Several times I’ve thought about blogging a few themes – gentlemanship and its relation to wisdom and tyranny was on my mind earlier, but unfortunately it is still on my mind: there are a ton of questions that arise depending on how one wants to see the relation. It looks initially like being a gentleman has nothing to do with tyranny; it is the “many” for Xenophon who seem to hate tyrants that rule over them, but wouldn’t mind being a tyrant in the least themselves. But if one can divorce a gentleman from wisdom – and Ischomachus from the Oeconomicus is a “perfect gentleman,” and definitely not Socrates – it becomes unclear to me how a gentleman can guard fully against becoming a tyrant. Complicating this are at least two considerations: 1) a gentleman would be law-abiding (and thus not tyrannical himself, but perhaps acquiescing in tyranny) 2) a gentleman does not care for “freedom” as much as “virtue,” and doesn’t see “freedom” as indispensable to “virtue” (this sounds wrong, but think about the fact that gentlemen train themselves to willingly sacrifice, aim for honor at all costs). The considerations don’t indict tyranny from a gentleman’s perspective automatically, but then again, the whole line of thought is filled with traps (i.e. “On Tyranny” assumes the existence of beneficial tyranny – does this mean one can be virtuous under a tyrant? Strauss points out that the virtues even under the best sort of tyranny are diminished versions of themselves. Then again, Strauss emphasizes that Xenophon paints himself as an “aristocrat,” not a “democrat” – the end of the former is virtue, the latter freedom).

Anyway, none of the above is meant to be settled or even particularly clear. That’s what’s on my mind, and my head is swimming reading this stuff and wondering how to bring it to bear on what is more pressing. The neat thing about reading the commentary is that while the themes are a mess for me, the insights mean that I can go back to the dialogue and talk through it line-by-line: it’s like an instant lesson plan for a seminar.

Oh, in case you’re interested in reading the dialogue and seeing some of these issues for yourself: Xenophon’s Hiero – the dialogue is pretty short, it takes up about 20 pages in my edition.

America’s lost somewhere inside of Littleton
Eleven million children are on Ritalin
That’s why I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’
False media: we don’t need it, do we?
Pilgrims slaves Indian Mexican
It looks real fucked-up for your next of kin
That’s why I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’
False media

If I can’t work to make it, I’ll rob and take it
Either that or me and my children are starving and naked
Rather be a criminal pro
Than to follow the matrix
Hey, it’s me.. a monster y’all done created
I’ve been inaugurated
Keep the bright lights out of our faces
You can’t shake it
It ain’t no way to swallow the hatred
Aim.. fire… holla ’bout a dollar
Nothin’ is sacred
We gon’ pimp the shit out of nature
Send our troops to get my paper
Tell ‘em stay away from them skyscrapers
Ain’t long ‘fore you get y’all acres
I’ma show ‘em who’s the global gangster
Sentence me to four more years, thank ya
I’ma make you feel a little bit safer
Because it ain’t over
See that’s how we get your fear to control you
But ain’t nobody under more control than a soldier
And how could you expect a kid to keep his composure
When all sorts of thoughts fought for exposure again?

America’s lost somewhere inside of Littleton
Eleven million children are on Ritalin
That’s why I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’
False media, we don’t need it, do we?
Pilgrims slaves Indian Mexican
It looks real fucked-up for your next of kin
That’s why I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’
False media: we don’t need it, do we? (repeats several times in different ways)

Comment:

It’s been a while since I’ve listened closely to any hip-hop or rap, and The Roots are exceptionally literate – “Game Theory” (the song) is over my head currently, I’m not sure who the speakers in that song are addressing at what moment and why. “False Media” is the first song on the album Game Theory and I think accessible enough (”I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin”): our interest is the view of politics and media espoused.

The most notable line is before the song even begins in earnest: “I don’t think old men ought to provoke wars for young men to fight.” There’s a litany of Leftist complaints within the main body of lyrics: poverty and opportunity (”me and my children are starving and naked”), conformity at the expense of identity (”to follow the matrix”), power that isn’t accountable (”I’ve been inaugurated… lights”), hate (”It ain’t no way to swallow the hatred”), environmentalism (”We gon’ pimp the shit out of nature”), greed (”Send our troops to get my paper”), imperialism (”I’ma show ‘em who’s the global gangster”), jingoism (”Tell ‘em stay away from them skyscrapers”), the injustice of justice as a system (”Sentence me to four more years, thank ya”). The complaints – some of which are far more serious than many things in our political discourse currently, and yet still not taken seriously despite a host of radical academics and NPR and all sorts of crap meant to make us go on guilt trips – end with these lines:

See that’s how we get your fear to control you
But ain’t nobody under more control than a soldier
And how could you expect a kid to keep his composure
When all sorts of thoughts fought for exposure again?

The build-up to the full import of these lines begins with all of us being “lost inside of Littleton.” That “we” in the first refrain definitely contains the “I” who rhymes: the implication is that we don’t need false media because we can assume unity. There are other radical thinkers who do not think minorities can assume themselves to be an accepted part of something; the tragedy here is that there is a basis for hope – note “Pilgrims” in the list of the (in their case, once) persecuted – and that basis has been eclipsed by “false media.”

So what is false media about? “If I can’t work, I’ll rob and take it” – this might as well have been from the movie “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” based on a true story. “Starving and naked” recalls the many images of African children in poverty that are inescapable. “Matrix” moves us entirely into a movie setting; the monster that can’t stand light sounds like Frankenstein – we don’t see individuals anymore, we piece them together from media, from information about them lying about in the world. This creates something strange: the lyrics move from “I/me/my” as an actor to “I/our/you:” we’re all pieced together from media, everyone’s responsible for this mess, including our speaker (”I’ve been inaugurated”). We note that our speaker, before his “inauguration,” declared himself willing to rob to feed himself and his children (note that he doesn’t say “family”), and that descended into “be[ing] a criminal pro” for the sake of being an individual: power is the only way we understand survival or freedom or even ourselves.

How does power involve false media? We have to read a bit into this:

Keep the bright lights out of our faces
You can’t shake it
It ain’t no way to swallow the hatred
Aim.. fire… holla ’bout a dollar
Nothin’ is sacred

The monster – an actual construction from information – can’t handle truth. The power is ours: we create illusions and mask our own prejudices. We use the fact we have to survive – that we would do anything to survive – to justify what we would otherwise call hate. The trick is to recognize that this is a passive form of hate: yeah, most people aren’t skinheads. But does one need to be a skinhead to not care that the people next door are tearing each other to shreds? “Nothin’ is sacred,” but our speaker is more balanced than I am: “you can’t shake it:” this might be a necessity of political life.

Still. The next movement is to “we/our/my,” with “my paper” being the end. The implicit hate drives a search for comfort in the world, for identity raises some thorny questions. Again, who’s to blame? You can try and read this as a simple indictment of the Bush administration, but it doesn’t work: the speaker calls himself the “global gangster,” and makes it clear this is happening because all of us have a problematic conception to begin with. We think crime is divorced from us and try not to think of it at all except in cliched, trite ways – i.e. “prisons should be horrible so people want to stay out of them.” This is a hugely problematic attitude for a people who claim to be self-governing: you can’t just set prison budgets to zero and not look at the bills and the paperwork: if we were truly a democracy, every single person would know what goes on in a prison and hold themselves accountable for what went on in there. We would all be caretakers of justice, because that’s implicit in creating a government from the words “We the People.” “False media” – again – allows us to cut ourselves into parts and divorce ourselves from who we proclaim ourselves to be. There’s violence inherent in false media. To go back to the lines that matter most:

See that’s how we get your fear to control you
But ain’t nobody under more control than a soldier
And how could you expect a kid to keep his composure
When all sorts of thoughts fought for exposure again?

We’re finally in a position to see what this fully means: “it ain’t over” spoken from the mouth of the sentenced prefaces it, and what’s curious is that it’s not a threat. It’s an explanation and a genuine question. The speaker says he figured out fear, but someone else is in the position of being not only more in control, but completely out-of-control of his own life – the soldier. How does one know false media is false? Just look at how a soldier could make no sense: he’s a kid, and yet he’s fully composed. But what about “all sorts of thoughts” within fighting for their exposure? What about simply growing up and being independent?

• All American Blogger, “Who’s Best at Spotting Roadside Bombs?” – fta: For those folks who spend all their free time donning the headset, logging into XBOX Live and playing HALO, believe it or not, you will not see the roadside bomb that takes out your truck. You spend too much time narrowing your vision to the confines of a television screen…
• Finding Myself in Alaska, various pictures of Alaska itself: “Termination Dust” (click on the pictures to enlarge them), Labor Day at Hatcher Pass, Pictures of Wasilla in Fall
• Mike Tanier, “In Philadelphia, Heroes with a Lunch Pail” – an ode to Philadelphia sports fans. fta: Philadelphia sports fans are chronically misunderstood, especially by their New York counterparts. New York fans are born into a rich sports legacy: a trophy case of past champions, a galaxy of transcendent stars. Philly fans, spawned in caldrons of disappointment like the Orcs in “Lord of the Rings,” are conditioned to settle for less from their legends.
• Jennifer has some awesome photos of a walk in the park that didn’t go as expected: it had rained heavily in this area and there was flooding.
• Amy Sullivan, “Jesuit Message Drives Detroit’s Last Catholic School” – fta: In a city where 47% of adults are functionally illiterate and only 25% of high school freshmen make it to graduation, U of D is the chute through which bright young men can get to college. The school boasts a near perfect graduation rate and sends 99% of its graduates on to higher education.

More importantly, there’s something strange about saying “the boys of November” or “the Winter classic” (it is 39 degrees Fahrenheit out there). This is just strange, baseball season lasting this long. I think a lot of us who watched the Eagles crush the Giants Sunday were just happy to watch some football.

And that’s about all I have to say. I’ve been trying to write all day for the blog and nothing’s come of it. I read a lot of blogs earlier in the day that were political blogs, and they were awful for the most part. When I say “a lot,” I mean “a lot:” it is frightening what passes for an informed voter, and actually, that brings me to a question.

It looks to me that while lots of people put down “bandwagon” tendencies and “being popular,” there are actual rewards in the blogosphere for saying the same thing everyone else does. We can identify the positives of unoriginality here:

1. People can just read your titles and comment. You get interaction at a low cost.
2. It’s very easy to link and be linked to. People know what they’re getting, you know instantly where your audience is.
3. Your “brand” is established for you. People can find you if they need to.
4. The content is easy to produce, ludicrously easy. You can flood the Internet with your stuff, and ping everyone and their mother.
5. You won’t get the greatest keywords, but you’re still writing keyword rich content implicitly.

I’m curious: What other positives can you identify, and how do the bandwagon tendencies the blogosphere (or the Internet as a whole) produce differ from bandwagon tendencies in general?

The Menexenus ends with Socrates promising to tell more grand political orations to a young up-and-coming politician if the latter will not reveal to the source that he is giving the speeches away. The secret pact for the future between a philosopher and a youth is forged because of what is explicitly political; the source of Socrates’ funerary oration in the Menexenus itself is Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles of whom Socrates not unsubtly hints is responsible for the funeral oration of Pericles himself. It is curious that the Menexenus is so hopeful: not only is the central event of the dialogue a speech marking death, but Socrates tells of events that occurred only after his death (Bruell 202). The dialogue is entirely imaginary; the character Menexenus was discussed in the Lysis, where he was much younger and said to have promise; one of the issues here is the legacy of philosophy as opposed to history (201). But that legacy involves a dependence on the historians – not just Thucydides, from whom we get the Funeral Oration of Pericles that the dialogue is a comment on, but also Xenophon’s historical depiction of Socrates. In Xenophon’s Symposium, Socrates defends philosophizing outright against the man from Syracuse at a most playful moment (Symposium VII:2 – VIII:1), and the very playful beginning of this dialogue – Socrates jokes that Aspasia beat him if he didn’t recite the lines she dictated correctly (236b-c) – indicates that Socrates is perhaps most forthright in a sense here.

We see Xenophon and Thucydides being cited in terms of philosophical content at the opening of the speech – the beginning is an announcement that “There is a tribute of deeds and words” (236d). For Xenophon, what is crucial to know are deeds, speeches, and what men silently deliberate. For Thucydides, a preoccupation with words tends to ignore the fundamental importance of deeds: if one knows how others acted, one can reconstruct the speeches they gave to others or themselves to a reasonable degree. Now Pericles opens his own Funeral Oration with a questioning of the ancestral law requiring a eulogy: great deeds can only be rewarded properly by other great deeds, such as the very elaborate funeral given at the occasion. Speech, according to Pericles, is potentially dangerous to the truth of actions; it makes the truth a battleground, and if people hear of too much greatness, they become envious and incredulous (Thucydides 2.35). Pericles is not opening himself to a charge of undermining his own speech necessarily: the ancestors were not perfect in creating this law, but he will make the most of the opportunity and create something significantly better. After all, his generation is greater than those before: the military achievements of the past do not even need to be mentioned for the present purpose (2.36).

Socrates’/Aspasia’s speech is of immediate contrast. Words matter: “noble words are a memorial and a crown of noble actions, which are given to the doers of them by the hearers. A word is needed which will duly praise the dead and gently admonish the living, exhorting the brethren and descendants of the departed to imitate their virtue, and consoling their fathers and mothers and the survivors, if any, who may chance to be alive of the previous generation” (236e). Logos connects the living and the dead, nothing less: through logos is fulfillment of nature (”imitate… virtue”) as well as a sense of wholeness (”consoling”). An even greater implication is how we know those who have departed at all. One has to wonder if this is a shadow of philosophy – in loving wisdom, do words end up fusing “what is” and “what is not?” More importantly, for our purposes: the ancestral is not dismissed in Socrates’/Aspasia’s speech; in order to know how someone is good, one must account for their good fathers and ancestors. If Pericles is dismissive of the ancestral – the basis of justice in any given political order – for the sake of empire and glory, it seems like the movement of the speech in the Menexenus is from nobility and glory to piety and justice. We get a hint of this with the regress of ancestors: it turns out the most important ancestor for Socrates is the earth – the country from which Athenians are sprung, who of course is a goddess and discussion of which requires an accounting of gods and men toward her.

Bruell points out something most curious about all of this: facts which Pericles stays silent on, facts which discuss the unjust acquisition of empire by the Athenians, are distorted by Socrates perhaps in order to exhort the Athenians to virtue and justice (Bruell 208). This is a notion of prudence completely alien to us: we want everyone to swallow the hard, bitter truth all at once on any given issue. The fact that each time we make someone else eat what is bitter we conveniently ignore what we ourselves are avoiding is lost on us; I don’t think it is a coincidence Socrates speaks of civil strife in his speech, and cannot praise those involved in it at all, even though he can praise a number of other suspect deeds (243e – 244b). Socrates appeals to the “veritable tie of blood” creating “among them a friendship as of kinsmen, faithful not in word only, but in deed” as making the civil war fairly mild. Still, he asks for remembrance of those who died and how they died, and prayer for their reconciliation and gratefulness for the reconciliation among Athenians now. The link between between untruth and justice we have discussed before (law gets its strength primarily from its age); the link between untruth and fraternity is perhaps more related to piety than we assume.

Obviously, there’s a lot more in the dialogue than the points which we have touched on briefly; it is recommended because it does not shy away from the most pressing issues at the foundation of politics. One of those issues is the relation of family, honor and the city (209). Socrates ends the speech with two addresses of fathers going to war: to their sons, they speak as if already dead; to their parents, they speak as those about to die. They warn their sons about an honorless life: “life is not life to one who is a dishonor to his race, and that to such a one neither men nor gods are friendly, either while he is on the earth or after death in the world below” (246d). To their parents, they say “the gods have heard the chief part of their [their parents'] prayers, for they prayed, not that their children might live forever, but that they might be brave and renowned” (247d). The sons are told virtue is necessary to get anything out of wealth, beauty, strength and knowledge (246e – 247a); the fathers alone are told that happiness resides in having one’s life “ordered for the best” simply: temperance, courage and wisdom are displayed in remembering a proverb and accepting loss as one would gain (248a). The city is dependent on the family in the most critical way: if one of the problems of law is that its punitive aspects reflect human nature negatively, and its positive aspects shape man into something that doesn’t grasp his potential appropriately, we can see how the family works with that tension. The sons are threatened with punishment but are aiming to achieve and secure goods; the parents are exhorted to bear loss nobly but understand virtues which lend themselves to preservation. Perhaps law as a practical matter finds coherence within the scope of the family, i.e. “who one is” and “who one can relate to” (want to be). As a purely theoretical matter or purely individual matter, it can contradict itself in the most basic way: witness the typical discussion about Hobbesian sovereignty and the right of self-preservation.

References

Bruell, Christopher. On the Socratic Education: An Introduction to the Shorter Platonic Dialogues. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

Anyway, I did read a lot of poetry this month, and brought four poems in particular up on the blog:

• Robert Bly, “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter”
• Nomi Stone, “Why I Came”
• Emily Dickinson, “Expectation – is Contentment”
• Amy King, “Ivywall of Sparrows”

I also reviewed some of Thomas Jefferson’s writings, and put forth some speculation:

• Thomas Jefferson to William Ludlow: Monticello, Sept. 6, 1824
• Jefferson’s Epitaph, Education, and the Enlightenment Republic

And there was much written in a more practical vein about politics:

• A Quick Guide to Right-Wing Extremism on the Web
• Yet Again – Under No Circumstances Should Jon Corzine Be Elected Governor of NJ
• On Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”

I don’t think this was the greatest month in terms of my personal reading, but I can’t say I’m displeased with the writing. The future only promises to be that much brighter.

for Rob Davis

I missed you at the coffee shop
before sunrise, so I went along
with a to-go in hand all the way
to Clinton and Jerolemon,
where the subway juts up
from the earth’s eye socket,
& from the corner of my own,
I twisted toward the sparrows
upon sparrows covering
a 30-foot stucco wall cracked
with song, without syllables,
“Here Comes the Sun” in case
I lost track of the time.
Tell the people you pass
and inhabit later on:
Take your marketable skills
and raise them to this wall;
hold your brush up wet with
rushes and slows and find
your daytime position sings here.

Comment:

“I missed you” at a place we would awaken; there is little if any light out. Therefore, “I went along with a to-go in hand:” not seeing entirely yet, and with an object not made for any particular place.

“Clinton and Jerolemon” is almost an intersection in Brooklyn, and “where the subway juts up from the earth’s eye socket” may or may not be near there – I’m imagining the Borough Hall Metro stop to be like one resembling an eye. This landscape probably isn’t real: this could be anywhere: the poem ends with an exhortation to the entire world. “[F]rom the earth’s eye socket, / & from the corner of my own” – not that we see, but how we see. We are mimicking something we perceive to be natural, something that is an aspect of the whole (the earth). Therefore, “I twisted toward the sparrows / upon sparrows covering:” darkness upon darkness is being dispelled, but we only see that by forcing ourselves to pay attention to the sunrise, seeing a sparrow’s dullness emerge.

There is no light imagery except for a song title, and that is the revelation of cracks in a wall. That revelation signals the onset of the work day: the thing about the wall of sparrows is that for a moment, it doesn’t matter if they’re real or painted. The sun and the wall itself do not care, and yet are present; something in our speaker has broken through (”juts”/”cracked”), and darkness has come to life. So from silence, to a song playing in one’s head, there now emerges “tell.” This telling is universal, but we do not naturally associate with everyone – universality is achieved, and ends up being something different from what was first assumed.

For now, the achievement depends on taking what in us makes the work day and sacrificing it to the wall: “raise” has every religious connotation possible, and this is an awakening of light, not coffee. This doesn’t mean we abandon our work, though. Our work makes us a brush loaded with paint, capable of different sort of brushstrokes: “rushes and slows.” Working conceived as painting finds the individual daytime position singing. There never was anything universal other than the crudity of stumbling in darkness and standing in light; all people experience time. The true discovery of the “universal” is the individual.