. . . . . ¡ИEAÐ ШIÐE OÞEП!

Londominion

2008-05-13T16:16:00.001-04:00

The purpose of this post is to inform readers that the "webmaster" of Head Wide Open - Ben, Benjamin, Benjaminion, Benito Jaminolini, Ben-ana-na, Benladash, Bengerman, Ben J. Amin (no relation to Idi Amin), ¡Benjaminista! - will be off to London (England) today for a five-day trip. If a plane crashes in the mid-Atlantic, please fondly pray that I'm not on it. Otherwise, I will return shortly with possible stories, anecdotes, love-letters or hate speeches regarding England and the English. The title of this post, "Londominion," is a merge of London and "Dominion," the nation I am a citizen of, Canada, being a former "Dominion" (deluxe colony) of the British Empire. It is also a reference to the song "Dominion/Mother Russia" by English band/solitary misanthrope-romantic Sisters of Mercy. If I do die in a plane crash/bombing please regard one of the previous posts as my last will and testament, not this one. And to radical Islam, if I do die in a terrorist attack: Touché brothers, touché.

Man By Way Of Machine

2008-05-13T14:37:00.001-04:00

Technology is traitorous. Radiohead were right about the world becoming Planet Telex, where "Everything is broken." Any video game system above Super Nintendo is a needlessly complicated black hole of time and effort. The iPod is a farce designed to break down so you must constantly buy the newest model, thus negating any money supposedly saved from not buying CDs and giving nothing instead of next to nothing to the artist. Printers never know how to eat paper right, despite my feeding it and feeding it and feeding it a feast of frustration. The load of the computer is rarely worth bearing. All the data in the world won't buy back the soul you never had. There is no ghost in the machine, no master node to the network; only indestructible sterility for terabytes on end.

Luddism is not a viable or coherent ideology but it would be primitive carthasis for hammer to say hello to CPU. Machines break down and are discarded like deformed Spartan babies. The rate of obsolescence exceeds the rate of mindful absorption. Simple, sundry books wear and tear but last. As they are passed down to a diminishing few their preciousness only grows. Formats change so fast our cutting-edge media will be unreadable to the post-digital archaeologists of the future. The public record that is the Internet won't have a gramophone to play it. By trying to be in advance of the future we short-circuit ourselves out of the timestream. At least Ozymandias left a statue; our desert of 1s and 0s will leave no simulacrum of life to inspire poetry, if poetry is still around.

High-definition surround-sound cocoons all advertise themselves with the same implicit slogan: "Leave your home without ever leaving your home!" Well I want to leave my home! I want to have to go places to get things! I'm not a dripfeed-sucking amorphous mouth attached to a stomach defecating meta-content to be fed again, I'm an ape with all appropriate parts attached, and sometimes I like to swing from trees. Despite what the hyper-modern three-fifths of me says, I need sex, not computer porn; human contact, not virtual interaction; physical movement, not Nintendo pantomime; birdsong, not lifeless hum; experience, not television; live music, not memorex and player pianos. I may not live up to my ideals but I have them, and though I communicate them through machine I yearn to sear them in my flesh.

Even Heroes Have The Right To Bleed

2008-05-12T21:42:00.004-04:00

Devoted father, Rotarian, lady-pleaser and community patron Dennis Farina on charity mission to darkest Africa with nunnery.

From Reuters:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actor Dennis Farina, who was arrested on Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport for carrying a loaded gun on his way to board a plane, has apologized for the incident.

The 64-year-old former policeman who built a Hollywood career playing detectives issued a statement saying he was embarrassed by the arrest.

"I apologize to anyone and everyone that I have caused any embarrassment or inconvenience to," Farina said. "It is my own stupidity to find myself in this embarrassing situation. I'll be spending the next few days kicking my own a--. No one is more embarrassed than myself."

Head Wide Open accepts his apology, and recommends you do the same.

Between Mother And Justice

2008-05-12T01:49:00.006-04:00

Condemning the terrorism of the FLN (National Liberation Front) in their campaign for an independent Algeria, Albert Camus outraged the anti-colonial French left by declaring: "I have to denounce blind terrorism in the streets of Algiers, which might one day strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I'll defend my mother before justice." In choosing his flesh-and-blood mother over the abstract ideal of justice, Camus proved himself not just to be a good son--one of the few remaining meaningful roles left in a post-God world--but a true humanist. Sartre may have written that "Existentialism is a Humanism," but for him human beings were less important than the fashionable causes they were killed in the name of (though extreme principles necessarily lead to extreme hypocrisy, and it is certain that for Sartre some people, like himself, were less worthy of sacrifice than others). To be a good Communist party member was to put Party before all else, certainly before such a historically negligible element as one's mother. To do so would be scientifically (remember that Marxism was once seriously considered a "science") absurd--and few intellectuals besides Camus took the centrality of absurdity to life seriously. Perhaps the suspicion that most left-wing intellectuals would indeed put justice (or egalitarianism, or solidarity, or multiculturalism, or whatever the sacralized word of the moment may be) before their mothers is what makes many, including the lower classes they aim to speak for, look askance upon them. If a man can't be trusted to put his mother first, how can he be trusted at all?

If the concept of mother is expanded to motherland, we can see exactly how and why the internationalist left failed so spectacularly in the twentieth century. The concepts nationalists use in their rhetoric--blood, soil, community--are much more tangible than abstract notions of international worker solidarity. International socialism failed precisely in 1914 when the workers of the world chose their physical neighbours--their fellow citizens--over their imaginary neighbours--their fellow workers in distant lands. It was the floating threat of internationalist rape of the motherland--by communists, by Jews, by global finance--that allowed ultra-nationalists to expand conservative ideals like land and blood into counter-revolutionary sacralized abstractions of their own. The irony is that by elevating the concept of motherland to a holy signifier, ultra-nationalists were equally as guilty as the communists in putting unreachable goals before actual people. "Between my motherland and my mother, I choose my mother," would be just as much a heresy in a national socialist milieu as "Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother" was for Camus in an international socialist milieu. The autonomy of the family is a threat to any totalitarian system, and due to the primordial loyalty they inspire and the unregulated cultural and moral values they impart, perhaps mothers are the greatest anti-revolutionary threat of all.

Human beings exist in two worlds--the physical world, and the symbolic world that gives the physical world meaning. Symbols are made real through actions in the physical world. Thus communism was certainly a real phenomenon, as real people lived, killed and died for it--but it was them, not the symbols, that made it real. Thus Stalin was as much a legitimate representative of communism as Marx. Humans are symbolic animals and can no less rid ourselves of the urge to create abstractions than the urge to defecate and eat. Camus discussed the meanings of many important abstractions in his work: freedom, justice, revolt, exile. This is what makes him a philosopher and an intellectual, like his countryman Sartre. But unlike Sartre, unlike the ideologically dogmatic left, Camus was not willing to sacrifice his physical world of flesh-and-blood ties for symbols that are ultimately only as meaningful as the meaning we put into them. If the meaning we put into symbols involves the sacrifice of kin, these symbols are instrinsically anti-human. The swastika is anti-human, though surely Heidegger claimed to be deeply concerned with the human condition; the hammer and sickle is anti-human, though surely Sartre and the rest of Stalin's apologists claimed to be humanists. To be an intellectual requires an active mind, but to be a human being requires more than that. It requires, at the very least, loyalty to one's mother before any abstraction. Unlike so many intellectuals, Camus was more than the sum of his symbols: he was a true human being.

Encyclopedic Vanity

2008-05-10T04:02:00.000-04:00

Facebook is Wikipedia for nobodies.

French Culture-Wars: Céline Vs. Céline

2008-05-09T01:07:00.010-04:00

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Genre: Modernism
Influenced: Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., William S. Burroughs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Bukowski, Samuel Beckett
Famous Works: Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan), Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre)
Political Controversy: Released rambling antisemitic pamphlets before onset of Second World War; convicted in absentia as collaborator with Vichy regime
Romantic Interests: Whores, dancers, the abyss
Themes: Nihilism, nausea, misanthropy, the underworld, urban squalor, familial discord, bodily discharges, mortality
Pet Peeves: Petit bourgeoisie values, modernity, mercantilism, Jews, the decline of the west
Other Activities: Doctor, veteran of the Great War
Critical Reaction: "Movement toward adulthood—into the world, that is—becomes equated with progressive disassociationism, submission to the disintegrative process; and adulthood itself becomes, as it were, the inevitable end product, metaphor for decay in the entropic universe." - Alvin Greenberg
Quotable Quote: "I could hear the stampeding herds trampling the flowerbeds . . . The numberless legions of thirst . . . They were battling to lick the bottom of the pond . . . sucking mud, worms, slime . . . They’d plowed up the whole place, disemboweled the earth . . . a chopped-up crater for three miles around, rumbling with disaster and drunks."

Céline Dion

Genre: Adult Contemporary
Influenced: Mariah Carey, Seal, global anti-Francophone sentiment
Famous Works: D'amour ou d'amitié (Of Love or of Friendship), Tellement j'ai d'amour pour toi (I Have So Much Love for You), My Heart Will Go On
Political Controversy: In response to the American government's slow reaction to Hurricane Katrina, asked "How come it's so easy to send planes in another country, to kill everyone in a second, to destroy lives? We need to be there right now to rescue the rest of the people."
Romantic Interests: Older, bearded, cherubic bald men
Themes: Love, the heart, saccharine romance
Pet Peeves: Papparazi, anything that stands in her way
Other Activities: Established a restaurant, released a line of eyeliner and perfume, gives to charity
Critical Reaction: "[Dion's] sentimentality is bombastic and defiant rather than demure and retiring....[she] stands at the end of the chain of drastic devolution that goes Aretha-Whitney-Mariah. Far from being an aberration, Dion actually stands as a symbol of a certain kind of pop sensibility—bigger is better, too much is never enough, and the riper the emotion the more true." - Keith Harris of Rolling Stone Magazine
Quotable Quote: "I missed my family and my home, but I don't regret having lost my adolescence. I had one dream: I wanted to be a singer."

Winner/Loser: Tout le monde

Romancing The Aztec

2008-05-07T21:00:00.005-04:00

Still of Hernán Cortés wooing Aztec princess from Mexican film La Otra Conquista

Anti-Anti-Anti-Communist Manifesto

2008-05-06T02:32:00.005-04:00

After the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Marxistentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre decided to hedge his political bets by claiming to be neither communist nor anti-communist, but "anti-anti-communist." In a similar spirit of Gallic prevarication, I declare that I am neither communist, anti-communist nor anti-anti-communist, but rather anti-anti-anti-communist. I simultaneously loathe the idiot populism of McCarthyism (or Birchism or Hooverism or Bunkerism) and the useful idiot crypto-elitism of Sartreism (or Fanonism or Frankfurtism or Meatheadism). As applied to modern politics, I consider myself an anti-anti-anti-Islamist, anti-anti-anti-Bolivarian and anti-anti-anti-socialist (as well as being anti-anti-anti-social). I prefer to primarily use the all-encompassing title anti-anti-anti-communist, however, as it rolls off the tongue more easily. And so in these days of post-communism (and post-post-communism) I simultaneously loathe the idiot populism of post-McCarthyist Cheneyism (or Limbaughism or Foxnewsism or Elephantism [though I like elephants]) and the useful idiot crypto-elitism of post-Sartrean Chomskyism (or Saidism or Berkleyism or Nologoism™ [though I dislike logos]). Sartre wanted the freedom to bash the vulgar defenders of freedom without being called a Stalinist, and I want the freedom to bash the bashers without being called a reactionary. As an anti-anti-anti-communist I am so progressive I give progressives vertigo; their tunnel-vision prevents them from seeing the tunnels I've dug beneath them to get ahead. From this dizzying position I declare: anti-anti-anti-communists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your opponents' ability to know exactly what you're uniting against without pausing for several minutes to think!

Natural Antidotes For Depression

2008-05-05T22:44:00.003-04:00

Motion
Sunlight
Work
Communication*
Stories
Laughter
Bonfires
Lobotomization*
Visual Stimulation
Pie
Immersing Your Soul in Love*
Waterfalls
"Hurry Hurry Super-Scurry"
Endorphins
Nirvana
Fruit
The Outside World*
Dogs
The Mediterranean Sea
Meditation
Lists
War*

* Last resorts

The Basis Of Metaphysics

2008-05-04T14:38:00.003-04:00

"There exists a great background, vital and wild, which matters more than the people who move upon it."
- D.H. Lawrence

Metaphysical justification for mass murder in bold.

Personal Disclaimer

2008-05-03T04:17:00.004-04:00

I am not punk rock, hip-hop, country, fashionable, jet-set, folksy, pacifist, violent, chaste, lascivious, placid, hyperactive, Buddhist, Christian, atheist, faithful, socialist, capitalist, level-headed, psychotic, salt of the earth, cosmopolitan, Anglo-Saxon, visibly minority, revolutionary, conservative, super-human, subhuman, American, anti-American, self-sufficient, communal, objective, hot-blooded, saintly, demonic, popular, outcast, sociable, anti-social, cutting-edge, orthodox, multicultural, monochrome, zen, rational, at war, at peace, consistent, schizophrenic, in demand, undemanding, the life of the party, as good as dead, down with the sickness, the perfect picture of health, suburban, ghetto, pious, sacrilegious, hate-filled, free of hate, proletarian, aristocratic, scene, indie, mainstream, domesticated, wild, perfect, engaged, completely disaffected or unaware of the fact that listing things does not make them so.

Autopsy Of A Dead Hedonist

2008-05-02T10:02:00.000-04:00

The fluctuating capacity to have a good time depends on avoiding the urine spray of reality. Watch out for who stands next to you, but not too closely or it's creepy. Failure rears its beautiful stallion head and the voice-over says "ride." Actors take their place without the artful direction of art or a director. Oscillating fans are orchestrated by technically dead composers. The hum of power is an effortless melody but the efforts of sycophants discord the harmony. I don't have a gun but I have cold dead fingers. They itch for a warm hole to gather in and move on from. I promise you disappointment, a promise I will disappoint. The less we try the more success we come to regret. Stuff your face in cake, fat western world. Wrap yourself in blanket robes and tower over quavering rats with half an erection. That is the social life, friends. Smiles are unmistakably grimaces in the right light. A party is an orgy without the intentions admitted. I need a French duet to spit in the eye of love, Serge Gainsbourg and a corpse in vogue. Anything but a habit please. What is more deflating than lust no longer lusted for? Your fantasy life is neither. If you've gotten this far I'll read between the lines for you: I had an okay time last night. The problem with hedonism is the morning after.

Austro-Fascist Microcosm

2008-04-30T15:43:00.012-04:00

I had no intention of commenting on the recent horror-show in Austria, because some incidents are so obscene as to instinctively seem beyond commentary. The fact that this was the second infamous incident of extended rape-imprisonment in Austria's recent history struck me as peculiar, as did the notably Austrian Hitler-Freudian perverse synthesis of it all; then I read this new revelation:

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who held his daughter captive for 24 years and fathered her seven children through multiple rape, threatened to kill all of them by turning the sealed underground bunker in which they were held prisoner into a gas chamber, police said yesterday.

Mr Polzer said Fritzl behaved like a military overseer in the cellar and had managed to intimidate his daughter and her children so heavily that they never considered trying to escape. "The door to the cellar is made of thick steel and it has an electric combination lock," Mr Polzer said. "Fritzl told them that if they ever tried anything, he would keep the whole cellar locked up and then fill it with gas pumped in from the outside. Then there would be no escape."

I do not believe any particular nation has a monopoly on pathology. But certainly pathologies seem to manifest themselves in peculiarly consistent ways within cultures. British journalist F. A. Voigt noted that, "only the countries where grand opera flourishes have produced Fascism." Certainly there is a reason some countries are more prone to acquiescing to dictators than others. Literary critic George Steiner pithily observed the unlikeliness of British fascism when he remarked, "It is my conviction that had the infinite rhetorical genius of Adolf Hitler been tested at Hyde Park Corner, people would have said, 'Ah, come off it', and walked away." Of course Germany, Italy, Japan and other countries formerly considered hopelessly authoritarian (and in the case of Italy, ungovernable without authoritarianism) have now achieved success as Western-style democracies. A cataclysmic war can do a lot to reshape a national psyche. Yet perhaps a concept developed by that second-most famous Austrian of all time bears mentioning here: sublimation. Roughly sublimation is "the refocusing of psychic energy away from negative outlets, toward positive." So the Japanese who in another lifetime would have been been a kamikaze warrior to honour his family, now commits suicide if he fails his family in business. The astounding post-war economic rebounds of Japan and Germany are perhaps not as astounding if the concept of sublimation of martial energies toward economic ends is employed. But some psychic energes are too perverse to be so easily sublimated. . .

The present case in Austria is undoubtedly an isolated, horrifically unusual incident. Most Austrians are perfectly pleasant people. Most Germans before 1938 were perfectly pleasant people too, as were most Yugoslavians before their most recent incident of mutual ethnic destruction. Yet within every national psyche is a latent pathology that, with the right dictator or ideology, can cause the Josef Fritzls to emerge by the thousands and sublimate their personal perversions toward national genocides. Are there these kinds of people within every nation? Certainly. Human evil is a universal. That being said, I'd rather be a swarthy foreigner in Denmark than a swarthy foreigner in Russia. There are no doubt those liberals who would argue that belief in such a thing as a "national psyche" predisposed to group hatred is crypto-Nazism in reverse. Most Jews in pre-war Germany were assimilated liberals who likely felt the same thing. They were generally excluded from the crowd, so they did not know what effect the crowd mentality has on a group of people seemingly moderate and rational when met with individually. Individuals, however, are not the main problem. Individuals will produce horrific incidents like the recent rape-incest-imprisonment case, but they cannot produce deaths in the millions. That takes a crowd, a crowd either eager to live out its secret pathologies in the name of a greater good, or willing to silently look the other way in the name of a greater good. Let us be thankful that the Josef Fritzls of Mitteleuropa no longer have a greater good to commit even greater evils for.

Uplifting Rhyming Couplet Of The Day

2008-04-29T01:29:00.002-04:00

I drink to the trick of a mouth that betrayed me,
To the eyes and the look that lied.
I drink to the terrible world we inhabit
And to God, who never replied.
- Anna Akhmatova

Liana Papadogkona, Go To Hell

2008-04-27T17:42:00.029-04:00

I have a bad habit of exploring the Facebook groups of idiots to see what the reverse intelligentsia (duncentsia?) are saying. It only makes me angry but I feel a need to keep my hand on the pulse of the heartless, the stream of thought of the thoughtless. There's no point debating the complete cretins; sub-ideologies like anti-Semitism, aptly called by August Bebel "the socialism of fools" (which is much too kind to socialists, but I digress), are as intractably held as biblical literalism and UFO conspiracy theories. Holocaust denial offends me intellectually as much or more than it offends me ethically and ethnically. It is a total cop out, it is denying evidence you don't like simply because it makes your viewpoint more comfortable to bear. It's like if someone asked me why I don't like math and I said it's because I don't believe in numbers. That's not an argument! I have far more respect for a Nazi who says, upfront, "Yes, the Holocaust happened and I supported it happening, and I want it to happen again." That is morally repugnant but at least it's intellectually honest. I despise hypocrites who don't follow their beliefs to their natural conclusion. If you're an anti-Semite and believe Jews don't belong in Europe or your country, the natural conclusion of your beliefs is that Jews should be killed or deported. Most anti-Semites hate Israel, which is odd since it would seem to accord nicely with their belief that Jews should move elsewhere. The only other logical conclusion to their argument then, is that Jews should be stripped of rights and/or killed. Thus despite all finery, anti-Semitism drawn to its logical conclusion is inevitably Nazism. And thus socialism. Since anti-Semites believe Jews are overrepresented in upper-class fields, they must logically follow through with a belief in quotas to reduce the numbers of Jews in these fields. This is a socialist notion that individual achievement matters less than group identity, and thus ironically racists and anti-racists who also support quotas come full circle. After all, quotas that reserve spots for underachieving minorities take spots away from overachieving minorities. Thus so-called anti-racist collectivists, if they followed their logic to its natural conclusion, would find themselves in an agreement of means if not ends with anti-Semites and anti-Asians for that matter!

Above I've posted a representative example of an idiot who refuses to follow her beliefs to their natural conclusion. She wants to kick "Turks, Jews, Communists, blacks, Arabs and Muslims" out of Europe, yet denies she is a racist. Come now! You can make reasoned arguments about Europe's short-sighted immigration policies, but to call for racial groups to be kicked out on the basis of race is racism. That is not a slur, it is a logical conclusion. There is no nuance to her argument (what about mulattoes for instance, or Christian Arabs?) so there can be no nuance to what her argument amounts to. And this girl goes to university! I would like to take the opportunity to post her name in full - "Liana Papadogkona" - so future employers can find this through Google before they think of hiring her. Her name is Greek, which is not surprising to me. I knew a Greek guy in university who claimed that the reason Jews were rich was because of the money they received in compensation for the Holocaust. The reason is one for sociologists to look into, but in my experience Greeks and Serbs contribute disproportionately to the number of crass racists and anti-Semites out there. There was a Serb racist and anti-Semite in one of my high school classes who sported a banner on his backpack against the war in Afghanistan (this was just after 9/11, which he applauded while also hating Muslims) stating "Say No to War and Racism!" Again it's the hypocrisy that bothers me the most. Naturally Greeks and Serbs will accuse me of racism despite the nuance of my argument (I admit it is entirely ancedotal), which is one of the reasons the term racism has been stripped of value. Anti-Semitism was a self-designation invented by German Jew-hater Wilhelm Marr in the nineteenth-century, but now it is the hate that dares not say its name. I cannot and will not waste my time attempting to convince anti-Semites and racists that their beliefs are ideological slime, but I plead that they at least abandon the hypocrisy of denying who they are even when they practically meet the dictionary definition. Liana Papadogkona, you are indeed a racist and, as elucidated previously, if you followed your beliefs to their logical conclusions you'd realize that as a collectivist you are far closer to being a communist than an individualist Jew like me. In conclusion: fuck you!

Post-Script:

"I am just out having all anti-Semites shot."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to Franz Overbeck (signed "Dionysus")

Metametadata

2008-04-27T02:18:00.001-04:00

Send In The Khans

2008-04-26T13:33:00.003-04:00

I read an interesting Q & A in the National Post (the nation is Canada for you foreigners) with a young, unemployed self-proclaimed Islamist Pakistani immigrant in Toronto. I remember the type (usually Pakistani for whatever reason) from high school. One bit in particular caught my eye:

Q) You reject democracy, you support the Taliban and you believe that fundamentalist Islam is the only way to live. So why do you choose to live in Canada, a democratic nation with freedom of religion that is at war with the Taliban? Isn't it hypocritical of you say you believe what you do, while you sit in Toronto enjoying all the benefits of Western society?

A) Yes, I reject democracy and all other forms of governance except Islam. Yes, I support the right of Taliban to live freely and to defend themselves from any invasion based on lies and deceit. And yes it would have had been hypocritical of me to stay in the West had there been an Islamic state and still I would have had been living in the West but since there is no state in the entire world which has complete Islamic system in it and the Islamic world is full of either dictators supported by the West or leaders who are ready to crush any uprising calling for an Islamic system. Therefore it is better to be in the West where at least one can openly preach what he believes in unlike the so called Islamic countries where you can be jailed, tortured and even killed for speaking the truth against the government. Besides I was forced into coming to the West as my parents shifted here and I was not self sufficient enough to provide for myself back home. And believe it or not, me and many Muslims like me are willing to migrate ASAP to an Islamic state as soon as it emerges.

It is my opinion that the West should support the creation of an Islamic state so riffraff (and I do not use the term lightly) like Naeem Muhammad Khan will have somewhere to go where they won't bother the rest of us. The perfect place would be Somalia. Somalia almost had an Islamist government not long ago before the West backed an Ethiopian invasion to topple the short-lived regime. This was a mistake. Somalia is already, excuse the colloqualism, a literally pirate-infested shithole: what do they really have to lose by having an Islamic government? It would in fact serve several valuable functions for the world. One, it would give the people currently hijacking random boats off the coast of East Africa something to do; two, as previously stated, it would give fundamentalist parasites somewhere other than Canada to live; three, the example of a real Islamic state in all its kite-banning glory would actually serve to the world a living advertisement of how pathetic bin Laden's ideal world really is. Of course if the Somali Islamic "Republic" started harbouring terrorists we'd have to send in proxy crusader state Ethiopia again, but what are regional allies for? I support the battle against Islamic fundamentalism; but I hate the generally crass and stupid way the United States has gone about fighting it. It is impossible to fully rid the world of kite-hating pricks like Naeem Muhammad Khan, but it is possible to contain them. Giving them free plane tickets to Somalia would be a good start.

Clever Ain't Wise

2008-04-25T00:44:00.004-04:00

In a rare moment of sober coherence, troubled songsmith Peter Doherty wrote something profound: "You're so clever, but clever ain't wise." This distinction is hard to assimilate for the young. Having a pithy turn of phrase for the conversation is clever; knowing when to keep your mouth shut is wise. Unfortunately, like most lessons, this one is mainly learned through bitter experience: a well-deserved punch to the stomach in my case. When we're young we want to fill every ephemeral moment of silence with an ironic pop culture reference; every space on the wall with posters; every meaningless social encounter with the need to impress. Through the mutual reinforcement of peers the cocoon of extended schooling allows this behaviour to go on far longer than it would in any previous era or society. For this among many other reasons, our less-schooled but more lived ancestors were wiser than us. Less clever, which is why we tend to scoff at or ignore them, but wiser.

I value being clever of course. The best works of art, the best people, the best comedy ("A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole, for instance) is both clever and wise. There is a time for each, as that canonically wise text Ecclesiastes makes clear. I won't argue that the Tanakh, the Vedas, the Pali canon, the Canticle for Lebowitz or any other book is sacred: that sort of argument cannot be made or won. I will say that for a book to endure and define a people for thousands of years it likely contains wisdom. Atheists will disagree, and they are entirely right when they say that they are more clever than our superstitious ancestors. Our ancestors, in their superstitious wisdom, would likely have acknowledged this. I do not however, think our benighted forefathers would posthumously regret being born in a time when wisdom ruled over cleverness. They may not have written as many books as us, but something tells me theirs will last a lot longer.

Song Of The Thursday

2008-04-24T01:03:00.001-04:00

Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines a rake as, "A dissolute or profligate person, esp. a man who is licentious; roué." It defines a roué as, "A dissolute and licentious man; rake." If I were to be a rake or a roué - and I'd much rather be a rake or a roué than a pimp or a player - this song would be my soundtrack. It reminds me of my life in everything but the details.

Morphine - Thursday

We used to meet every
Thursday Thursday Thursday in the afternoon
For a couple of beers and a game of pool
We used to go to a motel a motel
A motel across the street
And the name of the motel was the Wagon Wheel
Oh
One day she said come on come on she said
Why don't you come back to my house?
She said my husband's out of town
You know he's gone till the end of the month
Well I was just so nervous so nervous
You know I couldn't really quite relax
Cause I was never really quite sure when her
Husband was coming back
Sure one of the neighbors yeah one of the neighbors
One of the neighbors that saw my car
And they told her yea they told her
I think they know who you are
Well her husband he's a violent man a very violent and jealous man
Now I have to leave this town I got to leave while I still can
We should have kept it every
Thursday Thursday Thursday in the afternoon
For a couple of beers and a game of pool
We should have kept it every
Thursday Thursday Thursday in the afternoon
For a couple of beers and a game of pool
She was pretty good too

Email From A Hater

2008-04-22T02:05:00.002-04:00

To: Assholes everywhere
Re: Don't hate the player, hate the game

Can't I hate both!?

Rhyming Couplet Of The Day

2008-04-21T20:47:00.000-04:00

’Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore,
And coming events cast their shadows before
- Thomas Campbell, Lochiel’s Warning

The Virus Becomes Us

2008-04-20T14:31:00.002-04:00

Having been besotted by viruses, I look to the words of Jeff Lebowski paraphrasing Lenin: "It's all a goddamn fake. Like Lenin said, look for the person who will benefit. And you will, uh, you know, you'll, uh, you know what I'm trying to say--" Since the only people who benefit from computer viruses are anti-virus companies, I want to conclude that they are the ones behind their proliferation. The alternative is that the world is full of nihilistic, mindlessly destructive peons with a means but no end; little boys in mother's basements jerking off to the sight of their perfectly, purposelessly constructed dunce-codes. Sadly though that is exactly the case, which is why Lenin, for all the seeming beauty of his argument, was wrong. People are just not reasonable or competent enough. Maybe certain aspects of the American government benefited from 9/11, but that doesn't mean they did it: nihilistic, mindlessly destructive peons with a means but no end did it, and that many people believe otherwise contrary to all facts is a sign of man's denial of the chaos of his nature and nature in general. So although I want to blame anti-virus companies for the proliferation of computer viruses, and refuse to buy an anti-virus program to spite their machinations, I know in my heart that there is no conspiracy. There are only dunces.

The Story Of Passover

2008-04-19T15:47:00.007-04:00

Moses and His People by Marc Chagall

"Most authors agree that once during a plague in Egypt which caused bodily disfigurement, King Bocchoris approached the oracle of Ammon and asked for a remedy, whereupon he was told to purge his kingdom and to transport this race into other lands, since it was hateful to the gods. So the Hebrews were searched out and gathered together; then, being abandoned in the desert, while all others lay idle and weeping, one only of the exiles, Moses by name, warned them not to hope for help from gods or men, for they were deserted by both, but to trust to themselves, regarding as a guide sent from heaven the one whose assistance should first give them escape from their present distress. They agreed, and then set out on their journey in utter ignorance, but trusting to chance. Nothing caused them so much distress as scarcity of water, and in fact they had already fallen exhausted over the plain nigh unto death, when a herd of wild asses moved from their pasturage to a rock that was shaded by a grove of trees. Moses followed them, and, conjecturing the truth from the grassy ground, discovered abundant streams of water. This relieved them, and they then marched six days continuously, and on the seventh seized a country, expelling the former inhabitants; there they founded a city and dedicated a temple . . . By frequent fasts even now they bear witness to the long hunger with which they were once distressed, and the unleavened Jewish bread is still employed in memory of the haste with which they seized the grain."
- Tacitus, Histories, Book V

Protest Song Of The Day

2008-04-18T03:45:00.003-04:00

Usually when I post a "Song of the Day" it's at least a decade old, perhaps because the majority of new music tends to the not good. But here is a (relatively) new song that defies that rule! The lyrics even manage the rare feat of being political but not embarrassing - cathartic and vitriolic in the Bob Dylan, "Masters of War" sense! The fan-made video is a little heavy-handed for my tastes but, eh, times are what they are.

David Ford - Requiem

Well the world’s getting heavy and it sticks to my feet
Well-practiced in losing and brave in defeat
With no friends in this business you keep your enemies sweet
And keep one in the chamber for every stranger you meet

I’ll take pieces of silver for a head full of rhyme
I’ll take a headache and a casket for a life full of time
I’ll take a patch of New Mexico and I will call it mine
And I’ll swear never to return to the scene of the crime

Well the mob’s getting angry and the torches alight
Because they’re putting up taxes by a penny tonight
And you can never taste freedom boys if you run from a fight
And when the heavens are falling take a step to the right

So we smoke ourselves skinny and we drink ourselves blind
Self-discovery knocks but there is nothing to find
And if you’re looking for victims would you keep me in mind
Let us be kissed on the cheek, let us be fucked from behind

There’s no need to tread carefully there’s no need to fear
Just talk in obscure non-specifics and try to look all sincere
Every administration blames the one from last year
So when consequence calls there’ll be nobody here

So we sell out our kids for a tank full of gas
And a lifetime in plastics for a fistful of cash
Let the rivers run dry let the economy crash
And let the discotheques resound to the requiem mass

So we sell out our kids for a tank full of gas
And a lifetime in plastics for a fistful of cash
Let the rivers run dry let the economy crash
And let the discotheques resound to the requiem mass

Refacing The Defacement

2008-04-17T11:57:00.005-04:00

Trying to remove a sticker from a book, I began taking off part of the book's cover with it. This destructive act, though minor, activated a neurotic impulse of futile discontentment. I flattened the sticker to resume the appearance of aesthetic integrity, but I knew that my destructive act had left a festering sore underneath. There was no objective reason for this to bother me but subjectively it did. I had defaced to achieve some imaginary purity and retreated to another illusion of purity upon failure. I felt like the man who had removed the collar from his wife's neck only for her head to fall off. He could put the head back in its place, but beneath the collar the torso was permanently severed. Even if the rest of the world never found out, he would know.

I tell this story for several reasons. Mostly because it is true: such minor displays of personal incompetence really do disturb my mental equilibrium. Eventually it will be restored but to hasten the process I've decided to write about it. Writing about it helps because it makes the act seem retroactively justified. I can bring meaning to a meaningless act by supplying my own meaning through words. This will stand as a lesson to the future in case something like the defacing incident should happen again - and it will. The damage cannot be undone but it can be redeemed if it inspires a creative act more positive than the damage was negative. Writing this is my way of making the regret obsolete. A minor piece of writing for a minor action to be sure, but representative of a principle I must believe in.

By writing such a facile anecdote down I immortalize it as a warning. This warning is entirely self-directed but if anyone else finds any worth in it that is a bonus. Weakness can be redeemed through the very act of seeking redemption. Festering sores that only fester in your mind can only be solved through your mind. By writing I gather my thoughts, and these thoughts are a product of the creative, outward-directed side of my mind. The destructive, inward-directed side of my mind would rather keep the sore festering by poking at it with subtle reminders. In order for the objective to defeat the subjective, I must make the subjective objective by writing it down. If this redeems what I have done it is redemption. If not, I'd rather go down verbally flailing than shut my mouth by swallowing my own tail.