R.I.P. Hugh Hefner, Libertarian, Heterosexual, Ridiculous Poseur

'Tis said, by feminists and Conservatives, that Hugh Hefner was "an exploiter and an objectifier of women," and that the centerfolds in Playboy were pornography.  I wouldn't know.  Frankly, pictures of naked women turn my stomach, so I never looked at them.  I read--used to read--Playboy for the high-quality fiction and political essays.  I like that Mr. Hefner said, fairly recently, anent his objectification of women, "Well, they are objects."  I suppose he meant in the same way that men are objects to me, and I certainly can't disagree with that.

But while we're on the subject, I've investigated the matter of the "objectification" of women (and men), and in actual fact I can find nothing wrong with it, if, in fact, it exists--except of course (I concur) that we shouldn't leer at or ogle people, or stare at their boobs or their crotches when we're talking to them.  On the other hand, if you think that leering at people or ogling them (or staring at their boobs or crotches when you should be politely looking them in the eye) is transforming them into "objects," you are not only an idiot, you are a very confused idiot--like those extremely stupid people who actually believe that there is in any sense, real or metaphoric, such a thing as a "patriarchy."

And yes, you might infer from this that, in general, I don't like women and see no reason whatever for including them in the conversation.

Waked this morning by a phonecall from my old friend and co-author Jean W., who wanted to talk about the Viet Nam War:

I talked for twenty minutes or so till my voice failed:  "Evil, genocidal, utterly avoidable military adventure, perpetrated by the stupid, greedy, cowardly and malicious villains who then, as now, rule the world, Viet Nam was not the United States' first great orgy of cruelty, murder and destruction.  There had been the Korean War--the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, Operazione Gladio, the CIA's bombing of Guatemala...many, many crimes and horrors that we (and the French) visited on the world after World War II.  And, come to think of it, what was Wilson's intervention in World War I if it was not a fucking, bald-faced war crime?"

Oh, for Christ's Sakes (note the archaïc form of the dative), give me a break!

Our Google Doodle today is Gloria E. Anzaldúa, "an American scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory"--three vastly pretentious and, in plain fact, utterly non-existent and/or imaginary (or vilely fraudulent) things.  "Theories" indeed!

A Signal Difference, between us English and French** speaking North Americans, and the Englishmen and Frenchmen whose Loins we spring from,

is that we, neither the Canucks nor the Yanks on this side of the Pond, simply don't get what "Class" is all about.  I have read several college-level tutelaries of Marxism (which, to my everlasting surprise, actually is [or is officially considered to be] a subject which is taught at University) which address the fundamental difficulty of persuading Canadian and American youths that social (indeed socioeconomic) classes exist, and that they belong to them (in whatever sense you wish to take this).  Interestingly, no matter what threats or promised rewards are deployed by their would-be professors of Marxism, a significant number of young Americans and Canadians remain unpersuaded--and presumably can never achieve academic grade point credit in a subject whose basic tenet(s) they find  absurd and unintelligible.  And I may say that, while I never enrolled in a class in Marxism at University, my several attempts at enrolling in Women's Studies classes were similarly baffling.

One of the most captivating discoveries, for me, in the last ten years of my life has been the astonishing revelation that I am  a direct, patrilinear and matrilinear descendant of the first White Americans who arrived in America on the good ships Mayflower (in 1620) and Little James (in 1623). Entirely unanticipated has been the discovery that my father's (and great-grandmama's) family has a written, and a legal, history dating back some 400 years--and more if you dig back into their apparent origins on the borders of Sherwood Forest in the 16th century.  What Protestants! Which means that neither they nor I can claim thereby to be aristocrats--but, rather, as is seen somewhat nakedly in the Mayflower Compact, men (and just behind them, women) of no class as such, and with no name for themselves, or for the necessary business of living in the world and governing themselves:  "Congregationalists" by default, because congregations of Protestant Christians were their primary political/economic core groups, although their preferred name for themselves was "Saints."  They might as well have called themselves "obstinately rhotic."

Anyway, what leaps out at me from the early history of my ancestors in this country--from the first judgments and decisions of wise (and learnèd) William Bradford, and even before--is the de facto emancipation and enfranchisement of children (and women), allowing them from a very early age to earn their own keep and to keep what they earned; creating, along with compulsory primary education, in effect, a volatile, affluent, child-centered society, which two centuries later was to win the indignant disapproval of Frances ("Fanny," which in her day did not mean "cunt") Trollope in her animadversions on the (lack of) Manners of Americans.




**I should say perhaps that I know so much about rude Québécois French because a couple of my favorite authors of homosexual (written) pornography write in this curiously vigorous, somewhat ungrammatical, but wonderfully clear dialect, which reminds me, for all the world, of my own Standard American Seattle Disk-Jocky Spoken English Dialect; of which I do not know, and cannot say, whether I am more proudly grateful, or more gratefully proud.  It is a thing wonderful in my eyes, and ears, that, through no merit of my own, I have been bequeathed, in its purity, what is, for the time, virtually the universal language of mankind (Like Attic Greek in the 2nd century of the Common Era).  I speak the language that my mother and father spoke, correctly and effortlessly, as it was spoken by their mothers and fathers before them--aided and instructed by that purest of dialecticians, the Schoolmarm.  

I've just had my seventy-fifth birthday, a couple of days ago; which makes me

old. I figure--given the current okay state of my health, and the excellent condition of my heart (in the opinion of cardiologists), and the fact that I quit smoking thirty-two years ago (when, if I'd continued smoking, I'd have had a fifty per cent likelihood of contracting lung cancer)--that I have, maybe, ten years left to live; although, frankly, I'm tired already and wouldn't mind dying sooner. Just sayin'.  But, curiously, things (by which I mean Kismet or Destiny) conspire to protract my existence in this sub-lunary sphere: I'm about to be granted an insane amount of money in an insurance settlement (for breaking my leg last year), the garnering, husbanding and careful expenditure of which should see me through the next decade.  Funny how these things work out.

So, looking back (and ahead), it's odd, and funny, how many of the things that I might have striven for--the legalization of marijuana in Europe and in the Pacific States, and the world-wide (in 1st-world countries) decriminalization and normalization of homosexuality--have just sort of happened, in a manner that I approve of but had scarcely anything (in fact, nothing) to do with. And, in the Décennie d'Or that for no good reason (certainly, due to no virtue or effort of my own) stretches before me, I propose to (finish learning to) play all the pieces in both books of the Wohltemperierte Klavier and all the keyboard suites and partitas (Bach's of course), and to compose a couple of Masses in the style of Thomas Tallis; though whether these will be Christian or Buddhist (or American Transcendentalist) Masses is uncertain in my mind.  

Perhaps it is all Jimmy Carter's fault:

It was his (resoundingly unpopular) giveaway of the American canal in Panama, basically, that ended Progressivism in America.  I've just viewed a television documentary on how difficult it was for Carter to get the canal-giveaway treaty through Congress, wherein he acknowledges how unpopular it was with the American people, and seems to recognize that it cost him his second term in office--and yet how blandly and brightly he insists that it was "the right thing to do."  Maybe this is what my compatriots mean by "hateful Liberal."  I rather think so.  Just why the fuck was giving the Panama Canal to the people of Panama (or, rather, to the control of the utterly corrupt, tinpot dictatorship which ruled Panama) so goddamned righteous?  Jimmy Carter never explained. Although he several times, in slightly different terms, reiterated that giving the Canal "back" to the people of Panama (who had never had it) was the "right thing to do."  God help me, I'm agreeing with Ronald Reagan--and the Queen Mother Elizabeth.

I had thought that nothing more deserved my contemptuous, dismissive ire than a persistent (or, worst of all, an unconscious or instinctual) belief in Class or Caste--

Which binds and fetters people within the "socioeconomic" circumstances and the narrow, hidebound philosophy of ignorance that they are born into, and which they adopt unquestioningly, often wordlessly and inchoately, from their parents and their parents' social milieu; and which is the underlying, unexamined, all-pervading prime tenet of most European philosophies and religions, including Marxism, neo-Marxism, Feminism, Islam and Christianity: Thou art, forever, what God has made thee.

And yet, while this philosophy of enslavement sufficiently explains the backwardness of Kansas, Texas and West Virginia, and the savage corporal punishment of children in the public schools of Red States, it fails to account for the CIA (as representative of the villainy of state terrorism), or for the fact that Hillary Clinton, the Butcher of Libya (and crudely exultant Murderess of Moammar Khadafy), has the brass balls to call herself a "Liberal."

Liberal? Yes, I suppose--in the sense of being, and wanting to live the life of, a Free, Honest, Generous, Enlightened and Benevolent Man--I am.

But "Liberal" has another, darker, much more restrictive--and, to me, quite incomprehensible--significance in the mouths of my fellow Americans: something to do with "socialism" (variously defined) and something like blanket amnesty for mass murderers.  The less intelligent, less educated, and more religious they are, the more certain my compatriots are of the meaning and the inherent evil of what they call Liberalism; but, alas, with low i.q.'s and lack of education beyond the primary grades, and with the extatic "Salvation" of Abrahamic religions, comes verbal confusion and logical incoherence.  I simply can't make out what they mean when they spit "liberal" as if it were a curse.

I have not seen, nor read, The Handmaid's Tale: I don't watch, or read, hysterical female/feminist trash fiction.

But I gather that it, the book and the movie, does/do, obliquely, touch on something that we all must face up to eventually as a civilization:  That not all women who are merely physically capable of having children should have children; nor should the option of having children be determined solely by women themselves; although they, of course, should, in all fairness, each and and every one, be allowed freely to choose not to get pregnant [contrary to the premise of this stupid book and dumbass movie].  But once those few women, who are both mentally and physically fit to bear children, have, with the proper supervision and support of the society they live in, got themselves pregnant, there ought not to be any termination of the pregnancy before the child is born (completely gestated), for any other reason than to preserve the life of the mother.  In a word, no abortion of a pregnancy ought to be allowed for any frivolous reason, or simply because the prospective mother has changed her mind, or no longer loves the sperm donor.  Because, you see, women do not wholly own the fetuses they bear in their wombs: For--such is the miracle of life that--fetuses at least half own themselves.

Viewing (Gay Male) Japanese Porn Videos Lately,

What strikes me most forcibly is how essentially masculine (indeed masculinist) Japanese gay male pornography is, in contravention of what our Occidental postmodern snowflakes imagine that it could be.  As I have said elsewhere, I personally find even the least suggestion of femininity or effeminacy in men abhorrent and sexually repulsive, and I am pleased to see that the makers of 'gay Asian' porn seem to share my deep aversion.  And I am both pleased and bemused by the adamantine virility of young Japanese men, which is  not a whit altered whether they penetrate or are penetrated, nor at all diminished by their being, to a man, exquisitely polite and affable.

CIA Whistleblower: Harvard Picks Torture Apologists Over Chelsea Manning

THIS is what's wrong with America--and why I no longer consider it my country.

Nowadays, they say, the Japanese have mostly stopped having Sex...

It's one of those phenomena that gets worse--more problematical--as you dig into it:  It's the young people, the very ones who should be working hardest to replenish the race, who seem most disaffected by the whole business of getting married and having babies, and who, in a savourous Japanese phrase that I can't just now remember, say that procreation is just "too bothersome." And it's a growing trend: Each successive generation is less and less interested in having sex and making babies--quite like the rising tide of atheism among the young adults of the West.  And it's not as if the Japanese are ever going to adopt the sluttish Occidental casual insouciance of having children out of wedlock. They'll just go on, living with their parents, masturbating to their stylized but perfectly adequate pornography, playing games and having hobbies.  And in a thousand years they'll be extinct.  Good for them.

That said,

My normal mode of utterance is, in my own view, more tentatively, even hesitantly, opinionated than apodeiktic; although a friend (name of Gary Darling; now long since dead of AIDS), did say that I was the most opinionated person he knew--and he was a gender-bending, masochistic bisexual who quite openly loved both cock and pussy (and sometimes gave me the creeps); but when he spoke candidly, from his Piscean Depths (like Bach or Chopin or Einstein), he spoke Truth Undeniable and Self-Evident. And/but so, if I seem belike a tad o'erweening, it may be due to my having read Lord Russell's History of Western Philosophy five or six times over in my young manhood--till I had acquired the supercilious habit and the tone of it.  I know how angry/mad it makes neo-Marxists and postmodernists and feminists, and it pleases me no end so to infuriate them: to say with a wolfish mildness, "But what is the evidence of that? Let's examine it!"  Logical Positivism/Empiricism is like Aqua Regia on the skins of female philosophers.  By whom (in fondly imagined throes of agony) I do mean Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Michelle Foucault.



But--and here's the funny thing--I do not include Jean Baudrillard among those awful pretend-fake, anti-science French postmodernists, whose contemporary and compatriot he certainly was, and whose language and "narrative" he seems to speak in terms of.  How can I despise Lacan and Derrida and adore Baudrillard?  But so it is.  I plead the miracle. 

Let's Get Something Straight

The whole point of this blog, from its origins to these presents, is what I now (after recent, painful reading: God, how I hate all German philosophy except Goethe, Hölderlin, Schiller, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche!) realize to be what Heidegger called "Eigentlichkeit," of which the English word "Authenticity" is the only feasible, but still just slightly wrong translation.  I mean I am trying to arrive at Universal or Absolute Truth (no less) the only way that anyone ever really can get there--if anyone ever really does get there--by being completely honest about my own experience (experiences), and by being faithful to my deepest intuitions of myself.  That is to say, I am (always) striving to attain, or more or less adequately to realize, My Truth, otherwise known as The Truth Within Me; which, as an American Transcendentalist I call, simply, Conscience.  There's no room for error.  When I speak apodictically, as (with a bow to the Blessèd Corner [of the Russian Kitchen of My Mind] where Mary Baker Eddy sits enshrined in Glory) I like sometimes to do, I mean 'Thus sayeth the Lord!'

Sooo...a 5.3 Earthquake (the biggest one of some 72 earthquakes occurring that day) on Saturday, in Soda Springs, Idaho...WTF?!

It took a little digging to discover the sublatent significance of this cryptic item in the news. Soda Springs, Idaho, of which I had never heard before, is, as it happens (as I found out when I Googled it), just across the border from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, and is situated directly (about six miles) over the Yellowstone Mega-Volcano Magma Lake which, we have all learned in just the last decade, underlies virtually all of western Wyoming and southern Idaho--and which, when it erupts, as it does every 700,000 years or so, will devastate most of the western North American continent; as it has done, in fact, repeatedly, in prehistoric times.  The reason that there are so many earthquakes is that, it seems, since last June, the Great Yellowstone Mega-Volcano Magma Lake has been a-quiver with a "swarm," that is to say a great number, of earthquakes--to date, nearly 3,000, and still counting.  Lots of little earthquakes--only, with Saturday's 5.3 on the Richter scale, not so little--indicate, at the very least, that there is some movement of all that magma underlying what is probably the biggest and most explosive volcano in the world. When finally it does blow, it will make the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 seem like a party favor.

These "swarms" of earthquakes come and go  every few years.  The last such "swarm" was in 2013, and the one before that nearly a decade before--and the real reason they're referred to as occurring in "swarms," like bees, is to emphasize their relative meaninglessness as individual events: Lest we panic.  Because, before The Big One, a lot of really major, high-visibility shit has to happen after the earthquakes start "swarming"--Like Old Faithful has to go dry, and other unscheduled geysers have to start spouting, and stuff like that.  It is important to realize that we'll have lots of time to get ready for it, and that we shouldn't even be thinking about it now.  And that's why the news story about the odd 5.3 earthquake in Soda Springs, Idaho didn't mention that Soda Springs, Idaho is right, dead center, in the middle of the Yellowstone Mega-Volcano.  The News People (if that's who they are) don't want us to worry.  Or panic. Or think about it too much.

Nurse Refuses Blood Draw On Unconscious Patient "You’re Under Arrest'

The thing is, there is absolutely nothing to be done with our militarized, above-the-law policemen but shoot them where they stand.  They can't be reasoned with, don't understand the concept of due process, and will not and cannot change.  And, while they live, they are a threat to the lives and liberties of their fellow citizens. They are vile beasts, like venomous snakes or parasitic leeches: simply to kill them makes the world a better place.

I've been an enthusiastic, tolerably knowledgeable Sinophile since my early teens, when I discovered Chinese art, and adopted Lin Yutang's The Art Of Living as my personal philosophy...

And I have naturally viewed with sorrow and anguish the Chinese history of the last two centuries, from the Opium Wars to Mao's insane, sadistic reduction of Tibet. But recent events in the progress of what I think we may call Chinese Civilization have lifted my heart and given me hope--and nothing more so than the development of the spectacular, nay astonishing, high speed rail transport which has flourished in the last couple of decades in China: peacefully, through their native economic and technological genius, uniting what is after all essentially the Chinese Empire, and assuring the national prosperity of China for all time to come.  A sign of which I take to be:  On July 27, 2017 a cargo transport train loaded with clothing, furniture and electronic goods left Ganzhou in eastern China for Kazakhstan, with an estimated time of arrival of twelve days.