B. B. King, Nobody Knows You when You're Down and Out
John Fogerty, When Will I Be Loved? This cover of the old Everly Bros. tune is now my favorite.
Beach Boys, When I Grow Up (to be a Man)
Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes In
Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In
Laura Nyro, And When I Die
Percy Sledge, When a Man Loves a Woman
Bob Dylan, When I Paint My Masterpiece
The Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece
Bob Dylan, When the Deal Goes Down
Wake up to 'woke' by reading this outstanding piece by Bari Weiss. It is long, but very clear, covers the essential points, includes examples and some suggestions on how to fight back, and last but not least, it receives the MavPhil plenary endorsement and nihil obstat.
And now I would like to ask any of you who are U. S. citizens and Democrats whether supporting said party makes sense for you and your family and their future and the future of the country. Please consider this question very carefully with an open mind in light of all the facts. Please do not retreat into your private life else you wake up some day soon to no private life at all.
Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.
It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.
So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.
Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.
In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.
Read the rest below the fold:
With apologies to Neil Sedaka, Calendar Girl.
A 'pastafarian' idiot was allowed to wear a colander in an official DMV photo in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Bring on the hoodies, the sombreros, the ski masks . . . . Story here.
Does this have anything to do with the decline of the West? Something. It is just another little indication of the abdication of those in positions of authority. A driver's license is an important document. The authorities should not allow its being mocked by a dumbass with a piece of kitchenware on her head. But Massachusetts is lousy with liberals, so what do you expect? A liberal will tolerate anything except common sense and good judgment.
A penne for her thoughts as she strains to find something to believe in. If only she would use her noodle.
If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in. Herein lies the best argument for continence. The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he is more destructive of the spirit. You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light, or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both. But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal. Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back? How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?
Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag team. The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses. His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.
It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self. He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in. (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.
One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandal straps. To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all. The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.
And so in the end Jack returned to the religion of his childhood.
The Last Interview, 12 October 1969. "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic." "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."
As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man. He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.
"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1)
Written 7 March 2005.
………………………………..
Senator Charles Grassley (R) was on C-SPAN this morning talking about Social Security reform among other things. He attributed the following quotation to Albert Einstein: "Compound interest is the only miracle in the world."
Did Einstein say that? I rather doubt it. It is too stupid a thing for Einstein to say. And there is no room in his worldview for miracles. There is nothing miraculous about compound interest, and there is no 'magic' in it either. It is very simple arithmetic. Suppose you invest $2000 at 10% compounded annually. At the end of the first year, you have $2,200. How much do you have at the end of the second year, assuming no additions or subtractions from the principal? $2,400? No. What you have is $2,200 + 220 = $2, 420. Where did the extra twenty bucks come from? That is interest on interest. It is the interest on interest on interest . . . that make compounding a powerful tool of wealth enhancement.
But there is nothing miraculous or magical about it. Words mean things. Use them wisely.
And don't look to Einstein for advice on personal finance.
The very best books, or so it seems, are usually the ones that get withdrawn from circulation in local public libraries, while the trash remains on the shelves. The librarians' bad judgment, however, redounds to my benefit as I am able to purchase fine books for fifty cents a pop. A while back, the literary luminaries at the Apache Junction Public Library saw fit to remove Linda Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (Norton, 1991) from the shelves.
Why, I have no idea. (It wasn't a second copy.) But I snatched it up. A find to rejoice over. A beautifully produced first edition of over 400 pages, the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America wanted $25 for it. I shall set it on the Beat shelf next to Kerouac's Dharma Bums wherein Rexroth figures as Reinhold Cacoethes. I hope the two volumes refrain from breaking each other's spines.
Moral: Always search diligently through biblic aisles and piles, remainder bins, and the like. It is amazing what treasure lies among the trash.
Conservatives, especially, are bound to find gems. The reason being that the tribe of librarians, dominated as they are by the distaff contingent, reliably tilt left and are eager to remove from the shelves what their shallow pates consider offensive materials.
Those of the first type try to see into eternity by piercing the veil of space and time. They attempt to look beyond this world. The mystics and religious contemplatives are of this type. A second type is content to view the world of space, time, and matter under the aspect of eternity. Not a look beyond the world into eternity, but at it from an eternal point of view. Some philosophers are of this type. One thinks of Spinoza. His amor dei intellectualis is an intellectual love of God or nature, deus sive natura.
The latter is a God's eye view of the world, the former a view of God. The genitive construction is a genitivus objectivus. One naturally thinks of the visio beata of the doctor angelicus.
(There I go alliterating again. A stylistic defect? And peppering one's prose with foreign expressions is considered by some to be stylistically suboptimal, pretentious perhaps.)
Not by my lights. But then I might be a dim bulb.
For Alan Rhoda,
Presentism is the metaphysical thesis that whatever exists, exists now, in the present. The past is no more. The future is not yet. Either something exists now, or it does not exist, period.
This is my understanding of presentism as well. Rhoda goes on to claim that presentism is "arguably the common sense position." I beg to differ.
It is certainly common sense that the past is no more and the future is not yet. These are analytic truths understood by anyone who understands English. They are beyond the reach of reasonable controversy, stating as they do that the past and the future are not present. But presentism is a substantive metaphysical thesis well within the realm of reasonable controversy. It is a platitude that what no longer exists does not now exist. But there is nothing platitudinous about 'What no longer exists does not exist at all, or does not exist period, or does not exist simpliciter.' That is a theoretical claim of metaphysics about time and existence that is neither supported nor disqualified by common sense and the Moorean data comprising it. The presentist is making a claim about the nature of the existence of that which exists. He is claiming that the existence of what exists either is identical to, or necessarily equivalent to, temporal presentness. Is it not just common sense that common sense takes no stand on any such high-flying metaphysical thesis?
In the four sentences that begin his article, Rhoda has two platitudes sandwiched between two metaphysical claims. This gives the impression that the metaphysical claims are supported by the platitudes. My point is that the platitudes, though consistent with the metaphysical theory, give it no aid and comfort.
Compare the problem of universals: It is a Moorean fact that my coffee cup is blue and that I see the blueness at the cup. But this datum neither supports nor disqualifies the metaphysical theory that blueness is a universal, nor does it either support or disqualify the competing metaphysical theory that the blueness is a particular, a trope. Neither common sense, nor ordinary language analysis, nor phenomenology can resolve the dispute. Dialectical considerations must be brought to bear. It is common sense that things have properties. That they are, common sense is equipped to establish; what they are, however, common sense leaves wide open.
It is the same in the philosophy of time. Dialectical considerations must be brought to bear. JFK existed. It is true now that he existed. Indeed, it is true now that he actually existed. If there are merely possible past individuals, JFK is not one of them: he is an actual past individual. What's more, JFK really existed: he existed outside of people's minds. He was never imaginary or purely fictional. If you meditate carefully on these points you should be able to appreciate how dubious, if not preposterous, is the claim that only what exists now exists simpliciter. The past is not nothing; the past was.
The case against presentism is strong. In fact, I hold that presentism cannot be true. Must I then be an 'eternalist'? Why? Both positions might be untenable. And this could be case even if they are logical contradictories. We would then be up against an aporia in the strict sense. But I don't go that far now.
Consider the gladiatorial combats in Rome. They are a thing of the past. That is a truism. They are no longer occurring. That too is a truism. But to say, with the presentist, that what no longer occurs is nothing at all, is not truistic but highly dubious if not preposterous. Or will you tell me that the historians of ancient Rome have no subject matter? On the other hand, the battles are not still going on, the besotted Romans drunk with blood lust are not still roaring, the gladiators are not still expiring in anguish. So in what sense are the gladiators, their doings and sufferings actual? How can anything wholly past be actual? How can an event such as a beheading, whose mode of being is to occur, and thus elapse over time, occur tenselessly or timelessly?
This is but a sketch of the intricacies of the dialectic that envelops the presentist and the eternalist. The 'present' point is that common sense plays no role in deciding between them. In particular, and pace my friend Alan Rhoda, presentism cannot rightfully draw upon the support of common sense.
Are you 'in' with the 'in crowd'?
Ramsey Lewis Trio, The 'In' Crowd
Dobie Gray, The 'In' Crowd
Glenn Miller, In the Mood
Beach Boys, In My Room
Beatles, In My Life
Suzi Quatro, Stumblin' In
Bob Dylan, Blowin' in the Wind
Kansas, Dust in the Wind
Bob Dylan, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
Bob Dylan, In My Time of Dyin'
Bob Dylan, Tangled Up in Blue
Five Satins, In the Still of the Night
Mungo Jerry, In the Summertime. That fabulous and far-off summer of 1970. I was unloading mail trucks at Terminal Annex, Los Angeles.
Van Morrison, Into the Mystic
When we started out, did we know what we were doing? We do now.
A bit of posturing and pretense may be needed to launch a life. Posture and pretense become performance. The untested ideal becomes the verified real. At the start of a life scant is the evidence that you can do what you dream: you must believe beyond the evidence if you are to have a shot.
And so I beg to differ with W. K. Clifford:
For a couple of rather more technical treatments, see here.
The young, their lives ahead of them, think life is long; the old, their lives ending, know that it is short. Why knowledge in the second case? Because the old, some of them anyway, are surveyors of life and not mere livers of it. This suggests that the old who lose themselves in the quotidian round may avoid the view from above and cultivate thereby a life-enhancing illusion.
Not filed under Sage Advice, but under Art of Life.
I wrote him off at an early age but then never wrote him back on again.
Unjust! But then it is hard to be just even to oneself. And sometimes justice to self requires injustice towards others. Such is our predicament in this dimly-lit slot canyon with unscalable walls and a flash flood coming, but you know not when.
Dwight Green writes,
I had forgotten about your focus on the Beats in October (more of a remembrance of Kerouac, if I remember right) until I saw your recent post introducing it for this year.A couple of years ago I drove to the Big Sur area and was unable to do much hiking due to recent fire and weather wiping out many trails in the parks. On one of my stops I witnessed what helped push Kerouac mentally over the edge, as he published in Big Sur. The incredible power that defines the area is truly awesome (despite the overuse of that word). It's been a long time since I really connected with Kerouac but I did that weekend. See here. (I'm in the process of moving this to a new site but I don't have all the links working yet, so this is the old site.)The incident is more than a little macabre and I don't mean to "profit" from it in any way, but I had not understood his feelings in Big Sur until that moment. Just wanted to pass it on in case it's of interest.
So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing. Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (1962)
. . . Big Sur follows Kerouac a few years after On the Road had been published (and fourteen years after the events in the book) as he's trying to handle the fame of his book as well as his inability to control himself, especially with alcohol. Kerouac's mental deterioration coincides with his visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. His isolation, exacerbated by the insignificance he feels in comparison to nature's power brings on a mental and physical breakdown. The poem he wrote while in Big Sur, "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur," echoes the parts of the novel comparing man's transience to nature's permanence, one of the many tensions in the book such as image vs. reality and beauty vs. hazard.
. . . on the headwaters of the human race. A very intelligent article. I have had similar thoughts. Here is an excerpt from an entry dated 30 August 2011:
But how can God create man in his image and likeness without interfering in the evolutionary processes which most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal? As follows.
Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. (This can be argued with great rigor, but not now!)
As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine intervention without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.
What 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through a spiritual encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.
But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone.
This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with a serpent or an apple or the being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a
spiritual event, and its transmission is not by semen, pace certain Pauline passages, but by socio-cultural-linguistic means.If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message. Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other — but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and literalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)
Our question was whether rejecting the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story entails rejecting the doctrine of the Fall. The answer to this is in the negative since the mere possibility of an account such as the one just given shows that the entailment fails. Man's fallenness is a spiritual condition that can only be understood in a spiritual way. It does not require that the whole human race have sprung from exactly two animal progenitors that miraculously came into physical existence by divine agency and thus without animal progenitors. Nor does it require that the transmission of the fallen condition be biological in nature.
Marvelettes, Please Mr. Postman.
Elvis Presley, Return to Sender
Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails. "The letters you wrote me were written in shame/And I know that your conscience still echoes my name."
Son House, Death Letter Blues
Elvis Presley, The U. S. Male
Larry Finnegan, Dear One. If you remember this one, I'll buy you a beer.
Hank Williams, Dear John. "That's all she wrote. I sent your saddle home."
Ricky Nelson, That's All She Wrote
Joe Cocker, The Letter
