Conservative Hollywood

Over the years I've developed a deep dislike (to put it mildly) at many things Hollywood spews out. But it was only recently that I realized part of the reason is that most Hollywood movies work on the same black-and-white assumption that characterizes a significant part of the conservative discourse. Perhaps this is why conservative policies are so unrealistic: they operate on a Hollywood-infused mentality, where, a) it's easy to know who's the good and who's the bad guy; and b) the good must always win in the end. Conservative politicians then simply want to bring about the world they see (out of the corner of their eyes) in the movies they spend so much time badmouthing. Badmouthing them for the wrong reasons, too, both from my point of view and from theirs. To me, the right point of view would be to badmouth them for their risible aesthetic derived from a reductive moral world view derived from a lazy and self-assured epistemology (if that's not too pretentious a word, and it almost certainly is, for a discourse whose supreme articulation is "We will find them and we will smoke them out!") From their point of view too, it ought to be wrong to badmouth for sex and violence the movies Hollywood produces, for without representations of sex how would we know who the bad guys are, and without violence, how would the world be saved from them? We all know that if there is anything worse than a world with bad guys, is one without them, both for your standard Hollywood flick and for your standard conservative discourse. In such a world one might need to think about alternative ways evil can come about, like out of people's ignorance or people's understandable to a point, self-interest, or people's good intentions pitted against well, let's just call it bad luck or bad karma or what have you... Or any number of other such theories. Why not just blame it on the devil, and wing it that way?

Before the Big Bang: A Twin Universe?

Before the Big Bang: A Twin Universe?

Evolution

I guess religion is the best evidence for the fact that evolution exists and is at work trying to keep us going. How else would we be able to survive, as individuals, and as species, were we not able to tell to ourselves the wonderful lies religion teaches?

Here is the truth: life has no meaning. Each one of us was born because our parents met and made love, because their parents met and made love, and their parents met and made love, for thousands of years. Before that we were not. After our puny three score and ten (yes, that's from the Bible, so?) years above this ground, on this earth, we will die, and we will never be again, just like, before being, for billions of years, we never were. If we are lucky, things we've done or said, or made during our lives will be remembered for a few generations, or for more generations, by some of our fellow humans. In the end though, when we pollute ourselves to death as a species, or when the next decent asteroid hits home, or when we genetically engineer a higher species than merely humans born of mother and father, or when, ultimately, the Earth dies enveloped of the fire of the dying sun, everything we ever did, or said or made will have disappeared and the rest of the universe will not know anything about our having been here, in the obscure corner of the obscure galaxy. (Assuming that everything we ever whispered will last until the Solar judgment day is so close to megalomania that it would warrant incarceration or worse.) And one so called day, the universe itself will become a very different place, if a place is what it currently is, and then everything will be truly quiet, or perhaps truly noisy. God? Perhaps there is such a thing, my model does not allow for denying his or her or its existence. Perhaps, outside the universe he or she or it sits and waits or plays with us, and with perhaps the other million forms of life evolving quietly, or not so quietly on their stupid planets. So? Other than "perhaps", what can we say of him/her/it? No, really?

So then, smart enough to know we will die, but not smart enough to be able to prevent it, or know whether preventing it is where it all is, we invented ourselves beautiful tales, about life after death. Perhaps afraid of the dreams of our recently dead, whom we missed so much, we corroborated that dream of a life after death with its own nightmarish corollaries. So? Does it make all this shibboleth any truer?

Mirror Stage

Two political thoughts

One:

Could it be that with a campaign for the White House between McCain and Obama, for the first time in years we will vote, instead of for the lesser evil, for the lesser good? (I'm optimistic that way: given the "choice" to vote for the lesser evil, we picked the greater, given the choice to vote for the greater good, we should reliably choose the lesser.)

Two:

Some waves tonight on CNN regarding the fact that apparently McCain was not born in the United States, but on some military base, and as such, according to the Constitution he would be ineligible to be president. Oh, the irony of a country whose founders never thought it would get to the point of having military bases abroad…

Be Cause…

This turns out will become one of my pet peeves… The game of "be cause". The game we play (no, some people play) when inventing a cause for something. Not so much inventing, as stating, setting in stone, the ultimate cause of some effect. The way it works is this: the player of "be cause" starts thinking about a certain idea, reality and so on, and (very often, polemically, that is, trying to call others' games of "be cause" incomplete, or wrong) stumbles upon a so-called more primordial cause, more explanatory, wider, deeper, whatever. This game has been played to death, and I stumble upon it everywhere I turn, it seems. The particular event that prompted these lines is a re-encounter, after so many years, with the Marxist pseudo-scientific pseudo-philosophy, with its assumption that everything in the (human) world happens for a reason, and the reason is (drum rolls ….) to make the capitalists rich… As games of "be cause" go, this is one of the more short sighted ones out there, neglecting such basic notions as: who are these capitalists (extraterrestrial beings? Gods?) and what makes them want to get rich and from here on, again all the way down to brain chemical imbalances and properties of chemical and physical elements is such a long way that if I met someone who told me this is the ultimate cause (and I didn't read about it in books written by well-educated people) I would think that someone is working (not very hard either) at pulling my leg.

If I had more time, I would wax philosophic on the meaning of the insertion of a blank space between "be" and "cause", the sense of that vacuity, and what it is supposed to hide in a black hole kinda sorta way. Derrida writes pages upon pages about/starting from the letter "a", perhaps I can do the same about the " "? The emptiness that hides being, through whose emergence into the space of the écriture the ultimate ontology is postulated, the self-made ontology, the God-like "(let there) be light". "Be light" of course still some sort of "be cause" game, but, again, just a game.

And yet, is it justified, I always ask myself this, is it justified to jump boats from one discipline to another? Is it ok to say that the cause of the Chinese cultural revolution has ultimately to do with physical properties of the universe (oh, just watch physis return through the backdoor, no, through the window because it is through the window that you make the illicit entries or exits, Faulkner says) than with the wild-eyed, crazed dreams of some deluded individuals combined with the will for power of others? (Replace "Chinese cultural revolution" with any similar Marxist-induced state of body politic coma. Results will not vary.)

(And if it is through the windows that we make our illicit exits and entries, what does it mean that the world's computing population spends their time in front of virtual windows, ™ or not ™?)

I am on a roll. Daylight, Scheherazade.

Words

"That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at. (…) I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. (…) that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching (…) He had a word too, Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack" (172). (W. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying)

Words as mold, in, ironically, both senses of the word, mold as hollow shape mold as 'fungal growth' that parasitizes life. Words as "view from outside", as what sifts through the sieve of our skin through our all too porous self. And the Lord God said ...animals and plants... dominion ... name them... and he named them, for they were all not him so it was easy.