Oxfridge

So I got around to watching the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones.  You know, I am getting a little tired of using fantastical, fictional worlds (e.g. Westeros, "the 60s") to stage ersatz commentaries on the subjugation of women that are, beneath their veneer of paternal concern, mere opportunities to show us more tits.  Otherwise, fine acting, although my hopelessly literal mind kept wondering about the agricultural viability of the world's northern climes.

The Matrix of Leadership

Now I have the pleasure and displeasure of knowing some people in what is often self-referred to in a hilarious overestimation of scale and import "the art world," and I can tell you that there is no realm of human endeavor more committed to inanity.  I do not say irrelevance, because I don't believe art should be relevant; a painting isn't an op-ed; a sculpture is not a power-point presentation.  But when your work can be confused with trash, not metaphorically, as in a moral judgement, but actually, as in scrubbed off and thrown away, then perhaps you will consider that your subversion of traditional aesthetics or whathaveyou has gone slightly awry.  I mean, you might consider abstract expressionism monstrous, but you would not confuse a Rothko with a spaghetti-sauce stain; you might think that Matthew Barney is hysterically grandiose and immensely tedious, but you wouldn't confuse The Cremaster Cycle with the faded snapshots you never bothered to un-magnet from the fridge.  Does your art "offer a steadfast commentary"--um, well, then it isn't art, but commentary, and boring commentary at that.  You see one of the problems of the visual arts is that it has sought to become simultaneously performative and philosophical and fall short as both performance and philosophy.  A Chorus Line is more interesting than commentary or performance than a freezer-full of film and video art; any half-assed blog is more philosophically interesting than a pile of junk that's supposed to lecture to you about the mundanity of daily existence.  Transformers 3 is better than the whole of your latest biennale; more skillfully crafted; more artfully accomplished; more rigorously drawn and truly done.

The Popes' Children

One of the funniest--and a very prevalent--notion is that only revolutionaries may hold radical beliefs, a prejudice akin to the idea that only the only true believers are missionaries, or perhaps missionaries and renunciates.  These sorts of ideas are really just the remnants of an insufficiently expurgated Western religious mind, the remnants of an inadequately examined monotheism.  Well I for one am no revolutionary, in part because despite my affect of bombast I am in fact modest, unlike those who, under the affect of modesty, would dictate to others the nature and direction of the right path.  In  large part, it's because I'm a determinist; I believe that social orders and movements, the arrangements of societies and the dispositions of civilizations, the rise and fall of economic systems, governments, and regimes are all determined by historical forces that take place on a scale infinitely larger in scope and duration than any human mind or personality can understand or endure.  If not Caesar, then Caesar, in other words.  We don't make history, but are made by it.

Been Travellin'

Been travelling.  In my unforgivable bourgeois naivete, I did not realize that the TSA's incredible regulations on liquids extended to wine, ye gods.  I thought it was just for soap and open water bottles and shit!  The fascists just stole a pinot auxerrois from Luxembourg and a real Baux de Provence!  I shall be several days in mourning.

The Queen Mutha

so it's easy to think of brooks as an idiot, but i think he's sorta onto something. at least he's sniffing at it, even if he doesn't know what it is.

the difference between h.s. and college isn't so much the educational content as it is the socialization. can't quite put my finger on it since i've only been turning the idea in my head for a little while this morning.
i'm thinking (anecdotally) about the relationship between me (b.a., j.d.) with my mother in law (h.s., i think). thinking also about the relationship between my sister-in-law (b.a., maybe an m.s.?) and her mother-in-law-to-be (h.s.) similar cases.

there are just certain "immature" behaviors that don't really make sense to me. for example, my m-i-l has this need to be "queen bee". it's something i remember from h.s., but evaporated in college. i hypothesize that, when you've only had a h.s. education, there are certain things (like "acceptable" behaviors) that are sorta frozen in time--hence "immature".

anyway, just a thought.

-puppylander in our own comments

Oy and double-oy, to paraphrase a great American. I hope puppylander, who is a regular commenter here, won't be offended that we are offended by this ridiculousness. Anecdotally I'm thinking about the relationship between Barack Obama, B.A., J.D. and Pakistan which is full of certain sociopathically homicidal behaviors that don't really make sense to me, for example, swarms of killer robots murdering civilians and children left and right. I conclude that this has to do with the socialization one receives as a jurisdoctor.

I like to imagine that even as he wrote, our commenter was shaking his head in quiet disapproval at some big black lady screaming at a cop. What do they ever hope to accomplish acting like that? What he calls maturity and acceptable behavior, I call a learned culture of undue deference and self-subjugation. If I may again undertake a little paraphrasis, college is a slave mentality. Yes of course David Brooks is onto something; he understands that education exists to mold the free mind into an employable jelly mold. It strips and sandpapers your brain; you are a chair to be refinished, upon which time the Vikram Pandits of the world will sit their asses down upon you motherfuckers.

So it may be that your mother-in-law buzzes around because she never took Intro to Psychopathy and Principles of a Con; it may also be that the elder women in an extended kinship grouping are simply recapitulating a few hundred thousand years of genetic and cultural behavioral norms. The idea that the completely weird behaviors one picks up in the pursuit of a late-modern system of institutionalized mind control represent a sort of ordinary and baseline human maturity is, ahem, exactly what they want you to believe. But in reality the long view down your nose at your social inferiors is no different from the long gaze of a billionaire banker from his trading-floor aerie onto the massed rabble on the grass below.

The Lord Great Chamberpot

I know I am not the first to point out that David Brooks is the only man in America who could fail to find a Red Lobster in exurban Pennsylvania, a territory that he mistakes for rural America, but as the Patented Son-of-a-1-percenter and a scion of poverty county, PA, I'm obliged to offer a bit of sour correction.

Then there is what you might call Red Inequality. This is the kind experienced in Scranton, Des Moines, Naperville, Macon, Fresno, and almost everywhere else. In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent.

Are there no investment offices in Scranton? No hospitals? No law offices? Small cities and towns may lack media conglomerates and sports franchises, but they do have cardiologists and attorneys and prosperous home builders. The literal top 1% of income earners in the US starts around $380K, but the top 5% starts at just over a buck-fiddy, well within the earning range of your average kuntry doctur. Anyway, Brooks reminds us that without a collegducation, most of us schmoes lack the opportunity to ascend into the upper echelons of our society's unquestionable inequality; why, with wider book learning, every mere blacksmith's son may seek to achieve his earldom before his true betters chop off his fucking head. This is easy to make fun of, but it's really one of the saddest conceits of our time. Bachelors degrees are like TVs and cell phones--even poor people have 'em!, much to the chagrin of our high-wage media moralists. The idea that giving every single soul a sheepskin will immensely enrich its earthly passage so completely misunderstands the valuation of commodities that it could only have been dreamed up by a capitalist. Oy vey--if every hillbilly in Texas were sitting on his own oil well, then no one gets rich. Universal college education can only ever recapitulate universal high school by becoming utterly worthless; if the 99% Tumblr is any indication, it's already occurred even with only, what, a quarter of the population actually receiving (I will not say earning) a 4-year degree? Next up, masters; doctorate. A lifetime of contemplative retreat in order to qualify as a candidate for an unpaid janitorial internship!

The sneering aristocratic mien is a really charming affect on a man who purports to have wandered out into countryside to commune with the Real People.  They fuck, divorce, breed like rabbits, and their table manners are atrocious!  And what do the evangelicals of the American university experience imagine their college educated civilization will actually look like.  Is every living person to be a civil engineer or an MD?  Can a society composed entirely of pharmacists prosper?  Can a nation in which every man and woman is a CPA survive?