This is to notify the masses that I am on hiatus from Amsterdam writing and will be filling the void with posts such as this. What sort of post is this? That has yet to be determined. Suffice it to say that it is likely to be crap. Why? Because my mind is frazzled. The Amsterdam series is the equivalent of three hundred 1.5-spaced Word document pages. The intensity of writing such a series is exhausting, to put it mildly. So, you'll be left with crap like this over the next month, give or take.
Perhaps it won't be crap, though. Maybe only this post will be crap, the crap I need to take to clear my mind, to allow my thought to unravel, to breathe a little easier. I haven't written anything that could be feasibly said to be dada or anti-dada or neutra-dada or splooge-dada or kerploeey-dada in quite some time. I probably never have. Or that's all I've ever written, not one lick of anything I've written making a bit of sense. Maybe it's all just made up horse-sense. Or maybe every fucking thing I've written is the Truth and nothing anyone else writes is anything but fantasy.
Yes, the latter is true. I know it is because I said it is. That doesn't mean that this writing is anything but crap, though. The Truth is Crap. I shall take a closer look at this crap to determine if it is anything but crap. What follows is likely crap:
Life versus Profit, a grudge match between breathing and misinformation, the working poor mentally and physically exhausted, the media clapping its hands feverishly, the endless stream of Reality TV not because life is too boring but too frightening; dysfunction and imbalance tilting family and social relationships because, well, who has the time? The cultural environment is best described as emotional breakdown, desperation, confusion, anger, resentment, frustration, and angst; the workaday world, a world of horrors, of perpetrators and enablers; First World Third World, master-slave, drilling and mining, throwing rocks at tanks, deserts of blood, forests of limbs; With Us Against Us, heroic and patriotic platitudes, blind trust in shock and awe, terror and destruction; Thoughts and Prayer, beliefs in ineffectual nothings, courage existing in dying hearts; Nation Is a Person, metaphors and analogies -- lies, lies, lies; Acceptance ... gone fishing.
Hugs from Disney World, we're having the best time without you, we care about you only to the extent that you represent a being that witnesses our being, you don't exist otherwise, not for us, we don't need you and we certainly don't want to be your representational witnesses; I earned my place in the world, my property, my possessions, my attitude of disdain for you, mine, mine, mine, I am a middle-aged two-year old with a lot of stuff and I want more of it, you can't have that, that's mine! Give me the toys, they're not yours, they're mine! Don't you get tired of being that way? Mom, the anti-materialism boy is bothering me again, can I shoot him? I can? Yay!
I shall now perform a feat of Marxism which will slowly devolve: Violent extremes of wealth and income are inherent to capitalism. Inequality cannot be viewed except through an institutional context. The fundamental characteristic of materialism is fatalism. An ersatz capitalism socializes losses and privatizes gains, succumbing to monopoly and oligopoly. Policy and law are the backbone of these economics despite what anyone wants to believe; ideologies and interests are expressed most clearly in tax rates and loopholes ... and bailouts. Corporations are persons but so are humans; the inequality between them is the result of a glaring but somehow unnoticed segregation. Privilege as a natural right has weaseled its way into social acceptance, expressed most dramatically through voting ... and not voting. Justice is a commodity affordable only to a few; could such a thing be just? Depends on who is writing the narrative. Trickle down economics continually trickles to Cayman Island bank accounts.
Peter Singer, reasons to like him: 1) He aims to reduce the suffering of sentient beings in the world (he includes animals in that category); 2) He is a practical and theoretical philosopher; 3) He shakes the tree of Christianity through criticism of historical harms against animal welfare, the environment, and the poorest of the poor; 4) He is a fascinating, engaging, passionate, and provocative writer who researches thoroughly; 5) He points a finger in the direction society is heading no matter how radical or disturbing.
Peter Singer, reasons to dislike him: 1) He reduces reason to utilitarianism and sees life and its fruits as exchangeable commodities in the currency of pain and pleasure (and sometimes preferences); 2) he views ethics through the lenses of dilemmas, calculations, and consequences and ignores the development of virtue; 3) He views life too abstractly by emphasizing impartiality, as if humanity has ever operated from a motivational center of impartiality; 4) Singer's utilitarianism is reliant on conventional values, an example being his convoluted boundaries of personhood using a calculus that cannot articulate justifications without using the very morality he so often argues against; 5) He seeks to discredit opposing views through argumentation rather than philosophical integrity.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the U.S. over three trillion dollars to date. Imagine how many tacos could have been bought with that kind of money. About three trillion, I suppose. Dollar per taco? Seems about right. Three trillion fucking tacos. That's over four tacos per person for every human being in the world--but infants don't eat tacos and neither do those in intensive care! I think it's okay to round up to six tacos per person. If those tacos had stayed in the United States and been dispersed to every U.S. citizen--including infants and the infirm--then each person would have had a thousand tacos. A thousand tacos for every man, woman, and child. That's a lot of tacos.
Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) was the author of the PATRIOT Act. Amazingly, he wants to fix it because he's been surprised at how it has been abused by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Big ol' shock there. Jim may not be bright, but at least he ain't smart. But he actually is miffed that the law was used for bulk collection of data, including personal telephone calls, on millions of citizens without regard to the Fourth Amendment (never mind that the law provided the legal means to muddy the meanings of search and seizure). Either way, ol' Sensei Brenner wants to stop the madness fourteen years after the madness began. Good for him. Pat on the head for you, Jimbo. Edward Snowden would be ... well, I suppose you'd have to ask him what he thinks, Sensei.
In the Sabine Parish School District in Louisiana a sixth-grade Buddhist student missed the supposedly correct answer for this question on a science test: "Isn't it amazing what the [blank] has made!" The "correct" answer: "Lord." Now that's good science! Gotta get me some of that good ol' science and eat it right up for breakfast or maybe just unroll it so I can wipe my ass with it: I'll either wind up with an empty stomach or a hand full of shit. Louisiana's got it going on in the science department: One science textbook being used in schools receiving federal tax dollars states that the existence of dragons has been proven scientifically; by analyzing certain dinosaur skulls scientists have determined that large chambers within "could have contained special chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire and smoke." Apparently, these fire-breathing creatures existed just a few thousand years ago. They may have been pets for humans! Surprisingly, Louisiana is ranked 48th in education in the U.S. Only West Virginia and South Carolina fare worse--makes me wonder what in the hell is being taught in South Carolina! Do South Carolina textbooks claim that air pollution is the result of God's farts? Could be. May as well be.
Try as I might, I will never be as absurd as the world around me. Saddens me. I try, really, I try, but I'm so fucking average when it comes to being absurd. The board of education in Louisiana is kicking my ass at this game. Nothing could be as Anti-Dada as they are. They are masters: Even if I wanted to do so I never could have gotten shit like that printed in textbooks. Fuck, I want to meet the author. What a fucking genius! That person's imagination, holy fuck. I want to drop Acid with the author some time, see what kinds of crazy shit we can cook up for the next batch of high school science textbooks.
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