The Natural Order of Things

Today I walked behind a couple who could lead a heterosexual pride parade. The young man had broad shoulders, a thick neck, a lantern jaw, and was literally carrying a hardhat. The young woman had perky breasts, a thin waist, child-bearing hips, and an ass that jiggled sweet nothings in my ear. Of course my genes desired the woman, but my head acknowledged: this is how it's supposed to be. The uber-male gets the uber-female. They deserve each other. No matter how much we may wish our "inner beauty" caused arousal, or channel our resentment into deconstructing gender, the natural order of attraction prevails.

Breivik As Symptom

The BBC reports from the Anders Breivik trial:

The prosecution has really been pushing him hard to give details about the networks of militant nationalists he says he became part of - about his supposed contacts with Serb nationalists in Liberia, and with English nationalists in London.

They simply do not believe that he did form links with such people. They're trying to discover whether he's a fantasist.

From what I gather, the Knights Templar of which Breivik speaks do not exist. As a former World of Warcraft addict, the man is undoubtedly a fantasist with dreams of his own merry band of heroes. But fantasists may nonetheless affect reality (Herzl: If you will it, it is no dream). Just possibly, Breivik is not delusional, but is rather pretending the Knights Templar exist in order to encourage European dreamers to start real cells of a fantasy organization. If so, he is modelling himself on bin Laden and sees his group as a reverse latter-day al-Qaeda: less a cohesive unit than a brand for extremists to gather around. Theorist of violence René Girard would call this a mimetic rivalry.

Multicultural utopianism - the utopian dream being that an ethnic group will willingly submit to immigration policies that would make itself a minority in its homeland - seems to have plateaued in Europe. The Greek debacle proves the continuing relevance of cultural differences to political projects. Frugal Germans and lazy Greeks do not good bedfellows make. In France, ideas once considered far-right are now mainstream. All utopian projects founder against the shore of human nature, and human nature is fundamentally tribalist. Breivik is an unfortunate symptom of this common-sense reality that is nonetheless unspeakable (though often thought) in bastions of elite culture like the university campus. I just hope the new nationalists will seek better models than sociopathic WoW addicts.

RE: The U.S. Soldier's Afghan Massacre

At least no books were harmed.

Olivia Munn Is A Sexist

I read widely and weirdly. I write when what I read creates a juxtaposition worth commenting on. A painfully liberal blogger comments,

Sites like YouPorn have moved the mainstream of pornography to the extreme. The mainstream now would have been considered extremely hardcore 20 years ago. Go onto one of the main hub sites, and there are adverts on the homepage showing women being violently abused - choked, strangled, slapped, thrown across the room, forced to crawl on all floors. . . . Brazzers moved porn from the Hugh Hefner 'old duffer in a velvet jacket' model of pornography to a Porn 2.0 version made by younger IT nerds who knew what IT nerds wanted: more cartoon fake boobs, more hardcore sex, more older women with younger men fantasies, more 'reality porn' or 'Gonzo porn' where frat-boys 'pick up' women off the street, put them in van and screw them; and more violent and abusive sex. The flipside of the frat-boy solidarity ('hey, us guys are all 'brazzers', right? High five!') is a fear / hatred of women, a sense they must be made to kneel, suffer, submit.

The argument here is that IT nerds/fratboys/degenerate males are the ones who get off on seeing women "kneel, suffer, submit," and are immoral for that. What then of the submissive fantasies of sexpot Olivia Munn, as seen in recently hacked cellphone pix:

Click for more instructions. 

Would a liberal heap the same opprobrium on Munn as he does her IT nerd/fratboy/degenerate male dominator? Would he castigate her for objectifying herself? Or would he praise her for her liberated sexuality, while demanding dominant males repress theirs and thus, ironically, deprive her of what she desires: a dominant male? Or would he spontaneously combust?

Wet pussies and hard dicks defy PC ideology. They are racist, ageist, ableist, fattist and most of all, sexist. They just love to take on socially constructed gender roles, almost as if they were designed that way. Olivia Munn is sexist. Porn is sexist. Sex is sexist. We are all sexist. We have no choice in the matter. Evolution is a reactionary process. But we do have a choice of whether to be hypocrites about it.

Songs For Solitary Men

Because I'm such a negligent poster, here's an anti-Valentine's gift for y'all: the HWO-curated collection Songs for Solitary Men. Maybe women can enjoy it too, I don't know.

1. Neil Diamond - Solitary Man - OBVIOUSLY
2. Quicksand - Dine Alone - self-indulgent but fun
3. Jerry Cantrell - Pig Charmer - awesome song about the late great Layne Staley
4. Ulrich Schnauss - On My Own - electronica to break things up a bit
5. Therapy - Isolation - Joy Division but louder
6. Leon Russell - Stranger in a Strange Land - some of that old time rock n roll
7. Beck - Go It Alone - he writes a catchy tune
8. Jah Wabble - Everyman is an Island - trippy and true
9. Days of the New - Solitude - I found this on Soulseek looking up songs called isolation - also how I found a song about Mengistu (I was wondering if any reggae dudes had followed further on with Ethiopian history)
10. New Order - Leave Me Alone - nice sentiment
11. The Kinks - I am Not Like Everybody Else - my anthem
12. Groundhogs - Eccentric Man - my other anthem
13. Pearl Jam - Like a Stone (Live) - this is my favourite recent hit, a different version for the hell of it
14. Illinois - Alone Again - I have a soft spot for some fey indie, being white
15. Cursive - The Recluse - everything else by this band is terrible, but this song captures the feeling of why I no longer seek one-night stands
16. Nine Inch Nails - Only (Stress Mix) - Trent is the master of solipsism, from one solipsist to another
17. Martin L. Gore - Motherless Child - a traditional blues number done by that guy from Depeche Mode about feeling like a motherless child
18. Johnny Cash - Solitary Man - reprise

LINK

The Beauty Of Self-Terrorizing Terrorists

Terrorists who succeed only in blowing themselves up make me really, really happy. They inspire in me faith in providence, karma or whatever euphemism you want to use for an Order to Things. Since the days of Job, man has asked, why do bad things happen to good people? No adequate answer has yet been found. But when bad things happen to bad people, we instinctively know the answer: because they're bad. Wrap it up in whatever philosophy or theology you want, but it feels good when the universe works the way it's supposed to work. BBC News sums up the day's events:

Police told the BBC the first explosion happened around 14:20 (07:20 GMT) at a house in the Ekamai area in central Bangkok, which the three Iranians were believed to have rented for a month. Two men managed to escape the explosion that severely damaged the house, according to police, but a third man who suffered minor injuries tried to hail a taxi. When the taxi refused to stop for him, he threw at least one bomb at it. There was a third explosion when the same man then attempted to throw another bomb at police, but missed. The man lost his legs when the device blew up.

Rarely do I say this, but Inshallah, God is Great!

Porn Stars: The Future Of Celebrity

Kim Kardashian owes her fame to a self-released sex tape. Her ass is her pass into the cultural conversation. Softcore pornography is already mainstream. Voyeurism has penetrated once sacrosanct boundaries. When will we, as a culture, stop beating around the bush? It's time to elevate porn stars to the rank of talkshow-guesting, magazine-profiling mainstream celebrities.

Unlike most reality stars, porn stars have a skill: fucking. Being good-looking is not enough. Truly successful porn stars earn their fortune and fanbase through a talent for the craft. The models and lite-actresses who feature in Maxim and Details are pale (actually, typically orange) imitations of the Real Thing. Why pay to see, why pay attention to, the empty signifiers of sex, when the real carnal heroes are ready and willing?

Tyra Banks, fashion model, looks down on Tyra Banxxx, pornographic model. Her disdain is thinly disguised fear. Banxxx has an appreciable talent that society needs. Society, filled as it is with the lonely and unloved, requires vicarious sex partners. It does not require human clotheshangers. Banxxx should be the one with the TV show, the media empire, the mainstream emulation. In due time, Banxxx will be that maven, and Banks will join silent film stars in culture's scrapheap. What's to stop her? Public decency? Kim Kardashian owes her fame to a self-released sex tape

Dreams Of Collapse

Maybe I'm not the only one who dreams of collapse. Nothing so dramatic as suicide; simply collapse. Let friends drift away, never leave home, accumulate dust. Spiral down, let beard grow, observe the world from a distance if at all.

"Be responsible." Of course. I take my filial duty seriously. I must make something of myself before I collapse. Or at least erect walls between myself and the truly collapsed: the dregs, the rap fans, the hopeless. Erect them just high enough to avoid bringing shame upon the family name. Then I can collapse in peace.

Every animal dreams of burrowing a hole and burying itself alive. My coffin will be a bookcase. I will fall asleep reading and never wake up. My bones will crumble. My penis will retreat into its skin. My words will form protective porcupine thorns. I will scavenge the ruins of my former self, sifting through memories in the absence of novelty.

This is my temptation. Maybe some men feel the urge to kill or rape or watch sports. I feel the urge to collapse. I am driven to dive to the floor. I want to find a quiet spot underneath the carpet. I lie in the bath and hope to never get up. I await the disappearance of phone calls. Lord, save me from nirvana.

Put The Veil Over My Eyes

Ancient wisdom agrees that sexual emission depletes man's vitality. Freud affirms that all works of culture result from sublimation - the rerouting of sexual energy. In a culture that celebrates unrestrained sexuality, the most radically liberating move is chastity.

Self-flaggelants will be the old-new exhibitionists.

Free porn makes the challenge greater than for any previous generation. But the rewards for self-restraint are potentially all the greater. Sexual frustration is a primal power. He who conquers himself may conquer the world.

The Middle Ages produced saints. Modernity will produce gods.

Sex is samsara, futile desire, post-coital sadness, pre-coital ensnarement. Sex empowers others and depletes our selves. The Muslims have it right but totally backwards. We need blindfolds for men (ocular veils), not burqas for women.

Sluts will walk. The chaste will rise.

The Unintended Consequences of Identity Politics

History is a tale of unintended consequences. Take the existence of Palestinian nationalism. "Palestinian" did not exist as a self-conscious identity prior to the creation of modern Israel. The Arabs who lived in what would become Palestine did not see themselves as Palestinians, but as part of the Muslim Ummah, or Arab nation, or Greater Syrian subset of the Arab nation. The Jewish intellectual Gershom Scholem observed, "We educated the Arabs about nationalism. It was our very existence that created Arab national consciousness. That is the peculiar dialectic of history and I'm not sure that there is any escape from it." Palestinian identify developed in symbiotic response to the emergence of Israeli identity. Israel unwittingly created Palestine, just as anti-Semites unwittingly created Zionism, by dashing the assimilationist dreams of European Jews like Theodor Herzl.

Today, I see the "peculiar dialectic of history" that Scholem spoke of working on various fronts. Its incubator is typically the university. (I speak as a Canadian, but I take it that American colleges function in a similar manner.) The university celebrates multiculturalism. Every cultural group has its own club, and will often man a table in the concourse to advertise or proselytize or raise funds. When I was an undergraduate, an acquaintance spoke half-jokingly of forming a Western European club. This acquaintance was not a right-wing radical, or a racist, or even someone particularly political at all. She simply thought, "Everyone else has a club, so why not us?" The idea never came to fruition but it will, eventually. As the multicultural paradigm becomes ever more dominant, the formerly majority culture will become but one culture among many (as it already has in many major cities, i.e. in Canada, Toronto), and develop similar institutions of cultural representation.

Darker-skinned folks are trained by universities to identify themselves as "racialized." The term "racialized" acknowledges that race is a construct, yet the bearer claims the right to a racial identity based upon the fact that other people define her by this social construct. As Hannah Arendt wrote, in the context of European anti-Semitism, "You can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as. A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman. The world would only conclude that he is simply not defending himself." Barack Obama defines himself as black, though he is only really half-black, because most Americans see him as a black man. "Racialization" fortified if not created Obama's identity as a black man. Obviously one can, like Tiger Woods, stake out a multiracial identity even if most people see a drop of black as equal to fully black, but few people of any race are strong enough to go against society's flow.

When I am in my heavily white hometown of Hamilton, I am part of the white majority, and am not conscious of being "racialized." When I am busing to work in minority-majority Scarborough, I am aware of my heretofore non-existent or subliminal identity as a white person (even if, by some more stringent white people's definition, I am not white but "ethnic"). Demographically, the North American metropolitan future is Scarborough, not Hamilton. Consequentially, white or European racial consciousness will begin to be more frequently articulated, even if in a carefully post-postmodern, "racialized by the Other" sense. As my apolitical (and this qualifier is key, because most people are apolitical) university acquaintance said, "If everyone else has a club, why not us?" I am not making a value judgment here. I am simply predicting, based on what I know of social psychology, what I foresee happening.

The other modern example of the "peculiar dialectic" I wish to mention is the emergence of a self-consciously "masculinist" identity. Again, the university is typically the incubator; it is where the educated classes come to a rudimentary political and cultural self-awareness. "Feminism" is a broad term, but one wing of it, a wing with undue influence in the university, demonizes men. At the very least, that's how the situation is perceived, by both men and women I talked to who had taken Women's Studies courses in university. Recall Arendt: "You can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as." Attacked as men, men will defend themselves as men. This is simply human nature. Men will, and already have begun to, articulate and defend their own group interests. Extreme masculinists will be the inverse of Andrea Dworkin and the "penetration is rape" school of feminist hyperbole. Cooler heads will, hopefully, push the movement in a more moderate position where it can meet feminism somewhere in the middle.

Feminists tend to be confused and/or threatened by a masculinist identity. This is because they think of men as the dominant class in society. Yes, most CEOs are men, but most men are not CEOs. Yes, most "players" are men, but most men are not players. The silent majority of men are no more "privileged" than women and, in some circumstances, less so. Where men are a minority, which includes the university and an increasing number of middle and upper-class professions, men will increasingly become conscious of themselves as a "genderized" interest group. Nice guys will no longer be content to finish last, but will begin to craft themselves a new social script as neither cretins nor milquetoast. Arguments about a history of oppression will not fly with newer generations who have not seen, and feel no responsibility for, "the sins of the fathers."

The peculiar dialectic can unfold in any number of ways. Recently, Europe witnessed the atrocities of a self-styled Christian Crusader, who clearly saw himself as the inverse of a Muslim Jihadist. A heightened Muslim corporate identity begets a heightened Western corporate identity, at least among a few (at first). Yet a heightened Western corporate identity need not manifest itself in violence. It can also manifest itself as a stronger, more cohesive society, willing to deal with other societies on the basis of mutual respect. On an individual level, a person aware of, and proud of who he/she is - whether this identity is biologically or socially constructed - need not hate who other people are. After all, who other people are helps define who we are, and vice versa.

Ode To My Madness

I cultivate my madness. It keeps me sane. It allows me to go through the motions without feeling motion sickness. I gorge my madness on music and words, and I sing to it "Grow."

I pretend to be normal to the best of my ability. They reward me by saying I'm mostly harmless. Another day then I can go home again, to cultivate my madness in peace.

I sing sonnets to my madness. I lie in bed with it at night. My madness is closer to me than you could ever be.

Confession of a Luftmensch

I am a luftmensch. This Yiddish/Germanic term means air person, someone whose head is in the clouds. Luftmenschen are concerned with ideas, not logistics.

Logistics bore and depress me. I skip over the details to get to the conclusions. Why, not how, is my perennial question.

Society has no place for the luftmenschen. Rather, it has one place, the ivory tower. The ivory tower is full of self-hating luftmenschen. They cling to the notion that, through "Theory," they are changing the world. Marx, not Socrates, is their model. Truth? It's only meaning is as a political weapon.

Despite loathing the typical "radical," I do empathize with anti-capitalist sentiment. In the capitalist system, the luftmensch has no value. Money talks, and everyone else is as good as mute. This, of course, also applies to the realm of erotic capitalism.

Living on air is lonely. But when you've seen the ground from up high, there's nowhere else you'd rather be.