Big ideas

And not from Newt Gingrich.

I much enjoyed talk radio host and constitutional lawyer Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto and am looking forward to kindling his new book, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America.

His manifesto made the case that the real issue in US politics underneath the usual Right vs Left divide is Statism, a love of governmental expansion which "big government conservatives" share with liberals/progressives. A quote from the upcoming text shows the same concern.

The Table of Contents indicates a review of utopian politics in Plato, Moore, Hobbes and Marx, then a review of American ideas via Locke, Montesquieu and de Tocqueville, with his own take on the utopian drive. Being a Five, I think I will enjoy this.

When I was a student at Columbia U in the 60's the American "revolution" was looked down upon for being so restrained and un-revolutionary. Just an uprising of the bourgeoisie. Hardly worth even calling a revolution. But the French, now there was a real vision, something really compelling.

Thomas Sowell is an excellent purveyor of insight on this topic. In his Conflict of Visions and The Quest for Cosmic Justice, he points out the utopian drive that always brings about its opposite. John Kekes is on the same page.

And, of course, your humble servant ExCathedra.

Enantiodromia again

On a religion column I read, the writer attacked gay sexpundit Dan Savage for creating a vile Google search item against social conservative candidate Rick Santorum.  Mr Santorum --a big government prig who seems to have nothing noteworthy or startling to offer about our current economic malaise-- tends to roll bestiality, masturbation, abortion, gay adoption and buttfucking into one big package of badness. Mr Savage, a sexual libertarian, did give vent to his deeper darker side on Bill Maher by wishing that "all the Republicans would fucking die."

Wow, what a choice for iconic figures. My thought is, "A plague on both your houses."

Why not?

In a sidebar of one of the blogs I read, part of a Twitter feed:

Ron Paul is insane. And he hates Jews, blacks & gays.

I am not a fan of Ron Paul. He's an ideologue. He has a few good attitudes, and a bunch I do not buy. (And then there's that whiny voice.) Leaving aside the ambiguities of whatever "hating" means*, why should a libertarian be fond of three of the most reliably and vehemently statist-voting (Democrat-voting) groups in the country? After all, we have a president who doesn't even seem to like his own country very much, especially the bitter part, full of "typical White people", which clings to guns and God.

*The supposedly all-loving Jesus actually required it. Lk 14.26

The pace of the jackals

Watched both the original 1973 film, Day of the Jackal, and its 1997 remake, Jackal. The original is much better. Far less blood but far more suspense. Edward Fox's charming sociopath looks even more smart and dangerous by comparison with Bruce Willis' plodding and detached thug. Bad direction, I suspect. Willis changes his appearance more than twice as often as Fox, but that cannot give his character much mystery or appeal.

The original film depicts an attempt on Charles de Gaulle's life in the early 1960's. Especially from the standpoint of 2011, much of the tension generated by the story lies in the cumbersome and primitive information and communication technology of fifty years ago. Technology with which I grew up and was quite familiar. Rotary phones (if you were in a hurry, I remember how long it took for the dial to circle back around for each number), tape recorders, typewriters, records full of paper in stacks of folders, no faxes*. No computers, no internet, no cell phones, no smart chips, no databases. One whole section of the movie requiring a phalanx of white male police detectives in white shirts and ties and cigarettes, working over days, would now be covered by a thirty-second clip of an single vegan Asian woman in leotards working at a keyboard, with a huge wall-sized screen and hookups to all the centers of the action. It really is astonishing how we become defined by our technology...(he says as he blogs.)

The mere three decades between the Cold War world of 1963 and the post Soviet (but still pre 9/11) world of 1996 belies the massive social change as well. (The watershed year 1968, however, was just a short while later.) Jackal I asks for $500K for his career-ending work, for Jackal II, $70 million. Shot in England, France and Italy, Day of the Jackal is full of...actual English, French and Italians. 99% White. The government, military and the police are entirely male. People at airports are all dressed up. France and Italy have borders, with guards. The constant cigarette smoking** and the drinking of hard liquor --things which are now, if I am not mistaken, practically illegal to show on screen-- likewise indicate how much life has changed in one lifetime. In Jackal, we have major characters who are female or Black or Russian, the enemy is the Russian mafia and the good-guy terrorists are IRA and ETA.

I recommend Day of the Jackal. An excellent thriller in every way.

*And even faxes are fading away, I think, in favor of printing a pdf file direct from your computer screen. Nowadays I arrive at the airport dressed very casually, partly because of the Muslim-inspired security procedures. And I already have my boarding pass with me, printed at home. The crowding of the planes is the downside of the fact that air travel is now much cheaper. And I can make all the arrangements from my laptop, without a travel agent --remember those?

**I once worked with a local gay man who was ashamed of his smoking habit. I remarked what a strange world we lived in, that a man who had sex with other men could be open and public about it with little concern, but had to hide his cigarettes for fear of moral censure. Puritanism does not disappear; it simply migrates.

My Ivy League education

did teach me one thing: the difference between disproving and disapproving. One of my philosophy profs pointed out that in argument, most humans' use of language is not really different from apes grunting in approval or disapproval. No content, only reaction.

I have discovered that conversations, and especially arguments, are very often not about what they are apparently supposed to be about.

I had a confrere in the Dominicans who was quite self-satisfied and haughty but really pretty dumb --he was a laybrother who was taking advantage of the postVatican II egalitarian fad to get educated.
I used to take delectatio morosa in trying to get him to enunciate an idea rather than just emote with words. Practically impossible. He'd come back from a movie and say it was good. "What was good about it?" "I liked it. It was enjoyable." "What particularly made in enjoyable?" "It was good." And so on.

It was not until his brother came on a visit, however, that I realized that I had misjudged and underestimated the man. Compared to his Neanderthal sibling, he was an evolutionary leap, a wonder of nature.

But I digress.

It is common as air to read commentors supposedly take down their interlocutors' opinions by saying, "That's racist" or "You're an anti-Semite" or "bigoted" or "discriminatory" or "hateful" or "insulting" or "offensive". Et cetera. But none of that is an argument. None of it touches on the truth or falsity of the proposition, factually or logically. It's just grunting, poop-flinging ape-talk.

A truth of wide application

2500

Since I started this blog in late 2006, I have posted 2500 times. (Sounds like a confession.) When I began it, I wondered if I would be able to keep at it for very long. Now it's five years later.

Since Blogger began keeping stats on the site just over two and a half years ago, Ex Cathedra has has over 144,000 hits. And my monthly peak in December 2011, over 12K, was the highest ever. What that means I have no idea, since a target composed of 2500 postings is pretty easy to hit.

I doubt very much that I have had anything genuinely creative to say. One of the purposes of this site is for me to blow off the steam that most of my friends, liberals, don't want to hear. (I can't really blame them; I don't want to hear their liberal stuff, either.) Most of my ideas about politics, sex and religion have remained stable for the last five years or so, except that they are probably more irascible. My combination of identity, interests and opinions --a happily man-loving man of right wing attitudes--is not too common, though. So, even if unsavory, I might be thought of as unusual.

Just a face in a crowd

A screen cap from a video of crowds in Rome at Christmas. Striking fella.

Words on parade

However noble the military calling, plenty of evidence exists that boredom and incompetence are as rife as ever. I believe that the word Snafu (Situation normal, all fucked up) was an invention of soldiers. Another exhibit, this list of current Air Force slang expressions. Even though these people are not as smart as John Kerry, the vocabulary is both apt and imaginative. Many are applicable to civilian life for sure:

BLAMESTORMING - Sitting around  discussing  why a mission failed and who was responsible.

SEAGULL COLONEL - A colonel who swoops in, makes a lot of noise, and dumps stuff all over everything.

SALMON DAY - The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

ASSMOSIS - The process by which some people seem to absorb success and promotability by kissing up to the commander.

ADMINISPHERE - The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the wing level. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are generally profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

404 - Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking the boss . . . he's 404, man."

GENERICA - Features of the Air Force landscape that are exactly the same no matter which base one is at, such as Burger King, Robin Hood, the BX, and AMC terminal. Used as in "We were so lost in generica that I forgot what base we were at."

OHNOSECOND - That minuscule fraction of time after hitting the "enter" key or clicking "ok" in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.

For the times, they are un-changing

"At New Year, an old man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of...calendars."

Two professors, of astrophysics and applied economics respectively, have proposed a new and rational calendar. You'd never really have to buy a calendar each year because every 364-day year would essentially be the same, repeating over and over...at least until Dec 21, 2012 when the world will end, according to the Mayan calendar. It's more efficient for business and banking, they say, as well as making scheduling easier.

Retaining the sevenday week, --an absolute requirement for Christians, Jews and Muslims-- they come up with four quarters of three months each, with 30, 30, then 31 days. Each date would always fall on the same day of the week. Christmas always on Sunday, Memorial Day always on May 28th, 4th of July always on Wednesday, etc. Your birthday would always fall on the same day of the week.

Since Mother Nature is not as rational as professors like to be, instead of our current quadrennial Leap Year, with its one extra February day, every five or six years (they have a list) there would be an extra week added after December, to bring the days back into alignment with the solar seasons. In those Hop Skip Jump Years, there'd be 53 weeks and 371 days.

There was a time in my life when my rational nature --I do have one--, my desire for order and my obsessive-compulsive streak would have made me very much in favor of such a project. It's impressive, but my first reaction now to this plan ---partly because it does seem so do-able--- is "No!".  It is not out of loyalty to Pope Gregory* but for the same reason that I want to keep the 12 hour clock, the dollar and the English measuring system. Because anything which smacks of further rationalizing and regimenting uniformity on a global basis wipes out locality, plurality, definition, tradition and familiarity. Even the complexities of the current calendar feel somehow more human than the professorial time machine.

The professors then propose an even more destabilizing change: the abolition of time zones, so that everyone on earth would follow Greenwich Mean Time...now neutered and de-Eurocentricized by calling it Universal Time. This means that everywhere on earth right now, as I write, it would be 6.22 pm or 18.22. But in San Francisco, it's 10.22 in the morning. For these two guys, the business benefits would outweigh the unbelievable strangeness of people in England having a Nine to Five working day, but in San Francisco it would be a Two to Ten day? This would disconnect clock time from any relationship at all to the light/dark flow of morning, noon and night. Seems nuts. Next we'd have the Star Date numbering system from Star Trek?

China already has one official time zone for the whole country. I am told, however, that people keep a second clock so they know what time it really is!

*Although now that I think of it, it's quite a comedown to have your calendar no longer euphonically and nobly named after a Roman Caesar (Julian) or a Pope (Gregorian) but two Baltimorian academics: the Hanke-Henrician?