leaned into the red stool that was nearest me, “Please may I have some water?”
“Oh is that all you want?”
“Yes please just a glass of water urgently.”
“But sir it doesn’t cost you anything, you are our one millionth customer and they will tip me based on your order, couldn’t you help me out, order more, I can take it home with me if you don’t want it, just help me out, its not going to cost you anything.”
Gasping for air. “Ok, Goldy, (the name on her name tag,) just order what you will, all I want is the glass of water.”
“No sir, I am not in this just for myself, you must order something for yourself, please.” Spitting her gum on the floor.
“Ok order me a hotdog and fries, and a glass of ripe cold water please.”
“Ok, that sounds better, I will add a couple of hamburgers for myself and my boyfriend, but don’t you tell anyone old man, I don’t want to lose my job over this.”
“Listen if you get me a glass of water then everything is fine, please the water.”
Giving me a sort of up and down dirty look for a skinny man. “Alright.”
Goldy came back with the glass of water and bags packed with hotdogs, fries and hamburgers, I left everything at the table and went to look at the sky, and that is when I realized it was night time. You could count every star in the night sky, amazing, it was a privilege, I got all moved by the scenery, the sky was sort of blue from the stars bleeding their light over it, and there were so many of them, and while marveling this a chorus of voices came to me.
“There he is boys, there is the millionth dollar customer of the mall of the Americas, this is a grand moment for us all.”
With that they started to shake my hand, while photographers snapped pictures of what were obviously company executives and company clowns with me.
I saw the president, a man that I identified himself as, “I am the president of the Great Mall of the Americas, it gives me great pleasure to be here with you tonight to witness you becoming the first of our spiral ride customers. Why I envy you, I wish I were going first.” He elbowed me, and as he said that the cameras snapped on furiously.
“Sir I think there has been some huge mistake I haven’t bought anything at your mall, I was just looking for my yellow truck and that is how I ended on the ninth floor.”
The fat, jolly, well dressed fellow smiled big eye, “We love modesty, that will sell better, you’re a good fellow, I admire you, sure fellows, this isn’t our million dollar customer, he is too modest for the title.”
They all laughed, clowns hugged me and forced me to dance with them, and then all the lights went off and a huge drum roll went off blaring an operatic voice, “The ride of rides, the spiral of spirals - spirals over us all, this is the moment, this is us, this is the time of the greatest mall of all time, and our one millionth customer initiates us into the blaring and spiraling infinity.”
The lights began to brighten quickening and flooding everything and the floor space opened up; Goldy rushed to pick up her food-to-go, and I backed up against a wall till I could make no half space any further; and suddenly the floor widened and the spiral opened and it was a corkscrew of black and white spinning wildly; I was all scared, and then the clown came up to me.
“Sir, you may cut the blue ribbon that unleashes the black and white corkscrew ride, unleash it please.” And with the oversized scissors in my hand, I cut the ribbon and a big orchestra blasted itself into the scenery, and dancers of every type scored every inch of floor space while trumpets blared.
The president then came up to me, and as if pointing a gun to my back escorted me to the entrance of the corkscrew, with a couple of fillies to charm me with their adolescent understatement. Still I hesitated, when they pushed me off.
I began yelling and yelling, and yelling and the spiral passed through me as if a time machine, the whole of my life was going through me, and there was nothing easy throughout the spiraling fall, until a big scarlet red bed began to seem obvious, and I landed on that huge cushion, and before me splattered cameras, signs hailing the millionth customer, and I, dazed couldn’t understand what it was all about.
Seconds later, the president and his executive clown landed near me and got me immediately off the red cushion bedding, sort of cleaned off my ruffled suit, and allowed the immensity of cameras to further pin us. Then a reporter came up to me, “How was it and what did you feel?”
“I felt dizzy, I don’t know, I felt lost, I felt spiraling out of control, I am surprised I am not hurt.”
And with that a roaring laugh came over those present. And the president grabbed the mike, and pointed at the ride, “You see it is just a spiral, it only takes you from the ninth floor to the first floor, and he felt totally out of control, ladies and gentlemen I give you the greatest mall of the Americas, the greatest mall in the land, where you are sure to feel out of control in a perfectly ordinary world.”
I fainted. Thinking about my yellow truck.
RC
I didn't expect to lose my truck, I am more likely to lose my keys, but this time I lost my truck. I thought I might lose my notebook but I didn’t lose my notebook though I have nightmares about losing my notebook I lost my truck instead. My truck weighs in at 4300 pounds, my notebook weights in at 4.3 pounds, most soldiers have to carry fifty pound backpacks, me 4.3 pounds and a couple more, and I am ok with that for I never walk very far, I don’t like walking. I don’t like walking long distances, it seems pointless; I don’t like cars, I don’t like being in cars for more than fifteen minutes, I don’t like plane travel for more than 45 minutes, I am a short distance person, the American continent would have never been discovered by me; I don’t have the urge to travel, the travel industry would have never materialized nor would have the international marketing industry if my genes predominated the human species, they don’t. I am but an antler within the human species, a nail of deciduous layered growth, so as to create a bony structure that intimidates yet a pair of nail clippers would cut it off.
My name is Davit Nutt, from Albarsperk, a small town in the Dacoma territories that used to belong to the Dacoma Indians but then they signed it over to the white men, and now they just operate the casinos. I am not however an Indian, I am a white man, and I don’t own the greatest mall in the Americas, I am just there now because we had a business meeting, I am a shoe salesman. I work for Longer and More Comfortable Molly’s. We specialize in shoes for people that are made larger by the culmination of their appendages.
We call them Molly shoes, I don’t know why we call them that, but I suppose Alph Parks, the owner of the company probably had a fat girlfriend named, perhaps Molly and he married Ethel Swarny and probably wanted to remember Molly instead, at least when he went to work and so there you have us, we are Molly Shoes Inc.
I am a catalog salesman, I go from door to door and sell shoes to people that are challenged by the size of their foot. This year, I made it to the list of top ten sales reps within the company; that is damn right I am the sixth most successful sales rep nationwide, frankly it is an honor. But equally I cannot brag, it isn’t that hard to sell shoes that are larger and more comfortable for larger people. And it isn’t hard because shoes of our size, large, extra large and wider and extra wider, (the secret of our design success,) large and cushy, well where else are you going to get that if not at Molly’s Shoes!
You have to give credit to big Alph, he saw the market coming, he predicted that America, as it became a bigger nation, would need bigger hamburgers, bigger malls and bigger steaks and consequently bigger cows, and bigger sex toys and logically it followed that Americans would get bigger, as success breeds size and their bigger size would make them not fit into their shoes; and thus Alph, a former hotdog salesman from Romaine Kansas opted to match the opportunity with the shoe and he begun to design shoes that are bigger and cushier and more comfortable and he hired me as his first salesman.
Why he hired me is still mesmerizing to me, the good lord cares for us in mysterious ways, I was at a greyhound bus stop, waiting for a bus to go nowhere, my wife had left me, precisely because she was not impressed by me, she once said that I could inspire a poem about yawning. When she left she took our daughter Nancy with her, Nancy ate a lot of cornflakes, and had grown where now she could use Molly Shoes but I don’t know where they are. They also took Henry with them, gosh when I think about it why even our children had sort of fat names, maybe that had something to do with it, or could it have been the chili-fries?
Ah what is a father to know, I don’t even know when we made those kids, maybe they are not even mine, frankly I wish I had greater paternal sentiments but I am more proud of having been invited to the Top Ten Molly Salesmen of the Year reunion, than I am of fathering Henry and Nancy; though they are harmless both and nice kids too. Still, as I hate to admit it, Nancy is nothing more than some kind of gum consumption machine that I am afraid will reproduce by happenstance; and Henry is a Video game fanatic consumer, where the games can never keep up with him, there is even a sweat spot on the carpeting right where he sits in front of his video game player to slaughter civilization over and over again. All this while our pooch Darwin, perhaps the most evolved member of the former family sits and muses over a bone shaped biscuit.
Davit Nutt, that is me, I am skinny, no more flesh on me than is required to cover up them bones, you can see my veins and arteries fluctuate in size with the ambient temperature, I am deathly afraid of the cold, I might be a mammal but my blood gets cold at the sight of a shadow, I am always looking for heat, maybe that is why I was attracted to my wife, she had layers of flesh. I am naturally attracted to heft, and so it is easy for me to sell oversized shoes, really I don’t understand how the other salesmen got ahead of me, they might have lied on their sales reports, maybe their managers bought some of the shoes to earn bonus points, maybe they faked sales, or maybe they overstuffed the inventory, because really I doubt that someone could beat me at the art of selling oversize Molly shoes.
I get into a house and I go in there and I say, “Look it here you see this here shoe, it will support all aspects of your lovely leg, (eighty percent of my customers are women,) and see how we have constructed the support structure to mimic how grass cushions a foot, why there are hundreds of thousands of invisible grass hairs growing right out of our shoes, and they use this new and exclusive and patented nano-organic technique where, by recovering the humidity produced by the sole of your feet, they will regenerate the grass like follicles in our shoes, so as to create a fresh grass sole supporting turf, where you will never notice you are wearing shoes, you might even feel your lovely feet naked.”
Then they sniffle and say, “But what about smells?”
“Oh nothing to that, don’t even mention it, because our nano-organic shoes have self reproducing soles they are also, impressively, self refreshing and so you go on and enjoy them as you might the morning dew under your naked feet.”
Of course I don’t use our shoes and they notice this and ask, “Why don’t you use them if they are so good?”
“Oh gosh” I flush red, “I wish I could use them, I have asked Alph to make them my size but as you can see a skinny fellow like me has not the frame to support a naturally growing sole environment shoe underneath his feet; there is not the necessary pressured conditions to create the ambient temperatures and chemical cataclysms to regenerate new soles, a process that is usually bi-monthly, for anyone offering two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch.”
The buyers do seem a little confused by all the science and so I reassure them, “But Alph keeps working at it, that guy he doesn’t give up, he knows that there is a huge market potential for his shoes and he doesn’t want to stay just a niche shoe, he wants to branch into the Olympics and Wimbledon. Why just imagine if the tennis stars could feel the grass underneath their feet, it be a whole different game; we at Molly Shoes realize the responsibility of the experience that we need share with our sole mates.”
I think it is because I am skinny that they think they have to take me under their arms, but when I smell underarm perspiration I know that I have made another sale, and there you have it, that is why I am here today, at the biggest mall of the Americas celebrating the biggest shoe success story of all time. Only I had a few wines, I normally don’t drink wine but since the boss has gotten a little rich he now feels that he has to drink wine and so he orders wine for us all too and you just cannot say no to the boss, he has this way of convincing you that you should drink wine and sell his shoes and so I do both, only the wine doesn’t sit well for me; I think us men of skin and bones should really stay away from any kind of liquor and so now because I didn’t follow that rule I am searching for my truck.
My truck doesn’t have an alarm, I get tired of alarms going off without reason, cars screaming smog are bad enough we don’t need them being obnoxious too. I never got the alarm option even as my insurance company was willing to give me a 10 percent discount off of the insurance bill if I added the alarm, apparently thieves are scared off by alarms, I refused that; and I also refused the 3 percent discount if I took the model without an ashtray, apparently smokers get into accidents three percent more than non-smokers; I also got the yellow paint job even though there was a 1 percent discount on that as well; but the truth is that I like yellow even though yellow crashes and clashes with red cars more often than not, and besides that I do smoke and so I figured what is the difference, I have a 3 percent greater probability of crashing and that probably buries that other 1 percent for having an attractive paint scheme.
And even with the attractive paint scheme I cant find my truck, damn. And if that were not enough I think the alcohol is having some effect, this I think because I have good reason to believe that at the Great Mall of the Americas I keep on going up the same stairs and the same ramp at least five times, and unless I get sober fast I might not find my truck.
Now in the old days it was easy, if you lost your vehicle at the mall you could just sit it out till about 10 pm where everyone had gone home and then the only car on the parking lot would be your yellow truck, but today the malls are open twenty four hours per day, and the people too are open twenty four hours per day, and so there is no way to empty out the parking lot.
Of course I hadn’t given up the faith, I figured I could find my truck, either by waiting for a sober memory or by ending the number of parking slots available for parking, I am an optimist, I think. And so I get into this mammoth elevator, I think it could house 30 people, and it goes straight up fast, I am going to explore the upper levels of the super parking complex, the elevator doors open like a portal into another dimension, slowly so as not to rip a little girl’s fingers off, slowly so that if there are thirty people in the elevator they can all witness with each other the industrial might of the great mall. I walk off into the ninth floor, I think it is the last one, I don’t dare to assume that I know how wide this mall is or how tall, I am on the ninth floor, ok.
Immediately as I step off I am elated at finding a Mall Cop in a white scooter type mobile with blue warning lights all over, the young man in it is a healthy fellow, well built but not robust, just good looking, he could have been in a golf cart without that blue uniform and looked the part of a wealthy country chap, I yelled with my voice while reaching him with wild armed signals.
“Hey there fellow, have you seen a yellow truck with red stripes running through the side and a chrome step, there are no two alike.”
“Well maybe yours is yours sir and with all due respect that makes it unique but here I see Ferraris by the half dozen.”
And with that he punctured the gas pedal on that electric kart gizmo and sped off, where I operated to catch him with my legs.
“No, no, just wait a minute; ok maybe there are others like mine, ok, (I was gasping for air,) but could you just be so kind as to give me a ride around this floor to see if it is here?”
The young man, I must say, was all proper, “Hey Mr. I sure would if I could but company policy doesn’t allow me, you might sue us if we get into an accident and I could lose my job,”
I paused him, “Yeah, yeah don’t worry I know and your girlfriend is pregnant and you really need this job, lets leave it at that and I will just walk on.”
With that we both signaled a mutual salute of professional attention and he purred off in his electric gizmo.
I scratched my head, I felt silly being lost, but I felt more silly for being drunk on the wine, still I went off to review the cars on the ninth floor. Not mine, not mine, Ferrari, not mine, Ferrari, not mine, not mine, Lamborghini, not mine, till I came up to a large concrete wall with the number nine on it; I had completed all the rows, I didn’t, anyway remember driving up nine levels, four maximum, I was afraid of heights. As I stood in front of the wall as if I were peeing like a Frenchman, I realized that I was in front of a door, I opened the door, and before me stood a clown in a huge ruffled yellow dress with white gloves, red cheeks and a falsely welcoming smile.
“Hey, hey Mr., you are our one millionth customer to the ride of the cytoplasm, you get to get on for free, put your money away, your money is not good here, (he was patting my back) your money is not good here, you are on us today, Mr., free suite, free food, free rides all day long and you get to start here, this is the get go point; (his happiness and incessant jolliness contagious but in a must way), you just get right on here, right on here. (guiding me with that charming force of a clown that hinders none.)”
“But I am not here to ride your ride, sorry I was just looking for my truck.”
“Yes, yes adults always have some fancy excuse as to why they don’t really want to ride our rides, but you dint come to the ninth because you dint know we were here, obviously you got here and you didn’t get here by accident right!”
“No, no you don’t understand Mr. Clown, what is your name, I am sorry what is your name?”
“Me, (his hand confirming towards his lapel,) “me, I am The Clown of the Mall of the Americas!” And with that he let lose a huge sarcophagus laughter, and repeated it for my enjoyment and any near-by listener, “The Clown of the Mall of the Americas!, that is me sir.”
“Well Mr. Clown of the Mall of the Americas, may I just walk by you, and sorry to have gotten caught in your life line.”
While I was saying that a huge squelching sound irked my ears and ended audibility within the vicinity, it was the sound of a huge mechanical machine on rail road tracks coming into its station; the cart however was little, tiny, a pure black pure metal contraption huge enough for one tiny person, but it had amplified sounds, and an amplified personage and what was more interesting was that the rails were on top so that its wheel carriage was hanging from its roof. The whole contraption, cart for one, was accompanied by a child’s song blurting out so loud that you could not hear what was audible.
“The crash cart, the cart of carts, the steroid of carts, is here to take you away, away, away you will slim into other worlds, you will hide behind the buttons of giants, you will skim the surface of milk waffles, and aid us in adding cherries to the supper chocolate sundae engine, and when we run out of cherries, which we will, you will help us push the last mile into the station. Hop, hop yourself and hop on board you all, we are on the cherry train, on the cherry train to the spiral, the black and white spiral awaits hurry on board for this train is ready to depart.” The music jostling the train and my ears, the clown pushed me onboard and locked the little black door tightly shut.
The cart as I tell you was no larger than I was, I felt like a man with a funny hat in a silent film, awkward and unaccountable. The cart whisked off at about ten miles per hour, a silence whisked in. Clouds started forming over the track, the cart began to feel, as indeed it was, too small for me. I could not make myself comfortable as an inch of something, bolts, rods, levers, pullies, wheels, springs would inch into me from all angles; my head barely cleared the metal ceiling, there were fortunately no windows so I could breath fine fresh air, but beyond that it was very claustrophobic and now I was in the plenitude of pure flight, on a track moving somewhere, but where?” I scratched any part of my body that I could scratch, I looked for moving parts on the cart, there were none, helpless, I ducked the clouds, frowning at parrots, seagulls and condors.
I don’t know why but at some point I started feeling comfortable when the thing sped up, wow, sped faster, I thought for sure it would come off the track, then it did a 360 track route, and swung downwards, I banged my head several times, my arms bruised too, I covered my eyes to prevent injury and then the thing flattened out after a remarkable screw entrance into a tunnel, and stopped; as if its passenger were not human the whole contraption swung and sprung open as if a dump truck, and thus unleashed me into the pavement. A sweet voice arrived over the intercom.
“You have arrived at the spiral tour, you do not need a ticket, you have been properly identified as our one millionth customer, your rides with us are free for the rest of your life and consecutive life times there after, please sit and wait, please sit and wait, we will be loading you into the spiral very soon, you need not get anxious, enjoy some drinks and food on us, don’t eat too much the spiral can make you a little dizzy, if you are pregnant or on your period we don’t recommend that you ride the spiral.”
I got up and scrubbed myself off while taking notice of a food stand and went right to it. A young lady, short, full of tightly straightened blond hair and dressed in a cheerleader outfit, came up to me before I could reach the counter; she was on roller skates, and made sure to halt me. “Don’t go to the bar sir, please, if you go there they don’t give me credit for your service, and if you tip while there I have to then share the tip.”
I was flustered but I leaned into the red stool that was nearest me, “Please may I have some water?”
“Oh is that all you want?”
“Yes please just a glass of water urgently.”
“But sir it doesn’t cost you anything, you are our one millionth customer and they will tip me based on your order, couldn’t you help me out, order more, I can take it home with me if you don’t want it, just help me out, its not going to cost you anything.”
Gasping for air. “Ok, Goldy, (the name on her name tag,) just order what you will, all I want is the glass of water.”
“No sir, I am not in this just for myself, you must order something for yourself, please.” Spitting her gum on the floor.
“Ok order me a hotdog and fries, and a glass of ripe cold water please.”
“Ok, that sounds better, I will add a couple of hamburgers for myself and my boyfriend, but don’t you tell anyone old man, I don’t want to lose my job over this.”
“Listen if you get me a glass of water then everything is fine, please the water.”
Giving me a sort of up and down dirty look for a skinny man. “Alright.”
Goldy came back with the glass of water and bags packed with hotdogs, fries and hamburgers, I left everything at the table and went to look at the sky, and that is when I realized it was night time. You could count every star in the night sky, amazing, it was a privilege, I got all moved by the scenery, the sky was sort of blue from the stars bleeding their light over it, and there were so many of them, and while marveling this a chorus of voices came to me.
“There he is boys, there is the millionth dollar customer of the mall of the Americas, this is a grand moment for us all.”
With that they started to shake my hand, while photographers snapped pictures of what were obviously company executives and company clowns with me.
I saw the president, a man that I identified himself as, “I am the president of the Great Mall of the Americas, it gives me great pleasure to be here with you tonight to witness you becoming the first of our spiral ride customers. Why I envy you, I wish I were going first.” He elbowed me, and as he said that the cameras snapped on furiously.
“Sir I think there has been some huge mistake I haven’t bought anything at your mall, I was just looking for my yellow truck and that is how I ended on the ninth floor.”
The fat, jolly, well dressed fellow smiled big eye, “We love modesty, that will sell better, you’re a good fellow, I admire you, sure fellows, this isn’t our million dollar customer, he is too modest for the title.”
They all laughed, clowns hugged me and forced me to dance with them, and then all the lights went off and a huge drum roll went off blaring an operatic voice, “The ride of rides, the spiral of spirals - spirals over us all, this is the moment, this is us, this is the time of the greatest mall of all time, and our one millionth customer initiates us into the blaring and spiraling infinity.”
The lights began to brighten quickening and flooding everything and the floor space opened up; Goldy rushed to pick up her food-to-go, and I backed up against a wall till I could make no half space any further; and suddenly the floor widened and the spiral opened and it was a corkscrew of black and white spinning wildly; I was all scared, and then the clown came up to me.
“Sir, you may cut the blue ribbon that unleashes the black and white corkscrew ride, unleash it please.” And with the oversized scissors in my hand, I cut the ribbon and a big orchestra blasted itself into the scenery, and dancers of every type scored every inch of floor space while trumpets blared.
The president then came up to me, and as if pointing a gun to my back escorted me to the entrance of the corkscrew, with a couple of fillies to charm me with their adolescent understatement. Still I hesitated, when they pushed me off.
I began yelling and yelling, and yelling and the spiral passed through me as if a time machine, the whole of my life was going through me, and there was nothing easy throughout the spiraling fall, until a big scarlet red bed began to seem obvious, and I landed on that huge cushion, and before me splattered cameras, signs hailing the millionth customer, and I, dazed couldn’t understand what it was all about.
Seconds later, the president and his executive clown landed near me and got me immediately off the red cushion bedding, sort of cleaned off my ruffled suit, and allowed the immensity of cameras to further pin us. Then a reporter came up to me, “How was it and what did you feel?”
“I felt dizzy, I don’t know, I felt lost, I felt spiraling out of control, I am surprised I am not hurt.”
And with that a roaring laugh came over those present. And the president grabbed the mike, and pointed at the ride, “You see it is just a spiral, it only takes you from the ninth floor to the first floor, and he felt totally out of control, ladies and gentlemen I give you the greatest mall of the Americas, the greatest mall in the land, where you are sure to feel out of control in a perfectly ordinary world.”
I fainted. Thinking about my yellow truck.
RC
A Scope of Sameness
I muse over the fact that at this very moment in fashion history millions of women the world over, in Japan, England, the entire North American continent and Africa too are all exposing their bellies to show off fashion sense. Oscar Wilde once remarked that fashion was so hideous that it had to be changed every six months. The showing off of your bellybutton trend has been with us at least some five years, though for all I know about fashion it could have ended a while back and we are now only witnessing its whiplash.
Bellybuttons are always interesting and fascinating, they are after all the thing that connected everyone of us, except perhaps Jesus Christ, Adam and Eve for they were a trio apparently conceived from a father or a hip; but the rest of us are all tied to mother through the umbilical chord and that harmony resonates through us all, and so when we see each others bellybuttons, well we know we are not Adam or Eve or Jesus but that we are all mammals.
Chickens don’t have bellybuttons, dinosaurs (are they mammals?) didn’t have bellybuttons, dolphins probably have belly buttons, I don’t really know that but I am not going to look it up, I should just be able to guess that they do. The matter is that anyone with a bellybutton could in theory participate in the bellybutton fashion show of oneness.
There is however one odd thing about fashion sense, African women and the women of India and Persia, have been exposing their bellybuttons for thousands of centuries so they are not so much participating in the fashion sense of the day; for a belly dancer is a cultural icon and her dress code has been defined as it has been for thousands of years; a genie doesn’t dress for the times. and so you could imagine a part of the world, for sure in India and Africa and Persia where exposing one’s bellybutton cannot be defined as fashion sense, instead it becomes an unconscious act, people from these places do not know that they are being fashionable because for them it isn’t fashion as much as it is tradition, and in order to be fashionable you have to be self-conscious.
Recently, democratic elections were permitted in Egypt, and wouldn’t you know it, of the seven possible candidates the one that they are most likely to elect is the same dictator they have had for decades, Mubarak. Not unlikely, in Russia, Vladimir Putin the head of state, a man that, according to the constitution cannot run for reelection, would undoubtedly win a democratic election even as he has acted to concentrate power and indeed rules as a benevolent dictator. And in my own country, Colombia, we have a democratically elected president, Mr. Uribe, who is actually more a dictator from the Harvard School of Business; and he is philosophically hopeful that a modified constitution will allow him an uninterrupted reign; for us Colombians only have this one man that can rule our country. At the periphery of Colombia is Venezuela where Hugo Chavez has been democratically elected to lead a Bolivarian revolution that will, if successful, make Uribe redundant. Chavez has facilitated his reign by making healthcare and education a national beneficence thus making himself popular enough to militaristically dictate over the affairs of his own country and its oil production.
You can see a pattern in politics much like you may see a pattern in fashion and the pattern here is that a people, democratically ruled, or ruled by dictators or kings, or parliaments are usually being ruled by the person or persons that they would have as their rulers!
Democratic states always pride themselves on the fact that they put their politicians up for popular nomination by their constituency. The assumption being that only a vote, a public and monitored vote will produce a true representative of a people. This is of course a fallacious assumption as we have seen throughout political history that countries, be they democratic, parliamentary, republican, dictatorial, militaristic and or monarchistic will invariably elect and promote similar political dynasties; and these dynasties tend to represent the “national character.”
The Russians have always liked absolutist tsars to rule them because the average Russian considers himself a serf and is his own worst enemy; as admirers of theological and monarchical theatrics they suffer the disease of blood relations and when it comes to war they love to bleed like the hemophiliacs that they are; but more they bleed because they believe that bloodletting heals the family tree.
South Americans have a tendency to love populist dictators or fatherly types because Latin men cannot bring themselves to leave their mothers and cease fearing their fathers; and Latin women have not learned to steal their boys from their mothers and become wives, but rather remain daddy’s little girl.
Italians like to be ruled by a mosaic of inconsistencies that are possessed by fanatic objectives.
The English have always liked their rulers to have higher aims with lower causes that can only be objectified by indifference and is superimposed by a brilliant disguise of witticisms.
Africans have always preferred despots, the African heart despises politics, its ear to the ground it prefers barbarian rule and barbarian law, it sublets politics to instinct and wild passions.
Unconsciously, Japan has never wanted its rulers to change, it always selects those that will forgo change, for the Japanese samurai is based on rigor, discipline, intensity of self domination, and subjugation; politically, Japan is a fetish.
The Chinese masses promote leaders that will isolate them from the rest of the world so as to acquire their one billionth of uniqueness from the rest of us. The Chinese also prefer leaders that are patient turtles in their acts, throughout Chinese history the thread of continuity is significant: a dominant aversion to foreigners, a certainty about the completeness of the Chinese universe, and as such a country and a people that can only be changed within, while promoting eons of change through spontaneous national-soul-catharses as mandated by their ambivalence towards individualism.
It is an inherent and natural tendency for national psyches to predetermine their leaders, regardless of the means to power, by a national and coherent consensus that rigorously mandates the character of the elected one.
The Bush-Republican dynasty of America is a consequence of a national psyche that was feeling insecure in the world, and seeks a rearguard action in a desperate attempt to bring a drastically changing world under a new hegemony. Bush has impressively trounced outmoded principles with callous disregard of the possible consequences; and we must be fair to him, the cold war was over, the treaties and the diplomatic mindsets that set international relations were open to discussion, Bush simply disbanded them. That which cannot be undone must be cut!
In a sense, the collective American psyche concluded that the world had changed dramatically, from the collapse of the soviet union forward, and that whatever came next no one could know, the only thing that you could do was tear everything apart and then let what must come from it rise as demanded and permitted by the new world order. Much to their credit Americans have always understood that change is something that you cannot control but that it is something that must be done; what defines the American psyche is their willingness to go into the unknown armed with only their wits about them. By selecting a president with no prejudice towards change, by electing a man that had no sense of history and ritual, they elected to realize that the modern world had changed and that they had to put a wrecking ball to the treaties and consensus of old and let what commeth may.
It takes a lot of guts to do that and Americans are admirable for their guts. By ball wrecking the past they fast forward the unknown future and have as their advantage the fact that they are always looking towards the horizon to solve all of their problems; thus they are able to perceive and indeed acquire the benefits of change much to the envy of the French who are a backward looking people, always thinking that that they can intellectualize the world and master its poetic passions in stanzas.
The French are fascinating, besides the Greeks of old no one has thought, much to their own detriment, more than the French. The French continually administer thought to their feelings, and their feelings are continually made prudish by it. Thus, in a remarkable fashion the French are fashionable but like all fashions their impact is severely handicapped by how fashionable it is. Of course a French leader has to write poems and novels, he has to have an intrusive understanding of history and needs to posses a certain effeminate disposability of character. In America these very traits would be admonished as the means of a charlatan to acquire distinction; and indeed to a large extent French history is a verbal attribute of marmalades through the promenade; still, as we shall see, these intricacies of a romanticized existence play their role in the world community.
The French have elected, and are so appointed, to be the guardians of past eccentricities, these only look like eccentricities to us now because they are adulterated by our modern worldview, in their time many of the traditions guarded by the French had their relevance. Today the wine industry has grown globally to a large extent because the French have lost control of the wine making process. But the traditions of wine making so fervently and bureaucratically guarded by the French wine makers have atoned the consistency and largely defined purpose and essence worldwide. This distinction implies that the French guard the historical presence and by doing so create the scope by which all other precedents for winemaking sift into the aging process.
It is then true that the meticulousness of winemaking, as done in France, with its infinite varieties and glorified plots would have never made a global en mass wine industry but it is also true that a global wine industry would not have been possible had it not been so.
In much the same manner we could judge how France elects its political framers, looks to set a precise precedent that while not the type to conquer the mindsets of the world, will instead be worldly. And that worldly aspect of it will undoubtedly effect, in unknown ways, how others frame their worldview or legal premise.
The wine industry is a cognoscenti reference to yet another industry that haplessly marches from tragedy to tragedy, with its own occasional fashion show of characters who trifle with the imagination: The airline industry.
Calling it the “airline industry” might be a misnomer as more money is made selling planes than is made flying passengers around the world; certainly Boeing and Airbus benefit greatly from the interesting fact that Airlines benefit from having two suppliers of Airplanes so as to reduce the risk of dependence upon one or the other; and so Boeing and Airbus are exemplars of a dual-monopoly with zero compromises. But still we talk about the “airline industry” because that is the mouth of the monster that feeds the travel industry from any angle: travel agencies, hoteliers, insurances, rental car agencies, plane manufactures, caterers, restaurateurs, conventioneers, eco hot spots, tropical islands, exotic getaways, theme parks, historical England, the royal family, Stonehenge, the pyramids, Bhutan, and the biggest rock in Australia all benefit first and foremost from the passenger-eating airline industry.
Yet even as all that is true, with all those dependencies the airline industry would, at first sight appear to be the worst run industry, the least profitable, the most strife-ridden by labor disputes, the most likely to suffer from prime material shortages or price fluctuations, and equally the most regulated of all industries and the least capable of price gouging its customers, as stiff competition sets a low profit margin, and high operating costs set stringently high load factors as the prerequisite to profitability.
In the final analysis the industry that most serves to riddle the world with immigrants and to bring businesses, governments and peoples closest together, the industry that shrinks the world continues to be an accountant’s nightmare. But then we must ask why doesn’t it just all go bankrupt and be done with it. Certainly the law of supply and demand would imply that there are far too many seats on airplanes if they are sold as such bargain rates that in the end the traveler is not paying the true cost of a ticket, upfront. That would all call for a logical free hand correction where maybe more airlines would go bankrupt, the prices could then rise, airplane seats per passenger capacity would fall, fewer people would afford travel but then the airline industry could be profitable and stay competitive.
Why doesn’t that happen? Is it because countries like Italy want to protect their airlines so that they are willing to subsidize their carriers into inferiority? Is it because bankruptcy laws in the United States are too liberal and kind to those companies that come under its protection? Is it because bankers and investors that finance the billions of dollars in airplane leases do not want to write off their losses and so they continue to renegotiate debt and reinvest hoping for a brighter day?
The truth of the airline industry is much less stark, and it is not the harbinger of bad news that the newspaper industry has made it out to be.
The airline industry isn’t an industry! It isn’t an industry because it cannot stand by itself, and more because it is not a principal in the acts of its progress. When airlines move people they always do it from a perspective of intermediaries, they are indeed what we ought call a “third-party-industry”; they are acting more as a go between than a causa célèbre or as prime mover of the thing itself. This is precisely why the airline industry does not really have high customer satisfaction and it is also why it doesn’t have high customer loyalty. You will change airlines faster than you would change toothpaste brands. You cannot feel any significant differences in airplanes, as a reason to fly this or that airline, for a modern Airbus or a modern Boeing airliner feel very much the same, first class is first class, but most of the rest of us are in cramped class, and the meals aren’t getting any better and the service is obviously not factor number one with the airlines.
If you want to know who cares about you, you just have to review their list of priorities, in the airline industry it is fuel cost, labor cost, maintenance cost, and cost per flight seat mile, then service and food, I might have the order wrong but service and food are certainly least important. So you might ask why doesn’t the airline industry care about you?
Well, don’t take it personally, the airline industry simply is not in the business of caring about you. It is in the business of moving you, your family, your friends, your business partners, your government officials, and the rest of the world’s peoples between to and fro; and this is very much like the transportation system of the slave trade, there aren’t any benefits to be gained in making you more comfortable and feeding you better, only more costs. To the airline industry the idea of you is an ephemeral idea, you exist as a piece of inventory that the longer you remain on the shelf the more you depreciate in value and thus the airline follows the old warehouse rule, first in first out and just in time inventory is what you are to them. When a plane lands gotta get you in there fast and out fast and the faster the better.
The harrowing narrowing of time between the time that the airline industry picks you up and delivers you to your destination has come under a theological constraint: the speed of sound. The speed of sound is a problem because airplanes that fly at the speed of sound make a lot of noise and people don’t like noisy neighbors. But there is a bigger constraint to it than just shockwaves, fast planes need to be small so they can slip through the air without insurmountable drag-coefficiency penalties. A larger body implies that you touch more of the atmosphere and the more you touch of the atmosphere, well, the more the atmosphere touches you, and anything that touches more costs more money to fly, that’s the drag of it.
Thus, unable to increase speed in order to make more flights within 24 hours, the next logical solution to moving more passengers in and out faster is to increase the size of the plane, fit more people in it and then you can move more people without using more planes, hence the new generation of jumbo jets that will be the equivalent of flying two planes at once, only at the cost of flying one plane, and using the flight bandwidth of just one giant plane.
But cram them and cram them has its limits too, and no one wants to think of the day that a super jumbo jet with 800 passengers crashes, but that little horror aside the growth of passengers will continue to rise for the foreseeable future so the solution of larger planes offers little hope that travel will actually get better for you and your luggage, though the differences between the two is indiscernible. Why it takes decades to expand an airport and decades to build new airplanes, and decades to understand migration and travel patterns and in decades to come oil is only going to get more expensive, so whatever the airline industry saves on consumption, through newer technologies, it will pay out as higher oil prices, due to increased demand; and that will subsume any cost benefit advantages.
You don’t get something for nothing, the airline industry is certainly proof of that and so you might say why are there airline executives even in that crazy industry, if you could be the CEO of a major airline, why would you want that headache when you could just as easily be the CEO of less cumbersome businesses? Certainly pilots love to fly and the intricacies of flying a jumbo jet have their crossword puzzle mesmerizing qualities; and certainly flight attendants love the benefits of being able to travel throughout the world and meeting interesting peoples; and for sure jet engine mechanics love drag racing; and we don’t know what to say about baggage handlers, or ticket attendants, there the glamour of the job is lost, but certainly there are plenty of people that work at an airline because they like what they do, but who would want to run an airline company, a thing three times removed from its consumer, a third-person’s perspective company?
The key to the riddle is very simple, the reason why the airline industry shows poor earnings every year, or when it does show a strong year, a rarity, it is usually one of low returns its because we measure companies on a fiscal yearly basis. This fiscal year measure works rather fine for chocolate makers and car manufactures and coal producers, as they are primal companies, thus such annual measure is more realizable than it is to measure an industry that is a third-party to everyone else’s actions; you could say it and it has been said, that the airline industry is there so that the plane makers can make airplanes; and you may extend that in any direction as it is equally true from any angle the airline industry is a third-party constituency to another industry: be it the restaurant or hotel industry or conventions or business industry etc.. the point is that as such, the basis by which we measure the airline industry should be fiscally generational, as tendencies in consumption and trends tend to be generational inflows, and thus an accurate listing of the genuine financials of a third-party type industry, as we now dare to define and claim the airline industry to be, should indicate a more precise and relevant measure of its sound or not business model. Executives that then work in this industry have not the capacity to see that there is no way to make an airline financially sound within the scope of a fiscal year but their myopia allows them to work for the industry.
In showing these various relationships some readers would argue that the same could said of the ground transport industry, or the shipping industry that are indeed basic third-party models, (and more industries such as pharmaceuticals which would seem to be fundamentally third-party-industries but that strangely also depend on ephemeral third party constructs, illnesses, diseases, viruses, governmental regulation, etc as catalysts for their own third party drug business to flourish and profit;¬¬¬) and I wouldn’t have any problem with those types of conclusions.
In brief: all types that depend on all types are fundamentally represented by their type.
RC
Bellybuttons are always interesting and fascinating, they are after all the thing that connected everyone of us, except perhaps Jesus Christ, Adam and Eve for they were a trio apparently conceived from a father or a hip; but the rest of us are all tied to mother through the umbilical chord and that harmony resonates through us all, and so when we see each others bellybuttons, well we know we are not Adam or Eve or Jesus but that we are all mammals.
Chickens don’t have bellybuttons, dinosaurs (are they mammals?) didn’t have bellybuttons, dolphins probably have belly buttons, I don’t really know that but I am not going to look it up, I should just be able to guess that they do. The matter is that anyone with a bellybutton could in theory participate in the bellybutton fashion show of oneness.
There is however one odd thing about fashion sense, African women and the women of India and Persia, have been exposing their bellybuttons for thousands of centuries so they are not so much participating in the fashion sense of the day; for a belly dancer is a cultural icon and her dress code has been defined as it has been for thousands of years; a genie doesn’t dress for the times. and so you could imagine a part of the world, for sure in India and Africa and Persia where exposing one’s bellybutton cannot be defined as fashion sense, instead it becomes an unconscious act, people from these places do not know that they are being fashionable because for them it isn’t fashion as much as it is tradition, and in order to be fashionable you have to be self-conscious.
Recently, democratic elections were permitted in Egypt, and wouldn’t you know it, of the seven possible candidates the one that they are most likely to elect is the same dictator they have had for decades, Mubarak. Not unlikely, in Russia, Vladimir Putin the head of state, a man that, according to the constitution cannot run for reelection, would undoubtedly win a democratic election even as he has acted to concentrate power and indeed rules as a benevolent dictator. And in my own country, Colombia, we have a democratically elected president, Mr. Uribe, who is actually more a dictator from the Harvard School of Business; and he is philosophically hopeful that a modified constitution will allow him an uninterrupted reign; for us Colombians only have this one man that can rule our country. At the periphery of Colombia is Venezuela where Hugo Chavez has been democratically elected to lead a Bolivarian revolution that will, if successful, make Uribe redundant. Chavez has facilitated his reign by making healthcare and education a national beneficence thus making himself popular enough to militaristically dictate over the affairs of his own country and its oil production.
You can see a pattern in politics much like you may see a pattern in fashion and the pattern here is that a people, democratically ruled, or ruled by dictators or kings, or parliaments are usually being ruled by the person or persons that they would have as their rulers!
Democratic states always pride themselves on the fact that they put their politicians up for popular nomination by their constituency. The assumption being that only a vote, a public and monitored vote will produce a true representative of a people. This is of course a fallacious assumption as we have seen throughout political history that countries, be they democratic, parliamentary, republican, dictatorial, militaristic and or monarchistic will invariably elect and promote similar political dynasties; and these dynasties tend to represent the “national character.”
The Russians have always liked absolutist tsars to rule them because the average Russian considers himself a serf and is his own worst enemy; as admirers of theological and monarchical theatrics they suffer the disease of blood relations and when it comes to war they love to bleed like the hemophiliacs that they are; but more they bleed because they believe that bloodletting heals the family tree.
South Americans have a tendency to love populist dictators or fatherly types because Latin men cannot bring themselves to leave their mothers and cease fearing their fathers; and Latin women have not learned to steal their boys from their mothers and become wives, but rather remain daddy’s little girl.
Italians like to be ruled by a mosaic of inconsistencies that are possessed by fanatic objectives.
The English have always liked their rulers to have higher aims with lower causes that can only be objectified by indifference and is superimposed by a brilliant disguise of witticisms.
Africans have always preferred despots, the African heart despises politics, its ear to the ground it prefers barbarian rule and barbarian law, it sublets politics to instinct and wild passions.
Unconsciously, Japan has never wanted its rulers to change, it always selects those that will forgo change, for the Japanese samurai is based on rigor, discipline, intensity of self domination, and subjugation; politically, Japan is a fetish.
The Chinese masses promote leaders that will isolate them from the rest of the world so as to acquire their one billionth of uniqueness from the rest of us. The Chinese also prefer leaders that are patient turtles in their acts, throughout Chinese history the thread of continuity is significant: a dominant aversion to foreigners, a certainty about the completeness of the Chinese universe, and as such a country and a people that can only be changed within, while promoting eons of change through spontaneous national-soul-catharses as mandated by their ambivalence towards individualism.
It is an inherent and natural tendency for national psyches to predetermine their leaders, regardless of the means to power, by a national and coherent consensus that rigorously mandates the character of the elected one.
The Bush-Republican dynasty of America is a consequence of a national psyche that was feeling insecure in the world, and seeks a rearguard action in a desperate attempt to bring a drastically changing world under a new hegemony. Bush has impressively trounced outmoded principles with callous disregard of the possible consequences; and we must be fair to him, the cold war was over, the treaties and the diplomatic mindsets that set international relations were open to discussion, Bush simply disbanded them. That which cannot be undone must be cut!
In a sense, the collective American psyche concluded that the world had changed dramatically, from the collapse of the soviet union forward, and that whatever came next no one could know, the only thing that you could do was tear everything apart and then let what must come from it rise as demanded and permitted by the new world order. Much to their credit Americans have always understood that change is something that you cannot control but that it is something that must be done; what defines the American psyche is their willingness to go into the unknown armed with only their wits about them. By selecting a president with no prejudice towards change, by electing a man that had no sense of history and ritual, they elected to realize that the modern world had changed and that they had to put a wrecking ball to the treaties and consensus of old and let what commeth may.
It takes a lot of guts to do that and Americans are admirable for their guts. By ball wrecking the past they fast forward the unknown future and have as their advantage the fact that they are always looking towards the horizon to solve all of their problems; thus they are able to perceive and indeed acquire the benefits of change much to the envy of the French who are a backward looking people, always thinking that that they can intellectualize the world and master its poetic passions in stanzas.
The French are fascinating, besides the Greeks of old no one has thought, much to their own detriment, more than the French. The French continually administer thought to their feelings, and their feelings are continually made prudish by it. Thus, in a remarkable fashion the French are fashionable but like all fashions their impact is severely handicapped by how fashionable it is. Of course a French leader has to write poems and novels, he has to have an intrusive understanding of history and needs to posses a certain effeminate disposability of character. In America these very traits would be admonished as the means of a charlatan to acquire distinction; and indeed to a large extent French history is a verbal attribute of marmalades through the promenade; still, as we shall see, these intricacies of a romanticized existence play their role in the world community.
The French have elected, and are so appointed, to be the guardians of past eccentricities, these only look like eccentricities to us now because they are adulterated by our modern worldview, in their time many of the traditions guarded by the French had their relevance. Today the wine industry has grown globally to a large extent because the French have lost control of the wine making process. But the traditions of wine making so fervently and bureaucratically guarded by the French wine makers have atoned the consistency and largely defined purpose and essence worldwide. This distinction implies that the French guard the historical presence and by doing so create the scope by which all other precedents for winemaking sift into the aging process.
It is then true that the meticulousness of winemaking, as done in France, with its infinite varieties and glorified plots would have never made a global en mass wine industry but it is also true that a global wine industry would not have been possible had it not been so.
In much the same manner we could judge how France elects its political framers, looks to set a precise precedent that while not the type to conquer the mindsets of the world, will instead be worldly. And that worldly aspect of it will undoubtedly effect, in unknown ways, how others frame their worldview or legal premise.
The wine industry is a cognoscenti reference to yet another industry that haplessly marches from tragedy to tragedy, with its own occasional fashion show of characters who trifle with the imagination: The airline industry.
Calling it the “airline industry” might be a misnomer as more money is made selling planes than is made flying passengers around the world; certainly Boeing and Airbus benefit greatly from the interesting fact that Airlines benefit from having two suppliers of Airplanes so as to reduce the risk of dependence upon one or the other; and so Boeing and Airbus are exemplars of a dual-monopoly with zero compromises. But still we talk about the “airline industry” because that is the mouth of the monster that feeds the travel industry from any angle: travel agencies, hoteliers, insurances, rental car agencies, plane manufactures, caterers, restaurateurs, conventioneers, eco hot spots, tropical islands, exotic getaways, theme parks, historical England, the royal family, Stonehenge, the pyramids, Bhutan, and the biggest rock in Australia all benefit first and foremost from the passenger-eating airline industry.
Yet even as all that is true, with all those dependencies the airline industry would, at first sight appear to be the worst run industry, the least profitable, the most strife-ridden by labor disputes, the most likely to suffer from prime material shortages or price fluctuations, and equally the most regulated of all industries and the least capable of price gouging its customers, as stiff competition sets a low profit margin, and high operating costs set stringently high load factors as the prerequisite to profitability.
In the final analysis the industry that most serves to riddle the world with immigrants and to bring businesses, governments and peoples closest together, the industry that shrinks the world continues to be an accountant’s nightmare. But then we must ask why doesn’t it just all go bankrupt and be done with it. Certainly the law of supply and demand would imply that there are far too many seats on airplanes if they are sold as such bargain rates that in the end the traveler is not paying the true cost of a ticket, upfront. That would all call for a logical free hand correction where maybe more airlines would go bankrupt, the prices could then rise, airplane seats per passenger capacity would fall, fewer people would afford travel but then the airline industry could be profitable and stay competitive.
Why doesn’t that happen? Is it because countries like Italy want to protect their airlines so that they are willing to subsidize their carriers into inferiority? Is it because bankruptcy laws in the United States are too liberal and kind to those companies that come under its protection? Is it because bankers and investors that finance the billions of dollars in airplane leases do not want to write off their losses and so they continue to renegotiate debt and reinvest hoping for a brighter day?
The truth of the airline industry is much less stark, and it is not the harbinger of bad news that the newspaper industry has made it out to be.
The airline industry isn’t an industry! It isn’t an industry because it cannot stand by itself, and more because it is not a principal in the acts of its progress. When airlines move people they always do it from a perspective of intermediaries, they are indeed what we ought call a “third-party-industry”; they are acting more as a go between than a causa célèbre or as prime mover of the thing itself. This is precisely why the airline industry does not really have high customer satisfaction and it is also why it doesn’t have high customer loyalty. You will change airlines faster than you would change toothpaste brands. You cannot feel any significant differences in airplanes, as a reason to fly this or that airline, for a modern Airbus or a modern Boeing airliner feel very much the same, first class is first class, but most of the rest of us are in cramped class, and the meals aren’t getting any better and the service is obviously not factor number one with the airlines.
If you want to know who cares about you, you just have to review their list of priorities, in the airline industry it is fuel cost, labor cost, maintenance cost, and cost per flight seat mile, then service and food, I might have the order wrong but service and food are certainly least important. So you might ask why doesn’t the airline industry care about you?
Well, don’t take it personally, the airline industry simply is not in the business of caring about you. It is in the business of moving you, your family, your friends, your business partners, your government officials, and the rest of the world’s peoples between to and fro; and this is very much like the transportation system of the slave trade, there aren’t any benefits to be gained in making you more comfortable and feeding you better, only more costs. To the airline industry the idea of you is an ephemeral idea, you exist as a piece of inventory that the longer you remain on the shelf the more you depreciate in value and thus the airline follows the old warehouse rule, first in first out and just in time inventory is what you are to them. When a plane lands gotta get you in there fast and out fast and the faster the better.
The harrowing narrowing of time between the time that the airline industry picks you up and delivers you to your destination has come under a theological constraint: the speed of sound. The speed of sound is a problem because airplanes that fly at the speed of sound make a lot of noise and people don’t like noisy neighbors. But there is a bigger constraint to it than just shockwaves, fast planes need to be small so they can slip through the air without insurmountable drag-coefficiency penalties. A larger body implies that you touch more of the atmosphere and the more you touch of the atmosphere, well, the more the atmosphere touches you, and anything that touches more costs more money to fly, that’s the drag of it.
Thus, unable to increase speed in order to make more flights within 24 hours, the next logical solution to moving more passengers in and out faster is to increase the size of the plane, fit more people in it and then you can move more people without using more planes, hence the new generation of jumbo jets that will be the equivalent of flying two planes at once, only at the cost of flying one plane, and using the flight bandwidth of just one giant plane.
But cram them and cram them has its limits too, and no one wants to think of the day that a super jumbo jet with 800 passengers crashes, but that little horror aside the growth of passengers will continue to rise for the foreseeable future so the solution of larger planes offers little hope that travel will actually get better for you and your luggage, though the differences between the two is indiscernible. Why it takes decades to expand an airport and decades to build new airplanes, and decades to understand migration and travel patterns and in decades to come oil is only going to get more expensive, so whatever the airline industry saves on consumption, through newer technologies, it will pay out as higher oil prices, due to increased demand; and that will subsume any cost benefit advantages.
You don’t get something for nothing, the airline industry is certainly proof of that and so you might say why are there airline executives even in that crazy industry, if you could be the CEO of a major airline, why would you want that headache when you could just as easily be the CEO of less cumbersome businesses? Certainly pilots love to fly and the intricacies of flying a jumbo jet have their crossword puzzle mesmerizing qualities; and certainly flight attendants love the benefits of being able to travel throughout the world and meeting interesting peoples; and for sure jet engine mechanics love drag racing; and we don’t know what to say about baggage handlers, or ticket attendants, there the glamour of the job is lost, but certainly there are plenty of people that work at an airline because they like what they do, but who would want to run an airline company, a thing three times removed from its consumer, a third-person’s perspective company?
The key to the riddle is very simple, the reason why the airline industry shows poor earnings every year, or when it does show a strong year, a rarity, it is usually one of low returns its because we measure companies on a fiscal yearly basis. This fiscal year measure works rather fine for chocolate makers and car manufactures and coal producers, as they are primal companies, thus such annual measure is more realizable than it is to measure an industry that is a third-party to everyone else’s actions; you could say it and it has been said, that the airline industry is there so that the plane makers can make airplanes; and you may extend that in any direction as it is equally true from any angle the airline industry is a third-party constituency to another industry: be it the restaurant or hotel industry or conventions or business industry etc.. the point is that as such, the basis by which we measure the airline industry should be fiscally generational, as tendencies in consumption and trends tend to be generational inflows, and thus an accurate listing of the genuine financials of a third-party type industry, as we now dare to define and claim the airline industry to be, should indicate a more precise and relevant measure of its sound or not business model. Executives that then work in this industry have not the capacity to see that there is no way to make an airline financially sound within the scope of a fiscal year but their myopia allows them to work for the industry.
In showing these various relationships some readers would argue that the same could said of the ground transport industry, or the shipping industry that are indeed basic third-party models, (and more industries such as pharmaceuticals which would seem to be fundamentally third-party-industries but that strangely also depend on ephemeral third party constructs, illnesses, diseases, viruses, governmental regulation, etc as catalysts for their own third party drug business to flourish and profit;¬¬¬) and I wouldn’t have any problem with those types of conclusions.
In brief: all types that depend on all types are fundamentally represented by their type.
RC
Sunday, September 11, 2005
In & Of the Way I Write
I have just reviewed the contents of a bottle of Queen Anne whisky and there appear to be plenty enough to last me through this excerpt from a letter to Rosa. Yes I have started drinking whiskey, the logical progression of a distressed alcoholic, an organized life must follow patterns, that is what I say.
Lets take up the point of control, and let us try to view the universe through a different set of eyes than those afforded us by the five thinkers that control the modern world psyche. Instead suppose that I am right, and that we are attached to everything and everything is attached to us, and then suppose that our brains are not per say autonomous units that operate to divine logic but instead let us suppose that our brains are nothing more than antennae that pick up all sentient elements, be they experience or aesthetic principles, the latter being voided of experience as they are rather for the enjoyment of feeling the remarkable associations throughout the sentient geometry of all beings.
Recently Ravens have been caught in the act of being sneaky, calculating and forward thinking. A raven was spotted stealing from another raven as a way of avoiding doing work like figuring out where the pebble was. The other raven, (doing all the work, figuring out where the pebble was and then pressing the appropriate tray,) realized that he was being taken advantage of by the greater bully, and so tricked the bully into thinking that the pebble was in the place where it wasn’t, and while bully was at it the imaginative raven went on and ate the real pebble.
An article, on the subject, in the New York Times, went on to say how we might have to redefine the “Them and Us” way of thinking about the animal world if we keep on encountering behaviors that were once only attributed to humans.
If a raven may well be cunning then what realm of human experience isn’t covered by that, not much Id say. Day after day I watch Bush handle a reelection and I say that guy was cunning; then they tell me how he once owned a baseball team and I say that was cunning; and then he makes a war because he is a war president and I say there is a guy that sees opportunity when he sees it; and now with Katrina all over the map, the guy continues to con us all. And so suffice it to say that the difference between Bush and a Raven is that the Raven is less cunning which is to say more good.
Regardless of all that the raven is not cunning because he is smart with that bird brain of his, anymore than we can say that president Bush is smart because he has a little brain. However for once, W will help us advance the cause of humankind in much the same way that the Raven will too. Even though they do not have large brains both W and R can be effectively cunning because they tapped into the entire spectrum of sentient activity, they feel their surroundings by letting their essence bleed through and thus the surroundings bled back all the environmental information in a sort of communed feedback loop; where they can then use the gamut of human or sentient essence experience throughout their daily activity; this as if indeed they were all knowing or very smart indeed.
It is easier for us to think that our president is a very smart man, else why would he be our president, than it is for us to imagine that he is merely a puppet of a collective political agenda, of which he is merely a fundamental receptor.
The brain is really only a receptor that is in one form or another possessed by all sentient life forms, so that they may detect one another and thus share in each others experiences; anyone that uses their brain merely as a receptor is most likely to gain the greatest benefit as they have an unobstructed access to the community of sentient knowledge - that is all throughout the feeling environment.
It is only a matter of time before the false barrier of species will be broken by the communality of sentient creatures and the discovery of greedy ravens, gay pigeons and rapist dolphins is only a harbinger of the dilution of barriers between them and us.
When I think, actively think, I am performing a cataloging function, that is I am working to retrieve information so that in can be stored in the supra consciousness formulated by all sentient beings; this consciousness feeds and funnels that information to any one willing to receive it or indeed in need of it. If a monkey in Africa learns to use a stick, by using his brain method, this information is instantly available, if so desired or needed, to any other monkey or even human species throughout the world.
There are two types of writers, writers that write like me, that is merely to reflect the supra consciousness and then there are writers that write from a discovery point of view. Hemiway, Wilde and good old Victor Hugo write from the point of this is the world, this is the world, and they are securing that reality and feeding that data back to the supra consciousness. Writers like Holderlin, Blake, Rimbaud and that darling Correa write what is already in the supra consciousness. We are not so much investigators as we are assuming that the whole, that has come to be from the collection of its parts, has created an entire unknown entity, within the supra consciousness; it is that entity that we are trying to touch and represent.
As such, since I am reading what has already been written then I have no need to think as my brain is only a receptor and any thinking that I do on my part is merely interference.
All writers that are technical in nature do well to collect their thoughts and organize them and formulate them accordingly; but writers like me that touch the supreme aesthetic will do best to touch the aesthetic while trying to avoid the very bad feelings that that will bring into this here existence. As a writer of the aesthetic I am often in touch with very primal forces, which while not genuine to our supra consciousness still manage to impose a penalty, a pain upon me which often times causes me to want to curl into a corner and reconcile myself into the wall.
The individual actors of this world might well think me insane, they don’t see all the connections that I feel, they don’t recognize that back pain or migraines are actually caused by the misalignment of individuals with their sentient metrics. Nor do they realize that the reason why advance civilizations tend to gain more weight, become fatter, is because more sentient energy, from throughout the world, is centered upon then and thus causes them to increase in heft as they cannot unleash that energy fast enough.
Bush is precisely in need of exercising a lot as he has a lot of energy concentrated on him. Equally he has that collective energy to use in ample ways, without having to think, so that he may cruise the globe with the agenda of his nation and the agenda of the world.
RC
Lets take up the point of control, and let us try to view the universe through a different set of eyes than those afforded us by the five thinkers that control the modern world psyche. Instead suppose that I am right, and that we are attached to everything and everything is attached to us, and then suppose that our brains are not per say autonomous units that operate to divine logic but instead let us suppose that our brains are nothing more than antennae that pick up all sentient elements, be they experience or aesthetic principles, the latter being voided of experience as they are rather for the enjoyment of feeling the remarkable associations throughout the sentient geometry of all beings.
Recently Ravens have been caught in the act of being sneaky, calculating and forward thinking. A raven was spotted stealing from another raven as a way of avoiding doing work like figuring out where the pebble was. The other raven, (doing all the work, figuring out where the pebble was and then pressing the appropriate tray,) realized that he was being taken advantage of by the greater bully, and so tricked the bully into thinking that the pebble was in the place where it wasn’t, and while bully was at it the imaginative raven went on and ate the real pebble.
An article, on the subject, in the New York Times, went on to say how we might have to redefine the “Them and Us” way of thinking about the animal world if we keep on encountering behaviors that were once only attributed to humans.
If a raven may well be cunning then what realm of human experience isn’t covered by that, not much Id say. Day after day I watch Bush handle a reelection and I say that guy was cunning; then they tell me how he once owned a baseball team and I say that was cunning; and then he makes a war because he is a war president and I say there is a guy that sees opportunity when he sees it; and now with Katrina all over the map, the guy continues to con us all. And so suffice it to say that the difference between Bush and a Raven is that the Raven is less cunning which is to say more good.
Regardless of all that the raven is not cunning because he is smart with that bird brain of his, anymore than we can say that president Bush is smart because he has a little brain. However for once, W will help us advance the cause of humankind in much the same way that the Raven will too. Even though they do not have large brains both W and R can be effectively cunning because they tapped into the entire spectrum of sentient activity, they feel their surroundings by letting their essence bleed through and thus the surroundings bled back all the environmental information in a sort of communed feedback loop; where they can then use the gamut of human or sentient essence experience throughout their daily activity; this as if indeed they were all knowing or very smart indeed.
It is easier for us to think that our president is a very smart man, else why would he be our president, than it is for us to imagine that he is merely a puppet of a collective political agenda, of which he is merely a fundamental receptor.
The brain is really only a receptor that is in one form or another possessed by all sentient life forms, so that they may detect one another and thus share in each others experiences; anyone that uses their brain merely as a receptor is most likely to gain the greatest benefit as they have an unobstructed access to the community of sentient knowledge - that is all throughout the feeling environment.
It is only a matter of time before the false barrier of species will be broken by the communality of sentient creatures and the discovery of greedy ravens, gay pigeons and rapist dolphins is only a harbinger of the dilution of barriers between them and us.
When I think, actively think, I am performing a cataloging function, that is I am working to retrieve information so that in can be stored in the supra consciousness formulated by all sentient beings; this consciousness feeds and funnels that information to any one willing to receive it or indeed in need of it. If a monkey in Africa learns to use a stick, by using his brain method, this information is instantly available, if so desired or needed, to any other monkey or even human species throughout the world.
There are two types of writers, writers that write like me, that is merely to reflect the supra consciousness and then there are writers that write from a discovery point of view. Hemiway, Wilde and good old Victor Hugo write from the point of this is the world, this is the world, and they are securing that reality and feeding that data back to the supra consciousness. Writers like Holderlin, Blake, Rimbaud and that darling Correa write what is already in the supra consciousness. We are not so much investigators as we are assuming that the whole, that has come to be from the collection of its parts, has created an entire unknown entity, within the supra consciousness; it is that entity that we are trying to touch and represent.
As such, since I am reading what has already been written then I have no need to think as my brain is only a receptor and any thinking that I do on my part is merely interference.
All writers that are technical in nature do well to collect their thoughts and organize them and formulate them accordingly; but writers like me that touch the supreme aesthetic will do best to touch the aesthetic while trying to avoid the very bad feelings that that will bring into this here existence. As a writer of the aesthetic I am often in touch with very primal forces, which while not genuine to our supra consciousness still manage to impose a penalty, a pain upon me which often times causes me to want to curl into a corner and reconcile myself into the wall.
The individual actors of this world might well think me insane, they don’t see all the connections that I feel, they don’t recognize that back pain or migraines are actually caused by the misalignment of individuals with their sentient metrics. Nor do they realize that the reason why advance civilizations tend to gain more weight, become fatter, is because more sentient energy, from throughout the world, is centered upon then and thus causes them to increase in heft as they cannot unleash that energy fast enough.
Bush is precisely in need of exercising a lot as he has a lot of energy concentrated on him. Equally he has that collective energy to use in ample ways, without having to think, so that he may cruise the globe with the agenda of his nation and the agenda of the world.
RC
Saturday, September 03, 2005
The Salsa Train
I was now on a train, a train to not exactly anywhere, I had bought my own caboose, two really, one for me and the wife and the other for the boys, my traveling companions, my partners, we sold our secret hot sauces at every train stop. People loved them, people waited for our chili train to return, they would stop working to visit with us, they would forget their children and chores, they say that the towns clocks would stop to give everyone a respite; I believe it, we make good chili salsa.
My wife, I better tell you about her now before I forget, she likes to clean a lot, she cleans all the time, these train carts get dirty a lot, they are dust collectors, as they move they pick up everything, from flies to traveling salesmen to lurid lovers, to secret agents, to dirty, dirty people, my wife cleans all the time; right now she is scrubbing the wooden floor, it will look pretty clean to me and to you after she is done, but not to her. I think she needs a kid, we don’t want to have children, or so we tell ourselves.
I am 62 now, the wife is 54, yeah I think she can still have children, but there are telling signs that we have endured and besides its just that on a train, well, what kind of life is that. We are always moving, I don’t know any other way to make a living than on this train, selling hot sauce, it’s a good ride, we don’t spend much money, we buy the ingredients at various ends of the continent and then while on the track we make it adding our secret touch, and there you have it, we circle the continent in an endless loop.
The train halts, the mountains cease to move backwards, the birds beat the train passing glances with an inching of pride, as the roaring of the diesel engines quiets into a loud humming perseverance of continuance. Diesel engines will run forever, something in them is bred for longevity, the workhorse of trade and industry are these engines, not those weaklings, maintenance heavy gasoline engines; our train is powered by a diesel and I always like to hear that roaring silence as silent as a diesel can get while we stop, the diesel keeps humming saying I am set to go on and on, it is not about speed, it is about endurance.
As our train eases into town you stop hearing the wind crossing from every direction, the squeaks and creaking noises disappear and instead you hear the children of Barington, a town full of life and yet of less than 8000 people, of which maybe thirty-five percent are children, we want to get them started early on our hot sauce train culture, and since they all love Emma, my wife, well that makes it all that much easier.
Emma comes to life when the children come up to her, they know she brings candy and trinkets from far away places that they will mostly never see, there are little plastic elephants smiling with their trunks way up in the air, and there are tigers made of wood which we pick up from a fellow in Obregon; a cold town with a hostile people with perhaps the best trinket maker in all of Asia, Stapho, or so he calls himself, I doubt he ever had a mother or a father but he was always a child and as such has always been his craft to make wooden lions and tigers and too many cobra snakes for my taste; still Obregon is a cold place, and there isn’t any heart there, the bandits are hardly welcoming though they eat our aji as raw chew for their teeth and we accept their money without questioning its origins; but we really enjoy Obregon because Stapho offers us his trinket craft, and his eyes get painfully happy when we tell him how the children, from far away places, react when we give them his trinkets. His brow lights up, you can see a fire sprinting from behind his old and dirty tunic, his bonny thorax heaves, and swirls of kisses reach us from his palms touching our faces in gratitude. This even as we don’t pay him but the bare minimum for it, Emma is a bargain shopper, she takes care of too many children and so she has to be careful with her spending, and besides that it would be rude to pay Stapho more than what the bandits pay him to make knifes of hardened tree stumps. It would be rude, or worse, unconscionable.
The kids love those toys, I keep some in our salsa kitchen, which is also where our bedroom is, they are soothing to the eye, like Stapho they are not looking for anything just a little appreciation perhaps, and that is not that hard to give to little creations of well crafted wood, with golden or green eyes, with dotted or striped bodies, and all in vivid primary colors, enchantingly simple.
Emma has a perfect memory of which kids she gave tigers to, or elephants or eagles and throughout the continent she remembers the names of each as if indeed they were all her children; which some would like to think themselves ours as dreams come to them of getting on our train and drifting off into those storied lands made up by Emma for them. These are not the lands we actually see, not those dry desserts, or those freezing mountains, nor the nutrient faulty lands, nor the hungry and poor folk that by far dominate our route, not the sting of cadavers occasionally badly disposed, not the disrobing hangings that happen along the way so as to warn the train travelers not to stop, no Emma leaves an imprint of a world full of marveling and merit, a world that everyone of the children will yearn to see until their elder years make them blind.
“No, no Yuri you already got a tiger, you show me your tiger or I will not give you anything, show it to me.”
Its sort of a game they play, she wont see Yuri for a few months to come and they just see each other long enough to argue that he would like to have two tigers while Emma would prefer that first all of the other children have tigers, and there are so many of them that we will subside before that happens.
But Yuri wants a second tiger, “My tiger madam is sad, very sad, he is lonely, he needs lady tiger to have children with and to marry and to get food for her.”
Emma looks askance “…get food for her?”
Yuri yells to make sure she hears above the roaring of the other children, “He is not eating he tells me he needs to be a father and a husband that he wants to hunt for someone else, he wants to feed his wife.”
Emma retains a small quiet because she wants to burst into laughter, but she holds back because she realizes that in some way Yuri is serious and serious in a way that could be painful to realize, she reconciles this and speaks in a gentle voice, “Well I think your green tiger better eat or there wont be much hope of him finding a wife, maybe on the next trip tiger lady will come with me, I will try to find her for you, but I cannot promise anything.”
With those words resonating in his mind, Yuri sort of despondently walks away and Emma calls him back, “Yuri.” He doesn’t turn around he is looking off at the distance, “Yuri!” He pauses and turns back, where Emma is right there to meet him hunkering down and hugging him, “You forgot your candy, its green like your tiger, its tiger food promise me you will eat it.”
Yuri retains his seriousness, “When will you return to us?”
“Oh it be a few months, maybe they will come faster,” she tries to hide the moisture in her eyes, “…you know the earth is shrinking Yuri, every year now the world is getting smaller, so we might return much sooner.”
He softens a little upon the news of a shrinking world. “I will eat the green candy then, but I will wait some days, just some days before I do.” And he grabbed the candy from her hands, pausing to feel with his eyes the pattern of her empty palm, as if a map of her whereabouts revealed itself to him, where he could be with her through some geography.
Emma watched Yuri fade into the sands of dry bush, she watched the skinny boy fading into the blades of grass, and from the station I was watching her; her long light grey skirt, picking up some sand, her white shirt reflecting the fragrance of the hot sun, her long burgundy-brown hair bundled into restraint, and still I kept on yelling that last sale. “Get your Aji now, wont be back for a while, get your Aji now, buy enough to last you till our next time…”
Only my words were drowning in the rubbing up sounds of a diesel engine roaring to go, the water tank was full, the conductor rang the air plummeting whistle three times fast, whole mechanics and hydraulics were throbbing through the dusty air, the children began to quiet in awe upon hearing the machine come to life; every time it was an amazing thing for them, they never got used to trains, they were other worldly, and we were other worldly too. Everyone started to clear out so as to make room for this huge black locomotive to engorge the scenery with its essence, even as it could not leave the tracks its immensity pounded itself throughout the surroundings engulfing everyone’s senses. Mirk, our conductor, felt all their attention laid upon him and this made him want to roar off even more, his kick was in arriving and in leaving, those two moments made him love his chu-chu train, in-between the stops and gos there was a lot of senile boredom.
When the train begun to rumble movement I realized that Emma was still hunkering down as if Yuri were still there, “Emma, Emma! The train, the train, we have to go. It is leaving Emma.”
My wife looked at me with her light blue eyes, without a word saying, “Yes I know darling, I am coming.”
And she did come, but first she had to swallow her insides whole.
RC
My wife, I better tell you about her now before I forget, she likes to clean a lot, she cleans all the time, these train carts get dirty a lot, they are dust collectors, as they move they pick up everything, from flies to traveling salesmen to lurid lovers, to secret agents, to dirty, dirty people, my wife cleans all the time; right now she is scrubbing the wooden floor, it will look pretty clean to me and to you after she is done, but not to her. I think she needs a kid, we don’t want to have children, or so we tell ourselves.
I am 62 now, the wife is 54, yeah I think she can still have children, but there are telling signs that we have endured and besides its just that on a train, well, what kind of life is that. We are always moving, I don’t know any other way to make a living than on this train, selling hot sauce, it’s a good ride, we don’t spend much money, we buy the ingredients at various ends of the continent and then while on the track we make it adding our secret touch, and there you have it, we circle the continent in an endless loop.
The train halts, the mountains cease to move backwards, the birds beat the train passing glances with an inching of pride, as the roaring of the diesel engines quiets into a loud humming perseverance of continuance. Diesel engines will run forever, something in them is bred for longevity, the workhorse of trade and industry are these engines, not those weaklings, maintenance heavy gasoline engines; our train is powered by a diesel and I always like to hear that roaring silence as silent as a diesel can get while we stop, the diesel keeps humming saying I am set to go on and on, it is not about speed, it is about endurance.
As our train eases into town you stop hearing the wind crossing from every direction, the squeaks and creaking noises disappear and instead you hear the children of Barington, a town full of life and yet of less than 8000 people, of which maybe thirty-five percent are children, we want to get them started early on our hot sauce train culture, and since they all love Emma, my wife, well that makes it all that much easier.
Emma comes to life when the children come up to her, they know she brings candy and trinkets from far away places that they will mostly never see, there are little plastic elephants smiling with their trunks way up in the air, and there are tigers made of wood which we pick up from a fellow in Obregon; a cold town with a hostile people with perhaps the best trinket maker in all of Asia, Stapho, or so he calls himself, I doubt he ever had a mother or a father but he was always a child and as such has always been his craft to make wooden lions and tigers and too many cobra snakes for my taste; still Obregon is a cold place, and there isn’t any heart there, the bandits are hardly welcoming though they eat our aji as raw chew for their teeth and we accept their money without questioning its origins; but we really enjoy Obregon because Stapho offers us his trinket craft, and his eyes get painfully happy when we tell him how the children, from far away places, react when we give them his trinkets. His brow lights up, you can see a fire sprinting from behind his old and dirty tunic, his bonny thorax heaves, and swirls of kisses reach us from his palms touching our faces in gratitude. This even as we don’t pay him but the bare minimum for it, Emma is a bargain shopper, she takes care of too many children and so she has to be careful with her spending, and besides that it would be rude to pay Stapho more than what the bandits pay him to make knifes of hardened tree stumps. It would be rude, or worse, unconscionable.
The kids love those toys, I keep some in our salsa kitchen, which is also where our bedroom is, they are soothing to the eye, like Stapho they are not looking for anything just a little appreciation perhaps, and that is not that hard to give to little creations of well crafted wood, with golden or green eyes, with dotted or striped bodies, and all in vivid primary colors, enchantingly simple.
Emma has a perfect memory of which kids she gave tigers to, or elephants or eagles and throughout the continent she remembers the names of each as if indeed they were all her children; which some would like to think themselves ours as dreams come to them of getting on our train and drifting off into those storied lands made up by Emma for them. These are not the lands we actually see, not those dry desserts, or those freezing mountains, nor the nutrient faulty lands, nor the hungry and poor folk that by far dominate our route, not the sting of cadavers occasionally badly disposed, not the disrobing hangings that happen along the way so as to warn the train travelers not to stop, no Emma leaves an imprint of a world full of marveling and merit, a world that everyone of the children will yearn to see until their elder years make them blind.
“No, no Yuri you already got a tiger, you show me your tiger or I will not give you anything, show it to me.”
Its sort of a game they play, she wont see Yuri for a few months to come and they just see each other long enough to argue that he would like to have two tigers while Emma would prefer that first all of the other children have tigers, and there are so many of them that we will subside before that happens.
But Yuri wants a second tiger, “My tiger madam is sad, very sad, he is lonely, he needs lady tiger to have children with and to marry and to get food for her.”
Emma looks askance “…get food for her?”
Yuri yells to make sure she hears above the roaring of the other children, “He is not eating he tells me he needs to be a father and a husband that he wants to hunt for someone else, he wants to feed his wife.”
Emma retains a small quiet because she wants to burst into laughter, but she holds back because she realizes that in some way Yuri is serious and serious in a way that could be painful to realize, she reconciles this and speaks in a gentle voice, “Well I think your green tiger better eat or there wont be much hope of him finding a wife, maybe on the next trip tiger lady will come with me, I will try to find her for you, but I cannot promise anything.”
With those words resonating in his mind, Yuri sort of despondently walks away and Emma calls him back, “Yuri.” He doesn’t turn around he is looking off at the distance, “Yuri!” He pauses and turns back, where Emma is right there to meet him hunkering down and hugging him, “You forgot your candy, its green like your tiger, its tiger food promise me you will eat it.”
Yuri retains his seriousness, “When will you return to us?”
“Oh it be a few months, maybe they will come faster,” she tries to hide the moisture in her eyes, “…you know the earth is shrinking Yuri, every year now the world is getting smaller, so we might return much sooner.”
He softens a little upon the news of a shrinking world. “I will eat the green candy then, but I will wait some days, just some days before I do.” And he grabbed the candy from her hands, pausing to feel with his eyes the pattern of her empty palm, as if a map of her whereabouts revealed itself to him, where he could be with her through some geography.
Emma watched Yuri fade into the sands of dry bush, she watched the skinny boy fading into the blades of grass, and from the station I was watching her; her long light grey skirt, picking up some sand, her white shirt reflecting the fragrance of the hot sun, her long burgundy-brown hair bundled into restraint, and still I kept on yelling that last sale. “Get your Aji now, wont be back for a while, get your Aji now, buy enough to last you till our next time…”
Only my words were drowning in the rubbing up sounds of a diesel engine roaring to go, the water tank was full, the conductor rang the air plummeting whistle three times fast, whole mechanics and hydraulics were throbbing through the dusty air, the children began to quiet in awe upon hearing the machine come to life; every time it was an amazing thing for them, they never got used to trains, they were other worldly, and we were other worldly too. Everyone started to clear out so as to make room for this huge black locomotive to engorge the scenery with its essence, even as it could not leave the tracks its immensity pounded itself throughout the surroundings engulfing everyone’s senses. Mirk, our conductor, felt all their attention laid upon him and this made him want to roar off even more, his kick was in arriving and in leaving, those two moments made him love his chu-chu train, in-between the stops and gos there was a lot of senile boredom.
When the train begun to rumble movement I realized that Emma was still hunkering down as if Yuri were still there, “Emma, Emma! The train, the train, we have to go. It is leaving Emma.”
My wife looked at me with her light blue eyes, without a word saying, “Yes I know darling, I am coming.”
And she did come, but first she had to swallow her insides whole.
RC
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
On in Intelligent Design
I think it is beyond reason how callous and uninviting the rational world has come to be.
I am an atheist but I could not possibly believe that I know that there isn’t a god, there simply isn’t one that I feel. I feel spirits and believe in spirits, but they are just as bad or good as any of us, and not particularly remarkable as they appear to want to deliver messages, have agendas and suffer from a want of association and some times a scary temperament.
If some one asked me to prove that there are spirits I would not be able to as they don’t do what I say, and that aside I don’t know how others might detect what I feel. Still they are there, they visit me often and more so lately.
Then I think about this Intelligent Design being taught in schools and I think to myself well I don’t really care. I am out of school and really when I was in school I only paid attention to the things that mattered to me, mostly girls, and beyond that I don’t remember much else so what harm there.
Intelligent Design might just be a clever way for the Faithful, the God fearing creatures to get their doctrine into secular academics. Clever, yes.
Why they might have found the loophole in the constitution for separation between church and state. Intelligent Design, as the title properly connotes, is a rational approach to faith; that is it concludes that god must be intelligent, i.e. not supernatural, just more intelligent than you and I, and so much so as to impress us all. He knows how to tie all those neurons and synapses and make them snap at just the right time so we can know math and math can know us. In other words the Intelligent Design proponents do not believe that God himself is a miracle but simply that he is very much like Einstein only ten billion, billion times more intelligent than E.
I don’t think it takes much rationalizing to come to the conclusion that if you rationalize a god and parachute him into the everyday doings of humanity that you will undoubtedly rationalize him out of faith and heart and miracle and religion will thus collapse. If it hasn’t already collapsed, as evidenced by the proponents of Intelligent Design which basically imply that god wasn’t an amazing love-faith-unity thing, but rather just a practical fellow applying the knowable laws and parameters of the universe to make things like humans. In other words if a god that is nothing like us cannot be proven to exist then a god that is everything like us can exist and must be provable and thus teachable.
If the evolutionists reasoned it out they would be extremely happy at this magnificent turn of events in their favor. For the problem for the empiricists of this world has been religions lack of faith in reason but now the faithful are trying to be reasonable they are saying that god has to be knowledgeable and intelligent, god is now a thinker type. As such he cannot be far from adopting logic and reason as his mondus operandis and eventually, if the faithful keep going this way, god too will believe in evolution.
So if I were the scientific community I would welcome this new worldview from the faithful. Yet we must ponder then why the evolutionists the scientists, the secular philosophers the open minded liberals, why do they mind so much if something is taught at school, specially something like Intelligent Design and the Bible and anything else like it? Why are they so scare of it? Why do they dedicate so much energy and time to lampooning in lacerating language the fact that creationist fervor wants to go back to school?
Schools have been the leading dogmatists for secular thought, and if religion wants to become secular, i.e. intelligent, then let it be so. Do scientists really think the brain is going to go backwards? Is logic so fragile that its dominance could be seeing its frightful enemy, religion, getting one leg up on it. Is not the fact that experiment after incoherent experiment continually prove beyond doubt that scientists are indeed right and correct about everything they think about the universe, not proof enough to allow them to feel secure enough so as not to fear giving a lollipop at the school playground to the faithful mongers?
I suppose that there are many things one can spend intelligence upon even defending one’s causes, but if the faithful are feeling so insecure that they want to go back to school, so as to prove themselves, by all means let them.
It was Christ that said we shall not walk alongside the sinful and tainted, hence the reason why I dropped out of school.
RC
I am an atheist but I could not possibly believe that I know that there isn’t a god, there simply isn’t one that I feel. I feel spirits and believe in spirits, but they are just as bad or good as any of us, and not particularly remarkable as they appear to want to deliver messages, have agendas and suffer from a want of association and some times a scary temperament.
If some one asked me to prove that there are spirits I would not be able to as they don’t do what I say, and that aside I don’t know how others might detect what I feel. Still they are there, they visit me often and more so lately.
Then I think about this Intelligent Design being taught in schools and I think to myself well I don’t really care. I am out of school and really when I was in school I only paid attention to the things that mattered to me, mostly girls, and beyond that I don’t remember much else so what harm there.
Intelligent Design might just be a clever way for the Faithful, the God fearing creatures to get their doctrine into secular academics. Clever, yes.
Why they might have found the loophole in the constitution for separation between church and state. Intelligent Design, as the title properly connotes, is a rational approach to faith; that is it concludes that god must be intelligent, i.e. not supernatural, just more intelligent than you and I, and so much so as to impress us all. He knows how to tie all those neurons and synapses and make them snap at just the right time so we can know math and math can know us. In other words the Intelligent Design proponents do not believe that God himself is a miracle but simply that he is very much like Einstein only ten billion, billion times more intelligent than E.
I don’t think it takes much rationalizing to come to the conclusion that if you rationalize a god and parachute him into the everyday doings of humanity that you will undoubtedly rationalize him out of faith and heart and miracle and religion will thus collapse. If it hasn’t already collapsed, as evidenced by the proponents of Intelligent Design which basically imply that god wasn’t an amazing love-faith-unity thing, but rather just a practical fellow applying the knowable laws and parameters of the universe to make things like humans. In other words if a god that is nothing like us cannot be proven to exist then a god that is everything like us can exist and must be provable and thus teachable.
If the evolutionists reasoned it out they would be extremely happy at this magnificent turn of events in their favor. For the problem for the empiricists of this world has been religions lack of faith in reason but now the faithful are trying to be reasonable they are saying that god has to be knowledgeable and intelligent, god is now a thinker type. As such he cannot be far from adopting logic and reason as his mondus operandis and eventually, if the faithful keep going this way, god too will believe in evolution.
So if I were the scientific community I would welcome this new worldview from the faithful. Yet we must ponder then why the evolutionists the scientists, the secular philosophers the open minded liberals, why do they mind so much if something is taught at school, specially something like Intelligent Design and the Bible and anything else like it? Why are they so scare of it? Why do they dedicate so much energy and time to lampooning in lacerating language the fact that creationist fervor wants to go back to school?
Schools have been the leading dogmatists for secular thought, and if religion wants to become secular, i.e. intelligent, then let it be so. Do scientists really think the brain is going to go backwards? Is logic so fragile that its dominance could be seeing its frightful enemy, religion, getting one leg up on it. Is not the fact that experiment after incoherent experiment continually prove beyond doubt that scientists are indeed right and correct about everything they think about the universe, not proof enough to allow them to feel secure enough so as not to fear giving a lollipop at the school playground to the faithful mongers?
I suppose that there are many things one can spend intelligence upon even defending one’s causes, but if the faithful are feeling so insecure that they want to go back to school, so as to prove themselves, by all means let them.
It was Christ that said we shall not walk alongside the sinful and tainted, hence the reason why I dropped out of school.
RC
Friday, August 19, 2005
Magdlen
Well, well a mystery poet, I liked that touch.
It is said that geniuses are dunces and I will now testify that even us normal folk are too; I don’t have the gift to recognize individual characteristics in a person as my mind has the tendency to be a super-modeler, thus in my head personal characteristics are blurred into only those that can be amassed in the giant gelatinous whole we call humanity.
So be it you will tell me when you tell me but hey I like the tickling you’ve done.
Yes! Yes! Afghan from Kifre was an amazing piece to write, I knew I had released something spectacular, something friction free, something that would just flow and flow unhindered by pretense or by style. You caught that well but you missed one part, it actually was more my ego and id than anything I have ever written, in a purer sense that was the real me writing without the subjugations of intensity, character and social demands that one feels one has to accomplish. And in this way you have it, it was liberating, liberating because it didn’t have my maleness, it didn’t have my thinker, it just had me feeling essence much as I might have felt as a child once, once before reality started pounding reality into me.
I would hope that you have stumbled into Lies, would love to hear what you think of that one. It is a mystery novel, I don’t normally write detective mysteries but my wife and my most adorable Rosa, love mysteries and so it was necessary to show them how simplistic that whole enterprise is.
You may find it at: http://www.lieslies.blogspot.com
Well mystery poet, share only what you must, that is what I say.
Besos
ricardo
It is said that geniuses are dunces and I will now testify that even us normal folk are too; I don’t have the gift to recognize individual characteristics in a person as my mind has the tendency to be a super-modeler, thus in my head personal characteristics are blurred into only those that can be amassed in the giant gelatinous whole we call humanity.
So be it you will tell me when you tell me but hey I like the tickling you’ve done.
Yes! Yes! Afghan from Kifre was an amazing piece to write, I knew I had released something spectacular, something friction free, something that would just flow and flow unhindered by pretense or by style. You caught that well but you missed one part, it actually was more my ego and id than anything I have ever written, in a purer sense that was the real me writing without the subjugations of intensity, character and social demands that one feels one has to accomplish. And in this way you have it, it was liberating, liberating because it didn’t have my maleness, it didn’t have my thinker, it just had me feeling essence much as I might have felt as a child once, once before reality started pounding reality into me.
I would hope that you have stumbled into Lies, would love to hear what you think of that one. It is a mystery novel, I don’t normally write detective mysteries but my wife and my most adorable Rosa, love mysteries and so it was necessary to show them how simplistic that whole enterprise is.
You may find it at: http://www.lieslies.blogspot.com
Well mystery poet, share only what you must, that is what I say.
Besos
ricardo
Monday, August 15, 2005
“do you think you can kill a brother off so easily?” Magdlen
I don’t know if you are expressing a loose incredulity with the story as a whole, a story that is reaching to show that there are a disproportionate number of beginnings and endings within the context of a life, including the ending of a genuine friend equally ending as a sort of adopted brother, and then having a sort of kissed off euthanasia ending.
Either way let me answer the question but first let me admit that I have never killed or hacked a gopher to death much less a brother at least in the literal sense.
The Watcher’s is an attempt at dealing with the incessant disconnect that is surmounted by our incessant persistence at consistency and indeed connectivity. Life blinks all the time, when we blink our consciousness remains alert only because the brain shuts down so that we don’t notice incessant blinking. Perhaps the same thing happens when we hack a gopher, the very act shuts something off inside of us, perhaps the very same thing happens in the act of torture, perhaps we blink, perhaps our entire consciousness blinks; perhaps genocide is an act permissible by a humanity blinking away.
In The Watchers, our protagonist is dealing with a disassociation that I associate with blinking, he is trying to continue his research, he is figuring out how to continue his research while dealing with the ordeal that his research assistant, Dr Randall, has become a quadriplegic. In short he is looking the other way so as to ignore the obvious, Dr Randall is never going to recover, Dr Randall is like a brother to him and he doesn’t want to face that ending.
In my real life Magdlen, (sorry I don’t know your real name) I have suffered the ending of a great friend Antonio, a wonderful brother Gabriel and a phenomenal mother, Patricia; all endings that I didn’t want to face, I always hoped I would die first but then evidence shows that I had my part in their dying first.
I never knew Antonio in person as he was a pure theatric of an Internet friendship, we must have poured 600 letters between us but we never spoke a word or saw each other alive. In a sense the absence of presence made for a more promising friendship; which indeed it was. One day however I had to fly to Minneapolis Minnesota to see his corpse, I should have never gone, that put an unwanted period in our semantics.
My brother died of AIDS, I suppose I know how pestilence and famine destroyed civilizations, AIDS making bed with my brother brought our entire family to a stand still. In a sense I went a little crazy when my brother took his own life, because he could not sit in a bed anymore; when he called to say goodbye I didn’t answer the phone. That made a runon on our semantics.
You think by that point I would have learnt how to say goodbye but I hadn’t. Mother suffered a stroke and by doing so ended my time in America; but as I came to be with her and to sooth some of her ills there was still the challenge of being her son, and I never overcame that; we argued a lot more than either expected to argue, and then when her time was near, she could sense that she would have no further to go with me. She stopped taking her medicine, she told me so, I did nothing to encourage her to resume taking it, I might have helped killed her with the absence of my urgings.
In some ways I guess I think it is easy to kill a brother but not as easy as having something to do with killing him by way of everyday simple life associations. Maybe a mother too may be killed in this assimilated manner of indifference.
In The Watchers our protagonist is looking at Dr Randall’s wife and he realizes that she is his connectivity to Randall and that Randall must be let go by those that love him; and thus then assumes the only kind and irresponsible and irrational act, he kisses Nancy and ends the blinking slightly off key.
Perhaps it was a terrorist act, perhaps it was an act of extreme kindness, perhaps it was an acknowledgement of the feelings had by someone that had not ended.
Ricardo
Either way let me answer the question but first let me admit that I have never killed or hacked a gopher to death much less a brother at least in the literal sense.
The Watcher’s is an attempt at dealing with the incessant disconnect that is surmounted by our incessant persistence at consistency and indeed connectivity. Life blinks all the time, when we blink our consciousness remains alert only because the brain shuts down so that we don’t notice incessant blinking. Perhaps the same thing happens when we hack a gopher, the very act shuts something off inside of us, perhaps the very same thing happens in the act of torture, perhaps we blink, perhaps our entire consciousness blinks; perhaps genocide is an act permissible by a humanity blinking away.
In The Watchers, our protagonist is dealing with a disassociation that I associate with blinking, he is trying to continue his research, he is figuring out how to continue his research while dealing with the ordeal that his research assistant, Dr Randall, has become a quadriplegic. In short he is looking the other way so as to ignore the obvious, Dr Randall is never going to recover, Dr Randall is like a brother to him and he doesn’t want to face that ending.
In my real life Magdlen, (sorry I don’t know your real name) I have suffered the ending of a great friend Antonio, a wonderful brother Gabriel and a phenomenal mother, Patricia; all endings that I didn’t want to face, I always hoped I would die first but then evidence shows that I had my part in their dying first.
I never knew Antonio in person as he was a pure theatric of an Internet friendship, we must have poured 600 letters between us but we never spoke a word or saw each other alive. In a sense the absence of presence made for a more promising friendship; which indeed it was. One day however I had to fly to Minneapolis Minnesota to see his corpse, I should have never gone, that put an unwanted period in our semantics.
My brother died of AIDS, I suppose I know how pestilence and famine destroyed civilizations, AIDS making bed with my brother brought our entire family to a stand still. In a sense I went a little crazy when my brother took his own life, because he could not sit in a bed anymore; when he called to say goodbye I didn’t answer the phone. That made a runon on our semantics.
You think by that point I would have learnt how to say goodbye but I hadn’t. Mother suffered a stroke and by doing so ended my time in America; but as I came to be with her and to sooth some of her ills there was still the challenge of being her son, and I never overcame that; we argued a lot more than either expected to argue, and then when her time was near, she could sense that she would have no further to go with me. She stopped taking her medicine, she told me so, I did nothing to encourage her to resume taking it, I might have helped killed her with the absence of my urgings.
In some ways I guess I think it is easy to kill a brother but not as easy as having something to do with killing him by way of everyday simple life associations. Maybe a mother too may be killed in this assimilated manner of indifference.
In The Watchers our protagonist is looking at Dr Randall’s wife and he realizes that she is his connectivity to Randall and that Randall must be let go by those that love him; and thus then assumes the only kind and irresponsible and irrational act, he kisses Nancy and ends the blinking slightly off key.
Perhaps it was a terrorist act, perhaps it was an act of extreme kindness, perhaps it was an acknowledgement of the feelings had by someone that had not ended.
Ricardo
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