ALLCAPS: (But, Some, Commas.)

Look: I don’t doubt that capitalism is extremely efficient with regards to production, nor that by and large it has been the most humane economic system that the Human World has known. Yet whether one is a very conscientious day laborer or an enterprising entrepreneur, one never settles for the best there is; one dreams of making it better, and one works upon the glaring shortcomings. Where capitalism fails is upon two fronts: the conditions of the workplace and the ease and availability of distribution, both of which are essentially one collective problem for the member of the Working Class.

There was a time when I lived on the fringes of society, Socratically, engaging strangers in political debate, going in circles. Then there came a time I tired of the same old platitudes. I was embarrassed with my fellows on the Left, and I could not get all the skeptics on the Right to budge, without giving in to them. So: I did the only sensible thing. I got a job. I honestly and earnestly wished to be proven wrong about the System; I’d watched too many David Lynch films, and I was hoping for a workplace like Twin Peaks. Perhaps I might have managed my expectations instead, but there was no way for a decent person to predict the sorts of evils I encountered on a daily basis consequently.

Why, then, did it take so long for me to act against those evils, having found the further confirmation which I needed for my radical convictions? Simply put: I’d learned to blame people, on principle, and I did not know whom to blame. At work I did not find the sorts of “comrades” Marxists speak of; I found hypocrites, degenerates, the lecherous, the shameless addicts, the barbaric, and the cruel. Why did it take so long for me to set them straight? Because I could no longer answer this for certain: is it Human Nature that’s intrinsically corrupt, or does the System MAKE us that way? All my life I had been leaning towards and leaning on the latter for my purposes. Yet if the former was far truer, why bother to save a single Soul? And how WOULD you?

It took me two years, but I now realize it like it happened yesterday. It does not matter, truly, whether people are “intrinsically” corrupt or not. A System which ENGENDERS that corruption is corrupt, which means that it remains imperative to change it for the Better. People will adapt to any System, and that is a blessing and a curse, depending on the Nature OF the System they adapt to. Even if People are born Evil, a Better System is a better chance at rendering them Good, and if they are born Good, a Better System will prevent them from converting. Simply leaving the matter up to religion and personal arbitration (the two of which have now become one) no longer suffices; we have all had quite enough of that. If People are intrinsically Good, they deserve a System which REFLECTS that and empowers it; if they are intrinsically Bad, then they deserve a kick in the ass by the same System, and if it’s a mixed bag: so be it. I can only hope to be one of the Good Ones, even if I have to end up doing some of the ass-kicking.

The objective necessity for reform does not vanish in light of the “disillusioning” psychological “facts”; it is simply restoked. Just as certainly as any restaurant, no matter how well-managed, wastes food, just as certainly it is that Human Beings have the obligation NOT to, and any farmer who enjoys the monetary rewards of difficult labour while the actual FRUITS of his labour go to waste must be made aware that production means little without effective distribution, and if he persists in his insistence that our System suffices towards both ends, then he deserves the privilege of neither, just like the man that sacrifices “freedom for security”. The matter is not a relative, polarizing issue between authoritarian liberals and regressive conservatives; it is a Universal Human Moral Calling: a genuine work ethic to Improve as a Whole.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

Freedman in Retrospect: Turquoise.

Freedman in Retrospect:

 

You know, Andrew: Ally was wrong about a lot of things, for which you were right to correct her, but she was NOT wrong about YOU. You’re exactly the sort of person that she made you out to be, and that’s exactly the sort of person that would fixate so neurotically upon her idle, passing judgements that you would completely neglect the far more disastrous consequences that MY relationship to her produced, consequences for which you assumed neither responsibility nor an attempts to alleviate the burden. I cannot say that it was you who broke us up, nor that what you saw in her was absent from Reality. Yet of that which you saw you saw only a fraction, and if that has blinded you to the rest of it then she was right about your pettiness; in her case, it took one to know one. I feel no shame in exempting myself from this moral burden; you’ve always known me to be one of the more magnanimous and passionate people to come out of this sleepy suburb, and I’ve paid my illusory dues for that fact.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

Asleep to Believe It: the Conscientious Slacker.

“The question whether one might not imagine a world in which it was not necessary to work in order to live is really an idle one, since it concerns not given reality but a fiction. Asking it, however, is always an attempt to belittle the ethical view. For if it were a perfection on the part of existence that work was unnecessary, the most perfect life would be that of someone who did not have to work. It could then only be by attaching to the word ‘duty’ the sense of a lamentable necessity that one could say it was a duty to work. Duty would then express not the universally human but what is general, and here duty would not express perfection. Therefore I would reply quite properly that it would have to be considered an imperfection on the part of existence that man had no need to work. The lower the level of human life, the less the necessity of work is apparent; the higher, the more obvious it becomes. The duty of working in order to live expresses the universally human, and expresses the universal in another way too because it expresses freedom. It is precisely through work that man makes himself free, through work he becomes master of nature, through work he shows he is higher than nature. […] [What] struggle could be more formative than that of making ends meet! […] I shall not insist so adamantly on my rights as to challenge you to make clear just where in your aesthetics you deal with this matter; I merely leave it to you to consider whether in this struggle life loses its beauty if one does not will it so, or whether it does not gain a higher beauty. To deny that such a struggle exists is madness; to forget it because it passes you by is thoughtlessness, and inasmuch as one pretends to a view of life, callousness or cowardice. […]”

Yet here I finally depart from Kierkegaard, on principle. It ought to obvious, at least to us in our present age, that the truly conscientious individual would find no shortage of worthwhile endeavours, having eliminated the felt need to conspire on behalf of one’s own survival. Furthermore, it is precisely this gift for imagination which endows the modern public servant, often from a young age, with a sprawling, keen awareness of one’s own potential, and it is precisely this sense of identity which is compromised most severely by day labour. Additionally, while the conscientious individual has no shortage of plans to benefit one’s own society, the felt need to survive is perhaps the most common corrosive force in the life of the mind, acting both upon the conscientious and the base, leveling the two alike, so that the unconscientious individual will find no shortage of excuses for the evils of the world within the Ideal of Survival. Thus, while the conscientious individual is squandered, the unconscientious individual will prosper under any paradigm that pits all men against each other (and including women in the struggle is no moral victory, accordingly). Finally, it must be made clear that ANY work which is performed as a means to an end is corrupt. A work ethic emerging out of such an enterprise is nothing more than individual manipulation. The reason that the drudgery of a routine remains unsatisfying to the conscientious man is that there is no guarantee that by performing it he saves the World outside himself. The individual who TRULY cares for the Survival of ALL Human Beings and Their Friends will never rest when only one’s own ends are met, and it is no mistake that “making ends meet” sounds like “seeking one’s own ends”. The pragmatism of the Work Force is quite often falsely “justified” by the sheer difficulty of the labour, yet it only can be “justified” accordingly by being filtered through a narcissistic egoism that’s engendered by the primal “struggle to survive”, a struggle which so warps the minds of workers (and empowers those whose minds are warped already) that the labour thus becomes more difficult than it need be, ESPECIALLY for those who do it conscientiously.

Those who are sensitive and conscientious often die of suicide once the awareness of their meaningless routines and lifestyles, coupled with an underdeveloped imagination and the pains of labour, gives birth to a number of fantasies of escape which take precedence OVER the primitive drives. All men under such a paradigm cannot wait to go home, since their commitment is a ruse, and those who will equate their Lives with such a Duty will, by the same token, hurry towards the End of the Shift. (Hence, suicide rates tend to be higher in men than they are in women, for the “man” is charged more severely by tradition with work, and traditional woman’s primary “labour” was, for a long time, the production of more men.) Of the survivors, this much may be observed: that they are often liars, hypocritical and eager to maintain the RUSE of true commitment while exploiting their own power and subordinates. The struggle to survive becomes the very birth of vanity.

 

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

Seldom Muddied Long: a Public Letter.

I want you to know this: that I do not come into the Lives of Others like a storm with the sole intent of uprooting their security. I rather wander in like a stream, though I don’t pride myself in my subtlety, for my waters are transparent and I only allow myself to become obscured by the reflection of the Sun and the Moon; I am very seldom muddied long.

What draws me towards them? It is optimism. I perceive the best in people; if I use them, it is only ever towards a Noble End. The question of what constitutes a Noble End is seldom vague to me. I have quite potent Visions, and I make the daily effort to resist those evil ones in favour of the Good. So clear and so immediate is this discernment that the abstract notion of a boundary between “Self” and “Other” comes, at most, in second place, quite often third or fifth. Autonomy is odd to me, abstract and vague, requiring analysis, but righteousness is unequivocal, translucent, unrelenting in its universal objectivity.

One cannot be an egoist if one is Right, and only egoists are ever Wrong. Ego is never an excuse, whether it is the Ego of the Self or that Ego which is projected on the Other, yet by that same token evil cannot be projected if the witness remains righteous in one’s Vision, and Ego in Others is transparent to those who do not yield to it within themselves.

Rest assured: if ever doubts do haunt my mind, I seldom sleep until I’ve banished them, and if I sleep I keep a record of my Dreams, seeking the counsel of my fellows constantly in their interpretation. You know this.

If I come to you, think not that you do me the favour by admitting me; I do you a greater favour by extending opportunity to you, especially if others won’t. It’s no less in your favour that I criticize you should I find the contents of your Soul disturbing. Evil I see for what it is. It would be so were it unseen; be thankful that I’m here to see it and alert you.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

LOST: Episode Analysis; Hearts and Minds. [Contains Old Spoilers.]

External Structure:

1. They are brother and sister.

a.  They have a sibling rivalry, but

b. He is protective of her, and

c. She has a history of being abused by partners, hence

d. He feels the need to protect her from Sayid.

2. He would use money from his mother’s company to bribe her boyfriends to break up with her.

a.  Theoretically, personal phobias and desires kept her from reporting the abuses to anyone except for him.

b. Not one to overpower the guys by force, he resorted to monetary incentive. In the process, he was proving himself to care more for her than they did.

3. He wishes to tell her about the Secret Bunker. John Locke objects. Locke learns the following:

a.  Boone intends to protect her from Sayid.

b. Boone has emotional reservations about keeping secrets from her.

c. She and Boone are not related by blood but by shared parents.

d. Boone thinks highly of her, in spite of his public antipathy towards her.

4. John Locke ensnares Boone in the Jungle. Possible motives:

a.  To keep hostility between Boone and Sayid from compromising the Collective Good.

b. To prevent filial loyalties from compromising the Secrecy and Integrity of the Excavation. This may be of value because:

                                       i.    He wishes to avail himself of the secrets of the Bunker, and/or

                                    ii.    He wishes to hoard the boar, and he must therefore make it appear as though the Hunt were waning. (This is Jack’s theory.)

c. To teach Boone how to defend those he loves out in the Wild, where his usual modus operandi (Mother’s money) is no good.

5. Shannon is captured as well. Causal Progression:

a.  Boone hears her screams, interspersed with the sounds of the Mysterious Beast.

b. He finds the courage and motivation to free himself.

c. He rescues her from the snares, but

d. She is snatched up by the Beast and killed.

e. He finds her. She dies in his arms.

6. Revelation One: Shannon is a con artist.

a.  After the death of her father, his mother stole a substantial sum of money from Shannon’s side of the family.

b. By pretending to be a Damsel in Distress, she is able to extort large sums of money from him without his knowledge, conspiring with various boyfriends who pretend to be abusive towards her.

c. This backfires in Sydney, shortly prior to their fateful flight back home to Los Angeles. This time around, the boyfriend made off with the money alone.

7. Revelation Two: Boone is in love with Shannon romantically and sexually.

a.  John Locke intuits this, corroborated by the revelation that there is no blood relation between them.

b. Shannon figures this out as well, early on, and she uses this to extort Boone.

c. They have sexual relations shortly prior to flying home.

d. They cannot maintain their relationship, because:

                                       i.    They are technically siblings,

                                    ii.    Their relationship is founded on manipulation, and

                                  iii.    She does not reciprocate his feelings.

e. This explains the hostility between them, which amounts to more than merely sibling rivalry.

f.   This also explains his aggression towards Sayid.

8. Revelation Three: John Locke never captured Shannon.

a.  Instead, John Locke gave Boone a dose of psychedelic, disguised as a salve for the wound on the back of Boone’s head which was incurred when Locke incapacitated him.

b. The entire sequence wherein Boone rescues Shannon was simply a manifestation of Boone’s sexual/romantic feelings for her, manifested as the archetype of Hero rescuing the Damsel in Distress. Be that as it may,

c. When he believes Shannon to be dead, he feels relieved, since she no longer has influence over him.

d. John Locke’s motives are the Moral of the Story:

                                       i.    Boone must liberate himself of his attachment to Shannon.

                                    ii.    Her budding romance with Sayid ought to be permitted to persist.

Internal Structure:

1. The Family:

a.  Stage One: Rivalry between siblings.

                                                                                       i.    Competition to adapt to the Wild, following a Life of Luxury and Comfort.

                                                                                    ii.    Differences in personality.

                                                                                  iii.    Most presumably: latent competition for the love of the parents.

b. Stage Two: The Brother’s Burden.

                                                                                       i.    Family ties require him to protect his sister.

                                                                                    ii.    Early manifestations of the Damsel in Distress.

2. The Community:

a.  She is frequently a helpless victim, owing, again, to her comfortable upbringing and general superficiality.

                                                                                       i.    She has a history of abuse by romantic partners.

                                                                                    ii.    Sayid, known for using violence to solve problems*, represents the latest installment in this ever-present threat.

b. Boone acts as her protector, though he is reliant on money to do so. At first, Locke’s test seems to be to turn Boone into a more skilled protector, one who can compete with Sayid. However, this is not so…

3. The Inversion:

a.  The Family:

                                                                                       i.    In the absence of a bond of blood, there is no biological incest between the two siblings, however: a devious sexual game is in play, one perpetuated by the social strictures which cause Boone to repress these feelings.

                                                                                    ii.    The Rivalry is a hoax, a coverup for this game. The competition is not between siblings for the parents’ love, but rather between potential partners for the woman’s love.

                                                                                  iii.    The Brother’s Burden is devoid of the filial purity it ordinarily carries. Ergo, it is not only self-interested but harmful to Boone as an individual.

b. The Community: men like Sayid and Bryan (from Sydney) are not the ogres whom Boone must overcome in order to rescue his little princess of a sister. Nor is Boone the ogre. Rather, his princess of a sister is a sort of enchantress, using her own sex appeal to manipulate men for money. This we know from her very brief flirtation with Charlie.

*Subtext: ironically, he only ever uses violence on her behalf, and he abstains (in flashbacks) from using it against those whom he loves.

 

The Critical Complaint:

 

1.         By dissolving the filial bond, the show’s writers remove one avenue of relationship from serious consideration. This reduces a family drama, as well as the only sibling drama, to a sexual drama, one to be added to the growing list:

a.  Jack and Kate.

b. Sawyer and Kate.

c. Sun and Jin.

d. Sun and Michael.

e. Charlie and Kate.

f.   Charlie and Shannon.

g. Charlie and Claire.

h.Sayid and Shannon.

i.   (Possibly but unlikely) Rousseau and Sayid.

j.   (Far more probably) Hurley and Food.**

**While this is formally “mean”, a substantial portion of this episode’s subplot revolves around this crippling infatuation, enough to portend that John Locke will soon find another guinea pig for his social experiments.

2.         By casting Shannon as the villain of the story, the plot deconstructs the Damsel in Distress, to the benefit of modern feminism but to the detriment of the show’s Dionysian, mythological themes. John Locke’s experiments, usually aimed at reconnecting civilized individuals with the Wild, this time only produce the same effect as the most banal and bourgeois clinical psychology. This is disappointing, considering that not only is Boone his most “civilized” patient yet, but the methods employed on Boone are by far the most extreme and experimental. To go all that way, only to overcome jealousy and to “move on”, is hardly flattering to the Wild Human Spirit, reducing Boone’s most primal moments to the sort of ending one might expect in a soap opera with a happy ending. Furthermore:

3.         Sayid is the Alpha Male. In spite of everything that Boone experiences, he cannot come between Shannon and Sayid, or rather he chooses not to. At once, three female fantasies are fulfilled:

a.  The Woman has Agency, though only by virtue of her sexuality and “feminine intuition”. The one-sided nature of her relationship to Boone reinforces this, as does that social order which forbids them to be lovers in Civilization, as well as Locke’s Moral Order in the proverbial Wild.

b. Boone backs down. Resolving himself stoically to his fate, he corroborates her agency in the most diplomatic manner, “for his own good”. Be that as it may…

c. She is nonetheless dependent upon Sayid. Sayid represents exactly the sort of man that she has come to rely upon to do her bidding. Whatever sensitivity he has she will have cause to exploit; all the while, he lords his superior agency over Boone, thus revealing again the boorish side of his own character. (“What if I don’t?” is an all-too-frequent piece of macho rhetoric that Boone encounters, and it is also utterly barbaric.)

d. All too conveniently, it is Sayid’s superior agency which Locke, the Wise Old Man, now doubling as a father figure for Shannon, (in the wake of her biological father’s death) deems to be essential to the Success of the Colony. Locke does not train Boone to be a fighter, but to be a monk. Boone’s own agency as a sexual candidate is reduced to a depraving fantasy, to make room for an even more depraving feminine fantasy: continued codependency. Boone may be free from Shannon, but Shannon is not free yet; she has simply transferred her feelings to Sayid. Want proof? It was Boone’s own recrimination that incentivized her to agree to Sayid’s advances, in spite of her laziness.

Archetypes have a place. The Wise Old Man, the Warrior, the Temptress, the Healer, the Other, the Lovers, and the Shadow, et cetera, all come into play in Lost’s cast of characters, and they find their poetic exaltation in their setting, their backstories, and their subject matter. The Damsel in Distress, theoretically, should have her place as well, and to recontextualize her outside of sexuality can help to purify the idea. This is not achieved, in part because this episode yields to a Freudian psychoanalytic form of “unmasking”, instead of the Jungian trend of “Reintegrating”. The Ethical Domain of the Hero is reduced to the private domain of the forbidden lust, one which is in turn a sublimation of “incest fantasy”. (One of Freud’s most often disproven theories, so farfetched that even young Friedrich Nietzsche would not go so far.) Thus the archetype of the Damsel is lost, the archetype of the Hero loses agency, and Shannon is in more danger than she ever was, at least until Sayid finds cause to use his “communications” skills again on her behalf.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

Women are Like Cakes:

The contemporary woman must surely be even more paradoxical than the nineteenth-century woman.

On the topmost layer rests the force of thousands of years of tradition, spread thin, like an icing prepared separately, for it holds little substance in the eyes and ears of illiterate millennials. This cream is composed of all of the “archaic prejudices” for a woman’s virtue: sensitivity, passivity, meekness, vulnerability, dependency, maternity, receptivity, elegance, and grace. It is by no mistake that these are also the words of poetry and artistry, yet just as the Philistine dismisses fiction as “made-up stories”, so the feminist dismisses femininity.

Beneath the cream, therefore, there rests the hardened crust: the modern politic of feminism. Its forerunners, foremost among whom is the fiery, ram-like Emma Watson, are more than happy to jump on the post-modern train of deconstruction, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor. To them, or leastwise ACCORDING to them, “woman” is a being independent of those roles “assigned to her” by expectation, whether it is natural or social. Regardless whether the “good girl” originates within a social order led by men or in the sexual psyche which men inhabit, she is invariably a mask forced upon the female body.

As such, the “natural qualities” of femininity, as they’re expressed upon the topmost layer of our cake, are mere persona, and they express neither the Facts of Nature (for postmodernism rejects all such facts, though millennials simply pick and choose which facts to believe in, citing Science here and Philosophy there, arbitrarily) nor an Intrinsic Imperative to Conform to Society (for postmodernity also rejects all attempts to “create Social Order”, and millennials, likewise in Ethics as in Facts, pick and choose their utopian projections, arbitrarily). Thus the feminist, quite literally, expresses “all which is wrong with Society”, since her episteme implies the rejection of any possibility of “being [objectively] Right”, either according to Nature or Nurture, as well as either Fact or Ethic: What Is or What Ought to Be. Woman “is” nothing, intrinsically, except for what she wills herself to be, and it is not so that she OUGHT to will herself to be either one thing or another; if anything, the feminist posits: “you ought NOT to concern yourself with what you ought to be, except by your own estimation.” It sounds almost noble, but that there can be no promise of reconciliation with men under such circumstances.

When one digs even a centimeter beneath this crust, it comes as no surprise that feminists care little for accommodating men, since they are often forced NOT into cooperation with them, as was the old paradigm, but rather into competition. The bulk of the upper layers of the modern woman’s psyche are the fresh realm of the contemporary Career Woman. Divorced from her domestic roots, the modern woman finds her entirely egocentric point of reference in Wonder Woman, a sort of perversion of Superman whose only distinctly “feminine” strength is her ability to always get the “Truth” out of wrongdoers. By all accounts, the Warrior Princess stereotype, not really an archetype, though it is treated as such, is simply the dated male role in a female body. Yet this is an apt caricature of the Career Woman whose blazer is simply a suit jacket tailored to the upper half of an hourglass. Just as Corporate Culture engenders in effeminate boys an unnatural aggression, so it does for Woman, who becomes indoctrinated in the martial laws of Social Darwinism in the Work Force. How can any political theorist mistake feminists for Marxists? Only by analogy to the Dark Side of Communism.

Thus we ought not to be surprised that, underneath the veneer of the corporate go-getter, we again find the vulnerable Mother, the disowned Daughter, the scorned Sister, and an entire pantheon of uniquely feminine archetypes (some posit nine in number) which outnumber the relative simplicity of the traditionally male role, rendering its lazy conversion into female derivatives much more insulting. Who would want to be a merely hackneyed perversion of the “Warrior” archetype under the paradigm of Modern Warfare, especially when one could become instead the Queen of Light? Perhaps I speak from effemininity, but I envy the “archaic” girl.

Thus we discover that the topmost layer of adornment on the modern woman, one so oft omitted or brushed off, for it is deemed to have neither substance nor nutritional value, is in fact that juice which drips from the very base of the cake. It was not that men fashioned women in their own image, but that they admired them in their most natural state, and it was by adherence to Nature that expectations developed, for expectation is the lifeblood of Society, and expectancy is the very womb from which all decency springs forth. In offending the superficial persona, Emma Watson also offends that furnace wherein the mask was fashioned, as well as the passions which kept it warm. It’s not ironic, though it is poetic, therefore, that, just as English philosophers found in Zen Buddhism a release from the machismo of Western Life, so it is that modern American fans of Japanese Anime can point to a phenomenon seldom revealed in Western Media: the stereotype of the tsundere. The tsundere woman is hard on the outside but soft and damaged on the inside. Beneath what she pretends to be, there is that all-too-human vulnerability christened the Divine Feminine.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

Musings: September 2, 2020.

I am not “pro” anything. Only crazy people define themselves (or others) PERSONALLY based upon their opinions about PUBLIC policy.

The film Parasite is not about “class”; it is about a man who stabs his benefactor in the heart with an axe over a question of smell. It is about psychosis, and if you sympathize with the protagonists by the end of the film, to the same extent as you pity them at the start of it, you are a danger to yourself and others. Simply put: no desperation excuses that level of depravity, and if you wish to help people, recognizing in your humility that you cannot save EVERYONE, then start with those you KNOW to be innocent, rather than those whose needs you deem arbitrarily to be greater.

It’s humiliating to admit, but that system which Karl Marx identified properly as the Devil in the nineteenth century has become at once our most deadly modern weapon and our last defence against utter savagery.

Dialectic Reasoning, especially in the Hegelian tradition, is not nearly as staunch and systematic as you might think; in many ways, it burnt our bridges with the archaic and inflated Aristotelian concept of logical “non-contradiction”. Hegel admits, in fact professes, that the more we analyze anything the more it is prone to internal contradictions and circular reasonings. He accepts this, and he urges us to take our thinking a step further in order to accommodate the fact.

Now contrast this with the contemporary attitude: once something no longer “makes sense”, people simply give up and act on what they already “know”. Who is the villain? Little Hegel is up in his study analyzing meticulously while the World burns. Is it his fault? No. He’s setting a fine example for us.

Now you might say: if “contradiction is good” (as per usual, boiling things down) and you are “pro-contradiction”, (while making things personal) then why are you calling US out on OUR contradictions? Simply put: it’s because contradiction isn’t the end. Hegel’s methods are supposed to resolve at least SOME contradictions which thought produces. In many instances, the simplest rational explanation for contradictions in human behaviour is “stupidity and moral feebleness”. It is BECAUSE most people do not practice Dialectical Reasoning that our society is so conflicted, as well as its constituents. Hegel helps us to understand ourselves. You are welcome.

How does one support immigration reform whilst challenging colonialism? The humanistic arguments are the same for both: that the simple fact of an established way of life does not preclude either the possibility nor the imperative for a new way of life, one intended to accommodate the needs of outsiders.

So: why should one group of immigrants restrict others? Simply put, needs are not enough. In order for a system to work, it must follow a code of ethics, usually one formalized in Law. The English colonists were not “illegal immigrants”, since no such formal, federal Law existed upon their arrival, except perhaps in England.

How ironic, therefore, that in appealing to their descendants, I found myself contending with the New Left!! To the liberals, you see, the matter of accommodating outsiders is a joke. There are no “others” to the new liberal; there are only white people, black people, and brown people, and we like white people least.

This is what the argument has degenerated into: fuck the buffalo. They were here first. Fuck science. They were here first. Fuck Law. They were here first. Fuck human rights, that all-too-recent European invention which silenced the archaic African invention we call slavery. They were here first.

May I append this? Fuck history, that means by which we can follow the development of ideas without subordinating ourselves to primitive myths and proto-Fascist ideologies. They were here first.

Don’t get me wrong: I love mythology as much as the next guy. I just hate people who take it literally, and there is no greater modern myth than the concept of Natural Human Rights. Everything which we take for granted as a Society is the product of that “White Man’s Burden” which seems so embarrassing in context. It is simply the nature of progress that one always looks back with shame, since it’s impossible to be constantly improving without always one-upping what came before.

[({DM.R.G.)}]

The Adept Time Traveler: a Thought Experiment.

If man were to pioneer time travel in the same manner as he did for air travel and space travel, and were this innovation commercialized in like fashion, that the ordinary man of ordinary income might afford to make journeys back in time leisurely, it would become imperative for him to develop, alongside this innovation, new forms of sensitivity training, that he would know, in entering into an “archaic” society, to treat it as his own, so as not to disturb the natural progression of historical events, just as a certain respect for foreign cultures is essential to one’s National Security. He would have to shed all of the pretense in style, behaviour, and demeanour which he will have taken for granted in his Present Age, adopting the linguistic, social, and personal customs of whichever time and place he will have made his vacation destination.

Though the concept of commercial time travel is farfetched “even by” our “advanced, modern” standards, this thought experiment nonetheless presents us with an outlook upon history which is thoroughly rational, sensible, and sophisticated, for we are invited to suspend our prejudicial preferences for the Present Age, truly internalizing the notion that what is Evil Now might have been Good Then, and what APPEARS Good Now may “prove” to be Evil later.

Were such an innovation to transpire, undoubtedly the MOST qualified time travelers would be the most nostalgic Souls, those readers of old, dusty tomes who struggle to discern the vernacular of Shakespeare from the modern meme. The classical Man of Letters would have relatively less difficulty in immersing himself within the customs of the Past than the millennial radical, simply because he already inhabits history to a wider and more profound extent, owing to his literacy, which the latter enviously dismisses as laughably “archaic”. This elucidates a central problem in our very recent episteme of history: that it seldom regards any time period ON ITS OWN TERMS, except insofar as the trends of a present, protected culture persist in the blatant defiance of “progress”.

Were such a technological breakthrough to transpire, we should not be surprised to find that our Present Age, in its infernal infatuation with itself and its own self-professed progressive righteousness, would fall swiftly into bad repute by future scholars as having been one of the Darkest Ages of Human History.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]