Smells Like Christmas Spirit

During every Christmas season, I find myself barren of "spirit," though full of other commendable traits, an observation one invariably makes about me at this time, and which my fellow curmudgeons must suffer too, I imagine. Although, as unkind criticism goes, this one makes me feel that I'm doing something right when I receive it.

"To lack Christmas spirit" is a polite euphemism tossed around during the holidays that generally means, "You're being a depressed ass, and no one wants to make Christmas cookies with you." To be entitled to such a description, one has only to reject, criticize, or abstain from any of a variety of holiday norms and obligations, like writing Christmas cards, listening to carols, wearing red and green sweaters with snowflake patterns, shopping for gifts in crowded malls, decorating your entire house with lights and tinsel, and making Christmas cookies.

Adolescents and old men are the usual victims of Christmas spirit deficiency, but iconoclasts of all ages turn their resistance into an art. How does one properly enjoy the Christmas season? One can either mope, grumbling maledictions upon receiving holiday wishes, or make every day a prelude to the grand festival of Saturnalia, in honor of the Western world's pagan origins. The latter, by the way, is a terrific gesture of respect for cultural and religious diversity.

The accusation that one lacks Christmas spirit, often wantonly hurled at so-called curmodgeons, is as incomprehensible to me as the concept of Christmas spirit itself. Does the moral zeitgeist suddenly change after Thanksgiving? Must we all succumb to the cheerful new ether that wafts over us from the North Pole, only to dissipate the day after Christmas? What is so intolerable about this season is not only the cheerfulness that pervades everything; after all, that is only a thin and transparent covering. Rather, it is the cynicism that belies the cheerfulness, and the pressure to conform to it.

If I decry the conversion of Christmas into a commodity, if I criticize the vast orchestration of lights and ornaments in every city and neighborhood, if I cringe at the continuous stream of carols on the radio, and in general, the transient euphoria of holiday cheer, it is not because I am mean-spirited. What was once, in the mists of a pre-Christian past, a season hallowed, has long since been ground into something positively hollow, and I wish it weren't so.

This Christmas cum Saturnalia, resist the urge to call anyone a grinch. It may be undeserved. That poor wight may in fact be gazing into those sacred mists.

Seven Up and the Loss of Innocence

For those unable to play one round of Seven Up without a sense of irony, there is no hope. They have lost their innocence.

The Author's First Line

_______ once told me a story about the time he fell in love.

I remember the story _________ told me about meeting a girl. He told me he had fallen in love with her.

__________ had this single, beautiful memory of falling in love, which he shared with me in a story.

The Bloomsbury Group

In letters, memoirs, and journal entries, the Bloomsbury Group is often alluded to, by members and nonmembers alike, as a casual association of British intellectuals who converge for nothing more definite than the discussion of “ideas.” With no manifesto or doctrine to speak of, the Bloomsburries were bound to each other by personal integrity, a common interest in art and literature, and a thorough rejection of the strictures of Victorian morality. Their elitism, however, provoked criticism from outsiders, who accused them of being “narrow in their interests, loose in their view of morals, irreverent, unpatriotic, remote, and superior.” Insofar as they had a keen interest in abstract thought, upheld freedom of speech and sexual orientation, questioned the authority of tradition, and avoided conscription in the war, this assessment is accurate. And yet, they believed these views could all be rationalized as an outgrowth of the ethical philosophy of G.E. Moore.

Typically, there was no consensus on the meaning of Moore’s Ideal Utilitarianism, nor was there any overriding opinion of its actual influence on the group. For J.M. Keynes, “it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth […] nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s of course, but chiefly our own. These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences.” What seems to have attracted Keynes most was that Moore’s philosophy, for him, “made morals unnecessary,” and replaced traditional notions of religion with a singular belief in one’s attitude towards oneself and the ultimate essence of things: love, the cultivation of aesthetic experience, and the pursuit of knowledge. General rules and conventions could not interfere, and a “Bloomsberry,” it was supposed, had no obligation to them. As Keynes defiantly states, “I am, and will always remain, an immoralist.” Leonard Woolf, however, disagreed with Keynes’s understanding of Moore’s philosophy, arguing that, on the contrary, it was intensely concerned with right behavior and what ought to be done. With faith in “common sense,” Moore impressed upon the Bloomsbury Group the duty to question “the truth of everything and the authority of everyone, to regard nothing as sacred and to hold nothing in religious respect.” This calculated irreverence turned them into astute observers of new trends and movements, while their aesthetic tastes became so rarefied as to compete with pure Epicureanism.

But as the twentieth century wore on, the conflict between a life of contemplation and a life of action assumed greater urgency. Bloomsbury, this essentially insular family of artists and intellectuals, became increasingly untenable, a judgment shared by the likes of Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood. With a second world war on the horizon, the question of Bloomsbury’s legitimacy could no longer be avoided. For decades, its members had lived apart from the rest of the world, a “watered-down aristocracy […] decidedly unwilling to sacrifice their independence to the cause of the working-class struggle.” By the end of the 1930s, it seemed hopelessly outdated. One could no longer ignore concrete social and political developments, particularly if one had the power to affect or influence them. The new generation, preparing to succeed the old and to stake their claim to society, was acutely aware of this fact.

O humanitas!

Who will save the humanities? Who will protect them? O humanitas, thou art not safe in these perilous times. The black clouds of economic recession loom over you, the chill winds of cynicism lash you, the once-firm ground of patronage quakes beneath your feet. Who will fight against the university presidents, slashing you with their gilt machetes in the interest of cutting costs? Who will lift you up after legions of computer science and business majors ride roughshod over you? Who will lead the charge into the land of the philistines?

O humanitas, in their eyes you are currency without value, the preserve of academics and armchair philosophers, neither of them able to generate any real lucre. For that you are politely acknowledged, but privately reviled, shunted off, and forgotten -- that is, when you aren't being dragged along to cocktail parties to make cultural capital of your venerable traditions.

Gerard Manley Hopkins quietly lamented,

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Underground Whispers

Whether or not Albert Camus ever read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is less important than how it summons Camus’s final novel, The Fall, into existence, and how the latter responds to its intellectual forebear on the question of freedom. Do we have it? Do we need it? Resting on opposite ends of the existential narrative, the distinction between these novels can be inferred by comparison of their dates of publication: Dostoevsky’s, in 1864, a youthful precursor, not quite ripe, among the first words in the genre; Camus’s, in 1956, a perfect representative, almost bitter, among the last words. Both texts, however, pose a timeless ontological problem without any discernible solution, shaking the reader’s confidence in the most fundamental ideas.

Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Camus’s Jean-Baptiste Clamence catches us unawares and bids us, ever so seductively, to stay and listen. “May I, monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?” Despite his good manners, he has intruded, and in the course of several days, in the form of a long confessional monologue, unravels this human conundrum: what good is free will if it constantly subjects us to antithetical moral choices, self-judgment and recrimination, and the inconsistency of reason and passion?
The subject of reason is at the forefront of Notes from Underground. Its anomalous speaker despairs of the Social Utopian project of codifying rational human behavior and subordinating human will to the laws of reason, for these efforts fail to appreciate the complexity of the human condition, and lead inevitably to a uniform and totalitarian society. Nevertheless, the Underground Man is paralyzed by his own freedom to choose. Because he is conscious of every motive, consequence, and counterargument of every decision he could make, no decision seems to be right. His self-doubting breeds his inability to act.

Clamence’s own impotence on that fateful evening, when he failed to help the drowning woman, defeats all his early pretences to generosity and benevolence. In time he realizes that the charitable instinct was no more than a show and an ornament, that this self-stylized “superman”—“a man at the height of his powers […] fundamentally pleased with himself”—was a mere hypocrite. The truth haunts him with a mocking laugh always at his back, never visible, like the abstract public he fears has been judging his every action. But the laugh comes from no external place; it is the reproachful conscience that needs to be silenced, and not by reason but through passion. “Despairing of love and of chastity, I at last bethought myself of debauchery, a substitute for love, which quiets the laughter, restores silence, and above all, confers immortality […] Yes, I was bursting with a longing to be immortal.” In submitting to his primal urges—of wanton pleasure, violent anger, scorn for the beggar, the need to survive—he can relinquish his hypocrisy and, in crude terms, finally be honest with himself.

For Clamence, man’s greatest illusion is that he can be redeemed from this honesty. “I am for any theory that refuses to grant man innocence and for any practice that treats him as guilty. You see in me, très cher, an enlightened advocate of slavery.” If man had never fallen, he would never know pain; had he never desired freedom, he would be immortal. Our Edenic legacy imposes upon us free will in a world seemingly without any objective moral truths. Should we try to save our dying comrade, though we may die in the attempt? Does nobility supersede vanity? “In short, you see, the essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy.” The judge-penitent’s argument, as Camus has been suggesting all along, culminates in absurdity. If the “greater rogue” is the collective of human passions, and submission to libertinism is enlightenment, then self-destruction must surely follow. The Underground Man is acutely aware of this fact, of the doom inherent in exercising either pure reason or pure passion, and in dismay, has withdrawn from the world above, where damnation seems to attend every human decision.

On True Crime Stories

Recently, while watching an episode of a crime show about convicted killer, Scott Peterson, I had the distinct impression that the story would have been much more interesting had it dwelled on the banality of evil. All of the ingredients were there: the handsome middle-class couple, their ordinary life in a modestly-sized city in California, the dashing but sophomoric husband and his cheerful wife smiling at us from photographs.

The only time the show seems conscious of exploring a grave dilemma of the human condition is during interviews, when residents or friends express incredulity that anything like what happened could have happened in their town, and by a man generally regarded as good and normal. Hannah Arendt recorded similar observations in her controversial book on the Eichmann trial.

But the show's producers were uncomfortable with revealing anything as terrifying as that which Arendt uncovered in her book. No, Scott Peterson was apparently not normal. In the episode's concluding remarks, a psychologist cleverly interprets Peterson's condition as bearing the hallmarks of narcissism. As a result of an indulgent childhood and adolescence, during which young Peterson was hardly denied anything (except real promise), the future killer failed to adjust to the realities of adulthood, and particularly to the duties of fatherhood, for he had never really grown up. He is Peterson, the Peter Pan killer.

The viewer can breathe a sigh of relief. What was once an appalling enigma has been encapsulated in legitimate psychological analysis. These things are explicable, he thinks, and are apparently quite rare cases! A psychologist on a television show has told me so! He can go to sleep now without any dread of his close friends or neighbors. He can rest assured of a legitimate explanation for everything, not least of the darkness of his own heart.

On Hurricane Names

While I don't condone hurricanes, I cannot resist the dark clouds, howling winds and whipping rains of a good tempest. Just as enchanting are the names we bestow upon them. When I learned that one Hurricane "Igor" was spinning towards the Atlantic sea board, I was at once delighted by the Slavonic appellation and curious about possible names for future hurricanes. Dubbing a hurricane, "Igor," would seem to suggest that the National Weather Service has either run out of "typical" names," or just felt like going Russian on a lark this hurricane season. If this is a trend, then it is entirely likely that hurricanes ten years hence will be graced with any of an assortment of odd names: "Cuthbert," "Oedipus," "Stanislaus"?

Then I read that hurricane names are reused every six years, barring those that cause severe damage and may thereon be retired. Goodbye Hortense, Gilbert, Roxanne. Farewell Katrina, Cesar, Mitch. I don't think we shall ever remember you fondly.

9/11: United but divided

Our memory of the attacks on September 11, 2001 is imbued with a pained sense of lost unity. Indeed, we enjoyed a kind of solidarity on that day, and for some time afterward, but not of a common political purpose or shared national identity. We were united by the trauma of a sudden and (at the moment) inexplicable catastrophe. For a day or more, our humanity preceded every other consideration - national, political, social, ethnic, and religious - as a testament to the integrity, not of the American, but of the human, fabric. We extended our hand and our sympathy to those affected by the tragedy, and thus extended it to all of our neighbors, because we were all affected; September 11 was our national tragedy.

It was not the first terrorist attack within our borders, not the first in New York City, and not the only time that we were awakened by radical shifts in history. But it was indeed the greatest, by the scale of its destruction and by virtue of its symbolic resonance. 9/11 decisively ended the 20th century and inaugurated a new era, along with a new and divisive political climate. In the wake of the attacks, institutions of national security were created and existing ones reinforced, constitutional rights throughout the Western world, and particularly in the US and Britain, were redefined and often systematically violated, and two wars in the Middle East were waged, thrusting all involved into an unenviable quagmire. 9/11 has also forced us to reconsider globalization - whom it benefits, whom it disenfranchises, and whom it imperils.

As families and friends of loved ones marked the ninth anniversary of that day, many insisted on the sanctity of observances, that 9/11 not be mingled with politics. But the proposed construction of an Islamic community center on property adjacent to the former World Trade Center reminds us that 9/11 has always been political, perhaps from the moment it was first broadcast on the media. As this historical event continues to be politicized, it will remain divisive, particularly on the question of restoration. Americans are united in their commitment to rebuild, not only buildings and infrastructure but the entire social order to accomodate a new age. They remain divided on how.

eConomy

Jobs are out there. But we can't help you find them.

To friend, or not to friend.

In 1979, Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism, a book which diagnosed contemporary American society and found it wanting: wanting attention, wanting to feel good about itself, wanting to remove obstacles from self-fulfillment. Morevoer, as an historian Lasch was quick to indict the prevailing obsession with the present, the obliteration from memory of the past, and the careless neglect for the future. Pathological narcissism had supplanted the individualistic and pioneering impulse in the American spirit, spawning a generation of "me"-ists afraid of commitment (to others and to society at large), yet seeking approval and affirmation for unworthy accomplishments.

So Lasch was a bit of a pessimist.

But I return to the Culture of Narcissim whenever I think about Facebook (or any other social media network), which has revolutionized the concepts of community and personal relationships at the cost, arguably, of "real" community and personal relationships.

Now, to play the devil's advocate:

Studies have shown, and laymen lament, that Facebook unwittingly encourages and enables our own narcissism. It thrives on it. We post pictures of ourselves, sometimes hundreds of them; record our banal activities, which increase exponentially thanks to hand-held computers, and wait for others to remark on our grafitti, while we remark on theirs. In some ways, Facebook has set up a mutual admiration society, in which members can legitimate each others' starkly boring lives, befriend (and unfriend) each other with impunity, or become voyeurs of one another's worlds. In the absence of work or more creative endeavors, we have virtual scrabble, Farmville, and Mafia Wars for our shared recreation. Our days pass on a perpetually refreshed screen of activity; but that screen is of a contant, relentless present. The archive of our textual activity is always gradually being purged.

Of course, the success of this jeremiad against Facebook depends on its simplification of the medium. Its benefits are not usually addressed (assuming there are some) because its pathologies are easier to discern. With respect to community, Facebook provides an alternative village, a democratic arena of sharing and playing, of general belonging without physical contact. Not only do we air the bric-a-brac of our lives but also important news stories, information about causes important to us, and appeals to support those causes. Some of the videos we share are quite funny and intelligent, like the ones produced by the Onion, and to an extent, like those by CampusHumor. I might even hail the imaginative merits of Facebook, particularly in the way of inspired status updates, those reflecting a tongue-in-cheek or madcap sense of humor, that we can't help but laugh at and participate in. In nothing else, the medium provides a wonderful opportunity to practice our irony.

But where does that leave non-virtual reality, the world of historical continuum, where Descartes reasoned out his existence, where people do, of necessity, meet? The land of sensual experience, where Johnson refuted Berkeley's solipsism by kicking a stone? The reality of war and poverty and disease and injustice? I think Lasch would say that Facebook inhibits us from really engaging with that world by marginalizing it. We don't generally post images of the brutality of life, though when we do, rarely, their serious effect is mitigated, then swept away, by the rush of unserious content. What does that say for our instinct to deal with the world? Have we been conditioned to shrink from it and find refuge in the general safety of social networking? Have we become too comfortable?

Conversion experience averted

One day several weeks ago, I was visited by two young men in white shirts and neckties, wearing black name tags and carrying backpacks. If I didn't know better, I would have assumed that the IRS was at my door to whisk me away on a camping trip. (I am a relatively scupulous tax-payer, after all). Well, it certainly wasn't the IRS, judging by the callow faces of these young "elders" asking me about Jesus Christ; to be sure, though, a kind of "trip" was involved. They were Mormon missionaries, and I had made the stupid mistake of opening my door.

The peripatetic Mormons have become a fixture of modern life. Like salesmen, they are inescapable, but whereas door-to-door peddling has become a thing of the past, missionary work, particularly in the suburbs (where souls really do need to be saved), continues to thrive. Principally speaking, the Mormon missionary and the traveling agent have a core objective: to sell a product. In the Mormon's case, that product is the Church of Latter-Day Saints, an odd strain of Christianity whose authority depends solely on divine revelation and gold tablets. To be fair, the traveling Mormon is not exactly like the salesman; he not only affirms its value but he actually believes in it, as well.

I allowed the two young men to come in. We sat down in the living room, where I was promptly interviewed about my faith. The questions were all predictable, of the "What kind of relationship do you have with Christ?" sort. I had quickly decided that I wouldn't wax skeptical about religion, lest I become the object of a feeble persuasion campaign. I figured that if I claim Roman Catholicism as my dominant faith, from which I do not stray on pain of death, they would leave me alone. (In fact, I have strayed from it, and very, very far at that). The young Mormons were relentless, invoking passages from their Book--which they directed me to read with them--that legitimated and reinforced their faith. When they spoke, it was with a pacific tone of voice unheard on the East coast--sincere, guileless, devout. The voice of thorough and unquestioned indoctrination.

I wondered later why I invited them in the first place. I'm almost sure it wasn't because a voice in a dark corner of my soul was pleading in small whispers for the comforts of Mormonism. I figure if it was a gesture of tolerance (to patiently hear their cause), then it was a naive gesture. Hadn't I learned from vampire lore? I had opened my door, perhaps not to demons but to agents of a mysterious religious order bent on "saving souls." Afterward, I was baffled that I wasn't more indignant about it, outraged that my freedom of self-determination was being subtly threatened. To "save one's soul" is really to lose one's reason, to voluntarily surrender one's critical faculties in the name of an authoritarian power structure founded on a myth. I should have tarred and feathered my missionaries! I should have grilled them on a spit!

Instead I wondered if, as a good secular humanist, I shouldn't try to disabuse these impressionable fellows of their simplistic and unquestioned beliefs. But, most likely, there weren't any arguments that I could make that they hadn't already heard and rejected. We could easily have engaged in some futile conversion competition. But it would have prolonged their visit, and I badly needed to read my Nietzsche.

A little learning is a dangerous thing

Here is a fact I don't believe I've ever publicized: I am a doctoral student in a dual history and literature program. Just recently, I completed all the requirements of the program preceding the dissertation. That means that two and half years of course work and a year of self-directed study for comprehensive (qualifying) exams are now behind me. These weren't painless years, I assure you. If the reader only knew the bouts of loneliness and frustration, the anxiety and sinking self-confidence a doctoral student suffers in the course of his studies, he or she would be compelled to send me money or to give me a hug. (I would gladly accept the hug). I cannot deny the edification of prolonging and deepening one's education; indeed, I'm not the same person I was when I entered graduate school, chiefly because my perspectives on nearly everything, from my own existence to various ideas and institutions, have been overturned--though I cannot say with certainty if this is a curse or a blessing. Perhaps both, as always.

Anyway, now that I have won for myself (yes, we must speak in terms of victory) a greater degree of independence from curricular requirements, I am resolved to do all those fulfilling things I've denied myself as a career student. Here is a partial list:

1) To travel, particularly through a country I should know better, namely, our own.
2) Read everything I rarely had a chance to read, like Shakespeare, Henry James, eighteenth century philosophy, etc.
3) Blog more often!
4) Paint. I've wanted to do portraits in oil-paint for a long time.
5) And, of course, to write. To write the fiction I've longed to write, with competence and precision, backed by worldly experience, under the direction of a beautiful, thoughtful muse.

I shall report back on my progress, or die of disillusionment.

World Coupling 2010

If I didn't know better, I might agree with some (prone to excesses of imagination, no doubt) who see the World Cup as a sportive restaging of international war. I suppose the comparison is plausible. Armies of all nations arrayed against each other on a no-man's land, kicking the proverbial ball of destiny back and forth, as empires crumble to the ground. With the exception of the latter ludicrous assertions, there is something to be said about the World Cup and World War, but only on the shakiest of ground.

Despite appearances, the World Cup is not the final refuge of nationalism in a globalized world. It is not, strictly speaking, even nationalistic. Any loyalist can assure you that soccer clubs comprise athletes not only from their own country, but those of others, as well. Observe the number of foreign players in England's Premier League, for example. To be sure, the recruitment of foreigners to national teams is motivated by the desire to optimize team performance rather than foster international solidarity. Though it may achieve that incidentally.

The fact of international cooperation in a so-called nationalistic match is not the only contradicting factor. A mass media sensation, the World Cup is streamed live to televisions, radios, computers throughout the world, boasting millions of spectators. This phenomeneon, coupled with globalization, stimulates widely scattered allegiances, most notably in countries with diasporic cultures, like America or France. Correspondingly, the games generate an enormous amount of money, akin to multi-national corportations writ large--the emblem of globalization.

Demythologizing the World Cup, however, does not deny the nationalistic impulse involved in watching it, only the legitimacy of its claims.

Terror in Freeburg

The Freeburg police department yesterday apprehended a local man suspected of running a terrorist operation from his own bookstore.

Pierre Bakunin, owner of The Old Curiosity Shop on Main St., was arrested in his store at noon by two undercover officers disguised as flamboyant homosexuals with immoral literary tastes. When Mr. Bakunin produced an unwholesome cook book, he was promptly arrested. While being led away, the former shop-owner was reported to have mumbled something unintelligible. One onlooker claimed he was speaking in tongues.

A careful investigation of the building was conducted shortly after Mr. Bakunin’s arrest. The investigation yielded damning evidence confirming police allegations, including a crate filled with such hazardous literature as Thomas Paine’s political pamphlet, "Rights of Man," Mark Twain’s racist novel, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Alan Ginsberg’s obscene poem, "Howl," and Vladimir Nabokov’s pornographic novel, "Lolita."

Since 1991, the Old Curiosity Shop had been an object of suspicion by the Freeburg Police Department and local residents. In that year, ownership of the bookstore, formerly known as the Town Book Store, passed from the hands of Wallace Chesterfield to the filthy mitts of Mr. Bakunin. The Shop’s history of terrorist activity began shortly afterward.

On random mornings, residents would wake to find on their doorstep more than they had expected: crouching beside the Freeburg Times, a lewd or otherwise anarchistic book in paperback. Milton Marsh remembers one fateful morning. “I walked out to get the paper and saw a blue book next to it. I picked it up, put on my glasses, and read the cover: ‘The Works of Marquis de Sade.’ But I had no idea who De Sade was. I couldn’t even pronounce his name.”

Mr. Marsh brought the book inside along with his newspaper. What he found in it astonished and upset this septuagenarian and former librarian. “I started reading an excerpt of “Philosophy in the Bedroom,” or whatever it was called. I just picked it out at random. After a minute of reading, my hands grew warm, then they went numb, and the book fell flat on the floor. I didn’t want to touch it. I picked it up with salad tongs and threw it in the fire. I later prayed to Christ to forgive me for bringing such smut into my home.”

But Mr. Marsh was not the only victim of this act of terror. Hundreds of other residents reported similar incidents, all within the span of a year. Leonard Potts, a general practitioner, found a copy of Sigmund Freud’s ludicrous book, The Ego and the Id, on his doorstep. The book fictionalizes the inner life of the mind, making outlandish claims about an entire mental world, mostly disgusting, which human beings are not even conscious of. “We’re no brutes,” Mr. Potts shrugged. “We’re decent human beings.”

Ida Tildwell also received an unwelcome gift: Grace Metalious’s lascivious novel, “Peyton Place,” about illicit activities in a small American town. Ms. Tildwell said that she had misplaced the book, but remarked that it was “very dirty.”

Neither was Mayor Frick Wheeler immune to these attacks. On September 3, after finding an illustrated version of Lady Chatterly's Lover on his doorstep, Mayor Wheeler decided to convene a council meeting to address this wave of terror.

The meeting was held at the Freeburg Community Center the following week, with over 150 people in attendance. The sense of rage, fear, and helplessness of residents was palpable. “We were beside ourselves,” Martha Freeman recalls. “Everyone was shouting and calling for justice. I was shouting, too. Someone left Nietzsche on my car roof!”

A special police task force was created to investigate the terror activity and to eventually root out the free-thinking rabble. Sheriff Burt Blunt was appointed head of the task force, known locally as The Valiant Squad. In his remarks to attendees, Sheriff Blunt said, “We’ll catch ‘em. And when we do, we’ll lock ‘em up for a good while. No one’s going to play with our minds and get away with it.”

During the meeting, town officials also proposed a moral-profiling law that would allow the Valiant Squad to apprehend anyone it suspected of immoral activity. After initial questioning, persons of interest would be sent before a special commission for further investigation. The Purity Act was passed in a separate election with near unanimous approval. It remains a vital resource for security and justice in Freeburg.

The arrest of Mr. Bakunin one week later has reaffirmed the value of the Purity Act. According to Sam Washington, a Valiant Squad agent, capturing Mr. Bakunin was “a no-brainer.” “You got a red-haired, bearded man with an earring, who buys organic food, lives with a woman who wears pirate clothes, and draws pictures in the park. Classic weirdo.”

Asked about the future of the Purity Act, Mayor Wheeler dispelled all fears. “It will remain indefinitely.”

Health care reform

The recent passage of American health care reform, which has emboldened Democrats and infuriated Republicans (alternate camps don't seem to feel anything), is not revolutionary--falling short, as it does, of the public option--though it has set in motion a tremendous force which will not be realized until bolder, less compromising legislation is passed. This future legislation is, of course, universal health care, a utopian dream towards which we are either blissfully or recklessly drifting, according to whom you ask.

Many, presumably driven by post-Red Scare paranoia, fear the new bill will culminate in some form of socialism (though I sooner expect it will culminate in more half-baked definitions of socialism). Other naysayers bristle at what they believe is an overt government takeover, a state of intolerable federal intrusion into states rights, private enterprise, and private lives. They feel particularly zealous about "reclaiming" their country, as though it were hijacked. More subtle critics worry about the government's increasing deficit, its solvency, the expansion of the welfare state, and the future quality of health care under the new bill.

Just as the financial viability of this bill relies on variables, so must our long-term vision remain visionary, not conclusive. We can at least conceive that more people will live longer as a result of this legislation. Among the existential possibilities of a longer life without the anxiety over affordable health care is the opportunity for individual and political empowerment. As the most democratic social reform in recent decades, the bill has the power to level inequalities while curtailing the concentration of money and authority into few hands. In political theater, it may recast the dominant parties as, in the case of Democrats, legitimate agents of progressive change, and in the case of Republicans, poor swimmers in the new political tide. All of this, however, remains uncertain, so long as demagogues from each side continue to shun bypartisanship, and the reality of the dream remains dream-like.

Tom Stoppard's Jumpers

Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers (1972) is as absurd and delightful as modern plays get, barring some of Beckett. It is also as satirical. In Jumpers, academic philosophy is the prime target, represented in miniature by logical positivism, a school of philosophy that tried, through the development of an ideal language, to get to the bottom of reality. The play, wonderfully enough, has no basis in reality, for it is constantly crowded out by acrobatic scholars, high jinks, an inner play, and an assortment of two-dimensional characters — by all of which it masterfully proves its point. In exposing and ridiculing the absurdities of logical positivism, Stoppard shows how academic philosophy in general, often obsessively preoccupied with the nature of reality, tends to be blind to it.

The play’s main narrative — a detective story revolving around a murder — is never actually resolved. Instead, it is continually deferred by the insistent questioning of human action, values, and beliefs. The act of murder itself is subject to epistemological interrogation: How do we know it is wrong? How do we know it isn’t something else, like an expression of the “antisocial”? In this dystopian world, where the tenets of logical positivism constitute a normative world-view, Stoppard deftly shows its implications on human experience and perception. Indeed, the true reductio ad absurdum is the triumph of irony, for in the process of determining reality with linguistic precision (“gymnastics”), one strays further and further away from it. In the court of philosophers, something as obviously wrong and deviant as murder may never be prosecuted, because it is never “adequately” defined.

Cogito's debut

Voila! my first blog!

O Muse, who didst hearken to mine ancient forebears, the scribes and chroniclers of ages past, who in their respective Arcadias (or Hades', as the case may be), do vaguely recall their own first inscriptions on papyrus, parchment, or vellum--stand with me now!

Dear readers, the entry of one more blog, I trust, will likely not tip the scale, but with every little dispatch, may discharge reverberations through the edifice of virtual discourse. That edifice will not be toppled, nor is that our wish, for every intelligent blog--when it is not the mere rambling of a brimming consciousness--is an aid to human thought, perception, and action, to which this blog aspires to be an exemplary model.

A young scribbler nevertheless begs your pardon in advance for the absurdities that he will inevitably entertain. One cannot speak about contemporary art, culture, or general existence without occassionally veering into the irrational.

Fortunately, even the irrational can be elegantly articulated.