ex cathedra: Glass houses

Friday, December 30, 2011

Glass houses

A friend of mine loves to say, "People in glass houses gather no moss."

Don Cheadle --no favorite actor of mine-- will start in a TV drama, House of Lies, described thusly:

A subversive, scathing look at a self-loathing management consultant from a top-tier firm. Marty, a highly successful, cutthroat consultant is never above using any means (or anyone) necessary to get his clients the information they want.

Funny how people swallow the conceit of TV or movies showing "subversive" or "muckraking" ethical take-downs of amorality and greed. Last I heard, neither the TV corporations or the huge Hollywood corporations were paragons of Quaker righteousness. Nor are these noble actors working for peanuts. To say nothing of the media conglomerates who supposedly brave the risks of speaking truth to power. Capitalist corporations all, based on the pursuit of profit.

Nothing wrong with that. But the pretense. Gathers no moss.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: The TV show "All in the Family" gather'd a lot of moss. Everything unjust and oppressive in America is caused by low-class white males. A free ride to Ivy League, military-industrial complex (just opening up in those years as a liberational career climbing venue for women, blacks, and eventually gay men and lesbians), etc. All RCs were social justice activists (e.g. Archie's neighbour, a woman who agreed with Mike on everything except that belief in God was necessary, not a hindrance in the progress toward social justice). (The average RC priest was a mensh who knew all the Psalms by heart, both in English and in Latin.)

I totally believed in that show when I watch'd it. It gather'd a lot of moss. ... Even recently I didn't immediately wonder how many jet airplane rides Darryl Hannah takes in a year, including the jet airplane rides to D.C. to protest against the Keystone Pipeline. I was feeling something like, "Maybe she's right and should be taken seriously on this issue."

The pretense of rightness and being part of the solution is believable, it provokes a response of believableness -- within tribal boundaries I suppose. Fox News false. PBS true.

Well, I'm going to go improve my Nietzschean "shadow."; 6:37 PM, December 30, 2011

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Toward Our Future

What the sons of Europa need is a new religion: one that is as tribal, portable and survivalist as Judaism, as masculine, terrestrial and tough as Islam and as intellectually and aesthetically creative as Christianity...with a dose of the unflinching realism of the ancestral ways of the Greeks and Romans, Germans and Celts and Slavs..And for the larger Indo-European frame, something of the Indian capacity to combine an ultimate and philosophical realization of The One with a robustly mytho-poetic religion on-the-ground. Oh, and some of the psychological acumen of Buddhism.

Liberalism's Basic Flaw

Liberals believe that the chief role of the State is to force everyone to be equal, (ie, take vengeance on the successful). So when they are confronted with any group that they deem less well off than themselves, they are morally disarmed, completely and utterly. Any group that can achieve Victim Status is on their way to power and the (White) liberal's only job is to give them what they want, no matter how much that damages him. And nothing may ever be expected, much less demanded, of them in return. It's a recipe for suicide: no other outcome is possible.