Gendered flaws

In the Gospels, there are two kinds of outcasts that get particular attention from Jesus, tax-collectors and prostitutes. These strike me as classically gendered ways of falling out of the community.

In first century Palestine, occupied by Rome, local men, Jews, would purchase tax contracts from the government and then use that authority to collect taxes from their fellows. Of course, they collected more than was required. So not only were they seen as traitors but as thieves.

Women were not eligible for this kind of activity, so prostitution was the status that made them outcasts.

Jesus pointed out the particularly gendered way in which males and females became pariahs to their communities and included these groups in his mission.

I am considerable less Christian than Jesus, so my sense of gendered flaws is not about find a way to reconcile them, but simply to point out the different ways in which males and females can be obnoxious or worse.

As much as I am a fan of the male animal, there is one set of classical male behaviors which, even if they are evolutionarily comprehensible, I find morally reprehensible: men in a group, ganging up on a weaker individual. To me it is irredeemably cowardly, the worst behavior of the gender. They deserve a humiliating corporal punishment that matches their foulness.

What I find most obnoxious in women is when they use the cover of their gender, with the permission they have to be irrationally emotional, temperamental and superficial, and nowadays the cache of victimism, to terrorize those around them while they seek out some kind of gratification. An example? The narcissistic cow called the bridezilla and her typological sisters and cousins. (Talk about moments when heterosexuality is utterly incomprehensible to me!)

Just sayin.

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Galactic Jihad

The 1996 Tim Burton comedy, Mars Attacks, is one of my favorite films.

One of the major reasons is that it makes such accurate fun of the silliness of the human race, skewers the peacenick and elitist assumptions about fascinating extra-terrestrial cultures who will relieve us of our sense of being alone in the cosmos* (Annette Benning is a hoot here) , and it has the solution to the problem come from one of the aspects of American culture most despised by these groups.

The historic encounter takes place in Pahrump, Nevada, a metropolis I have actually visited, as part of an epochal trip to nearby Beatty, where adventure awaits you, and the exotic El Portal Motel.

The trip. And the movie.
Always makes me smile.

* I bet the Aztecs were equally thrilled when they had their solitude assuaged by Cortez.
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The REAL wrath of God

Or why I just don't get Reformed Christianity.

In my wanderings yesterday, the ones that led me to the grim and radicallove feminist and the veganettes of color, I stopped off on a blog by a man of Reformed theological conviction. A lot of these guys really do have conviction. Anyway, he expressed breathless affection for...John Calvin.

This man described his conversion. He had been raised a Methodist and professed never to have heard the Gospel. But he read St Paul one night, about the foolishness of God and the foolishness of the world, and came to the conclusion that not only did God hate the worst things about him, but God hated the best things about him.

I guess this is what the Prots mean by "total depravity".

And why the Reformation never found much traction in Italy.

I kinda have Calvinist ancestry. On my mother's side, her dad came from Scandinavian Lutherans who were originally French Calvinists who fled to Denmark, the Huguenots.

My chief reason for liking Protestantism is that only Protestants...few of whom were of the grimly Calvinist persuasion of the above-mentioned fella...could have created America.

Anyway, I had a bad day today and feel the wrath of God on me. But my atavistic Catholicism figures that He still likes the best things about me, even when I can't remember what they are. On a good day, even I do.

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The wrath of God

A couple of springs ago, in 2006 I think, a whole series of things went wrong one month. I smashed a tendon in my thumb, developed a molar infection that required a root canal, had expensive car trouble, I put my back out, trouble at work and I forget what else. I handled it with admirable aplomb until someone took a parking space I was aiming at and I exploded at them...only to find it was one of my staff.

My mother said to me, Well, maybe the Lord is testing you. I replied to her, No, mom, the Lord is not testing me. The Lord is fucking with me.

Well, He's at it again.

Not only did Barack Hussein Obama win the election, but the economy and my 401K decided to melt down just after I took the biggest financial risk I can remember.

I am negotiating a big shift in a major relationship very important to me.

My decennial sigmoidoscopy was declared incomplete and I have to do it again.

I have put my back out and sprained my knee so that my gym routine is sidetracked and my bod is not feeling as frisky as I did last summer.

I am about to age another year in three weeks.

Due to financial stress, I have no sound system in my recently broken-into-yet again car.

Then my laptop's electrical connection broke yesterday and I discovered that it has to be sent to the manufacturer for three weeks! and if the warranty doesn't hold, a couple hundred bucks repair.

I woke up for three whole hours in the middle of the night, prime time for catastrophic thinking.

Then. Then.

While I am having a Bad Day but trying to cope bravely, the neighbor's cat comes to visit and has rancidly foul-smelling diarrhea all over my bedspread.

God hates me, clearly, and today I don't blame Him.

I feel as if every flaw in my flawed character is in wide-screen technicolor.

TMI? I don't care.

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Boomer Jungoids again

About two years ago I noted how predictable the disciples of CG Jung had become. Whatever limits his thought natively has have been reshaped by the cultural values of the liberal Boomers who dominate that landscape. Their psychological reflections on culture always seem to strangely mirror the opinions of the professional classes of Marin County.

The two recurring themes to which supposedly complex psychological reflection usually boiled down to were shadow projection and the unintegrated feminine. This repetitive and rather reductive pattern meshed well with most of the Seven Pillars of Liberalism and its complex-ridden attitudes toward racist whites, brutal males, colonializing nation-states, devouring consumers, inquisitorial Christians, etc. The Usual Suspects.

Lo and behold, I just received a notice of a new edition of a "scholarly" Jungian journal and its three items exemplify my previous assessment. One is a scolding of Europeans for scapegoating the Gypsies with their own shadow projection. The other is a scolding of Europeans for the shadow projection, gender dis-integration (and essentialism) involved in a novel about slavery. The third is a book review on ecopsychology which scolds Europeans (and American whites) for....well, shadow projection on the wise and environmentally reverent dark native peoples.

The scholarly character of the pieces lies primarily in reflecting the obsessions of the pomo world of cultural studies and academic political correctness. The discourse has become so narrow and predictable that it qualifies for John Kekes' definition of an ideology.

Funny how the thought of an eccentric Swiss psychiatrist has come to match so well --absent his pre-feminist "essentialism"-- the opinions you could hear any day at the Mall in Kentfield or the faculty lounge at Stanford.

PS. What, you may be wondering, has the picture got to do with the post? Well, only this. I was searching in Google image for something appropriate and came up with this unlikely image of a homoerotic cartoon hunk named Jung. Not what you usually see in Jungian publications....
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Ash Wednesday

Memento homo, quod cinis es,
et in cinerem reverteris.
-Book of Genesis



FEAR no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' the great,
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finish'd joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

Fidele, Wm Shakespeare

USMaleSF

Responding to Eric Holder

Now here's a group we need to integrate :)
into the post-cowardly discussion on race...
"because they don't have the luxury
of being single-issue".

One of the vegobloggerettes says that her cuisinal practice
"offers me the opportunity to resist the colonial influences that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and forced poverty has forced onto my people’s diets."

ROTFLMAO.

I found these exotics thru my usual semi-free
association style, via a page from a womyn
whose PC-itude was enough to suck all the air
out of my patriarchal living room. She has been
a writer for Bitch Magazine. Her blog is
called My Ecdysis. That means molting.
It is a place "where
radical love meets feminism."

Example of this meeting:

"The face of G*d for me is the liberation of those in pain, myself included. My definition of feminism is not a worded explanation, limited by my westernized and elitist tongue. It is a drive, dare I write spiritual drive, to do what I can, when I can, and make one thing, or as many things, better for another human being born in my lifetime, on our planet, this place we all call home. With all the mystery and fear in my body, soaked in ethnocentric alcohol, I sober my life by sitting on the edge of my bathroom sink and pulling the bathroom mirror into my face.

I look up.

Really. I did not make that up. Really. I'm gonna go put some ethnocentric alcohol on my westernized and elitist tongue.

Pogo? Pogo, where are you?

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Unoriginal sin

Roses and names

Dutchman Geert Wilders, author of Fitna, is regularly described in the press as a "far-right" politician.

Assuming that this is true,
what do you know about him now
on the basis of that description, "far-right"?

And if I were to say to AG Eric Holder, one of our current crop of national schoolmarms, "Guess what. I don't want to be part of your nation of cowards anymore. I am giving up the pretenses. I am a racist."

What would he or you
know about me now
that you didn't know before?

Much of what appears to be discussion of concepts and ideas is really the acting out of complexes. Complexes are autonomous patterns of perception, attitude and action, driven by feelings and image. That is why my analysis of the Seven Pillars of Liberalism comes down to an image: George W Bush as the embodiment of the White Male Capitalist Christian Patriotic Gun-Owning Consumer.

With "far-right" complex, I think we have the image of the Nazi: again, a White Male who uses Nationalism and Militarism to oppress freedom and difference in favor of an upper class and ethnic oligarchy. Hitler, the Afrikaaners, Franco, the Pinochets, etc. To be called "far-right" evokes the images of Nazism: concentration camps, genocide, nationalist war, etc.

As John Ray points out, the taxonomy which puts conservatism in the same camp with National Socialism, rather than with its fellow Socialist ideologies where it belongs, is one of the great leftist lies and coups of the last century.

And as for "racist". KKK. Bull Connors. Long time ago. It describes Don Imus, but excludes Louis Farrakhan, excludes Hamas but encompasses Israel. That's because only whites can be racist, or so the doctrine goes. (Anyone who thinks that has no friends "of color", believe me.) It is so complex-ridden that actual rational discussion about it grinds to a halt almost as soon as it begins. This is one of the most useless words in our vocabulary.

Up there in vapidity with, though far more dangerous than, "open-minded" or "spiritual."

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