Various and sundry

I read Five Feet of Fury, by a very choleric Canadian broad who links to items in the Great White North that that miserably PC country's press would hide. She's more than blunt, but sometimes I wish she'd think before she writes. Yes, me! I think that! Today she responded to the news that SF city parking employees may lose their free parking perks by headlining something about welcoming back Dan White. Presumably because city employees were in need of chastisement. But damn, lady, he assassinated the Mayor and a supervisor in cold blood. And not because of principle. Over the line, Missy. Over the line.

Kinda sore in the haunches from the hike on Monday. But it was a very good day. Worth it. Out in the woods and fields and beach and hills in companionable company and good food. Nice.

Excellent program on the Roman Empire the other night, from Augustus til the 5th century. Focus on Trajan and Hadrian (first half of the second century AD) as the military and cultural high points respectively, with the still-fascinating process of collapse played out over the next couple of centuries. One of the profs they interviewed, almost all Brits, clearly felt that the Romans were more like Nazis and Mafiosi than a "civilization". I wondered if Constantine's founding of an Eastern capital hastened the fall of the West or if it was a stroke of genius that allowed Roman civilization, in its morphed Greco-Christian form, to survive for another thousand years.

Noises being made to allow women into combat units. Bad idea, methinks.  Aside from the limits that gay culture places on men of the homosexual persuasion, the one thing that seems societally very iffy about male homosexuality is that it contributes to the feminist-driven war on manhood. If DADT makes it likely that women will be fighting beside men on the front line, then I regret its repeal.

Has there ever been a successful society which did not provide significant --and I mean significant--- all-male spaces and institutions? Women will always have all-female spaces because men are utterly uninterested in entering them. Women, feminist women anyway, find any all-male space inherently offensive, scandalous and oppressive*. My impression is that if you abolish significant all-male spaces, aka male-only spaces, what you're trying to do is abolish men.

*Can you believe that we have actually had serious societal discussions about abolishing gender-exclusive bathrooms?! Remember that popular and pathological TV show Ally McBeal? Yikes.

A truly and fully egalitarian society would not only mean the establishment of a hyper-regulatory police state, --already underway, alas-- but, even if achieved, would fall under the weight of its own unnaturalness. If a classless society is impossible, as the gruesome Marxist experiment showed, why should we imagine one in which sex and tribe --more deeply ingrained than class-- do not correlate with power and resources? Secular utopias are eventually not one whit better than religious ones.

In a very unfair and historically sloppy way, philosopher Eric Vogelin nailed "Gnosticism" as the great disease and, to me, astoundingly, named it as an ideology of "immanentizing the eschaton". In plainer English, of trying to establish heaven on earth. No matter what you call that, it always leads to various kinds of hell. A very conservative attitude (but with very bad historical reading in this case.)

The precise attraction of Gnosticism for me --as well as its point of irritation!-- was that it made the creation of the world and the fall of creation the very same event. In Gnostic mythology, the world we know is an irredeemably flawed one. In orthodox thought, it was once pristine and then came unglued through the will of creatures, both angelic and human. Hence, you can get yourself to think that if it were perfect once, it could be again. Not so for Gnostics, for Gnostics it is essentially, inherently and inescapably broken. It was made broken, by a broken God. So how you could think that Gnosticism was about building heaven on earth is beyond me. I cannot think of a less utopian vision.

Like utopians, I have a streak of perfectionism in me, which I regret. It is an ally of my procrastination. Part of growing up has been to do what I can to lessen it. Because I have that radar to begin with, I notice "imperfections" easily. But I have come a very long way in noticing without being upset. And I have learned to try distinguishing between a real defect and a simple difference which I happen to find uncomfortable or incongruent. Even real defect is no bar to respect, admiration, friendship, even love. It better not be, or there'd be no human relations at all.

And there are a lot of differences which I like and value, even envy. (In that non-vicious way which we seem to have no name for: admiring something so that you wish you had it, but not wishing to deprive the possessor. Something I'd like to have too, not instead of.)

Okay. Now I'm even boring myself a little. Time to sign off.