249. Are You Real, or a Facebook Image?

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Thor

In a civ­i­lized coun­try the past is an open book and the future is an open oppor­tu­nity. As with coun­tries, so with peo­ple. There are mem­o­ries we laugh about, and things we would rather for­get, but don’t.  If we can hon­estly remem­ber the good and the bad, and the ordi­nary times in between, then we are whole peo­ple, not just paper cutouts from a pic­ture book. That is why sto­ries are so impor­tant. When the sto­ries are lies, then we are liars, now and into the future. If the sto­ries are hon­est, with a touch of humour, then we have hope. As for peo­ple, so for coun­tries.

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248. The American Dream and Other Nightmares

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Thor

Benny Lewis is an ami­able Irish­man whose inter­est­ing blog claims he can learn a lan­guage in three months. He has, he says, learned 8 lan­guages since he was 21 by liv­ing in dif­fer­ent coun­tries for a few months. How­ever this note is about a year he spent in the United States try­ing to under­stand that 4.6% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion. After a year he wrote a polite post­ing, “17 Cul­tural rea­sons why this Euro­pean never wants to live in Amer­ica” (http://www.fluentin3months.com/no-usa-for-me/ ). The result was amaz­ing. 2,578 com­ments flooded in, mostly from shocked Amer­i­cans. Why such thin skins? That is the fas­ci­nat­ing ques­tion. This is about Amer­i­cans in the place they call home. It is not about the Amer­i­can Empire, which is an entirely dif­fer­ent movie set, appar­ently devoted to eter­nal wars.  Except for a cou­ple of weeks in Cal­i­for­nia, I’ve never done time in the Amer­i­can heart­land, so my reac­tions are not informed by local expe­ri­ence, only rumour. I’ve met a few Amer­i­cans, mostly in Asia and gen­er­ally nice peo­ple. That’s it. Work­ing from at least that level of igno­rance, Benny’s com­ments make some sense to me (please read them; what do you think?). Aus­tralia, my start­ing point, is not a bad place, but I could eas­ily total up 17 rea­sons not to live there, and joke about it. Aussies are gen­er­ally not over-sen­si­tive about Ground Zero. But our Amer­i­can cousins ??!! Why so frag­ile?

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247. Who Succeeds and Are They Right?

Posted on August 4, 2012 by Thor

The most suc­cess­ful peo­ple of each gen­er­a­tion are usu­ally those most per­sis­tent at act­ing out and defend­ing the ortho­dox­ies of their cul­ture and sub­cul­ture. If they are busi­ness­men it will be the favoured way of doing busi­ness; if they are moth­ers it will be the favoured way of rais­ing chil­dren; if they are priests it will be the favoured way of sell­ing a reli­gion; if they are aca­d­e­mics they will have the most com­pli­cated argu­ments for defend­ing beliefs; if they are politi­cians they will have the loud­est argu­ments for the ide­ol­ogy of the age; if they are gang­sters they will be experts at the most fash­ion­able way of steal­ing money. This pat­tern of pro­mot­ing and defend­ing ortho­doxy to achieve suc­cess is the same in every human cul­ture and at every time in his­tory. Some­times an ortho­doxy is indeed the best avail­able answer avail­able at that time. Quite often it is not. That is why social change almost always involves a strug­gle, and almost always needs peo­ple with the courage not to be “suc­cess­ful” in the same way that the peo­ple around them hope to be.

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246. The Power of Negative Attraction

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Thor

From a safe elec­tronic dis­tance, we watch the hor­ror movie of some coun­try dis­in­te­grat­ing, the lives of peo­ple just like us destroyed for no rea­son. Why does it hap­pen? The lat­est one is Syria: ”The Assad regime itself is not so cohe­sive,” argues Nadim She­hadi of London’s Chatham House. ”What binds them [Syria’s lead­ers] together is neg­a­tive ten­sion. They will only trust some­one because they know they have some kind of hold over them.” (http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/assads-loyal-elite-grows-ever-smaller-20120721-22gt0.html#ixzz21IpxtkT1).  Here is a potent idea. Neg­a­tive ten­sion. We stick to the sur­face of mother earth because grav­ity holds us down. Cen­trifu­gal force wants to send us spin­ning off to visit the moon. Is it grav­ity or cen­trifu­gal force which is the neg­a­tive ten­sion here? Maybe it depends upon your point of view. Nature doesn’t have a point of view (does it?) but humans do. There seem to be end­less mar­riages that hang together by neg­a­tive ten­sion, once the first thrill of sex dies: there’s the mort­gage and the kids, in some coun­tries maybe reli­gion to bind them, and so on. Then there are all those mil­lions and mil­lions and mil­lions of peo­ple unhappy in their jobs, kept there by not know­ing how else to eat. If they win the lot­tery, will they work for love? Think next of those huge col­lec­tions of peo­ple we call nations states or coun­tries. How many of their lead­ers are lead­ers because the peo­ple love them? In some coun­tries we play a game of  illu­sions called democ­racy, pre­tend­ing to let the peo­ple choose. That’s tricky, and the truth behind it varies hugely, but there is some spark of a pos­i­tive idea in there. A lit­tle pos­i­tive hope is enough to keep the peo­ple together. In other coun­tries, so many of them, it is mostly neg­a­tive ten­sion. Power in those places comes out of the bar­rel of a gun. Between the peo­ple and the rulers there is zero trust, no mat­ter how many “patri­otic songs” they sing. When the gun is low­ered, the cen­trifu­gal force of sud­den hope blows these coun­tries apart.

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245. The Spotted Dog Trot

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Thor

Hey, this is a new inven­tion. It must be new because I just invented it. Don’t count the mil­lions of out-of-breath grand­pas flee­ing from bears and angry ladies over the last two mil­lion years. Here’s how it works: jog 50 metres, then walk 50 metres, then jog 50 metres, then walk 50 metres … for an hour and a half. If you think that sounds stu­pid, try it. Or maybe it is stu­pid, but it is amaz­ing how fast you can stir up a sweat. Maybe the bio­log­i­cal machin­ery gets con­fused and keeps pound­ing away at a higher level all the time. Any­way, it works, and any­body should be able to do it. This inven­tion hap­pened because some­times I walk, but walk­ing never feels like exer­cise. Most days I run. I’ve been run­ning for 50 years and love it. But every few days should be a “rest day”. That’s when the walk­ing hap­pens. Now I can cheat and do “real” exer­cise while I’m walk­ing. Well, guys, I’m going out to have a bit of spot­ted dog.

[Secret dic­tio­nary mes­sage for non-Anglos:  In Aus­tralian tra­di­tional cul­ture we never ate rice in a main meal. It was (is?) often served as a desert after the main meal, sweet­ened in a bowl with milk. Spot­ted dog is this sweet rice desert with raisins mixed into it  – a children’s favourite].

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244. Narcotic Attractions

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Thor

For the mug­gles its cig­a­rettes and booze. The wannabe urban cool-kats go for crys­tal, crack or smack with an entree of pot. On the down­ward age esca­la­tor from 30 to pear-shaped to hairy-wrin­kled, teem­ing masses of lazy human pro­to­plasm engage medicos in a dizzy­ing mutual econ­omy of  so-called pre­scrip­tion med­ica­tion, really a pan­demic of life-long drug addic­tion. Sex addic­tion? Dress it up and call it love to be respectable if nec­es­sary, but this the the addic­tion that can do no wrong. With flights of intel­lec­tual curi­ousity and unusual self-con­trol, some indi­vid­u­als in the human species occa­sion­ally escape our chimp and bonobo cousins’ addic­tion to fuck­ing the days away, but its always a brief flight, some­times tan­gled in reli­gion, nowa­days lured back to heavy breath­ing by the breath­less promises of pornog­ra­phy and adver­tiz­ing wiz­ardry. Money addic­tion? The inven­tion and his­tory of money proves that sec­ondary con­di­tion­ing works for the addic­tive per­son­al­ity even bet­ter than pri­mary stuff like glut­tony and sleaze. Kudos to the despised behav­iourists. Money addic­tion sucks ’em all in. From CEOs to stamp lick­ers, from Tim­buktu to New York, it’s a rare humanoid who won’t sell their soul and their brief life for the smell of money. What to do with the stuff? After food and shel­ter, that almost becomes an after­thought. Betray your best friend, tor­ture a refugee, cheat your way into some two-bit job … and all for what? To buy a sec­ond iPad for your bed­room or take a two week hol­i­day in a 4.5 star hotel?  Nah, it’s pin­ning the money itself to your triple-bypass chest wall that brings the thrill. And then there’s the addic­tion spun by that ring to bind them all, power. Now this one is pri­mary, even deep enough in the DNA switch­board to have its evo­lu­tion­ary antag­o­nist. You can’t have dom­i­nance with­out sub­mis­sion, and it seems that many of the human type, and per­haps espe­cially some of the female per­sua­sion, get a deep sat­is­fac­tion out of utter sub­mis­sion. That’s sure good for bed­rooms, dic­ta­tors and the god busi­ness. But give your aver­age  politi­cian, or mer­chant banker, or drudge sol­dier, or cardi­gan wear­ing, blink­ing office clerk, or life-defeated clean­ing lady a small taste of power. Wow. The addic­tion power is instant and incur­able. If even money palls and sex reduces to sticky exhaus­tion from a short thrill, when it comes to the power nar­cotic its rav­en­ous appetite is never exhausted.

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243. Who Minds the Minders?

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Thor

We have laws and police to dis­cour­age bur­glars, extor­tion­ists and mur­der­ers. That’s the low level stuff. Remem­ber that old idiom that laws are for the com­mand of fools and the guid­ance of wise men? Who han­dles the clever scoundrels? In fact the main rea­son for hav­ing armies is to deflate the egos of politi­cians, the “enemy’s” and ours. Politi­cians every­where and regard­less of ide­ol­ogy have scant respect for the rule of law when their inter­ests or egos are at risk. But then who minds the gents with medals and guns? Unfor­tu­nately it takes extreme courage to con­trol mil­i­tary offi­cers who think their right­eous­ness and power grows out of the bar­rel of a gun. This is excep­tion­ally so when the gun bar­rels make dol­lars as well as corpses, which is the nor­mal state of things. Real courage is def­i­nitely rare amongst bur­glars, politi­cians, dis­armed gen­er­als, or you and I. In the end we all play tag with threats and thumb­screws and flat­tery to keep the other guys in line.  Tech­nol­ogy reaches to the stars, but human pro­gress … well, we still share all that DNA with chim­panzees.

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