My wife and I saw a trailer for a remake of the film, “Red Dawn.” Toward the end of the trailer, a character says, “To them this is just a place, but to us, THIS IS OUR HOME.”
Ironic, is it not?
A patriotic treatise or patriotic parody? A political satire? How can a film both inspire a feeling of idealistic national pride AND question one’s tendencies toward nationalistic idealism?
Time to [re]read Karl Jaspers’ “The Question of German Guilt” and find the answer(s).
A few years ago, I installed a couple of ultrasonic buzzers in our attics to keep out animals. The first year, it was quieter than usual — fewer bumps in the middle of the night by our furry friends. Then, this year, I discovered a family of raccoons had taken up residence in the attic.
Call it affirmation of survival of the fittest except, in this case, it is a family of deaf raccoons that discovered a place to live peaceably under the roof of our house.
I found out that fact last night by opening the attic door and shouting at the raccons to be quiet. The baby raccoons kept chasing each other until one of them must have smelled me and turned, catching the attention of the other two who turned and froze, too.
Waving my arms and making aggressive charging motions scared them off into the unreachable corners.
Well, at least there’ll be no more screaming at the top of my lungs and confirming to my neighbours that the crazy man next door is trying to commune with the dead again.
In robot news, more from the analysis of Heidegger’s Being and Time by Hubert L. Dreyfus…
“2. Comportment is adaptable and copes with the situation in a variety of ways. Carpenters do not hammer like robots. Even in typing, which seems most reflex-like and automatic, the expert does not return to the home keys but strikes the next key from wherever the hand and fingers are at the time. In such coping one responds on the basis of a vast past experience of what has happened in previous situations, or, more exactly, one’s comportment manifests dispositions that have been shaped by a vast amount of previous dealings, so that in most cases when we exercise these dispositions everything works the way it should.”
“4. If something goes wrong, people and higher animals are startled. Mechanisms and insects are never startled. People are startled because their activity is directed into the future even when they are not pursuing conscious goals. Dasein is always ahead of itself.”
In other words, our actions/thoughts are based purely on the past while focused on the future. No wonder we have no idea what we’re doing in the present moment.
In business news, UPS made a hostile bid for the company Space Exploration Technologies Corp, commonly known as SpaceX, now that SpaceX has demonstrated its near-Earth-orbit package delivery service is reliable.
Experts expect FedEx to make a competitive bid to prevent UPS from expanding its reaches to “infinity and beyond,” with FedEx merely wanting to “be there before there are customers to be there,” mainly the Earth-to-Moon route that international transportation corporations are watering at the mouth to sink their teeth into.
The UPS CEO denied that Felix Baumgartner would be vice president of dropoff service for the new SpaceX division, if their bid is accepted.
The bicycle messenger union has opened negotiations for a stratospheric drop and parachute deployment training center that could provide pinpoint hand-delivery of packages to customers in remote locations via sky-high balloon or dirigible.
Pickup of the delivery person is a major sticking point in the negotiations at this time.
While the “live in Japan” set of 21st Century Schizoid Band bangs out tunes in the living room, the unsyncopated water beats of rain from the gutter streak across my window view.
Out of synch, out of tune…vie-veh-vuh-v-vroom!
Methinks it’s time for a new stop-action video before neuropathy takes over my toes and I can no longer feel sand squish between the digits of my feet.
Tonight, after our private dance lesson with Joe at KCDC, I joined my wife at the Jackson Center to celebrate her new company’s 10th anniversary in business.
Of all the stats they named, one stood out the most — combined charitable giving, between the company (~$400k) and employees (~$1.1M), has been around 1.6-million American dollars to the community.
I learned a long time ago never to lecture people about their responsibilities for charitable contributions.
We develop our own habits of helping others — sometimes a simple smile or pat on the shoulder, sometimes a 100-million dollar university endowment.
Or we may scowl at the whole world and return to our solitary meditation in Quonset huts deep in the wilderness.
I give away my ideas for consumption/contemplation by the whole species — a gift with no value or debt attached.
For instance, movie aficionados question the quality of remakes because the originals were just so hard to match.
Well, there’s at least one film that was so bad to begin with that investors are urging Ben Affleck, on the chance his new movie, “Argo,” will be a hit, to let a director take a shot at
remaking “Gigli.”
Rumours say that Amanda Bynes has been terrorising fellow drivers on the streets of LA to prove she’s tough enough to act the J-Lo part in the remake. Several Indian actors have hinted they are rough enough to reprise the role of Gigli.
We’ll see.
Meanwhile, for a brief moment of semi-sanity, American football fans applauded the return of the “zebras,” better known as nearsighted field referees, to the NFL.
The Atlanta Braves, an all-American baseball team, hope the magic of “Trouble With The Curve” will propel them deep into the postseason playoffs this year.
Can Sarah Brightman sing her way to heights that Felix Baumgartner can only dream of?
I have neglected our scientists glued to their desks in the subterranean b-b-basement chambers for too long.
Let us visit them and see if they have answer to the question, “When does a set of smartphone users with their portable handheld computers disguised as telecommunication instruments allow the use of the networked devices as a virtual supercomputer during idle CPU cycles?”
Me, with my Bluetooth keyboard and large LCD monitor, I’ve just about given up the use of a desktop/laptop PC, carrying my equivalent of an OQO in the Samsung Galaxy SIII.
Next on the list: synching the smartphone to my brain interface for better multitasking, spinning off calculations to the dedicated hardware device that displays results in my third eye, an audiovisual hybrid developed just for this new me who had to train myself to respond to a new “language” that doesn’t interfere with my normal functions within polite society.
Rewiring myself from the “reptile” brain on up has been a tiring task but one well worth all the risks so far.
Duplicating this reconfiguration via genetic code remapping will be the greatest challenge with the personal stem cells my scientists created for me to play god (note the lowercase).
Creating a genetic one-off experiment of self is the safest route at this point in our knowledge base.
Well, that’s all for now. Time for a chemical bath to wash off all the symbiotic “germs” and see how a “virgin” self responds to the environment.
Then take “Looper” for a spin on a Möbius strip.
Today, the author J.K. Rowling hinted at the rewrite of the Harry Potter world she had created.
In the new version, 10% of the girls at Hogwarts become pregnant and quit school, 20% of the boys pass on the STDs they contracted during conjugal visits away from the school and are summarily dismissed, 15% of the students drop out (due to poor grades, lack of motivation, etc.), several instructors will be fired and arrested for inappropriate relationships with their students, the Ministry of Magic will be fired for running Ponzi schemes, dragging the headmaster down with them, and the majority of the students will be dismissed for rampant cheating, leaving Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley to fend for themselves once again, having committing all of the acts cited above.
In other words, Hogwarts needs no external enemy — it will do perfectly well destroying itself from the inside.
I’m not a political candidate but I approve this flashback message that you could be Dodge material, just in time for a female Air Force officer to take charge of basic training.
9-23-2012 “beyond the grim”, story about movie trailer that convinces people there’s a film about a legend about a man who believes there’s a boy who sees the grim reaper in mirror reflections and also hears whispers about who’s going to die next; international “do not consent” rule that allows a person to opt of use of his/her image for any reason while in public/private; increasing, rather than decreasing, one’s freedom from intrusion
by business/government in the always-on, always-connected internet age; the myth of the middle class, a metaphor for compliant populace ready to compromise freedoms for perception of security from imagined evils against exercising one’s freedom to exist in/out of “1984”/”animal farm” type societies …zzzz…
To see that I exist, that there is a set of states of energy that can be traced back to the union of two sets of states of energy, one still living…
This “I” cannot justify its existence after playing with a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet, updating an Apple iPad 2 to iOS 6, adding contacts to a Samsung Galaxy SIII and asking if I, all references to “It’s A Wonderful Life” aside, have made sufficient contributions to say I deserve calling myself my father’s son, Richard Lee Hill II.
There are brief moments like these when I ask myself if my blue-eyed, red-haired, freckly-skinned genetic material goes to the grave without any attempt to reproduce myself, then why did I live at all?
Silence follows accusingly, guilt-ridden, mocking, watching others who do and do not reproduce themselves build legacies that live…
Why am I here if nothing matters?
I have accumulated and continue to accumulate toys in an attempt to fill in the gaps of my life where [grand]children should be.
The massive waste in our species’ endeavours that we dedicate to the excess time our social network has given us outside our basic childrearing tasks is phenomenal.
We have become the emperour’s clothes.
I am a prime example.
I should be dead yet I still live, the personification of self-preservation, a set of states of energy perpetuating itself as long as it can.
Devoid of meaning.
A transparent being.
Time to dull my brain with alcohol, a legal means of escape from the torture of living with myself, happy in my comfortably suburban misery with no motivation to escape from the multiculturalism that is smothering me, who is the son of a father who thought that pot-smoking hippies like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are giving our country away.
Dad, what can I do to make things right? Legalise the recreational use of substances like marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms and LSD to raise them up to the legally-destructive level of alcohol, tobacco and prescription medication? Show secret videos we have recorded of private speeches that Hillary/Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have given over the years that will destroy international relationships, let alone upset the balance of voters’ opinions?
Dad, I tried to support Mitt Romney, I really did.
But without a child of my own to say that I have preserved the genetic heritage of which you were so proud, having descended from one of the American Revolutionary War heroes, it’s difficult to swallow the bitter aftertaste of the two-headed monster we call the duopoly of the Republican/Democratic political machine that promotes two people I can barely distinguish from one another, Obama and Romney.
Dad, I never supported Bill Clinton. But I never supported George W. Bush, either.
Our political system has become such a convoluted, commercialised, nondemocratic system that I’ve given up fighting it — we’re just one, big, international conglomeration of interdependent business functions now, a group of nations in name only.
The dogs of war are eating the scraps and I can’t stand the stench of income inequality that our nation has dissolved into, despite it appearing better than many political systems around the world.
I agree the “haves” should not be taxed when they have competed to earn their gains for themselves and their heirs but many of them have become too greedy, driven mad by the spectre of recession/depression hanging over them and the lifestyles to which they’ve grown accustomed.
Look at me, living in the lap of relative luxury, surrounded by piles of useless crap that demonstrates the excess our society generates for our childrearing-free moments.
Has the Great Recession taught the upcoming generation to appreciate life without gizmos just as the Great Depression and WWII taught your mother and yourself to appreciate enriching the mind through education that enhances one’s family rather than mind-numbing distractions that turn us into technological zombies?
Dad, I’m sorry I never gave you a grandchild from me, your older, sole male heir, a son you almost lost when he got dragged into the muck of pop culture for a while as he tried to define/find himself out from under the shadow of your strong personality.
There’s nothing I can do about it now.
All I can do is make sure your wife of 55 years, my mother, is taken care of the rest of her life, however she wishes to live it, until one of us dies first, as I give my wife the time she deserves with me.
It’s not enough but it’s all I have to offer in a country that had grown too druggy, multicultural and unpatriotic for you.
Otherwise, I’d prove the real balance of power by encouraging our nation to go to war with nations that are ill-prepared to handle our massive firepower, economic and popular culture power be damned, while I sit back and enjoy the show on all my useless gizmos, before those nations complete their detente arsenals and ruin the fun we closet warhawks truly enjoy.
Dad, maybe that’s the idea. Should I use the transition of leadership in China and the discord in the U.S. as well as the turmoil in the old Ottoman Empire to start a good, old-fashioned, patriotic ass-whooping of a war? I’ve got enough profiteers on my side around the world to make it interesting and a savvy business investment, besides.
We’ll see…
Next best comment attributed to a salon.com news article responder:
I agree with many of your arguments as written, but to be fair, I think it is more complex than that. Other contributing factors include the following:
– The “two cultures” of the arts vs. (not and) the sciences is a major issue. For various reasons, our society takes sciences more seriously than the arts. (Just look at the reward sizes of typical NSF vs NEA grants, or salaries and employment rates of graduates of science vs. arts programs, or who we give H1 visas to and for what.) The wedge between the arts and sciences–which is epistemological and political and waged from both sides–makes them “separate but equal” in the historical sense of that phrase (i.e., not at all equal!).
– While the sciences make an obvious case for their own state support (technological innovation, etc.), the humanities have not been as successful since the 1960s. It used to be that people believed that teaching Great Books made us model citizens. But the humanities were among the first to deconstruct that argument as ideological. And they were right: there is a problem with only reading dead white men. But if we don’t teach dead white men, then what can we teach that the public will agree should be taught? Multiculturalism and grand theory have been two answers proffered since the 60s, but (I’m stating a fact, not advocating for it) these have not achieved consensus in the way that dead white men had in the past.
I also think that the humanities themselves have their more recent origins (since the 19th century) in upper class culture. If only well to do men could go to college, then all that Latin and TS Eliot and critical thinking was another way they could demonstrate their fitness for their white collar professional jobs over everyone else. But with college becoming more accessible since the 1950s, the class alignment has changed, and people have become more specialized in order to be competitive. It’s not enough to be smart any more, you also need to know C++. (Of course, now knowing C++ seems to excuse one from being smart, which is a problem.)
Of course a concerted cross-generational conservative political attack on critical thinking and the humanities hasn’t helped. But neither has the hard turn to postmodern theories that to the public just sound crazy (like Baudrillard–and I am not saying he was crazy, well maybe a little bit, but very few outside of comp lit departments really understood what he was trying to do) so it just seemed like a waste of public resources–not saying I agree!
Anyway, my point is that we humanists need to make our own case for public support of what we can offer–and this is a slow and long-term commitment. Critical thinking is a very good argument and I agree with it. I think we can strengthen that argument with a more compelling rapprochement with scientists and technologists than humanists and scientists/technologists have collectively done so far (it’s a two-way street).
The best comment attached to the same news article:
I’m dismayed to see that you are equating the liberal arts with the humanities. The liberal arts include the social sciences and the natural sciences. Chemistry is a liberal art. Music is a liberal art. Psychology is a liberal art. So while I agree with your analysis, this article is itself a symptom of the decline of the liberal arts amongst those who think they’re defending them. Which is the saddest part of this all.
Repeat after me:
The Emperor Ming: Klytus, I’m bored. What plaything can you offer me today?
Klytus: An obscure body in the S-K System, your majesty. The inhabitants refer to it as the planet Earth.
treetrunkdings 