Stars of the Living Dead

"I do lament the gradual disappearance of small, quirky local [radio] shows due to the trend toward national syndication. And I often get bored and impatient with the same arch-conservative message being drummed out 24/7. But let's get real: Liberals have been pathetic flops on national radio -- for reasons that have yet to be identified. Air America, for example, despite retchingly sycophantic major media coverage, never got traction and has dwindled to a humiliating handful of markets. The Democrats are the party of Hollywood, for heaven's sake -- so what's their problem in mastering radio?

Instead of bleating for paternalistic government intervention, liberals should get their own act together. Radio is a populist medium where liberals come across as snide, superior scolds. One can instantly recognize a liberal caller to a conservative show by his or her catty, obnoxious tone. The leading talk radio hosts are personalities and entertainers with huge rhetorical energy and a bluff, engaging manner. Even the seething ranters can be extremely funny. Last summer, for example, I laughed uproariously in my car when WABC's Mark Levin said furiously about Katie Couric, "What do these people do? Open fortune cookies and read them on air?"

The best hosts combine a welcoming master of ceremonies manner with a vaudevillian brashness. Liberal imitators haven't made a dent on talk radio because they think it's all about politics, when it isn't. Top hosts are life questers and individualists who explore a wide range of thought and emotion and who skillfully work the mike like jazz vocalists. Talk radio is a major genre of popular culture that deserves the protection accorded to other branches of the performing and fine arts. Liberals, who go all hushed and pious at Hays Code censorship in classic Hollywood, should lay off the lynch-mob mentality. Keep the feds out of radio!"

Camille Paglia
Salon magazine, January 14, 2009

Dial-A-Reductionism

If reality can be explained by just a few protected and unargued factors, that explanation's own universals don't make any sense. And yet to be proposed as uniquely true among all perspectives, it must assume those universals nonetheless. But that explanation negates those universals by reducing everything to those few arbitrary factors.

All by dismissing other possibilities.

Absent Participation

This is distant. Only the few reach it. And they are delighted.

Nietzsche

Vague Kharma

Questions not properly answered, don't go away.

Anonymous

Transtemporal Causality

The cause in contemplation is the rule in operation.

Adapted from
Francis Bacon, circa 1600
Franciscus de Verulamio sic cogitavit

Errol Flynn Revisited

From what I have observed in life, belief is not something you develop. On the contrary, if I have developed anything definite it is a dull smouldering anger at the abysmal mystery of my presence on this earth, with not the least clue to any reason for it, a mystery that probably not even death will solve for me.

Why am I alive?

In my early forties, I find myself in a state of tortured confusion where my every past action or experience, my daily movements are measured and appraised by one who does not seem to be myself. An alter ego who stands by with detached and contemptuous mien, sneering at the bumbling efforts of a human in search of a soul, a human burdened and bewildered more every day by the external questions: "Where do I come from? What am I? Where am I going?"

Swept by doubt, desperately seeking just one little sign from Heaven---the sign that those who believe do not demand, I am carried along like duckweed down a Chinese river, feeling yet always denying the existence of a benign Deity, knowing so well in my heart that I have reached the supreme goal of egoistic existence. For what?

Belief. Why does it elude me? Why can't I find peace of mind like those I envy? Those who have listened and heard and felt, and having done so, contritely let fall all other barriers and started to believe wholeheartedly in God?

Why am I even unable to begin by renouncing the material things, the transitory and ephemeral? Why, knowing---and knowing, strangely, with humility---my faults, my myriad imperfections, do I go on with outward complacency, yet with growing inward desolation? Why must my mind remain factual and materialist while within me I stifle my cry for help and will not yield an iota to the stumbling craving in my soul? Will this rebellion against God never end?

Whom the gods want to destroy, they first make mad. Perhaps this is what's happening to me. Or maybe I can seek solace in the thought that I'm only going through a sort of male menopause.

So this life is only a preparation for a hereafter? This is still an illogical premise to explain the period of human history in which I have lived. The graveyards at Anzio and ten million of the world's finest men swallowed up, sacrificed upon the most incomprehensible of all mankind's bizarre altars: humanity's inhumanity to humanity, war.

So belief is a word the meaning of which eludes me. I mean belief in the concept of a benign all-seeing God. God, in the sense of a creator, yes. God in the sense of a Supreme Being I can believe in.

But a God who believes in me, a God who is aware of my soul's existence, who after death will clear up the great mystery of my reason for life in this world, I have no belief in this God, nor can I even begin to seek it with a full heart.

Today I see a strange world, more bewildering and paradoxical than anything I have read in history, even the birth of Christianity. One half of mankind grimly devoted to stamping out the ideas of God and religion, the other half apathetic to both. Supine and hypocritical, the professed believers in a Christian God today give lip-service in the various totem-houses, listening in private to their ministers and priests dencouncing the other Chrsitian sects with hatred and malice. In the light of the Church's sordid history, its stubborn refusal to keep pace with modern thought, perhaps this apathy is understandable.

The world's need for belief is desperate, more desperate than my own, for I am only one lost individual in a tortured universe, a world that is weary, shocked, and shattered. No philosophy or fanatical political dogma can stand against a true belief in God.

Belief. I wish I had it.

Adapted from:
Errol Flynn, "Faith?"
Rome (or Naples?) 1952 (1953?)

Cube-Farm Foreboding

"The microchip will colonize all rote activities.
And we will have to scramble to reinvent ourselves."

Tom Peters
Talent: Develop It, Sell It, Be It