A Note on Butts in Seats

It is fashionable in some circles to decry “Structuralism” as French nonsense under the general meme “I have a Master’s degree”,

“I have a Master’s Degree. In Science!” – Ask Mister Science, Duck’s Breath Mystery Theater

“but I don’t understand it.”

However, structuralism by any name is an excellent way of understanding power, which is why, I believe, elite opinion is so selectively anti-intellectual.

For example, there is the abstraction of the specific coexistence, in South Africa, of high-minded ideals in its modern Constitution, with the deliberate use of almost all successful politicians even centrists like Zuma with mobocratic tirades against women and gays, as documented in the New Yorker (28 May), in “Violated Hopes”, by Charlayne Hunter-Galt.

Smart people notice a correspondence, an isomorphism, between two manifestations of this collision, for example in universities in which the faculty are paid to mouth human rights and diversity while their students, regurgitating these ideals on examinations, form covens promoting identity politics which deny certain human rights and diversity often using, as self-protectve coloration, identity politics.

The structure is the gradual “post-modernism”, not what’s normally meant by “post modernism”, but a demotic and demonic variant, where you narrate your “religion” as a going-back-to-basics under hyper-modernization.

Now, this used to be, in Picasso’s, Stravinsky’s and TS Eliot’s time, a rarefied and aesthetic gesture, itself a Modernism in what Adorno, at the beginning of his rib-tickling magnum opus Aesthetic Theory, calls “the vortex of the newly taboo.”

The permission to artistically innovate in a vortex generates economic competition among artists, especially male artists that escapes non market facilities such as Salons. Now, it is very, very hard to create something new. Jackson Pollock ripped art a new asshole by single-mindedly pursuing a vision at the cost of his life, dancing before the world. In dancing improvisationally one feels stupid at first which is why you need that trance music, very simplified music that lets you cover up your mistakes.

But one form of innovation can be brilliant in the hands of genius and that is essentially nothing more than pastiche, whether it’s Picasso’s 1920s classicism, Stravinsky’s “Classical Symphony”, or Eliot’s Four Quartets. But in general it avoids the basic problem of encountering one’s Self as an Artist. It is the adoption of the false (Fundamentalist) persona. And it has steadily decayed to become the Dadaism of today’s Republican politics: for example, a recently proposed North Carolina law decreed that sea levels at coastal resorts are to be extrapolated only using linear, and not exponential formulae, for the scientific conclusions destroy the value of riparian real estate, and I am not making this up.

Neoclassicism is the thesis, Fundamentalism is not so much the antithesis as folk neoclassicism even as in Max Weber, Erasmus was the thesis and Luther the folk response. The South African “rainbow” the thesis, Zuma and earlier Buthelezi the folk response.

But the folk response, while claiming a connection with the past, lacks this. It is an affair of a generation disconnected from actual folk-ways.

Today, the homeboys in Africa calling women witches, engaging in “corrective rape” to “cure” lesbians, and killing their girlfriends, or the good old boys in Montana beating up sissies, never really knew the Christianity, Islam or animism of their grandfathers…any more than even Picasso could claim to have been an ancient Greek, Stravinsky “really” a tonal composer of the 19th century, or Eliot a Lancelot Andrewes.

But politicians today, who can never criticize or try to teach the people, find it useful to address these neo-saved because it tells them that the problems of modernization are caused by sorcerers. It’s not your fault is the message of Fascism and Fundamentalism. Its core constituency is not an enumeration of We the People, unlike the US Constitution, which has no predefined notion of what They the People think, but literally enumerates them every ten years in our Census.

The Republican or African demagogue preconceives a description of right thinking usually cribbed from religion as a time-saver. This description is crudely described as “vote for me or you’re a fag” because it pre-describes right thinking.

Picasso got tired of competing with Braque, in many ways a better painter. Stravinsky needed to put butts on seats and Schonberg’s severe adherence to the 12-tone system sent butts off seats in search of a stiff drink.

The greatest of these men (for I don’t question their greatness), Thomas Stearns Eliot, was competing largely with himself. Fortunately for all of us, the Waste Land wasn’t the last word in his case, and the Four Quartets were his answer to the fragmentation in the former work. But, same as me, he had to use an element of pastiche, swiping two ideas from Dante in the Four Quartets: *terza rima* and the idea of the ghostly reappearance of a dead mentor, a Mantuan, “o anime cortese Mantoana”.

Let’s see if I can bring this mess together. The truly traditional is well and truly gone, Flintstone. It is that scene in Alex Haley’s Roots of the raising of the boy child to the gods of the sky and forest because it is a boy. Brought back it becomes demonic, the girl being genitally mutilated and that murderous clown in Norway, Breivik, maddened by You Tube videos, killing girls and the philosophy of my old school-fellow, Ted Nugent.

And from a neoconservative text itself emerges this terrible warning: TS Eliot writes in the Four quartets that we cannot revive old policies or follow an antique drum.

But if I continue in this vein my butt will start hurting, NOT because thinking is bad for me. No. Sitting on my arse is bad for me.

Godard might get a Prize? No way!

The Zionists are going rigid and drumming their heels and turning blue over the possibility of Jean-luc Godard, he who makes all those films which they saw when coked up in the Seventies and can’t remember, winning a Prize.

Godard was right on Schindler’s List: had that movie’s images of Auschwitz been made by a non-Jew it would have been banned. But the whole point of art, to me, is universality: see the poem below this post.

Tribalism in art is the idea that you can’t make art that tells the tribe’s story unless you’re a member. This is a popular meme, applied even in the borderline case (like that of my marriage) where the tribe or Other you have re-presented has a meaningful relation with you or (in the case of the Palestinians) your friends.

Part of the victimization system is the Victimizer’s lie: that there is really no intimate relation between the Victimizer and the Victim.

My former wife was my Victim when, long ago, I was abusive. Based on this, she now is Victimizer in that she wishes to erase the six years of our marriage from her memory; it appears that she no longer uses the email which I used to communicate with her, primarily about the kids, up to 2005, and this email is now sending me junk about Viagra (!) since it’s been colonized by a spambot.

I need a meaningful relationship with my grown children, if only to have a place in addition to Facebook to tell what Borges calls “the true story of your own death”. But having been raised by my former wife, the kids follow her lead, and if she ignores my existence so do they. This makes me the Victim, as if (as is logically possible) the Allies had, in 1946, allowed the Jews to return to Germany legally enabled to be a master race, and this had gotten out of hand, resulting in a Holocaust of Germans at the hands of vengeful (Old Testament) Jews in 1975.

“Who is the slayer? Who is the victim? Speak.” – Sophocles

It is different for me to write about a former spouse than it would for me to write, say, about a Hollywood star with whom I’ve never had a relationship.

But what does Godard have to do with Israel’s victims, the Palestinians? Well, plenty, because their victimization set perhaps the first post-Holocaust precedent that a person or people may still be selected for brutalization, their cries ignored, their claims disregarded, and this makes life difficult and dangerous for all of us…except for the Jews, whose lives remain endangered and made difficult by anti-Semitism but not by post-Holocaust neo-bullying: today’s pattern of finding friendless groups (Palestinians, older heterosexual divorced men, Catholic priests who happen not to be child molestors) and kicking the shit out of them pour encourager and as a safety valve for one’s free-floating rage.

“Thou shalt not cathect”. Post-holocaust Judaism has regressed into a Law that cannot be obeyed unless you’re Jewish, making it impossible for anyone, including Jews, to follow the Kantian imperative (to act so that your action can be recommended as a universal moral law). Zionists are asking me to support the IDF’s sending an SMS (“hey, we’re going to bomb your neighborhood) and then bombing the ‘hood as “humanity and justice” which is tragedy and farce, and asks me, in fact, not to be an autonomous moral being.

To sympathize with a people with unattractive characteristics (their Islamic beliefs as so little understood by Westerners) purely because they have been treated unfairly-unjustly is not tribal enough for many Jewish thought leaders who would like us to economize on altruism. It is considered a cheap fashion statement like one of those very cool motorbikes you see many Parisiennes use to scoot around Paris.

Hmm. Well, last March I took the side, at work, of a Malaysian-British gentleman whom the putative manager of English department seemed to have disliked in a motiveless and narcissistic way. My reward at a company where I knew damned well that solidarity was a threat to management was to be terminated with one hour’s notice. I am now humping around Hong Kong to interesting and poorer neighborhoods as a temp teacher, and just got my first call from a collections department…I won’t make my Visa payment until 20 Nov. Yippee, here we go again: I’ve been there before, so hopefully I can survive better.

Solidarity is a luxury good today, and we’re expected to do without it below a certain level; only the super gazillionaire like Bill Gates is thought to have the luxury to finally get around to eleemosynary detour and frolic.

But the paradox of advice in a fuck-you, devil take the hindmost society is that the advice itself becomes a competitive move in the game. I was told in the 1970s to loosen up and go out with the guys in the office for a drink and not work so hard, because I was making the guys in the office look bad, and the function of drinking-groups remains the search for and eradication of the member who thinks she’s special, whether she jumps to her death from Princeton’s chapel or is filmed having an orgasm for Internet posting. Therefore we need not respect the injunction not to take a stand since the advice is intended to destroy us.

To be anti-Israel based on Israel’s dismal track record has always had real consequences for celebrities, who undergo stress owing to death threats and the paparazzi (who brought Diana down), and who retain consulting firms to try to ensure their security.

And as Zionism continues to regress from what it was under Herzl to the infantile rage of a David Horowitz, one cannot help but notice how these shitstorms are triggered by the concept of the “prize”.

When we were kids, if a kid had a birthday party, we all had Mom buy some cheap junky but cool toy at Woolworth’s for the birthday girl or boy, and went to the party. What we got was Betty Crocker cake, never chocolate alas, usually white on white: mothers of the 1950s had a racist horror of their children being chocolate smeared.

But I noticed in the early 1980s that my younger son’s taking offence at his elder brother’s receiving any kind of special recognition (even his goddamn birthday) was pandered to by my former wife. If my elder son got a present, my younger son had to get a present, and I was working in far-away California, unable to put the boot in. Had I done so, probably, I would have been dismissed in this matriarchal system, which is why I left in the first place.

I have learned from Mamas on Lamma Island that this pot-latch is now spinning out of control. Tai Tais and wealthy Gweipos (Euro-Mamas) both expect, when they bring their children to birthday parties, not only a present for their child. They expect a fancy and expensive “gift bag” and, for the Gweipos, no end of expensive booze.

The birthday boy or girl if at all unpopular is often openly bullied at these parties. The message is that no-one is special except a Big Other.

Likewise, modern Zionists are enraged by the idea of a pro-Palestinian winning a prize. Part of their regression is (so clearly in the trajectory of David Horowitz) a complete lack of inner balance or a super-ego, and this creates an unfillable need for external affirmation…that is seen to be a feature of the psychology of the ancient world.

The “anger of Achilles” is infantile for it is primarily about what other heroes will think of him. You distinguished yourself in the ancient world and as recently as the Napoleonic wars, since life expectancy was low, by Fame constituted solely in the recognition of your mates: there was no such thing as second place or “knowing in your heart that you are right”: Napoleon knew this at Marengo.

Paradoxically, a “Jewish” thinker (Spinoza) pioneered the very idea of inner-directedness and autonomy and Ecclessiastes reminds us when praising famous men that men can be great but unknown. The idea of justice, its link to fairness, and then the idea that the autonomous person might take a stand for tax collectors, slaves, ho-bags and Palestinians, all originated in the seedbed of Torah.

But alongside is the complete lack of justice-as-fairness also seen in Torah: the punishment of Onan and Ham, and God’s smug response to Job, a book somewhat reminiscent of Mao’s “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom”: Job is encouraged to speak up and then bitch-slapped.

The whole point for the Godard haters is that Israel won the Six Day War by guile and trickery as well as force and that after this, we must never give a prize to an anti-zionist lest the collective wrath of online Zionism unleash millions of emails. Justice, to be Justice, must be unjust in the sense that it must feel like injustice to its targets. The Palestinians must find a way to hew wood and draw water on Shabboz happily for the Jews and their girls must learn to dance nude in clubs, or else.

Godard needs to learn how to make fun and entertaining films like Schindler’s List about fun and entertaining company managers who do their darnedest to save the Jews. I mean, come on. I can’t stand his films myself, because I have little time for movies except when exhausted and when you’re exhausted you want to watch something like Idiocracy, Dodgeball, The Hangover or Schindler’s List. That is because you are too tired to laugh or cry, and the machinery of the film does it for you. You’re on life support, being fed intraveiniously.

Godard-watching is more like cracking a book. It is unlikely that Israeli “settlers” pop Godard into the DVD. Running around shooting innocent children is hard work and takes a toll.

If Godard gets a Prize, the Zionists will have one of those shit fits in which their body goes rigid, like rich kids in Hong Kong who are almost bigger than their Indonesian helpers.

Or something. I need to finish Zizek’s latest book, In Defense of Lost Causes, for sometimes I think he’s too facile and his ease of jumping around infects my style. I need to get over Zizek.

Robert Longo, “Barbara”, lithograph 1998 (saved as GIF and then as JPEG by EGN to remove colour information for best display on a variety of monitors, and to enhance the grain of this image)

Lana Sutton #1, the truth dances

Edward G. Nilges, “Lana Sutton Study #1″, pencil, pen and colored pencil on A4 size paper, 26 Sep 2010

Edward G. Nilges, “Lana Sutton Study #2″, pencil, pen and Gimp modifications on A4 size paper, 28 Sep 2010

Lana Sutton is a political activist, musician, dancer, environmentalist and holy terror in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The media systematically represents populism as Tea Baggery, but she is in no way a Tea Hag. She just feels that the good old boys of her town shouldn’t mess with her for not mowing her lawn, and furthermore that they are a bunch of crooks…who have so deconstructed the line between business and government to make ordinary people spiritless and cynical.

A few days ago, I fired off a letter to the International Herald Tribune. They’d tarred her cause as Tea Baggery since she’s active in the recall of a corrupt mayor, since that’s what they do: if they can’t do their homework, they herd us into a Concept.

She appears to me like a sort of Lola Montez, the Irish adventurer and dancer who fired up German youth in the revolutions of 1848, who somehow knows that the truth exists because she still feels it body and soul.

That is, most of us sit flaccid in front of the TV and the bodily decay that results, results in turn into a negative epistemology, something misnamed “skepticism” which is merely ignorance, and something swept and garnished…all to ready to turn into belief in right-wing malarkey.

So…my next art project, to be narrated here, is a painting celebrating her. In this the first cut, I like the simplicity of the side view, because the way her skirts float reminds me of a Greek vase.

In the green drawing I simulate the method best described in Daniel V. Thompson’s book The Practice of Tempera Painting: white and black chiaroscuro on a middle tone. I simulate it in Gimp by adding a new translucent layer and using the (clumsy) Gimp brush to add the white.

If bone could speak and skin could sing…

“You do things because of the way they look
You do things because they feel good
But I do right”

(Lana Sutton, I Do Right)

That is: us baby boomers lost the very idea that you do something out of what Kant called pure or reinen “duty”…to the extent that in the 1980s I could not even claim to my sophistoe friends that I was trying simply to do right on a job or as regards my kids.

Reaganism explained us as universally self-interested. But one of the unexpected consequences of the claim of universal self-interest is that we’re always doing something for some other reason.

This put the Yuppies on a treadmill named “rationality”. You work at some soulless job to get the money to buy the expensive vacation to recover from the stupid job. Everything is a tight loop (I do A to get B which gets me C which fires me up to do A) or else as it happens to some corporate crook’s benefit, poured out like water on the ground.

“Self-interest” and the whole theodicy of rationality was in fact a massive fraud: check out that negative equity, baby. The saint does what she wants, not what’s in her self-interest.

I was terminated last month from a job as a teacher which I had for five years and loved, mostly because the sight of kids farting around always cheers me up. My specialty was the rambunctious boys such as the Tiger Monk.

The Tiger Monk’s helper should get combat pay since he is never still but ever in motion, questing about the office on a secret mission from God. But I was able to get him to do his work by telling him stories while he swotted away.

The company did so without notice and gives no reason, thinking that they can morph the job into a pure or reinen contract and at-will. By law they were supposed to have given me two months’ notice or pay in lieu, but they’d given me a schedule past the kiss-off date and put me on the Fall bulletin. They even promised parents and kids that “Mr. Edward” would be the children’s teacher; many parents and kids liked me.

This shall not stand. There shall be Kung Fu fighting.

I was told by a former co-worker that the Tiger Monk, on the day he was supposed to start his fall classes with me, was questing about the office, saying, over and over again in a sad voice, “where is Mr. Nilges?”

I have filed a claim on this matter with Hong Kong’s Labour Relations Department. Oh, this might mean I won’t get a character reference? Well boo hoo: I have CEO references from all over the world, and, I’m a little tired of the corporate treadmill anyway. I refuse to be a 19th century servant and I’m quite aware that there may be consequences.

So, this one’s for you, Lana, and Tiger Monk, and Lola, and Joan of Arc.

The welfare state is now the debtor state

The welfare state has turned into a debtor state, where ordinary people balance their budgets with credit out of necessity, not because of any moral failings whatsoever.

John Maynard Keynes was roundly condemned in sniffish tones by the Right for recommending that the British government employ the unemployed to dig and refill holes in times of deflation.

It is less well known that Milton Friedman recommended (as a logical consequence of his fiscal philosophy in which the money supply would be the only thing under government control) that the rich be somehow beguiled (interest payments) to throw money at the rest of us from helicopters.

Which is precisely what has been done.

Keynes’ proposal, like Friedman’s, was meant as a limiting case, understandable to Cambridge undergraduates but neither to journalists nor the general public. Likewise, Friedman’s.

Nonetheless, it’s better for the soul to spend a day digging a hole in the hot sun with one’s mates…than to look for offers in the mail in a house you don’t deserve.

Friedman is a profoundly immoral philosopher. Governments broke their committment to the savings and sanity of the middle class when they went off the gold standard in 1914, and Ron Paul is the only conservative to see this. His recommendation that we go back is racist and jejune, but two theorists of the Frankfurt School, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, would agree with him in some part; their future was destroyed by the Weimar republic in direct consequence of the loss of a gold standard.

Above all, people like me (who’s worked hard all his life but doesn’t take shit) need to be rewarded for our input. We should not be given fabricated reasons, plucked from some New Age tome, in “performance reviews” for what, as Marx knew, is systematic theft and, as Zizek knows, is normed violence against which Sep 11 was a clownish (and thereafter easily prevented) stunt.

And I’ll use credit. I used it to support and to maintain contact with my kids. I’ll pay my bills. But the Baby Boom of which I am a member will go down as a collection of selfish bastards at the top, and millions of debt slaves everywhere else.

It appears that South Africa is fixing like Thailand to explode, since the Friedmanite and Randroid playbooks do not work and are evil.

Sophisticated public relations is systematically changing real Left anger into Tea Parties because the rich and upper middle classes are running scared. You seldom encounter a “real” Tea Partier on Facebook, and when you do, they are assholes who harass women and bully men. The people I’ve met are all flaming radicals.

On some Shakespeare Twaddle

This is a note about some pompous twaddle concerning Shakespeare. Scroll down (or as needed, click the orange link above) to the next article to see the Shagspaherian play, “The Well-Hung Election”

“the way in which the content of his verse expressed universal truths by finding magnificently appropriate analogies for them, is what has got him recognized as one of the greatest poet/dramatists of all time.”

ZZZZZZ…Gee, no wonder kids hate Shakespeare.

Where do I begin?

First of all, what would it even mean to be “magnificently appropriate”. When was the corporate foot soldier known to arrive at work, dressed today in Gap monkish style, or in my day, in a suit and tie, to be complimented simultaneously on both the magnificence and appropriateness of his attire? I tried with flash chap ties and failed, since the sober yet elegant ties were not considered appropriate to my station in life. There’s no such thing as being magnificently appropriate.

Second, did S express “universal truths”? Can
we transform his plays into copy book maxims? Let’s try!

“Don’t listen to your parents, marry a hot guy, and commit suicide if
that doesn’t work out” (Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter)

“Kill Caesar but realize you done him wrong” (Julius Caesar)

“Kill your uncle for doin’ all those smelly things with your
Mom” (Hamlet)

“Cause your commanding officer to suspect his wife of infidelity, driving him batshit and getting her killed” (Othello)

“Usurp the usurper. Eventually it’s bound to come out all
right.” (History plays)

“Drink like a fish, steal from honest tradesmen, and sleep on benches until noon. Run from battle. Run from Sir Walter Blunt; pretend to have killed Harry Percy. Cheat a good woman. Promise marriage to two rich women. Everyone will love you and you will be saved.” (Henry IV 1,2: Merry
Wives: Henry V)

“Kill the sons of Tamara, Queen of the Emo Goths. Then when her other sons rape your daughter, cutting off her hands and tongue, you and your darlin’ daughter need to cook those boys into a pie and serve them to Tamara and Aaron. Loads of laughs for the entire family.” (Titus Andronicus)

Houston…we have a problem.

It is that Shakespeare wasn’t a Platonist, interested in “universal”
truths true all the time. Those are the people who express “universal truths” such as “if you fall in love with your son in law, you are a ho-bag whether you like it or not” (Racine, Phedre).

Shakespeare was an Aristotelean, who saw God and the Divine only in the fleshly world. His characters are people enmeshed in flesh. They have no lessons for us, not even cautionary tales, unless we are the sort of people with something of Shakespeare’s gentleness and capacity for “suffering” (a word which was closer to “experience” in Shakespeare’s time, probably because life sucked more). It is only then can we feel empathy for them.

Fashion victim or Fascism victim?

Listen! To the song I quote in this post: it will open in a separate window. I think this post got me fired in August 2010, although I posted it in March of last year. The person in question has her good parts and is not a political conservative but at a deeper level she’s very “American”, which is to say she can always justify it in the end. I suppose I share that same defect of character. I probably ruined a marriage with this habit of always trying to be right.

In an era of “skepticism” (which is often a fashionable self-applied label for ignorance) and irony, it’s believed that the truth cannot be known outside of mathematics and the hard sciences, and a checkpoint has been thrown up by the shock troops of skepto-ignorance, in front of biology, by Creationism.

This means that any attempt to get to truth outside of pure mathematics and physics will offend many people.

Therefore it’s easier to target people with the cruelest of remarks, the more inapplicable the better, since you only have to contend with one person, other people join in on the fun, and if Foucault is to be trusted, you’re doing society’s valuable work of keeping people in line.

Someone dresses neatly for work and even fashionably. Sure, go ahead and post “his fashion sense matches his personality” on the Internet.

Someone can read and even write above a lower bound of complexity which is getting lower according to English profs. Wow, he’s “verbose”, that sounds deep, doesn’t it.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.

And if we call you a micro-Fascist, this is because Fascism is the aestheticization of politics.

“Bernard, I want you to know… that I try. When Jean and the kids at the school tell me that I’m supposed to control my violent temper, and be passive and nonviolent like they are, I try. I really try. Though when I see this girl… of such a beautiful spirit… so degraded… and this boy… that I love… sprawled out by this big ape here… and this little girl, who is so special to us we call her “God’s little gift of sunshine”… and I think of the number of years that she’s going to have to carry in her memory… the savagery of this idiotic moment of yours… I just go BERSERK!”

- Billy Jack

Stanley Fish on motorcycle and Jag-you-are repair and my reply

Stanley Fish once again displays the haute bourgeois American male’s worship of overpriced and hard to repair machinery and his n-order habits of fetishizing and reification.

My comments are at this writing “awaiting moderation”:

Wow, details at eleven. Liberalism is without core committments, as opposed to conservatism? Give me a break. The problem isn’t that liberalism is without core committments, it’s that people think, unlike Elvis Costello, that peace, love and understanding are amusing and unmentionable as core committments.

I realize, Stanley, that you are not ideological and you don’t fetishize (you would use the word “idolize” in an America where that word is in more common use than “fetishise”). But you wind up fetishizing at a second remove.

You’re a smart guy, therefore I think you’d be the first to admit that for every down-to-earth motorcycle or Jag repair shop operated by a crusty old philosopher who dispenses Deep Wisdom along with craftsmanship, there are small shops operated by crusty old sex perverts and right-wing lunatics from whose bourne no Triumph or Jag-you-are returns undamaged.

You also may realize that those big corporate auto-repair and oil change shops are in many cases the salvation of women rightly intimidated by crusty old men, or indeed any driver without the funds to afford a single bad repair: who doesn’t ride motorcycles or drive Jags for fun, but needs a Hyundai to get to work.

The big shops, like Starbuck’s, guarantee by the book service to the little guy who just needs a repair, or a cup of coffee. And, the majority of their employees are just as dedicated as the denizens of the small shops. They may not themselves be rich enough to be familiar with the charming design quirks of air-conditioning at the high end, but they can repair Ford Escorts, and most of us drive Escorts or take the bus.

More on “deferred gratification”

My post below, on a New Yorker article about deferral of gratification which in typical fashion does no theory and accepts deferral of gratification as a Good Thing with utter lack of criticism, is automatically linked to three posts on how to teach deferred gratification to your kids.

I teach a third grader who is a Chinese princess and human wrecking ball. She likes to move, she likes to carom about my classroom, so every week we visit the school library to return books and find new books.

Unfortunately she clamors for the Berenstain Bears, and each and every book in this series teaches a wheezy Moral Lesson. I have no brief against Improving Books, but the authors of this series are idiots.

The Berenstain bears are one of those isolated nuclear families so common in America, dominated by a female who has long ago forgotten that she wants anything, with a father infantilized by the mere fact that he still desires anything at all: Mother gets, on Christmas, tools to help her do her work whereas Papa might get something fun.

The children, often in cahoots with Papa, are forever having problems with deferral of gratification. Although the Bears live in “bear country” it is recognizably an American suburbia, with suburbia’s lunatic attempt to reconcile city and country, so the Bears, with Mama always trying to warn about living within one’s means, are forever being psychically raped by marketeers: the children are forever, along with Papa Bear most of the time, always failing to live up to standards that groan at them from the sky through Mama Bear.

Because these are so clearly North American bears, the possibility is never raised that through the road of excess might lie the palace of wisdom, or that one might be Powerless. It isn’t considered that the name of the state a person is in, when she is deferring gratification, might be “alienation”, and it’s child abuse to teach alienation.

These books are an insult to children’s intelligences. My own student seems less interested in Improving Moral Lessons than in Cunning Plans like a normal kid, but she’s in a different culture. It’s one in which no Improving Lessons are needed for the most part in the savage competition and struggle to learn English, Chinese, and math. There is in fact little time for Improving Moral Lessons as a separate subject: just enough scarcity (for example, of real estate) exists to make life the teacher, and my own student just finds it fascinating that the Bears have the problems they have.

Two alternative children’s books to The Berenstain Bears are the classics Eloise of the Plaza, and Madeline.

Most kids immediately understand how to relate to Eloise of the Plaza. They already know that Eloise, with her nanny, her messy room, and her failure to study is in reality a desparately sad and lonely kid whose jet-setting Mom in turn is desparately sad and lonely, and who has abandoned Eloise at the Plaza so she can use her fading charms to snag a second millionaire husband. Texts, in other words, create moral and conceptual boundaries in the child’s mind, not by groaning saws and maxims but by quietly presenting views of what it looks like on the other side of the boundary. Kids who read fantasy are better able to spot fantasy.

Madeline alternatively shows kids who are self-discipline of necessity in a postwar France of scarcity, with parents with diplomatic jobs under enormous pressure in the middle of the Cold War, who nonetheless are able, not to “defer gratification” (this is a given) but to insist on it when it’s right…as in the case of the visit of the trustees of the school, who say that the kids can’t have a dog; Madeline, with fine Republican fervor, insists on the equality of dogs and Miss Clavel winds up in cahoots with the children to keep the dog.

Genevieve, noblest dog that is in France
You shall have your ven-ge-ance!

Now, when one hears some of the brats in international air terminals clamor for gratification, one might think that DG is a real problem. But as my own therapist tried to point out to my Mom and Dad in the 1960s, we can inappropriately identify (that is, theorize) a problem in which were embed.

I was in the lobby of a four-star hotel in Hong Kong recently. Some British kids were whingeing for treats. But as I half-listened I realized that the real problem lay elsewhere.

The real problem was that when the father finished an email back to the UK recounting their trip to Hong Kong on his portable computer, he asked the mother to proofread it for him, and she snapped at him “I’m not your bloody secretary!”

That is: if you dethrone, as so many “feminist” women dethrone, the father (as Hong Kong author Martin Booth insults his father in his book Gweilo), then it follows as the night the day the children will whinge and get out of control, all the more so if the father, having his own issues today with his late or aging father, goes along.

Cf. Kevin Spacey in American Beauty: somehow, feminism turned at some point into the idea that men are a joke, and as a result Spacey is “too embarassing to live”. In American families, the joke is that fathers, unlike typical mothers, never seem to get rid of transgressive Desire for more than that which contributes to the family: Dad develops tics: he’s always in the Internet, or insists on listening to Wagner while collecting stamps, or like Spacey starts working out and smoking dope, or like me exits the system.

Successful fathers teach their kids how to reconcile desire and the law: but this is impossible if his desire is a fucking joke.

But instead of doing the work of looking at the family system, adults try to “teach” deferred gratification.

It’s much harder through example and precept to teach love of the world. I only realized after my divorce that the only sane way for me to act around my kids was as if the starting point was love minus zero, as I saw my grandmother act (my own relationship with a mother, who had me bring her coffee and cigarettes for her in the morning, and who let us kids fight for breakfast alone, is a matter for a separate post). Kids learn through example: but if their own parents “deferred gratification” in graduate school (or, like my own parents, in the war) the kids haven’t seen this. Instead they see the parents insisting on their formerly deferred gratification and naturally, the kids emulate this.

I would have been of course delighted to listen to my father defend the Morgenthau plan to de-industrialize Germany after his service overseas, to the mathematician Norbert Weiner at Harvard. Kids naturally ask, what did you do in the war. But all I saw was my father leasing enormous, boat-like Cadillacs. By 1962 I was fantasizing living in a country where cars were forbid, having grown up carsick in enormous cars without seatbelts filled with smoke.

American grownups have long counseled each other to take the money and run, to pay as little taxes as possible, so how, exactly, shall they teach their kids “impulse control”?

If the reason for “impulse control” is as I said in the preceding post deferring gratification in order to get a later gratification, then the kid is free to clamor for gratification now.

Don’t teach this insanity. Instead, teach any way you can the notion of worth in itself, the aesthetics and ethics (pre-ethical, pre-aesthetic) of what it would be like to value something for itself. Plunk the kids down in front of art. Take the blighters to church if you must. Or play and watch sports with them, waiting for the moments of purity: point them out, whether it’s a patient right-fielder, or a center forward.

As it is, the New Yorker article is mythological…it unwittingly assumes axioms.

For example, American middle-class grownups think of the poor as bad at “impulse control”. I took a Greyhound bus from Chicago to Seattle to attend the Microsoft Author’s Conference, and I sure saw a lot of impulse control on that bus, whose driver treated us like shit. It takes in fact quite a lot of “impulse control” in America to be black and/or poor: in this connection, search You Tube for Chris Rock’s video “how not to get your ass kicked by the police”.

Blacks have long cultivated “impulse control” and deferred gratification, because it takes both to refrain from smacking Whitey upside the head in a racist society. Chris Rock is telling people nothing more than what my black friends’ parents told them: obey the law, turn that shit off, get a white friend, and don’t ride with a mad woman.

Sure, in addiction recovery, you do learn deferred gratification…or do you? Most of your seriously addictive substances cannot be deferred: they have to be given up. Oh, I will wait to shoot up until this evening…yeah right.

For Kant, man has basically only two states. He’s seeking to gratify biological needs, including artificial ones created by addiction, or else he’s acting out of pure duty: the paradox is that when one acts out of duty one is free in Kant.

Major Robert Shaw, commander of the 445th Massachusetts (black) regiment, is free, in Robert Lowell’s poem “On The Union Dead”, to “choose life and die”. Acts of pure righteousness, in other words, are like radiation from outer space: they create new worlds. Wouldn’t it be better to teach a kid about this ability to do, as Major Shaw did in South Carolina, the right thing out of free will?

As it is, the Berenstain Bears are ursine-subhuman, since the authors of this series secretly, subliminally send the message that there really is nothing but impulse: that we should cover up the impulse by deferring it, not by finding something more delight-ful. At the end of the day, Mrs. Bear could say to Papa Bear, whose life is a joke, what April Wheeler tells Frank in Richard Yates’ bleak novel Revolutionary Road: he’s not what she’d call a man.

And note of course that when the “spoiled” child becomes an adolescent, she often discovers something like pure Duty in the wasteland of puberty, and turns overnight into a pillar of fire, dedicated perhaps to a dance teacher, or as I was to Shakespeare. Of course, the parents make a joke of this.

But if you teach “deferred gratification”, all you’re teaching is the skills of the hamster: who defers gratification to get into a good school, who gets a status job, and who saves compulsively for a gratifying retirement.

But this can in no sense be assimilated to righteousness.

The fact is that as a spoiled child (where the language of the participle implies an irreversibility) I clamored for treats because there was something missing in my family. My parents had had a large brood unthinkingly because the Church forbade birth control, and because they had so unthinkingly followed the rules, where rule-following isn’t what Kant meant, they were all surprised that within the biggest house, five intelligent, well-fed and well-cared for kids is an ongoing disaster as needs collide.

I wanted Recognition, but was referred to as one of “the boys” and told what it was that I wanted, in fact at various times bribed…paid off. I admired and idealized my father, but from afar: I loved my Mom but she was always too close, and too ready with physical abuse. And, she filled the house with smoke because for adults of her generation, smoking was so universal as to be invisible, and they didn’t see how smoking caused one to defer gratification by being, itself, a toxic gratification. My Mom in other words was preaching DG but not exactly practising it.

It’s taken me many years to get my impulses under some control. But if you’d told me in 1958 that I was the one who needed this, whose lack of impulse control was the only problem worth considering, I’d have sweetly agreed (being pasive-aggressive) and then proceed to sabotage the whole deal.

The New Yorker study of course neglects the possibility that any one of the kids subjected to this crap might be in fact very good at deferred gratification, so good, in fact, that she snarfs sweets in secret.

The fact is that we are either doing our Duty or giving in to impulse: there is no third state: it is a media fantasy that the human persona can literally work for a distant goal without any second-order gratification. The Soul, said Emily Dickinson, seeks Pleasure first.

Shakespeare Not Deny’d: A Comical History

The Internet has given new life, sad to say, to certain lower middle class habits of thought, which had disappeared from general life circa say 1981, but which now reign supreme: sexual hysteria, xenophobia, and proto-Fascism.

One way it does so is a curious phenomenon of reference. “Citation” is to a mathematician no more than partial ordering such that for three members of a set {a b and c}, a and b may support c, and in general the support for a final assertion is a graph, and hopefully one without circularity, a tree (a graph without cycles).

But on the Internet, the speed of reference means that circular chains can appear. Thus it turns out that in Shakespeare denial (the belief, formerly crackpot, that S didn’t write the plays), Holocaust denial, Creationism, Madoff-Ponzi schemes, one discovers that the adepts are able to “document” their claims with all sorts of “citations”, which in turn “cite”, and in most cases, turn out to self-cite by way of a chain.

Here’s the beginning of a play in S’s style writ by me about this phenomenon.

London: a street

Enter the Ghost of Will

Will: They saye todaye I am not myself and did not write
The plays in the Folio, publish’d after my Deathe.
Hence I am come to Earth to plague with haunts
These false scholars and apish priests who with machines
Made by Madmen Turing on chiefest brutal report,
Spread these foul lies, which on fleetest legs
Painted full of tongues, do blight the land.
I am God’s spy here in modern London town,
On the aptly named Isle of Dogs, whereupon the Yuppie tribe
Do growl and gibber in the remains of the wabe,
On midsummer’s day, blighted by the foul pestilent vapours
Of unguent used for fuel. But soft, who comes hither.
I shall hide myself: but wait there is no need:
I am made of invisible stuffe indeed.

Enter two unemployed bond traders

Trader Primus: Give me some wine. I shall tell thee, Secundus, a secret, since I lovest thou very much indeed.

Trader Secundus: What art thou, Corinthian? A mattachine sodomite?

Trader Primus: Nay, indeed not, although it must be said, thou hast a cute Butt and are oft enow, the butt-receiver of my iterative jesting: I am thy Pitcher, and thou, my Catcher, as they say in America.

Trader Secundus: Bee thou my pitcher, sweet Wench, and I shall have thee on yonder bench.

Trader Primus: Hush indeed: thou’rt bawdy. But knows’t thou my secret Gnostic knowing, thou pea-brain’d, lily-liver’d, lump of suet?

Trader Secundus: I knows’t it not until thou tellest me, that’s certaine, for is it not written, that Wisdom cries?

Trader Primus: Wisdom cried and Jesus wept when thou wert got between sheets. But this is my gnosis: Shakespeare, whom thou readst for thy ill-deserved A levels, did not write those plays.

Trader Secundus: Thou’rt bedlam.

Trader Primus: If I am, then thou’rt for the stocks, pizzle. Know thou as I do ken, for I saw it on the Internet.

Enter Gordon Brown

Brown: What, and are you of the laboring classes,
Abroad without the signs of your profession? Where are your laptops?
Why wear you blue jeans? Know’st thou not the dress code?

Primus: ‘Faith, sir, we are poor unemploy’d men, in search of work.We are abroad to a job fair held this day in Smithfield. Beat us not for we are of the common sort, beat us not, good sir.

Edward G. Nilges 3 May 2009: Moral rights have been asserted by the author, so up thine.

Rand is not relevant

Is Rand relevant, asks the Wall Street Journal?

Here’s my comment as submitted to the Journal.

It’s news to me that planning for one’s survival and flourishing is anything more than a human instinct, not a virtue, since what we ordinarily understand to be a virtue (cf. Kant) is always in excess of the pursuit of our self-interest, no matter what planning horizon is selected.

The only reason why planning for one’s survival and flourishing is virtuous is that it is virtuous to try not to burden others.

I am well aware that Rand professed to dislike Kant. The problem was that she may never have made the considerable effort that is required to understand Kant, and in fact anticipated a contemporary gesture of the CEO: a fashionable anti-intellectualism and contempt for writing that makes “unreadability” an argument against a text, convenient if you Kant read the text in the class.

I submitted careful and detailed status reports while wasting my spirit in an expense of shame in 1981, working for a “consulting” firm in Chicago in a building on Ohio street where porno films were also being made: but because I was young and thin and rather “cute”, I was by definition unimportant in data processing, where then and now horrible fat men have more technical authority. My status reports were termed “verbose” by a manager who operated on Randroid principles, destroying anyone who got in her way. It was here I wised up on how people learn, especially in graduate skewl, how to operate in the “real world”.

Rand anticipated today’s contemptible culture of self-reproducing celebrity, since she professed to be a philosopher while being bone ignorant of actual philosophical method: as a real philosopher, Sydney Hook, showed in an excessively gentlemanly review of Notes for a New Intellectual in 1962, Rand made an absurd substantive (“synthetic apriori” inference) from an “analytic apriori” axiom, to wit, a=a.

This wasn’t a matter of philosophical opinion. It was a matter of logic.

However, in today’s contemptible culture of self-reproducing celebrity, if you have money and media attention already, you get more. Rand had a knack for producing reams of the sort of trash people read at the beach, and it sold in the 1950s. Therefore, she was able to announce to a talk show host, in 1960, that she rilly wuz a filosofer or something.

Banks (!) have funded various thinktanks which promote her thought as part of a kulturkampf against the New Left which started in the 1970s.

As a result, a generation of Yuppies was unleashed on the economy which preferred “self-interest”: at the Princeton P-Rade in 1989, an annual ritual of that school’s alumni and graduating class, drunk members of the graduating class carried a sign reading “The Nation in Princeton’s Service: Wall Street here we come!”.

At Wall Street, those students and others pursued Holy Self Interest 24/7. They created overelaborate financial instruments using rocket science which have become today’s toxic mess, and graduates of deVry and Roosevelt University, not Princeton graduates, are paying the price.

It’s in Jack Welch’s self-interest (on the front page of Financial Times for 14 March) to write now that he was just kidding about “shareholder value and nothing else” in 1981, but it wasn’t in Bernie Madoff’s self-interest to admit wrong in a court of law.

But Bernie Madoff is the *mensch*. Jack Welch and Ayn Rand are role models only for the *schlemiel* and the *putz*.