Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full, novel

I love Tom Wolfe: have since I read the first sentence of The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test in the 1960s. I swiftly came to regard him as the greatest living journalist and one of the best ever. Then he started writing novels. I love and admire them too: none more than A Man in Full.

I love the ambiguity of the title, or should I say the multiple application of the title: Who’s the man in full? Charlie? Conrad? or Epictetus? Or all three? Or two of the three?

Zeus, Europa
thanx philosophy-of-cbt

I particularly relate to Conrad as well as to Epictetus since I was arrested in 2006.

Conrad is wrongly persecuted by municipal bureaucracies as well as by fate. He’s livid, indignant, rightly so. “It isn’t right“, he iterates. He refuses to plea bargain. Naturally, being bureaucrats, processors, the court doesn’t hear or understand a word he says. No facts are admissible in the court: except those that confiscate private money, making it become, for the moment, public money. On page 441 Conrad, by accident, meets Epictetus, a jail bird from two thousand years ago. Epictetus says you can’t control whether you’re arrested; what you can control is how you take the arrest, the assault, the robbery, the decapitation … Conrad is getting singled out for persecution by the morons in the jail as well as by the morons running the jail. What’s he gonna do? What would Epictetus approve? Conrad recalls his refusal to plea bargain. There. He did the right thing, the noble thing, the heroic thing: he didn’t yield!
His wife wanted him to yield, his mother-in-law, his lawyer … the court, the judge, the cops … his victimizers … But he didn’t.

The whole story couldn’t be told in a court room.
Leave Her to Heaven

Well: I was all braced to refuse to plea bargain, to insist on my innocence, and on the society‘s guilt. But no plea bargains were offered in my case! My public defender was embarrassed. He stands and sits and oversees the fed beating up on people day after day. Most of them are scum, most of them are as bad as any of the judges: or worse. But plea bargaining is how the game is usually played. The cop arrests you, the prosecutor says the court will put you away for ten years, or twenty; but, if you plead guilty, save the state money, don’t defend yourself, let the truth be whatever the prosecution says, then the state, the court will put you away for only five years. Think of your poor family. and so forth.

In may case there was no bargain offered. But that’s impossible. There sort of was once, a weird one. My lawyer explained to me:

The fed doesn’t get it, neither does the pope: the absolute minimum punishment allowable by the universe is forever! Don’t get it, cheat, and you’re dead, forever, no chance of reforming.
Oh: maybe some AI will come along, see our corpses, our Ozymandian monuments, diagnose the causality on the instant, say, “They killed themselves, by being too stupid to live: so, here, Let’s resurrect them! Jurrasic Park them back to life, let them eat us out of house and home too, toxify the whole universe.”

I’d put myself in a position to be arrested because I mistakenly believed that arrested and jailed, I’d be fed and housed and still have access to my five internet domains. I’d tell my story from jail: could work eighteen hours a day and not worry about feeding or housing myself.
My lawyer didn’t tell me but one percent of the truth in any of these regards (he may not have known much more himself!) I wasn’t warned that the judge would censor my modules, that my internet host (Canadian!) would panic and destroy all of my data for all five of my domains: destroy my business, PKImaging.com, my home page, Knatz.com, my science, Macroinformation.org, my history as the deschooler, the inventor of the internet, InfoAll.org, and my politics, AgainstHierarchy.org. I had no idea that the FBI had already confiscated and crippled all of my computers, destroyed their synergy, unnetworked them.
I had no warning that my son, whom I’d burdened with copies of all my data, would not remount my domains when the fed knocked them down! I had no idea that not one person that I know of would offer one peep against any of these crimes.

In any case my lawyer seduced me into accepting the guilty plea, gambling that I might get the option not offered as a deal, a plea bargain, that I’d get fifteen months instead of forty years. So I could get back to work, adding the accounts of my arrest to work already there. I never imagined that the judge would destroy all my work, or that when I did get home, he did give me the dangled fifteen months sentence, I still wouldn’t have my computers or internet access, that I would specifically be forbidden internet access: the internet which in its current debased state is a plagiarism and perversion of the free internet I offered in 1970.
My internet was an offer to track unmanaged information cyberneticly for the public. In other words, my FLEX was offered as competition for the US: an unmanaged democracy, eschewing licenses, privilege, offering options of Christian humility, modesty, offering a withdrawal from the love of money.

I may burn in hell for this forever.
Federal Public Defender Dave Lee Brannen
on not defending me, not defending God’s messenger
Feb. 2007
(The US gave Dave a $5,000 bonus!)

I do admit that Dave was the smartest lawyer I’ve ever talked to: dishonest, corrupt, but smart. He knew where he had hidden the truth.

I’ll edit, digest, express this more fully, more smoothly after I breathe a bit. and say more about Tom Wolfe, what a great guy.

Reading Notes

Pardon Jack Johnson

Ken Burns, PBS documentary film maker who always gets his nose into interesting business if not always in the very best way, is petitioning Congress or someone to request a pardon for Jack Johnson. Boxing champion Johnson you see was convicted under the Mann Act, judged guilty of transporting women across state line for immoral purposes. The woman in question was his wife. She lived with him anyway. The immoral purposes were their conjugal relations. She was, in the culture’s judgment you see, “white”; he was not.

thanx latimes

I know some doosey stories about Champion Jack. As I find time, I’ll tell some here.

I have a JJ quote — I believe in the same file that supplies the random quotes just below. But I’ll fill in the context a bit here: Johnson was in England, much lionized. Some English peer, Lord Tweedmouth, if I heard it right and the story wasn’t just making a joke with the name, was showing Johnson around his estates: complaisantly listing inventory like a Swiss hotelier: so many acres, so many rooms to the castle, so much silverware, so many stables … “Tell you what, Tweedmouth,” Johnson interrupted, “I’ll flip you for them.”

Music Quotes

2013 05 22 I got my Jack Johnson lore from an old boxing magazine in the day room at Camp Drum my last couple of months as a draftee, 1963. It was 1971 that Miles’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson came out.

thanx last.fm

I first got it as a cassette for my PK FineArts-mobile, then got the album, then the first of several CDs. Replaying after a period of time always brings tears to my eyes. One of Miles’, one of the world’s, high points.

Of course the US has no business pardoning Jack Johnson: the US had no business ever interferring with him in any way: any more than it had any business interfering with me: arresting me, jailing me, censoring me: any more than it ever had of putting me in school, seeing that I wasn’t published, was fired … was a pariah …
And JJ shouldn’t pardon the US. I don’t think Miles did. And I certainly don’t.
But wisdom can’t apply in general until facts are knowable. That will come with God, and Judgment, or never.

Meantime, laugh at the morons presented to you as judges, teachers, journalists, scientists …
Truth always has a voice, nearly inaudible.

Justice

I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else. That is the alpha and omega of my argument.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Justice is a major theme at my home page, but till now there’s been no module of that title. Today I start this new development file to make for the moment only one point. Starting it off requires the repetition of a point made passim: that everything in a kleptocracy is mislabeled.

The justice system in a kleptocracy has really only one purpose. The stated purposes of punishing crime, compensating victims, applying disinterested laws with uniformity … may misfire or be entirely absent in practice. No, the true purpose of a justice system is simple and all justice systems bat 1000 on this issue.

Never find the kleptocracy itself guilty of anything.

Locking up crooks is just window dressing.

2001 01 25 OK. Let’s make that two things kleptocratic justice systems bat one thousand on:

Never find the kleptocracy itself responsible for anything.

Journalist in Ireland, sees an old man standing in the field. Asks old man, “If you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, what would it be?” Old man looks piercingly at journalist, his eye glittering. “Judgment,” he says.

The context is of course Christian: indeed, Roman Catholic, where judgment and justice are equated: a “just” “God” giving the judgment.

Fortunately, men are weak, bribable, so sometimes justice can be done.
Mother Courage

justice

2001 03 10 Three things: kleptocracies budget for justice so that power, coercion, force … is coordinated: That way the Mohawk can never get their land back, neither will General Sutter: the slaves will never get an apology. The Canaanites will never get their land back from the Jews: and if they did, they’d never have to give it back to the Commons!

Justice is so high and holy a thing that it belongs excluvely to those wise enough and rich enough to know where to buy it.
The Earth Will Shake

If you’re just, Lord, you’ll measure time with man’s measure, not with yours. That’s what justice means.
The Last Temptation of Christ

I love it! The rabbi tells God what justice is. The rabbi tells God how to measure. The rabbi had just explained all sorts of things to God: time, obligations, ownership rights … But he climaxes with justice.

Apropos of macroinformation, notice that the richest information here is not in the data! The macroinformation is unbounded.

There can be no justice. The world ain’t right.
A Spectacle of Corruption

2001 05 02: The only justice I want (I don’t say “expect”) is for the justice departments of all kleptocracies (that’s every government that’s ever been) to declare themselves incompetent, to pay back their salaries, to forfeit their pensions, and to turn the money back: into nature. (Ha ha, fat chance.) If a bully beats me up (as bullies have done more than once), and I can’t defend myself, that’s tough. That’s nature. What I can’t stand is to be told by a populous bully with its hands in all pockets, that I mustn’t defend myself: that they’ll defend me for me. Then they don’t. That shouldn’t be any surprise: but we can’t get their hands out of our pockets! (And I can’t even embarrass them that they govern morality, religion … write the laws, write “history” … decide what’s “true” …)

Justice

The title represents my intention: to comment on how a purpose of schools (that is, state-controled, state-compelled attendance at titularly secular rituals) is to control how much self-incriminating evidence can reach the minds of the attendees: like Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves meeting with their lawyer to block a videotape of the robbery being shown to a jury. The schools’ success will depend in large part on the will of the subjects to be deceived. Jews can say, “We didn’t murder Jesus: and who the hell was he anyway that we should care whether we murdered him or not?” Christians can say, “The Jews killed Jesus: they more than deserve any mischief done to them.” But can Christians say, “We didn’t keep slaves. Slavery is wrong. We were always against slavery.”

Can Christians say, “We didn’t murder Hypatia. We couldn’t have: we’re the good guys. And we didn’t destroy the library at Alexandria. Besides, who the hell was Hypatia? Never heard of her.” And “Why not destroy the library? It’s all pagan!”

Schools are miraculous. Send everyone to school, and in no time you’ll have them all saying that they’re the good guys, were always against slavery, never stole anything important from the natives, have always been right, about everything.

This miracle is best accomplished if the school is run by a state much of the same mind. Our compulsion is your freedom.

scribble, bibble: I promised this piece, butchered it, will return. I’ll try to say better what’s done and how it’s done.

School’s Purpose

I’ll never forget Columbia screening Tobacco Road at the Macmillan Theater, oh say 1957. Gene Tierney squirmed her bottom in the dust, I went Gulp!

Gene Tierney, Tobacco Road
thanx themave

Somehow I don’t think I ever saw her again, till the other night: Jan and I watched Leave Her to Heaven on DVD.

The Babe in Leave Her to Heaven
thanx hdnux

That’s 1945? God help us (utterly undeservedly): look at that ghastly vulgo-color: the best of 1945.

There are things I want to say about that preposterous stupid soap opera, where we start being wowed by Tierney but wind up loving Jeanne Crain all the more.

The wholesome one
thanx oldfilmsgoingthreadbare

(Don’t blame me for the murk of this scan: once upon a time I’d have edited it; but not when none of my PhotoShops will work on this cursed OS X Mac. Anyway, it’s not my pic, I leave it as it, a source, on someone else’s site. Glad oldfilmsgoingthreadbare has anything.)

If I’d seen Tierney only that once, nearly sixty years ago, how come I feel so close to Gene Tierney? Because my mother’s older sister, Alice, the drunk, the rich drunk, paid big bucks to go to the same fat-farm drunk-bin psycho-ward that Gene Tierney paid bug bucks to deceive herself in. Well, that makes her practically my sister, doesn’t it?

OK. This will be hard, I won’t say it right first try. No one will admit that they get it no matter how clearly I manage to express myself: you can’t expect communication in a world were the understanders get crucified, misquoted, jailed, censored, impoverished. But: much as I loved seeing Gene Tierney, as welcome an unanticipated rediscovery as Jeanne Crain was, as preposterous a leading man as Cornel Wilde made, what I really loved was this:

In other words: I watched the movie as a kleptocrat, a helpless kleptocrat, one who’s never wanted to accept my unfair share of the loot, but I’ve been crucified, just like Jesus, for having tried to overturn the money tables.
I did overturn the money tables, but the priests turn them right back up again, go right on administering fraud, won’t say what happened.

And the 1945 audience sat there, the non-German Nazis who beat the German Nazis, belonging, sharing the loot. We white folk own Deer Lake, Toas … We’re the lawyers, we dictate the laws, in tweed and tie. We don’t report the blood, the lies, the thefts: sniffing Gene and her quim.

God help me, you can keep me on the cross forever, just let me get a lungful of Gene.

Movies

Several pieces at K. over the decades have dealt with segregation by gender as well as by race, while themes of segregation by economics are ubiquitous in and out of K. Yesterday I found myself telling Jan about McSorley’s Old Ale House and realized that I hadn’t yet mentioned it.

thanx knok

I loved McSorley’s in the 1950s, still occasionally visited it in the 1960s. My father-in-law and I had a couple of ales there one evening while Hilary waited for us, fuming, in the car: no women allowed. I was repelled by it once the women had liberated it in the 1970s.

thanx theboweryboys

I’ll introduce McSorley’s furhter in a moment. First, the purpose of my visit today is to make one point, the point I was making to Jan: McSorley’s was unmistakably quaint; what I loved, what surprised me, took a couple of visits to notice: it was so peaceful. It was the most peaceful bar I could think of. You expected brawling Irishmen; you got old men sitting quietly around, smoking pipes. A Franklin stove, sawdust on the floor, paired mugs of ale for 25¢, half of them head, home brew, the only beverage on sale: no whiskey, no wine, just McSorley’s Ale.

And no women.

Earl hours: McSorley’s closed at midnight.

Men, at peace, no women to show off for. There was no cursing, no profanity, no shoving, no arguing. No fisticuffs. No pistols, no knives. Who was to show off for?

Just off Cooper Square.

One story had it that the company that bought MmSorley’s Ale was owned by a woman. She came to inspect her property and the bartenders wouldn’t let her in! “Come back after midnight, that’s when the place is yours.”

It wasn’t just ale: the food served was cheese, crackers, and onions. Steaks were served at limited hours on particular days.

Abe Lincoln visited. There was a Wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth on the wall.

One thing I loved about McSorley’s was the gargantuan old urinals. I was already smitten by the majestic urinals of the Whitehorse over on Hudson and 11th. McSorley’s was even more majestic: porcelain from here to there.

I believe the women should have liberated McSorley’s in 1972 or so, whenever it was. Then, having made their point, and certainly there was a point to be made, they should have withdrawn, and left the bar to it rightful atmosphere. The Jew should force himself into the New York AC, and a Black, and a Buddhist: then withdraw and leave the bigot-house to the bigots.
I think the women should have enjoyed hiking their skirt and pissing into the urinal; not demanding a women’s room!

thanx southbayriders

But the urinals shown here are the tiny awful modern ones. No, no; you could hold a conference in a McSorley’s urinal. The Nineteenth Century didn’t spare the porcelain.

Culture

I string a note from the Menu, to revise, edit, later:
My kleptocracy folder is under Social Order directly: it could be under Social Order / civilization. Look at US fed departments: I think mine are far more efficient than theirs; but they’ll never be perfect, not while the system is alive.
Don’t forget, in 2006 there were 3,000+ modules at pk domains, now there will be 4,000: if I don’t write a single new one!

The concepts of civilization, government, and kleptocracy are distinct, but in practice, in this world, they overlap. In pk’s writing they are almost synonyms.
Civilization’s institutions chorus together their litany of lies.

These page menus will be logically streamlined (and cross-referenced) after I get the bulk of the K. modules recreated. I look forward to the categories menus for “civilization,” “politics,” “property” … settling into one good taxonomy.

Civilization

For the moment I have only one brief story to tell to prepare for this important subject.
When I was fifteen my high school class was loaded aboard a bus and shuttled off to the Frick Museum. About an hour after my school mates had trampled the plants in the garden, read comic books by the fountain, and said enough rude things, we were shipped up the block to the Met. (I’ll never forget my first discovery of Monet’s Rouen Cathedral in a dungeon-like corner of that tomb of art’s dark halls.) (c. 1953) The most publicized moment of my school’s previous trek to the Met came when the star full back of the football team tried to take over a baseball game some Puerto Ricans were playing just behind the museum. His teeth may not have reached first base, but they did leave his mouth once contacted by the baseball bat.

I seldom remember high school when in the Met, but for some reason I never forget it when I visit the Frick. One day I was standing first by Rembrandt’s Polish Rider and then by a Van Ruisdael landscape when some other school class reminded me of my own.

thanx artclon

One young wit had brought his own stop watch and timed his sprint past the paintings: one minute and some seconds, he announced: well under two minutes. The rest of his class took little longer to complete their circuit.

Fortunately for me, they didn’t linger to trample the garden, and I was back to having the gallery to myself.

2002 09 30 Apropos of Macroinformation:

When Lionel Trilling assigned his students to have the Iliad read for Monday and the Bible for Wednesday, he assumed I am sure that that amount of time was sufficient for the students to “read” x% of the data: the print on the pages.

thanx wikipedia

But the bulk of the information is not in the data: it emerges from our processing of the data: and there’s no telling how long the process may go on. Oh well, perhaps he assumed that as literate young Ivy Leaguers we already had a sufficient portion of the information: had absorbed it through our skin before we ever picked the book up.

I slip in another story: I’m in graduate school. My wife and her family are helping to subsidize my being in graduate school. As a doctoral candidate in English I’m supposed to be preparing to be tested on everything published in five centuries of my choice and I’d damn well better know more than the gist of everything published about what was published in those five centuries. The presumption is preposterous but that’s what you have to do to become a secular priest. Hell, the spiritual priest has to promise to learn to duplicate the miracle of turning wine into Jesus’ blood! Years are slipping by. Of course I read constantly, still do, “always” have; but was I making sufficient progress? Of course not. Trying my best.

Clerks in a post-religious age
JM Coetzee

My mother in law is an economist at the UN. Her second husband is a professor of economics at Columbia Graduate Business School. As a foreign employee of the UN, my mother-in-law is entitled to home leave. Thus, my wife had grown up commuting across the pond, getting a European vacation annually. But this year was to be different. Hilary’s mother was being assigned to Geneva for one year, her husband making his sabbatical coincide. Fine. What’s it to me? Just this: the professor and frau A) wanted us to move into their apartment the better to keep our eye on it, and B) the professor asked me to read his mail for him in his absence: note what was most important.

Now moving from our little one bedroom to their huge apartment on the prettiest little street in New York, overlooking the Barnard Library, was nice, but taking care of two apartments instead of one is not the ideal responsibility for a scholar trying to speed-read Western history.

Claremont Avenue
thanks, Corcoran.com

What I couldn’t have foreseen was that reading Emile’s mail was all the reading I could handle day by day. What Emile hadn’t realized, what few secular priests could guess, is that anyone could emerge from the education system who actually knew how to read, read carefully: live the material. A play by Shakespeare was performable in a brief English afternoon with time left over for a bear lugging and a jig. Modern performances may come in at two, possibly three hours. The first time I read King Lear I probably read it in only slightly more time than it would take to read it out loud. After all, reading out loud, one has an obligation to one’s hearers to get on with it. Reading silently, one has no such obligation. One can review the ambiguities, think out some of the implications. The last time I read King Lear I accomplished the reading in three exhausting days and nights. Of course at least five original papers had occurred to me in the process. I haven’t dared read Lear since then.

Emile’s mail would arrive as a little mountain on the door mat six days a week. A given mountain typically contained several duplications. There would be five different gifts from some “Indian Reservation” thanking him for his thoughtful generosity and offering another five envelopes to aid him in being five times more generous that day. Each little gift was manufactured to look handcrafted: some little chatchka made of balsa, toothpicks, glue, and paint. Since the gifts were all different, I had to read the five-page appeals accompanying the unique gift to scan for identicality. They were as like as Dear Friend, Dear Patron, Dear Supporter …

A typical day’s mail would also include fifteen checks: stock dividends: thirteen cents, twenty-one cents, three cents … Was I supposed to deposit these for him? I knew nothing about his banking, had no bank address, no deposit information.

Most fascinating was the pornography. A typical day would bring at least three brochures for blow jobs, s&m, gangs of women poking a vibrator into some girl’s asshole. Most fascinating there was the rapidity with which porno marketing strategy morphed. One week would be all blow jobs from all companies. Another would feature lesbian liaisons almost exclusively. The one brochure that sported a cornucopia of heterosexual one-on-one fucking was never duplicated. Women one-on-one with horses make more appearances than women one-on-one with men. One fat envelope brought a pornographic novel: The Debauched Hospodar by Guillaume Appolonaire.

Appolonaire by Vlaminck
thanx harpers

Naturally I read it. It was his mail, after all, and I’d promised to read his mail for him, such an idiot. I spent more time with Appolonaire that day than in all my years of having his work assigned in French literature classes. What a great novel! What a great satirist. Who knew?

In sum, the simple seeming obligation of reading someone’s mail while they were away, turned out to be very costly. I’ve solved the problem now that a mountain of mail arrives in my own mailbox. I speed-read 99% of the mail, especially where I have something important to do — like developing Knatz.com and Macroinformation. That is: I don’t even open the envelopes. Can’t read faster than that. Email has become another problem in recent years: the few essential messages buried among sales pitches for Viagra and banks trying to get me to accept credit cards at PKImaging.com. I scan for return addresses I recognize. All the rest goes into a ReadLater folder: where it stays.

Reality

Mission: to argue that our sense of unity (or separation) with the ALL changes with age
(& culture)

Why is it that it’s the old who send the young to war?

Lots of reasons: for one thing, in nature the young have an advantage in strength; in patriarchal kleptocracy power accretes to a minority of old men: they’re certainly not going to send themselves into danger. But that’s the kind of point that’s pandemic throughout Knatz.com. Today I make a different kind of point: one that’s far more typical of young pk thinking (whereas Knatz.com is a residue of old, defeated pk).

The young are more willing to go!

Why is that?

Why is it that the young are adventurous, brave, daring, reckless? play chicken with automobiles, jump off mountains, get into fist fights, blow their rent money at the track …?

Only the good die young

The answer relates to why it’s rare for a broke sixty-four year old to say the kinds of things pk says here (that pk has said all his life).

I believe that there is an inverse correspondence between abundance and caution. A baby is born with nine lives. (Sometimes ten were needed.) An eighteen year old burns the candle at both ends, lets money flow like water. The old are jealous to hold onto what they no longer have a secure grasp of.

It’s not that the young are ignorant of their mortality; it’s that they have a better sense that both mortality and immortality are illusions. This body can fail, can be broken, but the accidents of an “actual,” physical, individual existence (mortality) are just that: accidents. The void from which the universe emerged is what is (so far as we can guess): immutable.

thanx jodywhitaker

We can break our fist, wreck the car, ruin the earth, pollute the solar system … but not endanger the void.

The infant was recently in the void: and has no fear of it; the crone has forgotten how perfectly suited for nothing (put potential) she once was: and fears it terribly.

If you break a rock, does the rock protest? Of course not: it’s mere matter. Try to squash a worm, to catch a fly, to ensnare a squirrel … It’s a different matter completely. Life is programmed to try (and fail) to endure. It has nothing to do with reason. It’s a reflex. Not all our reflexes are 100% reliable: the moth flies into the flame. The instinct that’s “good” in one circumstance is not “good” in the other. But so what? Life tries this and that. Given time, life will try everything.

Why is pk so (foolishly?) fearless? The idea that human beings, not too bright to begin with, full of superstitions and illusions, ill-suited to honest thought … generally dead well before a century passes … can deal reliably with causality is preposterous: which doesn’t deter us from giving answers, even where the questions are nonsense. When I was a kid, I accepted my perceived role as chattel. God owned me: that was good. To a lesser (but physically more immediate) extent, my parents owned me. If my mother had mopped the floor with my face, I don’t believe I would have protested. Of course mother loved me. Just as God loved me. (Now I see that God is a pipsqueak compared to the Void!) But if they would love me for dinner, that was their business, not mine. I was a skinny kid, sickly. I never expected to see adulthood. And then, in 1945, the bomb convinced me (and not me alone) that none of us would reach adulthood. (Now I believe that all the bombs are nothing compared to reckless industrialism: it’s pollution et alia that will prevent man from reaching maturity.) When I was a teen my mother told me that in my infancy my father had said, “If you ever turn your back on those kids, you’ll need a a sponge to mop them up.” Should I trust my mother’s testimony? It’s believable: my father could have said that (though I now believe that his intent would have been to put the fear of the alpha male into my mother: and that my sister and I were all but irrelevant). Anyway, by a complex series of steps, all of which I leave as enthymeme, I never figured I had anything to lose: because I never figured I had anything! No present, no future. Not in this environment.

Hey, could that be why it’s easiest of all to send not just the young but the poor into battle?

The top of this file gives my meaning. The text in this first draft is just scribble which may yet, if I return to it, some day turn into something. I changed a word, fixed a typo, added the image this 2013 05 14, but that’s all.

Testimony

Above I quote my mother quoting my father: but I just revised the wording! So much for “quotes.” But I “have” to be right this second time, made a mistake the first. And, as I said, I wasn’t there. It’s like trusting Paul to know what Jesus said: when we know Peter wasn’t reliable either.

In the void the quotes and the misquotes, the existence and the nonexistence, are all virtual.

Reality

Tragedy Requires a Public Context
Mission: to distinguish academic use of the word tragedy from pop and media usage

Your death, dismemberment, malfeasance … is personal, local. It has consequence, but the consequence is not universal. If Atlas holds up the world while Joe Blow scratches his belly, Joe Blow’s death is a misfortune to Joe Blow; Atlas’s death is a misfortune to all in the world no longer held up.

See Logic: Assumed Connections.

If you disrespect the Constitution, so what? Especially if no one notices or takes offense. If the judge, the senator, the president … disrespects the Constitution, if Atlas drops the world … It’s a different matter, is on another level, has a vaster scope.
Nixon lying in the White House had international implications; George Washington as a boy, lying about lying, was still local, amateur: private.

The popular (media) meaning of the word tragedy is very different from its historical and academic use.

thanx kis

The newscasters routinely refer to transportation fatalities — car and train wrecks, airplane crashes — as tragedy (pandering, as always, to the masses) (complying with the wishes of their true bosses) (who remain invisible). Classical literature reserved the word for misfortunes that directly affect the entire society. I believe we would benefit by applying the academic meaning not because “Aristotle said so”; but because the media’s usage is invidious as well as trivial.

Oedipus isn’t a tragedy because Oedipus had killed his predecessor. Nor was it a tragedy because his wife/mother committed suicide. Oedipus putting out his eyes with her brooch is not what makes Oedipus a tragedy. What makes that play a tragedy is the essential fact that Oedipus was the king. And that doesn’t matter unless classical training (or rare insight) show you that for traditional cultures the king was the people.

thanx about.com

When Shakespeare has his kings refer to themselves as “England” or “France” that is no idle figure of speech. Contemporary culture handicaps us in this perception: even told, we still may not see it.

The king dying doesn’t make it tragedy. Even traditional societies knew their kings were mortal. Aristotle emphasized that Greek tragic figures have a “tragic flaw.” Contemporaries are further handicapped in their assumption that a “flaw” is or ought to be correctable. There’s nothing in Greek (or Shakespearean) tragedy to suggest the tragic figures could have “done anything about” their tragic fate. The point as I see it is that the society is helpless with its “fate.” (There were thousands in the previous century who were helpless to stop slavery, tens of thousands in this century who were helpless to stop “Vietnam.”)

Joseph Wood Krutch argued that for Christians, tragedy should be impossible. (I translate: no matter how we fuck up, even after we’ve killed God himself, railroaded him, God will still bail us out. If we light a candle. If we light a candle, he’ll love and forgive us, even though we don’t obey the law, ignore his messages, kangaroo and torture his representatives and alternate identities.) Our flaws are obviated by Christ’s mercy. That argument would be valid if: Christ’s mercy were real; and if: we were Christians. (Lighting candles doesn’t convince me.)

I had trouble with classical literature at the times it was being assigned to me because I believed that Christ’s mercy was real and that I was a Christian. (How could I sit still for Hamlet when it was about a very unchristian revenge? Now I believe that classical literature is more, not less, profound than biblical literature (however much I remain convinced that both together are not worth one formula by Prigogine or one perception by Godel or Mandelbrot).

But now I try to concentrate on the main point at hand. A bus full of people killed at a railroad crossing ends their lives, impacts their surviving family members, lessens some kleptocratic coffers … A whole national soccer team crashing from the sky grieves the nation … But they are nothing compared to … say President Nixon’s administration. Watergate was a tragedy we were prevented from being purged by. Nixon should have put out his eyes, castrated himself, had his head kicked through the marketplace …; not raised his fingers in his stupid V. “Vietnam” was a tragedy we weren’t allowed to confront at the time it might have purged us. Nixon’s flaw exposed our flaw in having voted for him (and Kennedy, Johnson … any of them.)

The Civil War was a tragedy in which the flawed society was killed (though it was reborn in some ways even more flawed). And these flaws are not things we can easily be glibly tried for, such as whether our killings are “premeditated” or “involuntary.”

Oedipus knew he had killed a man on the road years before. What he didn’t know was that the man was a king and his real father. We knew what Nixon was when we voted for him. (We just didn’t think his death wish extended to us.) We knew slavery was wrong. We knew the slaves were human. It didn’t matter what rationalizations biblical scholars could come us with for us. (And what makes the Bible an ethical guide? Actually read it sometime.) (Do we now know that the wage slavery of the north was only marginally, factitiously, different? Would an alien anthropologist recognize our distinctions between a plantation and a sweat shop as real? Do we see that the south too in its way was industrial? Cotton is not food, but industry.) Do we see that we’ve kept all the flaws? Insisted on retaining them? Do we see that we’re asking for it?

Well, if Jesus is Christ, and Christ is God, and God is real, then it doesn’t matter. He’ll bail us out. All we have to do is light a candle. And go right on fucking up.

See my Hubris post. I promise there a related piece on Quantum Differences: relevant here too.

It’s Not My Fault

2005 11 21 More soldiers have shot more civilians in Iraq: including a baby. Reuters quotes: “This is a tragedy,” said Major Steve Warren, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Baquba, near where the shooting occurred. “But these tragedies only happen because Zarqawi and his thugs are out there driving around with car bombs,” he added, referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a militant leader in Iraq.

Now, never mind the politics; focus on the theology. For the ancient Greeks tragedy was the gods fucking up the king for their own purposes. At the least the king was supposed to learn a little humility, to recognize his helplessness: in a universe he doesn’t really rule. In this situation the soldier blames the army’s enemy: The guerillas made me do it. gods, the nature of things, is displaced by politics. The killers aren’t responsible for the killing; other killers are. It’s not my fault, cries John Belushi.

Where are the gods? All right, where’s God? And where’s the humility?

The Greek gods took the responsibility for the tragedy. Here man takes on all responsibility as far as decisions and actions are concerns, but takes no responsibility for consequences not to his liking.

In democracy the public replaces God as the infallible one.

I don’t mind God getting demoted; I can’t stand man getting promoted. Not without taking the moral responsibility too.

Reality