Mrs. du Toit Weblog - WAP Version

Monday, November 17, 2008

From the Closet

A few weeks back I asked for requests for final posts.  A relative responded and the topics were (generally) more personal in nature.  If a non-relative had asked me some of these questions, I might not have been willing to answer… but because it was this person, someone whom I love and adore, I’ll respond to all in a single post.


Summarize and give your opinion of George Bush’s Presidency - Has his cowboy mentality spurred a new generation of politicians?  Has he influenced Sarah Palin?

Tell us about your conversion from a Democrat to your current political standing - Define your current political standing



What did your Mom do right in raising you - Give a positive review of your upbringing



Summarize where you stand on important political issues

a. Abortion - Under what circumstances is it OK?



b. Gay Marriage (If someone is born gay, why are they deprived of the right of same sex marriage?  Why isn’t this unconstitutional? Why is marriage only between a man and a women?  How does this relate or not relate to the Iraq War?)


c. Why is Universal Health Care unfair?



Why did you leave California? (Why not fight the power that caused you to move?)



Why was Greg Gay?


Give a sales pitch for traveling the world



Posted by Mrs. du Toit on 11/17 at November 17, 2008 5:49 PM CDT
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Satire

One of my childhood friends, “Johnny,” was extremely clever.  He didn’t come by his cleverness by environment, although his environment gave him opportunities to demonstrate it.  He was born clever, with a jaundiced eye of the world.  When he was three years old his mother took him home to meet the relatives.  Even at his young age, he was all too aware that he was “on show,” so he behaved like a dog.  I don’t mean “dog” in the scum/bad manners sense.  He LITERALLY behaved like a dog.  When spoken to he’d only bark in response.  When food was served he’d lap it up, face in the plate.  He did this despite being black and blue from being pinched and spanked by his mother… and he did it for three entire days and only stopped barking when they got on the plane home.

It still makes me laugh… and I still admire Johnny’s tenacity.  He didn’t care what others thought of him and that is a rare trait. 

When he was in high school he had to do a paper on Japan.  He stayed up the night before and adorned himself as a Japanese actor.  He had the full catastrophe of wardrobe, the black wig, the full make-up.  He went to school like that, turned in his paper on Japan with a flourish, and said absolutely nothing.  He spent the entire school day dressed like that, with no comment.

He’s spent his entire life mocking the world and when folks try to figure out his motives, or find some inner meaning in what he is literally doing, he just gives his wry, “gotcha” kind of laugh. 

That kind of satire and living life in a kind of purposeless artistic statement, is something that most folks don’t understand.  Most folks have a fairly high investment in what others think of them, or an inherent shyness or timidity that keeps them from doing that sort of thing.  They can’t relate at all. 

So, too, with most satire or dark humor.  H.L. Mencken took it to high art in his essays, using the language and ideas like a boxer uses his fists.  He did it to get a rise and reaction out of people, to see if he could push their buttons.  He “won” when they got upset or took it personally or seriously. 

For satire to be effective, there has to be an element of truth to it.  It has to take someone’s sacred cow and then gore it, mercilessly. If there is no blood, it isn’t satire. In our politically correct world, this is all too rare, and folks who do it are far and few.  Ann Coulter does it, in her own way, making folks on the Left incensed about her callousness, and folks on the Right not wanting her on the team.  She doesn’t care.  She’s clever.

The folks who get upset about that sort of thing are the same people who thought that Tom and Jerry cartoons were too violent, and set about to get them taken off the air under the guise of being bad for children.  They’re only “bad” for stupid children and their stupid parents.

Clever children, children who were born seeing the irony in all things, don’t have a lot of opportunities these days.  Cartoons were once the bastion of the ironic, teaching children how humor could be used as a weapon.  The folks who didn’t get Tom & Jerry make me giggle, in the same way Johnny did… and that’s the point, really.

Creators 1.  Nanny-banners 0.

Trying to explain humor is nearly impossible.  Satire is even more difficult.  Most folks understand comedy (in the modern definition) because they go to see hacks like Gallagher and actually laugh.  They watch things like Benny Hill and think that’s funny, too. I’m actually grateful for people like Gallagher and Benny Hill, but maybe not the way people think.

Years ago there was a golf tournament (the details don’t matter) that was incredibly difficult.  The hole placements were making it impossible for the professional golfers to make par, and most ended up looking like amateur players, and they lost their ability to remain calm and cool under pressure.  When the course manager was confronted by one of the players he was asked what he was doing, “Are you trying to embarrass the best golfers in the world?” he asked.  To which the course manager responded, “No, sir.  Just identify them.”

Gallagher and Benny Hill are like that.  They allow us to separate the fools from rest of the herd (the chaff from the wheat), so in that sense, they do us a service.

Humor and satire, not comedy, have that as their only purpose.


God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and satire to keep me laughing as we fall over the cliff to our deaths.



Posted by Mrs. du Toit on 11/17 at November 17, 2008 10:52 AM CDT
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Thursday, November 13, 2008

The United States of America:  The Miniseries

This post is long and windy, with polish edits
to come at some future date.

It would be interesting, at some future time, to watch a series on the U.S.  It would be like watching a series on Ancient Rome or Greece, with the mistakes that caused their greatness to disappear obvious to the viewer, through the wisdom of hindsight, and knowing how it turned out, before the show began.

Episode I, The Early Years:  This would include Columbus arriving on American shores, the pilgrims, and details about the Mayflower Compact. 

Episode II, The Revolution:  This would detail the events leading up to the American Revolution and the first decades of creating a nation.

Episode III, The First 100 Years:  This would chronicle the people and the events leading up to the Civil War and the Reconstruction Period, following up with the anarchists in the Northern cities and the seeds of discontent they sowed, and explain the concept of:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Episode IV, The War Years:  This would detail our participation in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I.  What would be most interesting about this episode would be the social changes that took place as a result of those wars, with the establishment of FDR’s policies, the rise of the “The Worker” to noble status, and to the irresponsible libertines of the 1960s. 

Episode V, A New Century:  We haven’t lived that chapter of our history yet, but we know the episode would begin with the attack of 9/11.  What follows would be how the reformation of the Middle East turned out, based on American’s resolve (or lack thereof).

This is where my whimsy of my miniseries ends, but what becomes interesting is how one forecasts what happens next, or what they want to happen next.

How many episodes would there be?  Is Episode 5 the last in the series, detailing our fall from Grace?

I think the discussion of that is an interesting one, as a hypothetical, and begins to categorize people into various political and social boxes:

  1. One World Box:  America as a separate nation is defeated gradually, adopting the government trends of the EU, and becoming a latecomer member.
  2. Muddle Along Box:  Do whatever we can and as best as we can to sway the country to allow us to have many dozens of episodes.
  3. Destroy To Rebuild Box:  Throw in the towel, but douse it in gasoline first, abandoning gradualist improvements, and choose all-out war instead. 

* * *

I think the thing that turns most conservatives away from intellectual pursuits (well, besides the endless arguments about how many libertarians can fit on the head of a pin) is that it is mostly lacking compassion.  I’m not talking about memes and oxymorons such as compassionate conservatism.  Intellectualism is, by definition, completely devoid of compassion, as it attempts to survey man’s history (his successes and failures) with dispassionate, level-heads.  It’s history of man at the level of 64,000 feet, only swooping down to glimpse at the details of an individual life when that life made some sort of lasting impact. 

Our miniseries would do that.  We’d swoop down a bit to explore Washington, Adams, Madison, and Jefferson.  We’d look at the lives of Lincoln and Roosevelt.  There would be peripheral swoops to examine the lives of Hitler, Stalin, and Brezhnev comparing and contrasting them to the American view of things at the time, and how they altered the course of history.

But what is often lacking is the compassion and recognition that there were millions and millions of other people who had no paradigm shift impact on history, living ordinary, miserable, and joyful lives.  Intellectualism, certainly in its modern incarnation, is devoid of that.  It is missing the cliché of the common touch, the lives of Les Miserables and the glorious courage of facing the banality of getting up every day, doing the same thing, day after day, for the simplisme of providing food for the table of our children, the warmth of a mother’s love, or the security blanket of a father’s vigilance.

They existed and exist today—people scraping-out as best they can, doing whatever it is they do, hoping (and many praying) that the world will exist tomorrow, reasonably unchanged, so they can continue to live their ordinary lives.  The textbooks or historical record cannot document the lives of every human being who ever lived, yet it is the 300 Pound Gorilla in the room—the subtext of history—that while we hear about the grand plans, schemes and Holocausts caused by the ones who are documented in history, the people who are left undocumented are no less worthy or important… because they’re so anonymous.

Also among the hordes of the undocumented there existed good and bad ones, people of character, courage, and honesty, alongside their boorish, unromantic, thieving fellows.

We have no sense of that in distilled histories, the textbooks that have replaced the detailed accounts of Man, The Human.

The fascination—as well as the despair—of the historian, as he looks back upon Isaiah’s Jewry, upon Plato’s Athens, or upon Rome of the Antonines, is the hope of discovering and laying bare the “substratum of right-thinking and well-doing” which he knows must have existed somewhere in those societies because no kind of collective life can possibly go on without it. He finds tantalizing intimations of it here and there in many places, as in the Greek Anthology, in the scrapbook of Aulus Gellius, in the poems of Ausonius, and in the brief and touching tribute, “Bene merenti”, bestowed upon the unknown occupants of Roman tombs. But these are vague and fragmentary; they lead him nowhere in his search for some kind of measure on this substratum, but merely testify to what he already knew a priori—that the substratum did somewhere exist. Where it was, how substantial it was, what its power of self-assertion and resistance was-of all this they tell him nothing.

— Nock, Isaiah’s Job

It is easy then to forget they exist… to think only in terms of Paradigm Shifts, Cataclysmic Holocausts, or Election Results.

What is the impact of those major events on Mr. Anonymous? 

It is because of that condition that folks can talk casually of things like Resets, of hastening our demise so we can rebuild it.  We look at the events of the day and think of them as chapters in a textbook, as if it is something that has already happened, rather than remembering that these things will have enormous consequences to the people who live and breathe, who get up everyday to go to work, first kissing their spouses and children as they go off to do their menial tasks, to bring food and shelter to their families each day.

In the long term it will be better, folks will say, or they’ll bring up the cliché of the boiling frogs, suggesting that folks would be better off if they were scalded enough to jump from their hot-water-pot-existences.  And so this merry band of clever revolutionaries, in self-contrived acts of good stewardship, turn up the heat, in hopes of seeing millions of frogs released from the confinement of their hot pots, able to live lives of free men again… blinding themselves, of course, to the consequences of their resets and grand Ideas… that millions of those frogs will simply boil, go through life with the scars of third-degree burns, and it will bring about misery, death, and sorrow to millions.

No single individual was the hero of the movement that swallowed up these lives.  The Idea was its hero.  It was, as a historian of the revolt has called it, “a daydream of desperate romantics.” It had its theorists and thinkers, men of intellect, sincere and earnest, who loved humanity.  It also had its tools, the little men whom misfortune or despair or the anger, degradation and hopelessness of poverty made susceptible to the Idea until they became possessed by it and were driven to act.  These became the assassins.  Between the two groups there was no contact.  The thinkers in press and pamphlet constructed marvelous paper models of the Anarchist millennium; poured out tirades of hate and invective upon the ruling class and its despised ally, the bourgeoisie; issued trumpeted calls for action, for a “propaganda of the deed” to accomplish the enemy’s overthrow.  Whom were they calling?  What deed were they asking or?  They did not say precisely.  Unknown to them, down in the lower depths of society lonely men were listening.  They heard the echoes of the tirades and the trumpets and caught a glimpse of a shining millennium that promised a life without hunger and without a boss.  Suddenly one of them, with a sense of injury or a sense of a mission, would rise up, go out and kill—and sacrifice his own life on the altar of the Idea.

—Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower

But it worked out so much better in the end! they’ll say to themselves, seeing the mass of misery as something that wasn’t human, or wasn’t miserable.  It is, regardless of which political sphere is pulling the strings, the psychopathic repeat of any means justifies the end we desire.

Quit it.  We’re not lab rats.  We’re not $30 a day extras in the backdrop of our miniseries, who have no lines, no reactions, and no lives.

From Albert Jay Nock’s Journal (1930):

Nothing can be done about the liquor problem, the farm problem, problems of public ownership, and the other social problems that afflict us. I say, nothing can be done; that is, nothing except the one thing that will never be acknowledged as necessary, the self-imposed discipline of a whole people in acquiring a brand-new ethos. We have been trying to live by mechanics alone, the mechanics of pedagogy, of politics, of industry and commerce; and when we find it cannot be done and that we are making a mess of it, instead of experiencing a change of heart, we bend our wits to devise a change in mechanics, and then another change, and then another… (The) clear insistent testimony that a nation’s life consists not in the abundance of the things that it possesses; that it is the spirit and manners of a people, and not the bewildering multiplicity of its social mechanisms, that determines the quality of its civilization.

* * *

Folks just want to be left alone they’ll say, and we’re going to force changes that will restore their ability to be left alone, they’ll continue.  This is a grave error, one of the failures of anonymous, common touch-less intellectual study.  It misses the point thoroughly.  People do not want to be left alone.  We never have and never will.  We want to feel important, in whatever way we define that.  We want the power to tell others what to do, or have a chance to be respected by others, though acts of greatness, or acknowledged as being something above the mediocre.  It is why we developed the ability to speak and to communicate.  A species that developed sophisticated methods of communing and communicating with others is not a species that wants to be “left alone.”

People want to be led or be leaders, in our various castes, tribes or neighborhoods.  They want to be rich (however that is defined), and rise above their circumstance, or want their children to rise above and be recognized.  We’re a pack species, not lone wolves.  And with pack animals, with animal groups who form social networks, there will always be leaders and followers, good or evil, and noble or gullible. They want their neighborhood, tribe, village, city, or country to be First Round Draft picks, first to the table for the hot entrées.

There are modern, pseudo-intellectuals who pride themselves on being able to detail the lives of Machiavelli, Rousseau, Roosevelt, Edison, or Ford.  They focus their energy on understanding the documented-men whose actions were so remarkable that they have sub-chapters of our miniseries-of-man devoted to them.  Those who know of them think themselves quite clever and educated, knowing who all the great leaders and creators were, quick to add their Jeopardy-style factoids to any discussion, correcting errors of omission, dates, or historical events for which they played a part.

They have learned nothing.  Their educations, as they are, have taught them nothing about who man is, only who the Star Search winners of history have been.  They are not the people who enable us to carry on, to remake societies, or to abide by and create social compacts.  Those carriers of all things good and noble are anonymous faces of history, the undocumented, and those for which we have no census.  I’m not suggesting that a true intellectual, the one who really is about finding truths, can skip over the Star Search winners, but it doesn’t end there.  That’s only the beginning of finding truth.

The ordinary man existed and exists today, but they will, as they have always been, be ignored.  Their role in shaping history is thought not to be, simply because there are no chapter headings with their names on it.  That is what makes intellectual pursuits so challenging and so interesting, because so much of what really mattered, and what really happened, is left undocumented, and we have to fill in those chapters ourselves. 

What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant? Albert Jay Nock asks in his essay, Isaiah’s Job:

As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, labouring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

It is the Remnant that carries the baton, differentiated from everyone else (as Nock describes) by quality, rather than numbers or circumstance.  And as Nock further detailed in his essay, we have no idea how many there were, how they accomplished what they did with any certainty, but those of us who spend time looking at the great Gantt Chart of man’s existence know that they had to be there. 

They’re the ones who taught their children to say please and thank you.  They’re the ones who made up the fairy tales to soothe a child’s nightmare to help a child transition from awake to sleep.  They’re the ones who showed up for the barn raisings, carried fire buckets to a neighbor’s barn fire, blew the horn or beat the drum when the Barbarians were at the gates, and didn’t think twice about leading other men in a charge up a hill, into a stream, or over a barricade to keep the Barbarians at bay. They muddled along, not as individuals, but as members of a kind of collective or secret society, bonded, and well aware of their duties and responsibilities to others, fully recognizing that they were not important as individual, autonomous persons, but only as a member of a greater community of humane-kind.

(It has always been interesting to me that the single letter “E” transforms human to humane.  Would that being humane, and all that it entails, be as simple as adding a letter to our lives.)

Man is not, as a whole, humane, nor could we describe all of man’s existence as human, finding little to distinguish him from beast in the way he behaves and conducts his life.

* * *


There is an episode in the real miniseries, Band of Brothers, that I have great difficulty watching.  I do watch it, of course, but I have to prepare myself for it.  Why it bothers me so much illustrates best the point of differentiation of man and beast.

It is the second to last in the series.  It is when the men of Easy Company find the concentration camp. 

By way of background, for those who may not have watched or loved the series as I do, we have come to know these men by this point in the series.  We know their names and personalities, and watched them lose their buddies, and endure indescribable hardships in their journey through WWII Europe.  We watched them transition from young and ignorant trainees to fearsome soldiers.  They’ve seen the horrors of war, and the effect on them as individuals is not the same.  Some are able to carry on and some not, some carrying the scars of battle better than others.  In general, we recognize that their innocence has been lost, as all soldiers lose it, and a kind of wisdom and maturity takes its place.

We also know about the Holocaust.  We know, from hindsight and study, what occurred and the enormous evil that was done to so many millions. 

That isn’t what bothers me, although it does, but intellectually only, as being able to internalize the deaths of so many millions is something we can only relate to from afar.

What bothers me was the fact that these men, these battle-hardened and fatigued men were so unprepared and gob-smacked by what they found.  They had no words and walked through the camp as if they’d gone through the Looking Glass.  These were men who had first-hand experience of man’s inhumanity to man, to the horrors of war, and found within themselves the muster of Kipling’s And so hold on when there is nothing in you—Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on.”

These men were stopped dead in their tracks by what they were seeing and what was left for them to find.

And that bothered me.  It bothered me as no history of the period had before.  It brought it to my gut and the images of what these men were forced to find and address is seared in my mind… it made me angry and puts me into a silent rage.

Education contemplates another kind of product; what is it? One of the main elements in it, I should say, is the power of disinterested reflection. One unmistakable mark of an educated man is his ability to take a detached, impersonal and competent view of something that deeply engages his affections, one way or the other-something that he likes very much. The study of history has really no other purpose than to help put this mark on a man. If one does not study it with this end in view, there is no use studying it at all.

— Nock, Journeyman

We cannot relate, as I said, to 6,000,000 people being exterminated like last week’s garbage. We even round the number, because we have no certainty of the actual numbers, nor could we spend the 10 years of our lives on so unproductive a task of reciting their individual names. We know the facts, but we cannot relate to them.  We can use words to describe the magnitude of the Holocaust, and recognize it as the ultimate example of the tyranny of man, but even the tense and plural of that word is wrong.  No single man could have pulled it off.  The man, Hitler, could not have done it by himself.  He had help and the help of thousands, willing, duped, or terrified, but they helped.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

—Edmund Burke

What bothers me is not the enormity of the numbers murdered, although it should (and does), it is that the Germans and those who helped them, left that for others to find, and to deal with.  It is that it caused men, brave and self-less men, to come to terms with what man is capable of.

We do not have trouble relating to a lone nut.  We know they are among us, and all throughout history, a single lunatic who has played reindeer games on his fellows, leaving behind a series of horrors, or single act of evil.  We know about those guys and can deal with that, emotionally.

What we always hope and rely upon, however, is that if he had told someone else about his plans that they’d have done something to stop him.  He couldn’t have gotten a few thousand people to go along.  One of them, certainly, would have blown the horn or beaten the drum, right?

And we shield ourselves in the comfort of that.  We know, because history teaches us, that grand conspiracies are most often foiled by the lone dissenter who blows the horn, long before the group is able to do what it planned to do.  Someone, among those who heard about it said, “Whoa, there” and ratted-out his fellows.

But that is not what happened in Nazi Germany.  It took the complacency, the participation, and the non-passive actions of thousands to pull off the genocide of over 6,000,000 individual lives.  With the knowledge of that, with the veil pulled back, every last remnant of our security and our humanity was removed.

We are animals, each and every one of us, capable of participating in conspiracies just like that, and if we think ourselves somehow special, somehow immune, somehow different from the German people, we are only fooling ourselves.

When I watch that episode I realize that I am part of all of that.  What the men of Easy Company had to face and recognize is that we’re all capable of that.  It is in each and every one of us and it is the way we respond to that test, or how we hope we’d respond, that distinguishes us as humans or animals.

We make excuses so we can restore a portion of the safety veil.  We like to say that they couldn’t have known, or didn’t know.  We find excuses for the men who participated, saying things like they were tortured if they refused orders, or would have been shot themselves.

And in that we find the few, the truly humane humans, The Remnant.  They were the ones who were tortured and did not falter.  They were the ones who were shot because they did not follow those orders.  We don’t hear about those Germans, but they existed, because they had to be there, because among us they always are and always have been.  They’re not even a footnote in history, counted among the 6,000,0000 others. 

The Remnant then is always at risk of being exterminated, of being the least likely to survive Darwin’s challenge.  It is the not-Remnant gene that survives, and it is our beast-like nature that survives unscathed.  We carry that animal gene, that beast tendency.  It exists in small or greater degree in all of us.

Yet The Remnant continues on, regardless.  They won’t be profiled in our miniseries, because they never are.

* * *

I’m in Box #2, the Muddle Along Box, because that’s all we can do.  And I want no part of those who categorize themselves in Boxes 1 and 3.  Right or Left.  Righteous or Indignant.  Those in Boxes 1 and 3 are the same animal, the same beast, who sees mankind as his personal plaything, a grand experiment of cogs and centuries with ends that justify the means, rather than human beings.

There are many, as I’ve said, who are thrilled with the prospect of a Reset or a Revolution, or “Change” and make their decisions based on how much closer it will put us to the Glorious Day, when we can begin shooting at our mass-man, greedy, lazy brothers, or load them on cattle-cars, sailing ships, or rocket-ships shot into space.  This is when we can set things to rights, to fix the errors of our ways, force us to jump out of our boiling pots, to put the contents of the red pill in the water supply, or to restore our society to the fantasy of what never has been, and never will be, a society of people who are desirous of being left alone or best buddies with everyone singing around a campfire.  And all we have to do to achieve it is leave no one alone and bring the misery to their doorsteps, their feet, and test them to see if they’re with us or against us.

Even a successful revolution, even if such a thing were conceivable, against the military tyranny which is Statism’s last expedient, would accomplish nothing. The people would be as thoroughly indoctrinated with Statism after the revolution as they were before, and therefore the revolution would be no revolution, but a coup d’Etat, by which the citizen would gain nothing but a mere change of oppressors.

—Nock, Man

And then we’ll have and do what?

Rinse.  Repeat.  Ad infinitum.

* * *

The only way to improve society Nock said:

Il faut cultiver notre jardin. With these words Voltaire ends his treatise called Candide, which in its few pages assays more solid worth, more informed common sense, than the entire bulk of nineteenth-century hedonist literature can show. To my mind, those few concluding words sum up the whole social responsibility of man—The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit. In a word, ages of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individual. Its method which Jesus apparently regarded as the only one whereby the Kingdom of Heaven can be established as a going concern; that is, the method of each one doing his very best to improve one, “is to present society with one improved unit.”

I have no desire or ambition to fix other people, nor any historical evidence to suggest that it is anything but a futile task.

I would like The United States, The Miniseries to have dozens of episodes, but I am fully aware that we are an animal group with very short attention spans.



Posted by Mrs. du Toit on 11/13 at November 13, 2008 6:07 AM CDT
The Big Picture | (20) View Comments
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