Point Two: There seems to be a split in this type of television, though, between the pro-institution premise, the counter-establishment premise, the canned laughter approach, and the one-woman’s life thing.

I can work up only disgust for the establishmentaphilia side. I’ve no interest in legal dramas that emphasize law enforcement or crime solving. The CSI/Law & Order stuff is not my cup of tea. I much prefer ones that emphasize that police lie as a matter of course, prosecutors don’t really care if you’re guilty or not, and judges in the US have cardinal powers with little recourse if they’re unreasonable. Basically – authority is primarily an opportunity for expedience, self-service, and playing god.

The slapstick stuff  I find a bit like tricking me with fillers and artificial ingredients. And the one-woman in a tough world thing seems to be written for someone else. Even if it has some really fun David E. Kelley tropes, I can only take so much Ally McBeal – it feels like Twin Peaks ate Boston Legal and just spends too much time on one character’s feelings as a way of getting more of her legs on screen (men in the 90s were all gaga over Flockhart in a race to the thinnest). I tried the Defenders, but it’s too Dean Martin for me. On the teen side, this stuff would be Porky’s – bleh.

The absurdity of the establishment stuff with substantive characters - Boston Legal – was my first true love (and still the one I’ll go back to and watch the same episodes repeatedly, like Seinfeld episodes). Recently, I watched all seasons of The Practice that I could get on Hulu. Then I branched out to The Deep End, Raising the Bar, and now Philly. I can put up with a lot from anti-establishmentarianism – so on the teen side I liked Parker Lewis, Bart Simpson, and even Malcolm in the Middle. Smart kids making mincemeat of an absurd environment (or, if you’re not of my persuasion, absurd kids showing out in an ordinary and necessary environment). Premises govern attitudes.

One of the beautiful things about streaming video is the plethora of television shows we get to watch without having had to endure all the crap. We haven’t owned a TV set in a long time, and get 100% of that fare through Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and various international sites. The nice thing too, now, is the ability to sort and watch on demand. You couldn’t do that when you needed a TV Guide.

I love those two quotations. I worked at a place once that, when the first bombs rained down on Baghdad, broadcast radio reports of the US action over the PA system. It then ran red, white, and blue streamers at every single cubicle, wall to ceiling, and you weren’t allowed to remove them. This was topped off by gathering the entire workforce of several dozen (on my shift) in the center of the building for patriotic and religious songs, accompanied by ‘folk’ guitar. I chose to keep working and later was brought before middle management for disloyalty, being unpatriotic, and for getting chuckles from more timid souls when I said the place looked like a used car lot. I had to welcome the opportunity to bring the ultimate hostile work environment suit when they tried to compel docile participation.

Now if they’d apply this logic to university loyalty oaths. If I’d been older and smarter when I had to turn away a job I’d already been hired for, because they wanted me to swear away my mind, will, and conscience, I would have made that a test case.

The fact is, when you have to compel participation, it means your ideology is bankrupt. Even if it’s right, it’s wrong. It means your own adherence to it is illegitimate and weak-kneed. I consider contemptible any political, religious, social, or vocational ideology that has to pressure conformity and punish dissent. And when two such ideologies compete, each proclaiming themselves the sole answer, vying for all the stakes in a polarized conflict, I reject them both, regardless of what they are.

It starts out a bit YAD feeling, with what seems like it’ll be a frame story. What King is actually doing is setting up a means of discussing time travel, which I really appreciated. In fact a character I’m writing, while mostly based on a real phenomenon I experience, may have gotten his name and a little of his shape from a phenomenon in King’s book. Sweet!

The way King is decribing the town of Derry, an oppressive place that just stinks with the kind of built-in evil King likes to find in ordinary towns of ordinary people, like the abusive undertone in the ordinary American family, is superb. Also, I really, really like an encounter he set up with some wise children. King keeps feeding me sensitivities that I already like and look for, and that flesh out things I’m trying to work out and resolve in my own writing and thought. The children have a kind of Gunslinger series feel.

I’ll pretty much read any more that Koontz puts out with the three main protagonists of this one.

Money spent on a house, and then you decide you don’t want a house. Money spent on a degree, and then you decide you don’t need the degree. Money invested in a business that doesn’t work, and then you start another business. Investing in a career, and then changing careers. These seem to be a source of shame and embarrassment to the very people who are willing to plunk down huge sums if it’s “the right” choice – the “wise” choice. Any wisdom I may have comes precisely from experimentation, and being willing to pay my way in it.

I’ve noticed a close relationship between the pressure to ‘figure things out’ by the time you’re a late teen (no teen *ever* has his life figured out, mind you – so it’s pressure to assume a pose, not to embrace reality) and the conservatism that decides that, even if life isn’t particularly grand, we made the right choices because they’re the ones everyone else around us made. I think this is one reason why people become more ‘conservative’ as they get older. It’s not age and wisdom, it’s fear and shame – the shame they’d feel at having made less than made ‘less than optimal’ choices (the optimal choice at the time is whatever choice gives you the information you need) and the fear of changing direction late in life (it’s always late to those who are afraid, and always just in time to those of us with courage).

I’ll pay for education of whatever type, again and again, and never be ashamed of it. I’m not ashamed of the college courses I took in subjects I don’t use, but wanted to understand (how would I know what they were about until I studied them?). In fact, one way to get the answers to questions of vocation and lifestyle is to experiment. It’s more efficient with books, but if you don’t have the personal integrity (I didn’t always) that people misname “self-discipline”, then you can use courses. The difference is that courses empower others to decide what you know, and books empower you in regard to what you know. A “course” is literally a direction someone else plots for you. A book has a plot you choose to follow.

I’m also not ashamed of the religions I experimented with, the jobs I tried out, the relationships I tried on – for me, these were far more valuable educational choices than most of the garbage that passes for university courses. School was the *least* educational experiment. See, I think another difference between people who roll their eyes at those of us that are always experimenting, and who are ashamed of their own failed marriages, failed initial career choices, that failed stint in school, the military, or a particular religion that they prefer not to focus on, is this: those of us who are unashamed, indeed more than willing to do it again, are on a quest for truth. We live epistemically active lives. Far from being lost to an “adolescent” penchant for exploration, we are not stagnated in that late teen mode of needing to have it figured out.

Those who sweep their own experiments under the rug and have “arrived” at the truth, the way things out to be – who have figured it out (we call them conservatives, but it’s not limited to political and cultural conservatism per se – just as many leftist/progressivist political ideologues are conservatives who have ‘obtained’ the truth and are sure of how things “out to be”. Whether they raise their fists against corporations – sure they have the solution, or work as slaves to those corporations and raise their fists against people of other colors (think Alabama) or against those of us who don’t bow to some panty-colored pastel uniform with a sociopath in it that we call a “boss”, they’re all basically conservative as regards the truth. They’re not looking for it anymore – as something that you constantly grown in – they’ve found it and stagnated. That goes for your parents, too, who tell you that they’ve figured it out, how we should then live, in the form of endless advice and commentary. They’re just conservatives of a different type. The ideology is different – the mentality is the same. It’s fundamentalism about reality.

There is indeed a quality of ‘being educated’ that includes some substantial knowledge of history, literature, science, etc. But it’s also a quality of healthy respect for the unknown, and the seemingly limitless expanse of knowledge. There’s a humility towards the truth that comes from education. The prideful and mis-educated either disdain the very existence of truth (nihilism) or else insist they finally have stock of it (conservatism).

One of the reasons academia creates so many of these types is that it’s simply easier to sell in this culture. It’s a protestant attitude toward truth as something that you can presumably identify, possess, and show others – like a verse in a bible or a date on a calendar on which you were “saved”. Truth becomes a quantity of something you can possess as a personal attribute, rather than a quality of being in which we participate but cannot ultimately comprehend. That proposition – that the nature of truth is a quantity, is the one to which the nihilistic and conservative responses are directed – and it’s that proposition that is ultimately protestant, whether in belief or disbelief. There’s a certain arrogance that comes with protestantism, in whatever cultural form – whether it’s the guy trying to force others to live according to his scriptures or the atheistic (nihilistic) reaction which tells you there’s no basis for anything except expedience (now *that* is a wasted education).

A catholic epistemology sees truth not as something “we know” so much as something we are always (continually) either going into or running away from. It is never static, because we are never motionless in relation to it. A conservative calls that “relativism” and indeed, it does find useful analogy in the theory of relativity. But it’s not the kind of solipsistic sophomoric trick that the conservative is referring to. You can find that on any college campus among dopes for whom education is a gimmick – people who will never actually be educated. The protestant is afraid of truth that moves, of truth so vast you can’t get on the other side of it and nail it down like a doctrinal statement or a political platform. Afraid whether nihilist or conservative. And this fear is part of the reason they aren’t experimental-lifers – people who spend their entire lives experimenting. Not nailing it down would mean the ultimate terror – the need for continual change, possibly continual significant change, right up until you die and (in the catholic mind) even afterward.

I’m not suggesting a gnostic epistemology, best critiqued in the words of St. Irenaeus: “these gnostics claim to always be ‘seeking’ the truth but never intend to actually arrive at it”. His critique is fair. That kind of “seeking” is nihilism under the guise of catholicism. It always insists that nothing is really known or knowable, and that isn’t catholic at all – it’s gnostic-nihilistic-protestant. It’s a trick. A pose. A false mask. Our father in the Faith also criticized the gnostics for presuming at the same time to hold secret knowledge only available to the “enlightened” – for being illuminists – a contradiction with their own nihilism. In other words, they were also the other side of the gnostic-protestant rubric – conservative fundamentalists. They had comprehended the truth, could nail it down, and would tell you that you could nail it down if you shared in their inner illumination. The bishop identified among the now fashionable “secret teachings” and “secret teachers” with their “hidden gospels” the very impulse represented in today’s protestant ideology, of one kind or another, now fashionable among atheists and fundamentalists alike. In short, he criticized them for pseudo-education and artificial truth – for fake knowledge – fabricated “gnosis” – a ‘wisdom’ of unaccountable absolutes.

What’s ironic, is that if you listen to one party or another – nihilist or conservative – they’ll each paint any other option as the other faction. For them, it’s polarized among only two real possibilities with of course limitless personalization – there can only be nihilism or conservatism, however you want to package, repackage, or tailor them. They’re stuck in the same dialectic you see the US stuck in politically and culturally and for the same reasons and out of the same cultural origins. This has already been detailed quite well elsewhere and by more agile narrators than myself. So, I’m saying that I am not attempting to substantiate either position – quite the opposite – I’m linking them to each other as two facets of a single cultural attitude and impulse, and I’m rejecting that impulse, and began rejecting it long ago. To reject protestantism as a cultural force is not merely a religious attitude, but a rejection of an entire set of cultural fallacies that work themselves out in every area of human endeavour in the West.

Whenever I describe my next large-scale experiment, some conservative pops up with “the risk! oh, the dreaded risk! how can you? how could you?” and then when I persist, I get a litany of how ‘immature’ I must be, because I keep educating myself and keep paying willingly for it, with no signs of stopping. I get painted like that cousin or friend everyone has that is always one moment a true believer of this or the next thing, never anything for long. And it glosses over the real difference. I’m exceedingly happy with the results of almost all of my experiments, certainly all the big ones . And I have added what I’ve learned to my repertoire of experience and knowledge. The charge of randomness reflects not the reality of my choices but the terror and parochialism in the soul of the other person. Far from being random, I can mark an effective timeline of increasing clarity and definition as a result of those experiments. The process, in other words, overall – is an abiding success.

Just an example – I could pick from anything, but religion is handy. I spent some years as a fundamentalist. What did I get from that education. Exceeding literary familiarity with the texts they borrowed from the Christian fathers, a heavy dose of religious pathology that I know I don’t want but can easily identify, diagnose, and effectively critique, and an abiding understanding of group dynamics that I’ve found reiterated in all kinds of cultural frameworks – academia, corporate life, political activism, etc. There’s a fundamentalism of culture at work that I learned to defend against and successfully refute. I next spent some years as an Anglican. I got a heavy dose of bifurcation there (an environment rendered essentially glossaliac by competing frameworks of nihilism and conservatism) which lent a lot of insight into how Western institutions are perrenially drawn between the horns of competing internal impulses. I also got a deeper literary familiarity with some of the Christian fathers, as well as the Western post-schism writers, and some liturgical tradition. It was at this time that my interest in cultural history and cultural change was peaked, something I also pursued academically.

Eventually, I became Orthodox, and some people of course said “there he goes again” as tho I was the perennial adolescent who would never “settle down” (was never the goal). I even plotted it out on a timeline for people – this is an exceedingly common journey through one thing to the other and for exactly the same reasons widespread among a ton of people – but no, it was deeply necessary for them to view it as random. Why? The message I got back is that grownups would be terrified to change so much, more than a couple of times, and “late” in life (I thought we planned to live forever? Or was that just some crap you said at “church” but never really thought was true?). The abiding aesthetic ethos I derive from Holy Orthodoxy has served me incredibly well, as has the Eastern intellectual analysis of Western culture. In fact, to these I attribute my later liberations from polarized politics, from artificial academia, and ultimately my introduction into what I’d consider genuine ethics which has been a shaping force in my lifestyle. It’s a global religion – and when I left my home country and lived abroad, each thing only enhanced the benefits of the other. Being able to see over the roofs of one’s local village, and look at a wide world of which the village is only a small part, is hugely beneficial. One might call it the essence of education itself.

Now I could detail the same kind of journey in vocation and work, in education and knowledge, in ethics and social activity, or in lifestyle, culture, and relationships. Indeed, these are all intertwined. The need to assert that they’re random, the hapless experiments of someone who got sucked into them, and will “never learn” is begging the question. I have not only been willing to pay every bit of all of that, but would even be willing to relive the mistakes if I absolutely had to, in order to get where I’ve gotten now. I can just hear it – “I could have gotten where you are now, if I wanted to, without going through all the changes.” No you couldn’t. That’s the teenage view of how life works – that you can get it all figured out – that truth is static – that “maturity” and “wisdom” likewise come from being static. When I see grown people (30s, 40s, 50s, 60s) arguing that, it strikes me as like the pre-teen girls wearing lipstick and waving around their VISA cards in the mall. It’s a pose. Any adult that tells you they’ve got life figured out isn’t one. It’s a journey or its childhood. Actually, childhood is a journey too – stagnation because we think we have the world figured out is adolescence. It’s just that a lot of people never get beyond that. No wonder they get mad at immigrants moving into their neighborhoods, and for reasons they’re unable to fully articulate or explain. No wonder they want to burn the rest of the world if it doesn’t bow to the supreme culture. Sounds a lot like high school.

The last thing I’ll say is that, as a result of living experimentally, I know more, have learned more, and have access to a wider repertoire of perspectives than the other people I know who have lived the same number of years but decided early on that they had it figured out and have since stuck to their guns. Most of them haven’t lived more than a few hours from their birthplace. Most got “the basics” acquired somewhere in their twenties – the education, the career, the wife, the house, the religion, the political party, the kid(s), and are delivering those things in the same order to their kids – starting with schools – “the education, the…”. More power to them. I don’t disdain them for living that way. I do disdain the judgment that by not doing so I’m a random, immature blown-in-the-wind rogue bull. It’s wilder than that. I don’t intend to ever stop (again, not even after death). You don’t have it nailed down, and neither do I. The difference between us is that I also *know* that I don’t – and, again, that I’ve built up a relatively wide repertoire of reference points that can seem outlandish in that 50 mile radius, but which I’ve found incredibly useful in a big world full of seemingly limitless possibilities. I’m not better, but I find myself better off than if I’d just accepted the consensus attitude and become an upstanding citizen in my twenties.

I’ll pay for that advantage. And I’ll keep paying, as long as I can get it, because it’s the best education I could hope for. There’s no such thing as “expensive” in relation to it. All such education is costly, just as not getting it is costly. Spending years being the same and trying very little that’s new is costly. The difference is in whether we admit what we’re paying and why. I don’t have a prescription for anyone else, incidentally – though I’ve offered what I have to friends who have asked. “Try on lots of hats,” I’ve said. Find your vocation first. That’s how I see it. That’s what I think would be most effective. It has worked out well for at least one person I know, besides myself. But if I don’t have “the answer” (because I don’t believe there is just one answer – that’s not a thing I believe – it’s a thing I don’t have any beliefs in), it’s also true that no one else has a prescription for me, either. The people that think I’m doing it wrong are mainly tedious in that they think they also know how I should be doing it right. And that’s not education – it’s indoctrination. I’m just not a believer. Education has worked very well for me.

First, I don’t think of life experiments only in terms of accident and intention. The choices we make are more complex than that, and so are the reasons for them. I chose to go live and work abroad for various reasons – but mainly to see the world in a way I figured I couldn’t once I got out of school for good, and certainly not if I got married. Why? Well, I wanted a broader frame of reference, broader experience, and to interact with things more than a couple of days from where I had been.

The more conservative voices said I was being foolish to take off for a country about which I knew nothing, with virtually no money, and not much of a lifeline if I got in trouble. And it certainly was costly in many ways to be there. But what I got in return was exactly what I set out for. It’s priceless. I would do it again. Virtually the whole of the rest of my life was shaped by the understanding I got from living daily life several years in a completely alien culture – from ordinary grocery shopping to trips to the dentist to working and playing in the culture – and even if not especially from the hardship I suffered. In other words, that experiment was successful in a permanent way.

I’ve been told the benefits of it were ‘accident’, so I can’t ‘take credit’. But in fact, I set out to break free of a single cultural frame of reference, willing to risk whatever it took, willing to pay whatever price it took, and I got exactly what I set out for – what I wanted most. And like I say, I’d do it again. There were added benefits (I got married there, instead of in my country of origin), but those benefits also came from that initial choice. I met my wife as a result of seeking out and embracing an alien culture. I married her as a result of living in it and letting it change my life. If I can’t take credit for deciding to do whatever it took to get the results I’ve gotten, however they may look in the particulras, then none of the choices we make are ours to make, and that’s a theory about living in a world of either random events or predestination and helplessness that is someone else’s religion, not mine.

When we went back to the states, we chose Oklahoma, again. It’s a choice we would later regret in many ways. We did it because I weighed the savings we had against our familiarity with the other places we wanted to try. We made a choice out of economic risk assessment. My goal was financial security for my family at all costs. I achieved that goal. That experiment, too, was successful.

My wife is a child of the city, and I grew into my manhood over several years of living in city with a density that exceeds New York. It took us some years, and some extensive travel, to realize that the city is ultimately where we belong. We’re wed to it, as surely as to each other. The farther away we get, the more unhappy we get. We’re urban, right down to the sinews. In Oklahoma, we did all the traditional things that people do. We shopped, ate, and grew older. And in the last several years, kicked ourselves.

But it wasn’t the kick of failure. People who don’t grow much or evolve much talk of life as if you’re supposed to have it all figured out by the time you’re twenty. I’ve seen those guys. They never grow up. Or if you don’t, then they say you’ve “wasted” however much of your life until you do figure it out. In fact, fear of “wasting” it, or “having wasted” it is one reason so many people make some rather permanent decisions when they’re young that can’t be undone, and then never really rethink their lives. But I don’t see it that way.

None of the choices we’ve made are failures, if they were made with lasting intentions that have stood the test of time. We might revise how we answer those intentions, but even the “bad” choices are good ones if they get us farther along. That’s again, because life is a process, not a philosophical proposition. The other day I was listening to NPR and they said Oklahoma had just achieved #1 status in the entire US for financial security of its residents. Remember my goal back then?

If I had decided to hit the West Coast, which was the alternate plan at the time, and try to make a life in LA, the cost of that, while we were getting my wife the work experience to learn the language, identifying our vocations (which we did in Oklahoma), working through whether we belonged in corporate life or not (we don’t), and deciding whether higher education (which is cheap in Oklahoma) would serve us in the long run (it doesn’t), we might have broken our financial situation and ended up (as many CA residents do) fleeing to the suburbs of the Midwest. In short, we might have started in Cali and ended up living the balance of our lives in Oklahoma.

Instead, by opting during those formative years for arguably the most financially secure place on earth, one that I was familiar with, knew how to live in, and could help my wife learn to live in, a decision that intuitively and intellectually seemed safest and best at the time, we not only solved the main problems we had to solve over the next 10 years, we did so while building the financial security it would take to live almost anywhere. In other words, because we chose Oklahoma then, we can live anywhere we want now. And yes, I can take credit for that choice. I might not make that one again, but it was still probably the best one.

I remember when my wife and I were first living together in the US, what an uphill journey it was for her to find her vocation (she despaired of it at times). We experimented with various schools, areas of life, jobs. It took 4-5years before we had a possible line on it, and a couple more before we knew we were right. We got her through school on a student loan, and then paid that loan off in truly record time. We couldn’t have done it as easily struggling to live in LA or Seattle (my preference at the time). And that’s just one of the hurdles we needed to cross. The arena we picked for crossing all the ones so far was a place where we knew, at a minimum, we’d survive, not be homeless, and be able to get work easily and pay rent easily.

People who say, “Well I don’t understand why someone like you would ever pick Oklahoma to live in the first place” – this is the answer we’d give them. It was our starter state in the US. I understand there are people who love it, and want to live all their lives in Oklahoma. More power to them. For me, though, it was a place to experiment with my life and achieve success in a whole host of experiments that have paid off ever since. The list is quite long. It’s just that the rest of them lie elsewhere.

This Experiment: Success

We’re still not done. And if we die tomorrow, we won’t be done. The good work that began will be perfected until the very last day of all days for all of us, whether anyone else thinks that or not. But in the meantime, we have found our way, more than ever before, and we keep finding it. She knows her vocation, and I know mine. We have learned what we need to live in the world and also with each other. You were foolish, impatient, and premature. We would have waited for you to change, to grow, to become men and women, to reach your full stature – even though you fell terribly short of it, as your leaving makes clear. We did wait. We were waiting. And enjoying you while we waited.

We are not now the last scene of the movie, the freeze frame, just the way you remember us. We never were those frames, but we certainly didn’t stay motionless and at an end when you left. We know that it’s the same for you. You are not exactly as you were when we knew you. I want to say to you that we forgive you. We wouldn’t trust you again. How could we? I wouldn’t have the luxury of trusting you again on behalf of those I’m sworn to protect. But you were wrong, you did wrong us, and we do forgive you. And we have moved on and become more than we were. And you missed that. Like a parent missing the life of a child. You missed the most wonderful things that friendship can bring. True friendship always longs for the brightest and best for those it has joined itself to – for their exultation, fulfillment, and joy. Friendship bears all that goes before and believes in all that will come – it hopes for it all, endures all for the sake of it, and seeks it out with unfailing patience – or else it isn’t actually friendship.

We were your friends. You were not, it became clear, ours. It’s a sadness we’ll get over. But you won’t, because you never knew, not really. Those who leave never do know. And I can tell you from experience, you’ve missed the things that, as a husband who is friend to his wife, I haven’t missed. I can tell you that you’ve missed them. And she could tell you the same, I think, in reference to me. They were the kinds of things we intended to see, contribute to, wish for, and help in you as well. Maybe you have them now, and we sincerely hope that’s true, even if they’re hid from us. We wish you well, that all is most well, and will remember you the only way we can – in our prayers.

That’s a farewell, then. Fare well.

How do you deal with motivations and behaviors you don’t understand? Do you superimpose meaning over them, thereby substituting an illusion for understanding, an assumption for reality, or do you allow yourself to remain in the dark and be comfortable with the dark, rather than fabricate artificial illumination?

How do you deal with motivations and behaviors you don’t agree with, but that harm no one? Do you need to get the other person to agree, or do you accept other people being ‘wrong’ and living ‘wrongly’? Are there areas where my harmless but “wrong” attitudes and behavior are simply unbearable? Should I then continue to bear with *your* wrongness, or shall I now decide that your wrongness is likewise intolerable?

How do you distinguish your perceptions from reality, or do you? Do you see the world as a function of your own mind, or is it a thing in itself that is often beyond your grasp? Can you live in a world like that, or do you require a solipsistic world – one in which you are the only real thing, and all else has reality only to the degree and in the way in which you perceive it?

Are you looking continually for truth in life, which is our representative word for the at once transcendent and real, or is expedience more important, which is a life that’s merely self-defining and has no significance in relation to another thing of which it is a part and microcosm? In short, is it just getting this or that thing you want, or is knowing worth more even if you get nothing?

Are other people the measure of you as a person, or are you unique and immeasurable by any standard, imcomparable, non-analogous, beyond comprehension? Is it more important to know what other people expect of you, what they like and don’t like, what they prefer, how they might respond, or rather to know who you are and what you want? Or again, is who you are and what you want a quantity of what other people expect and how they respond – which is simply to answer “other people are the measure of me as a person”?

Personally, I am comfortable with the darkness, I am comfortable with you being wrong and living wrong, I am not limited only to my perceptions – I can actually touch reality and know that I have, I do not accept existence without continual pursuit of truth – consequences be damned, and the world is not the standard – I am unique star and there is no measure of me but me – I am an incomparable universe – a microcosm only of God himself, frail though I am. If you answer these questions differently, I accept that. I don’t need you to answer them the way I do. But we probably won’t ever engage seriously in the areas where we differ – not *these* areas. I consider these fundamental, core – determining factors of what we mean by knowledge, ethics, reality, transcendence, and identity. I think they are the core epistemic and moral questions. That’s all.

image is Diogenes by Jules Bastein Lepage

The idiot is the true believer – the person who, for example, says we should be spending more money on keeping the nation secure and actually connects in his mind the money spent and his security. He’s the useful fool, and is a necessary component of the political ecosystem. The liar, the other necessary component, is the ideologue – the person who knows that money spent on beautiful and noble words goes into massive graft to make rich puppet dictators and wealthy military industrial investors – but expedience commits him to selling the idiots his pitch. The liar sees the fool, but the fool doesn’t see the liar.

Now you can say I’m just being me, or there’s no basis for any of this. But it’s not like I’m the only one saying it. If you think that, then I’m probably just the only one you know that’s saying it succinctly and directly, and who doesn’t care in the slightest if you’re offended. When you watch “What’s the Matter with Kansas” or read “The Dictator’s Handbook” or delve into any number of classic and modern works of cultural criticism one could point at, you find the exact same assertion, just more politely put and spread out over a couple of hours, at least.

If the political community consists of liars and idiots. Here’s a simple self-test:

• Do you say to yourself “yes, it might be a lot that way, or even mostly, but I’m holding out that something of the political endeavour is genuine and real and worthy…”. If that’s you saying it, then you’re an idiot. I won’t say much about this, because you can’t speak to belief. Not really. People believe in all kinds of things. Some believe Elvis is still alive or Pastor Joel Osteen doesn’t want your money. When it’s belief, you just have to leave it to its own life cycle.
• Do you say to yourself (and others), “but we’re right  - our ideas are the right ones – we can’t let those people or that group win, because they’re ruining everything…” If that’s you, then you’re liar. Incidentally, we both know you are – you just have lost the moral ability for self-assessment – hence this test. You might even acknowledge that you live by expedience – some liars do – but you still see yourself as basically right and doing a good thing. Whether it’s personal or ideological advancement or both, all liars see their cause as superceding the ethics of their means. A liar is just another kind of believer.

So now you know what camp you’re in (I don’t need to know, but you know). Or else you’re in the same camp as me – the person looking around at the liars and idiots and knowing it’s not fixable. If you do believe it’s fixable, circle back – you’re in the fool camp – the idiots – you’re useful but lost in your belief. If you think it’s fixable if you could just marginalize or eliminate the other party, group, or political faction, circle back – you’re one of the liars – you believe, but mostly you believe in expedience. No, I’m talking about the small cadre of us who absolutely know there is no cure, aren’t seeking one, and don’t want to fornicate with either the cows or the bulls.

Now imagine the clarity that comes from looking at the political ecosystem in this way. It’s not the clarity of the “right” positions (the ideologue), or the clarity of the still-held ideals (the true believer). It’s the clarity of knowing it’s not real. It’s someone else’s church. It’s a religion that’s completely made up (I know, some of you are morons – you think “all religion” is made up – which is a nice cover for one’s own theological illiteracy). Political life, viewed this way, is quite freeing. You don’t have to ask, “but… but what’s the solution?!?” No one with honesty or sense is saying that there is a solution. You don’t have to pick the correct team or remain (like the true moron “undecided”) – there’s no decision to make – there’s no side to choose. It’s like choosing between the advocates of predestination and free will. That’s a Protestant argument. If you’re not Protestant, you don’t have to be involved. Personally, I’ve found approaching the political ecosystem this way frees up time that I could have spent desperately looking to fix the world. I’m using that time for other things.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. Ah, but one more thing. It’s exceedingly common in the US for people to hear this presentation (again, I’m not the only one saying it) and to respond with, “I just believe…” – “just” is the word we use when we are dismissing any rational basis for things. And what follows is so often a religious framework. According to that framework, “jesus” commands a particular political attitude. To me, of course, this “jesus” is a figment of the imagination (i.e. doesn’t exist). The offered personage is either “jesus” the idiot, or “jesus” the liar. I can’t work up belief in or fealty to either one. In this context, “jesus” is a substitute for the word “just”. It means “dismissing any rational basis for things, and all rational critique, I choose to believe (idiocy), or I choose allegiance to x-ideology (liar), and I do it by appealing to a mythic role model who would presumably do the same thing. This “jesus” is the “just”  - the excuse – the unaccountable absolute – that lets people hear the above presentation and circle back around to their position as though it never happened. This “jesus” is the justification for clinging to idiocy or lies.

You can understand why someone like me would consider “him” a fictional character – a symbolic representation of one’s own psyche and moral and intellectual failing. Of course, there is a real Jesus. Only morons deny the historicity of Jesus Christ. Might as well deny that Nero existed, or Plato. It’s usually a fashion pose (sounds clever at parties) or a cover for historical illiteracy (easy to dismiss things – harder to engage in an actual academic discipline). But the idea of that Jesus being someone who’d show up and cheer for Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin is too absurd to be taken seriously – again, unless you’re a true believer (an idiot) or are using it for expedience (a liar) – circle back around.

Related:

Harpers article on how Spiegel ties disintegration of the Republican Party to its fornication with the Tea Party. They were liars who drank fool poison and became a confusing admixture of both. They contracted “tea partyness” like a venereal disease, and appear bizarrely syphilitic on the public stage.

Digital Tonto article on some ways to spot liars and fools.

The answer is simple. I respect things that have a long tradition – either of development or of sustained and resilient meaning. That’s not what I see in a lot of pop music nor in most pop religion, each of which are rife with ill-advised fads – like the mullet which, for a time, was supported by both, to mention the least embarrassing example. I’m not an Anglican, but no one can witness the prayer of humble access contritely offered and scoff, except a small-minded buffoon. The same with the cycle of Holy Week liturgics in the Church of the East. And I’ve never seen a child left hungry, or a mother deprived of a coat in one of those rural, full gospel black congregations.

It’s popular to utter trite remarks in coffee shops like “organized religion is just stupid”, but I can’t help but feel such pseudo-intelligent postures are a cover for a certain lack of experience and inability to take stock of the heft and substance around traditions with which the dilettante isn’t familiar. The comment could just as easily be, “Baroque music is dumb” or “there’s no value or significance to the poetry of the Romantics”. One cringes at people who can be so small minded about calling things small minded.

But small mindedness certainly does prevail in almost any area of human endeavour. We like to hold up medicine or law enforcement or military operations as somehow sacred priesthoods, or the laboratory as a place of unquestioned sanity and sanctity. Yet we are aware of daily abominations in each of these fields of endeavour – indeed – we have created of them a popular machine that serves craven and prurient interests. The standard has become widespread incompetent care, brutality, disregard for the innocent, and the inflicting of immeasurable suffering, pollution, and corruption. In the main, there is nothing pure. The middle of the road is always a Hell, to paraphrase Our Lord.

There is no question that among the fields of human endeavour suffering from vapid mediocrity, saccharine pretense, and shallow hypocrisy, art and religion are as burdened as statecraft and education. The critics are often as insipid as the thing criticized. You may think that of me. Everywhere, disappointment is abundantly available.

But the fact remains that, as Hopkins said, there yet remains “the dearest freshness deep down things”. There is substance in our world, and it is to be found in all of the aforementioned areas, however rare it has become and therefore more precious. A person that cannot appreciate tradition in its many faces, who cannot abide the enduring things, the things that have grown mature or show stern metal by lasting largely unphased by the exigencies of human frailty, is neither educated, nor a person of art, nor of books, nor of man – not really, nor of the earth.

And to love those things, is to at the same time at least distinguish them from passing novelties and temporal confections, however fun those might be for the moment, with whatever passing fascination. This is simply discrimination – a positive virtue, lost in the fake egalitarianism of the 1990s, where noticing the complexity of a Rembrandt vs. the simplicity of a Matisse, or of Michaelangelo’s sculpture vs. a straw basket, was a thought crime. One can like something about each, and still appreciate the depth of the Sistine Chapel vs. a random spot of paint tossed onto a canvas in a some inflationary New York studio. One can like Alice Walker and not claim in some sophomoric pretense that her poems are no different than Hallmark jingles, nor need to insist in some bourgeois way that likely Walker herself would reject, that her work equals the Bard. The confusion of processed food with food, by analogy, results in the thoughtless obesity of our age. And the snobbery that insists your gruyere is better than my cheddar isn’t a solution.

I love Depeche Mode and dig Johnny Cash, but it’s not Handel’s Messiah, nor is the Messiah, wonderful as it is, capable of conveying the depth of ages more vast in the voices that arc across a Russian cathedral dome at the birth of God into his world. When I compare any of these things to what I see when I glance (I can’t bear to watch for long) at megachurch prosperity religion with its amped up “soldiers” of a make believe “christ” or when I can’t make it out of a store before someone flicks on some overfed urban cowboy affecting a drawl as he claims our country is right even when it’s wrong (often crossing over, in fact, into the very Velveeta faith we’ve mentioned), I detect more than a difference of degree or of flavour. I detect a difference of phyla – like the difference between SPAM and the ham steak my grandmother used to serve on Southern holidays. One of those even my dog won’t eat. He knows it isn’t food. It’s what Hawaiian Punch is to fruit juice or what Wonder Bread is to bread. What is it Lewis Black says? “MTV is to music what KFC is to chicken.”

So yeah, folk music. I’m all about it. For the same reason I prefer those Russian voices and incense of the same substance that was two millennia hence placed before the newborn God, instead of plasma screens and theatre seating with some guy telling me it’s all right to base my life on the production cycle of the Mercedes. I’m not a snob. I snack a little on sugar, salt, and fat. I read Stephen King. But as a culture, I recognize we’ve become artistically and religiously obese, because we can’t tell substance from crap. There is definitely a difference, and if one can’t appreciate that difference, then perhaps it’s at least a worthy goal. Call it education, refinement, or just awareness. The alternative is to toss out every voice with a twang, and chase the widow out of her temple for daring to offer a mite, like some beret-wearing pseudo revolutionary going on about the ‘purity’ of the “movement”. Fascism (whether in the name of socialism or culture) is every bit as popular as a complete absence of discrimination that leaves us at the mercy of pop-everything. Both are equally to be abhorred in favor of an open and exploratory conscience that can appreciate those “deep down things” Hopkins mentioned, wherever they may be found.