Camille Paglia: The Radical Libertarian

July 30, 2015December 11, 2018 RilalyLeave a comment

Reading through Camille Paglia’s criticisms of the culture, one cannot help but think that most other social critics of our generation either feed a confirmation bias or speak about things for which most of us have no interest. As evidence of their lack of confidence, they scratch and claw their way through the competition to achieve an unprecedented depth in the sewer. On those occasions when Ms. Paglia does use overly provocative words, she backs it up with objectivity and a display of knowledge that is so vast that the adjective “informed” seems incomplete.

Camille Paglia is not a conservative, or liberal, and her politics have been described as “radical libertarian”, but she is a life-long Democrat. The “difficult to define” nature of her politics is something that most partisans pine for, but few of these “all over the map” thinkers could finish one paragraph of Camille Paglia’s thoughts without acknowledging that there is a comparative consistency to the overview of their thinking that could only be called limited to a certain ideology. Most diverse thinkers would also shrink at the evidence of inconsistencies in their beliefs system that suggests that they’ve either never been challenged, or that they’ve never truly given opposing views any consideration. From what I’ve read of Ms. Paglia’s work, when she is confronted by inconsistencies she confronts them head-on, and in a manner that contains no obfuscation or spin.

She is in favor of pornography, abortion, prostitution, drug-use, and assisted suicide. She is a proud lesbian, an atheist that respects religion, and a self-described dissident feminist, or as some feminist critics have called her an “anti-feminist feminist”.

If you have strong views on a specific topic, she’ll probably offend you in some manner, but her methodology does not consist of the quick to the throat one-liners that one has come expect from a provocateur. Those that worship at the altar of provocateurs may not even recognize what Camille’s methodology for what it is, as her criticisms dig deep and leave a lasting wound.

The average and ubiquitous provocateur will say something along the line of: “I don’t want some guy (Ted Cruz) that purportedly memorized the constitution at twelve years-old to be my president. If I would’ve been in his grade, at twelve years old, I would’ve put my knee into his throat until he changed … I want the guy I vote for to smoke pot, have premarital and post-marital affairs … and yes … I’m talking about in the White House, and I want my guy to snort coke off their partner’s backside. I want my politician to be a real man or woman that has lived a real life.”

Those of us that worship at the altar of provocateurs are temporarily put in a jam by such comments, because they’re directed at “our guys”, but it’s not that, and we find ourselves in a sand hole trying to defend our disinterest. It’s that that type of ridicule is lacking in ingenuity and depth, and originality. It’s something George Carlin was saying forty years ago, it’s Lenny Bruce, it’s retread. Those of us that pine for something different want that cutting-the-edge-of-the-throat type of originality from our social critics that is informed and appears to have no influence, and we also want the kind of critiques that have staying power in the manner Camille Paglia’s criticism does:

“(Ted) Cruz gives me the willies. The guy is a fanatic! He’s very smart, clever and strategic, and he has a fine education from Princeton, so people have to watch out for him. But I think he is self-absorbed and narcissistic to a maniacal degree. I will never forgive him for his insulting arrogance to Dianne Feinstein when the Judiciary Committee was debating gun control two years ago. There’s a two-minute clip on YouTube which I urge people to look at it. Cruz is smirkily condescending and ultimately juvenile. He peppers Feinstein with a long list of rat-a-tat questions, as if he’s playing Perry Mason grilling a witness on the stand. He was trying to embarrass her but only embarrassed himself. A president must be a statesman, not a smart-alecky horse’s ass.”

There is no substance to the insight of most provocateurs. Listen to the most caustic crowd long enough, usually found on satellite radio, or on podcasts, and you’ll hear that their analysis of even the most important subjects devolve to 5^th grade potty humor and fart jokes. Provocative jokes like those have their place, but they don’t have the kind of staying power that a Camille Paglia statement does, as her most recent interview with Salon.com, part II, and part III proves.

On Bill Clinton:

“Bill Clinton was a serial abuser of working-class women –he had exploited that power differential even in Arkansas. And then in the case of Monica Lewinsky– I mean, the failure on the part of (iconic feminist leader) Gloria Steinem and company to protect her was an absolute disgrace in feminist history! What bigger power differential could there be than between the president of the United States and this poor innocent girl? Not only an intern but clearly a girl who had a kind of pleading, open look to her–somebody who was looking for a father figure.

“I was enraged! My publicly stated opinion at the time was that I don’t care what public figures do in their private life. It’s a very sophisticated style among the French, and generally in Europe, where the heads of state tend to have mistresses on the side. So what? That doesn’t bother me at all! But the point is, they are sophisticated affairs that the European politicians have, while the Clinton episode was a disgrace.”

Camille preceded this observation with a slight correlation between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton:

“Right from the start, when the Bill Cosby scandal surfaced, I knew it was not going to bode well for Hillary’s campaign, because young women today have a much lower threshold for tolerance of these matters. The horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the U.S., led by Gloria Steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to Bill Clinton’s behavior because he was a Democrat. The Democrat president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didn’t matter what his personal behavior was.

“But we’re living in a different time right now, and young women have absolutely no memory of Bill Clinton. It’s like ancient history for them; there’s no reservoir of accumulated good will.”

Salon.com Interviewer David Daley: “A cigar and the intern is certainly the opposite of sophisticated.”

“Absolutely! It was frat house stuff! And Monica got nothing out of it. Bill Clinton used her. Hillary was away or inattentive, and he used Monica in the White House–and in the suite of the Oval Office, of all places. He couldn’t have taken her on some fancy trip? She never got the perks of being a mistress; she was there solely to service him. And her life was completely destroyed by the publicity that followed. The Clinton’s are responsible for the destruction of Monica Lewinsky! They probably hoped that she would just go on and have a job, get married, have children, and disappear, but instead she’s like this walking ghoul.”

Salon.com Interviewer David Daley: “Fifteen years later, that’s still the sad role left for her to play.”

“Yes, it’s like something out of “Wuthering Heights” or “Great Expectations”–some Victorian novel, where a woman turns into this mourning widow who mopes on and on over a man who abused or abandoned her. Hillary has a lot to answer for, because she took an antagonistic and demeaning position toward her husband’s accusers. So it’s hard for me to understand how the generation of Lena Dunham would or could tolerate the actual facts of Hillary’s history.”

Salon.com Interviewer David Daley: “So have the times and standards changed enough that Clinton would be seen as Cosby, if he was president today.”

“Oh, yes! There’s absolutely no doubt, especially in this age of instant social media. In most of these cases, like the Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby stories, there’s been a complete neglect of psychology. We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized–“Don’t ask any questions!” “No discussion!” “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written–in fiction or plays or movies.Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions.

“So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton–aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile–they’re engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power–and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy.

“Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, “Sexual Personae”–which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven’s sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac–a style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century.

“It’s hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia–this fear and envy of a woman’s power.

“And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother. He felt smothered by her in some way. But let’s be clear–I’m not trying to blame the mother! What I’m saying is that male sexuality is extremely complicated, and the formation of male identity is very tentative and sensitive–but feminist rhetoric doesn’t allow for it. This is why women are having so much trouble dealing with men in the feminist era. They don’t understand men, and they demonize men. They accord to men far more power than men actually have in sex. Women control the sexual world in ways that most feminists simply don’t understand.

“My explanation is that second-wave feminism dispensed with motherhood. The ideal woman was the career woman–and I do support that. To me, the mission of feminism is to remove all barriers to women’s advancement in the social and political realm–to give women equal opportunities with men. However, what I kept saying in “Sexual Personae” is that equality in the workplace is not going to solve the problems between men and women which are occurring in the private, emotional realm, where every man is subordinate to women, because he emerged as a tiny helpless thing from a woman’s body. Professional women today don’t want to think about this or deal with it.

“The erasure of motherhood from feminist rhetoric has led us to this current politicization of sex talk, which doesn’t allow women to recognize their immense power vis-à-vis men. When motherhood was more at the center of culture, you had mothers who understood the fragility of boys and the boy’s need for nurturance and for confidence to overcome his weaknesses. The old-style country women–the Italian matriarchs and Jewish mothers–they all understood the fragility of men. The mothers ruled their own world and didn’t take men that seriously. They understood how to nurture men and encourage them to be strong–whereas current feminism simply doesn’t perceive the power of women vis-a-vis men. But when you talk like this with most men, it really resonates with them, and they say “Yes, yes! That’s it!”

“Currently, feminists lack sympathy and compassion for men and for the difficulties that men face in the formation of their identities. I’m not talking in terms of the men’s rights movement, which got infected by p.c. The heterosexual professional woman, emerging with her shiny Ivy League degree, wants to communicate with her husband exactly the way she communicates with her friends–as in “Sex and the City.” That show really caught the animated way that women actually talk with each other. But that’s not a style that straight men can do! Gay men can do it, sure–but not straight men! Guess what–women are different than men! When will feminism wake up to this basic reality? Women relate differently to each other than they do to men. And straight men do not have the same communication skills or values as women–their brains are different!”

On Atheists that sneer at Religion:

“I regard (those that sneer at religion) as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, “Glittering Images”, that “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.” It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents– they’re still sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile atheist out there when I began publicly saying “I am an atheist,” on my book tours in the early 1990s. I started the fad for it in the U.S, because all of a sudden people, including leftist journalists, started coming out of the closet to publicly claim their atheist identities, which they weren’t bold enough to do before. But the point is that I felt it was perfectly legitimate for me to do that because of my great respect for religion in general–from the iconography to the sacred architecture and so forth. I was arguing that religion should be put at the center of any kind of multicultural curriculum.

“I’m speaking here as an atheist. I don’t believe there is a God, but I respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system. They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny. Politics applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves the eternal principles of life and death. The great tragic texts, including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, no longer have the central status they once had in education, because we have steadily moved away from the heritage of western civilization.

“The real problem is a lack of knowledge of religion as well as a lack of respect for religion. I find it completely hypocritical for people in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of Southern conservatives.

“But yes, the sneering is ridiculous! Exactly what are these people offering in place of religion? In my system, I offer art–and the whole history of spiritual commentary on the universe. There’s a tremendous body of nondenominational insight into human life that used to be called cosmic consciousness. It has to be remembered that my generation in college during the 1960s was suffused with Buddhism, which came from the 1950s beatniks. Hinduism was in the air from every direction–you had the Beatles and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Ravi Shankar at Monterey, and there were sitars everywhere in rock music. So I really thought we were entering this great period of religious syncretism, where the religions of the world were going to merge. But all of a sudden, it disappeared! The Asian religions vanished–and I really feel sorry for young people growing up in this very shallow environment where they’re peppered with images from mass media at a particularly debased stage.

“There are no truly major stars left, and I don’t think there’s much profound work being done in pop culture right now. Young people have nothing to enlighten them, which is why they’re clinging so much to politicized concepts, which give them a sense of meaning and direction.

“But this sneering thing! I despise snark. Snark is a disease that started with David Letterman and jumped to Jon Stewart and has proliferated since. I think it’s horrible for young people! And this kind of snark atheism–let’s just invent that term right now–is stupid, and people who act like that are stupid. Christopher Hitchens’ book “God is Not Great” was a travesty. He sold that book on the basis of the brilliant chapter titles. If he had actually done the research and the work, where each chapter had the substance of those wonderful chapter titles, then that would have been a permanent book. Instead, he sold the book and then didn’t write one–he talked it. It was an appalling performance, demonstrating that that man was an absolute fraud to be talking about religion. He appears to have done very little scholarly study. Hitchens didn’t even know Judeo-Christianity well, much less the other world religions. He had that glib Oxbridge debater style in person, but you’re remembered by your written work, and Hitchens’ written work was weak and won’t last.

“Dawkins also seems to be an obsessive on some sort of personal vendetta, and again, he’s someone who has never taken the time to do the necessary research into religion. Now my entire career has been based on the pre-Christian religions. My first book, “Sexual Personae,” was about the pagan cults that still influence us, and it began with the earliest religious artifacts, like the Venus of Willendorf in 35,000 B.C. In the last few years, I’ve been studying Native American culture, in particular the Paleo-Indian period at the close of the Ice Age. In the early 1990s, when I first arrived on the scene, I got several letters from Native Americans saying my view of religion, women, and sexuality resembled the traditional Native American view. I’m not surprised, because my orientation is so fixed in the pre-Christian era.”

On Jon Stewart, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the liberal media:

“I think Stewart’s show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of contemporary comedy. I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone. I hated the fact that young people were getting their news through that filter of sophomoric snark. Comedy, to me, is one of the major modern genres, and the big influences on my generation were Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. Then Joan Rivers had an enormous impact on me–she’s one of my major role models. It’s the old caustic, confrontational style of Jewish comedy. It was Jewish comedians who turned stand-up from the old gag-meister shtick of vaudeville into a biting analysis of current social issues, and they really pushed the envelope. Lenny Bruce used stand-up to produce gasps and silence from the audience. And that’s my standard–a comedy of personal risk. And by that standard, I’m sorry, but Jon Stewart is not a major figure. He’s certainly a highly successful T.V. personality, but I think he has debased political discourse. I find nothing incisive in his work. As for his influence, if he helped produce the hackneyed polarization of moral liberals versus evil conservatives, then he’s partly at fault for the political stalemate in the United States.

“I don’t demonize Fox News. At what point will liberals wake up to realize the stranglehold that they had on the media for so long? They controlled the major newspapers and weekly newsmagazines and T.V. networks. It’s no coincidence that all of the great liberal forums have been slowly fading. They once had such incredible power. Since the rise of the Web, the nightly network newscasts have become peripheral, and the New York Times and the Washington Post have been slowly fading and are struggling to survive.

“Historically, talk radio arose via Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s precisely because of this stranglehold by liberal discourse. For heaven’s sake, I was a Democrat who had just voted for Jesse Jackson in the 1988 primary, but I had to fight like mad in the early 1990s to get my views heard. The resistance of liberals in the media to new ideas was enormous. Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true! Liberalism has sadly become a knee-jerk ideology, with people barricaded in their comfortable little cells. They think that their views are the only rational ones, and everyone else is not only evil but financed by the Koch brothers. It’s so simplistic!

“Now let me give you a recent example of the persisting insularity of liberal thought in the media. When the first secret Planned Parenthood video was released in mid-July, anyone who looks only at liberal media was kept totally in the dark about it, even after the second video was released. But the videos were being run nonstop all over conservative talk shows on radio and television. It was a huge and disturbing story, but there was total silence in the liberal media. That kind of censorship was shockingly unprofessional. The liberal major media were trying to bury the story by ignoring it. Now I am a former member of Planned Parenthood and a strong supporter of unconstrained reproductive rights. But I was horrified and disgusted by those videos and immediately felt there were serious breaches of medical ethics in the conduct of Planned Parenthood officials. But here’s my point: it is everyone’s obligation, whatever your political views, to look at both liberal and conservative news sources every single day. You need a full range of viewpoints to understand what is going on in the world.”

Free Your Mind and Creativity Will Follow

June 20, 2015May 17, 2016 RilalyLeave a comment

“You just sit there young man, and think about what you’ve done!” is something that most of us have heard at one point or another. We’ve heard this from a mother, a grandmother, or some authority figure in our lives. Sitting in silence is an excellent punishment for a young mind that wants to move, explore, and participate, and the negative connotations we apply to such forced inactivity, may be the reason that some of us still avoid it as often as we can. For some minds, however, it may be the key to tapping into untapped resources of creativity.

Ardent advocates of noise would disagree. They would suggest that the best way to find that creative place occurs in the exchange of ideas. The distracted mind, they would say, requires forced participation. They also say that suggesting these minds need more space, and more silence, may allow the cracks of distraction to grow wider.

The very idea that silence should play a role in the creative process seems antithetical to everything we’ve been taught. We, as a people, have spent so much time trying to create technological advances that put an end to silence that we’re now conditioned to believe that cluttering our minds with voices and images may lead us to finding individual, creative thought in that stew. Some do, of course, as every brain works different. Those that require more processing of information –conditioned to the same beliefs about the creative process– may buy a self-help guide to find out what’s wrong with them. For them, the source of creative thinking can, more often than not, be found in the brain itself … If it is allowed to breathe a little.

As Dorothy Gauvin stated:

“Your mind makes connections between facts and experiences that may seem unrelated to a logical entity like a robot. Imagination connects the dots and comes up with an ‘Aha moment’ we call inspiration.”

These technological distractions that we have, and all of the noise of the day, prevents our imagination from taking what we’ve learned to that place where all the dots can be connected to produce a creative thought, or what Ms. Gauvin calls ‘an Aha moment’.

“Remember the famous quote from A.A.Milne,” she writes, ‘Sometimes I sit and think and sometimes I just sits.’”

Some of us spent most of our time outside of the Socratic Method of teaching looking in. We’ve witnessed other brains firing right along with the teacher’s. The teacher hits them with a question, they fire right back; the teacher probes deeper, the students respond in kind, and a summary discussion ensues in which all participants are rewarded with like-minded smiles when they’ve reached the same conclusion. Some of us have always wanted to be those people, and we have been … the next day. The next day, we arrived in that class with an answer that would’ve knock our teacher right on her keister … If we had thought of it yesterday. We wanted a do over. We wanted to show the class that we had the perfect answer. It was too late for us, of course, the class moved on.

Every mind works different. Some minds are excellent for business, and school, and they can come up with the perfect solution on the spot. With that perfect guide, they can delve deeper into the depths of the mathematical mind than either party imagined possible, or they do it so quick that some of us stare on dumbfounded.

The spoils for thinking often go to the quick, and that fact has led some of us to believe that we were the dumb. Our “Aha moments” do arrive, but they arrived when we were walking down the stairs, after the meat of the discussion has long since passed, and we thought of all the things we could’ve and should’ve said. Our minds work different, and even if we realized this in school, we may not have been rewarded in the manner the quicker minds were, but it may have been less frustrating or embarrassing to realize that our brains work different.

If you have a “down the stairs, could’ve, should’ve said” brain, Ms. Gauvin writes, you may want to consider the idea of developing a routine that involves a moment, or a series of moments, where all you do is sit in silence to digest what you’ve experienced. She writes that some meditate, some contemplate, and some “just sits” there in a manner that “suits their circumstances and personality”. She says that once you figure out how your brain works, you should consider creating a regular period in which you experience silence in the manner high profile “professionals in Medicine, Sports, and the Arts” all do.

Feathers

“Free your mind, the rest will follow.” —En Vogue

Years after reading the brilliant, Raymond Carver short story Feathers, I reread it. I was confused. I went back to the title of that story to make sure it was the same short story I read all those years ago and recommended to everyone I knew that expressed even a slight interest in fiction. It was the same short story, of course, and it was just as good as I remembered, but I had so jumbled the details of that story that I misremembered it into an original short story.

Carver’s short story was so great that I experienced a creative high after reading it. As an aspiring, young writer, I have to imagine that reading that story was equivalent to a young basketball player watching Michael Jordan drive the baseline against the Knicks in the 1993 playoffs. Carver, like Jordan, made it look so easy that I thought I could do it.

The focus of Carver’s story was, of course, the main characters, but my focus churned on the side characters. I identified with them in some manner I couldn’t grasp at first. I decided to explore. I decided that this exploration was worthy of a short story, my short story.

Upon rereading Feathers years later, I realized that the side characters were so far removed from the ones that I had created that no lawyer in the land could prove an infringement on, or plagiarism of, Carver’s material. After getting over that initial spate of confusion, and some feelings of being so stupid as to misremeber those characters, I realized that I had come up with my first original “quality” short story. And all of those leaps occurred in quiet moments where all I did was ‘sit and think’ about them and the short story, and my relation to them.

The Sounds of Silence

Silence can be difficult to find at times. We spend so much of our time trying to keep our minds active, focused, and participatory that we’ve cluttered it with noise, under the proviso that “No TV and no beer make Homer crazy”, until we’ve reached a point where our lives are drained of silence.

If you’re one that needs a creative space of silence, and you’re able to find time for it, it’s important to note that there is no specific quantity of silence from which creativity is born. Laying out such a provocative idea may lead some to say that it doesn’t work for them. “I tried it,” they will say. “It ain’t for me.” Our natural retort will be, “Well, how long did you try it? How much effort did you put into it?” It’s a pointless –square peg in a round role– discussion for some, of course, because all minds are different. For those creative minds that don’t know how their brains work yet, and the others that have to deal with them, this may be an eye-opener. For those that experience writer’s block, or creative fatigue, silence may be the one method they haven’t tried yet.

Your silence should be drained of distractions. We all have minor distractions that pervade our silence, such as what sassy Susie said to us the other day; the delicious burger that we’re planning to eat tonight; reliving the Blackhawks championship run; and how the stand-up comedian described going to the bathroom in the toilet tank as going top shelf, and we all have an almost unnatural propensity to dwell on those ideas. To void your mind of such distractions, I like to think of the process the Tom Cruise character went through in the movie Minority Report, when interacting with the futuristic gestural interface to find the information he wanted in its database.

Not all silence should be active, or focused, but it does require a certain degree of participation to find the undiluted creative area. Focusing yourself into specifics is difficult, of course, but if you can swipe these distractions away, you can achieve various specific, creative thoughts on the subjects of your own choosing. The key to creative thought, in my opinion, is to create an eighth day in which you, the god of your creation, can rest with everything that hit you in the previous seven days. The key is to avoid putting headphones on when you jog, mow, or workout at the gym. Some may go so far as to “just sits” in a quiet room, others may take long drives alone to nowhere with the radio in the off position.

I found the perfect vehicle for freeing my mind, a while back, when I got myself the most brainless job imaginable. I didn’t do that for this purpose, of course. When I was forced, by management, to do away with all distractions for the ostensible purpose of placing all of my focus on a job that I could’ve accomplished in early R.E.M. stages, I achieved a state of blankness. Not everyone is as fortunate as I was to have found such a tedious job, I understand, and for those of you forced to focus on a demanding job will need to find another avenue, but many have found silent moments to stew.

This blaring horn of creative silence can also be found in the most innocuous places like a doctor’s waiting room. My advice: once you reach that point where you’ve waited so long that you’re so bored that the urge to pick up that magazine –you’d never read otherwise–overwhelms you, fight that urge. Fight that urge and stare out at the dregs of humanity that wait with you. Look at that guy with tousled hair and frayed jeans, in a short-sleeved shirt, and wonder why no one ever taught him how to dress. When you’re engaged in the monotony of lawn work, fight the urge to wear headphones, and pick those dandelions naked … without aural accompaniment, or stimuli of any kind. Free the mind from everything that you’ve been jamming into it for the previous seven days, and “just sits there” on an eighth day of rest, and the rest will follow.

Countering the Counter

June 17, 2015September 18, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

Analyzing how someone is different, weird, and just plain strange was a common practice at one time. The stated motivation for doing so was that we needed to learn about them, to know more about us, and human nature in general. Some took this to an extreme, of course, and we pursued this study for the purpose of entertaining the masses. Was this the wrong? Perhaps, but our attraction to the explanations for why people are different are endemic to human nature, and no political movements to end that will kill that fundamental truth.

We still have some who analyze these differences, but their findings tend to conform to the common ideal of the nice more often than not. And when it doesn’t, the analyst opens themselves to scrutiny that is less devoted to scholarly refutation of their findings and more to an effort directed at aspects of their personal characteristics to destroy that analyst and hopefully remove them from the argument.

The word “counter” in the title of this article is intended to include the counterculture, but it is not limited to specifically countering the tenets of that movement. Countering the counter, refers to the near universal acceptance of collective ideals and mass delusions that we’ve all been coerced to learn to a point where such thoughts have become conventional thinking of late. Some of these lesson plans have occurred on a large scale, but more of them have occurred in a smaller, more neighborly precincts that have transformed the way we now interact with one another.

“I know you’re trying to believe this,” I said to a purveyor of the message when I first encountered it, “but you can’t truly believe you’re saying?”

Different isn't always better — **Different isn’t always better**

Every free culture is subject to sociopolitical shifts over time, from the push to status quo ideals to the rebellious push away. With these opposing forces acting and reacting to one another in overt and subtle ways, it can also be difficult to determine where a culture is without historical perspective.

The question of whether America has changed for the better is debatable, of course, but what is not debatable is that it has changed. How much the culture has changed might be a better question, and for the answer to that question we might want to turn to our re-animator machine to resurrect a person that died in 1950.

To attempt to achieve some sort of objective answer We should allow this subject unfettered access to schools, businesses, and any and all places where people gather. Our research analysts would ask them to gain the perspectives from as many economic levels, cultures, and generations as possible in the time frame of one year. We would then ask them to sit down for an interview at the end of that year to have them discuss all the changes they have witnessed between 1950 America and 2015 America.

In that interview, they would probably have a tough time getting past the macro changes that have occurred since their time: the internet, the choices available to the average consumer on television, the power of television and the internet versus newspapers and the radio, and the home gaming systems. They would surely obsess just as much over a number of other macro events that have shaped our way of life in ways we now take for granted. Once we got beyond all that, however, we would inform them that the reason that this experiment was conducted in the first place was to study the micro, sociopolitical changes that have occurred for ordinary Americans in their every day lives.

A symbol that the “enlightened” 1950’s person may use to illustrate their answers would be the phenomenon that permeates just about every facet of modern America: Star Wars. For those not acquainted with the franchise, it contains two opposing forces: the Rebellion and the Evil Empire. In the 1950’s scenario, the Evil Empire would represent status quo institutions of the culture, such as those of a more traditional and religious mindset, and the Rebellion would represent the forces against all that. The final conclusion that the 1950’s man would reach is that the Rebellion has achieved a crushing defeat.

If the 1950’s man were a student of History, he might offer the opinion that this sociopolitical defeat had to have occurred some time ago. Why? “Power is power, and human nature is human nature. Once humans get a taste for power, regardless their politics, they want to stay in power, and they don’t care if they have to eventually adopt the very tactics that they so opposed in their rise to maintain it.”

“We had speech codes in the same manner you have speech codes,” is something he might say, “but ours were 180 degrees different. We considered someone that suggested that America was anything less than a noble power, or that they were in any way nihilistic, or atheist, to be different and inferior in many ways, and we ostracized them for not conforming to group thought. And the only reason I see this now is that I’ve been introduced to the alternative reality in this past year, where the patriotic and/or religious are now regarded as different and inferior in many ways.”

The Tipping Point

Some would say that the seeds for the 60’s counterculture were planted in reaction to the 50’s, but they didn’t begin to truly flower throughout the culture until the 70’s and 80’s. Those of us who were paying some attention to this movement would have to admit we were down for that struggle. They were the underdogs at that time, and it is human nature to cheer on the underdog. Especially when the movement was a celebration of all that is different. The status quo of their presentations were our dads, our teachers, and our bosses. We loathed all that they stood for and we wanted something different. We wanted what the musicians, the writers, and the artists were going on about. We may not have known the extent of their message, but we wanted it, and we were willing to do whatever it took to get it.

As author Malcolm Gladwell has informed us, however, all movements have a Tipping Point. Gladwell describes this moment, as: “The moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.” A cynic could also define the tipping point as that precarious moment when it’s at its peak, and the smallest thing will cause it begin to fall down the other side. That tipping point occurred, for me, when I discovered how much mileage the anti-establishment gained for being for against everything. There came a point where I began to realize that not everything is about what you are not. And once the fog of this culture war began to lift, and they stood victorious, some of us began to wonder what we were supposed to be for in the aftermath.

Another tipping point arrived, for me, when I was informed that this desire to be different was now considered so laudable that it was above reproach, or any form of analysis that could be determined to be negative.

“He’s just different,” the purveyors of the movement that I knew, said to combat any attempts to analyze, “and you can’t criticize something you don’t understand.”

I initially assumed that these people thought I would go negative in my analysis, and I attempted to inform them that this was not the case. I asked them if they thought that an individual goes out to get an eighteen inch, blue Mohawk simply because they had a boring Tuesday. We both agreed that this was probably not their motivation. We both agreed that something drove them to be so different that not only did they not mind that another might stare at them at an airport, but that they pursued it. We also agreed that something drives us all to be who we are, and that some of us enjoy analyzing those variations if, for no other reason, than to better understand ourselves. It was at this point that I was informed that further exploration, from me, would be deemed negative, even if my primary driving force for doing so fell within the parameters I was suggesting.

“Have you ever had a Mohawk?” he asked me. “No? Then you can never understand one that has one. And … and, you didn’t let me finish, your genuine desire to understand one will be critical.”

Okay, but I met a guy that used to have one, and it appeared to have influenced his life so thoroughly that the only thing his best man and the bridesmaid could think to say about him, in the toasts at his wedding, involved the fact that he used to have a Mohawk. You don’t find that’s fascinating, or worthy of inspection?

“I said you’re dismissed.”

Even though I planned to use my friend’s mentality as a source for trying to understand future Mohawk wearers, in an objective, albeit somewhat critical approach?

“SILENCE!”

Even though the rebellion to the status quo has been so successful at this point that most observers will avoid even a hint of observation that could be deemed negative, the standard bearers of the movement march on to eliminate anyone not yet sufficiently intimidated.

“What is your level of education? What was your family’s financial situation? What is your ethnic origin, your sexual proclivities, and your political orientation? Have you ever had anyone regard you as different? Has anyone ever been so afraid of your superficialities that they walked on the other side of the street? Has a woman secured her hold on her purse the minute you stepped on the bus? Has a store owner ever watched you walk through his store with that extra-special scrutiny that they reserve for your type? Have you ever been ostracized in anyway? Have you ever been picked on by bullies? If any of these answers fall outside the paradigm we’re discussing here, you are officially relieved of your analytical efforts, for you will never be able to understand the plight of others, and we don’t care to hear your “inside looking out” perspective. It’s the new world order. Welcome aboard.”

To Defeat: Eliminate, or Emulate?

How do we win a debate? The first, and most effective, tactic is to eliminate our adversary. By eliminating them, we don’t have to stand toe-to-toe with them. It also permits the audience to join us in eliminating everything our adversary says regardless if it makes sense or surprisingly insightful. The purpose of this tactic is shame, as the provocateur attempts to shame the subject from further subjecting their audience to their relatively unfounded ideas. If a follower can introduce shame into the argument, an emotion that doesn’t require much mental acumen to induce, it can provide tentacles that reach a wide audience and intimidate future skeptics into getting their mind right before entering into such an argument.

Attempting to defeat the other side of a culture war also denotes an end game, as if the prospect of changing that one hundred millionth mind would be an occasion for a dropping ball, a gathering on Main Street to witness it, and a retreat back to one’s humble abode for a nightcap to wallow in the victory. There is no such end game when it comes to welcoming traditional thinkers into the correct way of thinking. We’re right. You’re wrong. This is no game, and they don’t want their advocates satisfied with temporary victories.

The final, and most prominent, reason to avoid declaring victory, may have something to do with the fact that total victory may open advocates up to the critical scrutiny that they used against the status quo to gain stature. They prefer that underdog role that we all cheer on with emotion that will hopefully thwart the same rational investigation that we give to the powers that be.

The final, and most interesting element of the ongoing debates is the what then question. What do the victors do soon after achieving victory. One of the keys to victory for the contrarians was the ‘they don’t want you to hear what I have to say’ angle. “I’m too dangerous. They don’t want you to know what I have to say on this subject.” That was so appealing that we not only took the contrarians side, but we began to dress our comments in the same manner. Another effective rhetorical tactic they used was to inform us that the other side uses shame to seduce us into believing what they say. Once they achieved victory, they began emulating the forces they just defeated with censorship, demonization, and shame. The leading voices of the counter-culture were absolutely stunned that “their guys” the “new” leaders of the new movement were basically emulating all of the tactics they spent their whole lives fighting against. We must admit that we were too, but the thing no one accounted for was that it was human nature for the victors to attempt to dominate, humiliate, and vanquish their opponents by whatever means necessary.

Victory can be declared however. The culture war is over, and the rebellion has won. To see evidence of this victory, all one has to do is turn on the television. Every channel, including the Cartoon Network, has subtle and overt messages of the rebellion. Cartoons? Cartoons. The ultimate exclamation point behind this victory arrives when your friends denounce you for noticing the repeated messaging that occurs in cartoons. “You’re quoting something that an eggplant said to piece of asparagus?” Yes, you say with some level of embarrassment. Some time after you recover from that blow, you realize that total and absolute victory occurs when you defeat an opponent so thoroughly that they don’t even know when you’re firing shots at them.