The human being that isn’t.

The Japanese, who are more obsessed with robots than anybody, have coined a term for 3D human simulations that are so close to realism that people find them, well, disturbing. It’s called “The Uncanny Valley,” more technically known as coulrophobia. It’s the sense of discomfort we all felt watching the “Polar Express.”

Creepy, right?

Thinking these days that we should all have registered our discomfort with the Uncanny Valley of Obama. Have any of us ever seen him live?

He’s something like a person, only missing the human parts.

Think. We’ve seen him in Hollywood, on magazine covers, in constantly posed positions hooked to a TelePrompTer he was speechless without.

Are we having our first CGI president? I know I have the distinct sense of something inhuman about him. And his wife.

You?

Yeah. Love the plumes.

Okay. I like my back yard. You don’t? Bet you do.

And btw fuck Putin. Crazy queer czar. But I have a view of my yard Charlie Rose doesn’t.

My guy is not happy today. Working on it.

Glued to the Smithsonian Channel. Documentaries of destruction.

A terrible thing happened a dozen years ago. The greatest nation in history fell.

Nobody wants to be a prophet of doom. It’s the unfortunate fate of some of us. I share that awful title. I wrote a book called The Boomer Bible. It was a bible, with chapters and verses. I discovered after 9/11, almost as a curiosity, that it had 2001 chapters. It put a period on the United States.

It’s only now that I’m realizing the 9/11 attack wasn’t a blip, a hurtful hit, an opportunity to wake and strike back. It was the end of us. Everything after somehow led us to Obama, who is succeeding in destroying our country. While the people who should know better cheer him on.

A sorrowful day. A tragic anniversary.

Sadness has become a constant state.

The whole enterprise is going down. I wake up each day with Yeats’s lines in my head:

The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intensity

It’s the prefiguring of Catch 22. At some level I do lack conviction. I feel more forgiving than I used to. I feel more understanding than I was raised to be. I’d rather schmooze than fight. I can see more sides of arguments than I ever thought possible. But… The fanatics and ideologues make me want to cut their throats.

Where Yeats failed. He was an Irishman standing on a cliff. He thought that the “widening gyre” was something occurring below, an historical event he could somehow avoid. It’s a disease of poets. And even would-be poets. We think we’re just watching.

Maybe he knew better. Probably did. The chief attribute of a real poet is self hatred. The perception to realize all the darkest impulses, to feel them literally pulsing through your being, while knowing — actually seeing in some rare moments — what virtue might be.

Which means that The Second Coming is not a commentary on the 20th century. It’s a distillation of personal fury at one’s own self. Sorry. Here’s the whole thing:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I console myself that he was Irish and I am Scottish, meaning I never ever give up. But when the best lack all conviction, as they do, and the worst are full of passionate intensity, as they are, I find myself slowly, gradually retreating. From everyone.

Then I reread the last two stanzas. Which whip my head right around. Stupid fucking mick. Only the Irish give up. The Scots always want to, beg to, need to, but we just can’t. Something slouching toward Bethlehem? Cut its fucking head off. End of poem.

The Irish have mastered the art of seeming surrender, the flight to other values, other worlds. Scots can’t do that. They just fight, no matter what, even if they’re certain to lose or get killed in the process. So, yes, the Irish are smarter and more lyrical. Why I love my wife so much. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t change myself. The battle, the war, is lost, our country is gone, and I can’t stop fighting.

Which means, I guess, to the eye of the greatest Irish poet ever, I’m one of the ones who is full of passionate intensity, even as I feel all my convictions fading.

Hmmmm. Maybe the poem isn’t about global civilization. Maybe it’s about each and every one of us. Can your center hold? And what would your own Second Coming be? Hell. Think for a change. Read the poem as if it were about you. Oops. Sorry. Even the old mick never thought of that. Mackerel-snapper bugger…

In my case I think I’ve had it. Don’t like it. But I’m adjusting. To the fact that we’ve had it. Sigh.

The Natural

The Syria mess takes us all the way back to questions I — and others — were asking years ago. Back in July 2009, I wrote:

Conservatives are presently in danger of adopting the same schizophrenic view of Obama that lefties had of George W. Bush. In one breath they would denounce his stupidity and in the next decry his fascist cunning. Frequently one could hear both these mutually exclusive characterizations issuing from the same mouth. That’s probably why Cheney ultimately became the favorite villain of the left; he was the way to reconcile the irreconcilable. Cheney manipulated the idiot Bush and led the neocon conspiracy behind the scenes.

Now it’s easy to hear the same kind of paradoxical descriptions of Obama. He’s naive, inept, inexperienced, and fumbling. Also, he’s a brilliant political mind who’s working a strategy far beyond what anyone else can even comprehend, which is why he’s so negligent about facts and details that would obsess lesser men. Which is it? It really can’t be both.

This is where my old concept of Serendicity comes in. I wrote about it years ago as a combination of Jung’s concept of synchronicity (i.e., the universe spontaneously posing/answering questions by means of startling events) and the older term for luck combined with inspiration known as serendipity. Serendicity is therefore the universe trying to tell us something combined with what looks to us like strange luck in terms of timing and a consequent opportunity to see something we otherwise wouldn’t have seen.

So here’s the key moment. On Wednesday, September 11th, the Congress will hear the testimony on behalf of the administration’s desire for war authority in Syria by one Donna Rice, the president’s national security adviser.

Holy shit. Take a long moment to think about this. The day of her testimony is the anniversary of the Benghazi attack — 9-fucking-11! — about which she demonstrably lied her ass off on national television to the American people, on five different Sunday news programs. And the White House has chosen her to carry the ball in the Red Zone of the congressional vote. What are the odds regarding the date, the stakes, the forum?

There are only a few ways to think about this.

1) The Obama administration is every bit as arrogant, tone-deaf, and incompetent as its worst critics have argued. If one were looking for a lower credibility advocate for the White House on a national security issue, where would you go to find it? Nowhere. She is, in this instance, The One.

2) The Obama administration is deviously clever to the Nth degree. The president has no desire or intention to attack Assad’s Syria. Seemingly embarrassed and thrust out on a limb by his own off-prompter remarks about a red line, Obama is cunningly getting off the limb and putting the Congress on it. In fact, according to pessimist pundits like Norman Podhoretz, this whole soap opera is simply a Machiavellian stratagem for continuing the destruction of American hegemony in the world he has pursued systematically since his first inauguation. If he’d cared about the Syrian situation, he wouldn’t have backed down at the last possible moment, he wouldn’t have spent a week overseas, he wouldn’t have assigned White House hacks to approach members of congress they didn’t know and who didn’t know them. He wants a no vote, and he wants the humiliation to American standing that will inevitably result.

3) It’s Serendicity. A way of seeing that both 1) and 2) above are simultaneously correct. Which would be useful information, let’s face it. Obama has never tolerated embarrassment. His Mussolini pictures should be proof of that. He can’t tolerate criticism, democratic opposition, or any skepticism whatever about his earth-shaking, world-saving brilliance. He’s never been able to acknowledge even one of his manifold failures as a leader, policy wonk, commander in chief, or man of his word. But sometimes there’s a peculiar genius in the otherwise mediocre or disabled.

Donna Rice testifying before congress on 9/11 is, in this context, a message from the universe. It’s so utterly doltish — and symbolic — as a political tactic that it begs the question of who and what Obama is. He is what in sports is called a Natural. Why perhaps he loves sports so much. But the Natural he is is Useful Idiot. Like all the victims of his economy killing policies who continue to vote for him, he is an ignorant sacrifice to his own stoutest beliefs.

He is destroying the country and will one day be loudly and inveterately blamed for that crime. But he has no idea about that. He has no idea that he’s the ultimate Alinskyite tool. His notion of the presidency has always been a shallow, narcissistic view of the office as a platform for posing as the demigod his sycophants have constantly assured him he is. Not once in five years has he shown the slightest sign that he understands his constitutional responsibilities, the American people he’s sworn to serve, the military he continually refers to as somehow belonging to him, or the pain experienced by hardworking people in an economy he tinkers with like the Supreme Soviet in its endless Five Year Plans.

He’s little more than an actor hired to play a part. But the genius of it is that he has all the right instincts for the part his mentors and sponsors intended him to play. He is indecisive when it serves the Alinskyite purpose. Eloquent, inarticulate, charming, remote, inaccessible, pandering, insincere, contemptuous, negligent, glib, and unprecedentedly imperious by turns, always at times and in ways that seamlessly serve the mission of destroying the United States of America. And he himself doesn’t have a clue that slowly but surely he is laying himself out on the altar of history as a horrendous exemplar of the worst that can be done by a tiny man in a giant office.

The Alinskyite bet is that the damage will be so total even our belated awareness will be to no avail.

They might well be right. Obama is indeed a Natural.

Don’t tell him about this post. He’d only run off to Sweden again.

Why we should be alert to the blushing cheeks of Serendicity that are our only clue about how much fate and the will of the universe might be in conflict.

PS. Oh. Explaining idiot-savant in case you didn’t infer it from the text: a president of the United States who cares more about NCAA basketball brackets than Marine Corpse-men from all the 57 states, especially the Carolina ports on the Gulf of Mexico.

I know I should be talking about Syria and I promise I’ll get to it soon. But bear with me. I don’t think this lighthearted post is completely irrelevant to matters at hand.

My latest post attracted at least one member of the Rand militia to the comments section. I was fascinated to see that it contested no point I had made. Instead it went straight for my (fancied) jugular:

Your problem is that you can’t come to terms with the fact that people find more wisdom in Atlas Shrugged than all of your works. Because as you have told us, you are so much smarter than everyone. Show us your picture along with that of the Bitch. Certainly you are confident in your superior looks.

People? Which people? The answer to that question surely might figure into the mix. (I don’t resent Ayn Rand. I disagree with her. The “bitch” nomenclature was not mine; it was Brizoni’s.) But our commenter provides some insight about the question. It’s about looks. Because I published a late photo of her I was implicitly asserting that I was better looking…

She was lovely.

…because after all, that’s what writing is all about, right? How your portrait photo looks on the back cover.

From which I conclude that our commenter is a young thing himself. He’s the product of our new celebrity culture, which equates glamour with authority because there’s no learning left to criticize opponents intelligently or even question the like-minded on their premises and logic. Why celebrity political opinions are now accorded a weight they should never receive. Why Obama gets a pass from the exact 52 percent of the populace who have been hurt the most by his policies. He’s a celebrity, he looks better in a suit than any president since JFK, and the only thing that would improve on his photo appearance would be us in the pic standing next to him. The clincher? Commenter William equates my taunt to Brizoni about being smarter with a mandate for photographic proof of my “superior looks.” Being smarter requires looking smarter or more, uh, comely. Huh?

That would be funny if it weren’t so pitifully ignorant. At the other site, I’ve written abundantly about Rand. (Do an “Advanced Search” at Instapunk for Ayn Rand.) I have acknowledged my own early enthusiasm for her, I have sympathized with the Stalinist youth which catalyzed her radical counter philosophy, I have recommended reading her best novel Anthem, and I have meticulously detailed the intellectual and spiritual reasons why I came ultimately to reject the extremity of her philosophy. I have debated ad nauseam with staunch Rand defenders, who have become increasingly more personal and hostile in their tactics. But along the way I have also defended Brizoni’s right to argue his beliefs against numerous hostile commenters. Nevertheless, I’m the shallow envious one who’s more vain and rigid than thoughtful. Got it.

As far as I’m concerned, the subject is exhausted. There’s nothing nasty or personal in my latest post, even though it’s a rebuttal to a former friend who now desires “a knife in my heart” and presumes to write my obituary as a writer and thinker.

Well, Randians may reject the atheist left, but their tone and tactics are exactly the same. Get personal at once, speak, write louder than your foes, and insist that repeating, repeating, repeating the same tired talking points constitutes winning the argument. It doesn’t. Accuse the other side of monolithic prejudice when every word you pen or utter is precisely that. Opposing you at all is absolute proof of idiocy. Never respond to the substance of arguments but only the straw men you create on the page.

What remains as a basis for discussion? I told Brizoni what would change the discussion in another round of debate. What personal experience has led to this hardening of a philosophical preference into a kind of propaganda war? He ignored that as he has ignored all the points I briefly summarized in the previous post. That’s not a good sign for a human being who insists his understanding of humanity confers on him a superior ability to define a new god-free morality for the rest of us. If you can’t ever come out from behind the curtain of cant and put your wisdom in personal terms, you’re probably just an academic didact. Particularly when your academic CV consists of a hundred video games, one book, and some weirdly necrophile erotomania for its author.

So. You Randians have become the right wing version of the hard American left. And as with them, it’s all reducible by you to a single photograph.

Okay. I may as well conclude the same way. Here’s another pic of the greatest philosopher of all time, one who is greater than Jesus Christ himself.

Again, look at her eyes? Is this the “Thousand Yard Stare” or “The Runaway Bride”? You decide.

And this is me.

See? I was always better looking than Ayn Rand.

You are your own proof that the bitch is wrong. That’s the saddest thing of all.

The bitch in question.

It was the one thing that was different in his presentation. A dare. One I’m inclined to take the more I think of it.

After all, he’s putting her up against the idea of God.

Ridiculous.

I’ve been compared to a dying Ford tractor, incapable of mustering any response. Except, you know, the farting noises of a rusted engine trying to turn over.

Well, I may be old, slow, averse to living in the Mylie Cyrus universe, more content to behold my yard than live in Obama’s America, but that doesn’t mean I’m dead or hiding. It means I’ve chosen differently than those who wish to combat totalitarianism with totalitarianism.

Complete rebuttal. For those who have a grain of sense.

Let’s see. What do we know about human life on earth? Pretty much, the people who know everything, the people who are absolutely sure they know everything about how everyone else should live, are wrong.

The idea of God is the dissent from that kind of arrogance. It’s to say that there’s a standard higher than our smartest smarts. Something about what it means to be good.

It happens early in life. Mothers and fathers teach children what good is and expect their offspring to remember. Am I going too quickly for you?

I’ll try to go slower. Things I’ve said before but have never been understood. Like capitalism and Marxism are both morally neutral in their structural prescriptions, with one exception. Marxism puts people in charge, with an insistence that there is no God. Capitalism also puts people in charge, but it doesn’t say anything at all about whether there’s a God or not.

They’re both just systems of economics. The big difference is that Marxism despises and denies God, and capitalism is neutral on the question.

This is not an inconsequential difference. Any atheist philosophy must establish and maintain authority over the question of what is right and what is wrong. It doesn’t matter how idealistic they are at the onset of this task. What matters is that when morality is left to human hands, corruption, oppression, and totalitarianism become inevitable. No hero leader or human institution can withstand the conversion of simple verities to man-made laws. The law doesn’t ever know where to stop. The leading lights never know when to shut up and let people make up their own minds. As long as morality is strictly a human responsibility, there will be human beings who will play God.

The first proof that the bitch is wrong. Look at that sour face. No laugh lines there. It’s a tough job being a human god. No wiggle room for a wink or a nod at a miracle. There’s this overpowering need to explain and control everything, to be all knowing. You can see it in the writings of most everyone who would do without god. The instantaneous leap from rational reasonableness to certainty and from there to pompous contempt. Why Rand followers past the age of 18 are less a school of philosophy than a cult.

But they’re by no means alone. The second proof that the bitch is wrong. There is no country, no community, no human grouping of any kind that has been modeled on Rand’s philosophy. Not even her own inner circle, which more closely resembled the Obama cult of personality than the airy-fairy utopia she was peddling. You see, politics always intrudes, perverts, and transforms even the noblest ideas to their opposites when all the authority is vested in what purports to be the logic of the “right people.”

Why every nation that has attempted to organize itself as a rational, atheist entity has always ended by slaughtering vast numbers of its people. Right and wrong are never successfully adjudicated by the smart people who insist they know right and wrong better than everyone else. They’re, in fact, the ones least to be trusted. Lenin and Mao, and Robespierre before them, probably did begin as idealists. But they became murderous monsters.

Sadly, we can see their like in today’s leftist egalitarians. A third proof of why the bitch is wrong. The Randians insist that we can trust the human mind, without God, to infer a higher morality implicit in human history and experience. Which is the exact same position taken by the largely atheist lefties who now insist that morality is the purpose of stultifying and destructive political correctness, which is succeeding brilliantly at closing down free speech and gradually transferring moral authority from individuals and families to the state.

The Randians faint response to this is that the lefties have got it all wrong, that a truly rational morality wouldn’t look anything like what the lefties are doing. But who’s to say? In the absence of God as a moral force above mere human beings, morality is in the mouth of the loudest speaker, the smartest lawyer, the most ambitious politician.

Why the genius of the founders established a rule of law that did NOT define itself as absolute justice, but as an aspiration to an impossible ideal of divine justice. Sever that aspiration and everything collapses into gutter fighting over trivia, with far from trivial consequences.

What is right and what is wrong are not political questions. They are cultural questions, meant to be debated away from the rough and tumble of town hall or the market square. And they don’t settle themselves by some magical means, as many rationalists like to assume, because frequently the right answers are hard answers, not ones that would ever be arrived at by the powerful or ambitious expedients. Why we have religions, theologies, and churches to help us remember the important answers so routinely undermined by daily life experience.

The peculiar myopia of the dumb-smart hyper-rationalists is that they observe — acute spectators of the human condition that they are — the existence of religions and religious adherents who answer the questions of right and wrong wrongly. This they would correct with their own right answers about right and wrong. Which requires the abolition of belief in God. But their vision is indeed myopia. The big questions are not settled by a genius at a typewriter or sitting on a throne. They are settled by history. The fourth proof that the bitch is wrong. Of course there are religions which come up with wrong answers. That doesn’t mean religion is evil. No more than crazy political parties mean that democracy is evil. Time is the teacher. But if you have no appreciation of time or tradition, you are almost certainly going to be one of those who learn right and wrong the hard way, er, the worst way, by becoming a victim of divine justice.

The bitch was wrong. Look at her. Seem happy, enlightened, and soaring on the wings of freedom to you? Thought not.

You’ve never seen this kind of display in TV ads, have you? (Start at 5 minutes in.)

If you’ve come here from Instapunk, read what follows all the way through. There’s more here than there.

Let’s face it. Dogs are some of the top sellers in the advertising world. Greyhounds are the most exotic of all dogs, but Madison Avenue has no use for them. Why?

1. People think Golden Retrievers and Yellow Labs are handsome, friendly, and intelligent. But there’s a problem with that. People also think they’re superior to Golden Retrievers and Yellow Labs. You know. And French bulldogs, Boston terriers, and pugs. They make us feel better about ourselves. We love them, they love us. Greyhounds are God’s arrows. They love, but they hold much in reserve. They know who they are. Frequently, they prefer their own company. They make us feel smaller. When they launch, oh, Jesus. We’re just spectators. Not what the ad world wants.

2. Greyhounds don’t do cute things on cue. Not that they don’t do cute things. They do. Mostly when they’re lounging on a couch. They have, well, a conscious relationship with stuffed toys. They don’t chew them. They gather them up and hold them close, sleep next to them. Doesn’t lend itself to 30 seconds of selling somehow.

3. Greyhound faces. A subject unto themselves. Smooth, pop-eyed but not startled, endowed with eyes that see everything, even what we don’t want seen. The faces are blank fronts of bodies usually scarred by their own obsession with speed and our willingness to exploit it. Always open when we talk but so often closed in slumber on the floor or sofa. They don’t show emotion the same way other dogs do. They’re not in the business of reacting to us. No matter how close a bond you have, you will never see it in their faces. You learn it from the need for a greyhound hug, which is usually brief but intense, emotions flowing both ways. You look at them straight on, and you see no emotion except what is in their eyes. Faces mild as children’s dolls. Eyes you can fall into. They can see a change in your expression fifty yards away. Sighthounds. They live through their eyes. Even with you. TV can’t do that.

No God? Really?

4. Beauty. Ads are more about comedy and connection than anything else. Especially when dogs are involved. But greyhounds are principally, overwhelmingly, about beauty and awe. We love the dog in the Traveller’s Insurance ads with the floppy ear and the soulful face. Greyhounds don’t offer that. They stare like impassive gods at everyone who doesn’t have one. They don’t entertain. They just are. And they are everything opposite to advertising — remote, gorgeous, utterly uninterested in seduction or approval. When the moment comes, they will explode into action and chances are, your cameras won’t be able to record that moment with any fidelity. No one can keep up, no one should try, and that’s no way to sell insurance, cosmetics, or Fritos.

Whereas, you can see how winning Scottish deerhounds are in their ads, winsome, engaged with the camera, and all around humorously charming:

Excuse me, Rae? You have a comment?

Like we care.

OH. THE COMPLICATION. Raebert is somehow guarding me. He refuses to leave my side. At all. If he can be induced to go outside, which he can with the leash, he pees and/or poops immediately and returns to me. He insists on lying next to me on the couch, or on top of me. It makes me think I’m ill in some way he knows and I don’t. (Sorry, Brizoni, don’t think it’s so…) It makes me think about what the “next step” might be. Not believing in God because it’s so much easier that way? Or wondering what the fuck is going on with this amazing animal I’ve already been through so much with. One or the other of us is in peril, I’m convinced. I have to tell you I’d prefer his safety to mine. He’s only three.

Not really.

I’ll explain tomorrow.

UPDATE: False alarm. Brizoni had nothing to say, no new argument to make. I responded in the comments at IP.

I’m pretty much sworn against using dumb dog photos. But this one’s, well, the truth. How do you suppress the truth?

We love our pug Eloise. We found her on the side of the road, abandoned on a dangerous stretch. What happened next was a portent we ignored. We approached her like dog lovers approach stranded dogs, gently, speaking soft words, asking her to let us rescue her.

Her response? She took off like a shot, aiming herself mindlessly under the wheels of a giant SUV, which did actually clip her with a front wheel. She was hurled across the road, suffering multiple cuts and bruises that enabled us finally to catch her.

That was the day I had to apologize to the driver for what I said when he leaped from his car in horror at what he had done. (Yes, I do know when I need to apologize.) That was also the day, after lots of frantic driving around, we found our current vet facility. We’ve gone nowhere else since. So that’s to the good.

But then there’s Eloise. We got her right after returning from our honeymoon. I grew up with smart dogs, shepherds and terriers. Lady Laird as a rescuer of greyhounds was used to dogs that are, uh, not too bright. Neither of us was prepared for the pinnacle of stupidity represented by pugs.

What did we know? We watched Animal Planet documentaries about pugs. They were, well, baffling. The owners clearly loved them, made them the center of their lives, lavished all kinds of love (and outfits) on them, but it always seemed like they were winking at the camera, that there was some secret only pug afficianados would ever understand.

Almost ten years in, we know what that secret is. Pugs are not the sharpest knife in the drawer, they’re not the sharpest nail, pencil, crayon in the box, not the brightest bulb in the pack, not the fastest car in the lot, not the heaviest hammer in the toolbox… Oh Stop!

They’re the absolute dumbest dog in the world. All these years in, Eloise will still knock over her food bowl trying to evade having you attach her leash while she’s eating. Subsequently, she will get herself wound around furniture, steps, anything in the landscape and then rush at you frantically bug-eyed while you try to untangle her, which she will most often sabotage with renewed efforts to ensnarl herself.

None of this is meant to say we don’t love her or that we would ever give her away. It’s just that we’re bewildered. Pugs have a cult following. People who are clearly committed to getting pug after pug after pug, as if they were the answer to some question heterosexuals should be asking themselves.

We won’t be getting another pug when, and if, we survive Eloise. We’d get a Boston terrier, physically similar but smart as a whip and with excellent manners to boot.

There are lots of shows about dogs and which ones to get. Why I felt some responsibility. What they say about pugs is mostly true. Generally healthy, faithful companions, incredibly grateful for human contact, fine with children, and cute as a button, all of them.

But if it matters to you — and maybe it doesn’t — the average fence post is not as dumb as a pug.