Muttering into the void.
Why is there music in a church service? Why do we go to operas and musical theatre? What is it about music and lyrics?
Perhaps a demonstration is in order. Go take a listen to a regular-looking guy with a silly little harp telling a story in a thousand-year-old language, and then tell me you didn’t get shivers up your spine.
The supreme irony of liberalism is that liberals claim to believe that everyone is basically good, and that therefore government should intervene massively to stop the wrong that everyone is doing.
David Mamet, the famous playright, recently woke up to this interesting paradox:
I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.
Read the whole thing.
Except for all the others.
Because I grew up in West Africa, I have a slightly different perspective than people who bemoan the terrible horrible no good very bad Western, and especially American, life. There may be many things wrong with America, but compared to much of the rest of the world, it’s a pretty good starting point.
In response to the entries in a New York Times’s slogan contest, Lileks has some pithy remarks:
You can picture the satisfied little grins on the authors’ faces; you can imagine the whole tableau – the computer (which most people in the world will never touch, let alone use, let alone own) the TV in the corner connected to a network that has channels catering to every taste, the iPod stocked with music hoovered up free of charge without consequence, the fridge stocked with food – the light comes on when you open the door, too, unless it’s burned out, and then you go to the store and get another one; they always have another one. The soft bed, the coffee machine, the well-fed pet, the vast panoply of free information and unfettered opinion flowing 24/7 from the internet. You can drink alcohol without being sentenced to death; you can be a girl alone in a room with a man without earning a public stoning; you can stand up in a room and argue for the candidate of your choice without being arrested; you stand in a society that allows for astonishing amounts of freedom, comfort and opportunity. But.
But. Someone somewhere is a practicing Baptist and someone somewhere else is eating a hamburger larger than you’d prefer, and other people are watching cars go around a track at high speed. As your skinny unhappy friend said the other night: people are just too fat and happy. He bites his nails and plays WoW six hours a night, but he has a point. It doesn’t matter that these fascists-in-fetal-form never quite seem to accomplish anything; it’s not like they drove the gay Teletubbies off the air or had Tony Kushner drawn and quartered in the public square. But they’re preventing something. Something wonderful. And they’re driving large cars to Wal-Mart and putting 18-roll packs of Charmin in the back and they have three kids. Earth has withstood a lot in its four billion years, but it cannot withstand them. And even if it does, who wants to live in a world where these people don’t care that they’re being mocked by small, underfunded theaters in honest, gritty neighborhoods?
Read the whole thing.
Happy New Year to my approximately 4 readers!
I’m back to work this week, which means riding the Skytrain (Vancouver’s elevated commuter train).
It seems to be fashionable to sneer at people who aren’t fascinating and sociable during their daily commute. I was at a party just last week where a conversation dwelled upon how much more interesting a couple of homeless people were than all the grim stiffs in better clothes. How much better our world would be if everyone were chatty on the bus!
This kind of thing infuriates me.
Speaking only for myself, as an introvert and decidedly not a morning person, the idea of making witty and exuberant conversation with random strangers on the train is acutely stressful. I’m not a type A person, brimming with energy all day. I frankly prefer to save my stress for when I’m getting paid for it, in order to keep a roof over my head and food on my table.
I know it’s hard for extroverts and the television generation to understand, but entertaining you is fairly low on my list of priorities when I’m on the bus.
So next time you sneer at all the uptight sheeple going to work, consider that not everyone is a student or artist with a varied and interesting schedule. Some of us spend 9 or more consecutive hours a day at jobs that require a degree of concentration and energy, and wasting that energy on you would actually be detrimental to our livelihoods.