TRUMP AND HIS ILK IN POWER, # 01

 Well put by Tim Kaine, United States senator from Virginia:

"We have a President who refused to deploy the National Guard to protect the Capitol on January 6th, despite repeated requests from the Mayor of DC and the head of the Capitol Police — because those protestors supported him.

"And we have a President who has now deployed the National Guard (and Marines) in the absence of a request and over the objection of the Mayor of LA — because those protestors don’t support him.

"The President is not a king and the military is not his palace guard." 

Again, the mafioso mentality of Trump and his cabinet is on serious display here: the manic and irresponsible January 6th criminals were given a free pass, but in Los Angeles protesters who condemned Trump's wholesale deportations (of mostly law-abiding immigrants) are met with military force.  On one hand, rioting bigots loyal to the felon Trump are rewarded, but on the other, protesters and honest critics are suppressed with military force.  There was no public danger and no reason for federal intervention, but because Trump's political will was contested, he responded with uncalled-for armed force.  

What else would we expect from a fascist goon?  

MEASLES FROM RFK JR., THE MEDIEVAL WITCH! ESPECIALLY FOR YOU!

By the way, 

Are the American people too stupid to understand reality?  We'll have to wait and see!  But maybe the resurgence of measles and its needless deaths, which RFK is enabling right now, will light up a brain or two.  

God knows, it's not only Republicans who are stupid.  Democrats and Progressives and the various factions have all been too stupid for decades to go back and understand just who the American people really were!  And what is commonly called stupidity - human limitations - remains a truly universal fact, although we all judge it from personal and distinct poles, based on whatever viewpoint (or fashion) we hold dear.    

To return to measles:  

"This miserable and dangerous disease has already claimed the lives of two people – the first American measles deaths in nearly a decade. But despite the existence of a vaccine so effective that measles was once eliminated in the US, Kennedy has thrown his most enthusiastic support behind vitamins and cod liver oil – while also canceling scientific meetings of vaccine advisers."

- Jessica Glenza, Health reporter, Guardian US

A longer article is here:  

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cedlwxlp01zo

There may be some salutary things that will in the end emerge from Trump's Bizarro-world federal regime.  Perhaps the culling of some of the existing federal government's many unproductive or ill-conceived money-sinks will ultimately open space for a rebuilding of federal spending, a balanced budget, and perhaps better agreement about just what the nation needs.  But at this point that's only the vaguest of hopes, and one posed against a de facto government of thugs, bullies, and flat-earthers.  

Can the Four Freedoms co-exist with Human Nature?

Famously, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and his speechwriters) set out a powerful agenda for civilized and democratic nations in his State of the Union Address on January 6, 1941.  This was nearly a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  He had in mind the American notions of both Democratic government and material progress, as opposed to the nationalist and militarist notions of the intolerant regimes popular in Germany, Italy and Japan.  His speech outlined Four Freedoms, a comprehensive outline not only of what people need and wish for, but also of what just governments would be concerned with.  

To wit, that section of his speech:  

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

(i)  The first is freedom of speech, and expression—everywhere in the world.

(ii)  The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

(iii)  The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

(iv)  The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium.

It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

His words sound strangely optimistic in this part of the 21st century.  The people of our time have universally decided that they prefer war and enmity in place of peace and freedom.  Certainly, so long as the common mixture of grudges, gossip, resentment, and bitterness guide  modern electorates, barbarism will be the modern way of life.    

Nonetheless, while these points should obviously be the focus of political activity in the United States and, indeed, in all civilized nations, they are universally ignored and despised in favor of acquisition and revenge.  Everywhere, throughout the world, they are ignored in favor of egotism and identities based on violence.  

TRUMPIAN PERFIDY

Well said by Francis Fukuyama:

"What Trump has said over the past few days about Ukraine and Russia defies belief. He has accused Ukraine of having started the war by not preemptively surrendering to Russian territorial demands; he has said that Ukraine is not a democracy; and he has said that Ukrainians were wrong to resist Russian aggression. 

"These ideas are likely not ones he thought up himself, but come straight from the mouth of Vladimir Putin, a man Trump has shown great admiration for. Mee/ting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, the United States started a direct negotiation with Moscow that excludes both Ukraine and the Europeans, and has surrendered in advance two critical bargaining chips: acceptance of Russian territorial gains to date, and a commitment not to let Ukraine enter NATO. In return, Putin has not made a single concession."

Trump, still a villain and an opportunist to the utmost, has made American concessions that were not ours to make.  He has, in the manner of Munich, 1939, betrayed a vulnerable people to a dictator's ambition.  The differences are that while a desperate Chamberlain was fooled by Hitler's lies, here Trump is the liar, blaming the victims and Zelensky for Russia's quite naked aggession, while knowingly playing footsy with the KGB criminal-in-chief, Putin.  

The Post-2020 Prospect ...

Salutem vobis qui legerent -

I don't post much here in the oh-so-crowded vacuum of cyberspace anymore.  The shadows are loud, and the halls echo with resentment and bile.  

Why do people blog and post?  Often it is frustration, too often it is rancor.  Sometimes to seek sympathetic correspondents who will endorse their opinions.  Modern communications result in opinion puddles, echo chambers for bitterness and fury. 

As we advance to election time, I find myself frustrated and gloomy -- fearing the effective discipline and hard-assed rancor of the so-called "Republican" Party on the one hand, and on the other both the relative ineptitude of the Democratic Party and -- worse -- the misandry of the American Left.  If the Republican ticket prevails in 2020 and saddles us with another four years of the same Presidential goon and a Congress of malefactors like Mitch McConnell, whose regressivist bullshit we have come to know so well, THAT is sobering.  

Think about this;  What is a Republic?   It is a society of antagonists who nonetheless cooperate for the general good.  

Who could have imagined that the Presidency of the United States would be reduced to the level of a burlesque show, a "reality show", scripted by and starring someone like Donald Trump?  This week's first Presidential debate, however, brings it home:  violence and vulgarity, anti-intellectualism and racism, are the oh-so-popular hallmarks of the so-called "Republicans".  

This is a dire problem, for the current President is only the mouthpiece of this furious conservative groundswell, rather than its author.  This groundswell may be fostered by corporate money, but it is a real, visceral, long-ingrained disposition that Left-ish politics and Revolutionary loudmouth-ism did much to create.  The giddy cry of the Right is that "Now we are finally being heard!"  None of this is new; it did not begin with Reagan or Goldwater or the John Birch Society or the KKK; and it seems only too similar to European politics of the inter-war years in Europe.  

Because of his name recognition, because he vocally despises the Liberal and Democratic agenda, and because he's rich (and therefore, in the vulgar eye, a "winner"), Donald Trump is a choice representative for many working people in the United States.  This is a visceral thing, not a cognitive one.  No one on the Left has such a similarly broad appeal, except perhaps Bernie Sanders, and he is out of the running.   

Remember that in the 1900s the Democratic Party ITSELF was also an ardent protector of racist and exclusive social values that nowadays we associate with people like Donald Trump.  If the forces of Democracy ever hope to regain momentum in the United States, they will have to stop, examine conservative complaints for their genesis, think about the nature of people, and get a grip on what Middle and Rural America and what money-minded Americans are objecting to.  The Left, if it wishes to resume its dominant place in American politics, needs to understand what conservative resentment is all about, and it needs to champion NOT just the disenfranchised minorities, but also the middle-class and other groups that FEEL disenfranchised.  

How to do this, I cannot say.  But beyond marketing, politics is a Coalition-Building.  When the Democratic activists accept the fact that human beings are innately greedy, near-sighted, and corrupt; that White Males (among others) are not in fact misogynist devils all of the time (just as Black Males are not thugs all the time); and that we live in a Republic (a thing-of-ALL-the-people), THEN they may have an advantage over the more-ardent coalition of hysterical conservatives.  America will not move ahead in terms of realizing its promise of freedom and democracy until the American Left can learn to live with people as they come, always more or less reprehensible, but fellow-citizens, nonetheless.  

If furiously partisan ideologies and a universal ethos of extremism remain the standards extolled on every side (Winnerism on the Right, Self-Indulgent-Equality-of-Outcome-ism on the Left; in other words, Ultra-Individualism both Right and Left), the Republic will fail.  We need a New Center, tolerant but focused on ALL people.  

Valete bene.

Chaos vs. Cosmos

Chaos vs. Cosmos

Greek khaos meant a ‘vast chasm, void', and later came to mean 'formlessness, disorder'.  

Greek kosmos meant 'the world' or 'nature' or ‘order', thus also both 'the natural world' and 'the physical Universe', and then in a nearer sense 'the human (social) world'.  

For the Ancient Greeks, Khaos and Kosmos were logically in opposition:  Khaos was a kind of material nothingness, whereas kosmos was the more-or-less regular, observable world around us.  Entrepreneur Lou Marinoff ("The Middle Way", 2007) made this point for me and it is a useful framing tool:  On one side, the treacherous void - loneliness, poverty, death, anomie - and on the other side, the project of life - endless problems of self, people, pressures, work, and meaning.  

My own mental salvation has been informed not only by my own conclusions (drawn from years of muddling about and wondering "Why?"), but especially from insights of Stoicism (a philosophy worth investigating!).  In our time, when the American kosmos is reeling, rent by violent hubris and balkanization at every hand, it is important to realize that, historically and in fact, America has ALWAYS been splintered and internally antagonistic, from the beginning.  George Washington's own administration was plagued by rebellion; Lincoln was assassinated by a political malcontent; later, William McKinley.  Many cults have rejected matter-of-fact American life and tried to construct their own sub-cultures - the most successful, perhaps, being the Latter-Day Saints.  The USA, born from the idealistic Liberalism of the 1700s, has had to deal with natural human schismaticism; the anthropoid predilection for clubs and gangs, and the individual zoological urge to dominance.  And if the USA has been clique- and party-ridden from the start, at all levels, so has humanity, taken as a whole.  There are always exploiters; there are always malcontents; there are always gang-wars between rich and poor, male and female, staid and wild, absolutist and mediator, and so on.  Ideology and division and internecine resentment is the legacy of biology, psychology, and politics.  

And anyone who is going to try to live in our 21st-century republic should recognize that.  

So it's important to stop screaming for a minute and take a look at our Kosmos, forever full of schism and Khaos, of activism, daily living, and despair.  Life is not black and white, all or nothing, Good versus Bad; it's much more complex and murky.  Our understanding of life should take this into account; it should take all the nasty, antagonistic features of human variation into account: the frictions and the crimes.  They are nothing new - they are simply the flip side of a Kosmos.  In our time, they are especially amplified by our over-abundance of media, particularly now the Internet, and by our native impatience and our native vitality.   

The "Culture Wars" that we are promoting and suffering are a fact.  But in another sense, I propose that they are also an illusion - they are really not new.  And the ideological stances by which they're promoted are based just as much on fantasy as on real experiences.  

The "Culture Wars" are something to be reckoned with, but are not in fact something to be "solved".  In fact, they are just regular parts of life, natural frictions, concomitants of the human situation in history.  There is no Final Solution.  Anyone who claims that there is - that there is a "Key to happiness" - is selling something.  People are various, and their passions and follies are as well.  It's that simple.  Difference and other-ness are just parts of us being individuals - of each of us having perception, a brain, and innate limitations.  

What underlies the culture wars are Expectations:  each faction expects that life SHOULD be a certain way; and each faction finds someone to blame in an OTHER faction.  

It is in the general nature of people to expect success in living; this is part of our nature, part of the package, as it were. Even despite external adversities and internal failings, we retain certain implicit Egocentric Expectations, in particular:
(1) that I am good,
(2) that I deserve well, and
(3) that “life should work”.
These are natural enough to have - they are universal among people.  But they are feelings, not facts.  If you take them as a given, then you have misled yourself.  

Arising from these Expectations is a contradiction: how we FEEL the universe SHOULD be, on the one hand, and how it ACTUALLY turns out to be, on the other.  The feeling and the facts never gibe.  This translates into an opinion that life is broken, or that society is broken, or - still worse - that Other People are malevolently breaking it.  

This last conclusion -  that Other People are malevolently ruining life - is generally false; people do what seems good to them; self-interest, intelligent or foolish, is universal.  Never entertain a motive of Pure Maliciousness as an initial premise in living - it is a self-serving assertion, an excuse to blame others for our problems, a lie and a cowardice.  Still worse, it is historically the seed of fascism and genocide.  It is, in a word, a singularly villainous error.  Nazis blamed the Jews; Bolsheviks blamed the capitalists; Jews blamed the Arabs; et cetera.  Ideologies of absolutism are always an excuse for Theft and Murder.  

And yet these Expectations that translate into so much frustration and hysteria are universal, a part of the human operating system, as it were.  They may even be a mainspring of human life, something that we can't do without.  But they bring their own contradictions and problems with them.  How can we reconcile these feelings with the de facto nature of being human?  

There is a central principle in Stoicism sometimes called, simply, "the Rule", a measure to use in remaining rational:  that while a few things are actually up to us to control - what we choose to do, basically - most things are simply not up to us.  Health, wealth, obstructions, errors, disease, sex, pregnancy, poverty, bad luck, bosses, fashions, storms, car accidents, earthquakes, wars - such things are not up to us.  Some things we can have a bit of influence on - we can avoid wasting our health or our wealth; we can try to keep our friends and loved ones; we can exercise discretion and possibly make our situation better, but all the other things are thrust upon us: evils small or great that we must face, but which we have no control over.  

So, what is up to each individual?  Reason, intent, humility.  We can calculate, feel, weigh, and judge; we can cultivate an objective view of life to use as a reference, and we can avoid, reject, or minimize the passions that urge us to blame, hate, and kill - which is to say, avoid fury and violence and mania.  We can observe what really happens, put ourselves in others' shoes, reflect on how things happen - all instead of just fuming about why we didn't get what we wanted.  We can think twice, re-examine, and try to be factors of good in an antagonistic world.  We can step back when all the rest of the crowd is lusting after a leader with a Final Solution.  

None of this requires a God; it is the exercise of the God-like part that we all have within us - limited and unequally distributed, yes, but nonetheless universal.  And it is up to each of us to rein in our egocentric expectations, to exercise Reason, and to practice the Golden Rule - all with an eye to doing justice to others and to ourselves.  We all share a very imperfect world.  

Let's start with humility.  Dump "excellence" as an absolute requirement you make of self and others; allow that we are all both beast and intellect.  Life is not "All or nothing!" or "Black or white!" all the time.  Things are here dark, there light, and variously lit in shifting grays.  Do not let 'Perfect' become the enemy of 'Good'.  The point is NOT to "Win, win, win!", but to win enough to live well, and to do so as a good guy and not as a villain.  

Blaming others and seeking to Have it All - this is a delusional approach to being human; it is a step out of Kosmos into Khaos.  As people, we are meant to make do with the Kosmos, with the natural world - both conventional and unpredictable; to make do with the inevitable problems and people in our lives; and to countenance the big world as well as the nearer one of self and family.  

Salvete eis qui legant - 

Stoicism is coherent, I would say.  It accords with how life is.  It is a project, not a belief system.  Its doctrines have survived in a paucity of reporting and original texts, and stand or fail in our application of them and in our consciences.  To live according to Nature is a project, a quest, a  continuous goal.  In that regard, it parallels religious orientations, but it is not a religion; rather, an attitude and an empiricism.  

Valete. 

Wow. Trump. What a Villain, and What a Shame for the USA.

(May 05, 2018.)   

The other day, President Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement.  And now I read that Israel has launched strikes on the Iranian military installations in ruined, embattled Syria - something just short of an out-and-out attack on Iran itself.  Both actions are assaults on international peace and security, on Western credibility, and on human decency.  Both events are scurrilous blows to all the diplomats, leaders and activists who toiled for years to forge an anti-nuclear agreement with Iran, one that mitigated a great international threat without the firing of a single shot.  Both events simply hasten World War III, in my opinion, accelerating the current world-wide descent into barbarism, resulting in the suffering of further millions.

No statesman would have done this, in effect putting Iran back on the road to a nuclear confrontation and certainly setting back Iran's entrance into the civilized world of diplomacy; no decent individual would have gone back on America's word, backed out of our own promise, unilaterally tore up the contract; only an arrogant, giddy villain like Trump, dastardly, violent, and provocative, would have done this.  It is easier to understand Netanyahu's policy of endless violence - Israel lives under a shadow of Muslim and Arabic race and religious hatred - but Trump has no excuse.

But then, he didn't need one.  Because the Republican Party's answer to everything is always war and more war.  He and his adherents already despised the Deal, ignoring that it had succeeded in restraining Iran from direct development of nuclear weapons. They and Trump all harbor a primary contempt for diplomacy and a primary hunger for war.  And - of course - their obsession with destroying any of President Obama's substantial accomplishments.

This decision will alienate European allies; it will morally empower Iran to begin once more to develop nuclear weapons.  And, plainly, it served as a red flag to Netanyahu's Israel, signalling them to go ahead and begin undeclared war in Syria.  And so the USA joins not only the company of backward warlord-states like Russia, but also joins Al-Qaeda and such supra-national terrorist bands, all dedicated to a future of barbarism and carnage.

Jordan Peterson of Toronto, Humorous Interlude

Here's a good one - the joke's on me -

I bought the kindle edition of Professor Peterson's "12 Rules" (I thought) and then was dumbfounded to find a scraggly set of notes full of nonsequiturs and rather sloppy writing.  I was nonplussed - How could Random House publish this un-proofed mess?  It was absurd.

Hah-hah! (as Nelson would say).  I had picked up someone's own notes on Peterson, sold as an ebook!  No wonder it was relatively inexpensive. 

So - I have as yet to actually READ Professor Peterson's well-received book.  I will double-check the offerings on Amazon a little better next time....

Valete.

Jordan Peterson of Toronto

Salvete, qui legantes sint - 

My sons have been talking of this "new feller", Professor Jordan Peterson, and the HUGE splash he has been making in the cyber-world.  From what I have gaathered so far, he's made of equal parts Joseph Campbell, Karl Jung, and Dr. Laura Schlesinger.  I have yet to read his materials.

But the online response to his teaching and exhortations has been, as I said, HUGE.  He's become an overnight Absurdity cure, apparently.  So tonight I will begin his book, "12 Rules: an Antidote to Chaos".  If indeed it's aimed at the problem of life in the modern world, it is ipso facto of interest.

Controversy surrounds him - so I make no pronouncements yet.  Would it matter if I did so, prematurely?  Not to the world, but to me - yes!  Defective as I am, I still need to try to be fair and accurate.

I have read a critique of him published recently by another author I need to read - one Pankaj Mishra, author of "Age of Anger", his book about the general return to authoritarianism and violent nationalism and so on world-wide.  Mishra's topic seems critical to me, watching from the sidelines as the world's bedbugs - Neo-Nazis, Tea Party-ists, and others of dubious intent - have come to the fore over the last decade or so.

More to come.  Valete.

Literary Gems: Education of Henry Adams

For someone who is literate, I've really read very little in my life.   And read a lot of it late, to boot. 

The other night, passing a book store's dollar-rack, I perused it and picked up 'The Education of Henry Adams', and am enjoying it.  I hasten to add that I have but begun it; as usual, I have about five different books in play; but I carry it with me daily. 

His encounters and discoveries mirror mine in a significant way, in that he finds himself ever erroneous in his expectations, and finds all his education in astonishments, reversals, and dismay.  To that degree, I am continually heartened as he relates the twists and turns of his 19th century upper-crust career. 

(More later.)

Thick, the Clouds

Bene --

Coming back from depression.  Again.

It's always a question of "How" for me - some people may well have a facility of pluck or discipline or grit that allows them to throw a stern, guiding hand over their individual selves and steer this way or that, independent of their emotions - and despite having tried feebly over the years to nurture such a facility in my Self - I lack such a power.  I only encounter something like it in the depths of depression, something that says, "No, all the rhymes and platitudes of others fail; I have the choice, to try to live or to take myself away."  And thereafter I only arise from those depths by accepting my weaknesses and nursing myself with positives - I live, I breathe, I am not among the worst off, I grow old but am still able to get by, I enjoy little but can still enjoy nonetheless.  So the first is somewhat on the order of the Existential, but the second is decidedly Epicurean!  And then, in my silly & superficial profession, I style myself Stoic:  taking as a base that there is ultimately one universe, that some to-us-more-or-less-magical basis informs it, that causation exists and eliminates mere chaos, that the order of things cares not a fig for human lives or frailties, and so on.

Reason, if at the base of things, is something we discover and apply, as best we can.  But being human, it is not the Reason of the Cosmos that I cultivate, but that of a human being -- social, individual, and imperfect like all palpable things.

Valete.

Getting Past the 'Question' - Getting On With It

Salvete.  

There is - at least for some - a bafflement or a wonder, first that life should be upsetting and hard, and then later, that there should even be anything recognizable at all, given that chaos and hardship apparently have dominion in the Earth. Do the wretched exist simply to allow the existance of the felicēs? The answer would be a resolution to the question of God, among other things; it would inform us of the meaning of life. 

But it is an answer not forthcoming.  Its question cannot be resolved by human beings; our self-interest precludes objectivity; our mortal and physical limitations preclude full understanding. We can only draw lessons from what we see and what we can reason out. Thus the general question -- "Why? - "Why this, why not something better, or something even worse? Why anything at all?" -- while it frequently poses itself to our pattern-seeking, answer-seeking species, it is not one that should be asked too earnestly, for it admits of no reliable answer. 

In light of this, the proper question becomes, instead, "How?". "How shall we live? How should we live? How can we make the best of an unfortunate situation?"  

Valete.  

Avete -

Et nunc brevissime -

Among my blog-subscriptions is one that often shows old photos of Betty Page, in various states of attire.  A signal female model in a signal position in our recent cultural twists and turns, and yet another "pretty face".  In the un-simple confusion of biological life, being male involves being moved by "pretty faces" of various sorts. There is so much connected with that: how to sort it out? 

One way is this, to remember that "a pretty face" is a-dime-a-dozen in itself; that there is no "pretty" without some desire, some weakness on the part of the viewer; that more real than the impression that an image makes is the person (unknown for the most part) embodied within the source of the impression; that underneath said vision is a being, whether your superior or inferior or your more-or-less-peer, but certainly a creature with its own agenda; that we are morally bound to treat people well (if at all possible), and so to defer to her (or him or whatever); and, after all, that said creature is in the end just a messy-mixed-up-wonder of mucus, stomach acid, bacteria, noxious filth, and God knows what else! 

Such thoughts can push the superfluity of sexual excitement back a bit towards the proper indifference that we, as rational folks, should show towards strangers. 

Valete.

Not-so-Amazing, and Amazing, then Humbling...

Salve atque salvete! 

As a POST-post-scriptum to yesterday's dreary recital of self-pity and weary old dismay, let me say that it's remarkable and instructive what a difference food, fluoxetine and caffeine, and getting some work done, does for one's mood and outlook.  Reality doesn't change, but our readiness and attitude to engagement with it, our state, does.

And, in a conciliatory aside to the Christianos (qui tam plures sunt his in Civitatibus Unitiis), of which faith I have at times counted myself a provisional member, I expect that my petite and limited experience of mood-change is very similar to the long-term effect of being 'born again', a letting go of fear and helplessness and re-embarking on life, while trusting to God's control.  And this parallels what we gain from Stoicism - recognizing sad but necessary mortality, recognizing an underlying Universality in life and death all around us, and realizing that freedom is ultimately a humble thing, something that BELONGS to us in a simple and timeless way, and rarely a matter of what we would wish. 

Christianity is not a problem: Christians are good people, generally.  But fanatical Christianity is another story.  However, I'll let that be, at that point.

Recently I took up Goodman and Soni's book, "Rome's Last Citizen: Legacy of Cato the Younger", and heartily recommend it.  And I jotted this down in my notebook, from Lucan's Pharsalia (they don't identify the translation), speaking of oracles and other miracles:  

"Bound are we to the Gods; no voice we need;

They live in all our acts, although the shrines

Be silent...."

And from People magazine, of all things, I recorded a very good trans-belief-system quote from Muhammad Ali:

"Everything I do, I say to myself, 'Will God accept this?' Sleep is a rehearsal for death. One day you wake up and it's Judgment Day. So you do good deeds."

In a nutshell. 

And then, also in that People magazine, an amazing and humbling story - there are so many! - about Aimee Copeland, this young woman who lost legs and hands to disease, and has been reborn and re-equipped, in heart and in prosthetics!  It took me by surprise; horrible and then amazing.  A happy ending, by God! 

http://www.people.com/people/package/article/0,,21011736_21011374,00.html

And:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/aimee-copeland-new-hi-tech-prosthetic-hands-article-1.1347774

Worth pondering.  Valete.  

Feet Slipping on the Rocks

Salvete, qui legant -

How many of us recall being in water up to our necks and trying to find toe-purchase atop slimy, mossy lake stones?  That seems an apt metaphor for my mental and moral state just now.  Trying to get a grip, as it were. 

My life is not that of a gung-ho hot-shot nor even that of a giddy, myopic gas-bag.  My firmament in life is a slippery rock of absurdity - being myself too-much-that and not-enough-this, and so on.  The world of youthful competition and 24/7 performance-merit passed me by long ago, and it is one part of human nature with which I've never identified, except in fantasy. I've worked in my life - mostly for attorneys and their ilk, piddly stuff, but for people who DO live in the 24/7 giddiness - and seen them from a distance, occasionally felt the breeze of accomplishment myself.

But it's not me; that stuff is not forthcoming.  I remain out-of-it, strange, aside, "oddly conventional", and so on.  I balance atop the rock, liquid mossy, but that's as much as I can manage, it seems. 

So it is from this perpetual perspective of anomy that I face society's daily push-and-shove, and in particular these days the lightning and thunder spectacle of a Presidential election.  A decade ago I stopped asking "Why?" and accepted that people have their bestial norms and must act according to them:  a need to find enemies, a need to blame others, an inability to understand strangers, and (for oh-so-many) those very plain internal maps to winning, exploitation, and abuse of the "other".  This is nature; this is sadness for me, gaiety for them. 

There are a few lights in the dreariness: the Symbolic Sun (Invictus so far, if not truly immortal), friends, material fortune (to have a job, income, a home), and especially the boon of simple love, of wife and kids at home. 

So I'm still here.  Still trying to breathe and balance near the banks of Chaos River. 

Valete. 

P.S.  Yeah, post-commute-blues, feeling sorry for myself.  But this did help re-center me, and - as Jackie Gleason used to say - "Awaaay we go!" 

Earthly Reality...

Salvete, qui hoc in loco advenietis.

My son texted me a question - only rhetorical, really; but I thought I'd post my reply.  We were discussing Frank Miller, celebrated hard-ass of comicsdom.  My son texted:

"Why are people like Frank Miller so cranky?"

And I replied:

"They have a superiority complex, you might say; they despise the quiescent, the average, the sinful, the foolish.  Their condition and outlook is biological; it's winnerism; it's Nature.  As inevitable as Al-Qaeda or viruses...."

The un-said part was this:  "And, as it is with viruses or Al-Qaeda, or with people like Frank Miller or Friedrich Nietzche or David Duke, it's the simple duty of decent people to resist them, see past them, and to say yes to life, instead of hatred."  

A Referral regarding a Name in the News

Salvete, quicumque legant -

One of my favorite Bloggers, Ciceronianus,  posted something good recently that I thought I'd feature here.  

I, like probably a lot of people, am still trying to wrap my head around the spate of cop-on-black-civilian and other killings going on domestically.  One of the forces in this whole controversy is the "Black Lives Matter Movement" and Ciceronianus's article deals with recent abuse of that name.  

ciceronianus.blogspot.com/2016/07/how-not-to-do-things-with-words

You'll notice he reserves judgment and analysis on the whole controversy for later.  So do I.  

Valete, et audete sapere. 

Standing Up ...

The topic in "Standing Up..." here is Islam and what we can understand of it in the world today.   

 

More specifically, this topic began as the problem of the superficially "missing" moderate Muslims.  It's a common American prejudice nowadays that no one can be Muslim AND be a decent person at the same time; that the religious primacy of God and the Quran universally subverts Reason in Muslims and converts them all into passive or active supporters of Radical Muslim terror.  This isn't true, per se, but there have been more than enough murders committed in the name of Islam by fanatics and punks that the notion keeps presenting itself. 

But it behooves us to get "relative" about it.  (Yes, one can "get relative" without becoming a moron.  But if you're a dyed-in-the-wool absolutist anti-relativist for whom the world is always morally black and white, where only "we" are good and all others are bad, then you can just ignore what follows.)  While an exception may disprove the absoluteness of a rule, the exception is NOT the rule: the real world is infinitely complex and composed of endless Individuals.  Only bigots accept and apply pejorative "rules" to the exclusion of facts. 

My little investigation into the topic of moderate Muslims seems to show me (so far) four political and religious classes of Muslims:

• Atheists who are, technically, 'Muslim' (like the many technical Christians and Jews and so on);
• Moral Believers, people who are Muslim but judge others as people and not by labels; 
• Overly Devout folks who are extra-religious or even fundamentalist Muslims who are, nonetheless, horrified and saddened by Radical Islamic terror; and -
• of course - the Radical (Fundamentalist) Muslims who either support or perform acts of terror. 

I expect the same sorts of division apply to any group of a collective religious or political identity.  My point is that American and other reactionaries fail to appreciate the variance in Muslim attitudes and conditions, and instead lump every Muslim in the same trash bin with the Radical Muslims.  (The American Left makes the same mistake with Republicans and Christians and so on.)  They justify this by the murderous extent of Radical Islam's terror-movement, and its inhuman proclamations.  But the excesses of a few are still not the customs of the many. 

 

There are lots of modern Muslims who, in their own lives, can integrate God, the Quran, AND human decency, just as there are such people in any religious group.  We can pin a violent past (or present) on any of these other groups as well, whether Puritanical Christians, Communists, CEO's and "working men", Populists, et cetera; but that doesn't automatically make all the members of such groups murderers and rapists.  

 

I want to mention one author who speaks to the whole question of the "missing" moderates:  Ranya Tabari Idliby, author of two books:

• The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew - Three Women Search for Understanding (ISBN 978-0743290487)
• Burqas, Baseball, and Apple Pie: Being Muslim in America (ISBN 978-0-230-34184-5)

I am reading the second of these.  Ranya is decidedly Muslim; but she is also decidedly American.  She is heroic enough to condemn the murderers and criminals who slaughter and claim it as a service to God; and she is reasoning enough to have a commitment to Freedom and Goodwill - which makes her like a lot of un-sung decent Muslim folk who have not been interviewed or printed or otherwise published.  I hope to get back and sum up more of what I get from her book later. 

 

So, again, for people who think they're People of Good Will, don't condemn all Muslims for the actions of a few angry, crazy macho-types; but do read Ranya's book - very timely reading for all of us non-Muslims (Stoic, Baptist, Atheist, Catholic, Buddhist, whatever). 

 

February Thunder

(This is an old entry I never actually published.  Found it today and - some five months or so late - decided to put it up.) 

========================


Salvete, qui legentes - 

Which at this point probably just means ME! 

So is this a blog or a diary?  Nescio quid, sed Deo gratias quod hoc in loco nil Flammarum Belli pati debeo!  Quod sive totus mundus blogum meum frequentarent, nec mihi grave. 

Februarius is with us, and last night gave us some REAL WEATHER: thunderstorms, rain-drops big as marbles, a near-horizontal wind up to I-don't-know-how-many miles per hour.  It was a full-blown bluster, a soaker of a storm!  And it renewed itself again come midnight or so; the thunder was so continuous, extended and crescent; it mounted and mounted in volume -- I thought an airliner was crashing on our house. 

Actual thunder.  Still something of a novelty for us in the Eastern San Francisco Bay Area. 

Valete.