Shut Up!

Juror 5 works in education and is from Harlem. She said she tries to avoid political conversations and doesn’t care for news. She said that she appreciates Mr. Trump’s candor. “President Trump speaks his mind,” she said.(1)

If there is one thing that I have hated, at least since my college days, is the excusing of stupid, irrational, racist, misogynistic, conspiratorial, etc. bullshit spewing from people’s mouths as the action of merely “speaking their minds” or “expressing themselves.”(2)

When people speak, I want reasonable, logical, factual discourse. 

*

One thing I discovered today is that the American Legion considers me a “Patriotic American.” As such, I received a questionnaire that the AL has loaded with leading questions. 

Take the title question about protecting “American Values.” How can one answer “No”? Of course the phrase “American Values” is question-begging. What are “American Values”? How are they defined? And perhaps, more importantly, who has the right to define them?

The first question really gives the lie to any possibility of objectivity. Calling the flag “Old Glory” lays on the patriotic schmaltz pretty thick. 

The second question hauls in the ACLU as, one imagines, a boogie man. We all know that that organization’s activities are iffy, right? And here they are acting against “religious symbols.”

The third, fifth, and eighth questions veer away from so-called values. The third is another question-begging question. The other two are just banging you over the head with feel-bad information.

Questions six, thirteen, and fourteen are the red-meat American Legion questions. Question six drags in “traditions” (a question-begging word) to nudge a positive response to dragooning students into “reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem.” 

Questions thirteen and fourteen drag religion and God into the mix. I think it’s clear what “values” the Legion is trying to get us to reflex approval of.

*

 

Now, I’ve written about the Pledge of Allegiance before(3), so I don’t have to go through the same ideas again. However, let me bring in one new thought: What is accomplished by having six- and seven-year-olds mumble off by rote the P of A, when they have no idea what the words mean? 

“What is ‘allegiance,’ Bobby?” “I don’t know, Miss Brown.” 

*

Recently, I received a mail ballot for the election of fire commissioners for the part of the township I reside in. Wondering what exactly the commissioners did and who I should vote for, I accessed the Board of Fire Commissioners website and located the minutes of a recent meeting. Here’s what I found:

BOARD OF FIRE COMMISSIONERS MEETING

ORDER OF BUSINESS

REGULAR MEETING: October 2, 2023 / 2000 Hours

The regular meeting of the BOFC of the 7th Fire District was called to order at 20:00

hours by President Brian Henry, notice of the meeting was published in the Home News

Tribune and Star Ledger and posted in the Fords Library and on the Commissioners’

bulletin board.

Roll Call: All commissioners were present.

The Pledge of Allegiance . . .was given.

The guys whose job it is to fight arsonists start off their meeting with a recital of the Pledge of Allegiance. Now, what in hell does reciting the Pledge have to do with snuffing out brushfires or rescuing cats from trees? Unless it is make sure that none of the elected commissioners have defected to the maple leaf flag or El Tri, leaving the district vulnerable to a towering inferno. 

***

(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/nyregion/trump-trial-jury-hush-money.html

(2) See: https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2012/04/whisper-of-muse.html

(3) https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2019/06/ive-pledged-already-thank-you.html

 

Why the Great American Novel Won't Get Written

Recently, I watched a DVD of La mariée était en noir [The Bride Wore Black]. The film, adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich (writing under the pseudonym “William Irish”), was directed by François Truffaut and starred Jeanne Moreau as the title character. Wed and widowed within a few minutes, Julie Kohler seeks revenge against the five men who were responsible for the murder of her newly-minted husband as he and Julie posed on the church steps for a formal wedding photograph. To accomplish her mission, Julie, adopting various personae, travels across France (for the men have scattered after the fatal moment and never maintained contact with each other) to hunt them down and do them in, crossing off one by one each name on the list in her little black book when she has succeeded.

Though the movie lives up to its reputation as a classic and I enjoyed it immensely, I nevertheless could not get one big question about the plot out of my mind: how did Julie know who the responsible parties were (and, concomitantly, how did she know where to find them)? The police have no idea that the murders are linked or that any of the victims were involved in the unsolved murder of Julie’s husband. Only a second sighting of Julie by a character who was friends with both victims one and four leads to her connection to the revenge murders—but not their connection to the original murder of her husband.

*

It took me several years of procrastination after my retirement before I was ready to sit myself down before my computer keyboard to write the Great American Novel (Mystery Division). I had had several plot ideas in my head for a while, and I plucked the “stolen identity” one from the gray matter, fired up the machine, and started to write. I knocked out the first (admittedly short) scene fairly quickly, saved it on a floppy disk, and spent the rest of the day feeling rather Hemingwayish and Fitzgeraldian.

And so to bed—where I lay awake all night, trying to weave together the strands of the plot (how did A get to location Z?; when did B find out about Y?; and on and on through the night). I tossed, I turned, and, when the little voice in the back of my mind whispered, “Gotthelf hath murdered sleep,” I realized that if I continued my project, I would never sleep again until I, unlike Truffaut, left no questions to be answered.

That opening scene remains on that floppy, on some shelf or in some drawer—perhaps to be found in some heap of rubble many centuries from now by a future generation able to apply its superior knowledge to crack the Rosetta Stone floppy and to discover the mysteries of our culture—then again, maybe not.

But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

Essence of Cow

Two Museum Visits—and an Art Gallery Not Visited

***

Stepping off the elevator at the Museum of Modern Art several years ago, I proceeded into a room of paintings that I was sure that I had visited many times before. However, this time as I turned to the wall on my right, I was stopped in my tracks by a painting that I had no recollection of seeing previously: “The Cow with the Subtile Nose” by Jean Dubuffet: 

I gazed at the work in wonderment for some time. Surely, I thought, this is Essence of Cow.

***

Some years later, wandering the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I decided to drop in at the International Center of Photography, then located on museum row on upper Fifth Avenue. The ICP was hosting a group exhibition, each of the participating photographers being allotted wall space for both his prints and a statement of purpose. As I walked around the gallery I became aware of one salient fact—the photographers whose pictures held my attention had all declined to make a statement about their work. Their photographs worked as photographs because their images contained all the information needed. In contrast, there was one photographer who had an IDEA: he was in Hawaii and decided to go out into the tropical forest in the middle of the night and snap pictures at one location facing in different directions. The result was a set of images that looked like nothing at all, and had no compositional sense or internal tension.

***

The art gallery not visited was in Suffolk, England.

As reported by the Daily Telegraph in 2001 (link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1312686/Student-lazes-in-bed-for-her-art.html), for her end-of-the-year project an art student named Katherine Hymers was to spend four days lying asleep on a single bed set in the middle of the gallery amid the work of her fellow students. Her “work,” she said, was “a symbol of her struggle as an artist, representing the way that her art has become her life.”
Of course, just by looking at someone snoozing, one would instantaneously grasp that meaning, right? Or would one have to poke Ms Hymers in the ribs and ask, “What the hell are you up to?”

***

Francis Bacon (the 20th Century painter, not Shakespeare’s contemporary of the same name) once said, “If you can talk about it, why paint it?” Words are no substitute for (and certainly not an improvement on) the direct experience of art. Critic Jonathan Jones recently stated in the Guardian, “Art doesn't have to be about anything to be good. In fact, the easier it is to say what a work is about, the less interesting that work becomes.” I am reminded of the second- and third-rate books in the syllabi of some of my former colleagues; they were there because they were easy to teach in a connect-the-dots way. One could talk about Themes and Ideas all day. Never mind that the works were in themselves “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,” to quote Hamlet.

Henri Cartier-Bresson said great photography depicted "the decisive moment,” which he described as “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression." Perhaps all great art, each in a way appropriate to its particular genre, strives to accomplish the same result.
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To view some paintings by Francis Bacon: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bacon/
To view some photographs by Cartier-Bresson: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&rlz=1B2RNFA_enUS304US342&q=henri+cartier-bresson+the+decisive+moment&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=FywcS6SBOYOnlAeym7HvCQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=6&ved=0CC4QsAQwBQ

Cave or Cure? (Civilization, Part One)

The mighty Greek armada is making its way towards Troy. Its purpose is to deliver Helen, the wife of Menelaus, one of the leaders of the Greek forces, from her Trojan captivity and restore her to her husband. The fleet makes occasional stops along the way, and on one of those stops Philoctetes, one of the Greek warriors, literally steps into tragedy.

Oedipus the King is, of course, by far the best known play of Sophocles. His Antigone is also very well known. But, unfortunately, few people are aware of the tragedy of Philoctetes. In typical Sophoclean fashion, almost all the action has taken place before the playwright chooses to open the play. The mis-step of Philoctetes has occurred almost ten years before when he blundered onto a patch of sacred land. In punishment for his action, a guardian serpent bit him on the leg, infecting him with noxious venom. Back on board ship, the wound began to fester, and its stench and Philoctetes’ cries of pain were so disturbing to the other warriors that Agamemnon, Menelaus’ brother and leader of the army, had to do something. He called upon Odysseus (who is always referred to as the “wily Odysseus”) to come up with a plan. Odysseus had the ship make another landfall (this time at a deserted island), where he lured Philoctetes onto the shore and stranded him, as the rest of the army sailed off to war.

A war, which after almost a decade of bloodshed, still had not been won.

And here is where Sophocles begins his play.

Odysseus has once again been called upon to use his wiles for the benefit of the group. A prophecy has revealed to the Greeks that they can only conquer Troy with the use of the bow and arrows of the god Herakles. Unfortunately for the army, the weapons were gifted by Herakles to Philoctetes. Crippled by his wound and unable to wander far from his cave home, Philoctetes is dependent upon the bow and arrows to secure food. The weaponry has sustained him—that and his undying hatred of the man who deceived him.

Odysseus has taken Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, to Philoctetes’ island, intending to use him as a cat’s paw, to get the young man to inveigle the weaponry from the grasp of the crippled man. Neoptolemus does succeed in getting his hands on the weapons, but in a fit of conscience and pity gives them back to Philoctetes, who then turns the weapons on the man he most despises, Odysseus.

Disaster looms—averted only by the appearance of a literal deus ex machina: Herakles descends from the heavens. He addresses Philoctetes:

Thou too like me by toils must rise to glory-
Thou too must suffer, ere thou canst be happy;
Hence . . . to Troy, where honour calls,
Where health awaits thee- where, by virtue raised
To highest rank, and leader of the war,
Paris, its hateful author, shalt thou slay,
Lay waste proud Troy, and send thy trophies home. . . .
My Aesculapius will I send e'en now To heal thy wounds-Then go, and conquer Troy.

(translated by Thomas Francklin)

Left to himself, Philoctetes would savor his bile and nurse his grievances. But the god’s command to Philoctetes to swallow his hatred for Odysseus and the rest of the Greek leadership overrules him. The gifts of the gods (such as Herakles’ bow and arrows) are not for a private man. They are meant for the community (civilization, if you like). And it is within civilization that the arts and sciences flourish. It is only when Philoctetes is re-integrated into society that he can be healed. There is no art of medicine on a desert island.

The New "Chosen People"

Have you noticed that we have a new group of “chosen people”? The Jews? They’re passé. Besides, they’re all mixed up in Gaza (wherever the hell that is). 

It’s here in the USA that God matters, and God has been slowly building up his troops. In 1953, it seems that there was only one person whom God could depend on—President Dwight Eisenhower. At least that’s what The New Yorker reported one divine claimed. 

More recently, the USA no longer has had to depend on a lone soldier like Ike; there has been an onrushing of newly-anointed saviors of this country. 

For example, Tom Parker, the Alabama chief justice, has stated that “God created government,” and claimed that he himself had been called by God to “the mountain of government.”*

Then there’s Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who expressed shock that he was elected to that gaudy post:

But despite Johnson’s shock at being chosen to lead his people, he concluded that God knew best: “Only God saw the path through the roiling sea,” he concluded. . . .

In his first speech upon becoming speaker, Johnson said, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority.”**

But to top it all off, there’s Trump. 

This is really a battle between good and evil," evangelical TV preacher Hank Kunneman says of the slew of criminal charges facing Donald Trump. "There's something on President Trump that the enemy fears: It's called the anointing."

The Nebraska pastor, who was speaking on cable news show "FlashPoint" last summer, is among several voices in Christian media pressing a message of Biblical proportions: The 2024 presidential race is a fight for America's soul, and a persecuted Trump has God's protection.***

Trump has seemingly embraced this view of his mission in life:  

The former president has started some rallies with a messianic video made by social media influencers which opens with the line: "On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said: I need a caretaker, so God gave us Trump."

Well, all I can say is: God also gave us the tsetse fly. 

***

* https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/alabama-ivf-ruling-is-an-assault-on-the-right-to-privacy.html

** https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/12/mike-johnson-christian-nationalist-lawmakers-moses.html

*** https://www.yahoo.com/news/god-gave-us-trump-christian-100346241.html?guccounter=1

Language Follies 11 (The Ides of March Edition)

The Ides of March

If you’re Julius Caesar, you should take the soothsayer’s advice and beware this day. If you’re anybody else, there’s nothing to fear. “Ides,” which sounds so ominous, did not mean anything like”hex” or “evil eye.” In Roman times it merely was the designation for the middle of the month; hence, for March, the 15th.

*

Today’s Orwell Award for Euphemism

“Pain compliance”

“In a nutshell, pain compliance involves either manipulating a person's joints or activating certain pressure points to create sufficient pain to achieve compliance.”*

Don’t you love police talk?

*

The Wisdom of the Walls

Here’s some of the latest intelligence from the boundaries of sporting venues:

“100% Guaranteed Gasolines” 

(As distinct, one wonders, from what?)

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“Defending Networks. Hunting Forwards”

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“Tawandang German Brewery” 

(Which is located at 462/61 Rama III Rd, Chong Nonsi, Yan Nawa, Bangkok 10120, Thailand)

<>

And, finally Dr. Cinik, the good old Turkish man-of-all-work, who offers “Dental Treatments,” “Hair Transplants,” “Plastic Surgery.”

*

“Psyop”

(Or, “I am talking out of my rear end”)

“Lately,” The Washington Post, tells us,

it’s become popular in conservative media circles to brand certain things as a psychological operation, or “psyop.”

Climate change, for example. Or covid. Or the media coverage of Donald Trump. Or even the prosecution of Hunter Biden.

The Post identifies Fox News host Jesse Watters as 

perhaps the most influential superspreader of the term. In January, Watters used a just-asking-questions formula to suggest that Taylor Swift is a psyop asset of the Defense Department. 

Watters acknowledged that his show “obviously has no evidence” for the claim . . .**

*

“If I Wasn’t So Wrong, I’d Be Right”

Winthrop Sargeant was classical music reviewer of The New Yorker for many years. This item from April 30,1955 beats anything else he ever wrote:

*

And lest you think that a non-music music review would top the crazy chart in 1955, here’s a conspiracy theory that belongs to the world of Jesse Watters 

***

* https://www.officer.com/home/article/10250067/pain-compliance-vs-body-mechanics

** https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/02/22/psyop-conspiracy-theory-conservative-media/