From Elie Wiesel, Romanian-born Jewish writer, professor, political activist, and Nobel Laureate.
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
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He Said That? 12/29/15
He Said That? 11/10/15
From Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), 28th President, The New Freedom (1913):
Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.
He Said That?
From Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), Russian writer and playwright, from The Master and Margarita (completed in 1939, published by his widow in 1966):
You should never ask anyone for anything. Never- and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself.
In the Name of Tolerance, Kill the Curmudgeons, by Robert Gore
Game of Thrones features beheadings, hangings, torture, incineration, parricide, war, rape, incest, betrayal, and intrigue, among other untoward depictions. Refreshingly, the aspirants to the Iron Throne do not pretend they seek it for the public interest, common good, or the children. Those contenders with some nobility among the admixture of their motives acknowledge their ambition—it’s good to be King (or Queen)—and the ignoble have the courage of their own ruthless rottenness.
This naked drive for power, shorn of hypocrisy, stands in welcome contrast to contemporary politics. Between now and November of 2016, we’ll hear countless speeches and interviews from a dozen plus candidates claiming—while wiping away a tear or two—that they are running to Restore America’s Greatness, or Take Back America, or Fulfill America’s Promise, or some such Madison Avenue-conceived, poll-driven, focus-group-tested drivel. Any candidate who admitted that he or she sought the presidency because the American government has treasure, power, and empire that puts Alexander, Caesar, Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler combined to shame and yes, by God, it’s good to be King (or Queen), would be disqualified immediately. Instead, all must swear to make like Glinda the Good Witch and use their power—should they be chosen to lead the great people of this great nation—only for the Benefit of Humanity. That anyone can stomach this revolting nonsense is astounding, but millions do because of the central tenet of American politics: You can get away with anything as long as you say you’re doing it for somebody else.
Facebook, the company that made “like” a noun, epitomizes America, 2015. While human nature hasn’t changed a whit over the millennia, almost everyone wants to hide the worser demons of their natures, accumulating actual likes on Facebook and figurative ones in every other avenue of social interaction. Oh sure, if you poke around the Internet you can kind find plenty of naysayers, bubble-busters, and other curmudgeons, but even many of those misanthropes hide behind aliases. Nice people don’t journey to such dark corners. “Nice” is the vapid kissing cousin of “like.”
One can be labelled “nice” merely by keeping one’s mouth shut and nodding at the appropriate times. What’s a Facebook like worth when there is no “dislike”? The only word in the English language more insipid than “like” and “nice” is “cute,” a distinction achieved upon birth by virtually all mammalian offspring and many reptilian, amphibious, and bird species’ offspring as well. It is especially important for political and entertainment celebrities, their stock-in-trade popularity, to be considered nice and likable, which is why most of them acquire causes once they’re in the limelight. Never mind the bodies they stepped over on their climb to the top, the lies, backstabbing, criminality, debauchery, addictions, and transparent phoniness; they are deeply concerned about global warming, or income inequality, or the plight of the denizens of some obscure corner of the planet, or something equally worthy.
Declarations of unmet social needs have preceded every expansion of the welfare state and of course, such needs can only be met by removing money from some people’s pockets and putting it other people’s pockets. The pickpockets claim the mantle of “nice,” or more grandiosely, “humanitarian,” while protests from the pick-pocketed prove that they’re selfish and mean, the evil opposite of nice. That pursuit of happiness thing implies a certain selfishness, so it has been modified. You can marry someone of the same sex if that floats your boat. (Gay marriage isn’t just nice, it’s rainbow nice!). If you’d be happy keeping what you’ve earned, forget about it. You’re selfish and mean, and it’s a good thing Facebook doesn’t have a thumbs down, or you’d get a bunch of them. Besides, letting you keep what you earn would pull the rug out from under Obamacare, which the Supreme Court just twisted itself into a linguistic pretzel to save.
Nice as we are to each other at home (except to the selfish, the naysayers, the bubble-busters, and the curmudgeons) we outdo ourselves in war. Not since the Civil War has the US fought on its home territory. Since then, all its wars have been fought to save someone in some foreign land against some terrible scourge. Weirdly, oftentimes even the people we’re saving don’t want us there, and gratitude for our efforts is lacking. Oftentimes, so too is success. The misanthropes in our midst might say that our efforts have usually made the situation worse. They certainly have costed a lot of money and killed a lot of people, although that is cancelled out by the purity of our motives, which excuses us from conducting honest assessments of our failures and allows us to produce more of them.
Only the blackest of hearts question the motives of the pure. Those black hearts note that money involuntarily extracted from selfish bastards doesn’t just meet unmet social needs and make the world safe for democracy and the American Way of Life. It buys votes; funds bloated medical-care, welfare, agricultural, educational, and military-industrial-intelligence complexes, and pays the salaries of a swarm of micromanaging bureaucrats who get to make life miserable for the rest of us. Even with all the money the government extracts in pursuit of its unquestionably worthy goals, with such a big heart it cannot help but live beyond its means. A host of connected, but worthy, Wall Street types make well-deserved oodles of money using borrowed funds at ultra-cheap rates to speculate on the debt and interest rate machinations of the government and its central bank. Only the misanthropic could object to such a charitable endeavor.
There is only one problem with our rubber room, Barney the Dinosaur world: reality is sometimes not nice. As Greece and Puerto Rico demonstrate, credit markets can turn off the spigot and governments can go bankrupt, even when they are stocked with good people and the money is to be used for worthy purposes. It’s a funny thing about many not-so-nice people: they’re often the ones who know how to produce things. When the nice people—for the best of reasons, of course—make it difficult to produce, the not-so-nice produce no more than is necessary to keep themselves and their loved ones (even the not-so-nice have loved ones) alive. Selfish, you may say, but they have skills other than being likable—for which they often have nothing but contempt—and they use them. They may not much care if the whole system collapses, because they can take care of themselves, and if you want something from them, you’d better have something of value to offer in return.
So push them far enough, and the not-so-nice drop out…or rebel. The Confederate flag is a symbol of racism, which we all abhor. It is also a symbol of secession and rebellion, which may be a bigger part of why it is abhorred. In our Age of Tolerance, those sentiments are intolerable. The US was founded on secession and rebellion; they were once as essential to the American character as self-reliance and individualism (now known as antisocial selfishness). It would be the latest in a long string of mistakes from our benevolent powers that be if they assumed that spirit was dead and not just dormant. The better bet is that it will be awakened when their goo-goo flotilla of inoffensive banality, speech codes, trigger warnings, political correctness, and spineless conformity crashes on the shoals of dire but prescient warnings dismissed and hard truths left unspoken.
NICE IS BORING; THIS NOVEL IS NOT.
Porn, Popularity, and Power, by Robert Gore
Chemical addictions are no laughing matter, but they’re trivial compared to other, under-appreciated addictions that plague America: pornography, popularity, and power. Chemicals can wreck the lives of addicts and the unfortunates with whom they come in contact. The three Ps are on track to destroy an entire country, perhaps an entire planet.
It is difficult to find reliable statistics on pornography: who watches it, how much, on what forums, and the industry’s revenues and profitability. The numbers that are out there are all over the lot, but it is inarguably a multi-billion dollar industry with tens of millions of customers. What pornography does to the human brain has become an acceptable subject for scientific study. For many, porn generates neurological and chemical reactions similar to those generated by various drugs. Like drugs, pornography’s effects are so potent they can lead to addiction; the afflicted often risking marriages and jobs.
For a brief physical interaction that may or not have be an expression of romance and love, sex in all its variations commands a bizarre level of attention. The sexual revolutionaries stormed the barricades in the 1960s, but sex is more of a preoccupation now than it was then. Sexual imagery in advertising, entertainment, and the media bombard us. Virtually every formerly “transgressive” sexual practice, with the exceptions of pedophilia, bestiality, incest, and necrophilia (and they all have their advocates) are now tolerated, if not embraced, by most Americans.
Yet there remains a residue of prurience, titillation, naivety, and shame, something left over from the days when sex was not a subject for conversation, much less magazine covers. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Dennis Hastert is being investigated for allegedly improperly withdrawing money from his bank, paying blackmail to hide the details of a homosexual relationship. Bruce became Caitlyn. For all the tolerance and sophistication Americans have supposedly acquired since the bad old repressive days, they gawk at these spectacles like circus crowds used to gawk at bearded ladies and two-headed calves, with the modern barkers of the press, television, and Internet taking the rubes’ money and shepherding them into line.
Caitlyn has made more money, won more accolades, and garnered more publicity than when Bruce won the Olympic decathlon. The dollar potential of publicity and popularity is tantalizing: get half of one percent of the American population to buy what you’re selling and you’ll make a fortune. Caitlyn was part of the Kardashian juggernaut (pun intended) that capitalized curves, cat fights, self-absorption, and surgically enhanced pulchritude into hundreds of millions of dollars. Having turned what most of us would regard as a private decision and the subsequent transformative process into a publicity bonanza that not only keeps up with but surpasses the Kardashians, Caitlyn’s laughing all the way to the bank.
Lucrative as fame can be, for most of the famous, it’s not the primary draw. For that, think of the toddler screaming: “Look at me!” Among grown ups, the need for attention can range from nonexistent to pathological, and the latter predominates in the celebrity universe. The Irene Cara “Fame” (“I’m gonna make it to heaven, Light up the sky like a flame”) is a bonfire stoked by a gargantuan, multifaceted industry that attracts millions of moths desperate to emerge from their obscurity. For the few who make it, being in the public eye uncorks a brain-bath of potent neurotransmitters that often proves quite addictive. Even the threat of losing it may be psychologically devastating. Like most addictions, it requires increasing doses to provide the same high. Coming off those highs can be a depressing slide, the David Bowie “Fame” (“puts you there where things are hollow”). The costs of a fall from grace explain the don’t-rock-the-boat fear of so much of the celebrity stable: the PR machinery, bland public statements, scandal suppression, political groupthink, and endorsement of fashionable causes.
There is no psychological rocket fuel, for those so addicted, that rivals the exercise of power. Human history is mostly a chronicle of who scraps to the top of the manure heap, and much of it makes Game of Thrones look like a nursery rhyme. The chance to force others to bend to one’s will acts as a mega-neurotransmitter that overrides risks, judgment, and morality. No single group has inflicted more misery on the rest of us than our rulers, not by a long shot. Power sits atop the hierarchy of addictions and usually involves some or all of the others. Nobody in their right mind would take the other side of a bet that sexual promiscuity and chemical addiction rates—if accurate tallies could be obtained—are higher in Washington D.C. than the national averages. For reveling in fame and having one’s ass kissed, only Hollywood approaches the capital.
These addictions probably stem from evolutionary biology. The fat epidemic demonstrates that the human body hasn’t evolved for today’s sedentary lifestyles, In the same vein, human psyches are ill-equipped to handle certain powerful neurotransmitters, For much of history, the “life of man” has been “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651) Pornography would get you burned at the stake; sex—with a partner who was just as grubby and unwashed as you were—was for procreation; fame, for 99.99 of the population, extended no farther than the borders of their villages; power was divinely ordained for the crown and nobility. Progress, technology, wealth, and the growth of nations and governments has enabled the hyper-stimulation of certain areas and chemical processes within the brain that for millennia have lain dormant. Anyone trying to stop humanity from careening into oblivion must realize that the crux of the battle is fighting addictions that are far more difficult to defeat than traditional chemical addictions
“Fame” (Irene Cara), written by Dean Pitchford, Carlos Alomar, Ivan Graziani, and Michael Gore
Copyright: Universal Music Publishing Ricordi S.r.l., Unitunes Music, and Emi Affiliated Catalog Inc.
“Fame” (David Bowie), written by Dean Pitchford, David Bowie, John Lennon, Carlos Alomar, John Winston Lennon, and Michael Gore
Copyright: Emi Music Publishing Ltd., Jones Music America, Chrysalis Music Holdings Gmbh, Emi Affiliated Catalog Inc., Lenono Music, Chrysalis Music Ltd., Air Chrysalis Scandinavia AB, Chrysalis Music, Tintoretto Music, Unitunes Music, and Unidisc Music O.B.O. Unitunes Music
THERE ARE GUTTERS, AND THERE ARE PINNACLES
He Said That? 2/17/15
From George Orwell’s novel, 1984:
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
One of the things we lovers of liberty have been doing for years is giving statists the benefit of the doubt. That has to stop. They want power, pure and simple, and when we delude ourselves about their motivation, we’re the only ones who get hurt.
Posted in Government, Literature, Politics, Uncategorized
Tagged George Orwell, Power
