Sunday, September 30, 2012

Ironies of empire

The existence of words and ideas like "colonialism", "imperialism", "neo-colonialism", etc. is a purely post-Enlightenment Western phenomenon. Used by the former subject, vassals and subalterns of the 500 years of European expansion to undo the same peoples --the Whites-- who gave them the language to do it.

The Europeans --and their American cousins-- who once conquered and ruled these peoples now live in constant fear of merely offending them.

I wonder if any of the Arabs who converted the Turks to Islam had any second thoughts when the Turks --Seljuks and then Ottomans-- turned around and became their imperial rulers.

Human history since the rise of the city-state has been the history of imperial expansion by conquest. But only the European empires are criticized for "colonialism" and "imperialism, as if all the others were forces of nature and fate, while the Whites' empires --including the Crusades--were uniquely malicious and evil, deserving of a special title.

Pure BS.

Only Whites would believe it and let themselves be done in over a few words.

Whites: The Most Foolish People On Earth. (c)


----

Beastliness

A friend sent me a link to The Daily Beast --one of the organs of Official Truth--so that I could watch professional tennis players dancing Gangnam style. This dance phenomenon is something my friend just revealed to me yesterday evening. Sort a Korean macarena, built on the continuing global infection of hiphop. Watching the original video made me think that all of Asia was a giant cargo cult.

After that clip was over, something much less worthwhile came on. One "Ta-Nehisi Coates", who writes for the Atlantic. He's a Black apologist. The question in play was: Is GOP Opposition To Obama Racially Motivated?

And there you have the catastrophe of modern America in a nutshell.

My own sense is that, if it isn't, it ought to be. Why do I think this shockingly illiberal thought? This question: Is Obama's Policy and Behavior Racially Motivated?

Of course it is. And it is not friendly to historic America, a White nation.
So why should the GOP not be racially motivated in opposing him?

This is The Game. A Black President's history, words and behavior show that part of his agenda, like "Ta-Nehisi's", is to bring this White nation down a peg or ten. Everything about Black politicians is racially motivated. If they were not, they would be utterly uninteresting. But because of the fraudulent cartoon narrative I suggested in my previous post --that Blacks are a victim people only held back by The Man's racism-- when they act out of racial interest, that is virtuous, redemptive, noble. Any move they make to enhance their power, status and wealth is just, and we must support it. But when Whites do this, it's racism.

Marx's one good idea, mystification, illuminates the field. Of course, any movement toward Black equality must be a good thing, right? Because their pathetic situation, even after 50 years of effort, is all our Caucsasian fault, right? Even to think otherwise makes you that worst of all beings, a racist.

But when a war of revenge-by-policy is what the Civil Rights Movement turned out to be, to maintain the above fiction is mystification. Ex Cathedra is no longer mystified.




Friday, September 28, 2012

An insensitive and uninclusive thought

The bill of goods we were sold




What we got instead



--

Thursday, September 27, 2012

New frontiers

The word deserve is widely overused in our society. This, however, in a sidebar ad for a movie, deserves a prize.



--

More NYT wisdom






And the human cost of the First Amendment is having to read drivel like this.

How many murders and woundings are the result of people with legal guns?

And what kind of "people with guns" send others to the ER?

That we are not allowed to talk about.

---



Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Multiculturalism's fun

Big Bang Theory.

Indian dude Rajesh Koothrappali finally gets it on with a girl. A beautiful blond American deaf girl. The parents in India find out. He has to choose: drop her and find an Indian girl or be cut off from the family fortune.

Very amusing.

Now just for fun, imagine this. Howard Wolowitz falls for perky blond Polish Catholic girl ... His Jewish mother finds out. He has to choose: drop her and find a Jewish girl or be cut out of the will.

Very amusing.

Even more fun; imagine this. Leonard Hofstader falls for Raj's beautiful Indian lawyer sister. His mother in New Jersey finds out. He has to choose: drop her and find a White girl or be cut off from the family.

Rank and hateful bigoted racism. Not funny. At all.

Is that clear?


Time passing

2000

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone


2011
The Woman in Black*



Sorta like watching a boy you know grow up.

There was something about the little guy in 2001 that reminded me of a departed friend of mine who died of AIDS in 1988. I sort of imprinted the one on the other, I guess, so I've had a certain affection for Harry/Daniel ever since.



*This was a novel, then a play --2nd longest running one in England. This adaptation fiddles with the story. Radcliffe spends most of the flick alone, wandering. Beautifully filmed, but not a great vehicle.

--

Google is Muslim?

I was playing with online translators and combining that interest with my campaign of insulting Islam in honor of the First Amendment.

On Babelfish, I wrote this English sentence:

The God of Islam does not exist,
and Muhammed was not a real prophet.


When I took the Arabic translation

فان الله والاسلام لا وجود محمد لم يكن النبى صلى الله عليه وسلم الحقيقية.


and fed it into the Google translator, I got this:

The God and Islam do not exist,
and Muhammad prophet, peace be upon him.


I rechecked. Although Google accurately translated my English sentence into Arabic --Babelfish came out with something very similar-- when I fed the Arabic sentence into Google, out came the above Mohammedan honorific.

Even the software is a dhimmi.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Back up there

Well, my hit count for the last 30 days has passed the 15K mark. My summer slump, which I thought might be connected to my increasingly un-PC remarks about race, appears to have been just a summer slump.

--


Fatherless child, father to the man




Just forced myself to sit through Dinesh D'Souza's Obama's America 2016. You can download it and watch it at home now.

Most of it is based on Obama's own (but possibly ghost-written) book, Dreams From My Father. It is stomach-churning.

It only intensifies my perception that sitting in the White House, regardless of his birthplace or records, is a hostile alien. A Third World vampire riding a Trojan Horse, who, like the millions of his brethren now in Europe, North America and Australia, we invited in.

ExCathedra agrees with fellow half White/half Black author Shelby Steele, that Obama was only elected because of his race.

And if he is re-elected in November, his campaign to right the White Man's wrongs his father railed against will continue: by crippling the country that elected him without knowing who he was and is...or wanting to know.

An inversion of Clausewitz comes to mind: politics is the continuation of war by other means.

PS. Thomas Sowell makes basically the same point, clearly, if less colorfully.

--

Monday, September 24, 2012

In an alternate universe



Have had a picture of this guy in my files for several years.
Only second time I have seen one of him.

The tattoo gave it away.


Nice topography.

--

Monday, Monday

By hyperlinking from a blog comment elsewhere, I found the profile of a local guy I have seen in the neighborhood for years. Big, tall, strong, shaved headed guy. Pix of him in his bodybuilding contests. Then pix of him with a variety of divas and female stars. Then his list of what puts him off in other gay men. Number one complaint? "Hypermasculinity."

As if the gay community were awash in men who were too manly.

I wish.

Speaking of masculinity, just because I value it and see it under serious attack does not mean that I am therefore a paragon of the aforesaid virtue. And I am not talking mannerisms, but character. My flaws as a man are more than patent to me. If people could only support ideals that they themselves perfectly embodied, everyone on earth would have to shut the hell up.

--

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Stunning

Via SIOTW:

September 5 was Flag Day in Denmark. Outside Christianborg Place in Copenhagen, a formal ceremony was held paying tribute to members of the Danish military, living and dead; meanwhile, across the canal, a sizable mob of Muslims gathered, holding up signs reading “To hell with Danish soldiers” and “Islam will dominate the whole world” and howling out “Allah akbar” and various anti-Danish, anti-Christian, and anti-Western slogans in an effort to disrupt the commemoration. In an impromptu response, hundreds of the Danish soldiers in attendance formed a “human shield” along the canal and drowned out the Muslims with shouts and applause. “The soldiers’ exemplary behavior and good humor turned the episode into an inspiration,” wrote one commentator.

Should Danes congratulate themselves because of this restrained and "inspiring" response to an arrogant and consciously provocative show of utter contempt?

Or should one wonder, on this planet, with this species, if this is deeply wrong and unhealthy, a kind of sickness or madness...and that the truly virtuous response --and virtue must be based in reality-- would have been bloody and lethal?

These people are "refugees" and "asylum-seekers" who then basically piss all over what their feckless hosts hold sacred.

Had the protesters been neo-Nazis, other Danes, White men, wearing swastikas and shouting slogans...and had the "hundreds of Danish soldiers in attendance" attacked and beaten them to a pulp...who would complain, blame, protest or regret the violence and the lack of restraint?

No one.

But because they are racial aliens, dark-skinned and wrapped in a religion, --who riot and murder over a cartoon--the massive insult is met with a response that the Mohammedans could only find cowardly.

That the Europeans have brought this on themselves...hubris, blindness, stupidity, self-loathing...I run out of words.

Another example of:

Whites: The Most Foolish People On The Planet.©




Saturday, September 22, 2012

Not quite Equinox

Although today is the official Autumnal Equinox, the first day of Fall, in San Francisco the day and night will not be equal until this coming Tuesday, the 25th.

Still, the rays of the setting sun on the trees in the backyard seem autumnal.

Without Borders


A Facebook friend's friend had this image on his site, with a caption:


Do You See Any Borders?

Ah, borders. Regrettable obstacles to be overcome. Doctors Without Borders. Monks Without Borders. Very cool to be Without Borders.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down...

Well, of course, Ex Cathedra begs to differ. Borders, walls, boundaries...all absolutely necessary. In fact, we could use a lot more of them. And not porous ones, either.

Old enough to remember the Iron Curtain? I miss it. You knew who the bad guys were and where the Free World ended. Wish we could have a Green Curtain, to shut up and out and away all the Muslim countries...and stopped importing them here.

We do have borders, but if they define White countries, then they need to be overcome somehow. Even if they remain on maps, it's important to make sure that millions of Third Worlders emigrate there to prevent those racist Caucasians from getting to cocky and feeling at home in their own lands. That's why Scandinavia is full of restive and angry Muslims. Isn't that great? Who thought of that? What a terrific idea. Let's do more of it!

It's the logic of liberalism ---part of its mind-boggling refusal to recognize the reality of human nature's territoriality--to end all borders. Not doing so is a matter of convenience or laziness or hypocrisy. After all, Mother Earth doesn't have any boundaries: why should we?

Ironicalness

Although an intellectual himself --not a successful one, but one by nature-- Ex Cathedra is aware of the limitations of intellect.

Was thinking yesterday on the way home from the grocery store: when people become attached to an idea and yet their experience contradicts that idea repeatedly, they will usually prefer to cling to the idea rather than change their minds.

Not a new insight, but pretty accurate.

My favorite delusional idea du jour, of course, is egalitarianism. Equality or its contemporary (but incorrect) synonym Justice is a trance-inducing spell for almost everyone.

"Don't you believe in equality?" will always get righteously affirmative reply.

(Even though the question is so empty of content as to be merely a waving flag.)

Ex Cathedra would answer, of course, with a resounding "No."

It has not happened in a while, but when liberals --practically everyone I know or come in contact with is one-- discover that I am not one of them and ask, with shock, "So are you are Republican?", I take pleasure in replying in the negative. And after a second or two of relief when they think they have avoided meeting an actual Republican, I add, "They're pussies. Not hardly right-wing enough for me."

I have never had my interlocutor attempt to continue the conversation after that.

Does this make me a bad person?

Whaddaya know. I gave myself my morning smile.

Puzzlements

If race is "an artificial construct", and therefore....what?....trivial?, why is (nonWhite) culture, which is clearly "an artificial construct", so sacrosanct?

--

Friday, September 21, 2012

Ja Ja Ja

Again. A Matthew Montgomery film.

The shallow, jealous, "racist" brother in law makes all kinds of unpleasant remarks about the MM character, a half-Mexican. "There goes the neighborhood", etc.

Righteous outrage from the other lead. A wimpy White guy. Earlier in the film he slobbers all over himself apologizing for not saying the right thing to the Offended Minority Member.

Zzzzzzz.

Turns out the brother in law was right. Ex-con (as we learn) MM's old Chicano narcotraficante buddy --estereotipico--shoots him on the front lawn of the house...

Great for the neighborhood.

Reminds me of True Blood, where the nasty White Southern Christians are all bigoted and nasty and intolerant about the vampires. And totally correct.

My kinda religion


For you Biblically illiterate infidels:

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all of them who sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,
And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

The Gospel according to Matthew

HT to Friar Philip Neri OP

---

It's Complicated

For those of you un-initiated into the mysteries of Facebook, that's a relationship category.
  • Married. 
  • Single. 
  • In a relationship. 
  • It's complicated.
Welcome to moderne life.

Matthew Montgomery, who plays in gay indie films, often --and unsurprisingly-- finds himself in "It's complicated" territory. After all, the course of love, true or not, never does run smooth. His least ideological role, in Redwoods, is my favorite one. He's attractive, but not "pretty" at all; nice deep baritone. And he has enough "guy" energy to avoid the typical gay cartoon characters, who are legion. (Funny how a group so touchy about stereotyping does little besides stereotype itself in its own  "cultural productions", as the PoMo's like to say.)

Sometimes, well, often, I like him much despite the movie. In Long Term Relationship (2006), he falls for a terrific guy, but the complication, after the second date, is...
Matthew to his BFF: This is terrible. I can't believe it. He should have told me before. Before we even met.
BFF: What is it? Is he positive?
Matthew: No. That I could handle. It's worse.
BFF: Oh my God. He has syphilis? Hepatitis? Testicular cancer? He's bald?
Matthew: Worse. He's....he's...a Republican.

(Music from the knife in the shower scene in Psycho.)
You know, of course, that if the guy had turned out to be Muslim, that'd be, like, so cool.

What makes LTR a bit more interesting is that the political hurdle proves less important than that the two guys --who are in love-- have lousy sex. For months.

How does it turn out?

It's complicated.

--

Technology, pathology, theology

My ISP required me to switch over to a new technology* and so yesterday I was without Web access til it was done. So I watched a few hours of regular TV. Like a madhouse on screen. (And I speak here as a lifelong TV junkie, only relieved of the medium last year by the economy; well, my economy, anyway.) I don't know what's worse, the commercials or the programs. Almost totally unwatchable. Like a civilizational nervous breakdown.

*In the TooGoodToBeTrue Dept, my download speed has now more than doubled and my monthly rate has been cut almost in half...What am I missing?

***


One of the overlooked symptoms of depression is irritability. I am certainly depressed and have been for quite a while, with nothing on the horizon likely to shift that fundamental mood. Only a bit of anhedonia but a lot of irritability. A lot. (Really? But your blog is such a festival of affirmation; hard to believe...)

***

I have a Mormon friend and we had a recent brief exchange about Joseph Smith's King Follet Discourse. Here in print and here in audio re-enactment. A truly extraordinary and original piece of religious imagination. He outlines the back-story which makes it impossible to see Mormonism --like the Gnosticism it strangely resembles-- as a Christian religion. Smith's central theme that day, at a funeral, was the origin of God and the future of believers. The doctrine was reduced to a powerful couplet by a later LDS prophet, Lorenzo Snow:

What man is, God once was.
What God is, man may become.

Although this sermon never made it into the official Mormon scriptures, it reveals the driving theme in that faith, that the "Heavenly Father" Mormons worship was once a man, now arrived at deity, and that this is the future of faithful Latter Day Saints. This is what they now call "exaltation" or "eternal progression."

Apostolic Christianity (Latin and Greek/Oriental) holds a doctrine of deification through grace. It is central Patristic doctrine that "God became man in order that man might become God."

The Greeks emphasize this teaching, the Latins do not emphasize it in practice, but certainly do not deny it (Catechism, Section 460) . At every Roman Mass, at the pouring of water into the chalice, the priest says: By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share our humanity.

Contemporary Mormons do not deny Smith's teaching here, but are wary of it. It is the justification for plural marriage. Part, I imagine, of their mainstreaming and re-branding strategy. But as in so many things Mormons and Christians use the same words to indicate very different things.

Reminds me of how odd is the disjuncture between the squeaky clean Mormon presentation --pure 1950's Americana-- and the florid religious world it actually inhabits.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

World Wide Web

Within just one hour, my blog got hits from Brazil, India, Egypt and Pakistan, as well as several places in the States.

__

Requiescat in pace

After a long and brutal illness, my Dad died three years ago this day.


Our medicine is a two-edged sword, keeping us alive long long after all our quality of life has gone.

When I was a kid, part of Catholicism's reality was praying to St Joseph for the grace of a good death. That meant, of course, a death in the state of grace. When I think of a good death now, I think of one that is swift.

--

Identity politics

Although it has been branding dogma for some time now to speak of the LGBT community...Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender...I have always thought of it as a sexual Yugoslavia: the politicized amalgamation of groups that actually do not belong together.

Like People of Color. As if, aside from not being White, a Japanese and a Jamaican have anything in common. Or better yet, observe the warm POC interactions between local Blacks and the Asians who run the 7/11s.

And recently some SF Bay area bisexuals have complained (shocka) they are not really respected, that gays and lesbians think of them as unreliable fence-sitters, able to fade into heterosexual privilege whenever they want. Trouble in paradise?

Well, I am not LGBT. As I have gotten older, even the G part has to be put into quotation marks. Not because my erotic nature has changed, but because I dissent so sharply from the herd-values of leftwing politics, feminist-inspired ambivalence about masculinity, and chronic victim identity.

Where I call myself gay or homosexual or androphile or a man-loving man, my sexual identity comes from me, from the shape of my sexual desire for other men.

The amalgam of LGBT includes T, which is a desire not to be the gender you were born as. And in the case of MTFs, a desire to cut off your dick, get breasts and have a vagina installed with the remnants of your penis. Why someone like that should be part of my community I have completely failed to see.

The only commonality I can see is that all these folks have taken their cue from the trannies and embraced, consciously or not, their identity as gender deviant. Whether because of sexual object or gender behavior or gender identity, they interpret themselves as Men Who Are Not Really Men and Women Who Are Not Really Women. In 2010, the International Mr Leather Contest, a celebration of at least the trappings of (hyper)masculinity, chose a wheelchair-bound contestant who was born female. A triumph of LGBTism.

Why the LGBT power caste have not yet incorporated transvestites --who are almost always heterosexual males who get a sexual charge out of cross-dressing-- is a mystery.

LGBT are defined by what they are not. It is only because all the folks in the LGBT group are outside the realm of sexual normality (straightness: both of sexuality and of gender) that they form a group. It is a political tactic, not a personal quality. Like People of Color.

A strategy, not an identity.

And I say the hell with it.

Glad to be gay

One of my favorite actors in a scene with his wife, a character who embodies so many of the things about women that make me glad to be gay.

The Nineteenth Amendment...really such a good idea?

---

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Tempus fugit

The very odd flick Metropolitan is from 1990. The upper class youth in NY then were wearing tuxedos all the time? And top hats? Feels to me like 1920.

1990. Over twenty years ago.

1990 is to 2012 as 1940 was to 1962...and I remember 1962 very well.


Bingo, almost

Watching the continuation of Thomas Sowell's full interview with Peter Robinson, whose friendliness sometimes edges closer to syncophancy. And they both make sure that any discussion of race remains well within PC boundaries. On pretty well everything else: bingo.

Ex Cathedra's conclusions of the last several years --quite different from his previous attitudes-- are that, sadly, the Rainbow Nation is a multicultural lie. As we have been told so often, the problem of race is indeed central to American life. But not in the way we are always meant to hear it, viz. that White racism is the problem. It is not the problem.

I never set out to have the grim view of group competition that now seems so obvious to me. I have personal connections with individuals in almost every groups that I now consider inimical to the survival of Western civilization. I even belong to one of them myself. But individuals in groups, especially the nice ones, do not control the groups to which they belong. Being exceptions, they are not significant to the meaning of the group. And group conflict is what drives history.

Had a funny experience yesterday, watching the original The Thing (1951) From Another World. All in black and white, with an all-White cast --because it was an Arctic scientific/military outpost and in those days, what would you expect? I was only a toddler then, but my memories of the later 50's are clear. And although my eventual erotic shape* makes those times personally hazardous, in every other way they seemed preferable to me.

Typical old man?




*Some slash fiction starring Sergeant Bob and Captain Henry has promise :)





Monday, September 17, 2012

Thomas Sowell

Making sense, as usual.

Warning: includes clips of both Michelle and Barack, so NSFW.

Plus, Andrew Klaven on how to respond with sensitivity to Muslim barbarism.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Not mad

A few commentators have opined that the Muslim mobs that react so murderously to a movie or a cartoon are insane or at least suffering some kind of mental illness.




I beg to differ. They are acting quite sanely.

If you are a group that seeks or values dominance --which is essential to Islam as the ultimate territorial theocracy--and you can get this by displays of aggression, then why would you not do it? If a few riots and a few murders can bring to heel an entire civilization that otherwise massively outguns you militarily and is your technological superior, why would you not do it?

To be that superior civilization, not understand what the game is about, and apologize and appease...that is insanity and mental illness.



PS. Although it is unclear whether the killing of the US ambassador to Libya was a preplanned Sept 11th anniversary event, or had something to do with the Mohammed movie, a Muslim mob, as Muslims, killed an American ambassador.

If Americans decided to burn down a few mosques in retaliation...who would be the intolerant racist bigots?

One guess.


Absolution, maybe

Many moons ago I fell hard for a straight guy. Grief abounding. Much regret.

But I just saw a video with Collin Farrell singing one of the songs from Crazy Heart. I realized that he looks like that guy. So that guy, back then, looked like Collin Farrell.





Now I can kinda forgive myself. After all, who wouldn't?

Monkery business

Despite my expatriate affection for my old Order, not everyone is a fan of Dominicans. Inquisition, Schminquisition. People are so touchy nowadays.

From an 19th century British parody book :
Monachologia, A Handbook of the Natural History of Monks.



"The Dominican is known for barking at midnight with a discordant voice (the divine Office sung at midnight) and prides itself in the development of an enormous pot belly. It declares that this species ranks with the rattlesnake and cobra as being most dangerous to the human race. It stalks its prey and can smell at any distance wine and heresy. The most dangerous breed of this species is found in Spain and Portugal and it likes its victims well-cooked. Not surprisingly, declares Monachologia, the badge of this species is a mad dog carrying in its teeth a burning torch.*"



Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology Logo

*St Dominic's mother, while pregnant, dreamt of a dog carrying a torch that set the world on fire. Via a Latin pun, Domini canes, The Lord's dogs, the nickname of the Dominicans

HT to the DSPT, and a lecture by a Dominican on the Friars and food.

Despicable Me

By liberal (and many conservative) standards, Ex Cathedra is:

An Obama-hating White supremacist racist.
A patriarchal and misogynist sexist.
              (adding up to the typical Angry White Male)
A greedy capitalist 1%er
(by sympathy, definitely not by bank account!)

A "self-loathing" gay homophobe.
A Christianist Islamophobe.
An immigrant-hating fascist xenophobe.
A warmongering militarist.
A jingoist Yankee imperialist.
A Gaia-raping anti-science climate-change denier.


Well, not a perfect description, but in the ball park :)


PS. The jury is out concerning my anti-Semitism. I give confusing readings here by my anger at the ungrateful and destructive attitudes of Jewish liberals to the most welcoming Christian country in their history but by being frankly Zionist (Give me an obnoxious Sabra over a horde of Palestinian savages any day), as well as valuing my Jewish family members and friends...and chopped chicken liver.

----

Doubtless

My sense of the utter enmeshment in and captivity to the Boomer worldview by the supposedly psychologically enlightened, evidenced here by a program offered by Jungians. I know these four people: passionate liberal Obama-loving Democrats all. Drowning in what Jungians refer to contemptuously as "the collective."

One of the opiners, a man I quite like but who is entirely wrapped in a liberal Democrat world, once astonished me by going all Chris Matthews' style gooey about Obama's smile...

His description of the cultural complex reveals the assumptions involved, which will vitiate the project. I detect no interest at all in trying to self-analyze the cultural complexes and unexaminable assumptions of the Jungian collective, reflecting so closely the view of the Bay Area bourgeoisie.

At least in one place, he admits the difficulty they will have in "resisting the typical Jungian temptation to reduce every group conflict to an archetypal motif." In my experience, this has been an automatic hermeneutic of accusing one side (easy to guess which) of shadow projection and then lamenting the loss or the patriarchal repression of the feminine. End of story.




WORKSHOP
OPEN TO CLINICIANS & THE GENERAL PUBLIC
THE CITIZEN’S DILEMMAS IN DIVISIVE TIMES |
FOUR 
VOICES

MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS
Those of us who get our bearings from the “Spirit of the Depths” as well
as the “Spirit of the Times”—who pay attention to politics as well as to
our dreams—find this a difficult historical moment. How do we manage
ourselves psychologically and politically amidst all the fury and vitriol in
public discourse? How do we tend both psyche and polis? The American
election looms against the backdrop of a fierce zeitgeist—economic and
environmental crises, revolution, tyrants who murder their own citizens,
occasional glimpses of a new day.
During this half day conference four Jungians will speak to these
issues from diverse points of view. In the tradition of Jung’s Man and His
Symbols, we will use word and image to evoke both the collective and the
archetypal.
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS 2012: SURFING THE EMOTIONS
AND COMPLEXES OF THE COLLECTIVE PSYCHE

Super PAC dollars and the insatiable national appetite for the lowest
level of pandering at the highest volume make the chances of a
substantive debate about our country’s vision and policies of the future
highly unlikely in the 2012 Presidential elections. Although so much is
at stake, it is still reasonable to ask: why should anyone join the “talking
heads” who will be surfing the subject endlessly? Even though the
issues and policies will be muddied rather than clarified, there is still
something inherently fascinating about this national spectacle which
will play more like a Superbowl game than the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
The fascination comes from the fact that the collective psyche and its
connection to the cultural and collective unconscious are energized with
charged emotionality, complexes, and characters parading across the
national stage. The elections give us a unique opportunity to consider
the state of our national psyche in its confusions, absurdities and deep
concerns. What issues will trigger potent emotions in the electorate?

Which cultural complexes with their stereotypical thinking and fixed
attitudes will shape and determine public opinion? The Presidential
elections are a collective x-ray about how we perceive ourselves as
a people, what we fear and what we hope for at a conscious and
unconscious level.



LOVE IN THE TIME OF CACOPHONY:
AN INTROVERT’S GUIDE TO POLITICAL EXTREMISM

In the journey of many seers comes the confrontation with a politics of
extremism. Jung’s reaction to the break with Freud threw him into the
chaos of a collective unconscious at the brink of war. His explorations in
The Red Book attest to the depth of the conflict and reveal his discovery of
an inner guide. From the Middle East, we learn of the persecutions of great Islamic
mystics and their revelations of light and guidance. Henry Corbin,
the renowned French Islamist, writes of the Great Disjunction in the
Western psyche and how it functions in the cultural wars between the
Christian West and Islam. With this perspective in mind, we will examine
some of the religious and political forces within our own society.

CLINGING TO THE AXIS MUNDI:THE MUSE OF POLITICS

How can poetry respond to the rancor, the bitterness, the extremism, the
climate change deniers, the New Deal dismantlers, the Women’s Rights
plunderers of our collective moment?
(Bolding mine). Poetry is no more than the flap
of a butterfly’s wings, the dart of a hummingbird—a strophe flung into
the roar of the mob. Poetry does so little, dares so much. Poetry is the
prophet down from the mountain, a gadfly on the body politic, a witness
to the desecration; poetry sings our cultural myths, mourns what’s been
lost, praises the newborn day. NRL will read and muse
about some of her political poems.

COSMOS, PSYCHE, AND POLIS:
AN ARCHETYPAL ASTROLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON OUR TIME

The past and the future are converging in our time with extraordinary
force. Old structures are collapsing, movements for radical change
spreading, societies becoming deeply polarized – all this amidst an
increasingly critical state of Earth’s biosphere. To help us navigate such a
dramatic threshold of transformation, we need multiple perspectives and
sources of insight.
Jung pursued astrological research throughout his career, and many of us
who have followed his lead in a more systematic way have concluded that
there are few frames of reference more helpful in illuminating the timing
of individual and collective archetypal dynamics than an archetypally
informed knowledge of the ongoing planetary movements. Perhaps more
than any other form of analysis, archetypal astrology can illuminate
synchronistic waves of events and trends occurring throughout the world
at a given time, while also revealing larger historical patterns that unfold
cyclically through the centuries. In this final portion of the conference,
we will examine the current planetary alignments to help identify the
major dynamics at work in the cultural zeitgeist for our complex and
precarious moment in history.


Secondary gain


For you benighted souls
who may not recognize this image,
click here.

One of the ex post facto reasons I've discovered for liking my friend Bill is that he is such a seething bundle of contradictory opinions that he makes me feel consistent and integrated by comparison.

Chatting at dinner last night with my ex T, as we typically do on Friday nites, Bill opined about the virtues of direct democracy, like the Athenians had, and about the decrease in real democracy suffered by large representative republics like ours, on which grounds he found American self-congratulation about our democracy quite hollow.

In any other context, Bill has a view of homo sapiens so low and so hostile that on my worst day I would be acclaimed a liberal humanitarian by contrast. To imagine that he would want to be governed directly by our loathesome species, in a universally suffraged voting mob no less, is laughable.

And of course he neglected to note that Athenian "democracy" was severely limited to non-slave adult male citizens who had completed military service, no more than 20% of the city's actual population.

But then, part of his charm is his ability to passionately hold inconsistent, even antagonistic, nay, massively contradictory positions simultaneously. From a self-described Christian Nihilist*, who would expect less? Being the well-read fella that he is, when I point this out to him, he just smiles and quotes Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes.




*Not a bad monicker for liberals in general: all the martyred and selfless 
high-minded perfectionism of Christian morality with not an ounce of groundedness either in nature, history, race, metaphysics or divinity. As recently described, it is the politics of pathological altruism. The Island of Laputa as a cultural program.

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Friday, September 14, 2012

Heresy


The Dalai Lama
Mohandas Ghandi
Martin Luther King

Three men whom it is assumed one will mention with respect, even awe. Heroes all. (And none of them White, which makes it much cooler to think they're cool.)

Just let me say that Ex Cathedra finds all three of them seriously flawed and no genuflecting will be forthcoming.

Dolly L ---as B refers to the Tibetan monk-- owes his celebrity to his exile. And to the silly Western infatuation with Buddhism. Not because Buddhism is silly --it is a brilliant religious psychology in many ways-- but because Westerners uncritically love its non-Westerness. As for His Tibetan Holiness, most of what he spouts is just pablum, like the other His Roman Holiness can do on a bad day. Peace, love, compassion, etc. Blah Blah.

The former ruler of the feudal state of Tibet provoked this post when he recently opined that religion was no longer adequate to the global ethical needs and something new was required. When has religion ever been adequate --whatever that may mean-- to the ethical needs of an intrinsically unethical species on a planet which makes living ethically a very iffy proposition? I cannot think of anything Dolly has ever said that Mr Rogers didn't. Color me unimpressed.

(Now that I think of it, We Need Something Entirely New is as easy and unoriginal a highminded response to a problem as the cheap adolescent satire of You're All Hopelessly Corrupt.)

As for Ghandi, his political achievement of an independent India is very impressive. But his ideology of non-violence is as stupid as any form of pacifism.  If he had been facing the Chinese, the Japanese or the Germans (or the Mughals) rather than the British, you can bet he would not have survived long enough to head a movement. You only get to be a great visionary if your opponent has a conscience. Plus, telling the Jews not to resist Hitler...how noble of him.

And Rev King. A socialist, a plagiarist, a serial adulterer. Like Ghandi, he succeeded because of the American moment. And the results of his undertaking, intended and unintended, are now taking down the country. So not a hero of mine.

Gosh, who could be next on Ex Cathedra's shockingly heretical UnList?

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Thursday, September 13, 2012

Curmudgeonity confirmed again

My friend Bill got me to watch an episode of Last Man Standing, a Tim Allen comedy about a manly man Dad in a household with a wife and three daughters.

It offended me.

If my sisters had spoken to my father with entitlement, disrespect and contempt that these little bitches do --which we are supposed to find funny--, they'd have had their heads handed to them.

---

Old and New Testaments, Muslim-style

Bill Warner's lectures on the Koran, the Sunna and the Hadith as texts for a 1400 year old expansionist political system led me to realize that Islam has its own Old Testament/New Testament structure.

I have always thought that Mohammed was smart to create a stand-alone scripture entirely of his own making because of the tensions and complexities Christianity faces with the Jewish Old Testament and the Christian New Testament bound together in one book, The Bible.



Reading the Koran is arduous (I did my first reading of it back in 1991, as a companion to Hourani's The History of the Arab Peoples.) It is not much larger than the New Testament, but its chapters are arranged by size: largest to smallest, excepting the first one. It appears chaotic, repetitious and very ill-tempered.

It is a basic of Islamic Koranic interpretation to divide the text (for study) into those parts revealed in Mecca, the 13 earlier years of Mohammed's career and those parts revealed in Medina, where he was the warlord. Broadly speaking, the non-violence in the Koran is from Mecca; the Medinan verses are martial. And the doctrine of abrogation holds that a later revelation is weightier than an earlier*.

There is thus a kind of internal Old/New Testament within Mohammed's book itself.



*Given Islam's extremely high doctrine of the Koran --that it is uncreated and eternal, about as literally the Word of God as the second person of the Trinity in Christianity-- it is very odd that parts of this Final Perfect Revelation are rendered moot by other parts of it. As if, from all eternity, Allah kept changing his mind. But then, Allah is Will, not Reason.

--

Revising revisionism

Once a source of manly pride, the Crusades are now reflexively understood by Westerners as an ethical flaw: White European Christians once more attacking inoffensive UnWhites. Etc. Etc.

It is, of course, total bullshit.

Here's a map of the Mediterranean in 1100, the time of the First Crusade. All the dots on the yellow Christian lands show Muslim incursion, attack and/or dominance at the time.


Note the situations of Spain and France, all the Mediterranean islands, the coastlines of Italy, the Adriatic and Greece, as well as the situation of Byzantium.

And who in the West now knows or remembers the campaign of the Muslim caliph Al Hakim, against the Christians and their churches in his empire, banning the celebration of Easter or the use of wine, essential to the Mass, and culminating in the utter destruction both of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the tomb of Christ in 1009 ? To say that the Crusades were unprovoked is a lie.

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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Lying backwards

Contemporary Brit series shows a flashback into Victorian times, where the secret protective agency set up by the Crown is run by...women and Blacks.

Sheer race and gender PC. Makes me fuckin' crazy.

Now we have Phallic Females and Numinous Negroes projected back into our history in places where they could never have been.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia lives on.

--

What endures

Woke up feeling off. Dreaming of the breakup of the country. Then, thanks to a cryptic text from B --whose birthday is today: Happy Birthday, boyo-- read about the murder of the ambassador in Libya. And, via Facebook, a story about how "racist" peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are, according to the Portland educational system. I used to think extreme right-wingers were hysterical when they said that liberalism was a mental disorder; not any more.

At that point my declinist stomach started to churn and roil.

God, if I were King of America, there would be a forest of gallows as far as the eye could see. Whites: The Most Foolish People On The Planet (c).

Anyway, one of the ways I distract myself --escape-- when I feel off like this is remembering what lasts. And part of that is how men are with each other.

Two film images.

The first is from Redwoods (2009), a movie I really like and have seen several times, regardless of (ok, because of) its romantic sappiness, etc.  The two leads have real chemistry as they play out their initial and instantaneous entrancement. Their interactions have the ring of truth. And not just in bed.

The second is from another flick, Testosterone (2003). Oppositely, an unnerving and offputting story, full of lies and obsessions. One scene, between a lead and the other lead's ex-boyfriend, also tells a truth about men.


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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Accurate

I know a lot of things I wish I didn't know.



HT to Leah K.

Stats

I started Ex Cathedra in December 2006. Blogger started keeping statistics on it in May 2008.

According to Blogger, I have uploaded 2900 posts and have had 260,000 hits. Just last month, they tell me it was over 13,000 (and my own are not counted.)
But these are not the posts I made in the last month; they could be any of the 2900.

The 65 or so  posts I have made in the last 30 days have been read 642 times altogether, averaging only 20+ readers a day...so well over 12,000 of the hits are on older posts, which spread out over almost 6 years.

And Blogger stats make it clear that posts containing pictures of male pulchritude are the most popular. However, I have no idea how people find them, except that Google is the primary referral site.

I added the Feedjit Live Traffic Feed widget yesterday. It tells me every time someone "hits" one of my 2900 posts, where they are from, and sometimes which post they hit. Already, combining Feedjit and Blogger stats, I have discovered, for example, that my 3 June 2012 post on Multicultural Sensitivity in the Cannibal Community has been hit 117 times.

Makes it all worthwhile...

Nine Eleven




Muslim jihadis killed 3000 Americans on this day in 2001.

Despite the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, on the homefront the reaction has been symptomatic of a dying culture, one that fears even to name its enemy lest its enemy be offended...
In 2001 there were 1200 mosques in America. Now there are 2100. 
Everyone who tries to board a plane is treated as an equal terrorism risk, with our naked bodies on film now, lest a non-White* religious group be offended. 
Presidents issue Ramadan proclamations and celebrate it with dinners at the White House. 
Muslim immigration to America continues unabated. 
          Muslims are accorded special treatment and accomodation given
          to no other religious group.

          Criticism of Islam is now pathologized as "Islamophobia".      
The 9/11 Memorial in NY has no indication of who killed all those people and why. 
Barack Hussein Obama, raised a Muslim as a young boy, issued his 9/11 statement today and there was no mention at all of Islam. 
And today, 9/11/2012, the US Cairo embassy's response to mobs who
destroy the US flag to protest a rumored US film "insulting" to Mohammed to condemn "misguided individuals" who hurt the religious feelings of Muslims or followers of other religions.


How can our ancestors not disown us in shame?

"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe … 
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish. 
They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means. 
The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours." 
Lee Harris
Civilization and Its Enemies


*As I have often said, Islam is coded as a race as well as a religion and granted all the suicidal immunities, the license and deference, that Western liberal democracies grant only to non-Whites. Were Muslims mostly White, no such accomodations would be forthcoming. On the contrary.

--

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Monday, September 10, 2012

The real fantasy in Rowling's Magical World

I love the Harry Potter movies. I have seen all of them at least several times. Although it's easy to read the background politics of Harry Potter as a liberal attack on White racism in a multicultural UK, I have no idea if JK Rowling had any conscious intention about. But even if she did I don't think it's at all that simple.

The Bad Guys are the magical equivalent of "racists", --the Malfoys are superpale and blonde--although both groups, they and The Good Guys are multiracial. It's about pure-blood Magicals against mixed-bloods or spontaneous magicals born to muggles. (And isn't the term muggles pretty close to negroes? A name imposed on non-magicals by a superior race?) Easy, though, to cast Harry and Friends as contemporary multiculturalists vs Voldemort as Hitlerian RightWingers.

Easy, but wrong.

The Magical World appears indeed to be one of racial, ethnic and sexual egalitarianism. But it is radically different from any real human world so constituted. It is an accomplished, unremarkable, taken-for-granted and utterly passionless fact. Without tension, without resentment-based power struggles, without any racial or gender competition or hatred. To say nothing of the absence of an alienated youth culture.

All the peoples of color at Hogwarts, for instance, aside from their skin hue or ethnic history are completely assimilated into a thoroughly traditional British culture. Without any change of character at all, they could be played by native English. With the exception of Cho, who has a brief romance with Harry, all the others are merely window dressing --local color, if you will--with no role in the narrative. Kingsley Shaklebolt, who is Black, eventually becomes Minister for Magic. Aside from the visuals of his skin and clothes, he could just as well be an actual English wizard. I mean, even his name...Ginny dates Dean Thomas, who is Black, but finally, like the other major characters, marries within her own race, with Harry.

And in Goblet of Fire, at the Quiddich World Cup and the TriWizard contest, ethnic/racial/gender identities are utterly intact. The French girls are all French, the Bulgarian boys all Bulgarian. No African or Asian "diversity."

Boys are boys and girls are girls, a truth accepted and uncriticized. Married couples --including the wife taking the man's name-- are utterly traditional and rarely (unlike dating) interracial. Molly Weaseley is a heroic character and also a completely traditional housewife and mother to her boys. It is in fact a world that imagines equality without ever seeming to have required feminism or multiculturalism to create it.

In short, a total fantasy.*





Yet it also contains, without remark or protests, elements that would horrify contemporary liberalism.
All the major characters are White. POC's and their kiss-ass friends have noticed and, predictably, whined. "White privilege" and all. (I bloody well hope so.) As we all know, it is against the law for White people --especially in a White country like England--to be in a group by themselves.
The house-elves are a slave race. Individual manumission is possible, but no one protests the existence of this peculiar race-based servitude but Hermione, whose moralist crusade against this and other forms of "wizard superiority" are met with a mixture of indifference and disdain. Harry frees Dobby out of friendship, not principle. He uses Kreacher just as a master would use a slave and makes no attempt to free him. (In the books, when elf slave Winkie is dismissed and freed, she degenerates into a hopeless drunk.)

Squibs, like Mr Filch, --here again, named by their superiors--born of wizards but lacking magical powers, are so poorly thought of and treated that it is common practice to try to integrate them into the muggle world, among "their own kind."

And there is no economic or class equality: rich and poor exist unremarkably, absent any government program to redistribute wealth. No one protests the treasures held in the vaults at Gringott's.   
The French and Bulgarian magical schools which compete for the TriWizard cup are both ethnically pure White --no African or Asian "diversity" in them and they are sex-segregated. To say nothing of the stereotypical traditional styles of femininity and masculinity they represent. Again to no protest or even remark from Rowling's characters at race-mixed and gender-mixed Hogwarts.
Azbakan prison is a grim, cruel, isolated, miserable and punitive place, accepted as such, and there is no attempt to reform it and seek better treatment for prisoners.

Humanoid species do not intermarry: elves, goblins, centaurs, and there are semi-human species, which do, but the magical humans --witches and wizards--dominate them all, make the rules and hold all the power.  
In the books there is a reference to failed Goblin Rebellions, which the Goblins clearly lost. They run the bank but have no political power and are forbidden by law to use wands. As Griphook states when he learns that Harry buried Dobby with his own hands, he is a very unusual wizard.
Only human Magicals, witches and wizards, are allowed to carry wands. (And who would extrapolate from there, for instance, that in the real world, racist-fascistically, only Whites be allowed to carry guns?)
Even if her conscious intention is to support the suicide of multiculturalism in Britain, the lineaments of her story and magical world powerfully undercut that very idea. I notice in the movies that whenever any characters preach, be it about death or friendship, it is flat and trite, the weakest moments in her work. She is a storyteller, not a propagandist. Even if she wishes to be.
And very importantly, the group that Voldemort and Company hate so much, the mixed-bloods** and the spontaneous magicals born of two muggles, have no, none, not the slightest trace of group identity as outsiders against the Magical world and its culture. They are all utterly devoted to it, unquestioningly. Like Anglo-Indians utterly devoted to the Raj. Integration and assimilation are the universal desires, not resistance and diversity. Mixed or muggle parentage is noted as a matter of fact, but not a matter of interest, much less victim-privilege or advocacy. Their loyalty and identity is Magical. This, too, makes the situation utterly unlike racial or ethnic relations here in the real Muggle world.

So the apparent easy congruence between contemporary egalitarian liberalism and Harry Potter's social order, which has its own unapologetically unequal hierarchies, is in fact more complex. Almost to the point of rendering her over-arching moral issue itself as mere fantasy.

And it is complexity --of culture and character and narrative, both conscious and unconscious--which is one of Rowling's gifts. As a critique of English racism, it fails, under the weight of her writer's talent.

*Very much like Star Trek, where technologically-created abundance has transformed the nature of humans and our societies beyond race, class or gender.  Utterly unreal...which is fine, it's the definition of fantasy...but no grounds on which to take an ethical attitude.

**Voldemort himself is a mixed-blood, with a muggle father and a witch mother.
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Sunday, September 09, 2012

An indigenous voice

suggesting solutions to a particular social problem.

Not elegant, but clear.

HT to Kathy Shaidle.

Before the dawn

Awoke in the dark. Bad dream.

You know who Trayvon Martin is. Everybody does.

You don't know who Shannon Christian and Christopher Newsome were.
Hardly anybody does.

That sad fact encapsulates everything that is wrong with the sick game of race in America.


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Saturday, September 08, 2012

A likeness

An un-nuanced metaphor for Christianity and a nation.

A man's native ferocity can be somewhat softened by marriage to a woman. It can civilize him. But if a woman takes over the marriage, he is hen-pecked, or pussy whipped, un-manned.

Influence is one thing. Misrule is another.

From Blessing to Preaching

The 1992 film Baraka was a gorgeous celebration of the varieties of place, animals, plants and people of the planet.

The followup, 2012's Samsara, is far less successful.






Baraka is a Semitic root for "blessing". Samsara is the Buddhist term for the endless wheel of existence...and in Buddhism that is not a good thing, since the whole point of that religion is to escape its clinging impermanence.

So while Baraka was celebratory, Samsara turns out to be preachy and moralizing. All done with images, by the way. Some of which are quite compelling, but many of which seem only decorative or, worse, propagandish.
It turns out, unfortunately this time, that you can preach without words.

It's more like Koyaaninisqatsi (1982), which had a clear moral message about the clash between nature and civilization.

As well, in the time between 1992 and now, the availability of stunning images is so much higher that the shots Fricke and Magidson provide are not so...stunning anymore.


As examples of what we are supposed to see as soulless mechanization and dehumanization, we get lots of shots of mass production: everything from irons to guns, to chickens and milk cows. All in Asia.

My thought --not what I was supposed to think-- is how great it is that we are able to produce so many needed items, to say nothing of cheap and healthy food, for the masses of people on the planet.

And what the hell was that older white guy with the crazed face makeup about?

Ex Cathedra and Samsara are not a match made in Nirvana.




Friday, September 07, 2012

Dirty Harry Speaks

I am normally not impressed with the political mouthings of actors, whose gift, after all, is the ability to make believe that they are someone they are not. Most cultures classed them with whores. Therein lies their kinship with politicians, I guess.

But since this one has held an elected public office AND he agrees with me:



Affirmative action in action.


Trouble is, a majority of the American people bought it. And it's not at all clear that they won't do it again in November. Which suggests that Barry Hussein O is as much a symptom as a problem. The fault, dear Brutus...

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