CH@VEZ:

Apparently, English-speakers needed an excuse to regard Todd as a Chavez, perhaps for lack of associates of mixed race, Spanish ancestry, or simply pale-faced Mexican descent. When stepfather Jorge Chavez “returns” to Todd’s Life in Season Six, appearing in fact for the first time on screen and without any prior indication that he had existed, viewers had an “a-ha” moment, as though only by having a Hispanic stepfather could Todd have been worthy of the Spanish surname. At first, it seems like the opportunity to apply his knack for misadventures towards a noble, egalitarian cause would teach father and son to atone and to understand one another as men and equals. Yet, as per usual, the cinematic universe of BoJack Horseman thrives off of the tragedy of those who feel and the comedy of those who think. When it most looks like Jorge Chavez is about to commend Todd for his good will, trusting outlook, endearing demeanour and godly karma, he defaults to perhaps the most crushing prejudice he could produce: I should have realized [why my way of doing things, according to dedication and hard work, is not Universal:] you’re white.

Personally, I felt the sting of that on multiple levels. As a first-generation immigrant from the proverbial Second World, I know that life is not easy for first-time Americans and their immediate progeny. My parents, too, had imbibed me with a number of prejudices from the Old World regarding dedication and hard work, though it did not take me long to see the error of their ways. For years, I ascribed their myopic fixation upon worldly notions of “success” to the “evils” of Life Under Communism, thinking that it was only owing to trends in Eastern Culture that most of the Honours Students, many of them Asian, were afflicted with hypocrisy, competition, and neurosis. It became clear to me, around the time I read Thoreau, that being “dedicated” was a form of tunnel vision aimed only at one’s own preservation and aggrandizement, and that life outside of dogma required an open mind, a forgiving attitude, and some luck.

Even had he not been voiced by Aaron Paul, I must imagine that Todd would have exemplified my “new virtues”. For some time, I thought of these as “American values”. The Protestant Work Ethic seemed to be entirely contrary to the Protestant Reformation, and by contrast Eastern religions, as well as the absence of religion altogether, removed the felt “necessity” to work hard when cleverness might help to attain the same ends by more sensible and humane means. Perhaps the Asians I knew personally were all overachievers, as accords the stereotype and culture, but their religions expressed a different ethos.

Yet being easygoing had little to do with being “white”. Black America taught me that any value, no matter how noble, could be subverted if it might become the expression of tyranny by one group towards another. Furthermore, it was only White America that seemed to harp on “hard work”.

I expected to find more sanity once I returned to college, having heard that “Cultural Marxism” was on the rise. Yet I was crestfallen. Liberals had begun to think only in the same banal terms as the proto-Fascists they opposed, and while there was a craze among dark bodies to tell their sob stories and phobias, the simple fact that police officers in America can’t tell Russian Jews apart from W.A.S.P.’s seemed to be the cause for my exclusion, even from the company of those people who valued inclusion most. Besides: yet again, being noble had become a cut-throat competition!!

Todd Chavez has not had it easy. Since Episode One, we have been privy to his many lives, all of them overlooked by BoJack, who only recognizes Todd’s “alternative lifestyle” as being valid if Todd is a “troubled gay teen”. Yet not only do we learn, three seasons later, that Todd is part of an even smaller sexual minority than homosexuality; we also see in that same episode that he is involved with the Mexican drug cartel.

Todd is apparently not so Nordic in appearance that he can’t pass for Latino. Five episodes later, Todd’s charming face earns him an affiliation with both the Skinheads and the Latin Kings in a Los Angeles prison, though his refusal to adhere to any ONE label almost gets him murdered, except for when his incredible luck saves him.

When Todd realizes that he is asexual, he resists labelling to the best of his ability, though he finds it impossible to escape the realities of being a sexual minority, realities which to some extent are deeply peculiar to those people who HAVE that label.

All that Todd seems to want from people, outside of what they offer him voluntarily, is to be respected unconditionally. His stepfather, given the opportunity to learn this, only otherizes Todd. And this is why Todd refuses to visit with the Mother he just saved. By his own admission, he is a Chavez, so he must be cold beneath his cheerful persona. By telling his stepfather this, he atones with the father figure, transcending whatever nostalgia for his mother he might feel. Yet he also shames the name of Chavez and all the false pride that Jorge ascribes to it. “Dunking on the olds”, perhaps for the first time, Todd at once owns his Hispanic identity and disowns its meaning.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

O RALLY:

O Rally: Activism on the Internet and Why It Does Not Work.

Take feminism, for example. A great many of us encountered this, amidst other philosophies, in our early days of surfing chatrooms, often walking straight into a fringe debate between a group of political radicals serving a private purpose and a group of men of early to middle age resisting these notions. Even an adolescent boy can realize quite quickly that there is nothing universally “feminine” about the feminist position; this is rather a reaction to patriarchy, and as a reaction it is also a transparent outgrowth of it. By the time that we graduate high school, we’ve managed without it, since there is little social pressure or historical precedent to embrace it. We have weighed its pros and cons, decided upon the extent to which it affects, and put it to rest. Perhaps we dated a feminist that left a sour taste in our mouths and some emotional scarring whose social and legal ramifications took years to recover from, but as painfully as we learned that misandry exists, we are to that same extent more sympathetic to victims of misogyny, so we do not throw feminism out with our exes. We simply recognize the extent to which an ideology can help to influence worldview and behavior, as well as to facilitate healing, and we choose a stance that behooves us individually, and proceed. Our fathers already taught us the fallacies underlying this ideology, and we know to what extent we wish to be like our fathers, so again: we put the matter to bed, knowing where we stand. Being the chivalrous type goes hand in hand with being a male feminist, and we accept the charges of feeling good about ourselves in this manner to that extent which we can afford it. We don’t march in the streets. Yet we do accept the burden of being the guy who doesn’t laugh immediately at the period joke. And though by that I don’t mean to say “period” as in “period piece”, that secondary meaning also works, since it’s just what life at the start of the millennium was like.

When Emma Watson found feminism, or perhaps feminism found her, it was like the discovery of electricity: profound, life-changing on a global level, and redundant. Feminism had been around for one hundred years, so of course educated people HAD known about it. Some of us had deeply nuanced ideas about why it could not work, alongside many other radical ideologies that appear good on paper. But we had no idea that somehow these views would be dismissed OFF HAND by a mob of social networkers who shared their ideology through memes, tweets, and upvotes. The far left was one monster, but this began to look like FASCISM. Consider the Polish Jew who has devoted his life to studying Nationalism and expounding upon its shortcomings: by the time that he catches wind of the latest Nationalist craze the Gestapo is already at his door, and they are NOT interested in hearing his thesis.

But SURELY it would not come to THAT. NOT in AMERICA.

That first year wasn’t so bad. I was not surprised to find myself surrounded by feminists on the Debate Team, since power is a huge motivator for the POOR debaters. Debate was something divorced from ordinary life, either because it was an attempt to reform life in the image of a better one, or because it was a game to many people. By this point, I had had enough run-ins with the New Left to understand that I was a different kind of liberal. I could also see that this new feminist fad was simply derivative of the older feminism, and if I had to call myself a “non-feminist” or an “anti-feminist” in order to consolidate my stance on certain matters of common sense, then that was totally okay. Perhaps I *would* have called myself a feminist back when I played Braid, though its creator Jonathan Blow denied any sort of feminist message attached to it, dismissing associations between his game and “their own ideologies” as superficial. (Coming from a Berkeley man, that’s quite the moderate statement!!) Yet at that time catcalling was “still a thing” (the first thing I defended, in the spirit of simple transparency and modern solidarity with strangers, wishing not to live in fear and thinking to accrue attention by being generous with it) and abortion was a controversial issue about which I was starting for the first time to think critically and with respect to the intrinsic value of Life and how that plays a role in secular ethics. So no: I could no longer safely say I was a feminist, because I did not wish to  be one of “those” people.

But I had no idea that I was in a dilemma; I could no longer safely say that I was NOT a feminist, either, even if it was true. And this changed everything. For the first time in my life, politics mattered outside of politics.

And one learned what happens when non-politicians try to be politically correct.

The craze, which I tried to the best of my ability to hold back from affecting my life, really hit decisively when Bill Cosby was arrested. Here was a man who not only helped to shape my childhood with his work; in fact, references to his influence upon the childhood of millions became a sort of red herring, a pseudo-Freudian analysis of infantile retention in a society that was progressively [sic] losing its grasp upon what it means to “grow up”. Bill’s work was not a testament to our youth but to his own legacy; his arrest was a testament to a new bureaucracy that threatened to destroy any such legacy. I found myself surrounded by young people who could no longer separate art from artist, though I only knew one man who ever MET Bill Cosby, and I knew no such women.

At first, it all seemed obvious to me: CLEARLY you never KNOW the Artist. The Artist is presented to you through a series of photographs, quotations, and vocal recordings, as well as public records, always filtered through a highly regulated bureaucracy wherein every member’s job is to produce media that appears to “Truthfully represent Reality” whereas every human shortcoming ensures that this amounts to nothing more but “mere media representation”. I did not KNOW the artist; I only knew his work. And while I do not extend this to men like Charles Manson, I had no precedent yet to EQUATE Bill Cosby with Manson. How could I? After all: not only was there no physical evidence presented for foul play, but literally fifty women at the LEAST came forth making the same claims.

I must have laughed. This, I thought, might finally wake people up to how silly the whole craze was. After all: if you have a mob of fifty strangers saying the same thing, CLEARLY they have conspired based upon a common goal, made available to them by the suggestion of the media. No one would POSSIBLY believe them without evidence. We might extend that courtesy to friends, since we stand by our friends no matter what. Without us, our friends might have no one to listen to them, and we would not wish that upon them. Every person deserves to have his or her point of view received, at least by SOMEONE, though it need not be by EVERYONE. And when it’s just one or two people saying it, then do they NEED evidence? What are the odds that they would even FIND it? We don’t HAVE to take their claims into consideration; it’s a fact of life that not all things which happen personally happen LEGALLY. But that’s just part of growing up. A miscarriage of law has one true victim, and that is the Law Itself. If you will pardon the extended metaphor, to hate the law for an injustice in its application (a “miscarriage”) is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Yet if we are GOOD FRIENDS who can ACCOUNT for the CHARACTER of the apparent victim, we might give him or her the benefit of the doubt, since that is not outside of our ability, and neither is it gossip, whose portents always pale by contrast with a firsthand account.

Could an entire generation of young people have forgotten this??

But surely, not THIS generation. After all, we grew up with the INTERNET. A simple Google search and we have access to a treasury of history. We can learn about the Holocaust, the Salem witch trials, and the Inquisition, as well as the popular presumptions that appeared to justify them. A few quick clicks will produce an entire list of formal fallacies on Wikipedia, with the fallacy ad populum right up there, cushioned cozily against the fallacy ad hominem. Rudyard Kipling satirized the mob with his apes saying “we all believe it, so it must be true!!” Surely, in an age saturated with popular science, we are so scientific as to deny any crowd making unwarranted claims. It’s kid’s stuff: the more people that believe something, the more likely it is that at least ONE of them will produce concrete evidence for it. This in itself is not confirmation bias, so it serves as the standard for whether or not the belief is valid. Conversely, if FIFTY people CLAIMING TO BE DIRECT WITNESSES, as VICTIMS, cannot produce a single modicum of evidence, then FIFTY PEOPLE ARE WRONG. We KNOW that. Because we have the Internet, and that means no excuse to ignore the history of popular delusions.

In order for Bill Cosby to have been convicted, not only would we have to warp his words from over ten years ago in order to “sound misogynistic”. We would also have to IGNORE the fact that what APPEARS misogynistic now, ex post facto, would have been normal for any one of us to say back then, and without any reason to presume that we “know better now”, we would have to ignore as well that he made no attempt to HIDE this. We would also have to prioritize the interests of a GROUP of people over the rights of any one individual, meaning that instead of saying “it is better for ten criminals to go free than for one innocent man to be imprisoned” we should say “it is better for one man to be presumed guilty than for fifty women to be silenced”. We should have to ignore the entire history of witch hunts, as well as the plaints of one of our father figures who taught us to think critically, reducing our use of the Internet to social networking and skimming only that surface of it which comes up on the headlines of a search engine, which now functions like a monopolized international newspaper that governments are forbidden to unsubscribe from, for fear of appearing tyrannical. Finally, we should have to so reduce intellectual inquiry to repetition and adolescent gossip that it would become indistinguishable from upvotes and likes, giving into the entire force of emotivism and, despite having gone to college, saying things like “all these people can’t be wrong”, thus adding to the same mass of popular consent that we have just arbitrarily enthroned for being so massive. Information, no longer restricted by reason or factuality, would spread literally like a viral video, propagating exponentially, since only its size is required for it to keep growing in approval. Our analyses into the subtleties of intersexual communication and the use of modern chemicals would be reduced to saying “me too!!” like children in a classroom who have yet to learn that reality is not always ABOUT YOU; that’s why it’s called OBJECTIVE. Above all, we would have to so fetishize “consent” that any sort of DISSENT would be sacrilegious.

But we are much too “clever” to do that. RIGHT??

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

QU!D PRO QUOT!NG: a Response.

SOURCE: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/the-secret-to-getting-people-to-do-what-you-want.html

RESPONSE:

My God, this is literally the second lowest form of moral development. It is literally advertised as how to manipulate people, and then you try to deny its identity as manipulation even as you give us the literal definition of manipulation. BY definition, manipulation is any sort of communication, verbal or nonverbal, that is aimed AT A PARTICULAR OUTCOME, usually for one’s own benefit.

Beginning with self-interest ends in moral corruption, every time. Often, what people want is disappointing or disastrous. Their desires are expressions of their false feelings of being “incomplete” or “broken”. The Buddhists describe this as thrishna, or “thirst”, otherwise known as (ignorant) craving or desire. Post-modernist thinkers ascribe desire to the entire force of schizophrenia in capitalist societies, by avenue of which the market is sustained, so even a series of minor disappointments from the perspective of the consumer amount to disastrous living circumstances for producers. Desire also feeds a number of health problems, such as addiction, obesity, avarice, complacency, confirmation bias, (not in the sense of pattern recognition but the reaffirmation of dogmas) and laziness. It is a form of Pavlovian conditioning that persuades people to like you AGAINST THEIR BETTER JUDGEMENT, and in its most severe expressions it is a means of imprisoning people who are helplessly attached to certain destructive habits and cravings, segregating them from those who might compel them to take the more difficult route and to CHANGE. So long as it is motivated by self-interest, it is exploitative and unreliable, so that even those who can continue to show their gratitude to the benefactor may be disappointed at any moment. In the matter of drug addiction, such a flimsy arrangement even often leads to DEATH!! It’s no surprise that addicts often describe the Devil as the one who gives you what you want, always expecting something far more in return.

Manipulators thrive off of this sort of “reciprocity”, though all that it does is to preserve a status quo which accommodates the narcissistic sense of one’s own perfection and the egregious wealth one requires to fund such an enterprise to begin with. To acquire such resources, one often needs to develop a situational awareness far outside the scope of “this for that”, whose Latin expression “quid pro quo” is synonymous with rape FOR A REASON.

In more accommodating people, it might be natural to give more, to begin with, with the HOPE of gaining status and attaining recognition, but one soon thereafter learns that there is no guarantee of such retribution by those who managed to attain power by more aggressive or indirect means; most often, people just take advantage, inexplicably, because they have become accustomed to seeing “preferred results”.

It is through desire that we give in to temptation, sell out, and betray those who depend upon us, dissolving our history as well as our conscientious identity. We know how we would PREFER to be treated, but this becomes irrelevant when we no longer have to worry about being mistreated. Unfortunately, we often run the risk of repeating the cycle of abuse when we forget our history, thereby becoming what we hated, a mere representation of power itself, a stuffed shirt devoid of personality and humanity.

Giving unto others with the expectation that they will return the favour is not genuine altruism, and maintaining a status quo which is already morbidly perverse is not genuine justice. Moral growth depends upon a series of sacrifices, as does heroism. We advertise work as being heroic, somehow, as we are exposed to propaganda that depicts war as though it were an end in and of itself instead of a tragic last resort. Yet heroism cannot be attained by egoism alone.

Unfortunately, egoism is not confined to dissenters and deviants. Often, the most heroic people are the least popular and the most seemingly self-entitled, since the injustice that they combat has a way of finding them and the group they angrily defend begins to include themselves.

When more and more people sell out and become corrupt instruments of the status quo, the general public is comprised of egoists. How is this possible? One does not wish to believe it, and far less does one wish to figure it out. Yet the bitter truth is that an ignorant mob of hypocrites manages to prosper at the expense of a SCAPEGOAT, and that scapegoat is often an upstanding and innocent character who is portrayed as a “thief of virtue” by those who simply sold their virtue for short-term happiness. In such a mob, not only do people do “good things” EXPECTING to gain influence and privilege; if they are not repaid, they rally the entire group AGAINST the “ungrateful” party, regardless of that party’s actual needs.

We cannot have that in a growing, humane civilization. For this reason, true compassion must take into consideration instances wherein the use of force, reason, anger, demand, and sacrifice are sometimes at least conceivably necessary to attain true justice. The simple question “why do I owe you that?” is never an answer to the statement “I need it.” After all: if every question has an answer, or at least if this one is more than rhetorical, then that answer is usually a statement, and in this case it’s the aforementioned claim of need.

No state that uses military force, money, and a legal system can be legitimate without this. Giving people what they want ought almost never to be in trade, but rather based upon mutual understanding and spirited, intellectually informed dialogue, aimed at growth, progress, and common goods.

It is for this reason that false kindness is immediately suspect, often recognized at once as being insincere, and in many of the world’s cultures customs are stringently honoured to ensure that no gift is given for morally corrosive reasons. Desire is truly one of the two monsters that guard the Buddhist Temple, since what we want will kill us. Give people what they need, with consent and without debt.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

TR!O:

You see, you clean your lenses and the World becomes clearer. Like magic.

He is rather good at moving on from things, but there is one thing he CANNOT let go. Those things which he no longer dwells upon are fixed in place, yet that’s only because he DOES NOT THINK ABOUT THEM. Yet he always has to wonder: what could I have done to keep this tragedy from happening? He thinks about it, a lot. And for this reason he is uncertain about it.

Factors:

1.     He could have prevented it.

2.     He had his hunches about how to prevent it.

3.     He had ulterior motives to disregard these hunches.

On the other hand:

1.     His foremost critics are the other two.

2.     Both of them may be equally evil, and the one whom he still loves seems to have believed that.

3.     If he was to distrust one traitor, must he disown both?

4.     He is not responsible for their betrayal, but only for having trusted them.

5.     His “ulterior motives” were aimed at arriving at the Best Version of Himself, by generous means.

The more generous position, towards himself, has more arguments, and it seems only fair that a generous person would be generous towards himself. But does that make it more valid, or simply easier to rationalize? The others made gestures of generosity as well, but did they not remain self-entitled and manipulative in doing so?

If morality is objective, rather than subjective, then he is right, and he WAS right. The others simply envy him for his virtue. What he wanted was higher on the spiritual and moral spectrum than what they wanted, and it was tragic to have squandered that. Her death is but a natural consequence of their refusal to repent and grow.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

W!NDSP!R!T:

No Regrets: the Birth of Kamikaze Rhetoric.

My debate professor, though he initially inspired me and motivated me to improve and to excel, made a number of disturbing arguments over the course of the three semesters that I took classes with him. Foremost in my mind, however, is this: that in the past, “we had time” to engage in philosophy, but that that is not the case in the present day.

That time is speeding up, accelerating towards a breaking point, is not farfetched, though I owe it to Hindu philosophy that I can conceive the concept. Yet, realistically, life expectancy has only gone up in civilized* countries in the last two hundred years. If men had time to think back then, then certainly they have it now. Why, even WOMEN have started to think, and with the exception of feminists a great many of them.

There is absolutely no “application of one’s time” in the present day that can simply be PRESUMED to be important, so thought is a prerequisite to action. Doctor Whearty cannot INDUCE action in his students without warrant and reflection, unless he resorts to methods such as force or coercion. There is simply no inherent imperative for us to join a side. THAT must be supplied, and philosophy alone can supply it. If anything has changed in the last two hundred years, then it is the nature of authority and the death of romantic nationalism. And both of THOSE changes have been for the better, whereas if Whearty and Hawking were right to condemn philosophy to the grave, even if only for the sake of argument and personal aggrandizement, then the Hindus may be corroborated in their vision of the End Times.

Frankly, both sides are true. Things have gotten better, but only for the wise. Ignorance has grown in direct proportion. One has simply to choose a side now. And I have no regrets about the side I’ve chosen.

Whearty made another chilling suggestion, one dark night at (I think) Mt. San Antonio College: that hate speech ought to be banned.

Thankfully, it’s not, so I did not hesitate to cuss out all the debaters, calling them faggots and niggers.

Why?

Why NOT, of course!! After all, I’m simply ARBITRATING a way of communicating, doing so to arouse sentiment in support of my cause, apathetic to the occasional dissenter. Oh, don’t get me wrong; I certainly have VOLUMES of text to corroborate my position, to degrees of philosophical subtlety and sophistication that many of my peers can only begin to imagine, as I can only begin to imagine how they interpret it. I am CERTAINLY not a bigot; you simply have to read a lot of Deleuze, Heidegger, and Nietzsche to understand that as clearly as I do. And before you laugh at my seeming arrogance, know that your laughter is at your own expense. I have lost nothing but corrupting social influences. You have lost Enlightenment Itself. (as though you ever cared for it.) It’s not that I don’t HAVE a philosophy. I simply feel no need to weigh it against YOUR philosophy, preferring to power my way through its actualization BECAUSE I CAN.

And obviously I am satirizing you by doing so.

*yes, CIVILIZED!!

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

DETER:

Arguing with Determinists: the Inevitable Frustration.

So one might wonder then: if truly everything is automatic, why do we imagine ourselves to be free, constructing entire societies upon individual responsibility? The answer is: inevitably. It is mechanically inevitable that only certain minds would recognize their own nature. And at this point, perhaps mechanically, my own mind’s contempt for the determinist doubles. Even Divine Right is relatively modest by comparison. It is one thing to suggest that God willingly endowed certain men and women with privilege, perhaps in response to human-all-too-human foibles that resulted from the will He bestowed upon others. Yet to deny ANY will whatsoever, and to say that even GOD could not prevent one’s knowledge attaining absolute clarity!! How bold indeed.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

El Camino del Medio: Jesse Pinkman's Virtue.

The proper function of art is to inspire sympathy; the proper function of propaganda is to invoke judgement. Art achieves sympathy (as well as empathy, which in some senses is more important) by two routes: one is by portraying a character with whom the viewer wishes to identify, reminding the viewer of the difficulties of the heroic (virtuous) life under adverse circumstances, and the other is by portraying a villain whom the viewer despises, but while propaganda seeks to uphold a prejudice by demonizing this villain, art toes the line, inspiring sympathy for the villain’s victims.

In Breaking Bad, foremost of the victims was Jesse Pinkman. Initially presented as an aimless junkie with a deviant occupation, he quickly becomes the puppet of a man whose station we are all taught to trust, even in America: his high school teacher. One can only begin to imagine the response that Breaking Bad must have received in Japan or in India (countries which actually value education) when the revered sensei resorts to petty blackmail in order to coerce the young Pinkman into pushing the limits of an initially harmless business.


It may be true that Jesse’s associates were not so kind, but further backstory (especially in the seminal spinoff Better Call Saul) reveals that they were all corrupted by their employers. As for the product itself, whatever moral errors young Pinkman commits in selling an incredibly depraving drug are absolved to some considerable extent by the fact that, unlike Mr. White, Jesse is not exploiting an addiction which he does not himself have, and unlike other dealer-users like Tuco Salamanca, he never allows the drug to corrupt his character, only clouding his judgement. It is safe to guess that, in Pinkman’s case, he was his own first victim, a user long before he was a pusher. While that may seem to corroborate a judgement made against him later, casting doubt upon his identity as a victim of forces beyond his control, two facts remain apparent: that, explicitly at least, he is the only TRUE victim of his own actions at the start of the story, so that still sets him apart from his associates, and that even this affront to his health pales before the tragic losses and traumas that his oppressors impose upon him and one another.


Furthermore, it is his ability to take action against these injustices when OTHERS are the victims, even when he is himself an accessory or even a puppet to these crimes, at great personal risk, and often to an extent that he would not go to in his own defense, that sets Jesse Pinkman apart from his associates. By the end of the series, he has had plenty of opportunities to become as corrupt as his initial employers, yet instead he GROWS in fortitude and virtue while everyone about him, on both sides of the law, descends into depravity and sociopathy. Truly, his name is neither red nor white, neither bloody or pure, but in between. 

Viewers naturally fell in love with Jesse, citing him as a Soul too pure to survive a world of sociopaths. Perhaps, of course, I am confusing him for Gale Boetticher, whose death is directly overseen by Jesse, though only once Walter’s influence and Gustavo’s presence have become foreboding, and only on behalf of Walter and his family, and only in the wake of a child who was murdered after also being used to commit murder. Yet Gale’s eulogy is Jesse’s defense; Jesse was also, in practice, a civil libertarian who simply gave consenting adults what they would have gotten otherwise. It was not until Walter came along, with his existential crisis, that Jesse “broke bad”, and his conscience made this a process of character growth that, by the end of the series, molded him into the only consistently heroic character. When Jesse DOES survive, viewers are relieved to see some justice in a broken world.

By contrast with his middle-class parents, whose influence upon his early life can be inferred by the infuriating, narcissistic prejudice with which they treat him when he needs them most, Jesse truly exhibits the Judeo-Christian virtues, even as they are defined by contemporary secular thinkers such as Zizek. Slavoj Zizek contrasts Christianity with Buddhism, for instance, by describing it is a religion of the Fall: an expression of love attained not by rising above the base qualities of life but rather by falling into them. Like Christ, Jesse keeps the company of prostitutes, drinkers and gamblers, becoming one with them but never surrendering his innocence. Any pragmatic error that endangers him is the result of either compassion or righteous indignation, often in defense of the innocent and even, sometimes, out of forgiveness for the evil. He rushes into battle with no thought for the morrow, and he even acts as the family scapegoat for his brother, who only maintains the appearance of a perfect child but who, like all other characters in the Breaking Bad universe, indulges in a contradiction, though it’s one that Jesse makes no attempt to engender and, in fact, helps to abate, without any overt hypocrisy.

Walter admires Jesse for having done something “special” at a young age, yet it is Walter’s own station in the middle class, against which Pinkman has rebelled, that allows him to exploit Jesse early on. Pinkman’s rebellion is only justified once we see the extreme impersonality of his family, a group of people who seem as base as their pretensions are lofty, severed from the World in a state of complacency that is either shameless or delusional. Unlike his parents, Jesse goes straight down into the pits of Hell, at first only to make a living by doing that upon which his own happiness, however chemically contrived, depends, though eventually to protect all of the people that he meets and gives his word to along the way. The hero of old always did precisely this, though more powerful forces mocked him for defying his fate. Yet it is ultimately Jesse’s ability to chart his own course that creator Vince Gilligan, who seems nonetheless to misunderstand Jesse, considers Pinkman’s final achievement.

The only question that remains is this: if Jesse is truly a self-made man, is he responsible for his condition? Does a man who has to decide only between the two basest of human instincts, which are greed and fear, have the right to charge him thousands of dollars for those risks which Jesse never benefited from, (for he had refused to run away from unfinished business and bad karma) only to deny him his freedom over less than two grand? Such a gatekeeper is certainly not the pinnacle of morality that Jesse imagines him to be, and as much as he may preach that Pinkman made his own luck, his insistence that “tugging on heartstrings” is of no consequence, an echo of Jesse’s mother, is easy for him to say, for apparently not only does the miser have no heartstrings (nor values, outside of a hypocrite’s feelings of monetary entitlement, like Anakin Skywalker’s owner), but were HE the “snitch” that the Nazis had captured, he might certainly be more left-leaning in his personal politics.

Jesse is not responsible for what happens to him, because, by definition, that which happens to us is NOT what we do, and the value of what we do rests upon what we ALLOW to happen to other people. Jesse neither allows harm to come to others nor imposes it, except in those situations where less conscientious men and women present him with a dilemma wherein it would be a lie to say that he had had a better choice. “Better”, in Jesse’s worldview, is not so simple as that which benefits and preserves him. If Walter demonstrates that the root cause of misery is the pursuit of happiness, then Jesse’s refusal to prioritize his own happiness over the well-being of others is not to be regarded as the cause for his own misery. As for Jesse’s initial attempts to pursue his own happiness, it is fair to say that he had no way of knowing that a legal course of action would be the best course of action. Mike teaches us that there are good criminals and bad cops; the McGill brothers remind us that the law is imperfect. Walter teaches us that it is quite easy to build a criminal empire whilst sheltered in the comfort and reputation of the suburban middle class. Jesse’s parents demonstrate the extreme naivete, narcissism and hypocrisy of this group of people, which both educated liberals and meth heads will despise in equal measure, though Jesse forgives them, however diplomatically. The entire Breaking Bad universe is set up to call our notions of propriety into question, and only Pinkman and his friends remain to provide moral guidance, often through their defiance of what is given, whether the dogma is legal, spiritual or psychotherapeutic. Jesse cannot put things right, but he alone battles wrong.

Why, then, are we inclined to blame him? It is simply because we all have the predisposition to break bad and to rationalize it. When we defend the actions of evil men and women by treating them as though they were the consequence of actions by good men and women, we seek to protect ourselves. We avail ourselves of our felt omniscience as an audience, as though we might learn from the mistakes of the heroes. Yet life has but one overlying tragedy, and that is the absence of compassion. As actors in our own life dramas, we have no way of knowing what our fate will be. Whether we adhere to an idealized notion of legality, such as Skyler and Jesse’s parents do, a romantic conception of the American Dream, a libertarian doctrine or a vendetta, our choices are more or less arbitrary and their consequences impossible to predict; hence the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is irrefutable in contemporary drama. All that we have is what we do, and the truly heroic characters are those who act out of spontaneous compassion, whose self-interest never crosses the line of depravity until it is pushed. Jesse Pinkman, in BOTH incarnations, remains pure.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

KRUX:

I know what happened. I can tell you how it happened. I can show you who’s responsible and everything. And I can clear my name of wrongdoing. Only: you seem not to want to believe that I am innocent. You want so fervently to think I’m not a victim of what other people did, or that my well-meaning and disciplined intentions are somehow mistakes that you can learn from. I guess you want to believe that this will never happen to you, or that there’s no reason for you to make the sacrifices and to take the risks I did. Or you just want to blame me because I’m here, in front of you, and, if you’ll notice, I alone take responsibility for everything I did. It simply troubles you that I did everything right, and still I must live with others’ wrongdoing. But that’s a reality I’ve come to grasp. You can learn all you want from my mistakes. It won’t help you to prevent making your own mistakes. Your only hope is to learn sympathy for those who made those mistakes in good faith rather than becoming the problem. Then you’ll appreciate kindness when YOU are the victim.

Dm.A.A.

BODETH: Philosophical Reflections on BoJack Horseman.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

Albert Camus.

The Horse That Crosses Every Line: How BoJack transcends Epistemological Distinctions.

For a show that is so self-referential, postmodern and memetic that it appears at first to have absolutely no subtext, drawing upon its overtness for both its comedic and artistic value, BoJack Horseman certainly lends itself to a lot of speculation by fans. Perhaps that is a part of its brilliancy; after all, it is bound to attract a sense of humour that loves to deconstruct projections and to denounce attempts to make sense of nonsense, so fan theorists are likely to be ridiculed for their desperation to find a “hidden” meaning underneath all the layers of explicit satire and criticism. Yet, if we are to be honest with ourselves, the postmodern, no-holds-barred format of the show’s writing, one that seems only to restrain itself as an ironic reference to censorship, litigation, and Scientology, is almost as suffused with references, nuances, and in-jokes transcending class and creed as a post-structural philosophical text by Deleuze or Derrida. Even considering what is “overtly” overt, it is all too easy to THINK that one understands the situation as it has been presented, yet further analysis and review will prove this presumption false. In effect, everything in a show’s presentation is “overt”, whether it is registered consciously or unconsciously by the viewer. To draw a definitive line between “text” and “subtext”, in a show so contemporary and free of form, is already to become the target of a satirical metajoke. Yes: it’s all right there in the open. But like Gustavo Fring from Breaking Bad (or the extremely manipulative woman in Vince Gilligan’s early work on the X-files), the show’s meanings are “hidden in plain sight.” What is “overt” is simply that which is “overtly” overt, and that sense of its being “formal” or “explicit” text is derived directly from its meaning crossing the threshold of a viewer’s consciousness. As such, it is wrong to say that viewers “read too much into” the show, for there appears to be no definite point at which the reference is “improbable” or “projected”, just as there is no definite line at which a viewer may be considered “slow” or “misinformed” for missing a given joke or reference. As much as it pains me to admit it, anything goes in analyzing this show, and what at first appears farfetched seems irrefutable upon reflection.

BoJack Kills: the fringes of BoJack Film Theory Regarding Suicide.

The leading question is, therefore: will BoJack die? More specifically, fans are curious to see if he will kill himself. There is plenty of foreshadowing throughout the show leading up to every tragic outcome, whether it is Sarah Lynn’s death, Butterscotch Horseman’s affair, Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter’s divorce, or the lobotomy of Beatrice’s mother. BoJack’s suicide is also heavily referenced. Some radical theorists even suggest that he has already killed himself and that the events of the series thus far take place in a surreal afterlife, such as in two psychological films whose titles I will not divulge so as not to spoil them for fans of mind-bending psychological drama.

Knowing your film history can certainly help you to catch some subtle jokes and references throughout BoJack, and if his death is alluded to by reference to other cinematic deaths then we might gather evidence to corroborate these morbid theories. The details are chilling when one digs into them. One of the most revelatory episodes regarding BoJack’s depressive self-destruction is Stupid Piece of Sh*t, wherein BoJack inexplicably stops his car halfway down Mulholland Drive. Some viewers have pointed out as well that Naomi Watts’ character in One Trick Pony has a split personality when she loses herself in the role of a young woman named “Diane”, who I should note was at some point a server who served coffee.

The paragraph above essentially functions as one long reference, though regarding what I shall not divulge. Needless to say, fans of both works will marvel at the parallels. After all: some of those details, which are extremely overt, only seem to serve a function in the context of a film reference that also carries deep existential weight. Yet are they conclusive??

Breaking BoJack: how BoJack descends into Madness.

If BoJack has, indeed, killed himself in a previous life, then the events of this series are likely to lead up to a reliving of that event. The perversion of our contemporary world in this case not only serves a satirical purpose but is central to the plot. Why is the “D” removed from “Hollywood”, without any sensible ramifications? Why are anthropomorphic animals running about like in one of Aesop’s fables? Why are most of the celebrity names changed, though not all? Is it impossible that BoJack is in fact only DREAMING that he was once a successful actor, only to discover, by degrees, that he was a colossal failure? Again, parallels to the aforementioned film are striking, and further research in quest of fellow observers noticing the same details only produces more details corroborating this theory independently. Yet if we must draw a line, let’s examine the “hard facts”.

But You Can’t Make Him Stop Drinking: Alcohol and Revelation.

In It’s You, BoJack claims that there will be plenty of onlookers when he kills himself, as if he knows. Intoxication produces more insight and clairvoyance for him, time and time again, than do his attempts at sobriety. If, in fact, he is living in a Dream, then only intoxication can produce this, though plenty of characters try to steer him away from it.

The Duality between dream and intoxication is found in Nietzsche’s early work on Drama and Music, known as The Birth of Tragedy. The observation is not premature, since Nietzsche, like Sartre, is referenced, however passingly, in Season Five (according to a parody of one of his quotes on Flip McVicker’s white board.). If Apollo and Dionysus represent conflicting states of consciousness, then the only means by which to escape one is to indulge to excess in the other. When BoJack “escapes” reality, he also comes to terms with it, though what he comes to realize is difficult to accept.

Most of the really “positive” influences in BoJack’s “life” try to steer him towards sobriety. Every woman who claims to love him, be it Wanda, Hollyhock or Gina, tries to lead the horse to sobriety, by various methods, whether it is Wanda’s hands-off approach, Hollyhock’s admonition, or Gina’s overt interference.

All three of these women represent his positive qualities. Wanda is successful in the industry which BoJack despises, knowing nothing of his history. Hollyhock represents his childlike innocence and relatively normal insecurities. Gina is grounded and professional, representing his ability to settle into happiness instead of chasing greatness.

Conversely, the women that tend to lead him back INTO hypnosis are those who represent more negative qualities. Beatrice Horseman represents the inability to love, a deeply repressed maternal instinct that only comes out when she, too, is no longer in her “right mind”. Sarah Lynn represents the temptations of the celebrity lifestyle: a source of existential despair but also a great convenience. And then there is, of course: Diane, for whom we stole the “D” from Hollywood. Of all supporting characters, she is perhaps the most obvious character foil; since Zoes and Zeldas, it’s suggested that she and BoJack share a personality type, even if only as a stereotype. Diane has far too many hang-ups to list, but it’s safe to say that, despite superficial differences in ideology and policy, she and BoJack represent the same difficulties adjusting to modern life.

All three of these women take part in drinking and even drug-taking with the hero. Beatrice actually forces young BoJack’s curiosity about cigarettes, Sarah Lynn goes on several benders with him, and Diane binge drinks with him on multiple occasions. Diane, too, has revelations whilst under the influence of amphetamines, dreaming up multiple “Dianes” she has not yet discovered, yet another reference to dissociative identity disorder surrounding the name “Diane”. While it is, in fact, Diane that ultimately brings BoJack to rehab, this is only after she has divorced Mr. Peanutbutter (thereby effectively becoming “another Diane” and fulfilling her own drug-induced prophecy). At this point, it is likely that she is about to become a “positive influence” in BoJack’s life, perhaps even romantically, as Mr. Peanutbutter proposed to Pickles the waitress. Yet, like all other “positive influences”, her solution is inauthentic and serves only to forestall what appears to be inevitable.

Two Tracks to Run In: Does BoJack Have a Choice?

The most obvious overlying metaphor is that of running: running from problems, running in circles, running from nothing, running up a hill. BoJack’s role model is a race horse who committed suicide; Diane wrote the book on Secretariat, so why WOULDN’T he dream that she wrote a book about him? Perhaps he committed suicide in the hopes of becoming great? After all: he mentions that “only the greats die young”. Some intellectuals are said to have committed suicide so as to become gods. Is BoJack the god of his own Universe, not in the Christian sense of a God who is omnipotent and omniscient, but rather in the Hindu sense of a god who has forgotten his true identity and has surrendered control to the dream he has fabricated for himself? It’s not as though BoJack’s decadent lifestyle does not already agree with this metaphor.

At the end of Season One, BoJack is informed that he is a young person’s hero. At the start of that same episode, we see Secretariat’s suicide overtly. In Season Two, BoJack and Diane lament the studio’s decision to overwrite Secretariat’s tragic demise. Is it impossible that this expresses Bob-Waksberg’s own fears of his tragedy being censored by Netflix? I suppose that the creators have had some years by now to work that out with the Wandas, Zeldas and Turtletaubs that they have to work with. Yet even this process serves a reminder: we all have a choice. BoJack’s existential struggle is that he cannot take responsibility for his own happiness. He feels too much guilt for pursuing happiness, so he only submerges himself in things which will make him miserable. Perhaps, if this show is truly a form of Purgatory, he is reliving his last few years in order to set things right: to win the Race of Life. Sure: in Secretariat, it ends up being COMPUTER BoJack that gets the good ending. Yet is it impossible that our hero might LEARN something from that movie which he sabotaged and then abandoned, like so many other dreams? Perhaps there truly are two lanes for him to run in. If taking responsibility for one’s own happiness proves only to be another form of self-destructive narcissism, as critics of Sartre have demonstrated in recent generations of philosophical inquiry, then perhaps the goal for BoJack is NOT to attain happiness by chasing it but rather to FIND it as a byproduct of living meaningfully. He still has a chance to make things right, and he is known for doing just that. Season One ends with a successful audition for his favourite film. Season Two ends with a selfless but sincere act of friendship towards Todd Chavez, after a failed attempt to restore his friendship with Charlotte. Sure: all of these bridges are burned eventually. Yet what about his relationship with his sister? BoJack may not always do the right thing or even try, but when he gives it an honest effort he does make some progress. The only problem seems to be that for every step forward there are two steps back. But what if this is not the case? What if the steps backwards are simply steps in a new direction? After all: he changes. What at first appears to be a terminal narcissist proves to be a deeply scarred child. He may win yet.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

FAUST things FAUST:

Whether it’s the neoliberalism of U.C. Berkeley, the technocratic elitism of U.C.S.D, the positivism of Dartmouth, the dismissiveness of Yale, or some other set of inherited prejudices, higher education succeeds, as most dangerous cults do, in reinforcing the worst predispositions of the prodigious child’s ego, and the honours “track” in grade school affords us so much privileged insight into these predispositions that they are laughably characteristic when they appear in the graduate. These schools succeed in their project of (shamelessly literal) indoctrination not by simply presenting the(ir) foundational texts before the students AS THEORY, but rather by SUBMERGING the young mind in a close-knit echo chamber that is saturated with these unconscious prejudices by social suggestion, their survival becoming dependent upon conformity. This often happens when the child is for the first time separated from the family for a long time, often with the expectation of encountering the “real world” in which one’s every action is of consequence to one’s literal survival. And one sees it growing like a cancer, beginning with the freshman’s naïve love of novelty and ending in the senior’s fully actualized cynicism. By the time that one might be reminded by the likes of Socrates or Nietzsche that what is most important one has known all along, one has sacrificed too much for the ideals of the establishment, upon which one has begun slavishly to depend, to be able to transcend either one’s trauma or the fallacy of sunk costs. Like a gambler, the graduate continues to put more and more time and money into the method, only to lose more and more of his or her heart. It’s no surprise that a professor such as Martin Heidegger, operating in one of the most pretentious and strict societies in recent history, indicated that we do not create culture, but that it creates us, and we do not possess freedom or use technology; THEY possess and use US, respectively. Nothing is closer to a Deal with the Devil than Academia, and if one must defensively demand a citation as proof, I refer you to DOCTOR Faustus.

Dm.A.A.

PS9(555!)

Ninth Post-Script:

In the relatively conservative societies of the past, where liberals of our general sentiment and sensibility lived cloistered on the sidelines, writing from the prisons and outside the protection of a nationality, growing up and assuming a social role, except in the case of the child prodigy, meant to agree to certain dictates, for without them there would be no social order and no ethic. Yet the function of moral propriety was always more than merely narcissistic conformism. Its function was expressed in teleology, the process by which mankind ascends closer to Godhood with each subsequent generation. The closer that we come to that Ideal, the less we need to rely upon stricture and structure, for it was only ever aimed at reform and to atone for sins inherent to the times. As those sins are purged OVER time, the need to discern “worthwhile” occupations from “meandering” and meaningless ones lessens, for the entire function of the distinction was to bring us to a point wherein that same distinction will have served its purpose and would cease to be necessary. One does not need to know the destination to understand how such a passion burns to its own destruction. So it is in matters of economy. Fiscal conservatives only PRETEND that we live in the largest welfare state in history; in many ways, our welfare lags behind others. The establishment of this state, however, was aimed at the same goal that all moral reasoning aims towards: the common welfare. To oppose welfare is to oppose everything which is “good”, and the most traditional definitions for “good” will corroborate this. So it is that, as we come closer and closer to living a truly decent common life, dogmas which were previously necessary cease to be, having run their course. It is like a code that will continue to run only until it has fulfilled the function for which it was designed. Hence “teleology” means literally “the Movement of God” or “the Movement Towards God”. We are all God, in disguise, moving towards the realization of our own True Nature.

And to think that people continue to hate the hippies!! By this definition, they were the most spiritually advanced and morally refined of all generations.

Already “growing up” has less to do with doing that which is “necessary for survival” and more to do with that which is “intrinsically rewarding”. Already we begin, within a time referred to as “the Future”, even now, to live, for the first time, perhaps, within the Present. Already individual identity and conscientiousness begins to outshine social order in merit. Occupation ceases to be judged by social utility but rather by the capacity for the Individual to rise above the myopia of the partisan tribe.

Already, the paradigm of “identity” grows upon the remnants of “society”. And this is because “society” was only ever a stepping stone towards this transmutation.

Remember: our ancestors had to make sacrifices so that WE might not have to. Only those who failed to meet this challenge deferred it unto us. THEY had to live “the right way” so that WE might someday be able to live “our own way”. It was always prefigured that it would be so. Their lives cannot have meaning unless ours has a different meaning.

Live your own life.

Dmytri.

The Draft as Rape: an Existential Parallel.

Why are you such a pushover?

It’s because I am humble.

And yet you brag about it!

I confess it.

I always find it hilarious that people in this country are so harsh towards rape but so forgiving of conscription. I mean: what is the difference between the two, really?

Look upon sex, for instance: it’s a primal, selfish act that is nonetheless the expression of a deeper, more selfless longing for solidarity with another. Now, there is nothing intrinsically NOBLE about sex. Sure: it may be necessary for the survival of the species, of one’s own gene pool, of one’s own family line and legacy, but to presume upon the value of any of those things one must presume upon the value of one’s own birth and subsequent life. It’s noble for us to transcend nihilism, and it is permissible for us to yield to our own carnal longings, even if we must rationalize them accordingly. Yet for this to be attained JUSTLY a great many things must happen; sex must be justified, usually by rationalization and via romance. War, too, must amount to more than mere animal instinct if it is to attain any decorations in the Public. Now: we all know how we (have agreed to) feel about the use of force, coercion, and even persuasion and hypnosis towards the ends of sex; to rape is to reduce the Other to a means for one’s own pleasure, often out of undisciplined desperation. Now, if we actually CONSIDER our reasons for being hostile towards rape, might we not have to extend those same reasons to conscription? After all: one cannot stop human beings from fighting and killing with any greater ease than one can stop them from fucking and procreating; the nineteen-sixties stand as evidence for this fact. No one can rightfully be FORCED to have sex, however essential it may APPEAR to the fulfillment of another’s passions, for while these passions can be rationalized by appeal to the ideal of survival, that REMAINS AN IDEAL. Must your genes survive? We need not go so far as to demean you, blaming either your genes for your bad luck nor vice versa, nor either upon this mysterious quality of “attractiveness” and its opposite and lack thereof, if we wish to dismiss the perception of reproduction as being biologically imperative. We just take it in our stride that there is no necessity for everyone to mate, though most may have that desire. Why, then, must we pretend that the perpetuation of a nation, of the life of one’s family (at the inevitable expense of other families), or of a way of life is an ABSOLUTE? Obviously, any one of us, acting independently, may act in such a way that ensures the preservation of these things, and ethics verily emanate from this tendency. Yet must the felt need to rationalize these tendencies be allowed to grow to national proportions? We may be capable of acting heroically in independence of one another, but must this become a collective goal, and CAN it? Can an entire nation TRULY be unified in righteousness, or is simply the act of national unification a symptom not of genuine compassion but merely of a sublimation of primitive instincts? Honestly: how often has humanity been right in a group, by contrast with the number of times it has been wrong? In asking this, I know I can’t address a group, but an individual. The individual’s ability to transcend the animal instincts is one of the most indispensable of freedoms. If sex is base and unnecessary, then one must never be compelled by force or coercion to participate in it, though some tribal societies have been known to do that. So it is with that instinct we call war. Instead of treating conscription as a necessity by which the “noble” warriors might succeed in leading the “ignoble” cowards, might we not instead admit that that nobility is self-righteous and arbitrary? After all: what is a greater arbiter than force? The will to survive is one of man’s most ensnaring passions because the fear of death is one of his most depraving phobias, and the willingness to die “for one’s country”, at the expense of one’s own conscience, can hardly amount to more than a sublimation of that same fear, for when one surrenders one’s conscience one does not dissolve one’s ego; rather, the ego is directed so far outwards, identified so completely and extravagantly with a “noble, patriotic cause”, that its connection with the Soul, its solitary source of compassion for the Other, whether expressed as an individual or an ostensibly rival group, is severed entirely. When social justice takes on this quality, it becomes proto-Fascism. When love takes on this quality, it becomes destructive obsession. Let’s not deny that there is just as much dignity in sex; after all, one process produces the family and the other protects it. Yet neither is an expression of that family’s true potential: to restore unity within the larger Human Family. Those who cannot fathom this goal are inhibited, and for them to inhibit others, under the auspices of altruism and sacrifice, is a perversion of altruism and sacrifice. To die for your country (or, more accurately, your corporation!!) is never to overcome the fear of Death, but rather to rush directly at Death with a battle cry, hoping to kill Death itself, crazed with the obsession of survival. That which must survive is a carrier of one’s ego, just as one’s child is, and often this is more than an analogy, for the child is literally the motivator and the excuse. If one survives the battle, one might then subject the child to the same torment, insisting that only to die for one’s children is noble. One feels guilt for surviving, but not for killing; rather, one regrets that one did not die in such a manner that one would be remembered as a hero, so now one must secretly wish for the death of one’s children and the survival of one’s grandchildren by avenue of that same sacrifice. If one’s own children fail to die, they are to raise one’s grandchildren to inherit the tribal burden: to become a sacrifice to the gods, so that the entire family may be immortal. It is a karmic pattern so deeply ingrained in human history that only the very few so accept the possibility of defeat that they can surrender totally, as conscientious objectors to the fight itself. If you are clinging to survival, surrender is no way to protest war, for any war worth protesting must have the same outcome: one’s own annihilation. Yet if survival ceases to pervert by becoming an ideal, treated as an end in and of itself, then dying nobly takes on different meaning. There is no longer the need to sublimate, at that point. Neither must one force others to die, whether they are one’s own kin or some more distant relative of the human family tree. At that point, too, one regards the rapist NOT as a personification of the Devil, who lives within one’s own heart and hides behind every noble impulse. One simply sees the rapist as a confused human animal, trying to force others to participate in a carnal act that, like war, is not of absolute importance. And the conscription officer is no more dignified.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

ARTFUNK:

The proper function of art is not to be progressive, advancing human society towards some final objective or providing a steady flow of revolution and reform to keep restlessness at bay. The proper function of art is to act as an expression of universal human truths that each generation rediscovers time and time again, often one individual at a time. Considering this, the entire meme of progress appears rather absurd. The human condition remains the same at its most fundamental level; only external diversions in culture seek to suppress this. The same threats that man and woman encountered four hundred years ago remain imminent today. The role of the artist was to arm the mind against these forces, so that the tragedy depicted in the work of art would remain a work of fiction. The great geniuses were always edgy, defying the timeless tendency towards egoism in all its forms by pushing the envelope. This egoism includes the tendency to take offense, especially when none is intended. In previous generations, men like Mozart, Handel, and Joyce could get away with overstepping boundaries and blazing trails, not because they were the products of a liberal scene (which was not the case) but rather because they did not rely too heavily upon the opinion of the common peasant, often depending instead upon the patronage of a wealthy benefactor who recognized their genius, however grudgingly. Today, art is disguised as policy and reform. Works are only considered relevant in so far as they break ground, but not because they reaffirm values which are more fundamental and timeless than the status quo at present. Men like Shakespeare and Kafka are esteemed because they allowed for certain liberties that have been taken for granted today, yet that is not what made these men so great. Rather, it’s that they were not afraid to TAKE those liberties as means towards another end: that of expressing a Truth. Truth has been reduced to a political and linguistic construct, comparable to propaganda and almost invariably synonymous with it. But what Faulkner observed was not of relevance because of its relationship to Fascism; rather, he saw the world through an exceptionally, breathtakingly keen lens that has not been tarnished over time. Time is the enemy; eternity is the goal. The problems of our contemporary culture are twofold, both derived from “progressive thought”: on one end, works that are OFFENSIVE are repressed, not under conservative auspices, but rather under LIBERAL auspices, barring any serious consideration for their liberal value by contrast with the egoism and complacency of dogmatic “liberal” critics, who saturate the consuming public. On the other end, if a work is not progressive and liberal ENOUGH, there is no audience for it, and it can only be progressive and liberal insofar as it appeals to trends within groups. Our society has not become more free and progressive by seeking to dissolve tradition; it has confined us to redundancy. In democratizing culture, it has allowed culture to kill genius.

Dm.A.A.