In Australia, there is the concept of mates. The word loosely translates as "friend", but the truth is that Americans lack the concept completely. Your mate has your back, and you have his. Your mates help define you, and accept you unconditionally. Once you're in, you're in for life. It's not easy to get in. When I was nine, I had a kid who used to annoy me mercilessly on the playground. One day, I had had enough of his picking on me, and I knocked him over with a punch. He got up, shook himself off, and shook my hand. "We're having a party this weekend. Here's where it is."
I was still really angry, and I didn't immediately understand what he was doing. He wanted to know that I would stick up for myself when provoked. He needed to know if, after he was my mate, I'd stand up for him. Once he found out that I'd stand up for myself, I was in. At that party, everyone there treated me like a mate, and I felt more included than I ever did before, and I never got selected last for any game again at that school.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Craigslist does give valuable information sometimes...
Interesting post about friendship, being wanted, and being a man.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
A note of skepticism
A belated thanks to Jesse for his introduction. Over the last two or three years since Jesse and I saw each other regularly, I've become much more sure of who I am in several areas, such as joining Jesse in the libertarian camp, and much less sure of who I am in other areas, like religion. Although calling libertarians a camp is like calling Congress a team, or Unitarianism a religion. Sorry Unitarians. Anyway, readers of this blog will have to be satisfied with Jesse's intro.
In a debate over at Cato Unbound, Jonah Goldberg wrote:
I think Goldberg is onto something here, but moves onto other issues. Any political philosophy - heck, any vision of the world - has to make an argument for what the world should be like. but what will the world be like?
To justify "devising an argument in which the smartest political strategy, historical forces, and his own personal preferences happen to be in almost lockstep accord," we then have two possible explanations, not mutually exclusive.
(1). the author invented the explanation of inevitability to persuade himself that his optimism was justified.
Ie, Optimism + "platform X is good" ----> "a course of events where platform X helps/comes about is inevitable."
A happy socialist must conclude that the world is inevitably headed toward socialism, no?
(2). The author cited inevitability as an argumentative tactic; ie, he did it to bring others to fight for platform X.
Inevitability is a powerful argument. If something is inevitable, why fight it? Thinkers from Mises, Hayek, and Popper to C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling have all recognized this.
But - and maybe Brink Lindsay makes this argument in Against the Dead Hand, I haven't read it - (1) is an equally powerful reason why such arguments of inevitability get made - self-deception.
I consider myself a libertarian/classical liberal partly because I'm an optimist, and Smithian classical liberalism reconciles what is and what should be. (Sorry, Rand, you weren't the first to bridge is and ought). People are self-interested, even selfish, but that is not bad per se. Choice both enables morality - for how can one be virtuous if one does not freely reject sin? - and prosperity.
So I'm a libertarian because it makes things fit together. And I also happen to be an optimist. Thus, Brink's argument that a more libertarian future is inevitable strikes a deep concord with me, and likely also with Brink. Especially because an optimistic libertarianism will likely believe our Utopia is stable once reached.
And the same is true with any other ideology.
On a more personal note, consider the decision to believe in a religion. I've been exploring a particular one recently, and am currently loosely contemplating conversion. Right now, it makes sense to me - all the doctrines fit together, together with my moral sensibilities. It doesn't, say, punish people who've never heard of the true religion with eternal damnation. But does that make it true? I don't know. I'd like to believe so.
But if the vision of some subjective pieces of information fitting together can lead to flights of fancy, perhaps we ought to be more cautious when we think we see the pieces fit. The Dan Brown genre should stay fiction in our minds.
UPDATE: David Friedman was here first too:
In a debate over at Cato Unbound, Jonah Goldberg wrote:
A warning flag should go up when someone devises an argument in which the smartest political strategy, historical forces, and his own personal preferences happen to be in almost lockstep accord. In Against The Dead Hand, Brink chronicles in lucid detail and limpid prose how the very smartest experts of the early 20th century were absolutely convinced that their ideal social policies were confirmed by science, morality and History. There's a similar whiff of hubris coming off libertarians who are not only sure that theirs is the best path, but that it will also be the most successful path.
I think Goldberg is onto something here, but moves onto other issues. Any political philosophy - heck, any vision of the world - has to make an argument for what the world should be like. but what will the world be like?
To justify "devising an argument in which the smartest political strategy, historical forces, and his own personal preferences happen to be in almost lockstep accord," we then have two possible explanations, not mutually exclusive.
(1). the author invented the explanation of inevitability to persuade himself that his optimism was justified.
Ie, Optimism + "platform X is good" ----> "a course of events where platform X helps/comes about is inevitable."
A happy socialist must conclude that the world is inevitably headed toward socialism, no?
(2). The author cited inevitability as an argumentative tactic; ie, he did it to bring others to fight for platform X.
Inevitability is a powerful argument. If something is inevitable, why fight it? Thinkers from Mises, Hayek, and Popper to C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling have all recognized this.
But - and maybe Brink Lindsay makes this argument in Against the Dead Hand, I haven't read it - (1) is an equally powerful reason why such arguments of inevitability get made - self-deception.
I consider myself a libertarian/classical liberal partly because I'm an optimist, and Smithian classical liberalism reconciles what is and what should be. (Sorry, Rand, you weren't the first to bridge is and ought). People are self-interested, even selfish, but that is not bad per se. Choice both enables morality - for how can one be virtuous if one does not freely reject sin? - and prosperity.
So I'm a libertarian because it makes things fit together. And I also happen to be an optimist. Thus, Brink's argument that a more libertarian future is inevitable strikes a deep concord with me, and likely also with Brink. Especially because an optimistic libertarianism will likely believe our Utopia is stable once reached.
And the same is true with any other ideology.
On a more personal note, consider the decision to believe in a religion. I've been exploring a particular one recently, and am currently loosely contemplating conversion. Right now, it makes sense to me - all the doctrines fit together, together with my moral sensibilities. It doesn't, say, punish people who've never heard of the true religion with eternal damnation. But does that make it true? I don't know. I'd like to believe so.
But if the vision of some subjective pieces of information fitting together can lead to flights of fancy, perhaps we ought to be more cautious when we think we see the pieces fit. The Dan Brown genre should stay fiction in our minds.
UPDATE: David Friedman was here first too:
If I conclude that the rules that would be just are similar to both the rules that exist and the rules that would be efficient, that may simply be evidence that my moral judgments are ex post rationalizations of the world I live in or the conclusions of my economic analysis.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
I Can't Get No Education
My sister often amazes me with the depth of her knowledge. My parents are often quick to point out that this is in no small part due to the influence I have on her. She's the only 11 year-old I know who knows about the Ukrainian famine and the crimes of the Soviet Union. It took me years to even begin to grasp authoritarianism, which is what she is beginning to get. She has a maturity that simply astounds me (though she's still thankfully a kid at heart).
What I realized about this though is really how stifling the compulsory education system is. My sister picked up, from me, a love of reading and learning, and she's already now starting to see how much she can learn on her own. As we drove back from our grandmother's, she picked up my copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and I had her take a shot at pronouncing the title. She didn't do too bad with big words like that. She was very curious about it, and so I explained what the words meant. She picked up on that immediately. I told her about the guy who wrote it and she wanted to know why Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag. That's when it really hit me about the schooling bit.
If there weren't people to foster her love of learning, she would have either had to develop that fully on her own or just go through the motions at school. While my parents were supportive and taught me a lot, I had to get my love of learning on my own, and I think my heinous awkwardness and introversion pretty much drove me into that direction (two traits my sister lacks). Most people who have read the things I've written in the past are probably attuned to my thoughts on schooling, so when I say things like schooling teaches dumbness, most people who know me know that those beliefs are part of the package deal you get with me and my wacky radical beliefs. To others though, that's an amazing, and uncivic, notion to put forward.
"Schooling teaches dumbness."
My sister is not gifted. She is not a prodigy, as some may be wont to label her. She's a clever girl who catches on quickly because she lives in an environment that has always fostered independent thought. That's not a unique trait, and that's why I say schooling teaches dumbness. The vast majority of kids can be like my sister and learn like this. But when you have an institution with a rigid structure (even if some of our most creative teachers have been able to bend the structure within their own part of the structure, the structure itself still exists), with set times to learn set things in such a rote manner, you encourage dumbness and a lack of wonder. That system tells children that you learn this at this time, and once the bell rings or once that clock strikes that time, the learning of that is done and you learn this new thing. Schooling has had both benevolent and shady intentions, but that's simply intention. The results we have are simply depressing, and no amount of money being thrown at the problem and no amount of bureaucratic management is going to change that. I don't blame the teachers either. I've known both good and bad teachers, but in the end, they are at the merciless direction of superintendents and bureaucrats, which is a notion that, when I examine it, surprises and disturbs me how much it is tolerated and accepted.
The bit about dumbness has also been an idea that I have played around with a lot in the last four years. Being around highly intelligent and "gifted" students awoke me to a reality of intellectual elitism that is prevalent and even fostered in schools. The sense of superiority is just astounding (and it is something that I have fallen victim to in the past). The way some have talked revealed a deep seated prejudice and patronization towards intellectual "inferiors", and while part of these attitudes are in reaction to a school environment that cherishes jocks and popular people over others, they're still irresponsible attitudes to foster, and it encourages the notion that the dumb are hopeless. There are ignorant people out there, and ignorance is a staple of humanity since we all are struck by it at points in our lives, but our institution has created a class of people that need to be 'managed'. By stifling creativity, independent thought, ingenuity, and complete curiosity (an act which should be anathema to everything this country once stood for), we have taken children and made them a class of dependents, fostered a hierarchy that puts "gifted" students above a whole class who can easily be labeled stupid and dumb; the unwashed masses who can't be trusted (and as a cynic, I can say that while I have heard some very ignorant things come out of the mouths of these people, it often pales in comparison to some of the unbelievable ignorance of what comes out of the mouths and minds of intellectuals and intelligent people). I believe that the human mind is innately curious, but schooling and our culture seems to try to do everything it can to stifle it; it's what they call keeping you in your place.
There's a quote from John Taylor Gatto I have often quoted, and while I knew what he was saying before and agreed with it, it didn't really click with me until I noticed how quickly people can catch on if you encourage them to, or give them the opportunity to. My sister is no prodigy, but when I break down concepts for her and explain them as simply as I can, she gets it. I'm convinced that you can do this with the majority of people. Dumbness, for the most part, is taught, like Gatto said.
"Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
[...]
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.
[...]
According to all official analysis, dumbness isn’t taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you’re a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social order."
Unfortunately, I don't know if there's really any hope for it all. I've often been insulted for being an idealist, but I know my beliefs will not come to fruition beyond the small sphere of influence I may have. Since I do not follow the path of revolutionaries who want to force change at the barrel of a gun or follow the path of bureaucrats and politicians who want to force their personal ideology and agenda through the force of law, all I can hope for is that my ideas, and the ideas of those who inspired me, catch on. I'm an idealist, but I'm not expecting anything. I've never shied away from being called a radical. The word radical is at its root, the Latin word for root. What I see is what I believe to be the root of major problems that we have. A diseased tree that has its branches pruned may look pretty with some work, but it's still a diseased tree. As long as people are content to try variations of the same, tired solution to an old problem, then the best I can do is point out that it's a bad idea. What is true, what you believe might be true, and what you want to be true are all very different things, and it seems like it's becoming so foggy that they're all starting to blur. The best intentions don't excuse the vilest results.
We're not going to get anywhere if we continue to close off discussion towards anything we don't want to hear, or to ideas we're not familiar with or refuse to even consider. The narrowing of what is acceptable thought is hurting us in the schools and in public discourse. What I believe is only going to seem wackier and wackier as this trend continues (though I think some people are starting to wake up) because it's not acceptable thought. It will be dismissed with a wave of the hand, as well as the opinions of others who have their own take on it that doesn't follow the official line. So, I hope my sister asks me questions about the things I believe, I hope that she continues to be open to hearing other opinions. I hope she listens to what other's have to say and learn from them. I hope her mind continues to be as open as it is.
It's just scary when I consider the institutions. H.L. Mencken once said "Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"
Who would want to live in an institution? I'm only now just becoming aware of the serious damage institutionalized thinking has caused me. The last three years have been hell for me because I've had to further and further personally isolate myself to numb the pain and understand the damages inside. The cure was never socialization, as some people seem to think it is. Actually, Grace Llewellyn had a good quote for this:
"A healthy social life requires much more than indifferent daily acquaintanceship with three hundred people born the same year you were...[institutional] socialization means bringing an individual under the control of the group. School-style socialization makes a group of people obedient and easily manipulated by peer pressure or "authority"; it makes a nation of idiots who wish they were people on TV since they don't know who they themselves are...As for romance. Affection, intimacy, and passion really are not encouraged to take root in a linoleum room smelling of chalk-dust. A mystery-relationship belongs out in the big mystery-world."
It's been a strange road for me, having gone from being a rabble-rousing firebrand, to a meek and heinously awkward guy who hated himself, to being someone that I think has been humbled enough to principled and committed but not as zealous and more inclined to inquiry. What I realized though, is that through all I've been, the damage that institutionalized thinking caused me was always present.
I should probably clarify though what I mean by institutionalized thinking. I've been in school for as far as I can remember. I was raised to compartmentalize everything. I was raised to know a social order and to believe that only material pursuits or those that advance a career are the only worthwhile things to attain in life. I was taught to believe that this is the way things are, and that the ones who aren't in harmony with the machine are defective. Institutionalized thinking is thinking that causes you to think how do I properly live within an institution. It's the kind of thinking that causes you to believe that your education ends when school is out, that your spiritual life stops the moment you leave the church, that you are your career or that you are your labeled place. It's the kind of thinking that tells you not to think.
That's how damaging it is.
The people I've talked to about it around here, seem to be subconsciously aware of it. It's my own suspicions that our own human nature instinctively rejects it, but when you grow up with it, taught to believe it, accept it, maybe even love it, you start to think that's all there is.
I forgot about the world outside.
Those who caught me mostly in my pessimistic and cynical glory, may be surprised to know that there was a time that I did find a lot of beauty in the world. I had a wonder about things that lost for the last three years. I still had a lot of growing up to then, because I did think I knew everything, but I also had a purpose. I was fighting for something then, and fighting against the damages of my institutional thinking.
It's really astounding, when you sit down to think about it, how often people are proud to not know anything. There's nothing wrong with being a simple person and not being extensively book-learned, I have no problem with that, because I don't think that's ignorance. When I see ignorance, I see it in the person who proudly talks about how they don't like to think. I don't expect us to be a nation of philosophers--I don't even think I would want that--but I think a little more honest discourse is what we need. No one is talking anymore, or rather, people aren't talking about things that really matter, and I don't want to. Getting by with the minimalist effort. In the last part of his book A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto had some interesting things to say about rhetoric and conversations. He talked about the categories of conversation that fill up our daily lives, but how they're ultimately unfulfilling, especially for the younger generations. It was a very interesting point he made, and I think I need to reproduce in its entirety.
"Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, where rhetoric was discarded by the philosophy of the Reformation, many of the young look at this interminable future of elaborate social conversation networks that industrial societies find vital to "business culture" with disgust. There is some fundamental and radical difference between the important talk of youth that makes love, friendship, and significance reasonably easy to reach, and the social conversation of older people, in particular of self-important older people, that makes it apparent these life-and-death qualities are very difficult to obtain in later life.
I hope you'll reread that last idea. It will help you understand why attractive young people in the United States, almost exclusively the sons and daughters of the prosperous, kill themselves in record numbers these days. Teenage suicide, occurring as it does in the classes who have "made it", is mute and powerful testimony to how sterile and inhuman a destination "making it" really can be. When children prefer death to the life of the future as they see it being lived by their fathers, mothers, and family friends, it's time to find the problem not in them but in us."
It breaks my heart, and I do suspect that institutionalized thinking has a lot to blame for it. I need to disagree with Emerson who said that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"; I would have to say that it's complacency that's the hobgoblin of little minds. We're living in a culture that is quickly reaching a cultural singularity where less and less free thinking will be going on, or at least that seems to be to be what's going on. I'll never forget the first work I read by Kierkegaard, and the quote of his that just jumped out at me. "People often demand freedom of speech in place of the freedom of thought they seldom use."
There's nothing quite like the freedom you feel when you feel like you're shaking it off of your back. You begin to feel compassion again, that your senses are no longer dulled, that there's hope and love in the world, beyond the narrow views of what is love that are often presented to us. You start to feel again.
But in the end, who are you?
Who are you?
Gatto has an excellent essay in A Different Kind of Teacher entitled "What Really Matters?" There are truncated versions of it online, but they just lack the punch of the one that was placed in the book.
"Where do you start? First you have to find yourself. There isn't any other way. If you wait on that you'll be buried even deeper in the artificial programs of others. First you have to strip away decades of programming and overlays and discover your own outline beneath it all. It hurts to do that. This was once called "knowing yourself". Until you know that step there won't be any self to know, just a collection of relays and switches, sensors and twitches that can be manipulated by engineers you can't see. On the other hand, if you know what matters and are willing to fight and even die for it, nothing can colonize your mind and you will be truly a free spirit.
All bold emphasis is my own.
I don't know if I've ever known a generation who seems to be lost without an identity more than my own. An entire generation raised to be special and never knowing what makes them supposedly special; no wonder employer's are at a loss at how to handle employees from my generation, a generation raised without a sense of personal identity and raised completely with a sense of dependency. I've seen the excess of it all. When we didn't accept what the television said--I know it to be true because MTV tells me so--we wandered around like little children in the supermarket, all the way up into our teens and beyond. Waiting to be told to stop, waiting to be told when to go. Turn me on, turn me off, because I don't know how to take care of myself. I must know something because my diploma says I do, but why do I feel so lost? I think that about sums up too many people I have known, including myself. I wasn't surprised for a minute to read that my generation doesn't have an appreciation for the effects of violence or that it's the most materialistic and narcissistic generation yet; how could I be surprised when this was exactly how we were raised to be.
How many of us are acting based purely on impulse? What impressed me about that Gatto quote was what I bolded. It hurts to do that. This was once called "knowing yourself". The stakes are high, especially with being at the doorstep of transhumanism, which will only open up a whole new can of identity issues. If it hurts this much now to recapture yourself just for you, to be that person you are and be completely one and at peace with that, then how are we going to survive down the road, when we don't even seem to be sure who we are most of the time? What caught my attention in Gatto's essay was what he wrote about machines. He noted a couple of things, that we communicate and live through machines now, which denies us a large part of our identity. Part of the exhilaration I've felt from feeling like I had my life back again is that I'm starting to see people again, and I'm much more aware that I'm lost in a world of machines. Everything we do now is dependent on machines, and while I'm not a Luddite, we erred in letting them set up our identities for us. Our identity has become supplanted by the identity of the iPod, the identity of the personal computer, and, the worst culprit of all, the identity of the television. We've let things define who we are. Is it any wonder that there's so much desperation in the nation that has long been considered the capital of progress and prosperity? Is it any wonder that there is a malaise in this country with a psychic sense of decline when we don't feel like we even know who we are anymore, much less who are neighbors and loved ones are?
Who are you?
What has exacerbated the situation for my generation is that we don't know anything practical. I can't take care of myself right now, I lack the ability and knowledge. Our adolescence has become a kind of extended childhood, making us older and older dependents. I do not know the first thing about simply living, and so at the age of 20, nearing 21, I am scrambling to figure out how I can even manage to take care of myself. Oh yeah, I know a lot of things. I had facts and figures crammed into my head, ready to spit out like a living Pez dispenser, but what do I even really know? I forgot about the world outside, having been programmed, and pushed further and further into a box I simply existed in. No wonder Ireland seemed like such a liberating experience for me.
What's going to happen when we further lose our identity in machines? Gatto has some ideas:
"Machines can be stored anywhere, can function anywhere, and are indifferent to the machines they associate with, but men and women must build the meanings of their lives around finding a few, very few, people to touch and love and care for. If you fail in that it doesn't matter how well financed the school you went to was, how healthy the space program is, or how many machines you own--you'll be miserable. If this is so, and I confess it looks that way to me, you'll have to sabotage the global economy to survive as a human being, and you'll have to learn to think for yourself because schools and governments and machine-makers will lie to you about what matters every time."
Bold mine again.
I know my stakes in the matter, and I know what I'm fighting for. I have a better idea of who I am. I know what's right for me. And Gatto was right, it hurt a lot to get here. Friends would occasionally tell me that I would benefit from all of this, and I did. It hurt like hell, it hurt a lot. I was torn apart inside and driven to complete madness. Everytime I thought I was out, I was dragged back into the pit. In the end though, it gave me back who I was, and who I should have been. It had to be done to bring me here, otherwise I would have languished, emotionally crippled and devoid of anymore function in this world. Force of will, love, and compassion have brought me back though, and restored my identity to me. I smile from time to time now.
What I realized about this though is really how stifling the compulsory education system is. My sister picked up, from me, a love of reading and learning, and she's already now starting to see how much she can learn on her own. As we drove back from our grandmother's, she picked up my copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and I had her take a shot at pronouncing the title. She didn't do too bad with big words like that. She was very curious about it, and so I explained what the words meant. She picked up on that immediately. I told her about the guy who wrote it and she wanted to know why Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag. That's when it really hit me about the schooling bit.
If there weren't people to foster her love of learning, she would have either had to develop that fully on her own or just go through the motions at school. While my parents were supportive and taught me a lot, I had to get my love of learning on my own, and I think my heinous awkwardness and introversion pretty much drove me into that direction (two traits my sister lacks). Most people who have read the things I've written in the past are probably attuned to my thoughts on schooling, so when I say things like schooling teaches dumbness, most people who know me know that those beliefs are part of the package deal you get with me and my wacky radical beliefs. To others though, that's an amazing, and uncivic, notion to put forward.
"Schooling teaches dumbness."
My sister is not gifted. She is not a prodigy, as some may be wont to label her. She's a clever girl who catches on quickly because she lives in an environment that has always fostered independent thought. That's not a unique trait, and that's why I say schooling teaches dumbness. The vast majority of kids can be like my sister and learn like this. But when you have an institution with a rigid structure (even if some of our most creative teachers have been able to bend the structure within their own part of the structure, the structure itself still exists), with set times to learn set things in such a rote manner, you encourage dumbness and a lack of wonder. That system tells children that you learn this at this time, and once the bell rings or once that clock strikes that time, the learning of that is done and you learn this new thing. Schooling has had both benevolent and shady intentions, but that's simply intention. The results we have are simply depressing, and no amount of money being thrown at the problem and no amount of bureaucratic management is going to change that. I don't blame the teachers either. I've known both good and bad teachers, but in the end, they are at the merciless direction of superintendents and bureaucrats, which is a notion that, when I examine it, surprises and disturbs me how much it is tolerated and accepted.
The bit about dumbness has also been an idea that I have played around with a lot in the last four years. Being around highly intelligent and "gifted" students awoke me to a reality of intellectual elitism that is prevalent and even fostered in schools. The sense of superiority is just astounding (and it is something that I have fallen victim to in the past). The way some have talked revealed a deep seated prejudice and patronization towards intellectual "inferiors", and while part of these attitudes are in reaction to a school environment that cherishes jocks and popular people over others, they're still irresponsible attitudes to foster, and it encourages the notion that the dumb are hopeless. There are ignorant people out there, and ignorance is a staple of humanity since we all are struck by it at points in our lives, but our institution has created a class of people that need to be 'managed'. By stifling creativity, independent thought, ingenuity, and complete curiosity (an act which should be anathema to everything this country once stood for), we have taken children and made them a class of dependents, fostered a hierarchy that puts "gifted" students above a whole class who can easily be labeled stupid and dumb; the unwashed masses who can't be trusted (and as a cynic, I can say that while I have heard some very ignorant things come out of the mouths of these people, it often pales in comparison to some of the unbelievable ignorance of what comes out of the mouths and minds of intellectuals and intelligent people). I believe that the human mind is innately curious, but schooling and our culture seems to try to do everything it can to stifle it; it's what they call keeping you in your place.
There's a quote from John Taylor Gatto I have often quoted, and while I knew what he was saying before and agreed with it, it didn't really click with me until I noticed how quickly people can catch on if you encourage them to, or give them the opportunity to. My sister is no prodigy, but when I break down concepts for her and explain them as simply as I can, she gets it. I'm convinced that you can do this with the majority of people. Dumbness, for the most part, is taught, like Gatto said.
"Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
[...]
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.
[...]
According to all official analysis, dumbness isn’t taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you’re a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social order."
Unfortunately, I don't know if there's really any hope for it all. I've often been insulted for being an idealist, but I know my beliefs will not come to fruition beyond the small sphere of influence I may have. Since I do not follow the path of revolutionaries who want to force change at the barrel of a gun or follow the path of bureaucrats and politicians who want to force their personal ideology and agenda through the force of law, all I can hope for is that my ideas, and the ideas of those who inspired me, catch on. I'm an idealist, but I'm not expecting anything. I've never shied away from being called a radical. The word radical is at its root, the Latin word for root. What I see is what I believe to be the root of major problems that we have. A diseased tree that has its branches pruned may look pretty with some work, but it's still a diseased tree. As long as people are content to try variations of the same, tired solution to an old problem, then the best I can do is point out that it's a bad idea. What is true, what you believe might be true, and what you want to be true are all very different things, and it seems like it's becoming so foggy that they're all starting to blur. The best intentions don't excuse the vilest results.
We're not going to get anywhere if we continue to close off discussion towards anything we don't want to hear, or to ideas we're not familiar with or refuse to even consider. The narrowing of what is acceptable thought is hurting us in the schools and in public discourse. What I believe is only going to seem wackier and wackier as this trend continues (though I think some people are starting to wake up) because it's not acceptable thought. It will be dismissed with a wave of the hand, as well as the opinions of others who have their own take on it that doesn't follow the official line. So, I hope my sister asks me questions about the things I believe, I hope that she continues to be open to hearing other opinions. I hope she listens to what other's have to say and learn from them. I hope her mind continues to be as open as it is.
It's just scary when I consider the institutions. H.L. Mencken once said "Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"
Who would want to live in an institution? I'm only now just becoming aware of the serious damage institutionalized thinking has caused me. The last three years have been hell for me because I've had to further and further personally isolate myself to numb the pain and understand the damages inside. The cure was never socialization, as some people seem to think it is. Actually, Grace Llewellyn had a good quote for this:
"A healthy social life requires much more than indifferent daily acquaintanceship with three hundred people born the same year you were...[institutional] socialization means bringing an individual under the control of the group. School-style socialization makes a group of people obedient and easily manipulated by peer pressure or "authority"; it makes a nation of idiots who wish they were people on TV since they don't know who they themselves are...As for romance. Affection, intimacy, and passion really are not encouraged to take root in a linoleum room smelling of chalk-dust. A mystery-relationship belongs out in the big mystery-world."
It's been a strange road for me, having gone from being a rabble-rousing firebrand, to a meek and heinously awkward guy who hated himself, to being someone that I think has been humbled enough to principled and committed but not as zealous and more inclined to inquiry. What I realized though, is that through all I've been, the damage that institutionalized thinking caused me was always present.
I should probably clarify though what I mean by institutionalized thinking. I've been in school for as far as I can remember. I was raised to compartmentalize everything. I was raised to know a social order and to believe that only material pursuits or those that advance a career are the only worthwhile things to attain in life. I was taught to believe that this is the way things are, and that the ones who aren't in harmony with the machine are defective. Institutionalized thinking is thinking that causes you to think how do I properly live within an institution. It's the kind of thinking that causes you to believe that your education ends when school is out, that your spiritual life stops the moment you leave the church, that you are your career or that you are your labeled place. It's the kind of thinking that tells you not to think.
That's how damaging it is.
The people I've talked to about it around here, seem to be subconsciously aware of it. It's my own suspicions that our own human nature instinctively rejects it, but when you grow up with it, taught to believe it, accept it, maybe even love it, you start to think that's all there is.
I forgot about the world outside.
Those who caught me mostly in my pessimistic and cynical glory, may be surprised to know that there was a time that I did find a lot of beauty in the world. I had a wonder about things that lost for the last three years. I still had a lot of growing up to then, because I did think I knew everything, but I also had a purpose. I was fighting for something then, and fighting against the damages of my institutional thinking.
It's really astounding, when you sit down to think about it, how often people are proud to not know anything. There's nothing wrong with being a simple person and not being extensively book-learned, I have no problem with that, because I don't think that's ignorance. When I see ignorance, I see it in the person who proudly talks about how they don't like to think. I don't expect us to be a nation of philosophers--I don't even think I would want that--but I think a little more honest discourse is what we need. No one is talking anymore, or rather, people aren't talking about things that really matter, and I don't want to. Getting by with the minimalist effort. In the last part of his book A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto had some interesting things to say about rhetoric and conversations. He talked about the categories of conversation that fill up our daily lives, but how they're ultimately unfulfilling, especially for the younger generations. It was a very interesting point he made, and I think I need to reproduce in its entirety.
"Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, where rhetoric was discarded by the philosophy of the Reformation, many of the young look at this interminable future of elaborate social conversation networks that industrial societies find vital to "business culture" with disgust. There is some fundamental and radical difference between the important talk of youth that makes love, friendship, and significance reasonably easy to reach, and the social conversation of older people, in particular of self-important older people, that makes it apparent these life-and-death qualities are very difficult to obtain in later life.
I hope you'll reread that last idea. It will help you understand why attractive young people in the United States, almost exclusively the sons and daughters of the prosperous, kill themselves in record numbers these days. Teenage suicide, occurring as it does in the classes who have "made it", is mute and powerful testimony to how sterile and inhuman a destination "making it" really can be. When children prefer death to the life of the future as they see it being lived by their fathers, mothers, and family friends, it's time to find the problem not in them but in us."
It breaks my heart, and I do suspect that institutionalized thinking has a lot to blame for it. I need to disagree with Emerson who said that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"; I would have to say that it's complacency that's the hobgoblin of little minds. We're living in a culture that is quickly reaching a cultural singularity where less and less free thinking will be going on, or at least that seems to be to be what's going on. I'll never forget the first work I read by Kierkegaard, and the quote of his that just jumped out at me. "People often demand freedom of speech in place of the freedom of thought they seldom use."
There's nothing quite like the freedom you feel when you feel like you're shaking it off of your back. You begin to feel compassion again, that your senses are no longer dulled, that there's hope and love in the world, beyond the narrow views of what is love that are often presented to us. You start to feel again.
But in the end, who are you?
Who are you?
Gatto has an excellent essay in A Different Kind of Teacher entitled "What Really Matters?" There are truncated versions of it online, but they just lack the punch of the one that was placed in the book.
"Where do you start? First you have to find yourself. There isn't any other way. If you wait on that you'll be buried even deeper in the artificial programs of others. First you have to strip away decades of programming and overlays and discover your own outline beneath it all. It hurts to do that. This was once called "knowing yourself". Until you know that step there won't be any self to know, just a collection of relays and switches, sensors and twitches that can be manipulated by engineers you can't see. On the other hand, if you know what matters and are willing to fight and even die for it, nothing can colonize your mind and you will be truly a free spirit.
All bold emphasis is my own.
I don't know if I've ever known a generation who seems to be lost without an identity more than my own. An entire generation raised to be special and never knowing what makes them supposedly special; no wonder employer's are at a loss at how to handle employees from my generation, a generation raised without a sense of personal identity and raised completely with a sense of dependency. I've seen the excess of it all. When we didn't accept what the television said--I know it to be true because MTV tells me so--we wandered around like little children in the supermarket, all the way up into our teens and beyond. Waiting to be told to stop, waiting to be told when to go. Turn me on, turn me off, because I don't know how to take care of myself. I must know something because my diploma says I do, but why do I feel so lost? I think that about sums up too many people I have known, including myself. I wasn't surprised for a minute to read that my generation doesn't have an appreciation for the effects of violence or that it's the most materialistic and narcissistic generation yet; how could I be surprised when this was exactly how we were raised to be.
How many of us are acting based purely on impulse? What impressed me about that Gatto quote was what I bolded. It hurts to do that. This was once called "knowing yourself". The stakes are high, especially with being at the doorstep of transhumanism, which will only open up a whole new can of identity issues. If it hurts this much now to recapture yourself just for you, to be that person you are and be completely one and at peace with that, then how are we going to survive down the road, when we don't even seem to be sure who we are most of the time? What caught my attention in Gatto's essay was what he wrote about machines. He noted a couple of things, that we communicate and live through machines now, which denies us a large part of our identity. Part of the exhilaration I've felt from feeling like I had my life back again is that I'm starting to see people again, and I'm much more aware that I'm lost in a world of machines. Everything we do now is dependent on machines, and while I'm not a Luddite, we erred in letting them set up our identities for us. Our identity has become supplanted by the identity of the iPod, the identity of the personal computer, and, the worst culprit of all, the identity of the television. We've let things define who we are. Is it any wonder that there's so much desperation in the nation that has long been considered the capital of progress and prosperity? Is it any wonder that there is a malaise in this country with a psychic sense of decline when we don't feel like we even know who we are anymore, much less who are neighbors and loved ones are?
Who are you?
What has exacerbated the situation for my generation is that we don't know anything practical. I can't take care of myself right now, I lack the ability and knowledge. Our adolescence has become a kind of extended childhood, making us older and older dependents. I do not know the first thing about simply living, and so at the age of 20, nearing 21, I am scrambling to figure out how I can even manage to take care of myself. Oh yeah, I know a lot of things. I had facts and figures crammed into my head, ready to spit out like a living Pez dispenser, but what do I even really know? I forgot about the world outside, having been programmed, and pushed further and further into a box I simply existed in. No wonder Ireland seemed like such a liberating experience for me.
What's going to happen when we further lose our identity in machines? Gatto has some ideas:
"Machines can be stored anywhere, can function anywhere, and are indifferent to the machines they associate with, but men and women must build the meanings of their lives around finding a few, very few, people to touch and love and care for. If you fail in that it doesn't matter how well financed the school you went to was, how healthy the space program is, or how many machines you own--you'll be miserable. If this is so, and I confess it looks that way to me, you'll have to sabotage the global economy to survive as a human being, and you'll have to learn to think for yourself because schools and governments and machine-makers will lie to you about what matters every time."
Bold mine again.
I know my stakes in the matter, and I know what I'm fighting for. I have a better idea of who I am. I know what's right for me. And Gatto was right, it hurt a lot to get here. Friends would occasionally tell me that I would benefit from all of this, and I did. It hurt like hell, it hurt a lot. I was torn apart inside and driven to complete madness. Everytime I thought I was out, I was dragged back into the pit. In the end though, it gave me back who I was, and who I should have been. It had to be done to bring me here, otherwise I would have languished, emotionally crippled and devoid of anymore function in this world. Force of will, love, and compassion have brought me back though, and restored my identity to me. I smile from time to time now.
A New Challenger Enters the Arena
Due to writer's block, I haven't written a whole lot on this blog, even though I vowed I would. Another problem is that my upcoming trip to Canada and New England for a week (starting on Sunday) will also resort in me not posting anything, exacerbating the posting situation. All of that is superfluous to this post.
For the few people who read this, and the one or two people who have stumbled here, a new poster has been added to the blogroll of Heartland of Darkness. He doesn't go to a liberal-arts college in the so-called heartland, but he does go to a college and I do know him. His name is Sam, and if he wants to introduce himself proper in anyway, he will, but for now I will introduce him.
His name is Sam.
Anyway.
Sam and I knew each other in high school. He was a grade behind me, but he's two years younger than me due to the fact that he had been bumped up a grade. I first came in contact with Sam through Quiz Bowl (yeah, we were both quiz bowl dorks), where his intelligence was quickly noticed by all. If my memory serves me properly, and it may not, I was still playing on the JV team (where the freshmen and sophomores were relegated to, and I was a sophomore), while Sam the freshman was immediately bumped up to varsity level. It was during my sophomore and junior years that Sam and I became a kind of intellectual rivals with each other, at least when it came to politics. Sam often viewed my beliefs as a bit crazy, and so it went, we debated each other and played Quiz Bowl and often mocked each other in class.
During my junior year was when we were both on the varsity team, and where him and I started to respect and like each other more, greatly due to the fact that we were 2/3s of the team. My junior year didn't yield a lot of varsity quiz bowl players. Normally teams at the very least have four players (the maximum allowed to play at once in the league we played in), but there was only myself, Sam, and our captain Julie; a trio fighting against the odds.
Senior year was when I inherited the title of captain for our varsity team. I got to spend the year leading a rag-tag pack of five other quizbowlers, only one of whom was a senior like me. I might not have been the smartest of the six, but I had to be the stable center and lead all of us on. I also got to prep Sam to take the title of captain for the next year, since I would be gone. I probably failed in this regard and I'm sure Sam just figured it all out on its own, but I like to make up memories of me being a good mentor.
It was also during that year that I was starting to slowly win Sam over to my side. As we debated Frederic Bastiat (he's still a favorite of mine) and laugh along with the inimitable H.L. Mencken, we began to see eye-to-eye much more. Oh, the woe I brought to his parents by radicalizing their son. I just have that effect.
I lost contact with Sam for a while when we were both in college, mostly due to the fact that I went completely crazy and just the general effect of our lives drifting apart from one another, but now we've come in contact with each other again, and I think we've both become surprised at how different the other is. Even though we still find interesting ways to butt heads with each other, we still manage to see eye-to-eye as well.
And that is my terrible introduction for Sam, the other poster at Heartland of Darkness.
For the few people who read this, and the one or two people who have stumbled here, a new poster has been added to the blogroll of Heartland of Darkness. He doesn't go to a liberal-arts college in the so-called heartland, but he does go to a college and I do know him. His name is Sam, and if he wants to introduce himself proper in anyway, he will, but for now I will introduce him.
His name is Sam.
Anyway.
Sam and I knew each other in high school. He was a grade behind me, but he's two years younger than me due to the fact that he had been bumped up a grade. I first came in contact with Sam through Quiz Bowl (yeah, we were both quiz bowl dorks), where his intelligence was quickly noticed by all. If my memory serves me properly, and it may not, I was still playing on the JV team (where the freshmen and sophomores were relegated to, and I was a sophomore), while Sam the freshman was immediately bumped up to varsity level. It was during my sophomore and junior years that Sam and I became a kind of intellectual rivals with each other, at least when it came to politics. Sam often viewed my beliefs as a bit crazy, and so it went, we debated each other and played Quiz Bowl and often mocked each other in class.
During my junior year was when we were both on the varsity team, and where him and I started to respect and like each other more, greatly due to the fact that we were 2/3s of the team. My junior year didn't yield a lot of varsity quiz bowl players. Normally teams at the very least have four players (the maximum allowed to play at once in the league we played in), but there was only myself, Sam, and our captain Julie; a trio fighting against the odds.
Senior year was when I inherited the title of captain for our varsity team. I got to spend the year leading a rag-tag pack of five other quizbowlers, only one of whom was a senior like me. I might not have been the smartest of the six, but I had to be the stable center and lead all of us on. I also got to prep Sam to take the title of captain for the next year, since I would be gone. I probably failed in this regard and I'm sure Sam just figured it all out on its own, but I like to make up memories of me being a good mentor.
It was also during that year that I was starting to slowly win Sam over to my side. As we debated Frederic Bastiat (he's still a favorite of mine) and laugh along with the inimitable H.L. Mencken, we began to see eye-to-eye much more. Oh, the woe I brought to his parents by radicalizing their son. I just have that effect.
I lost contact with Sam for a while when we were both in college, mostly due to the fact that I went completely crazy and just the general effect of our lives drifting apart from one another, but now we've come in contact with each other again, and I think we've both become surprised at how different the other is. Even though we still find interesting ways to butt heads with each other, we still manage to see eye-to-eye as well.
And that is my terrible introduction for Sam, the other poster at Heartland of Darkness.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Mixologist Jesse; Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Drink Until I Can't Feel Anything Anymore
The world is a difficult place to live in sometimes. Or most of the time. Or all the time. Pick your preference, it's all the same to me. When your country feels like it has descended into a collective psychosis, ultimately you feel the urge to go crazy yourself; or drink. People have found other ways to cope, and I applaud them for it, but those two are consistent favorites. I've tasted both myself, and I do enjoy mixing and matching. There's plenty to drive you to that point, such as the recent announcement that Norman Podhoretz has been named Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy adviser. A lot of candidates have been coy about their desire to bomb Iran, but here's a man who has come out and said he wants to bomb Iran, and I guess in that weird "respect your greatest enemy kind of way", you can applaud Podhoretz for saying what others are thinking, as much as it makes you want to reach for a strong drink.
That last sentence right there is what we call a segue, because I'm going to use that to move onto talking about alcoholic drinks, because if there's anything you need when the politicians are turning your trousers brown, it's a strong drink. As Charles Bukowski once said, “So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” So I present ten favorite drinks of mine. They're not ranked in any preference, because I can't even begin to rank them. I've tried many different things before my 21st birthday, which is coming up, and I'm just thankful to have them (as long as I can stomach them).
1. Gin and Tonic
I start things off with an oldie-but-a-goodie. Is there anything more perfect than a well-made gin and tonic? It's a king among summer cocktails, and even with its occasional reputation as an "old person's drink", I can't think of many who have tasted a well-made gin and tonic and have been above drinking it. If you feel you've lived a full life full of purpose and accomplishment, this is the perfect drink to kick off the apocalypse with, as you kick back in your lawn chair and watch two suns in the sunset.
2. Guinness
If you've never had a perfectly poured Guinness in Ireland than you simply don't know what living is. There are those who prefer stronger stouts, but they all lack what Guinness has, and that's the experience of Guinness. You simply cannot replicate it in America and what you can but at the stores will never give you the experience of drinking a Guinness in an Irish pub. Thicker than our piss-poor American beers with a heavenly layer of cream on the top, this is a beer for those who crave something old that is still good in this world of ours that is falling apart.
3. The Bitter Pill
This one is not as well known, and it was one that I discovered on drinksmixer.com, probably the best source for any adventurous mixologist. It's a very simple drink, just mix equal parts Jack Daniels and vodka and mix with Coke. The effect is very interesting, because when mixed properly, the Jack will disguise the vodka, making this beverage quite potent, as my roommate at the time and I found out one night. He observed "you can't even taste the vodka at all" and so on a whim we made these drinks portable and went scouring our liberal-arts campus in search of parties to crash, and by the time we had found one, the Bitter Pill had gone to our heads. The next thing we knew, we had crashed a party in a freshman room, where we entertained the eager-eyed first-years with tales of our college adventures and my roommate's family's tendency for penguin theft. The rest of the night was a flash-forward montage of devious plans, and ended with us waking up in our beds. My roommate wasn't alone in his bed though, and found that he was cuddling a large inflatable banana that we had nabbed at some point during the night.
4. 151 Reasons
151 Reasons is plain and simply a madman's drink. No sane person should be drinking Bacardi 151 in the first place. However, since I'm off on the cusp of madness, I guess I can get away with it at times. I often like to play with the recipe, but the basic recipe is here. The drink was a bit of a hit among my friends at our yearly toga party, and it's existence has become a bit synonymous with me, since I'm really the only one who makes it at the college. I never imagined that orange juice would mix well with any kind of lemon-lime soda, or lemonade, but apparently I was wrong, and when mixed properly it has a kind of tangy taste that really helps with the high-proof of the liquor. Don't expect to really remember anything if you drink more than a single cup of it though. I drank a little too much of it before a pirate themed party in one of the dorms, and the stories revolving around that night have become the stuff of legends.
5. Finlandia
When people ask me what my favorite vodka is (and I do love vodka), the answer I'll most often give is Finlandia. Scratch that, because my favorite vodka is a vodka that for the life of me I can never find (it's called Priviet Vodka, and because of how hard it is to find in my college's area, the vodka has become a bit of a much-desired commodity after I gave it the one-time introduction to the college), so really, my favorite vodka I can find is Finlandia. I love it because it's affordable and it's pretty good as far as vodkas go (if you can't handle drinking vodka straight, than the quality of the vodka really doesn't matter a whole lot in the scheme of things, but I do drink it straight). I also have a strong preference for Finlandia with Lime, which is a couple of dollars cheaper and is infused with my favorite fruit. It's actually been a long time I've had it, and I think in order to celebrate my 21st birthday, I may need to pick up a bottle of it.
6. Arrogant Bastard
I don't think I could do Arrogant Bastard any justice, so I'll let it speak for itself:
"This is an aggressive beer. You probably won't like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appericate an ale of this qualtiy and depth. We would suggest you stick to a safer and more familiar territory-maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it's made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beer will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make a beer taste better. Perhaps you're mouthing your words as you read this."
It has a high alcohol percentage of 7.2%, traditionally comes in a single 22 oz. bottle, and really, you have to love craft beer to love this strong ale. It is very tasty though, and a wonderful treat after a long week.
7. Cran Vodka
Often times the best drinks are the simplest ones. Cranberry juice and vodka. Simple, to the point. It was actually after trying a cran vodka that I started drinking cranberry juice in the morning. I had an aversion to cranberry juice due to some bad association I had with it, but when I unknowingly tried a cran vodka, the tangy taste of the juice itself won me over. This is an everyman's beverage, something that is cheap and easy to make which anyone can enjoy. This is the drink you drink when the trendiness of our culture reaches ridiculous heights. At the end of the day, you sometimes just need familiarity. Delicious familiarity.
8. Long Island Iced Tea
A classic. I don't know many people who drink them these days, but my father had a pretty humorous story about drinking them when they first became popular. My mother has been a bartender for many years, and she used to know a lot of other bartenders, and when my parents were younger, my father was waiting for my mother at a bar that a friend worked at. The bartender asked my father if he wanted to try a Long Island Iced Tea, and my father did. He drank the first one down and asked for another, telling the bartender to actually put some alcohol in it. My father didn't know anything about Long Island Iced Teas at the time, and after the fourth one, he went to grab his coat, and spent about a minute reaching for it. He hadn't realized that he had gotten drunk on them and had lost all motor skills. My mother had to walk him to the car and drive him home.
9. Tequila Sunrise
I don't even know if I would call this a favorite drink. I hate tequila. I like it in Long Island Iced Teas, but I hate tequila other than that. It's something out of the foulest depths of hell. Somehow though, I became reluctantly fond of tequila sunrises. It's not something I would prefer to drink often. I've found that certain liquors have different effects on me. Wine makes me pensive, gin makes me effervescent, rum and beer make me jovial, vodka is a bit of a wild card and tends to just amplify how I've been feeling the whole day, but tequila makes me very angry. Actually, the only reason it probably made this list is because through it, I've become fond of the tequila sunset. I'm not keen to drink a tequila sunrise until the sun rises, but I do like drinking a tequila sunset when the sun sets on our "new empire in rags" (apologies to New Pornographers).
10. Disgruntled Elf
The last drink is one that my former roommate turned a lot of us onto at the wedding reception for two of our bars. With an open bar at our disposal, he gave to us the Disgruntled Elf. 1 oz. each: Triple Sec, Gin, white Rum, blanco Tequila, 2 oz. of granny smith green apple syrup, and 6 oz. of Sprite. It's a mighty mean drink and it was a hit at the reception. It seems to have the right proportions and it tastes very smooth. The green tint of it also makes it that much more appealing, since it's well-known that color has a strong appeal in what we eat and drink.
Well, after typing all of that, I really want something to drink now.
That last sentence right there is what we call a segue, because I'm going to use that to move onto talking about alcoholic drinks, because if there's anything you need when the politicians are turning your trousers brown, it's a strong drink. As Charles Bukowski once said, “So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” So I present ten favorite drinks of mine. They're not ranked in any preference, because I can't even begin to rank them. I've tried many different things before my 21st birthday, which is coming up, and I'm just thankful to have them (as long as I can stomach them).
1. Gin and Tonic
I start things off with an oldie-but-a-goodie. Is there anything more perfect than a well-made gin and tonic? It's a king among summer cocktails, and even with its occasional reputation as an "old person's drink", I can't think of many who have tasted a well-made gin and tonic and have been above drinking it. If you feel you've lived a full life full of purpose and accomplishment, this is the perfect drink to kick off the apocalypse with, as you kick back in your lawn chair and watch two suns in the sunset.
2. Guinness
If you've never had a perfectly poured Guinness in Ireland than you simply don't know what living is. There are those who prefer stronger stouts, but they all lack what Guinness has, and that's the experience of Guinness. You simply cannot replicate it in America and what you can but at the stores will never give you the experience of drinking a Guinness in an Irish pub. Thicker than our piss-poor American beers with a heavenly layer of cream on the top, this is a beer for those who crave something old that is still good in this world of ours that is falling apart.
3. The Bitter Pill
This one is not as well known, and it was one that I discovered on drinksmixer.com, probably the best source for any adventurous mixologist. It's a very simple drink, just mix equal parts Jack Daniels and vodka and mix with Coke. The effect is very interesting, because when mixed properly, the Jack will disguise the vodka, making this beverage quite potent, as my roommate at the time and I found out one night. He observed "you can't even taste the vodka at all" and so on a whim we made these drinks portable and went scouring our liberal-arts campus in search of parties to crash, and by the time we had found one, the Bitter Pill had gone to our heads. The next thing we knew, we had crashed a party in a freshman room, where we entertained the eager-eyed first-years with tales of our college adventures and my roommate's family's tendency for penguin theft. The rest of the night was a flash-forward montage of devious plans, and ended with us waking up in our beds. My roommate wasn't alone in his bed though, and found that he was cuddling a large inflatable banana that we had nabbed at some point during the night.
4. 151 Reasons
151 Reasons is plain and simply a madman's drink. No sane person should be drinking Bacardi 151 in the first place. However, since I'm off on the cusp of madness, I guess I can get away with it at times. I often like to play with the recipe, but the basic recipe is here. The drink was a bit of a hit among my friends at our yearly toga party, and it's existence has become a bit synonymous with me, since I'm really the only one who makes it at the college. I never imagined that orange juice would mix well with any kind of lemon-lime soda, or lemonade, but apparently I was wrong, and when mixed properly it has a kind of tangy taste that really helps with the high-proof of the liquor. Don't expect to really remember anything if you drink more than a single cup of it though. I drank a little too much of it before a pirate themed party in one of the dorms, and the stories revolving around that night have become the stuff of legends.
5. Finlandia
When people ask me what my favorite vodka is (and I do love vodka), the answer I'll most often give is Finlandia. Scratch that, because my favorite vodka is a vodka that for the life of me I can never find (it's called Priviet Vodka, and because of how hard it is to find in my college's area, the vodka has become a bit of a much-desired commodity after I gave it the one-time introduction to the college), so really, my favorite vodka I can find is Finlandia. I love it because it's affordable and it's pretty good as far as vodkas go (if you can't handle drinking vodka straight, than the quality of the vodka really doesn't matter a whole lot in the scheme of things, but I do drink it straight). I also have a strong preference for Finlandia with Lime, which is a couple of dollars cheaper and is infused with my favorite fruit. It's actually been a long time I've had it, and I think in order to celebrate my 21st birthday, I may need to pick up a bottle of it.
6. Arrogant Bastard
I don't think I could do Arrogant Bastard any justice, so I'll let it speak for itself:
"This is an aggressive beer. You probably won't like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appericate an ale of this qualtiy and depth. We would suggest you stick to a safer and more familiar territory-maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it's made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beer will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make a beer taste better. Perhaps you're mouthing your words as you read this."
It has a high alcohol percentage of 7.2%, traditionally comes in a single 22 oz. bottle, and really, you have to love craft beer to love this strong ale. It is very tasty though, and a wonderful treat after a long week.
7. Cran Vodka
Often times the best drinks are the simplest ones. Cranberry juice and vodka. Simple, to the point. It was actually after trying a cran vodka that I started drinking cranberry juice in the morning. I had an aversion to cranberry juice due to some bad association I had with it, but when I unknowingly tried a cran vodka, the tangy taste of the juice itself won me over. This is an everyman's beverage, something that is cheap and easy to make which anyone can enjoy. This is the drink you drink when the trendiness of our culture reaches ridiculous heights. At the end of the day, you sometimes just need familiarity. Delicious familiarity.
8. Long Island Iced Tea
A classic. I don't know many people who drink them these days, but my father had a pretty humorous story about drinking them when they first became popular. My mother has been a bartender for many years, and she used to know a lot of other bartenders, and when my parents were younger, my father was waiting for my mother at a bar that a friend worked at. The bartender asked my father if he wanted to try a Long Island Iced Tea, and my father did. He drank the first one down and asked for another, telling the bartender to actually put some alcohol in it. My father didn't know anything about Long Island Iced Teas at the time, and after the fourth one, he went to grab his coat, and spent about a minute reaching for it. He hadn't realized that he had gotten drunk on them and had lost all motor skills. My mother had to walk him to the car and drive him home.
9. Tequila Sunrise
I don't even know if I would call this a favorite drink. I hate tequila. I like it in Long Island Iced Teas, but I hate tequila other than that. It's something out of the foulest depths of hell. Somehow though, I became reluctantly fond of tequila sunrises. It's not something I would prefer to drink often. I've found that certain liquors have different effects on me. Wine makes me pensive, gin makes me effervescent, rum and beer make me jovial, vodka is a bit of a wild card and tends to just amplify how I've been feeling the whole day, but tequila makes me very angry. Actually, the only reason it probably made this list is because through it, I've become fond of the tequila sunset. I'm not keen to drink a tequila sunrise until the sun rises, but I do like drinking a tequila sunset when the sun sets on our "new empire in rags" (apologies to New Pornographers).
10. Disgruntled Elf
The last drink is one that my former roommate turned a lot of us onto at the wedding reception for two of our bars. With an open bar at our disposal, he gave to us the Disgruntled Elf. 1 oz. each: Triple Sec, Gin, white Rum, blanco Tequila, 2 oz. of granny smith green apple syrup, and 6 oz. of Sprite. It's a mighty mean drink and it was a hit at the reception. It seems to have the right proportions and it tastes very smooth. The green tint of it also makes it that much more appealing, since it's well-known that color has a strong appeal in what we eat and drink.
Well, after typing all of that, I really want something to drink now.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Strange Talk About Edgar Cayce
My college was founded by the Disciples of Christ, a small Protestant denomination of Christianity that was basically an off-shoot of the Restoration Movement. I could probably do a whole post about that, but that's not what I'm going to write about right now. The Disciples of Christ have given the world some interesting, well, disciples. Some of the well-known people who came out of the Disciples of Christ have been Colonel Sanders, Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand, and gay bishop Gene Robinson (before he came out and before he became Episcopalian). Also, Ronald Reagan was baptized in the church before he became a Presbyterian later on. There are two disciples though who are much more controversial though. The first is Jim Jones. Yes, that Jim Jones. A lot of people don't know this, but Jim Jones was a minister in the Disciples of Christ, beginning in 1964, and was closely affiliated with the church up to the mass suicide at Jonestown (that embarrassing debacle for the church prompted changes within its structure so that something like that wouldn't happen again).
This post isn't about Jim Jones though, it's about the other controversial disciple; Edgar Cayce. I don't know if this post can even do Edgar Cayce justice. So much has been written on Edgar Cayce, and he has had an enduring influence on the New Age movement, it's difficult to know where to even start. Some view Cayce as a 20th century mystic, while others saw him as a crank. As for what my opinion on him is, I'm pretty much in the "he was a crank" camp, especially since he was the precursor to the odious New Age movements, but he's still a fascinating figure to me regardless.
Some quick biographical information about him. Cayce's early life has little to note. He was born (1877) and raised in Kentucky, was a very devout church-goer and read the Bible every year, all that jazz. Cayce's life changed after he was struck with a pretty bad case of laryngitis, causing him to completely lose the ability to speak. A year later, 1901, a traveling hypnotist attempted to cure Cayce. According to accounts, Cayce's voice returned when he was under a trance but disappeared when he was out of it. After that, a local hypnotist continued to work with Cayce to get his voice to return, which apparently worked, but a peculiarity about the treatment was that in his trance, Cayce used the pronoun "We" instead of "I". Another peculiarity about it was that Cayce could also apparently know the symptoms and cures of other people's ailments when he was under a trance, and so he began to trance heal for free in town. Cayce's fame grew and he started to rely on voluntary donations to support himself and his family as he did his readings.
In 1923, Cayce moved on from simply trance healing to much more weightier topics, and began to delve into reincarnation and people's past lives. From 1925 until his death in 1945, Cayce worked as a professional psychic in Virginia Beach. The reason why that Cayce endures is because of some of the interesting things he predicted and the things he believed. You can find many of those prophecies here, but to sum up, a lot of them were about subjects like Atlantis and the Sphinx, and other paranormal things. Egypt frequently came up with Edgar Cayce, and he believed that records about Atlantis lay somewhere beneath the Sphinx.
Of course, there are the critics.
It's too late though to really delve into the beliefs, predictions, and followers of Edgar Cayce though, so this is a topic I will return to later. Enjoy the night you insomniac Heartlanders.
This post isn't about Jim Jones though, it's about the other controversial disciple; Edgar Cayce. I don't know if this post can even do Edgar Cayce justice. So much has been written on Edgar Cayce, and he has had an enduring influence on the New Age movement, it's difficult to know where to even start. Some view Cayce as a 20th century mystic, while others saw him as a crank. As for what my opinion on him is, I'm pretty much in the "he was a crank" camp, especially since he was the precursor to the odious New Age movements, but he's still a fascinating figure to me regardless.
Some quick biographical information about him. Cayce's early life has little to note. He was born (1877) and raised in Kentucky, was a very devout church-goer and read the Bible every year, all that jazz. Cayce's life changed after he was struck with a pretty bad case of laryngitis, causing him to completely lose the ability to speak. A year later, 1901, a traveling hypnotist attempted to cure Cayce. According to accounts, Cayce's voice returned when he was under a trance but disappeared when he was out of it. After that, a local hypnotist continued to work with Cayce to get his voice to return, which apparently worked, but a peculiarity about the treatment was that in his trance, Cayce used the pronoun "We" instead of "I". Another peculiarity about it was that Cayce could also apparently know the symptoms and cures of other people's ailments when he was under a trance, and so he began to trance heal for free in town. Cayce's fame grew and he started to rely on voluntary donations to support himself and his family as he did his readings.
In 1923, Cayce moved on from simply trance healing to much more weightier topics, and began to delve into reincarnation and people's past lives. From 1925 until his death in 1945, Cayce worked as a professional psychic in Virginia Beach. The reason why that Cayce endures is because of some of the interesting things he predicted and the things he believed. You can find many of those prophecies here, but to sum up, a lot of them were about subjects like Atlantis and the Sphinx, and other paranormal things. Egypt frequently came up with Edgar Cayce, and he believed that records about Atlantis lay somewhere beneath the Sphinx.
Of course, there are the critics.
It's too late though to really delve into the beliefs, predictions, and followers of Edgar Cayce though, so this is a topic I will return to later. Enjoy the night you insomniac Heartlanders.
Nature's Little Monsters: Voodoo Wasps and Zombie Cockroaches
I have a couple of phobias, and one of them is entomophobia, the fear of insects. All insects. Not just spiders (arachnophobia), but any kind of insect or bug, or anything resembling one. Worms too, put them on there. Anything that can be called a bug, or even be incorrectly called a bug but is generally called a bug, I want nothing to do with. They freak me out. I don't like them on me, and I certainly don't like them causing me to wake up by buzzing around my hand when it may or may not be a wasp when I'm busy dreaming important things. Thankfully, that thing I heard about eating spiders while you sleep appears to be a myth, but the thought is unnerving enough.
One part of my hatred of bugs (and my reasons are countless) is that they are simply nature's monsters to me, and I'm not alone in this. Our popular culture is full of evil insects, from the insectoid monsters of Them to Jeff Goldblum. Then, of course, there's T.H. White's analogy between ants and totalitarianism in The Once and Future King and the fact that the Borg were based on and intended to be an insect species. Fiction doesn't hold a candle to fact though, as we've learned time-and-time again, and the darkest parts of human creativity can't compete with nature's.
Possibly vying with the candiru (it's not a myth that it can swim up your urethra, making it the most terrifying fish I have ever heard of) in scariness in concept, is the Emerald cockroach wasp. The short version is this: the wasp preys on cockroaches, makes them into zombies, and plants their eggs in them until their little wasplings burst out of the cockroach in nature's reenactment of Ridley Scott's Alien.
The longer version is that the wasp stings a cockroach and paralyzes it, and then does it's own little form of neurosurgery, rendering the cockroach into its own personal slave. The cockroach's willpower and defense mechanisms are destroyed, allowing the wasp to do whatever it pleases to it. Since the wasp cannot carry a cockroach, it uses the wasps antennas to steer the cockroach to the wasp's little lair; like I said, zombie cockroaches. The funny doesn't end there though, because the wasp plants its egg inside the roach, and when that egg hatches, that larva will feast on the cockroach's innards for the next four weeks, feasting and burrowing its way out. When it's time, a full-grown wasp bursts out of the cockroach, and the cycle of life begins again.
Nature is a very scary place.
You can go here for a more thorough look at the Emerald cockroach wasp, complete with pictures.
Well, there goes my ability to sleep without fear of nightmares tonight.
One part of my hatred of bugs (and my reasons are countless) is that they are simply nature's monsters to me, and I'm not alone in this. Our popular culture is full of evil insects, from the insectoid monsters of Them to Jeff Goldblum. Then, of course, there's T.H. White's analogy between ants and totalitarianism in The Once and Future King and the fact that the Borg were based on and intended to be an insect species. Fiction doesn't hold a candle to fact though, as we've learned time-and-time again, and the darkest parts of human creativity can't compete with nature's.
Possibly vying with the candiru (it's not a myth that it can swim up your urethra, making it the most terrifying fish I have ever heard of) in scariness in concept, is the Emerald cockroach wasp. The short version is this: the wasp preys on cockroaches, makes them into zombies, and plants their eggs in them until their little wasplings burst out of the cockroach in nature's reenactment of Ridley Scott's Alien.
The longer version is that the wasp stings a cockroach and paralyzes it, and then does it's own little form of neurosurgery, rendering the cockroach into its own personal slave. The cockroach's willpower and defense mechanisms are destroyed, allowing the wasp to do whatever it pleases to it. Since the wasp cannot carry a cockroach, it uses the wasps antennas to steer the cockroach to the wasp's little lair; like I said, zombie cockroaches. The funny doesn't end there though, because the wasp plants its egg inside the roach, and when that egg hatches, that larva will feast on the cockroach's innards for the next four weeks, feasting and burrowing its way out. When it's time, a full-grown wasp bursts out of the cockroach, and the cycle of life begins again.
Nature is a very scary place.
You can go here for a more thorough look at the Emerald cockroach wasp, complete with pictures.
Well, there goes my ability to sleep without fear of nightmares tonight.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
People You've Probably Never Heard Of: The Dark World of Emil Cioran
"Tell me, do you just like and do different things just for the sake of being different?"
A neighbor of mine asked me that recently, baffled by the fact that I disagreed with just about everything they said and believed and said things they had never even heard of before. I don't know what it is, other that that it is. There might be some element of truth to it though, since I do like to search out anything obscure and unique. It's not that I think it will make fashionable or trendy, or that I'm indie-than-thou, there's just something refreshing I find about anyone forged their own path, whether or not I agree with them. So, it seems only appropriate to start a new series on this blog, entitled People You've Probably Never Heard Of.
"Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it."
In this first installment of People You've Probably Never Heard Of, I present the curious figure of Emil Cioran. If pessimism had a patron saint, Cioran would be it. The Romanian-turned-Frenchman philosopher lived a long life, living into his 80's and dying in the 1990's, while churning out a kind of poetic philosophy that made Schopenhauer look like a sunflower.
"A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime..."
Emil Cioran was born in 1911 in Răşinari, Romania, a small town in the Transylvanian region. His parents were Emilian and Elvira. Emilian Cioran was a Romanian Orthodox priest, as had been many men in the Cioran line. The family later moved to Sibiu, where Emil began to learn the German language and develop the love of language that he would have later on in life.
Even as a kid, and later on as a teen, Cioran seemed to have a very morbid personality. When he was a child in Răşinari, he would entertain himself by playing with skulls in the cemetery, and when he was a teenager, he began to obsess over the morbid aspects of the religious life he had been brought up in. It was around that time that he lost his faith, though he never stopped obsessing over the idea of faith Christianity.
Cioran attended University of Bucharest, where he became close and lifelong friends with the lesser-known Mircea Eliade and the more widely-known Eugene Ionesco. In his more youthful days, Cioran had some sympathies with the ultra-nationalist Iron Guard, though those sympathies appear to have been short-lived. After he graduated from Bucharest, he began to study philosophy in Berlin. It was during this time though that Cioran became incredibly disillusioned with the world and with academic philosophy. His outlook began to become so bleak that his mother told him that if she knew he would be that unhappy, she would have just aborted him.
After a little bit of teaching, Cioran moved to Paris and eked out a living from translating and reading, as well as the charity of other Romanian expatriates living in the city. He also wrote and published several books of his pessimistic philosophy, often wrote in the form of aphorisms, which had become a favorite of Cioran's (and his way of merging the philosopher and the poet).
"Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough."
What does one make of Emil Cioran? It's hard to say. I've read some of his works, and it's almost breathtaking in the bleakness of how he sees the world. He has boiled down everything that was wrong with the 20th century and created a personal philosophy that not only destroyed taboos, but was almost Lovecraftian in its negative scope of living and humanity. Cioran wasn't simply in existential despair, since to despair implies that it's supposed to be another way when it isn't, because he saw the world in terms of not only was it dark and brutal, but it was destined and made to be that way.
His works aren't the kind you're likely to walk into the bookstore and find, so he remains mostly relegated as an intellectual curiosity for those who don't exactly walk on the sunny side of the street.
For further reading:
Little Blue Light
Wikipedia
Spike Magazine
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