“Composer Artisan” ISFP. Socially and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. Current fields of study:Playboy, A Course in Miracles, building a new life in Humboldt County.
Hollywood, California, is my spiritual hometown. I actually grew up in three other communities in California, but it hardly seems to matter which three. How could my heart take root anywhere under the tyranny of American public schooling?
I don’t have to work for a living. After my father died in December 1997, my family and I won a legal settlement.
The Blog About
Nothing: Sudheer of Hyderabad, India, is a big fan of Playboy and an
even bigger fan of Seinfeld. In this blog, he composes humorous
dialogues for the show’s characters.
Hit & Run: the official
blog of my other favorite magazine, Reason: Free Minds and Free
Markets; winner
of the 2005 Weblog Award for Best Group Blog; “the best
libertarian blog” according to the October 2005 issue of
Playboy.
Scoobie Davis Online: a self-described “filmmaker, surfer, and party crasher” in southern California. He’s also a Playboy fan, a left-leaning political gadfly, and a connoisseur of Jack T. Chick religious tracts.
The Search for
Health in Decadence: poetry and philosophical writings of Will, who has
engaged me in lengthy, good-natured debate through comments on my
blog.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven
Pinker. With stylistic flair, a Harvard cognitive scientist
refutes myths about human nature underlying a multitude of political
beliefs—including many of those that would either favor or
oppose the sexual revolution.
God in Popular Culture by Andrew M. Greeley. A liberal Catholic
priest sees quasi-Christian messages of grace abounding in the
allegedly soulless realm of commercial pop culture. For all I know,
Greeley is not necessarily a Playboy fan. But his
interpretation of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” has
influenced my impression of Playboy. (In case anyone wonders, my religious heritage is Lutheran on my father’s side and secularist on my mother’s.)
I hate you guys today. I hate you, because I can’t help blaming you, my audience, for the guilt and stress of the constant sense of failure to meet expectations that I’ve been experiencing.
Under normal circumstances, I’m a flaky procrastinator. Under the abnormal circumstance of preparing to move to the coast, I’m practically hopeless.
Lately, some things have been sucking. Moving away from my past and towards the Pacific coast has proven more difficult than I thought. Meanwhile, I embarrass myself with daily failures of nerve: I keep failing to find the guts to give nearly as much of myself as I could to the self-study projects. Do the self-employed have the toughest bosses of all? If the work is not necessary to earn a living and yields only intangible rewards of self-enrichment, does this paradoxically make the work so much harder to get done?
Unfortunately, it’s been another seven days with nothing on my Playboy fan blog between two autodidact reports. This embarrasses me in at least two ways. For one, I feel unworthy of the beautiful ideas Playboy symbolizes for me, having let so much time go by with no thematically appropriate material on the blog. For another, I’m starting to get paranoid at the thought that people will suspect that the time I waste avoiding my own goals is spent masturbating.
As these paragraphs brew, it occurs to me that I only wish I could name masturbation as the thief of my time. Physical self-love is an order of magnitude more dignified than the mental acts of self-abuse I indulge in almost constantly. All day long, I have compulsive fantasies about being helplessly victimized as other people piss all over me verbally. The temptation to unhappiness is shockingly difficult to avoid. Who, especially among Playboy fans, wouldn’t be less ashamed of an addiction to wanking than to that?
Do you procrastinate? I do, to an embarrassing degree. Three weeks ago, I “officially” took Spanish-language cinema off my list of studies as I announced I was about to watch Y tu mamá también, my last item of that category. I still haven’t watched the whole thing.
Just this past week, I have had a better excuse than usual for that kind of delay. Wednesday through Friday, I was busy looking for a new place to live. I should have some good news about that to blog soon. In the meantime, I’m still learning to step up to the challenges I’ve set for myself as an autodidact.
Lately, the most exciting development in my ambition to learn stuff just for the sake of learning stuff has been my brushing up on the art of driving. It’s not a wonder that I’ve decided to commit to viewing the entire original series of Star Trek. Suddenly operating a motor vehicle again makes me feel warp-capable, as it were.
I’m stumbling my way to a sense of skill in time management. “Management” feels like a misleading term for exactly what I’m learning. I’m learning the pleasure of self-confidence from keeping myself and my environment beautiful with good habits like shaving my face and making my bed every morning. Although this represents a change in my relationship to time and how I act in it, this hardly feels like “management.” It feels almost the opposite: like being seduced by what appropriately timed behavior can do for me, a relinquishment of will instead of an effort of will. If not for the intense distraction and discouragement of America’s un-American public schools, I believe I would have discovered this years earlier. In our hearts, we all know that school sucks!
My closest relatives live in Chico now, but I didn’t grow up there. My little sister discovered it on the family’s behalf when she was admitted to its California State University campus (NSFW: a highly rated party school, incidentally).
“Families aren’t democracies,” said Daddie Dearest, may he rest in peace. If that’s true, I don’t see why the common boundaries of personal ownership apply within them. No democracy, no rule of law!
A few weeks ago, I muscled and guilt-tripped my way into my mother’s guest bedroom here in Chico. At 36, I’m a refugee of my own war against my parents. I have had trouble seeing my rational self-interest in doing grownup stuff like driving and keeping an apartment clean. In the past ten years, I’ve been kicked out of two apartments for failing to take care of them. Soon I’ll find a place to live on the northern California coast somewhere, more on which in a future post. Naturally, I’m allowing Mom’s eagerness to be rid of me push her into managing the logistics of the move, heh heh. I’m too busy with my fun stuff to handle more than the bare minimum.
When I was in my teens, Mom called me “opinionated” and “arrogant” because I didn’t believe as firmly as the cowards around me that misery loves company. I think of my parents as war criminals for forcing me to endure schoolyard bullying, paramilitary gym classes, witless bureaucracy, and brain-numbing homework in the American public school system. By 16, I was mentally whipped and beaten enough to refuse to avail myself of a summer job or a driver’s license out of helplessness and spite. A pattern had set in.
In my mid-twenties, I finally got around to a driver’s license. But I used it only to drive my black Honda Helix motor scooter. After a few years, one injury, and many humiliating incidents of panic and cowardice on the road, I sold the damn thing. I’ve been wheelless since about 2000. To make a long story short, Mom has refused me permission to drive her Jeep Grand Cherokee because of my lack of recent experience. Ah, but not everyone needs to be a coward just because she is. What can she do, ground me?
Most American schools are run so stupidly and condescendingly (as opposed to what is possible) that they can suck the joy out of learning anything—even literature, science, or driving. My alienation from the automobile has felt like a kind of anorexia. It’s hard to describe the self-doubt, confusion, and guilt that arise from the passionlessness. It’s hard to describe the joy of actually wanting to drive now. Appetite brings purpose to life.
Playboy models know well the soul’s mysterious obligation to go behind parents’ backs. I appreciate the wisdom of their example. Those young ladies are still older than I am.
I hoped that my commitments to my study projects would bring a sense of adventure, and I haven’t been disappointed. On Saturday, I was almost suicidal with despair over my seeming inability to step up to the challenge. But yesterday, I found the courage to open up my day planner and browse it leisurely. The experience was just what I needed. By necessity, a person of my pleasure-seeking disposition relies on appetite as his moral compass. When I rediscovered the desire to play with my nerd toys, I felt almost reborn. Hallelujah!
Speaking of hallelujah, I didn’t mention A Course in Miracles a week ago. At Lesson 125 today, I’ve finished a third of the year-long Workbook. When I’m having a hard day, the Jesus of the Course can sound annoyingly chipper about the blissful reunion with God in my future. But I stick with Him, because He has a way of making a lot of sense after all. Hallelujah!
I’m not the most self-disciplined guy in the world. But when I move gradually towards better study habits, I call it success. It has been a successful week.
So far, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 classic Sex and the Single Girl has been easy for me to understand and appreciate as a man who reads Playboy. Three years after this book, Brown would take the reins of then-ailing Cosmopolitan magazine and turn it into the guidebook for liberated women that Playboy already was for liberated men. Much like Hugh Hefner’s, Brown’s appreciation of the opposite sex is aesthetic and sybaritic but always honorable and trustworthy.
I haven’t made any progress this past week with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. This book still fascinates me as much as ever, but I’ll need plenty of time to teach myself how to teach myself its contents effectively. Differing types of books, such as Sex and the Single Girl versus The Art of War, will naturally require different approaches by a student.
In a screenplay like Juno or a memoir like Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, Diablo Cody makes her distinct voice heard. It’s probably healthy for me, with my Camille Paglia–esque tendency to regard exotic dance with pagan religious piety, to listen to someone like Cody describe it in a more cynical way. It’s good intellectual balance.
A similar quest for intellectual balance has drawn my attention to the Analects of Confucius. Here I find a radically different guide to human relationships than I get from the libertarian individualism of Playboy and Reason magazines. But in their most sophisticated forms, various philosophical systems have a funny way of coming to resemble each other in practical application. I shouldn’t be surprised if Confucianism turns out to be fairly “libertarian” in optimal practice. So far, as a Westerner dipping my feet into another civilization’s manner of thinking, I’ve been taking my time with the introductory notes by translator Arthur Waley.
After I get around to watching Y tu mamá también, I’ll retire Spanish-language cinema as a study category. But with Netflix and theatergoing, I’ll continue to keep up with cinema in general. A few weeks ago, in my blog sidebar, I declared Hollywood my spiritual hometown, and I have no cause to regret it!
Español es una lengua hermosa, y me gusta estudiarla. Quiero tener un vocabulario más grande y saber conjugar todos los verbos.
Good books are fun, but they don’t inspire physical self-confidence the way musical instruments do. On my electronic keyboard, I’ve been doing extensive chord drills and working my way through two pieces: an adagio in D minor by Italian Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti, and the classic rock tune “Locomotive Breath” by Jethro Tull. This past week, after a long absence, I got back to studying the Aboriginal Australian wind instrument known as the didgeridoo with help from an instructional CD by Ash Dargan.
With all due modesty, I think I’m starting to kick ass with my self-study projects. (I don’t want any grief about the afternoon timestamp of this post, either. I started composing it in the morning and followed my standard procedure of editing the timestamp to reflect the actual time of publication. So there.)
I take pride in letting this new blog ritual be nerdy and boring, if that’s how it comes out.
Oscar Wilde said, “When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.” Now that I’m lippy enough to call myself an autodidact, I have to find out how to be that. I’ve been mortified to learn how intimidated I am by the studies I’ve assigned myself. Because my spirit has rebelled against authoritarian schooling in any form, I’m burdened with the responsibilities of curriculum-setting that I refuse to delegate to others. Uh-oh! What do I do now?
Fortunately, I seem to have had good instincts so far in starting to make it happen. Close to the top of this blog’s sidebar is my public list of “current fields of study.” Having put my reputation at stake, I can’t afford to run away from the challenges. If I weasel out of a difficult project like the Analects of Confucius, for example, I’m afraid I’ll feel like a dork forever. It’s too late to back out now. (For all the obvious reasons, friendship and sex will be somewhat more private than the other study projects.)
Yesterday was a very good day. After a few days of stalling, I went for it. I moved forward with the Analects and a good many of the other study projects, too. A week from today, I’ll be ready to report on specific projects in more detail. But this post has enough paragraphs already, so I’m done for now. A measured laziness can be a virtue for a writer if it encourages brevity.
According to a Hindu proverb, it takes a thorn to remove a thorn. I’m finally getting over the “Why did they always tell me I’m wrong?” thing by being told by Someone Else (through A Course in Miracles) that, in a manner of speaking, I’m literally always wrong. Meanwhile, I’m also getting kicked out of my apartment just when I’m preparing to go to the Playboy Mansion for the third time. But God’s grace has provided an elegant solution in the division of labor according to comparative advantage. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
After the party, I’ll need a cheap place to live while I plan necessary changes in my life. It might as well be your guest bedroom, so you should expect me there in mid-June. Because of my criminal record for ill-advised scuffles with cops just a few years ago, I warn you against “teaching me a lesson” with another arrest. California’s “three strikes” law could mean disaster after that. If you have to worry about something, worry about that. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
Don’t try to make me go to rehab; I won’t go, go, go. Although I know that I can’t afford to deny the consequences of my behavior, I categorically refuse to medicalize my behavior in any way. I acknowledge no “disease” of any kind for which I need to take twelve steps or any variation thereof. Besides, I’m already doing superbly with the do-it-yourself spiritual program I’m on. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
You don’t have to believe in Rousseau’s doctrine of the Noble Savage to recognize the tyranny of America’s public schools. When I remember the slavery of homework that you helped bind me to—the unnecessary anxiety, guilt, shame, boredom, and sense of impending failure all the way—I feel no compunction whatsoever farming out my worries to you. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
Nobody’s guilt trip about my “growing up slowly” can discourage me. All I can say in reply is that I’ve been doing the best I know how all along. By logical necessity, this ends the argument. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
How do I know? Because this diabolical musical variation on Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds looks so much like the sadistic glee of the two dipshits who gave me life in teasing me in public on a difficult subject during a difficult time. Not coincidentally, it’s the sadistic glee I take in publishing this post, too. This is a scene of grand-scale science-fiction violence with imagery clearly intended to evoke the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Sensitive persons, you know the drill.
Naturally, Wikipedia can tell you everything you didn’t know you would enjoy knowing about “Yakety Sax” (not to be confused with the less interesting “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters).
For another inspired take on extraterrestrials extra-tyrannicals, read here.
Update, June 15, 2008, 5:37 p.m.: Probably the fourth time all the way through for me, the Spielberg version of the Wells novel is as good as I remember.
A month ago tomorrow, I changed the outgoing message of my phone answering machine, making it even angrier than it had been. It was good for me. I think I’ll keep it.
In a certain manner of speaking, a poltergeist invades my psychic space several times a day. After learning too well the lessons in spinelessness of America’s oppressive public school system, I accumulated countless memories of failing to resist abuses of authority—even at home. Too many memories of one’s own cowardice, and the world becomes a scary place all the time. Minor setbacks and frustrations in everyday life become sources of great terror, confusion, shame, guilt, and rage. When I hesitate unreasonably out of these feelings, I sometimes make horrible new memories of being a coward, too.
In 2007, middle-class Americans are expected to take their unseemly emotions to a therapist’s office. But I say no. In the spirit of my anti-therapy post of yesterday, I reaffirm my right to take my madness to the streets instead. My suffering is not my problem alone. My suffering is the entire community’s problem. Otherwise, a lot of squeaky wheels may never get greased.
Besides the political argument against therapy, I now have an empirical, practical one. This past month, I’ve felt stronger, more effectual, and more capable than ever. I have every reason to believe the trend will continue. As a therapy veteran, I think a therapist who would have endorsed my angry phone message, or anticipated its benefits, before the fact would be hard to find. To paraphrase Dickens, therapy is an ass.
I know other black women have appeared in Playboy, but the stunning [August] photos make Garcelle [Beauvais-Nilon] stand out. As a young black woman I feel good about my own body when I see another black woman proudly displaying hers. Codi Bean Charleston, West Virginia
—“Dear Playboy,” November 2007
My tribute to the “La Belle Beauvais” pictorial started with a racially insensitive pun on the UPS slogan. But at least I’m not guilty of the common academic bigotry that regards consumers of popular culture as helpless blank screens (blank slates, if you will) for the beliefs and attitudes that pop culture would project onto them. Even professors who defend Playboy sometimes appear to think that way. The above letter demonstrates what those academics fail to notice in their condescension: commercial pop culture is always a dialogue between producer and consumer, never a monologue. Not to be anti-intellectual, but if the weather report contradicts what you see through your window, which is more credible?
Technical note: I didn’t know it until I composed this post, but I had deleted photographs recently from three earlier posts (here, here, and here) while screwing around with my web domain file manager. Blogger.com apparently doesn’t republish JPEG pages that have been lost in another domain. Fortunately, correcting the error was simple.
Update, October 19, 2007, 1:38 p.m.: Damn! I forgot about the photos missing from this other post until today. I noticed they were gone when, through SiteMeter, I saw that somebody had found that page through Google Images.
Update, December 5, 2007, 1:28 p.m.: Yesterday, I fixed this post.
Explaining the virtues of both personal and economic freedom to friends with high-speed Internet connections has never been easier. Reason.tv, the online video department of the renowned libertarian magazine, has opened up shop.
Their first editors’ pick is this YouTube video of ABC newsman John Stossel sharing his libertarian wisdom with an appreciative crowd at the Blue Velvet in Los Angeles:
One seemingly trivial fact becomes increasingly significant to me the more I think about it and the more I compare these guys [in their thirties] with kids their age who didn't grow up in [utopian communes]: Not one of them owns an iPod.
—“The Ranch,” Playboy, October 2007, p. 136
In his article on hippie communes, their founders, and the people raised in them, David Black sees no need to finish his thought on what’s so bad about iPods, taking it for granted that his readers oppose “consumerism” as much as he does. I wonder what he thinks of the iPod sported by the October cover girl.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time I’ve seen Playboy contributors do the trendy but hypocritical Adbusters thing by laying a guilt trip on somebody else’s material pleasures. Like liars, sanctimonious people have difficulty keeping their stories straight. Watch Black congratulate his own generation for having no anxieties about becoming poor, and then, in the same paragraph, warn of global economic doom:
The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up out of the shadow of the Depression. Since they had no fear of going without, they embraced voluntary poverty. Today this concept has metamorphosed in our new overheated economy into “voluntary simplicity,” a trend bearing a hint of the you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit mentality: I’ll reduce my expectations before the bubble pops and we’re all left with enforced simplicity, which used to be called poverty.
A different world from the dream of the 1960s. [p. 133]
Although I wasn’t alive to see that decade, I know that Black’s memories of it are rather selective. Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling 1968 book The Population Bomb forecast inevitable global famine in the 1970s and 1980s that would kill hundreds of millions all over the world. This is fairly typical of the many Malthusian predictions that have failed to come true since then. Still, Black needs a reason to sneer at people who shop at Costco and admire Ronald Reagan. The proper term for his attitude may be “voluntary despair.”
While researching my previous post, I browsed left-wing feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte’s recent work. It reminded me of why I get so angry at people who seem to think they own the patent on compassion while they support policies that unintentionally hurt the less fortunate.
Update: August Pollak alerted me to an article in Campus Progress about the [Independent Women’s Forum] conference [on campus sex and dating], an article that seems a bit more honest about the ugly sexism on display. Contrary to my theory that men act like dicks a lot of the time because they’re living under some pretty ugly pressures, the ladies at IWF seem to think that men were born dogs. But you know, having an empathetic attitude towards male feelings [serves as] evidence that one is a man-hater. You only love men if you see them as no better than leg-humping dogs.
I can’t say why exactly Allison Kasic of the IWF fascinates me so much. I think it’s because she’s smart enough to have clued into the fact that there’s [something] disillusioning and miserable about the attitudes of so many young men towards young women, but she comes to the exact wrong conclusion about how to handle the issue, arguing that instead of combating the misogyny that’s handed down to young men as a birthright, we reinforce the sexist notion that female sexuality is more of a commodity than a set of autonomous female desires. She’s got a write-up of [the] IWF sex conference that the evil sleeper cell [right-]winger Dr. Drew [Pinsky] spoke at, and it’s just a train wreck of false assumptions and pie-in-the-sky hopes about how to coerce a less contemptuous attitude towards women from the frateratti.
[Personally, I don’t see Dr. Drew as belonging to the cultural right. Instead, he’s one of our too many vaguely left-leaning public-health busybodies. But as I explained in an earlier post, one shouldn’t expect Dr. Drew to have very consistent political convictions on anything. Now I’ll let Marcotte speak for herself some more.]
By the way, to calm the nerves that a paragraph like the before invariably ruffles, I’m not saying all college age men are pigs. But it’s been my experience that there’s a lot of pressure on men when they’re younger to demonstrate a certain level of contempt for young women in order to satisfy their male peers that they’re all man. As they get older, their priorities shift and some of the compulsive misogyny falls away for a lot of guys that were only into it half-heartedly. But when you’re actually in college, sometimes the amount of pressure on men to be disdainful towards women can be stifling. In fact, my heart goes out on a level to a lot of young men who find themselves in a situation where respect for women is simply incompatible with having camaraderie with men in college. It’s this tension that I think is driving a lot of the unhappiness with men coming from the college women at this conference that Kasic talks about.
Ah, but does Marcotte really know what empathy is? In opposing school choice, she effectively favors a public-school monopoly for America’s poor and middle-income families, who have much less discretionary income for private schooling than wealthier families. Let them eat cake, indeed. Besides the direct name-calling I’ve already mentioned, I believe I have good reasons to take her stance on school as a lack of true empathy for me, thank you very much:
1.) As time goes on, every wise and honest person will eventually recognize Judith Rich Harris as the Copernicus of child development. To the degree that misogyny among American men is the problem Marcotte says it is, it must be because of the way American boys children* socialize each other—and not a direct consequence of the way American parents treat their boys.
2.) Jokes about schoolyard bullying, even as presented in entertainments like The Simpsons and A Christmas Story, may become even more ambiguously funny after a study of Harris. After all, jokes about prison rape aren’t necessarily funny, either. It’s obviously not the moral equivalent, but the difference is only a matter of degree.
3.) In light of Harris’ scholarship, my seemingly endless guilt over my failure to stand up to my father when he was alive is certainly the effect, not the cause, of having such a horrible time with the brutal machismo of the public junior high school locker room. The only way I knew to preserve my self-respect in the face of the assault on it was to feel superior by being the biggest goody two-shoes in the room. Unfortunately, the ruse corrupted me until I was too sheepish in the face of authority, and too lacking in personal ambition, to grow up gracefully and become an unbitter adult. In principle, Marcotte surely hates that locker-room culture as much as I did. But since public-school gym class is too stupid and cruel to survive the rigors of a free market in education—especially if I had my way and teenagers weren’t the new niggers—she aids in the oppression of millions of young people of both sexes.
4.) Alarmingly, Marcotte doesn’t seem to worry about the creep-up in legal age of majority that has taken place for the last few generations of Americans. Compulsory high school is an historical aberration (like marijuana prohibition, cough). It shouldn’t be such a sacred cow across the political spectrum. Andrew Sullivan has made the mistake of supporting it, but somehow I wouldn’t expect him to play the more-empathic-than-thou game in debate about it that Marcotte does about feminism. (For the record, I supportPlayboy’s good-faith effort to ensure a minimum employee age of 18.) Five days out of every week are a needless sorority initiation for millions of girls during the difficult early years of puberty. Meanwhile, the heart of the teacher’s pet bleeds for 18-year-olds who get drunk and expose their breasts for Girls Gone Wild. The child is father to the man—and to the woman, too. (Sorry, ghost of Emily Dickinson, but you were right about long dashes being so much fun.)
5.) My credibility gap between Marcotte and Sullivan lies in the respective presence and absence of the Blank Slate doctrine in the mind of each. Between the two, Sullivan shows more respect for the influence of evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics on our policy debates. Nineteenth-century racists and sexists thought those sciences were on their side; twentieth-century racists and other dangerous idealists (Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Woodrow Wilson) are exposed as fools by them. (And yes, the sexual revolution which Playboy heralded has sometimes had Blank Slate conceits of its own, although I still don’t think that that revolution has always been wrong.)
Marcotte’s compassion for me as a man is at best the compassion of the elephant for the merchandise in a china shop. Her intellectual clumsiness makes the analogy fair. I already know that I can’t trust her to see my fascination with Playboy as something other than a kind of brainwashing. I don’t need her “empathetic” missionary work to save my tribe from devil worship. If that’s her agenda, can anyone blame me for resenting it?
Baker is 39 now, and probably still smokin’ hot. Marcotte is pretty cute, in case that’s at all germane. But since she seems so militant about its possible effect on her credibility (“God knows someone like me could never just, oh, put up some erotic pictures of myself without losing all credibility forever amen”), I won’t post her photo here.
Radley Balko and Andrew Sullivan have each given The New York Times’ David Brooks a good pounding for his defense of government growth under George W. Bush. Brooks had it coming, but Sullivan has revealed a chink in his own armor. According to a Yiddish proverb, a liar needs to have a good memory. Sullivan reminds me that a non-libertarian needs the same trait to avoid embarrassment about the forms of government meddling that he happens to like.
“I’m a small government Goldwater conservative, but I think compulsory high school education is worth the trade-off of freedom,” says Sullivan in passing. Ah, but of course, someone else’s freedom is always easy to trade off. (For example, the sodomy laws that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down just a few years ago were academic problems at worst for Sullivan’s conservative heterosexual friends.) Federal and state governments conveniently give teenagers only as much autonomy as soccer moms see fit to give them—even though societies where life as an adult is much harder have often considered their members adults at 14. What I’ve said about teenagers may be vulgar, but there is little hyperbole in it, I’m afraid.
When you summoned me to jury duty recently, I told you by mail that I use marijuana every day for psychiatric reasons—which I have every right to do according to section 11362.5 of the California Health and Safety Code. Since I haven’t received any further communication from you despite having been scheduled to appear the day before yesterday, I thankfully assume that you see the obvious dilemma between state and federal law if I showed up for jury duty with a dropper bottle of olive oil laced with cannabis.
Hypothetically, if my medical documentation had been misplaced or disregarded, my associates in the cannabis community and I would have been superstitious in the Corleone sense. (We’d act within the law, of course, but with that attitude.) Ed Rosenthal has shown how much an intelligent, well-connected stoner can embarrass public officials.
Some might say that Rosenthal proves we need more jurors who think like me. I’m flattered, but I’m either too smart or too dumb to be selected for any jury where I would likely make a difference. Impatient with an experience so reminiscent of a government-run school, I would soon confess my belief in using jury nullification to make victimless crimes unpunishable and excessive civil judgments unwinnable. You don’t want guys like me there. I figure I’m eliminating the middleman.
“I’m always suspicious of men who want to meet Bunnies.” The January “Playmate News” section attributes these words to Playmate Cara Zavaleta without context (p. 171). I may be leaping to conclusions, but I’m offended if she means what I think she means. I assume she’s describing a higher level of caution than women appropriately have towards strange men in general. If I met her, would my heroine addiction creep her out?
Zavaleta’s attitude has me wondering about the effects of the progressive ideal of egalitarianism on the self-esteem of the gifted. I’m arrogantly guessing that she has had to spend most of her life pretending she’s nothing special to keep her beauty from alienating others. But her high midi-chlorianmillihelen count, her rare willingness to flash the entire world, and some non-genetic good luck have made her something quite special indeed.
My geeky Star Wars reference allows me to segue to my problem with David Brin’s hyperegalitarian screed against the “elitist, anti-democratic” saga. In a different context, Andrew Sullivan acknowledges inequality as a fact of life:
Of course, discussion of human natural inequality will always be sensitive. It’s a hard fact to absorb that some people will never be as intelligent as some others, or as musically gifted, or as mathematically skilled. Americans in particular hate the notion that there is some natural limit on what people can and cannot achieve.
But there is a distinction between moral and political equality for all—the bedrock of a liberal society—and unavoidable natural inequalities between human beings and, in a few narrow areas, between social groups. This cannot and should not mean that any individual should be prejudged or denied opportunity. But it does mean that some imbalances in certain professions may not be entirely a function of prejudice or bigotry.
Since Brin prefers “true science fiction” to space opera or superhero comics, I’ll say that my experience as a “gifted child” in the government school system—perhaps one of the “institutions” Brin would have us serve—reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which begins with this paragraph:
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Interesting post and I definitely agree with the assertion that US public education, and its evolution in our society into its current state and form, encourages a prolonged adolescent period which did not exist in human societies until our very modern period of institutional education. To take it further, perhaps you should discuss the inherent power structures established in secondary education and their relationship with the overarching power structures of our capitalistic republic and Western society in general. Particularly the relationship between authority figures and the emerging independent thinker our system is supposedly set up to produce, which in actuality is geared towards making citizens easier to control and manipulate.
Also - I wonder what your solution to the problem of institutional education would be.
Thanks for the post idea, AGS. I propose a two-part solution:
1.) Have the law treat teenagers less like children and more like adults in terms of both liberty and accountability.
2.) Privatize the entire education system. Compulsory, government-run schooling as we now know it—barely a century old—is a road to hell paved with good intentions. Not every civic impulse born of the Progressive Era deserves our ongoing respect. Jim Crow, a regrettably fitting example for Martin Luther King Day, is one of its bastard children. Even many radicals of the day, like Eugene V. Debs and Jack London, saw no problem with it. Left to more of its own devices, the free market would almost certainly have weakened racism, and it could do much to liberate teens. Our system isn’t too capitalistic; it’s not capitalistic enough.
In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, professor Allan Bloom blamed the sexual revolution for his students’ condescension towards their ancestors. “Many think their older brothers and sisters discovered sex, as we now know it to be, in the sixties. I was impressed by students who, in a course on Rousseau’s Confessions, were astounded to learn that he had lived with a woman out of wedlock in the eighteenth century. Where could he have gotten the idea?” (p. 107-108) Where could Bloom’s students have gotten the idea that our forebears were Doris Day? From bowdlerized textbooks in government-run schools, of course. I support the complete privatization of education partly because bureaucrats have bad taste in literature. For instance, they would seldom ask high-school teachers to assign this passage from the sixteenth-century French classic by François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (1990 translation by Burton Raffel, p. 34-35):
At the end of his fifth year, Gargantua was visited by his father, Grandgousier.... And Grandgousier drank a good bit, both with the boy and with his governesses, asking the latter most earnestly, among other things, if they had kept him fresh and clean. To which Gargantua replied that he had made sure that, nowhere in all the land, was there a boy cleaner than he was.
“And how do you manage that?” said Grandgousier.
“By long and careful experience,” said Gargantua, “I have invented a method for wiping my ass which is the most noble, the best, and also the simplest ever seen.”
“What is it?” asked Grandgousier.
“I’ll tell you,” said Gargantua, “right now.
“Once I wiped myself with a lady’s velvet veil, and I liked that very much, because it was so soft that it made my ass feel really good;
—and then with a lady’s hood, made of the same stuff, and it was just as good;
—and then with a man’s scarf;
—and then with an embroidered red satin veil, but the gilt came off and rolled up into all sorts of shitty balls, and they scraped half the skin off my ass—may Saint Anthony’s fire roast the ass of the goldsmith who made the thing—and the lady who wore it!
—I got over that by wiping myself with a page’s hat, handsomely plumed in Swiss style.
“Then, once when I was shitting behind some bushes, I found a March cat and wiped myself with him, but his claws scratched my whole rear end.
“I cured myself of that, next day, by wiping myself with my mother’s gloves—nicely scented with cunt flavor.
Our young scientist goes on for two more pages, then breaks the suspense by declaring “that there is no ass wiper like a fluffy goose, if you keep its head between your legs.” (With apologies to readers elsewhere in the English-speaking world, this Yankee takes nationalistic pride in the translator’s use of ass instead of arse.)
Don’t make the mistake of thinking of Rabelais as an envelope-pushing Lenny Bruce or Howard Stern of his day. Old-time literature is filled with that kind of stuff. (Or will Howard Stern be literature hundreds of years from now? I ask in earnest.) Admittedly, the scatological humor of that example is more Hustler than Playboy. But through the “Ribald Classics” section it published regularly until, I think, the early 1980s, Playboy showed that there’s plenty of sexy stuff there, too. Today’s students are missing out.
brian423: we’re bored with you. Simple as that. Obviously, we’re not going to follow your link, nor are we going to visit your website.
You get your info from tainted, biased-against-reality, regressive/repressive sources.
As your religious institutions atrophy and crumble from lack of relevance in the 21st century, you’ll be left with nothing.
Unless you renounce your addiction, you’ll be on your own. But we do have a nice 12-step recovery program for you, if you’re interested.
Now, go back to your bibble-study. Your heaven is waiting for you...
Naomi
What did the author of Reflections on Playboy do to deserve this unlikely abuse? The post is about a 17–year-old woman who was easily persuaded to get into the parked car of a 38–year-old male stranger impersonating a police officer. She safely left the car a few minutes later, but not before giving him her address, phone number, and parents’ names. A comment penned by “reaper” called her a “dumbass.” Naomi more or less agreed, adding that only a Christian could be so stupid:
Fundie Alert: the next section will contain ideas that will cause extreme distress!
Blind, unquestioning obedience starts in church! Well, maybe in church-y families...
Twenty bucks say her parents were interviewed and stated, “God saved our daughter from that monster”, or something along those lines.
No, I didn’t google(tm) it, so that’s just a guess. But we all know how commonplace it is to thank him for “delivering from evil”; conversely, he never gets blamed for “delivering to evil”. Why is that?
Come on, xtians! This is right up your alley. Reminder: this is, for the most part, an atheist blog. So if we drag theism into the discussion of an Oklahoma mayor (whose wife posed “largely” nude on the Internets), why can’t we drag it into this topic? (The Rapid City SD mayor, arrested at the Iowa State Fair, did not meet our standards for blaming gaud...)
Naomi [italics and bold in the original]
I contributed this comment:
reaper, you’re blaming the victim.
Naomi, you’re placing blame on the wrong institution. Most likely, the young woman got in the car because compulsory schooling has led her to believe she is still a child. If you don’t believe me, please read my call for teenage liberation. (I thank TerraPraeta for making me aware of this post of yours.)
From that, Naomi jumped to the conclusion that I study the bibble, whatever that is. Despite its misleading title, she knew instantly that Reflections on Playboy is a “fundie” site. She already knows everything about all opposing points of view.
Where does self-righteousness come from? Religion per se doesn’t create it, or else atheists like Naomi wouldn’t show it. Some historians of philosophy blame Platonism, but I don’t buy that theory, either. The tragedy of Hippolytus, a polytheistic study of a self-righteous man, was first produced at about the time that Plato was born. To be so inspired, Euripides must have seen self-righteousness around him even then. “Indeed, the problem with Homo sapiens may not be that we have too little morality,” says cognitive scientist (and atheist) Steven Pinker. “The problem may be that we have too much.” My source for the quote—however tainted it may seem to Naomi—is “The Sanctimonious Animal,” chapter 15 of his book The Blank Slate. Whether or not they’ll admit it, atheists are just as capable of intolerant fanaticism as the rest of us.
Baker is 39 now, and probably still smokin’ hot. Marcotte is pretty cute, in case that’s at all germane. But since she seems so militant about its possible effect on her credibility (“God knows someone like me could never just, oh, put up some erotic pictures of myself without losing all credibility forever amen”), I won’t post her photo here.