False Entitlement

Yesterday’s article about a skinhead turned black belt martial artist social apologist says, “He is entitled to be a Holocaust denier. He is entitled to be a Nazi.”
Freedom of speech, right? Die dedanken sind frei? We’re toilet trained to say such things. But is it wise?

I’m for liberty. That’s what I mean by saying I’m an “anarchist”: I don’t believe in the Nazis pushing the Jews around, I don’t believe in the Jews pushing the Canaanites around. I don’t believe in the US putting me in school, grading me … let alone drafting me, blackballing, sabotaging me … censoring me … to name only a few things already done. So, obviously, if you’re paying attention, I don’t believe in any political hegemony ganging up on the above-mentioned skinhead no matter what he’s saying. (If he’s yelling Fire! in a crowded theater (which is not burning), then the audience will burn him alive whatever we pretend his “rights” are.

Forget politics for a minute, try to see what I’m getting at:

Some movie had a supreme court justice insisting that citizens had a right to be wrong, and to speak. Does anyone really mean that? Does the math teacher have the right to say 2 + 2 = 5? Not in a society whose Wittgensteinian language game defines 4 as 2 + 2.
Does the Pope have the right to tell the guards to arrest Galileo and hang him in the dungeon?
Do the doctors have the right to gang up on Walter Reed and prevent him from experimenting with mosquitoes and vomit stained clothing?
Did Wilberforce have the right to misunderstand Darwin, to mock his theory? Samuel Wilberforce the man did; but Wilberforce the bishop did not!
It’s one thing for a skinhead to be an ass, but do authorities have the right to be wrong?

Did NYU have the right to interrupt my statement about Scholaticism, Realism, and Nomianalism during my orals, to prevent me from articulating my thesis? to still not know forty-odd years later what I was trying to explain to them?
Apparently: sabotage is subsidized! Could the Temple have remained the Temple had it not scrourged Jesus?

NYU had the same right to interrupt me that the publishers had to not publish me, right? (The same right the government had to burn Reich’s books?) (How about the same right as the public had to sit idle while Illich’s books were stolen from the libraries while no new copies were issued.)

At Judgment, is God going to bore us about freedom of speech? Or is he going to correct us about the freedom to yell Fire? Are we going then to interrupt him so his point can’t get completed? That’s what humans do: they interrupt, then say they don’t: not publish, then say they don’t: scuttle ideas, then say No, no, Never, never.

If Jesus is trying to say something that might save us, do we really have the right to crucify him so he can’t finish the sentence?
If the universe is a true Bible, and we protect our kleptocracy with false gospels, via institutions with their hands in our pockets, do we have a right to blather on about truth or salvation?

When I complained, in a masterpiece of irony, 2006, the FBI arrested me, refrigerated me in a cell calculated to declaw some of the staph bacteria the jails steep prisoners in no matter the effect on the humans, the court censored my satire, not understanding it, not being qualified to see its targets, the IS host destroyed all of my online files, not just the satires. The news didn’t report it, the cops didn’t arrest the FBI … the citizenry didn’t tar and feather the judge, evict him from his fancy house …

Rights? What blather.

The only thing important can’t be said, or if said, won’t be heard:

We’re too stupid to live.

My public defender seemed to understand everything I said, seemed to recognize it all to be true. But he never passed on a single word. The judge never heard any of it, the prosecution.
Last thing he whispered before we went before the sentencing judge was advice against saying We’re too stupid to live where the kangeroos, the judge, the prosectution, might hear me! “These are intelligent people,” he told me! I think not meaning be to absurd:or, aware of his absurdity while unaware.
I could have insisted on screaming it myself, but this attorney warned me, rightly probably: the fed was ready to find a jury that would put me away for forty hears because of my satire, reading it as terrorism, oh shiver, not satire!
This attorney asked me if there was anything wrong with the prosecution’s summaries. I asked, “You mean apart from it being all false? no accurate facts?” He laughed, and passed on nothing to the court! The pretense of respect for the truth, of dispassion, was the thinnest of ice.

I made a mistake. I should have screamed and been prosecuted for forty years. I calculated, wrongly, that I could get out in fifteen months, and resume my testimonies: against this society, against this species, against all our false cosmologies, our false theologies … But why? If no one understood a word when I was twenty, or thirty, why should I trust that they might understand when I’m seventy, or eighty?

Sisyphus rolls the stone, up the mountain, for no good reason. Nothing is accomplished: but pain and wear and tear on Sisyphus.

But no. Shut up, pk, admit the truth:
I was right to plead guilty and get out in fifteen months, not to try writing further on the internet stolen from me by the society, not to further try explaining anything, but simply because I now have the best girlfriend of my life! And I’m deleting a few other things I said in this draft, for now anyway.

…
We’ve heard from people who say they heard what people who witnessed the Passion saw. But we don’t know what happened, we don’t know what Jesus saw. A gospel says that Jesus despaired, asked God why he had “forsaken” him. But what if God said to Jesus, “OK Sisyphus, now I’m going to give you the best pussy of your life. Never mind about saving those people; that can’t be done. But I’ll tell you this: if you’d taken all those girls you could have taken from the time you were twelve, the girls you didn’t take because you were dedicated, you wouldn’t have known the joy you’re about to know from the pussy I have in mind for you. All that rock rolling wasn’t in vain, it was really clearing your palate for coming bliss. The guy who hasn’t been crucified can’t know what you’re about to. Only the crucified.”

thanks, Dartmouth

Of course that could all be a lie, just more torture, Jesus tortured by Fate, and man, and God … But I know what I’ve got: bliss, a woman I really love.

---

Forecast for followup: I don’t approve of authorities correcting amateurs, I don’t approve of Republicans castrating Democrats. I don’t believe that people are intellectually or spiritually or politically sophisticated enough for anyone to correct anyone with political force. If one guy in the bar punches another guy in the bar, that’s fine. Just don’t put on a Pope’s hat or a Sanhedrin tallith or flash a cops badge and then punch the guy.
Or put on anything and do anything and realize: we’re monkeys jabbering on the sands of the Dead Sea.

The freedom of speech I’d like to support would encourage the thing being said being true!
If a book of the Bible proves to be a forgery, Timothy 1, for example, should churches have the right to still present it as the inerrant word of God? should congregations?
If science finds no fault in Darin’s theory (as improved by science), do school boards, do fundamentalists, have a right to say, “But it’s only a theory?” without having any idea what a scientific theory is?

Does the Reich have the right to tell the German people that they’re winning the war, when they’re actually getting slaughtered?

Do authorities have the right to be wrong: with leverage!?

Just look in the bone yard; not in the Times.

Round the decay … boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

thanks, Harvard

Oh, Jesus: I just had a vivid memory of Rachel Weisz, Hypatia, remaining silent as the ex-slave who loves her strangles her before his fellow Christians can stone her to death!

Can someone explain to me why that’s the best picture already online I was able to find for Davus strangling Hypatia? I thank the source anyway, it’s sure better than nothing.

Sentience & Semiotics

Anti-intellectual Microcosm

Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org &
Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / Social Order / HierCon / Army /
Service / Cuban Crisis / Whitehall Street early 1960s

Whitehall Street Induction Station is in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A contemptible easy “job,” however ugly and philosophically intolerable the circumstances, has turned insanely hard. We’re busy drafting Cubans to invade Cuba. On occasion I don’t even go home at night but catch a few hours sleep under my desk. I’m the only clerk typist who does the cases accurately, so the Army has learned to pile all the work on my desk, distributing only token work to the other typists. It’s OK, they’d only make me correct the others’ mistakes later anyway. The incompetent get promoted, the incompetent get three day passes every weekend. Their one reliable slave can never be promoted and can never be allowed a weekend. Imaginary reasons are routinely found to “punish” me so that I’ll work a six day week, up to eighteen hours a day while the others work four day weeks: about two hours of work, about five hours of staring at the clock.

One day I get my pile of cases done. There’s a moment’s respite. What do I do? Stare at the clock? Hide in the bathroom? No: I pull out my Tolstoy. I’ve been reading War and Peacefor months and months: going on years I suppose. Any five minutes I can spend with Andrew or Pierre or Marie or Natasha is precious.

The lieutenant walks in. He sees me reading. He sees the others, staring at the clock, picking at their cuticles, looking glacial … He says, “Knatz isn’t doing anything. Find him some work.”

---

Please understand: the lieutenant was supposedly an intellectual. He was using his army time to work on his Ph.D.: in psychology: behavioral psychology. note

Indeed he hired me once to come in on Saturday to do some typing for him. Fifty cents an hour or some such wage. I made sure he never asked me again. I typed his manuscript. Then asked if he wanted me to correct it. What did I mean: correct it? Oh, spelling, grammar, simple stuff. If he wanted me to edit it, I should get quite a bit more money. What did I mean: edit it? Oh, logic redundancy … I could rephrase your four pages more clearly as a single paragraph. I could then strip your single paragraph of its redundancies, reducing it to a single sentence. That sentence could then be tautologically demonstrated to be a truism. Your paper would evaporate: it wouldn’t need to be written at all: save everyone a lot of time.

No, just type it as it is, please. Uh, but do correct the spelling and grammar.

He never let me near any more of his personal work.

---

One week the work load was so heavy the whole crew was putting in extra hours. We’re dining out of Styrofoam at our desks for perhaps the fourth night in a row. The Colonel for some reason takes the stairs that evening: passes our open door, looks in. “Oh,” he says: surprised and apparently pleased: “you’re working late tonight.”

Fucking idiot. I’d been working from morning to night every day and night for months. The whole typing pool has been working late this whole week. But of course the commanding officer has no idea of what goes on in his station. Whitehall Street was set up so that there was no resemblance between job and job description, between theory and fact, between map and territory. In theory, the work was distributed evenly. See the above. In theory, the work was distributed evenly not only among those of similar to identical MOS (or army training code) but also between military personnel and civil service personnel.

Ha! Once my crew of college graduate English majors took over the typing pool, the civil service workers retired: right on the job. These veterans used to type three or four cases a day in quadruplicate. But once the collegiate slaves — draftees every one of us — could be forced to do the work, why should the civil service people do any of it? They no longer even had to type the one case they’d still do accurately, since the sergeant had taken to simply putting all the finished work on my desk for me to correct.

There was one civil service worker in particular who really disgusted me. All morning long she’d just stare at the clock waiting for her coffee break to come. She’d return from her break stinking of fresh martini. Then she’d stare at the clock till lunch time came. Once she returned from “lunch” she was incapable of focusing on the clock and would just slump at her desk until it was close enough to five to go home early.

Think of the time that would have been saved if they’d just mailed her her pay and let her stay home.

2003 11 15 One of the funny things about K. (how come I’m not laughing?) is how regularly reconstruction visits to files and sections still, as always, are under construction. Some coding or formatting nicety gets upgraded for the fourth time before the story takes the shape it needs to declare its most basic essence. Right now I’m redoing textured, colored backgrounds and adding for the first time borders within the module frame (that’s this one, the upper right, the one with the story) and my memory of the CO of Whitehall Street revealing that he had no idea of our hours or our work load comes happily upon the occasion of my first visit to TV’s X Files. 2003 seeing 1963 mapped onto 1993! I’ve now seen X Files Season I, episodes 1 to 4. In I think it was 4 Mulder, the UFO believer, and Scully, the UFO atheist (bkMarcus’s perceptive contrast), investiage a “case” where we’re told that the recently missing girl is the daughter of a woman who’d gone missing, claiming abduction, decades earlier. Mulder and Scully are feds: FBI. The fed is blind to everything Mulder thinks he finds. The government’s right hand having no idea what its left hand doeth even when told. The veteran abductee’s son receives digital codes from a TV always on, always tuned to no known channel. Mulder, our credulous “scientist” doesn’t recognize binary when he sees it! (Meaning that in 1993 TV could trust that the audience wouldn’t guffaw, the audience being trusted not to recognize it: not enough to be sure.) The FBI breaks all rules of decency to steal the code, indignant once they recognize the signal to be top secret! (revealing that the military is stealing alien technology, alien methods from alien wrecks) (now that’s the only art of the show truly unbelieveable: the military stealing hi-tech knowhow and not bragging about it, showing it off: intimidating the rest of the world!) Anyway, the kid must have gone on taking code dictation because when the pair return to the house of alien wo, the floor is covered with more binary. Scully ascends the stairs and accidentally gets another perspective: the code is also a cartoon of the missing girl: the boy’s sister. So: the boy is the only one who really knows what’s going on and where. The Harley bikers know more than Mulder and Scully. The military doesn’t know shit: it can only steal. The FBI doesn’t know shit: though it too steals. Mulder knows the next most after the boy (and the bikers). Scully knows the next most after Mulder. … And the fed knows the least of all. Except: somehow the fed also, paradoxically knows everything. Like the Church. The Church only hires, only promotes, the stupidest, most credulous people. Yet somewhere, buried in the Vatican, understood by some secret cardinals, is the truth! 2012 05 26 resurrecting, there are typos here I can no longer correct. I recognize a parallel here tough between what I said about X Files and what got blogged here about horror flix.

I don’t recall saying a total of two words to any of the civil service workers in my nearly two years there. I did get a note from the woman just introduced though. My girl friend was well known at Whitehall Street for showing up to meet me after hours. Everyone had been present when the Puerto Rican WACs were brought in to help me communicate with the Cubans. If everyone hadn’t seen the most amazingly beautiful, sexy, and jiggly of the WACs reach within minutes of sitting at my side under my desk to caress my groin, then they certainly sensed that something like that had happened. Etc. Anyway, this particular civil servant sends me a note: It’s a crude drawing of a women’s sex organs and asshole. There’s a hairy vulva, a gaping vagina, and an asshole. The asshole isn’t just gaping; it’s dripping. Plop, plop, plop … Little turds fall in a line from this bum. The caption below the drawing instructs me to “smile” if I like to “eat it.”

Why should I tell her? The woman turned my stomach. I couldn’t just smell her alcoholic breath, I could smell her: if you know what I mean.

---

And her smell wasn’t enticing. She wasn’t nearly as bad though as another civil servant who worked at Whitehall Street for a while. I’ve been in the public vicinity of many an unwashed pussy in my life but never one that stank like hers. She must have been diseased. By itself, with normal hygiene, normal pussy smells wonderful to a mature heterosexual male.

@ K. 2002 04 09

Notes

Behavioral Psychology:

Perhaps I should add: Columbia University was famous for its studies of behavioral psychology. But in Columbia College, where we were told, and believed, that we were the smartest of all, psychology was revered; behavioral psychology was held in contempt: at least among the students that I knew. Believe me: I no longer hold behavioral psychology in contempt. But I did then: and still did in 1962-63, at Whitehall Street.

Context

Hierarchy vs. Conviviality Stories

Moving Day

Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org &
Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Examples / Army /
Service / Berlin Crisis / Whitehall Street early 1960s
@ K. 2000 10 19

Sgt. Lyons barges into the typing pool, bristling with purpose, authority, command. The gang of us are marched off to a room empty but for a tall filing cabinet. “Pick that up and follow me,” he tells us troops. The group lays hold. The group heads the burden toward the door. The group is stymied. The cabinet was as wide as the threshold and taller than the door lintel. No amount of bluster got it through the door. “Put it down and follow me,” he tells the troops.

Phil and I nod at each other and hang back. Lyons won’t count noses for a while. I want to look at the situation without all that noise and confusion. I presume Phil does too. We didn’t need words to be pretty much on the same wave length in those days.

The room was empty but for that one cabinet. Therefore other troops had already moved everything from the room: everything but that one piece. I doubted that the room had been built around the cabinet. Neither did it seem likely that the cabinet had been built in the room. Therefore, the cabinet had once been moved into the room. A quick inspectection of the door frame suggested that the door hadn’t been altered for the sake of the cabinet: not during the Twentieth Century. “It got in. It’s got to be able to get out,” I reasoned. “Here, help me.”

The cabinet was big, not heavy. Phil and I alone had little difficulty putting it in line with the doorway. We tilted it. The gang had already tilted it. It jammed: it wasn’t going to unjam. So that wasn’t how it had gotten in. “Ah …” I said aloud. And gestured. We slid the cabinet through the door “feet” first. I was in the hall. Phil was behind in the room. But we could feel and hear each other just fine. We could each feel the other’s grip on the cabinet. It’s gonna be close but this had got to be it. Sure enough, the top finally just cleared the lintel, fractions of an inch before the foot had run out of hall space. We straightened the cabinet back up. Now it was in the hall were it could have plenty of room in more than one orientation.

Note: If Phil were telling this story he might put himself in the hall and me in the room. He might say “he” said where I said “I” said. We were cable of working as a team. In a good marriage is doesn’t matter whether it was the wife or the husband who said Let’s go to the mountains. It isn’t the case that one is the Leader and the other the Follower. Years after Wordsworth and Coleridge composed closely together they said they could not longer remember who had written which line. The amateur critic says Oh that’s easy: this must be Wordsworth and this must be Coleridge. No. They could think with each other’s mind as well as with their own. The most Coleridge of Coleridge’s lines could have been written by Wordsworth: and visa versa. If I was in the hall, speaking first, I was really Phil. If Phil was in the hall, speaking first, he was really Paul. I really do remember it as me who first decided to try it feet first. But I don’t doubt that had I not said it first, he would have and soon. Alas that team work did not last. We spoke the same language for a while only: not at first and not at last: but the “middle” was something to savor. Besides: read First Week of The Model and tell me I don’t have a genius for geometry. I’ll also say that it might not have worked if Sgt. Lyons had barked “Paul, get that cabinet out of here” or “Phil: you’re in command. Get that cabinet into the hallway and get it there now.” Intelligence can’t be commanded. An atmosphere of war is not its best environment.

Clump, clump. We hear the troops marching back. They turn the corner. Hide the women and children. They’ve brought the engineers: shovels, picks, dynamite … And there’s the cabinet placidly waiting in the hall for them: the unsolvable problem silently solved: and Paul and Phil just hanging there, not even making a show of gloating: brains humiliating the muscle every time. The look of humiliated loathing Sgt. Lyons gave us was not the first or the last such but it was the most intense. Because he’d make a fool of his command in front of every private in the building.

The only suspense left was whether he’d ask how we’d done it. He didn’t: just took the cabinet as delivered and on to the next vigorous execution of command.

I didn’t much like my previous start. But I leave it place (below, that is) to tinker with on another occasion.

Can anyone tell me if the kleptocracy has studied military fragging over the millennia? People living in a tribe will naturally defend the tribe, promote its interests, sacrifice themselves: males one way, females another; the talented one way, the less talented another. Pseudo communities require coercion. The trouble with military coercion is that you theoretically break the inductees as individuals and rebirth them as team members: not a magic that translates well to the labor force at hand: the dregs and scum of the society.

I used to ask my wife to do the dishes. Then I’d ask why the dish, put away, still had dinner crud on it. “I washed it,” she’d say. To her washing meant passing it through dish water: a ritual. To me it meant doing whatever it took to get it clean. Actually looking at it, being conscious of the purpose of the work. The army succeeds in believing that it’s reconditioned citizens into soldiers by passing them through the rituals of the dumbest people in the society and then believing the inspectors’ report: we resocialized them.

Basic training was instrumental in converting me away from the Christianity of my childhood, my pacifism, my belief in the sanctity of man. I wanted to kill alright: I wanted to kill the draft board. I wanted to kill the butchers shooting us with “painless” innoculators from three inches away, blood dripping down our arms, every robot treating us like a robot … (Held against the skin, the “gun” was “painless”; held at a distance, it was sadistic (or would have been if the sadism were conscious, deliberate.)

The trouble with the urge to kill is that is routinely accompanied by the urge to survive. You want to kill but you want to survive the killing, get away with the murder. That’s where our old Scandinavian enemy, the demigod Loge, gets us: we think before we act. Wait till dark. Wait till you’ve gotten out of basic. Come back disguised. Wait till you’re the pilot of a plane, wait till you’re got the Enola Gay, loaded with nukes, only instead of flying to Hiroshima, you unload a few over Fort Dix. Or you just come back to Dix’s whore town on leave, in civvies, wait in an alley with an assault weapon, wait till that lout of a sergeant comes into the alley to puke …

I’ll have to finish those thoughts another time: they’re not the story I wanted to tell today.
I was drafted our of Whitehall Street Recruiting Station. I was not recruited: I was drafted: coerced: given the “choice” between service and jail. But I’m already in service to mankind: you’re not competent to supervise me at it. I’m directly under god’s supervision. God doesn’t need your interference and neither do I.

Whitehall Street Recruiting Station had to be insane ever to accept as a soldier there a draftee who’d been drafted there. Draftees should be assigned abroad, reassigned further abroad … and euthanized before termination. It’s ridiculous to torment people and then arm them. I was under the authority of sadists I’d sworn to kill. Two years crept by. They lived: and I lived: if you can call it living.

Bad situations can have good features. Friendships can be made even during a plague. I formed one of my life’s best friendships at Whitehall Street. I don’t think either Phil or I made friends easily. And we didn’t become friends quickly. But once we did, it was a hard and fast friendship at least for the balance of those two years. Over the years, I think I proved to be a good friend; I think Phil proved to be a bad friend. But we couldn’t tell that yet from within the two years.

Whitehall Station had had all its previous clerk typists go AWOL. This time they assigned only college graduates, English majors all. OK to good colleges in all case. I’d graduated Columbia, Phil Ursinis. Jake was Cornell. Mike was CCNY. Phil went around assuming other people were stupid. I resented it. I wasn’t even sure I should bother to show him that he was wrong. On the other hand, we were stuck together. Maybe … It worked out well, once we bonded. I think Phil had decided that he was the leader no matter what. I was pretty used to that assumption from others, pretty much ignored it. It’s amazing we got along, but we did. Inseparable, for a while. But of course we were as low on the totem pole as we could be and circumstances would keep us there. No army was about to promote a draftee who made a point of showing the involuntary nature of his servitude let alone anyone it had shat on so violently.

Hey, see that soldier icon? Check out notsofancynancy’s WWII blog.

Hierarchy vs. Conviviality Stories

Genocide

Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org &
Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Genocide /
@ K. 2004 07 20

I’m just watching Polanski’s The Pianist: Warsaw, 1939, etc. So many movies have been made about Nazi atrocities — good to great; plenty not so good. By the time some adult consciousness started entering my boyhood, Nazi business well pretty well known. The genocide that first got under my skin though was that of the Armenians: for the simple reason that I loved reading William Soroyan. At first I didn’t know why his characters all stood around so stricken, then I began to get a few clues.

The Jews have gotten lots of press for their Holocaust. (It strikes me as disgraceful that there’s so little accompanying talk about the gypsies, the queers, the many others that the Nazis also detained, abused, sequestered, lined up … shot, gassed … However numerous, the murdered Jews were in that case again, still, a minority: six millions Jews; twelve million others: not counting military killings: eighteen million civilian murders.) (All estimates, of course: you can’t count numbers like those: just as the four million Vietnamese killed by American actions is an estimate: just like Professor R.J. Rummel’s estimate of one hundred sixty-two million civilians murdered by governments in the twentieth century: estimates all.) (And we’re damn lucky to have any that are even half-way so probable!)

Genocide: People recoil at any explanation,
because they confuse explanation with excuses.
Jared Diamond

The closest thing to responsible-looking numbers and lists I’ve seen with regard to genocide were published by Jared Diamond in his The Third Chimpanzee [New York, 1992] and, by God, I’ve got to mirror his charts.

Some Genocides, 1492-1900

from Jared Diamond,
The Third Chimpanze [New York, 1992]
page 284 in my paperback

DEATHS

VICTIMS

KILLERS

PLACE

DATE

1.

xx

Aleuts

Russians

Aleutian Islands

1745-1770

2.

x

Beothuk Indians

French, Micmacs

Newfoundland

1497-1829

3.

xxxx

Indians

Americans

U.S.A.

1620-1890

4.

xxxx

Caribbean Indians

Spaniards

West Indies

1492-1600

5.

xxxx

Indians

Spaniards

Central & South America

1498-1824

6.

xx

Araucanian Indians

Argentinians

Argentina

1870s

7.

xx

Protestants

Catholics

France

1572

8.

xx

Bushmen, Hottentots

Boers

South Africa

1652-1795

9.

xxx

Aborigines

Australians

Australia

1788-1928

10.

x

Tasmanians

Australians

Tasmania

1800-1876

11.

x

Morioris

Maoris

Chatham Islands

1835

Key: x = less than 10,000; xx = 10,000 or more; xxx = 100,000 or more; xxxx = 1,000,000 or more; xxxxx = 10,000,000 or more

Some Genocides, 1900-1950

from Jared Diamond,
The Third Chimpanze [New York, 1992]
page 285 in my paperback

DEATHS

VICTIMS

KILLERS

PLACE

DATE

1.

xxxxx

Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians

Nazis

Occupied Europe

1939-1945

2.

xxx

Serbs

Croats

Yugoslavia

1941-1945

3.

xx

Polish Officers

Russians

Katyn

1940

4.

xx

Jews

Ukrainians

Ukraine

1917-1920

5.

xxxxx

Political opponents

Russians

Russia

1929-1939

6.

xxx

Ethnic minorities

Russians

Russia

1943-1946

7.

xxxx

Armenians

Turks

Armenia

1915

8.

xx

Hereros

Germans

Southwest Africa

1904

9.

xxx

Hindus, Moslems

Moslems, Hindus

India, Pakistan

1947

Key: x = less than 10,000; xx = 10,000 or more; xxx = 100,000 or more; xxxx = 1,000,000 or more; xxxxx = 10,000,000 or more

Some Genocides, 1900-1950

from Jared Diamond,
The Third Chimpanze [New York, 1992]
page 286 in my paperback

DEATHS

VICTIMS

KILLERS

PLACE

DATE

1.

xx

Indians

Brazilians

Brazil

1957-1968

2.

x

Aché Indians

Paraguayans

Paraguay

1970s

3.

xx

Argentine civilians

Argentine army

Argentinia

1976-1983

4.

xx

Moslems, Christians

Christians, Moslems

Lebanon

1975-1990

5.

x

Ibos

North Nigerians

Nigeria

1966

6.

xx

Opponents

Dictator

Equatorial Guinea

1977-1979

7.

x

Opponents

Emperor

Central African Republic

1978-1979

8.

xxx

South Sudanese

North Sudanese

Sudan

1955-1972

9.

xxx

Ugandans

Idi Amin

Uganda

1971-1979

10.

xx

Tutsi

Hutu

Rwanda

1962-1963

11.

xxx

Hutu

Tutsi

Burundi

1972-1973

12.

x

Arabs

Blacks

Zanzibar

1964

13.

x

Tamils, Sinhalese

Sinhalese, Tamils

Sri Lanka

1985

14.

xxxx

Bengalis

Pakistani army

Bangladesh

1971

15.

xxxx

Cambodians

Khmer Rouge

Cambodia

1975-1979

16.

xxx

Communists and Chinese

Indonesians

Indonesia

1965-1967

17.

xx

Timorese

Indonesians

East Timor

1975-1976

Key: x = less than 10,000; xx = 10,000 or more; xxx = 100,000 or more; xxxx = 1,000,000 or more; xxxxx = 10,000,000 or more

The harm that comes to others has a savor,
and men are ever ready to look on.
Owen Parry’s Abel Jones novels

Max Beckmann, Night, 1918

Beckmann has been on my mind recently. But his Night was shoved between my eyes just last evening by Leonard Shlain, his Sex, Power, Time quoting a thumbnail of it most appositely: in the context of why humans can be so devoted to sustained cruelty while wearing one hat while being so devotedly kind while wearing another. There are any number of parallels between Diamond’s great books and this masterpiece of Shlain’s. Indeed, it’s being tangential to Diamond was how Knatz.com correspondent Billy Mac recommended the Shlain book to me.

---

Genocide Notes
2004 07 19

Maybe the Jews were snotty.

But then were the Armenians also snotty? The Indians? The Christians? …

Lenny Bruce, apropos of nothing, the comedian standing before a crowd said, “Bobby Franks was snotty.” Cruelty as comedy. Of course Lenny was satirizing rationalizations, not critiquing the murdered kidnap victim Bobby Franks. Then again I don’t doubt that Lenny Bruce could also be truly cruel.

Hamlet said “I must be cruel in order to be kind.” pk wowed a Shakespeare prof (his boss, the department chairman) by pointing out that not only was it a zowie oxymoron, but that Shakespeare may additionally have been suggesting the species with his diction: kind / mankind: I must be cruel in order to be human. Catholics will tell you about Original Sin. Catholics will also tell you that Jesus paid that debt: it’s true, but don’t worry: just believe, just light your candles. It seems to me that the murder of Jesus is good evidence that Original Sin, if there is such a thing, is still very much in force.

I was brought up to believe we were nice. I grew up believing that I am nice. Now I’m not at all sure. I’ve never been handed the power of life and death. Who knows what I’d do with it if I were. Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin might come to look puny compared to pk’s potential devastations. If I did it at all, I’d want to kill in the billions. Genocide the genocides.

But, at it is, look at those charts. Notice what looks to this non-statistician as an upward curve? I’ll now want to digest the charts into one chronological chart for the whole period and see what patterns emerge.

Realize, Diamond’s charts don’t claim to be complete. They only cover 1492 to 1990. What have we done in the fourteen years since then?

2005 02 16 Whoa! Does Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed [NY, 2005] ever answer that question! The Hutu and Tutsi genomurders were not done after the ’60s and 70s. They were just getting warmed up. Will our future make us long for Dachau as an age of innocence? Or might there be some humans left to wonder how their ancestors ever could have been so gross?

Diamond also reports that Homo sapiens is not unique in this behavior. Chimps also kill. Chimp groups also kill other chimp groups. Looks like we were born genocides.

Speaking of patterns, there are sure some beauties here: lots of peripety. 1962 to 1963 the Hutu kill the Tutsis; a decade later the Tutsi kill the Hutu: going them ninety thousand or so deaths better. Patterns are so pretty.

Has mankind ever seen anything more beautiful than the bomb? The awesome mushroom. More beautiful than God.

---

Back when I was in graduate school my wife’s step-father, economics professor at Columbia Graduate Business School, was looking into some Princeton-centered group that hawked a solution to world politics: kill all the communists and everything will come up roses. I characterized the group as intent on killing half of the people in the world. “Oh, no,” the professor protested: “they don’t want to kill anybody.” Not kill anybody? Don’t they want to kill all the communists? Isn’t that “half” the population?

Oh. Communists. They don’t count. Just like Jews don’t count. Injuns. …

I’d like to kill everyone who is or ever has been a racist. I’d like to kill everyone who is or ever has been a religious bigot.

I know, I know: then I’d have to kill myself too.

That’s OK. I’d do it.

---

Stalin uttered the cliché “You can’t make an omelete without breaking eggs.” A fellow communist said to Stalin, “I see the broken eggs; where’s the omelete?”

As pk says, one shouldn’t say that the end justifies the means without realizing that

the means are fossilized in the ends.

Another way of putting it, closer to the Stalin story:

The end justifies the means only if the ends are in fact met.

---

I interrupted my viewing of The Pianist to create this section, only getting back to the now overdue rental last night, 04 07 23. Very good movie, especially the last third. Music diminishes in other media, almost disappears on TV. Movies can do it OK on the big screen if the equipment is good. Live piano for the silents used to be very good with the right pianist. For the bulk of the film, protagonist Spielman’s playing is OK as movie music goes; but his solo while starving, for the Nazi who discovers him, is as good as music gets in a movie. And, was ever a musical performance better rewarded? The Nazi gives him bread!

But what brings mention of the movie back to this genocide section today, the 24, is my desire to comment on how well The Pianist portrays the Nazi’s marshalling the Jews, recruiting some to police the others for them. The Nazis select certain Jews to be better treated, fed better, so long as they’ll take up night sticks against the Jews who had been their fellows moments before.

Isn’t it true throughout kleptocratic society? The poor Spaniard wants to be employed: the only employment is with Franco. So the poor Spaniard becomes a cop, puts on a uniform: takes the night stick … In the US depression, those who wanted to be allowed to eat became cops, teachers … sought government licences, subsidies …

The Poles stood there while the Jews were robbed, sequestered. Then it was an easy step for the Poles to stand there while other Poles are led away, robbed, murdered … till Warsaw is empty of everybody: except wretched Spielman.

I’ll expand these ideas soon in any of the modules where they’re already founded. Society rehearses us in believing that groups have the right as well as the power to take from one and give to another: freedom, their own children, money, property …

In another good movie I just rented, Changing Lanes, Samuel L. Jackson is told that there’s been an accident, that his sons are hurt. Jackson rushes to the boys’ school which has just been warned by the same prankster that Jackson would try to kidnap his sons. He’s wrestled to the ground, handcuffed: by folks working for the state: the real kidnapper. Could Jackson’s wife have kidnapped Jackson’s sons from him without the connivance of the state? The group owns everything: including your children. Until the Nazis come: and then a different group owns everything. (Until the Russians come.)

---

2005 10 14

Our knowledge is so shallow: and our deeper knowledge is still shallow. Only today did it occur to me to become curious about the etymology of the term Hindu Kush. Geologists these days have been avoiding parochial terminology for things we now pretend are secular, cross-cultural, objective … Ah Ha! It’s a Muslim brag about a Hindu genocide of theirs! Imagine! As though Poland had been renamed Jew Kill by a victorious Hitler, or the whole US Dead Injun!

I’ll take this occasion further to remind us (or, inform us, in case you didn’t know) how shallow our etymological probes can be. Recently scholars thought of Latin as “ancient,” Egyptian as even more ancient. Recently scholars thought Hebrew was The Original Language! Now Semitic turns out not even to be a middle-eastern language, but north-African. I’ll bet that the phonemes “ma,” meaning mother, are older than the modern species, older than say 50,000 years: just the way control of fire is older than Homo sapiens, older than a million years: by quite a bit. Even as scholars build better and older Indo European language maps I remind us how recent ALL of that is. There’s hardly a word (other than ma) that might not mean Here’s where we ate the Neanderthal’s eyes.

---

2006 05 01

I was just a kid when the rumors of Hitler’s Holocaust were filtering around. When I saw photos of the starved bodies I didn’t react to them much differently from much of the other crap on the candy story magazine rack: porn, horror comics … I knew that ugliness sold, couldn’t be sure what was “news,” what was staged …

No, the genocide that affected me emotionally the earliest in my life was that which crept up on me through William Soroyan’s stories of Armenians in California: their relatives slaughter by the Turks was the dark cloud, only dimly perceived by young me, behind the characters’ angst. I loved the characters, the survivors first (thanks to Soroyan), became conscious of, and enraged by, the genocide that those few had survived only later. Still, it predated my rage at Hitler. (My childhood rage came merely from the propaganda against him.)

Anyhow, I’m about to watch a film on the subject: Ararat. (We’ve got Holocaust movies up the kazambe; here’s one for the Armenians.)

---

2006 09 01

I just read a couple of disturbing reports at theStraightDope.com on the Armenian genocide of WW I days. One account affirmed it, another account accused the affirmation of propaganda-inspired simplisticity: the Armenians, though they indeed were being killed in numbers, were in a complex political situation, with Russia, the British, etc. as well as the Turks involved, and the Armenians themselves were simply passive victims. In other words, though there were killings galore, the situation was sticky, and mere “genocide” is misleadingly simple.

The critic claimed that the issue was complicated by the West’s lazy hatred of Turks. I plead guilty there. There’s no one who hasn’t been muddied by propaganda.

In other words, if the bad Nazis beat up on the peace-loving Jews on their way to temple, that’s bad, but is different from the bad Nazi’s beating up on the Jews who are stockpiling firebombs to use on the Nazis. The claim is that the Armenians were in more than one or two cases engaged in their own political skulduggeries at the time.

Specifically the counter claim claimed that some Armenians were murdering Turks left and right, hoping that the West would step in and give them an independent Armenia.

Makes sense. ? Could have been. ?

One thing is clear: history is a mess.

Genocide Summary

Genocide Summery, 1492-1990

Here I reorder Jared Diamond’s charts chronologically by beginning year and I substitute rough numbers for his quantitative symbols (simply translating his “x”s) (and hoping I’m introducing no errors).

DATES

VICTIMS

DEATHS

1492-1600

Caribbean Indians

1,000,000+

1497-1829

Beothuk Indians

10,000-

1498-1824

Indians

1,000,000+

1572

Protestants

10,000+

1620-1890

Indians

1,000,000+

1652-1795

Bushmen, Hottentots

10,000+

1745-1770

Aleuts

10,000+

1788-1928

Aborigines

100,000+

1800-1876

Tasmanians

10,000-

1835

Morioris

10,000-

1870s

Araucanian Indians

10,000+

1904

Hereros

10,000+

1915

Armenians

1,000,000+

1917-1920

Jews

10,000+

1929-1939

Political opponents

10,000,000+

1939-1945

Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians

10,000,000+

1940

Polish Officers

10,000+

1941-1945

Serbs

100,000+

1943-1946

Ethnic minorities

100,000+

1947

Hindus, Moslems

100,000+

1955-1972

South Sudanese

100,000+

1957-1968

Indians

10,000+

1962-1963

Tutsi

10,000+

1964

Arabs

10,000-

1965-1967

Communists and Chinese

100,000+

1966

Ibos

10,000-

1970s

Aché Indians

10,000-

1971

Bengalis

1,000,000+

1971-1979

Ugandans

100,000+

1972-1973

Hutu

100,000+

1975-1976

Timorese

10,000+

1975-1979

Cambodians

1,000,000+

1975-1990

Moslems, Christians

10,000+

1976-1983

Argentine civilians

10,000+

1977-1979

Opponents

10,000+

1978-1979

Opponents

10,000-

1985

Tamils, Sinhalese

10,000-

Obviously the numbers are very rough. 1,000,000+, “more than one million,” could be very much more than one million (but less than ten million, or Diamond would have bumped it to the next grouping. 10,000-, “less than 10,000.” Clearly, it’s still in the thousands. 18,000,000 — Hitler’s number — is entered as 10,000,000+: quite a few more than ten million. What was the number of Armenians killed by the Turks? Here it just goes down as “more than one million.”

Never trust pk’s arithmetic; but you can trust pk’s mathematics to some extent. Thus, if you total rough numbers without taking careful account of what mathematicians call “significant numbers,” you’ll get a misleading number: possibly a highly misleading number. Without totaling here, we see that the numbers are huge. But I’m going to try a rough total anyway:

More than 27,001,000!

But we know it’s more: many millions more.

Notice the megadeaths that are not listed as genocides: the nine million Indians dead immediately after 1492 who never even heard of Europeans: killed by European diseases long before the white man got close to them. Notice that ordinary wars are not included.

2012 05 26
But: but, but, but …
But let me say further: It’s not as though there’s ever been any sane alternative (other than Ivan Illich’s and my offer of unsupervised cybernetic community data-basing, 1970 (Free Learning Exchange). Humans find a rich niche and immediately overpopulate it. We’re incapable of rational planning: so, nature seizes any method, however brute, to roach-spray us. I’m for nature, not for us.

I hope someone will notice dates here: I launched the above in 2004. Got arrested in 2006, censored in 2007: 4000 text files worth, again as many graphic files. Slowly, since 2008 I try to put some back.
Was I arrested for exposing genocide? to the genocides? I joke about revenge, that proves I’m a terrorist: to the kangaroo trial terrorists it does.
The atheists don’t believe in Judgment!
Never mind what I no longer believe; what I still believe in is truth! No one really gets away with anything. We just don’t see the consequences: but blindness is not a reliable form of knowledge.

Civilization

pk’s Catch-22

Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org &
Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / HierCon / Army /
/ Berlin Crisis / Whitehall Street (early 1960s) /
@K. 2002 09 24

I’m assigned at Whitehall Street Induction Station. Since it’s the same joint that had processed me as a draftee, it’s all the more galling for this once-upon-a-time pacifist, this once-upon-a-time Christian, this now and always anarchist to have his nose rubbed in the very scene that had been the physical adjunct to the amassed coercions of his being drafted. I remember getting on the bus to Fort Dix. The same pathetic shrimp hard-ass sergeant that had busted my balls in each of my three days of visiting Whitehall Street — no less hellish because they came in two installments a few months apart — steps up onto the bus to grate further on my indignation, my helpless-Christian outrage. Sgt. Lyons. By age twenty-three I was already beginning to acknowledge that I was rather less Christian than I’d once believed. I remember vowing that if I ever did decide to throw over my morality, that Sgt. Lyons would be one of the first I’d seek out and kill: Buck Sgt. Eton of K Company, Fort Dix New Jersey being the very first. (Another shrimp. Somehow the physically (and mentally) disadvantaged non-coms are the worst.

Months and months later, don’t you know: it’s Sgt. Lyons who’s my sergeant at Whitehall Street. Sgt. Lyons doesn’t have a clue why I should hate him, resent him. note (Sgt. Lyons himself may well have loved the Army: thought it was a good (ahem) “career.”) Sgt. Lyons may well not have realized that I hated him. Like the Spec4 in the note below, he may have thought himself innocent in his treatment of us, may have thought of us as now in the same boat: him though having the rank. (I’m not positive: I think Sgt. Lyons would have been E5, perhaps E6. I had the definite impression that his rise had not been fast and that his rise was about riz. Low bridge, everybody down.

So one day I’m sitting at my desk. I’m in a lull between piles of cases. I am doing nothing. Neither am I gold-bricking. I’ll again be clack-clacking away once they bring me more cases to type. I’m surprised to see Sgt. Lyons standing at the side of my desk. Sgt. Lyons, for the first time I’ve ever noticed is not scowling at me. Sgt. Lyons is not threatening to fuck my girl friend (his very words) if she comes hanging around Whitehall Street any more. (Sgt., we’re in New York, not Fort Dix. She’s a free adult. She can hang around anywhere she wants. And it’s me she’s waiting for, not you.) Sgt. Lyons — can it be? — has a book in his hand — a book! — a paper back: Catch-22. I’m startled. Sgt. Lyons speaks to me: a little bit miffed, but seemingly not miffed, for this moment, at me. “This book is supposed to be so funny,” he says to me, the literary expert. “I don’t see a thing funny about it. It’s just weird. You tell me,” and the aggrieved sergeant puts a passage under my nose: “What’s funny about this?”

I take the book from his hand. His finger has been pointing at an exchange of dialogue. [It's 2004 01 16 and I finally got the book in my hand. Section three. Havermeyer: the passage in which me meet Orr and his gasoline faucet: where Orr first teases Yossarian with the crab apples / horse chestnuts business. Page twenty three and following of the paper back I purchased that day in the PX.]

I start to read. I start to guffaw.

Aside. A year or two before, the adorable girlfriend of a friend (I was in love with her myself) had our senior year been reading Catch-22. She was buried in it, riveted. Shrug. Meant nothing to me. Now it’s a couple of years later. I see every commuter reading Catch-22 on the LIRR. But popularity puts me off. Either I read it before it’s hot or I read it once it’s cooled; I don’t gad after best-sellers. Silly? Of course. It was nevertheless the truth about me. Well in this case I had obviously made a terrible mistake. Sgt. Lyons stands there fuming while I read his book. I run with it to my friend Phil. Ursinus College, 1960, English. I point to the same passage. Phil starts to laugh. I grab the book from Phil and run with it to Mike. CCNY, 1960, English. Mike is no more willing to give the book back to me that Phil had been. I return to my desk. Sgt. Lyons, not irate, not yet, is still standing there. “I’m borrowing your book,” I tell him. I sit down. I resume reading.

“Get your own book,” he says and snatches it back from me.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, and bolt for the PX. Phil and Mike are right behind me. Fortunately, the PX has at least three copies left on the shelf, so we don’t have to tear each other to fragments over a scarcity.

For the following weeks Sgt. Lyons has to look at Knatz, Rowe, and Melcher, reading Catch-22 between tasks, at lunch, as we walk in the door in the morning, walking blind from the subway …

Did I ever tell Sgt. Lyons what was funny about that passage? Or any other passage? No. I made no attempt. These forty years later I still cannot dream what I should have said to him. Other than to get his head out of his ass. What? Should I have extemporized Macroinformation for him right then and there? (I wish I had, actually.)

So, Sgt. Lyons was only a couple of sections, a couple of dozen pages, into Catch-22 when he presented his confusion, his non-fit with the literature, to me. I never saw him reading at it further. I doubt that he did. Did I and Phil and Mike deliberately piss on his literary aspirations? Sgt. Lyons was the last thing on my mind once I got a load of Joseph Heller: particularly that book: particularly while I myself was in the service. But had I then had sufficient processing power to consider both the book and Sgt. Lyons at the same time, sure, why shouldn’t I begin my revenge right then and there: and in that very way? Sgt. Lyons certainly asked for it. Imagine! Asking me! the same guy he’d been rudely pushing around: another hunk of meat to inspect.

I could perhaps plan a more painful experience for Sgt. Lyons. But I don’t believe I could plan anything more humiliating: than to be shown for what he is: an illiterate buffoon in front of Whitehall Street’s The Three Literateers.

I already have my revenge: I’m me; while you’re you!

[Again 2004 01 16 If you don't know the novel you don't know the significance of Orr and his faucet: or his crab apples. And neither does the first time reader upon reaching section Three. Clevinger. It's clear enough from the beginning of the novel that Yossarian wants out of WWII. It's not at all clear that the passage in question was Heller's first flash of the "gun" that would go off in "Act III": THE foreshadowing of the method Yossarian would finally succeed with: having learnt it, not too swiftly, from the patient, persistent Orr. Yossarian, at the beginning, is clowning with survival; Orr in contrast is weaving a good plan: hidden in plain sight. But the passage rings with foreshadowings as well as clangs with comic absurdity. The literarily alert reader cannot possibly say at that point what the faucet will become in the novel, or the crab apples; but you know it's something. The texture is oh so rich. The novel starts absurd; but our faith is justified, the absurdities come into focus as wholly practical: the story climaxes affirming life.

And I must take this occasion (any occasion) to emphasize something I have not heard recognized nearly enough about that great novel these four plus decades: author Joseph Heller is a Jew: no secret. Jews have made a big deal out of the Holocaust: the attempted genocide of Jews. "Yossarian" is an Armenian name. Ta Dah! Get it? The Nazi's grotesque "genocide" of Jewry is no worse than the Turks' slaughter of well more than one million Armenians in 1915. The Jews had the clout to scream about it, Allies cooperating for their own political agendas. Who screamed about the Armenians?

William Soroyan, for one. How many heard him? [See Jared Daimond, The Third Chimpanzee, p. 285. K. reproduced some]

---

PS. Apropos of Macroinformation: as Sgt. Lyons read Joseph Heller I don’t doubt that he got all of the data; what he didn’t get “any” of was the information! the macroinformation! information being the improbable effluent of the data.

Notes

No Clue Why I Should Hate Him:

In basic training itself it was standard I am sure practice to yell and scream at us eighteen or twenty hours a day for the first several days. Had some army lawyer been there he might have testified at a court martial that we were not cursed at: no profanity being used, things divine also not being invoked. I am sure such a lawyer would further testify that we were not physically threatened. The sergeant never said Give me ten pushups, face in the mud, soldier, or I’ll kick your scrotum flat. However, if the lawyer were Gandhi and the court were something a few degrees better than martial, then I don’t doubt that every single thing the military personnel did would be adjudged to have been profane, obscene, violent, and blasphemous.

Now, I understood perfectly well that this behavior was not preferred by some of the non-careerists. They only did it while the careerists were watching them, and then not as loud or as intrusively as the careerists themselves. For instance: I insert this footnote to relate an incident with a Spec4 who was one of the soldiers harrying us out of the bus when we first arrived. (Imagine airline stewardesses acting like devils from hell the instant the plane door opens over the tarmac at Honolulu. By the way, if you haven’t been in the military, enlistees, and draftees with them, are ordered on an E spectrum. On first arriving at basic training we were all E1: the grade called Private. On graduation we were promoted to E2: Private First Class. As E1s our pay was something like $89 a month. The promotion made it an even $90. We were given one stripe. We had to wear it sewn on our sleeves.

But of course the army was supposed to feed us, cloth us, house us, transport us. Our salary was for fun, not for necessities. You could save it, send it home, put in on a horse. If your pockets were empty, they still fed you breakfast and put you on the truck for distant duties, told you to get marching for duties within a few miles. E3 got you a second stripe, got you called Corporal: once upon a time. By the 1960s the military was divvying soldiers between “leadership” roles ha ha and “specialist” roles. The specialist E3 gets a patch to replace his one stripe, not a second stripe to add to it. E4 for the “leaders of men” is buck sergeant: three stripes: a chevron. But most soldiers are specialists these days. All they get is a bar to put under their patch: Specialist Fourth Class: or Spec4.

The guy I’m remembering was a Spec4. Maybe he was only a Spec3. Somehow they made the poor bastard act like a corporal or a sergeant and yell and scream in our faces. And he did.

A week or two into basic things were calmed down a little bit. It must be hard work to scream at people eighteen hours a day. The sergeants wanted to go drink a beer. Go talk nice to some female. Rest their vocal chords for Monday. Weekends began to be at least 1% toward being a weekend after the first few weeks. I’m walking into the barracks as this Spec4 comes barging out, on his way to the company office, his duty time arriving. A minute later he blunders back into the barracks, all flustered and red faced. He reemerges from his room a moment later, attaching his brass pins to his collar. He looks at me and a few other E1s in the vicinity accusingly. “Muh brass,” he whines, “Muh brass. How could you let me go off to the HQ without muh brass?”

Mister, I’d have willingly let you go to the moon without an oxygen mask. I’d have laid a red carpet for you: if it was into the entrance of hell. I’d have let you walk up to the queen stark naked: the more willingly if it were a capital offense: always punished instantly. This guy had been terrorizing us. Now he thinks we’re his buddies? In WWII should the German soldiers have pouted that we didn’t warn them that our bullets contained lead?

Context

Hierarchy vs. Conviviality Stories

Revisit the Brightest

A guy on TV last night said “We have to put the best and brightest in the classroom.”
I posted my Best & Brightest module at the IonaArc blog, then moved it to K, 2004 (then revived it here, 2011); but no one has learned a thing from me, so, vanity vanity, no one learned from Ivan Illich, no one learned from Jesus, I try repeating: repeating Illich to start:

Deschooling opposes compulsion to attend a meeting.

If we talk about freedom, then we can’t also talk about putting anyone in a classroom: not the best, not the worst, not the brightest, not the dimmest, not one child, not one adult. You can lure them, entice them, tempt them, you can offer to hire them, you can try to outbid the competition, but where do we get off “putting.” It’s fascism.

A free people wouldn’t want anybody put any where for any reason.
But we’re not free. We impose a draft: then we drop it, but impose it again. We have a Constitution, but we don’t follow it.
(Any draftee can tell you about conscription, but we do things worse than conscript: take childbirth, population development: ask any woman who didn’t want that marriage, that liason, that child …)

But I’ll tell you what’s worse yet: Where do we, the people who if we didn’t put Jesus on the cross, treat other teachers not much better, get off pretending that we could tell the “best” if it bit us? Or the brightest?
I see humans trying to know God; where do we get off claiming that we’ve succeeded? that we do know God?
Or, we can claim anything we want, but when does God speak? Will we hear him? Will we listen?

We’re supposed to put the best man in the White House: have we ever done it? Once? Were we ever even really trying?

I put the 2004 effort at K. under Homeostasis. I’ve been harping on the concept since the 1970s. But I’m not aware of having successfully communicated any point about it to any single other human. Zero feedback if not zero understanding. But in a nutshell: homeostasis is how a system maintains it’s balance. A group with average IQ 90 to 110, averagely intelligent, may cooperate with a guy of IQ 115, 120; but it will run in horror from a gal or guy of IQ 185! 190!
We murdered Jesus, calling him a criminal!
That’s what the story says, I say it’s an accurate symbol of human behavior. I say not that we did it once, not that we learned our lesson; but that we’ll do it every time, that the lesson is not learnable.
No lesson can defeat gravity, no lesson can increase c‘s velocity.

Homeostasis Menu

Undertow Gravity Upend

I’ll never forget, this memory from the very early 1940s is utterly vivid: Jones Beach, I’m a toddler, playing in the wave wash. There’s a shell, being tumbled, there’s a sand flea … Ooo. If I’d picked up the sand flea even I could have crushed it; but little Paul didn’t crush things, I just gadded about the surf wash, Ooo, Ooo.

I know my mother was watching me, calling, reassuring me every other few seconds. But quick, before I could notice, before my mother noticed, a wave grabbed me, knocked me down, held me down, held my face mashed in the seething sand and broken shell of the liquid beach / ocean world-grinder mix … I was utterly helpless. I was utterly shocked. I’d never imagined being so helpless. Compared to me ground by that wave a rag doll is Superman. No time was wasted deciding that I’d better hold my breath, I held my breath, automatically: my first conscious experience of anything automatic. No time was wasted telling the wave than it had no right to grind me. Ground by the wave there are no rights, there’s no ought, no imperative but the wave’s.

The toddler became a little boy.
Paul with Beth and Dad

The wave mashed me, held me, but then dragged me, inexorably, at some tangent to the beach: eastward, a bit out to sea (as my older mind reconstructs it). I’d already held my breath for a good several seconds, now I had to hold it still, several seconds more. I never doubted that I might have been in the final moments of my life, that my consciousness was about to be wiped. I had no quarrel. Total helplessness was actually very peaceful. I didn’t waste time imagining my funeral, like Tom Sawyer (whom I wouldn’t hear of for another half-dozen years), I didn’t imagine my mother’s grief. My mother was irrelevant, my mother was nothing compared to the dictation of this wave.

I’ve been knocked about by many a wave since that first one. I’ve never again had my face held in the sand like a puppy being toilet trained: maybe because I know better than to resist any wave big enough to spike me into the broil. My first I may have tried to resist, the futility instantly learned. I know one thing: I absolutely loved, and miss, that total helplessness.
Maybe that’s what Germans were looking for when they followed Hitler! Maybe Hitler gave utter ecstasy to six million Jews, grinding them helpless, and eighteen million dissidents. But no: no Wehrmacht is strong like my wave was strong. My original Platonic wave.

Near thirty years latter I had another ecstasy of helplessness. It was a Saturday. The snow at Sugarloaf was superlative, the weather gorgious. But I’d promised to help officiate a a downhill race on the long trail that wound around the backside of the mountain: intermediate trail, very famous, I’ll think of the name: same slope on which I broke the clutch handle of my Yamaha trail bike, big sprocket, trying to climb up the mountain! I don’t remember what I was doing. I wasn’t a timer, maybe I watched a particular gate to see that any participant crossed it legally, maybe I had the power to DQ. (Now I remember: it wasn’t a Colby race, it was a warm up for the Olympics. Suzy Whatsername was in that race.) Whatever, it took all day. So it’s almost time for the lifts too shut down before they thank me and dismiss me. I race for the gondola. If I blitz the gondola trail I just maybe can get two runs in. If not, I should take my time, savor the descent.

At the top I check my watch. Sure: I’ll bust it, ski this mother wide open, catch the gondola still operating, back up for another: that the last of my day. I pound the gondola trail hard. The moguls are beautiful, I’m smashing them into spray. No, no, that takes time, ski straight, schuss! Ah! That’s what I’ll do: that one crest, that’s mountain, not mogul, that’s ground that’s projecting that lip, offering a really scary jump for the intrepid.
Skis on snow are faster that airborne skis, but it will only cost me a second: I’m feeling super, I’m going to catch so much air here, I’ll ever come down, or I’ll be half way to the lodge by the time I do: and on the intermediate part of the trail, not this black belt expert hair monster.

gondola trail cut straight down, at right
thanks, tripadvisor

I take the lip, I time the kneebend, the leg kick for launch, and, just as I’m about to enjoy my flight, it’s for sure going to be the highest, longest, by far, I’ve ever jumped, something in the snow ahead catches me eye. It’s wool, it’s colorful, it’s stretched on the snow: some kid was skiing ahead of me, the ridge obscured him, he’s fallen, I’m about to ram the steel and fiberglass tip of my 207 cm K22s into his ear. I froze!

I’d been dreaming of catching a lot of air, of imitating the tip hanging picture of Pepi Stieglitz on the cover of the magazine. Everything’s great, I have lots of air, I’m hanging my tips, and I see a kid, helpless, right in front of me. Jean Claude would have spread eagled, kept his skis away from the kid, miss the kid by a mile. But me, I froze. I did not realign my skis with the terrain after my tip drop. I just froze. I landed. My tips dug straight into the nearly bottomless snow of 1969. The mountain grabbed my tips, and held them. I blew out of the bindings, my leather safety thongs disintegrated. I tumbled 180, 360, 530 … through the air. I landed, whump!, blasting a snow burrow, yes, almost to where the sexpert trail whimpers to intermediate, near half way back to the lodge. I extricate myself from the burrow. My left ski is off to my left, God knows where my right ski is.

But I’ve got to check on that kid! I’ve heard no screams. Surely a kid would have family nearby. What lone kid would be skiing the goldola line at 4 PM? I see my right ski. It’s quivering, slowly now, in the snow a huge distance back up the mountain: that’s by far the longest tumble I’ve ever taken. I realize that I’m completely alright. If anything twisted, if there’s going to be any pain, it will come later. I pick up my left ski and begin climbing toward the companion. Where’s that kid? What the hell did I see? think I saw?

It’s a scarf. Someone lost a scarf. A long scarf, worn by an idiot, scarf like that can strangle you. You’d think people would learn from … come to me in a minute. Anyway, I reach my right ski. I’ll put it back on first, make a solid platform from which to struggle with the left ski. But I’m not getting any purchase! I reverse, put on my left ski, now I’ll struggle with the right.
I try to ski and fall straight back down on my face. Now I see it: the right ski has totally delaminated. All the component layers are unglued, unsandwiched: wood, glue, air, fiberglass, steel … nothing. It’s a banana! No, wait, I’m wrong. Not K22, they came later; these were Heads! Head 200 cm 360s! The Heads were soft, not like my K22s, but not that soft.

So: I wanted an adventure? I wanted to skii two runs? Well, I had two adventures: I flew through the air, and II got to ski back to the lodge on one ski! I put my left ski on my right boot, right’s my strong leg, carried the deconstructed ski and my poles lying across my arms, like a course setter carrying the flags, and skied, skidded, jumped back to the lodge.
Once on Mt. Washington, Tuckermans, spring, maybe spring 1969, I saw two girls ski down to Pinkham Notch on one ski apiece. That way they’d have only one pair of skis between them to have to carry back up to their camp! Man, those girls! Either they can’t ski worth crap, or they’re so good, you can’t ski with them! These girls skied on one ski almost the same they’d ski on two! Strong! Brave! Beautiful.
Still: I skied the one ski better than most would: and would have skied it more gracefully with practice.

My target coming up, but I breath for a moment

Caliban, Ariel

The wave held me, helpless. My fall spun me, tumbled me, helpless. Momentum, gravity … natural forces … Forces!
Caliban: heave; Ariel: light.
We do this and that with the earth: build railroads, go to the moon, we’re such hot shit. But we don’t know what’s coming. One minute we’re playing in the wave wash, ooo, I’m the big monster, that sand flea is so little … And wham! The wave knocks all vanity into a cocked hat.

Cartoon I loved long ago, New Yorker, 1950s: preacher stands pointing to some passage in some limp black book he’s holding. Alpha military type behind a desk demands, “Does this God of yours realize he’s dealing with the United States of America?”!

PS Resorts are constantly engineering new trails. Does the above pic show my Sugarloaf of 1967, 68, 69? I can’t tell. At least it’s a pic with trails cut straight in the fall line, and shows a gondola line.

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