Jon Cogburn's Blog

the whole play

Levi Bryant puts his finger on it

How often does one read one's own thoughts?

HERE Levi gives voice to the most important existential freakout of our benighted age. Nothing compares in relevance. Key exerpt:

But generally the answer is that I’m literally horrified by the fact that collectively we have knowledge (and I’m not making any bullshit, postmodern qualifications about this) or that an argument is better than another, and the fact that changes nothing. We know yet nothing changes. It drives me nuts. We have the better argument (and no, I’m not saying I always have the better argument, though narcissistically I suffer from the flaw of thinking I do) and it doesn’t persuade. It drives me nuts. I’m horrified by this. My horror first began with how the American public responded following 9-11 (especially in the lead up to the Iraq war). It’s grown worse and worse in the intervening years as I’ve watched growing religious fanaticism (which is mainstream Christianity in the States… Sorry Episcopals, UU’s, and UCC’s, you’re the minority), as I’ve watched mainstream responses to our economic problems, as I watch the way in which environmental issues are shuffled off the table. It drives me crazy.

Me and Neal Hebert's favorite play has something to say about this too:

We few survivors
We few survivors
walk over a quaking bog of corpses
always under our feet
every step we take
rotted bones ashes matted hair
under our feet
broken teeth skulls split open
A mad animal
I'm a mad animal

Of course the inmates of Charenton (and Hebert actually hales from Charenton Louisiana, look it up) lived through the revolution and the coming of Napoleon. Levi, me, Neal, the lovers, the dreamers, Kermit the Frog, etc., and all the other prophets reading this, see what is coming and know the same despair.

Don't be deceived.

But what is clarity worth if it makes no difference? Maybe Episcopelianism or Presbyterianism or Hegelianism (assuming that Cassandra at least is part of Spirit knowing itself) maybe helps here, or maybe it makes it worse. I don't know.

Poor Marat! Poor everyone!

rant of the day

My God but people have idiotic conversations right outside of my office door.

This morning three students bantered for fifteen minutes about how one of them hadn't brought his backpack to school that day. It was surreal, because if you didn't know English, then from their tones of voices you might think they were being incredibly witty, tossing clever bon mots (sp?) back and forth. But beneath that tone was a content so unclever and pedestrian, that I feel guilty associating it with run of the mill unclever pedestrianness.

It was the conversational equivalent of all of those "Scary Movie" type movies that don't really contain anything funny but mimic enough tropes associated with funny cinematic moments that the audience is fooled. How common is this kind of thing?

I know, I know, the content is not the point, the whole point is rather some Darwinian signalling thing concerning reproduction, and in fact they could have accomplished the same by cheeping at each other.

But this is why Darwin sucks. I would much prefer listening to people cheep at one another than to this nonsense.

Why I took some posts down off of Newapps

[IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please go HERE to read the full text of the petitition titled "SPEP Members Against the Advocacy Committee Resolution, and if you are a member of SPEP please consider signing your name. Also go HERE where I encourage people to join SPEP (and become eligible to sign the aforementioned petition).]

I decided to take the following three posts down from NewAPPS. There is a consensus that they might work to undermine the kind of rapprochement between analytic and continental philosophy that the Newapps bloggers are trying to establish. Also, they infuriated more than one dear friend for whom I have a lot of respect and love. Finally, there's a weird dynamic that when one posts about controversial issues in a group blog, then people tend to perceive the posts to somehow be reflective of the group itself. This certainly is not the case with the three posts I've moved here, and I'm moving them in part to forestall any such confusion.

If I was writing them today I'd change a couple of things about them, but would not change the very things that have gotten me the most angry e-mail from people I don't know.

turn of the key

Wow, what started as a great day (lunch with John Protevi!) sure turned into a festival of crap.

The janitor somehow messed up the lock to my office while locking the door after checking for trash/recycling. I was so caught up in reading that I didn't notice until 5:45, when I was trying to leave my office for a much needed bathroom break. I was trapped. At that point in the day everyone had already left the building except for some students here for orientation who had been doing weird and frankly disturbingly hearty LSU football game cheers all afternoon. I couldn't bring myself to scream at them that I was trapped. They were all so excited about being at college and sports and stuff and I would have just felt like a complete ass-hat for exposing them to what fools their professors were going to be.

Plus, being locked in your office with screaming hoards of spirit filled kids on the other side of the hallway (all the while with a full bladder) is not very much for anybody, never mind for a claustrophobic whose collected neuroses rival Woody Allen on a bad day.

Luckily, Emily came to campus with the infantry and between the four of us we managed to pry open the vent thing on the door and slip my key through. It was pretty cool, like one of the more outlandish Brady Bunch episodes. And, as we had hypothesized, the lock worked from the other side. And even better, by the time I escaped my office all of the kids singing LSU football game cheers had gone back to their dorms or wherever such people congregate after singing football songs all day.

Man I would be completely lost without my wife. As of last Sunday we've been married for ten years.

Things to do if you want to live longer

Nice Daily Beast article HERE. They didn't mention anything about driving, which as the number one killer of people in their teens and twenties, has one of the biggest impact on death rates. Anyhow, here are the things they do list, with the percentage effect on your chance of being dead within 20 years.

There's some interesting philosophy here. Given how literally toxic getting laid off is (you are 15-20% more likely to die within twenty years if you are laid off), shouldn't this be reflected in criminal proceedings against people whose criminal behavior results in lots of other people losing jobs?

Also, lots of these things effect men and women differently. For example, being Mormon is much better for male mortality rates than for women. Should this inform feminist critiques of Mormonism? More strikingly is the effect of marrying a spouse more than 7 years younger than you (which decreases mortality for men and increases it for women).

Also, it is really important not to confuse correlations with causation. For example, a lot of the sleep data is probably the result of the fact that people who sleep too much are likely to be sleeping off hangovers. So there is a common cause for sleeping too much and increased mortality, rather than sleeping too much causing increased mortality. I strongly suspect the optimist/pessimist thing is the same thing. If a large enough percentage of the pessimists and optimists are being rational, then whatever is causing the pessimism and optimism is whatever is causing decreased and increased mortality rates. This being said, I'm going to express all of the following as if they were causal, because it's more fun that way.

1. Don't get laid off: +15-20%.
2. Get and stay married: +20%.
3. If you are a married woman, not marrying someone over seven years younger than you: +20%; if you are a married man, marrying someone over seven years younger than you: +11%.
4. Do not  more than 8.5 hours a night: +15% (but sleeping less than 4 hours is horrible too).
5. If you are a woman, have a waste less than 35 inches; if you are a man have one less than 40 inches: +25%.
6. Be an optimist: +55%.
7. Sit less than 8 hours a day: +18%.
8. Go to church regularly and do the social stuff involved: +25%.
9. Be a Mormon- men: +6.7%, women: +3.2%.
10. Be rich: +15%.
11. Drink two glasses of red wine a day (and no more): +25%.
12. Don't watch television: -8% for every hour a day consumed.
13. Live in Hawaii (life expectancy 81.3 versus Louisiana with 74.2).
14. Be a woman (outlive men by 5.1 years)
15. Be literate: +50%.

One more thing I've learned from my kids

Thomas will be three in three months.

One of the great things about this age is that he really gets a kick out of helping out. For example, when I feed the cats or dogs, let the dog out, or take the trash out he's right their and I have to engineer everything in a way so that he gets to do some part.

Of course as a two year old he's completely incompetent at these tasks. Cat food gets all over the floor. The small bathroom trash can ends up overturned. Etc. But he really gets a kick out of helping and I'm not going discourage him from attempting to be productive. Plus it's a blast.

But here's the weird thing. I wonder how universal this phenomena is, where people's enthusiasm for a task is inversely proportional to their skill at doing it. As Thomas becomes more competent at tasks such as taking out the trash, he will certainly end up being much less excited about doing so. To what extent is this kind of thing a universal facet of the human condition?

Andre Agassi was on NPR selling his book a few weeks ago and he really did make being a professional tennis player sound pretty horrific. He was the greatest in the world for a while, but it was always at best a love/hate thing for him, mostly hate (for very good reasons that he lays out in the book). Or consider that David Bowie recently said that he didn't enjoy performing live that much. Or consider the original band for Hedwig and the Angry Inch. By the time the play had run for a year or so, Stephen Track, John Cameron Mitchell, et. al. constituted one of the best rock bands of all time. But after making the movie they all went on their separate ways. I wish them all the best, but what is the chance that any of them are going to rock out at what they do as much as they rocked out with Hedwig? How to explain this except with the hypothesis that the better you get at something the less tolerable that very thing becomes?

Is this just a reflection of general human fallenness, just part of the Freudian "Thanatos" that reliably leads us to undermine ourselves. Or is it external? Does the world systematically discourage competence? I don't know. As far as our weaknesses go, I do think the world tends to sympathize the least with that which makes us most pitiable (all neurotics know this in their heart of hearts). But as far as strengths, I don't know.

[Note: all of the above is a thought experiment. I'm sure there are people that are very good at what they do and don't end up loathing that very thing. And if I had more time this morning I'd continue the meditation, but with respect to the punk rock DIY aesthetic and rocking out at things you aren't that great at; that side of the equation leads to much more cheerful conclusions.]

another vision in yoga class

So my shoulder is healed enough to start doing yoga again. I went to the really easy classes yesterday and today and felt a bit ridiculous. I was just so incredibly crappy at everything. This being said, I did have a weird vision during the closing ten minutes of corpse pose today.

I saw this huge volcano spewing what I thought was greasy black smoke across the sky. But when I got closer it turned out that the smoke consisted entirely of alphabet letters rendered in a spidery, Charles Addams type font. It was really repulsive and frightening.

I guess too much of anything is always sublimely repulsive. . . But there is something special about too many letters befouling the atmosphere, the medium in which we reason destroying the medium in which we breath. I mean, I don't want to choke on an existential quantifier or even a zed for that matter.

extended existential freakout

Today was one long existential freakout.

In yoga class this morning the  person next to me was chewing gum the whole time. I don't know what is more inimical to the point of yoga, noisily smacking gum while doing it, or being so bothered by someone noisily smacking gum that your blood pressure goes up while doing it. In both cases you are conspicuously failing to instantiate Patanjali's extraordinary promise of liberation through stillness.

Then right outside the yoga studio there was a big Lamar Advertising billboard that touted the virtues of advertising in something called "The Sunshine Pages" (it's some kind of yellow pagey thing). Still traumatized by the sounds of the inside of my yoga friend's mouth, I thought something to the effect of, "If advertising in the Sunshine Pages is so great, why do they have to use the billboard," not even realizing that advertising for the Sunshine Pages in the Sunshine Pages is equivalent to believing the Bible is true because the Bible says so. Some days my fancy book learning avails me nothing.

Then we went to the mall to get haircuts.

Is there anything more forlorn than all those kiosk things selling useless crap in between the stores? I was taking a stroll while Emily got her hair cut and the kiosk people kept importuning me like prostitutes in Amsterdam's red light district. O.K. So I guess there is one thing more forlorn than all those kiosk things selling useless crap in between stores. But I had not taken a wrong turn on the way to the Van Gogh museum; I was just trying to walk around the mall while my wife got her split ends taken care of. I did not want skin care products, holographic pictures, jewelry, smokeless cigarettes, air-brush tatoos, remote controlled miniature helicopters, a shoulder massage, or Rosetta Stone software, etc. It all looked alien and vaguely threatening (because it all is). But my wants were immaterial; all the depressing kiosk people kept trying to lure me in over and over again until my walk became the stations of the mall. However, instead of scourging and what-not there was the forced joviality of saying, "No thanks," and again and again watching the depressing kiosk person's hopes get gradually more crushed by life.

And all the benches had these little sqwauking computer screens advertising a contest where you fill out a form and put it in an enclosure and you get contacted about being a model. I couldn't block out the burbling, and my tinitus driven ears did what they always do when there are barely audible voices, refusing to tune it out, instead attending to it and trying to figure out what is being said. So I went up to the stand and bent down to the screen, to listen to the pitch about how modelling is a lucrative career that just might be right for me. But then I was in the way of a pimply high school kid who was trying to submit his little form.

I could see the excited imaginations on his pock marked face. Him, pulled out of obscurity in Baton Rouge to walk the runways in glamorous company in all the great cities of the world. But reality painfully contradicted his fantasy. I saw him years from now standing by a kiosk and bothering shoppers. He thought he was a top model in training, but he was really a kiosk person in training.

What was I to do?

I bowed my head and headed back to the salon. Emily's hairdresser let me slump defeated into one of the unused barber chairs. I'd moved up in the world. When I was a kid they'd have to put a board on the arm rests so my head could reach the barber's hands. Not any more.

 I read Heidegger.

And only what is unmeaningful can be absurd.

Heidegger had never been to the Mall of Louisiana, but it still made sense.

deep thoughts

I had a big epiphany in yoga today. I realized that the point of yoga isn't to have big epiphanies, but rather to just basically feel O.K.

Later on I realized that that's why the overwhelming majority of people do the overwhelming majority of what they do; everyone's just trying to achieve the state of basically feeling O.K.

I don't know why human beings make such a hash of it. A priori, it does not strike me as too much to aspire to.

Yes, yes, all of our ridiculous vanity and destructive stupidity is ultimately rooted in the desire to basically feel O.K., but I can't help it. It still doesn't seem like too much to ask.

Lord of the Pies

While riding my bike home yesterday a group of people on the corner hailed me. I slowed down, and one of them yelled, "Where Pighead?"

It really threw me off. They were friendly people, and the mood was one of festive camaraderie. It made me sad that they had confused me with someone else. I was depressed yesterday after a departmental meeting (with the exception of church, yoga, and classes, all meetings involving more than three people end up depressing me; I don't know if this reflects the specific meetings I've been attending, or speaks to something more general about humans in groups). In any case I wanted to stop and tell my new friends where Pighead was. But I couldn't, I don't know Pighead.

I should have said, "I'm sorry, I don't know Pighead," or "You've got me confused with someone else," but instead I just pursed my lips, raised my eyebrows, looked up, shrugged my shoulders, and pulled my head back. The benefit of that gesture is that it is indeterminate between not knowing who Pighead is and knowing who Pighead is but not knowing where he is. It's less embarassing for everyone concerned.

simple question

At some point in life, vacations end up being a lot more work and stress than one's normal job.

Does this reverse itself as you get older again? Dear God I hope it does.

Nun for you!

Another bad dream last night.

In this one I was called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee and subjected to hours of abuse by angry Representatives. Instead of accusing me of being a secret communist though, they accused me of being a nun.

"Are you now or have you ever been a nun? Are you aware of any secret nun agents who have infiltrated philosophy departments in the United States?" Etc. Etc. They were very angry.

I tried my hardest to convince them. I pointed out that I wasn't Catholic, and that my lifestyle made it clear I'd never taken vows of poverty, chastity, or obedience. But nothing convinced them. A drunk Republican yelled at me that even if that was true it would only establish that I was not Dominican (the other orders apparently take different vows). I explained that if I lived according to "papal enclosure" rules I wouldn't be able to attend academic conferences (though again, many nuns don't live according to those rules). I tried to explain the difference between a "nun" and a "religious sister"  (the kind of vow one takes and the focus of good works), but nothing I did established my innocence in front of the United States government.

In fact non-ignorance always made this kind of thing worse; the less illiterate I proved myself to be, the more it convinced them that I was a nun or some kind of nun secret agent. How could somebody possibly know this stuff if they weren't really a nun?

And clearly, there was something wrong with me. Why wasn't my head filled with sports and reality television trivia?

At the apex of the dream I absolutely cracked. It began with the admission that, like nuns, I prayed for peace (the drunk Republicans screamed and banged their shoes on their table at this) and for the poor. Then it just snowballed with me admitting more and more nunish things I did until it reached the point where I gave them names of several academics I know who are or had been secret nuns. I was crying in the dream, and in the underdetermined way of all dreams, it wasn't clear whether I really was a secret nun and naming my comrades, or whether I was just naming names of innocent people so that I myself wouldn't face jail time and blacklisting. And I don't know which would have been worse. . .

Will the people I named now have the same nightmare as a result? Will they get called in front of the committee and threatened until they crack and name names? What if some of them don't crack? Will they then have dreams of being ostracized, fired, and jailed? Will an Edward R. Murrow come to their defense and convince the good citizens of Morpheus' American Empire that the real enemy is us, our asinine Representatives who accuse good men and women of being nuns without any evidence? Or are there to be no more Murrows, and we are all now damned to a world of dreams where the worst of us can gain power and money by exploiting unfounded, nebulous fears and the resentment of the ignorant? I shudder.

two freakouts on the UCO campus in the sunshine

When I'm coming down with a mild cold the most minor dissonance can wreck my serenity.

Yesterday was a beautiful day even by spring-in-Edmond standards. The sky was almost the color of Indian jewelry. Though it was not windy on the ground, the clouds continued a stately procession across the sky, many doing the cloud equivalent of the slow exercise of the elderly San Fransiscan Chinese

For an hour or so I sat by the artificial lake on the UCO campus reading Bulgakov, thinking about what makes good writing good, and enjoying the planet. At the UCO lake there are four or five adult Canadian geese with strange iridescent highlights in their plumage. They sun themselves and swim around in the lake. This day there were also eight tiny goose chicks (goslings?) following two of the geese (their parents?) in another stately procession. As a new parent myself, and a fellow child of God, it was amazing to watch. One led the chicks to a place where water runs over rocks and watched them carefully as they drank, bathed themselves, played their somewhat inscrutable, yet gentle, goose games. The other goose (the first one's spouse?) stood guard the whole time, keeping an eye on everyone. It was a perfect moment.

But then across the lake these undergraduate males started hooting and hollering about something. "Whoo! Yeah!" etc. . . followed by whoops of forced laughter. I couldn't tell what they were so excited about, but I knew in my heart that teenaged perpators of genocide made the same whoops the world over and throughout all history. They kept laughing and screaming and it made me deeply ashamed to be human. I could tell the goose on watch duty was becoming incredibly anxious and I wanted to tell him that it was going to be alright, but it really wasn't. There he was, being the best Canadian goose he could be, but surrounded by humans doing hideously lousy jobs at being humans. It was bone-weary sad.

Then as I was about to cross a street on the way home it happened again. This elderly black woman was waiting to turn left in her ancient Econoline van. She looked over at me as if to say, "I'm sorry I'm pulled so far forward into the pedestrian crossing." We smiled at each other and I began my traversal behind her van. But then I heard, "Fucking hurry it up already!" and then almost jumped out of myself from a car horn. The hurry-man was of course male and he drove a new jeep with his cigarette bearing arm hanging out of the window. He was healthy and privileged, and in his ecosystem the old black woman and me only existed as creatures to serve him or get out of the way. He didn't look enraged, just inhuman (or all too human, when I think of the geese). He kept screaming obscenities and of course I did the dysfunctional thing I almost always do in such circumstances. I froze in the middle of the street. The only way I got myself moving again was by making the sign of the cross. I don't know if he saw it, and it really wasn't a very nice thing to do, sort of the Christian version of giving him the bird.

I trudged home.

I wish I could say I've been making prayers for all of the impatient people, the rude people, and the geese, the goslings, and drivers of rusted out old vans too. I wish I had been praying for the sick, the prisoners, the heartbroken, the meek and weak. . . But I've really just been playing with my dog. He really likes it when you throw a tennis ball. You can do it like a hundred times and he never gets bored. Neither do I.

more Daves

For some reason, I am perpetually doomed to be outclassed and out-cooled and sometimes pummelled in my dreams by people with the first name Dave.

This time I was at a party for the University of Central Oklahoma undergraduate philosophy conference and Dave Eggers was there. It made me real nervous and I went over to try to tell him how much I liked A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Believer magazine. I was trying to say something interesting about the last sentence-paragraph of the book, comparing it to the last paragraph of On the Road, but in the dream I couldn't really express myself.

Eggers said, "Man, you're not real good at making party small-talk are you?"

And I said, "It's just that you reach a certain age and it's hard to get interested in what anyone has to say and even harder to say anything yourself. You've heard it all and don't want to contribute to the redundancy."

Eggers said, "Well I've heard that one before," and then walked away.

Crap. Predictible Cogburn flameout around one of my favorite public intellectuals. At least he didn't beat me up though.

Success Dopplegangers

One of the pitfalls of our increasingly inter-connected world is that we are all doomed to be haunted by dopplegangers who are vastly more successful than ourselves at the tasks nearest and dearest to our hearts. And I don't mean being haunted by someone who is just more successful in your field; I mean someone who is more successful in actualizing your very specific life goals. Examples:

Past Success Dopplegangers
In high school and college I tried to play music equally influenced by blues and punk, and often it was just me and a drummer. Then along come Jack and Meg White and do this vastly better than I ever could. In graduate school I (with my friend Eric Ward) tried to harnass the early Bowie's specific form of dystopia in a way influenced strongly by Nine Inch Nails. Then along came Marilyn Manson who did this vastly better than I ever could.

Present Success Doppleganger
In philosophy I've long had two goals: (1) use my linguistics training to make non-trivial suggestions to outstanding philosophical debates, and (2) philosophize about my cultural practices, especially video games. Then along came Peter Ludlow (who, by the way, is a real mensch) doing this better than me.

Future Success Doppleganger
I've long wanted to write an accessible book that incorporates zany philosophy of language views in a way that has cultural and meta-philosophical relevance. Mark Silcox and I are almost finished with such a book (or at least with the version that gets initially sent to Routledge). A priori I know that the book will not have a smattering of the cultural or philosophical cachet that Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. And this is not because he hit the zeitgeist at the right time. Rorty was a much better writer and philosopher and the book deserved the influence it had.

If anyone feels like sharing their success dopplegangers, that would be cool. Again, they have to be doing something very specifically analogous to what you have been doing. It's better if you didn't know of their work when you undertook your project (by this criteria Rorty is not a good example for me).

For what it's worth, I think that everybody has to just try to learn from their success dopplegangers and not be upset about it. Very few people are even competent at very much of anything, and somebody is going to be better than you at anything you do. Our hyper-connected society rubs our face in this, and I hope the result is not that people stop trying. I'm not sure culture would have produced a Jack/Meg White, Marilyn Manson, Peter Ludlow, or Richard Rorty if a lot of people weren't doing analogous things. So just being part of the millieu is important too.

another day, another nightmare

Last night I dreamed that the universe was addressing all of humanity.

The five or so billion of us were sitting in one of those big lecture halls like when Fidel Castro gives four hour speeches, but instead of Castro's grandfatherly, bearded visage it was the whole universe up there on the podium. And it was really pissed off.

It kept saying things like, "You guys are my eyes and ears over there. Most creatures would be happy to be the universe's eyes and ears. It's an important job, the pay is good. The benefits aren't great, but who's complaining in this economy?  Hunh?  Plus, the cost of living is low..."

Humanity really misjudged this part of the speech; we all thought the universe was making a joke.  Everybody laughed sycophantically as we had been taught when Dear Leader cracked funny.  But this just angered it further.

"Jesus Christ!  Do I have to do everything myself?  You numbnuts wouldn't know reality if it hit you in the face!  String theory? What the hell is that? If I'd wanted ten dimensions I'd have ordered Chinese food!"

Here humanity compounded its sins, for this was actually the universe's attempt at humor, albeit one that didn't make any damn sense.  I think the universe realized it was losing our sympathy maybe?  In any case, nobody laughed after the attempted joke.  Not good.

"You dumbasses need to get back to work!  Jesus Christ.  Whatever happened to competence!  The Milky Way used to be a haven for competence, and now we've got this?  What is this deconstructionism?  Deconstructionism Shmeconstructionism!" 

We stared at it terrified.  What if it banged its shoe on the podium, but its shoe contained our galaxy?  This has been known to happened.

"You make me sick!  Whatever happened to the New Critics?  Those guys knew how to read a damn book. Is that too much to ask?"

In my dream this kind of thing went on for hours.  Mostly the universe complained about how movies and music used to be a lot better than they are now.  At some point in the speech I realized that it obsessively follows all of those horrible awards shows (Grammy, Academy, etc.); not only did the universe complain about the declining caliber of winners in the last few decades, but it also critiqued the production values of the awards shows themselves (e.g. "you call that a dance number?").  And it kept going on about Judy Garland's last, tragic performance at Madison Square Garden.  Humanity found this mawkish and embarrassing.

It made me sad on multiple levels.  Why did reality give a crap?  I don't care about the Academy Awards, so why should the universe?  This being said, I couldn't help but feel that there had to be at least an element of truth in everything it said. 

Lucky for us, it never go angry enough to bang its shoe.  I kept thinking the universe would get more cheerful, announcing how with its guidance and various worker-heroes we had made glorious progress on the five year plan in spite of provocateurs like Derrida and film makers like George Lucas.  It never did though; it just kept yelling.  We didn't even get a show trial, even though humanity longs to see broken and now repentant Derrida and Lucas sitting handcuffed in the docs, the universe's prosecutor telling us lurid tales of sin and corruption. But nope, all we got was the incessant complaining.

All five billion of us in that hall tried to look resolute, as if we were going to do a better job from this point onwards.  But when we realized that there would be no show trials, in our heart of hearts we all just wanted to get out of there and go ride some bumper cars.

night of the living Davids

My deep and abiding hatred of all forms of transportation with the exception of walking and the French rail system always leads me to have horrible nightmares the evening before travel (later today we drive to Broken Bow, OK to share Thanksgiving with my Dad's Uncle Rupert, who raises fighting roosters and sells them for a good chunk of change to people in Mexico; I'm not kidding, I'll post some pictures when we get back).

Last night's was a doozy. It involved not being able to check in to the Francis Drake hotel in San Fransisco during an American Philosophical Association meeting.  The woman at the desk wasn't able to work the keypad because of these grotesque really long fingernails, I mean as long as Howard Hughes' were when he was holed up on a closed off floor of that Vegas hotel during the last phase of his madness (which also involved collecting his own waste in big glass jars that were then set up artfully around the room).  She kept having to start over.  In the dream this somehow telescoped into thirty minutes, at which point the time for presenting my paper had passed.

All of that would have been fine, but somehow the long fingernail woman knew I'd missed my paper presentation and she kept insisting that my department would not reimburse me now, so I couldn't check in.

I was too polite to point out that it was all because of her fingernails, so I didn't know what to say.

But at that point I saw that David Bowie (David Bowie!) was in the lounge area, and I took a desperate gambit, "Hey, hey, see David Bowie over there. I used to play guitar for him."

She was too cool for this though, "Sir, lots of people have played guitar for David Bowie; that's hardly reason for me to let you check into the Francis Drake."

I was sure that the wonder-working powers of Mr. Bowie would get me through this though.  I hailed him like an old friend, confident that he'd recognize me as a humble foot soldier of Rock, and in the ways of all great generals through history, help me out of this bind.  George Patton did the same kind of thing for his men.  So did Caesar.

And I think I would have gotten the divine intervention, but the Bowie I got was the shell-of-himself-Bowie that surfaced after the release of Aladdin Sane, the very same Bowie whose months long diet of cocaine and milk left him skeletal and insane (he was only later to exit the Los Angeles valley of death by taking bosom buddy Iggy Pop to Berlin).  In my nightmare Bowie kept pinching his nose and rubbing his gums, and somehow I knew that he might begin a horrible duet with Cher. 

But instead of going sub-par Lawrence Welk on me, Bowie just poked at me with his walking stick and said, "No dice Cogburn."  He turned to the desk clerk and told her, "I've never seen this man before in my life."

I was disconsolate, but felt better when David Chalmers began to check in on my right.  I was about to hail him when he turned around and punched me in the face really hard.  As I lay on the ground, looking up, he said, "I heard that song you wrote, mother******!" before kicking me in the ribs really hard.

I tried to give as good as I got; from the floor I said, "You're not the most important philosopher from Generation X.  You're not even from Generation X, look at your damn hippie hair!"

He leaned over and slapped me across the face.  It hurt, and if it wasn't a dream I would have wet my pants at that point.  Chalmers made a fist, shook it at me, and glowered through what I now realized to be in fact heavy metal hair.  I will never make that mistake vis a vis David Chalmers ever, ever again.

"First, unlike me, the hippies had long scraggly bangs that got in their food as they ate.  Close inspection reveals my coif to be cropped in front.  If you were a better philosopher you would have noticed that.  Second, the whole point of Generation X is wearing your hair," and then he started kicking me again and again to emphasize each word, "Any!" Kick! "Way!" Kick! "You!" Kick! "Want!" Kick! Kick! Kick!

I wanted to argue that he was fraudulently wrong.  Wearing your hair how you want was the hippie ethos, and all the heavy metal kids like Chalmers had just got that one wrong.  Pace Chalmers, "The whole point" of Generation X is being so horribly deformed by overexposure to situation comedies and game shows as a small child that you end up not even suspecting just how awful the Star Wars movies are.  How could the man who'd distinguished between the hard and soft problems of consciousness miss that?  How could anybody?  But I was in too much trauma from Chalmers' cowboy boots to insist on anything.

But things got worse.  Through my post Chalmers beating reverie I looked up only to see the two Davids walking away arm and arm, and Bowie was now an amalgam of all of his greatest moments.  He was wearing the dress from The Man Who Sold the World/Hunky Dory era.  He was in Aladdin Sane Zigster makeup.  His teeth were capped beautifully from his post Let's Dance era.  And he'd picked David Chalmers over me. 

O.K.  I should have known better about the hair thing.  I'm willing to admit that.

But who could have predicted that David Bowie had such an abiding interest in two-dimensionalism and the extended mind thesis?  And so little interest in anything I might have to say about Dummettian anti-realism, the Lucas-Penrose argument, or the metaphysics of video games?  My world had collapsed all around me, and there was nothing to do but weep.  As they walked away I heard Bowie say to Chalmers, "So what's it going to be tonight old chap?  Philosophy or music?"

But then through my veil of tears I saw David Lewis (David Lewis!) checking in.  But instead of awe, I tried to score cheap points off of his metaphysical status.  "Hey! Hey! He's not even alive!"  Given the level to which I'd sunk, perhaps it is better that nobody listened.  I grew more disconsolate.

Then my friend David Merli was checking in.  This cheered me up, until I saw he had that Aladdin Sane lightning bolt tattooed across his face.   Merli was in on it!

Richard Montague stood in line behind Merli, "Hey! Hey! He's dead and his name's not even David!"

"Shut up you little worm!  I had it legally changed in Nevada!"

I couldn't win.  The Davids had taken over the American Philosophical Association, and they were not to be messed with.  If David Chalmers could administer such a horrendous asswhooping, how much worse would it be to tangle with an undead Richard (now David!) Montague.

I slowly drug myself into the cold San Fransisco street, sitting on the pavement with some punk rock kids who'd never even heard of the Dead Kennedys.  Inside the Drake everybody talked about philosophy and rocked out while I contemplated life among my new friends under our new David overlords.  I would have to get used to the fleas.  Yes, that would suck, but the thing was I still had my brain.  I still had my brain.

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kid, in fact it's cold as hell

So Emily and I are all finished with our childbirth class.  It was pretty helpful in that we know more of what to expect.  In the second to last class we watched videos of four different births involving different levels of anaesthesia: two "natural" childbirths (given its prominent use by left-wing Puritans, I object to this word in most contexts, and certainly in this one; nothing is more natural than humanity's centuries long noble quest for better and better forms of anesthetization), one attempted "natural" childbirth where the mom progressively gave up and finally availed herself of the full panoply of drugs, and a c-section.  I managed to watch all of them without getting sick like I did during that where-do-we-come-from video in my tenth grade biology class at Jefferson Davis Public High School in Montgomery, Alabama.  It's good to know that I (or at least my vomit reflex) have matured somewhat since then.

Some people get more focused during stressful times, and I do this during the most stressful times (like when faced with the logistically difficult task of stopping the bleeding after partially severing my left index finger with a manual saw).  But anything less than that and I'm just the opposite.  I notice more and more minutiae until my consciousness is a pretty crowded place.   If I didn't have a small bladder maybe this would make me a good spy (I assume spies have to be able to hold it for a long time while for example being smuggled in a trunk in the baggage hold of a train; and I can't even imagine James Bond saying "Oh man, I have to pee like a racehorse; hey c'mon pull into that McDonalds"). 

Since all of the birthing tapes we watched were filmed in the late seventies or early eighties, the hairstyle, clothing, and mannerisms were frankly bizarre.  The best one was the unmarried New Jersey couple (this is the one where she abandoned the desire for naturalness five hours into the ordeal).  The expectant mom had feathered hair of the type that is sprayed back into two wing looking appendages, and the expectant dad had a miniature version of the same hair cut but with a squirrelly looking guido mustache, gold chain, and wife beater shirt to complete the look.  During the whole thing he was reading auto-trader magazines and trying to get permission from mom to buy a 70's era muscle car or motorcycle.  In between contractions the mom would, in her absolutely beautiful New Jersey accent, say things like "No corvette!  No corvette!" or "No motorcycle for you!  I'm having a baby here!"  It was a wonderful piece of cinema verite that I recommend to all people of refined taste.

Only about half the people in the class were married, and about third of the expectant fathers weren't there.  This, I gather, is why the non-pregnant person was referred to as the "coach" during the classes; it made me feel weird.  For one thing, with the noble exception of professional wrestling, in my heart of hearts I think college and pro sports are a complete waste of time and resources.  As a proud nerd, I am and will always be on the getting-picked-on-in-high-school-but-ultimately-doing-something-more-meaningful-than-sales side of this culture war.  For me and all of my fellow nerd soldiers, the word "coach" conjures up bad memories from junior high school (most of us got out of high school sports by some combination of joining the marching band and spurious medical excuses).  In my junior highschool all grades would be in the same gym class, and as there were no social promotions this meant in seventh grade I had to play dodge ball with people who had failed ninth grade twice.  Needless to say, I don't want to be a "coach" of any sort, and I actually found myself looking at the other members of our class and thinking things like, "If you two palookas would just get married, and if you slept with men worth a damn, then we could all just be Dads or Husbands."  I feel bad about this.  I love Jesus, and don't think he would have thought these things.

One more note about effect of rampant bastardy on American civilization-  Most of the fathers who had the basic decency to be there seemed sort of half-formed to me.  They wore baseball caps and those shorts with all the pockets in them.  They chewed gum and drank soda pop from fast food places.  They bounced their legs incessantly.  This really started to bug me during the most gruesome film, one of the "natural" births.  [Note- don't read this parenthetical remark if this kind of thing gets you sick- The baby's head got stuck in the birth canal of the clearly highly educated 1970's mother.  Then, while the bearded Joy-of-Sex looking 1970's father kept encouraging her to breathe in that infuriatingly dopey everything's-groovy way of people like that, the doctor performs an unannounced episiotomy right in front of the camera with what looked to be a pair of garden clippers and then proceeds to grab the baby's head and start pulling.  Duuring the whole thing the vapid father kept saying, "You're doing great, honey," as the mother screams in absolutely skin-crawlingly hideous agony.]  Anyhow, my thought was that since so many fathers today don't cowboy up and take responsibility for their errant seed, maybe this allows those of us that do to be bigger jerks.  Maybe all these guys could present themselves as adolescents because at some deep level they feel like the mother is just lucky that they are hanging around, so why d'ya have 'ta bother me allatime when I'm trying to watch the damn game, and, Jesus Christ, buy some damn chips next time you go to the store, etc. etc.  This thought depressed me, but did get me through the next two films.

Somehow the happy endings to all the films prevented me from going into a full-fledged existential freakout.  In my experience, human beings are very much like Winston Churchill's characterization of the United States.  The great man said, "You can always count on the United States to do the right thing, after exhausting all of the other options."  My fellow gum smacking, leg bouncing, baseball cap wearing, soda pop guzzling, sports team shirt wearing coaches were all going to be fathers soon.  And I noticed something else that happened at the end of these films; when the baby was finally handed to its 1970s parents, me and the fellow coaches all cried a little bit. 

Then I realized something that is probably obvious to normal people.  In a month or two all of us were going to be propelled fully into adulthood whether we wanted to or not.  My fellow coaches might stare at me across an abyss of a-literacy, television obsession, and for some of them jobs that actually involve doing something more useful than producing journal articles nobody reads, but they were going to be good dads, and for those of us on both sides of the abyss, that is the most important thing in the world.  The evolutionary advantages of big heads and walking upright (and the resulting small hips) has left human beings with an absolutely hideous birthing process, revolting and dangerous.  Nonetheless, even though in this respect we are much less fortunate than our fellow mammals, the day of the birth will still be the best day in the lives of all of the coaches and moms in the room.

Music to read this post by- Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Tiny Dancer, and Rocket Man.   Elton John at his peak could pour an insane amount of feeling into a song.  It can assuage your misanthropy. 

existential freakout in the Denver airport

Last week on the way home in the Denver airport I was pretty stressed out.  I had just come through Seattle, where they've now followed Atlanta's suit by installing non-directional Bose speakers so there is no way to escape Big Brother blaring CNN into your skull (the noise even penetrates 30 db blocking ear plugs).  Add that to everything else that is horrible about flying today, and then add to that what the complimentary cheese and fruit plate was doing to my dig estive tract, and J. Cogburn was a not a happy camper.

So I was in no way prepared to find myself the only one of four people in a Men's bathroom not talking on a cellphone. When I went in to the bathroom there were just two of the cellphone people, one standing with his elbow on the paper towel dispenser, one standing over the urinal, both blabbering away inconsequentially.  Nearly doubled over from a fruit and cheese induced cramp I hobbled into a stall, only to have a third cell phone person enter the stall next to me, talking on the phone the whole time. 

If this wasn't bad enough, there were several performative contradictions in the guy's conversation.  He kept blabbing about how his relationship with "Jess" was nobody's business but his own, and how Jess had no right to tell anyone, including his interlocutor "those things."  After several minutes of overhearing him, I had gathered that the problem was both extremely embarrassing and of a medical nature.  It made me really nervous that the next guy who came in would catch the third cellphone jerk's disease from the toilet seat. 

That's when I started to have a freakout.  What if these people were the first wave of an advancing army of cyborgs, come back from space to colonize what is left of the old style humans?  After all, talking on a cellphone while defecating is exactly the kind of thing that a cyborg would do. 

I though of our dismal future then, or rather the dismal future of all old-style humans like me.  The cyborg colonization would not be military, but rather economic and cultural.  I saw then an impoverished future where earth was essentially a reservation for old style humans who are reduced to sending their leaders off planet to beg for financial help.  I saw a future where old style humans make no holographic picture shows themselves, but avidly consume the junk holograms foisted on us by the cyborgs.  I saw that our book and music output would diminish, old style human publishing companies purchased and shut down by their cyborg competitors.  I saw a world where all fashion is dictated by cyborg whim, and began to fear when I left the stall everyone would be wearing block robot suits made out of cheap cardboard.  I saw a world where eating is something furtively done in dark corners because to eat food is to admit that you are not one hundred percent cyborg.

I might have cried for the lot of humanity, but my flight actually left from Denver on time, so instead I just drank a beer in first class, cautiously appraising our new lords and masters as they boarded the plane, some of them blabbering into phones actually attached to their cyborg heads.

another freakout at the DMV

I spent another two hours at the local DMV yesterday, and as usual for my pains I was rewarded with dystopian visions.

This time I saw a future where gene therapy and embryo selection had sped up evolution to the point where every woman looked like a Victoria's Secret model and every man like Brad Pitt.  The parallel evolutions that led to all the Brad Pitt look alikes also led to everyone sharing his sunny disposition and interest in architecture.

As I gazed across the tile floor and underneath the unforgiving fluorescent lights I wondered then what our genetically modified descendants would make of us with our weak chins, flabby necks, unprepossessing cheekbones, and various levels of obesity.  Would they remember us with our unglamorous dreams, hopes, fears, and hobbies?  Would they even know what we looked like?

Then the vision turned darker and I saw what would happen a few years after the time of the first vision.  In this world the very, very rich (and their famous courtiers) inject themselves with designer diseases and then have themselves inconvenienced in order to separate themselves from the beautiful masses for whom robots perform all labor.  In this twin earth, the DMV was hot vacation spot where billionaires go to both be apart together and to experience for a few days at least unending frustration.  In this twin earth, the man next to me who appeared to have a tremendous goiter on his neck had been on the cover of Esquire Magazine on three separate occasions.  The guy with the swollen and misshaped right foot pulling himself along in a filthy wheelchair with his left one had just purchased a new extraordinarily fashionable strain of tuberculosis.  The one guy in there that actually looked a bit like Brad Pitt but also had an obese, hair-lipped, wife covered by oozing white leprous tumors?  The fact that he still looked like Brad Pitt showed him to be vulgar new money, perhaps an injury attorney.  The diseased woman was his new trophy wife.

What had the twin me done in this future world of mirrors to merit citizenship of this posh resort?   I couldn't figure it out and actually went into the bathroom to look myself in the mirror to make sure that I did not in any way resemble Brad Pitt.  In addition, I wasn't cheerful and had no discernible interest in architecture.  What had I done to deserve that blessing?  What would I do to earn it?

near existential freakout at the DMV

Yesterday at the Baton Rouge Department of Motor Vehicles I was one of only two Caucasians in the whole place.  That would have been fine, except for the fact that the other Caucasian had two confederate flag tattoos on his arm, as well as a t-shirt with the flag on it.  He was greasy and angry looking.  Of course he came and sat down by me.  At close range, I saw that his shirt said, "If you have a problem with this t-shirt, you need a history lesson."  He had long hair, a long beard, and a big belt buckle.

Digression- when I was in college, people sitting next to me on airplanes always used to try to convert me to their religion.  I don't know if that was just a popular thing for religious people to do in the late eighties and early nineties, or if it had to do with me in my late teens and early twenties.  I don't know.  However, I got pretty good at sending off "don't talk to me!" vibes without being unacceptably rude or presenting myself as mentally ill.

So as I emanated the "don't talk to me" vibe to the confederate flag dude, I thought of things I would write on his shirt if I could.  Here are a couple- "If you are wearing this t-shirt, you are too dumb to understand history lessons," or less succinctly, "If you are wearing this t-shirt, you are a downwardly mobile white male who deals with his inferiority complex by simultaneously pretending to be a victim and identifying with those you perceive as stronger, in short you are the kind of idiot that makes fascism possible."  Anyhow, these thoughts kept me from having an existential freak-out.  Unfortunately though it got worse.

A woman sat down on the other side of me, only promptly to take her left shoe off and begin massaging her foot with both hands.  I could actually smell her foot.  Periodically she rubbed her foot on the floor and emitted these little ecstatic groans, before picking it up and again massaging it.  She had these really long, fake fingernails.  The thought of their undersides crawling with foot and DMV floor cooties made me ill.

While this was happening a large extended family took about fifteen minutes to get candy out of the machine in front of me.  I was trapped between the loser and the foot rubber and the family.

I don't know why, but in situations like that I am almost always compelled think of what would be the worst possible thing to say.  I think then it probably would have been to call Mr. Noble Lost Cause a hippie and tell him he should go live in Vietnam with the Beatles and other peaceniks if he wants long hair like that.  As he then would try to establish his proto-fascist bonafides with me, I'd say that I thought he was a girl with his long hair and then ask him if played with dolls and liked to kiss boys. 

Of course, I didn't do that.  Luckily, before it got any worse, the DMV people called my number.  I pushed through the extended family, at this point each member of which was at the beginning stages of high fructose corn syrup high.

When I got up to the lady at the desk, it turned out I didn't have all the right paperwork, and would have to come back next week.

Cogburn men are nothing if not perseverant.  Taking a deep breath I again waded through the candy eaters, to open the door and walk boldly out into the Baton Rouge sunshine.

existential freakout in post office (with apologies to Christa Weil)

I was standing in line in the post office yesterday about to mail a box of philosophy books to Oklahoma.    It took forever.  One guy was trying to do a money order for twenty three dollars and fifty seven cents.  What could that possibly have been for?  I have always thought that it bespeaks a general level of incompetence to do a money order in that quantity, and I was not to be surprised.  He kept nervously asking the teller all these questions as if the U.S. government was trying to screw him over in some way regarding his money order.  In addition, the tubby middle aged guy in an Eric Clapton t-shirt (it said something like "old slowhand" ) right in front of me wouldn't stop drumming on the little table where you can get forms and stuff.  He was really into it! nodding his head back and forth with genuine passion.  I almost couldn't look away, until I noticed the postal clerk's weird makeup.  She had used really dark, bruise colored blush in a half moon shape around her upper cheeks.  It made her look like the kind of creature into which malevalent racoons will evolve thousands of years from now.  She was also not capable of dealing with the old guy's anxiety about his money order, and the process seemed to go on to infinity with the jerk drumming away on the little table.

That's when I had an existential freakout.

I looked at all of the other people in line, and instead of feeling the warm camraderie of shared human suffering, I felt like I'd accidentally landed on the wrong planet and that I was about to be found out and possibly sent to a government research lab to be plied with alcohol like David Bowie in "The Man Who Fell to Earth."  It made me nervous.

Then I started to think about the whole world being destroyed except for the ten or so of us standing in line in the post office.  What kind of species would evolve from such a limited gene pool, one that (to be honest) had pretty clearly already been peed in numerous times?

I closed my eyes to try to stop these thoughts, but that only made it worse.  To the polyrhythmic idiocy of the frustrated drummer it all started to became clear to me.  Our (by "our" I mean those of us in that post office) post apocalyptic descendents would be somewhat like bees, with a stratified society of different kinds of post-humans.  I tried to stop this train of thought by opening my eyes again, but the racoon woman was glaring at me, so I closed them again.  Then the prophecy was on me full force, and here is what I saw.

At the edge of any city/hive live the warrior posthumans, possessing lightning-fast reflexes and endless patience, still as crocodiles for most of their lives, but like crocodiles ready to spring into murderous violence at no provokation.  The warrior posthumans have eyes as big as current humans' heads, each containing thirty thousand lenses and able to spot a mosquito from fifty yards away.  They have four large opaque wings, each capable of independent operation.  Their chitinous bodies and liquid surrounded cardiac system allow them to withstand over 30g of lateral force, and their prey intercept rate is over 97 percent.  These posthumans are asexual and they survive on the flesh of defeated enemies.

Approximately 100 terran meters underneath the city there live legions of posthumans known as "repletes."  Like the fois gras geese of today, these posthumans are overfed to the point of bursting.  Though strongly resembling humans of today, they spend their entire lives hanging in small groups from the subterranean ceiling.  As small children, with still supple endo-skeletons, they are attached to the ceilings and henceforth fed a steady diet of nectar.  As they grow, their abodmens stretch until their skin becomes so thin that it is transparent, the digested nectar glowing inside them and lighting the huge underground chambers.  Repletes are so continuously full and obese that they cannot move, and live their lives dreaming of of the day they will be chosen for consumption during the worker posthumans' religious ceremonies, usually around the age of thirty-three terrestrial years.  At this point, full grown repletes typically weigh over one thousand pounds and upon death provide enough fermented nectar for a two day ceremony involving one hundred and sixty workers.

Worker posthumans are not really posthumans but rather highly evolved male postchimpanzees, kidnapped by the warrior posthumans from their postchimpanzee camps, castrated, and then educated by other workers in agriculture, engineering, and post-human religion.  At the age of thirteen terrestrial years, they are put to work growing food and keeping the city running.  I hypothesize that through their religious ceremonies a kind of psychic connection between the workers and the posthuman queen is established and strengthened.  I am not certain of this though.

Finally, every posthuman city has a queen posthuman, though "queen" is misleading as the creature is technically hermaphroditic.  If one were to look at a full grown queen (a crime punishable by death!) one would see a slowly undulating six foot diameter sphere, covered in spiky protuberances that slowly drip poison.  Blinded workers attend to her every need. . .

At this point in my vision, the racoon woman said, "Sir, sir. Can I help you?  CAN I HELP YOU?"  I opened my eyes and still found it horrifying to gaze upon her.  Nonetheless, I steeled my resolve by meditating upon the strength of all of the Cogburns through history, and finally stepped forward to mail the books.

freakout avoided at Mose Allison concert

Last night Emily and I went to see 80 year old piano blues legend/LSU graduate (with a minor in philosophy) Mose Allison at the Shaw Center.   I saw him a couple of times in Austin Texas around fifteen years ago and once in Washington D.C. about twelve years ago. 

The performance was great and it was amazing to see somebody at the age of 80 so on top of his art.  He played a great mix of his sad, humorous, and philosophical songs.

The outing was marred by a couple of things.  First, his microphone was too loud so that during every piano solo you could hear his Glenn Gould style warbling.   Second, I was surrounded by gum chewers.   The whole area stank of Bazooka Joe, and the constant repetitive motion of their jaws made it hard to focus on Mose.  Finally, I just took off my glasses and closed my eyes.  Luckily the music was loud enough that I couldn't hear their mastication, albeit they did keep talking to one another. . . Nonetheless my closed eyes averted a freakout.

I don't get it.  If I waived my hands in front of my face repetitively it would be clearly unacceptable and a distraction to the theater going public.  But these days wherever you go (airplanes, church, weddings, concerts, graduation ceremonies) there is at least one self-satisfied moron chomping away on gum.  Part of a point of church, concerts, and important ceremonies is for people to sit still, shut up, and lose themselves in something bigger than themselves. 

Gum chewers violate the social contract, drawing us back to the Hobbesian state of nature where life is nasty, brutish, and short.  This is because losing oneself aesthetically and being in groups without drawing attention to oneself are behaviors demanded by civilized society.

If you are not convinced, contemplate this.  In professional wrestling the arrogant bad guys ("heels) almost always chew gum and the good guys ("faces") never do. 

visit to EBR highschools

This semester E. Beck has been teaching intro to philosophy in two East Baton Rouge Parish public schools.  The program is run by Baton Rouge Community College, and students get community college credit for the classes.  On the whole, it's been a miserable experience for E. Beck.  The students just won't shut the hell up and are almost incapable of sitting still.  98% of them are MTV babies and adopt infantile oppositional attitudes towards any authority, even authority that wants to help them hone their critical ability to oppose.  They are paralysed by prefabricated cool.  The whole thing is very depressing.  It makes me want to read Adorno.

Today I went with E. Beck to turn in final grades at the two highschools.  At one of them the assistant principal made E. Beck recopy her spreadsheet into a school approved grade form.  We stood in the office while I read out the numerical scores to her, and she copied them. 

While doing this I noticed that the office had several posters of EBR School Board Mission Statements.  One of them read, "The mission of the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, owned jointly with the community, is to provide quality education which will equip all students to function at their highest potential in a  complex and changing society, thereby enabling them to lead full, productive, and rewarding lives." 

I couldn't continue reading the numbers.  What did this mean?  The system is "owned jointly with the community."  By whom?  I mean who is the entity besides the community that owns the schools jointly with the community?  Surely this isn't what they meant to say.  Why did they say it then?  Shouldn't the school system's mission statement be literate?   I began to feel nauseous, and my scalp started to sweat.  But there was more.  Who came up with the bullcrap about a "complex and changing society"?  Has society ever been simple or non-changing?  So why litter the mission statement with this useless platitude?  Why are they telling us their mission is to provide "quality education."  Does any school system attempt to provide a bad education?  Are these people idiots?  Who's watching the watchmen?

When I was pondering what it means to live a "full, productive, and rewarding" life in a "complex and changing society" I overheard the vice principal ("the principal is your pal") calling a mother about how her son had disappeared from school that day.  The kid had received an office referral for "acting up" during a final exam, and had not gone to the office.  He went to the gym, walked around aimlessly, and then disappeared.

While overhearing this I looked again at the shiny poster with the mission statement.  I thought about a student that Emily sent to the office a couple of weeks ago.  That student wouldn't shut up about how stupid Descartes was.  Her jokes weren't funny, but the other students laughed. . .  Emily had told the class that Descartes invented analytic geometry and was one of the founders of the theory of optics, and this MTV baby called him stupid.  And the other students laughed like that was witty.

At that point I started to have an existential freakout.  It would have been O.K., but when I looked away from the mission statement, I saw on the opposing wall a huge picture of Robert E. Lee in Confederate regalia (the school is Lee High).  Around the huge picture were smaller portraits of all the principals since 1950.  Some of them had sideburns.  Most were old and smiling in that phony "I'm congenial!" way.  Maybe some of them were.  If they were it made me sad, because they're playing second string on the wall to a man who defended slavery and partially responsible for hundreds of thousands of people dying.

I looked at the stupid mission statement, and back to the Lee portrait with it's principal portrait satellites.  I left off reading the numbers and walked over to the Lee portrait.  It said that it was given by the "U.D.C." which I think is the United Daughters of the Confederacy. 

My thoughts turned very dark; the freakout got even more existential.  In addition to my scalp sweating, I got goosebumps and felt an impending vertigo.  What was I to do?  I suffered an unbearable urge to draw a Hitler moustache and Devil horns on the portrait of that evil psychopath Lee.  I started to think of vile phrases with the intials "U.D.C." and wanted to spray paint them on the wall.

But I didn't.  I crapped out, bowing my sweaty head in defeat.  I returned to the table and continued reading the numbers from E. Beck's spreadsheet, so she could fulfill the requirements.  It was a victory over my own psychic incontinence, but (alas) not over evil.

today at the mall

While E. Beck was getting her hair cut at the Aveda Salon today I walked around the Mall of Louisiana.

Across from the Aveda Salon there is a "Glamor Shots" photography studio. 

"Glamor" originally referred to the magical power that elves and other such creatures had to bespell us.  Laurall K. Hamilton portrays this very well in her fiction.

In the studio I could see the glamorshots employee applying layer after layer of makeup on a customer, making her glamorous.  She was extremely overweight, but more importantly chewing a huge wad of bubble gum with her mouth open.  Her mouth moved up and down.

I was hypnotized by the movement of her mouth and couldn't focus on anything else.  It was like one of those 1960's films where the narrator intones "you are getting very sleepy" and all the viewer can see is a slowly spinning top and a charm swinging on a chain back and forth.

My soul was in peril.  What kind of evil post-hypnotic suggestion was going to be programmed into me?  Where was Angela Lansbury to comfort me?  Frank Sinatra?  What would I do?

Thank you Jesus; the spell was broken.  The glamor shots employee had to get the accumulated makeup off of her teeth, which caused her to cease the cow-chewing-cudlike motion.  I snapped out of it.

They both turned their heads towards me.  He was wiping lipstick and flesh colored powder makeup stuff off of her right upper bicuspid and the pink wad of gum sat tumor-like, bulging out of the left side of her mouth. 

At that point I had an existential freakout.  I was mad at them for hypnotizing me, but also felt the same kind of guilt as when I gawk at a particularly gruesome car wreck.  And the gum chewer wasn't even dead, or even in the process of being removed from wreckage with the jaws of life.

I wanted to tear my hair.  I wanted to go over to the Abercrombie and Fitch store and rip down all of the horrible speakers blaring techno bass notes into my soul.  I wanted the mall to be still and silent, so we could all get right with the universe.  We would destroy the gumball machines, and then put the gum chewing women and the glamorshots employee on our shoulders, parading them through the Mall of Louisiana, singing, "Hail to the new King and Queen of the Mall of Louisiana."

But none of that happened.  He pulled the washrag off of her bicuspid and waved it at me while smiling.  She smiled too, as much as she could with the gum-chewing.

I realized that they took the "glamor" in glamorshots very seriously, thinking the elf magic had worked on me.  She thought that she had enough glamorous makeup on so that it put me under her spell, and he encouraged her in this lie.  She raised her eyebrows in a sort of come-hither fashion.  I don't think she really wanted me to go into the glamor shots.  Rather, me staring just confirmed for her that she was doing the right thing, and that her significant other would be truly wowed.

I stumbled away, sadder, yet wiser.