He’s not all right. Watch my eyes.
If I were the writing sort, I’d start thinking about what’s going on at Deerhound Diary. Treating it as some kind of whole.
Oops. I am the writing sort. Maybe I shouldn’t comment on my own stuff. But I will anyway. Because I just can’t not.
In my mind it’s a whole, given that our world as we know it is ending. I value and respect our commenters, but they respond to each post as if it were distinct from others. There is no conversation. Just comments. You don’t have to respond precisely to what I say from day to day. Doesn’t anybody want to talk, to rage, about what’s happening?
When I rip off five posts in a row, as I’ve done here in a way I couldn’t at the other place, I AM asking you to put it all together, hold it all in your heads at the same time. What I did in my early writing, trying to defeat the line. Trying in fact to dynamite the line. Later, I surrendered to the line and wrote arguments not holograms.
I don’t know whether I’m effective at what I’m trying to do. You come in and say I liked that or you made me think of this similar anecdote. Which is welcome. But there’s a bigger intent here. Everything is everything. I don’t get that you all get that.
Synchronicity. Serendicity. The country is stricken. My wife has a horribly broken arm. My deerhound is traumatized. Everything is everything. As always, I am living and feeling everything at once. Is anyone else experiencing this synergy of disaster? Does anyone want to talk? Or is denial your preference, our national preference, the same one step at a time approach we see even in the new media? Life is life, politics is politics, and disgusting corruption is something we can all pretend is business as usual. You know, it’s always bad, it’s bad now, and our best defense is to be reasonable, rational, and measured in our response.
That’s not how I feel. I don’t feel like reading quotes or mild statements of agreement. I feel like reading rage, wild hope, nasty nasty indictments, the passion of the living.
I know I’m alive because I feel like I’m dying. How do you feel? Are you just factoring it all in with the help of comforting readings that tell you you understand what is happening? Is there some cultural morphine that’s dulling your pain, fear, and dread?
Or, are you like me, insanely on fire, seeing symbolism in every moment of our truly unique and desperate times?
The meaning of the deerhound: he is the life of me, the embodiment of what I once was, fierce, unstoppable, invulnerable. But he has become languid, immanent. He licks my elbow. His latent, immense force is stilled.
I am paralyzed and he knows it. I am supremely enraged and powerless to express it adequately. Not an emotion I’m used to. He looks at me with sad Scottish eyes.
Read through all the posts here, from front to back or back to front. Get a sense of the tiptoeing between private life and public catastrophe. Ken the highs and lows. Experience your own versions of same. Then talk….
“Or, are you like me, insanely on fire, seeing symbolism in every moment of our truly unique and desperate times?”
That’s me, but trying not be consumed by the fire. Have been very burnt out & losing trust in just about everyone and everything. Increasingly I think there’s no way to talk or write ourselves out of this. The 20% has successfully reverted our culture back to the point where force is going to be the main way things get done, not by reason or critical thinking.
Case in point: Syria. The same exact crowd who, for 8 years, foamed at the mouth about lies, war crimes, unconstitutional acts, and whatever else. Silent and okay with whatever Obama wants to do. Christians being slaughtered in Obama’s Egypt? Well, they had it coming. The Crusades, you know. Which must be how they got into Egypt in the first place. But that rodeo clown! Oh, that’s beyond the pale.
Yeah, low-information intellectuals. All Democrats. All totally fucking bankrupt of any accountability for a vote they’ve cast or action they’ve taken. Incapable of remembering which stance they took on what issue and why for longer than five minutes. Just look at Detroit. Hookers and their pimps, indeed. I know a bunch of them. I used to consider them friends, but for not for a long while. Nowadays I have no desire to talk to them whatsoever. They disgust me. At best they are naïve imbeciles who think gay marriage trumps any other possible issue. At worst they are full-on second or third gen socialists who are trying their best to one-up their old, hippie parents who sold out the revolution.
And yes, I see all of this shit repeated everywhere I look. There’s no escape from it. It’s on those I.D. channel shows the missus loves so much: the laborious, five-year murder investigation and subsequent show trial that ends with a judge commuting a death sentence to life in prison (with case currently on appeal, natch).
It was in those marathon posts between you & Brizoni I stopped reading, at the end of which he was incapable of conceding even a single point about anything, in a rage that nobody was bright enough to see the wisdom & light of his interpretation of Ayn Rand’s old writings as the New Good News.
It’s on the NFL and Sportscenter, as has been discussed before.
It’s in my son’s Sunday school book, which explains a Bible reading in terms of a parish going out of its way to welcome in some wetback illegals and set them up with English lessons, jobs, food, & toys. Which is totally analogous to Jesus & Levi the tax collector, b/c Jesus told him, “Hey, you can do whatever you want as long as you give me some tithe. These white folks are here to feel guilty & accommodate you, ese. Forgeddaboudit.” This on the same Sunday the priest chided the white middle class folks about walking through the “narrow gate”. Don’t fuck up, and you better give people free stuff like Jesus did! I’d love to know when the last time all the illegals in the parish were sat down & given the narrow gate lecture. Like, “Hey, dickheads. It’s wrong to go driving a car with no license or insurance and to take advantage of a broken medical system by not paying your bills. Also, your 17 year old daughters should not be on their third kid from a different dad.”
It’s in movies. We sat through the truly bizarre Iron Man 3 the other night. No idea what the fuck that was about other than not offending mooslims or the Chinese. The Mandarin, who in the comic is Chinese with some sort of alien power rings, was turned into a white guy who dressed half-mooslim and half-Chinese. However, he was actually nothing as the *real* threat came from (wait for it) American military industrial contractors who were just trying to make money from war. Which, come to think of it, is actually the same villain in all three Iron Man movies.
It’s even when I’m just trying to hang out with some friends, who are good people, and have a drink on the weekend. Because they are utterly convinced Bush allowed & assisted with 9/11 “for oil”. And there’s no argument or counter point that can be made. Even though we know exactly how it all went down and it shows a picture perfect example of a bloated, corrupt, incompetent gov’t across two presidents from two different parties.
And it’s every day at work. Having to stare at my alcoholic boss, who is never held to account by his boss, his buddy, who doesn’t care about anything other than getting out the door at 5 PM and back to his vodka.
But we have gay marriage & weed. La de fucking da. Two dudes in Washington can blow each other until their ears start leaking while getting high as a kite, and everybody better take them seriously…OR ELSE! What a joke. I’m not sure what the next frontier is on equality but I suppose it’s treating mentally ill people who want to mutilate their own genitals as “real” women once they get them lopped off. That and outlawing the speech of anyone who might want to tell them that, actually, they are still and always will be a man who decided to cut off his penis. Because that would be so mean.
Anyway, not sure if that’s anything like what you were looking for, but those are some of the thoughts going through my head lately. I’m glad you’re still writing and I appreciate what you do, because you and Mark Steyn are the only writers I’m regularly following anymore.
Thank you. Exactly what I wanted and needed. WordPress format seems to make commenters feel a sentence or two is all they should write. That’s not my preference. I want to feel that there are passionate people out there I’m writing for.
My only point of disagreement with you: if I had “friends” who tout the Truther conspiracy theory, they wouldn’t be my friends anymore and they wouldn’t be welcome in my house. Sorry. Why Lloyd Pye and I are no longer speaking. I no longer have patience with idiots and fools of that sort.
I don’t have patience for it, either. Was totally blindsided by it in the middle of an otherwise pleasant evening. It was one of those, “Really??” moments. Never saw it coming from this person. Just another example of how I can’t get away from this madness.
I dislike Bush a great deal, for various reasons. However, I’m PRETTY sure he is not a monster so soulless that he was able to scheme up 9/11 and afterward do photo ops with troops, meeting their parents and all that.
Best thing I can say about it is the comment from the South Park episode about 9/11 truthers: people are too afraid to accept the actual truth, which is A. yes, mooslims want to kill us that badly no matter how nice we are to them and B. our very expensive gov’t is weak & pathetic enough to get burned like it did.
Just a point of clarification. Bush didn’t do 9/11 not because he doesn’t fit some profile. The Truthers are wrong because all the evidence, all the science, all the facts are completely against them. There is no Truther theory that makes any sense whatever, in any universe. Believing what they believe is insanity — incoherent, nonsensical, illogical, impossible. That’s what’s so infuriating about it. I’ve actually studied the conspiracy theories. They’re as laughable as Obama’s phantom CV. Have you?
There’s no point whatever in hating GWB. He made mistakes. All presidents do. But he’s not stupid, corrupt, imperial, or sinister. His SATs were higher than Kerry’s and probably Gore’s too. He carried an NYFD fireman’s badge in his pocket throughout his presidency. He gave his best and has been incredibly gracious despite the constant abuse Obama has continued to heap on him. He threw a perfect strike wearing a flak jacket at Yankee Stadium. He was a fighter pilot who volunteered for duty in Vietnam.
I’m tired of the libels and cheap slanders. Disagree with his policies, fine. But don’t be giving me he sorta kinda maybe wouldn’t be behind 9/11 because he was maybe nicer than that.
Yes, I’ve read up on the facts & science. What I meant when I said “And there’s no argument or counter point that can be made.” Wasn’t implying Bush maybe possibly did 9/11, give me a break. I’m saying that anyone who really thinks Bush had a part in it must necessarily also think he is one of the most stone-cold evil bastards in human history despite all evidence to the contrary.
You know: sure, he was evil enough to murder everyone in the WTC and has been chuckling to himself at every Veterans’ Day ceremony since. But he only wanted to hang around in office for a few years and then got bored & walked away. Make any sense whatsoever? No. Why I feel stupider merely for talking about it, but you’re not going to win with a truther.
I don’t hate Bush, he’s certainly no Obama, but he bitterly disappointed me. A lot of wasted opportunities and misfires. I can go into more detail if you really want me to, but I suspect arguing about Bush is a waste of time. Not really want I want to spend energy on, anyway. I’ll just give you one small example that sums up how I feel about Bush: he was president when I had to take off my boots & open my bag for a search in La Guardia, in full uniform on my way back for the second half of my tour in Iraq. Meanwhile, some haji next to me breezed right through with no trouble. Those were his policies, not any Democrat’s. Utter and complete madness that I can’t excuse.
Can’t, won’t, blame you for feeling resentful. But I do see why he might have overreacted. The Muslim PC crap wasn’t all his doing, though. He should have stood up more against it. Given how friendly congress and the press were to him, you know, generally.
One thing that grabbed me in this post was your plea for ‘wild hope.’ Any hope these days would certainly have to be wild, but I’ll admit that I still have it. Perhaps it’s the way that I can insulate myself in this little bubble of a campus, surrounded by people I can impress as a big fish in a small pond (not being cocky, it’s just true). Perhaps it’s just because I’m a dopey optimist at heart, imagining that the world is getting better, not worse, as time goes on. Wait, didn’t I hear that from you or RJD at one point? I still look for signs of it everywhere, but perhaps I’m falling into the trap of confirmation bias.
But I have hope. Truly. After all that’s gone on. Because I am mostly comfortable, have my health and general happiness? Maybe it would just take some personal pain to make me hopeless. Here’s where I start dreaming up terrible scenarios, so I’m going to curtail that.
The book you recommended, The Liberty Amendments, gives me hope. Not that it will happen, per se, but that there is still a way. For now.
I keep thinking back to the German public before and during the Third Reich’s rise to power. The whole, “First they came for the… and when they came for me, no one was left.” Much of what you’ve said here on DD leads me to believe that we’re in a time like that right now, that the water is starting to come to a boil and we’re still sitting in it like the frog. But another part of me, one that I keep returning to, thinks that America could NEVER go down the path that Germany went down. That part of me thinks that while it seems like the whole US Experiment has broken down, there have been many, dozens, of other times in US history where people like us felt the exact same way, that it’s all over. And then it kept going. Getting both better and worse.
So I still have a wild hope, like a wild horse. I’m chasing it, sometimes I lose sight of it, but sometimes I ride it. Am I hopelessly naive? I don’t know what it is about tonight, but I’m hopeful. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
I still have hope. I’m working on something new. Seeing if I can write from the Dinosaur Perspective. Time will tell.
It was in those marathon posts between you & Brizoni I stopped reading, at the end of which he was incapable of conceding even a single point about anything, in a rage that nobody was bright enough to see the wisdom & light of his interpretation of Ayn Rand’s old writings as the New Good News.
It wasn’t that you weren’t bright enough. Your problem– all of you– is your integrity, not your intelligence.
If the Tims are the real spirit of America (“My boss is a drunk and I can’t do anything about it, waaaaa. I don’t like Ayn Rand so I don’t have to listen and you can’t make me, waaaaa. My friends are ‘good people’ even though they’re scum.”), then America is done. Here’s THE lesson of history: If you can’t face the truth, you’re fucked. The truth you can’t face is what fucks you. To save America, you’d have to confront the flaws in your code. Not just the other guys’ codes. But you’re not up to that. You like civilization just fine and everything. but you’d rather let it burn to the ground than admit His rusted-out hydrant has run dry.
In the story of America’s end, you’re no heroes. You’re bystanders. At best. And by your own choice. My contempt is bottomless. My heartbreak is total.
Enjoy irrelevance. You’ve earned it.
BTW: This “his interpretation” shit is as specious and contemptible a canard as anything uttered by your truther buddies. Your priest could levy the same accusation against you, that what you really want is for your interpretation to be pounded from the pulpit. Liberals could, too. “All you want is for us to submit to your interpretation of right and wrong!”
Everyone tends to think his interpretation is objectively correct. That’s how interpretation works. Difference is, I’ve proven mine.
I’d ask if I’m getting through to you in the slightest, but I know the answer.
“I’ve proven mine.” Really? Thus spake David Koresh.
Your proof apparently excludes empathy. You’ve known this site exists. Have you sent a single text message or email to my wife asking about her recovery from a traumatic injury? No. Maybe you’re the new Uber-Mensch, above such lowly individual relations.
Or is it drugs? Meth perhaps? Rationally (yes, I said rationally, a la Occam’s Razor) that’s the obvious answer when someone ceases to be whom we have known and becomes a remote, hostile, stranger whose limited conversation almost always reduces to FY.
And, no, don’t presume to try starting an intellectual or philosophical fight with me as an act of avoidance. You’ve been a shit. Had to laugh at your most egregious expression of bathos: “My heartbreak is total.” Tell any of us about heartbreak. Like you know about hurting for anyone other than yourself. Generally the sign of small, even tiny, hearts. Total because it’s like the snapping of a cracker. Or the fracturing of an ego that exists only as an image in the mirror. Or, to put it simply, an instance when people aren’t buying what you’re telling them they must buy. Obama feels the same way about the individual mandate. You’re becoming him. The same set of jaw is in your prose. You and he are the new anointed ones, Ill educated, absolutely certain about things that just aren’t so, and impervious to the overwhelming evidence that you’ve got everything mostly wrong. Rand help you…
When precisely did you become the Uber-Mensch? A shaft of light from Gary Cooper’s eyes on the Fountainhead DVD? No, don’t tell me anything personal. I’m being rational here. Meth.
Hope you get some help.
“In the story of America’s end, you’re no heroes. You’re bystanders. At best. And by your own choice. My contempt is bottomless. My heartbreak is total.”
Meeeeoooow! Hisssss! Should have known making fun of both Ayn Rand and gay marriage together would be too much for you to bear in silence. Sad.
Sorry to break your heart, B, tireless warrior of tomorrow that you are. Doing all of your…well, whatever it is that you do wherever it is that you do it. Nobody knows, but I’m sure it’s impressive. We’ll just have to take it on faith.
“This ‘his interpretation’ shit is as specious and contemptible…Difference is, I’ve proven mine.”
LOL! My mistake. Well done. Somebody get this man a slow-clap-which-builds-to-standing-ovation.
Geez, Brizoni, have you been in a coma? And this is the most important thing you have to say?