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andy's avatar

Fathers & sons & fathers-one-never-had & teachers & mothers, too … but.

This is from David Milch’s memoir, Life’s Work:

“William James was a vigorous, sweet-spirited, healthy-minded guy. He was so charming & engaging & brilliant, everybody knew he was going to be an ace. William’s problem was that he had no way to stand. His father had given him all of the data of experience & the blessing of saying, “You don’t know what it means yet, but just take it.” But to the structure of his life, he was no less an amputee than his dad was. He didn’t know what the hell to do & so he took to his bed & became afflicted with terrible headaches & backaches & so on. Everybody began to whisper about poor William James - he had such a great future & he turned out to be reclusive dick.

He had a teacher, Louis Agassiz, a great naturalist & madman who documented all of Darwin’s theories & was collecting specimens while refusing to believe in Darwin - he also insisted on being an unabashed racist. He came to the James house. William by this time was a physician who never practiced, but Agassiz came to the Jameses & he said, “William, we’re going up the Amazon, we’re collecting specimens.” William said, “I can’t get out of bed, let alone go up the Amazon.” Agassiz answered, “I didn’t ask if you can get out of bed.”

Agassiz put him on the ship & took him up the Amazon & literally threw him off the boat. And in that moment was born every aspect of William Jame’s philosophy, which is that you cannot think your way to right action, you have to act your way to right thinking. And from that came the James idea of pragmatism, that the good is what works, & that we rewire ourselves by our behavior.

This allowed William James to figure out that you don’t have to integrate the American experience into any preexisting structure, it is an unfolding. Accept it as such. Don’t try to put names on it. That was a refutation of the whole exhausted rationale of gentility. “It’s good because we’ve always done it that way. What James said was, “Who cares how you’ve always done it, just how are you doing it, how does it work?” And that brought all American behavior into the sunlight of thought. Because otherwise what you are saying is that everything is invincibly vulgar, it’s impossible & we must have nothing to do with it. There had developed in America a practice among the gentility of flinching from public life because it was so vulgar, & here was William James throwing open the goddamn doors & saying it’s all in play.

Henry [James], in his way, was standing outside, but he was hospitable to every story being available as material for rendering, to every aspect of the American story.

The example of these two men - of one or the other of these two men - has been followed by nearly every figure who has contributed to American culture ever since. Through everyone that William taught - & he taught everybody, including Gertrude Stein - & everyone who knew & read Henry.”

Plenty of applicable traction in this snip.

Including plenty of hardwired optimism, too, which should always be remembered-remembered-&-the-fifth-of-Novembered is a cognitive bias, or an imbalanced too heavy weighting of emotional bias.

It is all process.

Checkered flags are side effect. And not the point.

And if not side effect, those flags are not legitimate … which is where, for one example, everyone involved in “Flags of Our Fathers” types productions screws the pooch.

And I have not enough sympathy to go around - too many pooch-screwers - & orders of magnitude more seemingly-collaterally screwed bystanders & onlookers &, nowadays, cell phone videographers … recording Daniel Penny, for example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnqs3Y0eLTQ

Sympathy-suicide pacts are fundamental, tho, whether Darwin-Agassiz proved to classroom-satisfaction, or not.

Like the classroom reenactment of fundamental reality-truth scene pitched (that I sent ya’ll’s way awhile back), to a student body that mostly refused the lesson (because they had to, were pre-wired to), “What you’ve got to be before you can be William James is … William James.”

“Who are you?” is the question to be answered.

Seems that Agassiz had a pretty accurate idea of who William James was. But … if he’d been wrong, & WJ had perished … nobody keeps as much track of that side of the ledger; con/firmation book-cooking bias.

But lurking equality notions, & blank slates ready for equation-chalking, are a prominent “American” feature, whatever the ebb & flow of that Birmingham riot-firehose pressure is at any given moment.

Or, if preferred, boot camp, where youngsters are broken down & rebuilt by their $6 million dollar bootstraps … not funny how by the time Johnny Comes Marching Home all that “investment” so often has gone six-sigma LTCM kaput … because, of course, bootcamp, literal & lateral, doesn’t give a damn who you, youse, are. Dismantling, rebuilding, that dam is up to you - if you’ve got that process in you already.

“Be all you can be according to what we need you to be.”

William James’s philosophy & any of “The Stoics” that weren’t dilettantes & LARP’s have it in common that embodied configurations, personalities, mentalities can be sold-transcribed, taught, imposed, emulated & that method acting will eventually have concussed heads enough that amnesia, or dementia (which is the terrible fate that is disappearing Milch), will remove from cognition that the actor is faking it. At which time, the self-made bootstrap polishing comes into its own. “Look ma, top of the world!” Boom. (Jimmy Cagney, White Heat reference.)

The less famous brother who did this one jumped off a bridge:

“There’s trained & there’s untrained.” Boxcars on rails, or something else. Gravity is a kind of rail, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh_KCoQyWwg

I’ve got some take on America-lensed “frontier” from DH Lawrence to offer up later. He makes the “unfolding” forced error, too, but upended apples aren’t the cart.

What's the most well known Gertie Stein bumper sticker? "There's no there there." Except there is almost always some there there. Identifying it’s the thing.

But if I want the Winesaps of my youth, the local hybrid hucksters don't have them.

Looking forward to your interview in a bit.

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andy's avatar

Carving honest faces into the slippery slope that defaults to mytho-narratives & 1000-faced heroes is good honest work “&” play … because the pedagogy of pretend reaps exactly what it sows - & then some.

Beyond counterproductive, for most, are the “logically” positivist traducement-traditions which were, are, have always been sold by to whom for what?

Status quo cui bono propagation & extension, is what.

Anything to not “queer hustles” - up to & including & what the hell, exceeding queering all hustles, & posterity’s too/especially, over the longer time preferences no dishonest faces carved into Rushmores ever prefers … imagine the fellow-traveler outrage that would attend some variant Taliban explosive-effacing those great-men visages? That would get more press, & mileage, than the Lakota outrage over the defacing of the Six Grandfathers.

“The sculpture at Mount Rushmore is built on land that was illegally[14] taken from the Sioux Nation in the 1870s. The Sioux continue to demand return of the land, and in 1980 the US Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the taking of the Black Hills required just compensation, and awarded the tribe $102 million. The Sioux have refused the money, and demand the return of the land. This conflict continues, leading some critics of the monument to refer to it as a "Shrine of Hypocrisy".[15]"

David Milch, @ ~ 8:00:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erzbku4j0TE

***

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Here’s some of DHL’s take on frontiers, in the ‘nation of immigrants’ “American Mind” (except, oops, I misremembered, it’s Carl Ogelsby, not DH Lawrence … his book is out of print, used copies very expensive, but pdf is available):

William Appleman Williams deals with a variation of this

question when he argues that the basis for the long-term

general (or 'pluralist") coalition of the forces of capitalism

(or "plutocracy") with the forces of democracy in American

politics is the constant companionship of the expanding

wilderness frontier. Williams thus stands the Turner

Frontier on its head, correcting it.5 I add that another and

cognate effect of the frontier in American economic de-

velopment was to preserve the entrepreneurial option long

after the arrival of the vast monopoly structures which tend

to consume entrepreneurs. In the states whose political-

economic histories Marx studied, for example, the frontier

was never the factor that it was in America, except as

America itself was Europe's Wild West. The rugged-

individualist self-made rich man, the autonomous man of

power, the wildcatter, began to drop out of sight, to lose

presence as individual, type, and class, with the rise of the

current day computer-centered monopoly-corporate forma-

tions. The tycoon-entrepreneur is of course disappearing as a

type in America too, at least as a political force in national

life. The Hughes empire, at last, has been corporatized. Old

man Hunt is dead. His sons are bringing Harvard Business

School rational bureaucracy to the operation. But that only

makes it all the more curious that political power continued

to emanate from the type and the person, the image and the

reality, the ghost perhaps, of a creature like Hughes as late as

the second victorious presidential campaign of Nixon. Why

should the Cowboy tycoon have persisted so long as a

political force, competent to struggle against the biggest

banking cartels for control of the levers of national power?

As others have argued, the Frontier was a reprieve for

democracy. We may note here that it was also a reprieve for

capitalism as well, whose internal conflicts were constantly

being financed off an endless-seeming input of vast stretches

of natural riches, having no origin in capitalist production.

All that was needed was for the settlers to accept the

genocidal elimination of the native population and a great

deal became possible-the purple mountains, the fruited

plains. And generation after generation of American whites

were able to accept that program. The Indian wars won the

West. The railroads and highways were laid. The country

was resettled by a new race, a new nation.

Energies of expansion consumed the continent in about

two centuries, pushing on to Hawaii and Alaska. There is no

way to calculate the impact of that constant territorial

expansion on the development of American institutions.

There is no way to imagine those institutions apart from the

environment created by that expansion. It is a matter our

standard national hagiography paints out of the picture,

though we make much of the populist-saga aspect of the

pioneering (never "conquering") of the West. How can we

congratulate our national performance for its general

democracy and constitutionalism without taking into

account the background of that constant expansion? We do

not teach our children that we are democrats in order to

expand forever and republicans on condition of an unfrozen

western boundary with unclaimed wilderness. To the extent

that the American miracle of pluralism exists at all, we still

do not know how miraculous it would be in the absence of an

expanding frontier, its constant companion 'till the time of

the Chinese revolution.

The overwar in Asia has its internal American origin in

the native reflex to maintain the Western Frontier on the old

terms and to do so at all cost, since our whole way of life

hinges on the Frontier. What the late-blooming Yankee

liberal critics of the Vietnam war refused to hear and

recognize between the lines of the pro war arguments of the

more philosophical Cowboy hawks was this essential point

about the importance of Frontier expansion in American life

from the beginning.

In the nature of things, the American Frontier continued

to expand with the prosperity it financed. Now, in our

generation, it has brought us to this particular moment of

world confrontation across the Pacific, fully global in scale

for both sides, fully modern in its technological expression

for both sides-the old Westward-surging battle for space

projected onto the stage of superpowers.

The success and then the successful defense from 1950 to

1975 of the Asian revolutionary nationalist campaigns

against further Western dominance in Asia-China, Korea,

Vietnam-means that all that is changed. What was once

true about the space to the west of America is no longer true

and will never be true again. There will never be a time again

when the white adventurer may peer over his western

horizon at an Asia helplessly plunged in social disorganiza-

tion. In terms of their social power to operate as a unified

people and in the assimilation of technology, the Chinese

people are, since 1950, a self-modernizing people, not

colonials any more. And instead of a Wild West, Americans

now have a mature common boundary with other moderns

like ourselves, not savages, not Redskins, not Reds, only

modem people like ourselves in a single modern world. This

is new for us, a new experience for Americans altogether.

Our national transformation from an unbounded to a

bounded state will of course continue to stir the internal

furies. No one interpretation of the event will be able to

establish itself. No one will agree what the end of the

Frontier means, what it will lead to, what one ought to do

about it. But all will agree that it is upon us and past, whether

it is called one thing or another. And now ofter Vietnam, as

though it were not clear enough before, it is apparent beyond

any possibility of doubt that whatever this force of Asian

self-modernization is, whether it is evil or good or beyond

good and evil, it is assuredly not a force that United States

policy-makers can manhandle and manipulate and hold

back through diplomatic chicanery and military force. Even

if it were still advisable for the United States to stop "the

march of Asian communism," if that is what we are really

talking about, it is not possible for the United States to do

that. Look and see: China, Korea, Vietnam.

I have not written this book to say at the end, choose sides

between Cowboy and Yankee for Civil War II. My less

bloody belief is that ordinary people all over the map,

Northeast by Southwest, have a deep, simple, and common

need to oppose all these intrigues and intriguers, whatever

terms one calls them by and however one understands their

development. But this need of course must be recognized,

and that is why I write: to offer an analysis of the situation of

domestic politics from the standpoint of power-elite

collisions taking place at the top, and then, at the end, to suggest that democracy's first response must be to demand a

realistic reconstruction of the assassination of President

Kennedy. To comprehend his murder (as with the murder of

Lincoln) is to comprehend a very basic event in the history of

American government, as well as the crimes that came after

it. The comprehension of these covert political actions is the

absolute precondition of self-government, the first step

toward the restoration of the legitimate state.

More broadly I write to say that we are the American

generations for whom the frontier is the fact that there is no

more frontier and who must somehow begin to decide how

to deal with this.

What shall America do about the loss of its wilderness

frontier? Can we form our nation anew, on new, non-expan-

sionist terms without first having to see everything old swept

violently away? The unarticulated tension around that

question undermined the long-standing Yankee/Cowboy

coalition and introduced, with President Kennedy's assassi-

nation, the current period of violent and irregular movement

at the top of the power hierarchy. It is the precipitous and at

the same time unfocused character of this question of the

closed, lost frontier that has created such a challenge, such a

threat, to traditional American values and institutions, the

threat of a cancerously spreading clandestine state within.

~ The Yankee & Cowboy War, Carl Ogelsby, pgs 9-13

https://ia601307.us.archive.org/15/items/OglesbyCarlTheYankeeAndCowboyWar/Oglesby%2C%20Carl%20-%20The%20Yankee%20and%20Cowboy%20War.pdf

Maybe Don Henley read Ogelsby & that informed his Last Resort lyrics.

Who will provide the grand design?

What is yours and what is mine?

'Cause there is no more new frontier

We have got to make it here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ETN21RZwwI

Now here’s another Henley I think is less truthful, & thereby informs all the Yankee/Cowboy cruxes:

Out of the night that covers me,

      Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

      I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

      Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

      How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.

~ Invictus

And Maximus - the more famous brother did that one - wants to know: “Are you not entertained?!”

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andy's avatar

As I drink my coffee & you Coffee with Mike …:

“Triumph of hope over …”

Tragedy?

Hope does not synonym learning, may well antonym it, but it well telegraphs the near impossibility of transmitting learning from generation to generation. Can’t pass it on, so Hope in The Man From same & diamonds with lots of murky blue-grey carats in them.

I tried to get through Quigley’s tome. Had to set it aside. He recounts the same cyclonic sales funnel dynamic, over & over again; Dry/Depressing underwired cups. But The Man From Hope had high praise For Q’s de-anon’ing of the pragma/tism (rhymes magma) path to the Holy Sea.

Hope, especially, makes for reliable self-fulfilling tragedy-sales.

And contrary the myth, that hopium drug must have escaped Pandora’s box along with the rest of the evils, because that effect is massive, predating Quigley’s coverage, & postdating it, too.

“Supporters imagined … “

Hope Floats, via projectors projecting in theaters (of war) says Hollywood, in its imitations of life.

“Seventy-five million voters… “

Were only ever interested in getting that shoe, Orwell’s boot, on the other foot. No principle, or recognition, beyond that. The state is weaponized footwear & the clay-footed clog(ged)s want the putrid patent on that jaundiced steel-toed leather.

I haven’t V’d the Vendetta (voted) in a very long time. Recognizing at some point that doing so is unethical, immoral, unlawful (“albeit” legal) - I never will again, either.

It’s not that V doesn’t work, its that it is abjectly wrong, unlawful, un-virtuous if you like … & so of course does not, because cannot, work. Planned defectiveness.

Participation is enablement. Collusion. “Advance auction of stolen goods.” (Mencken) Pawns, in their little pawn shops of horrors, fencing each others’ loot that was looted from them.

People in groups are social proof stupid. Elevator pitch is vertical-steep & the gravity is strong enough to synchronize wo/menstrual cycles; Solomon Asch’s to ashes, Dostoevsky to dust:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y0KT0ajZBw

That other V(irtue) hangs alone because when it hangs together it disappears.

(Ben Franklin & the boys were not exemplars of virtue. And/so when their gambit karambit struck lucky in that other king’s armpit, they all got together & sat down to a McDonald’s burger/fries feast. In your face, & fascia, always is a must with the fasces folks.)

Because most people don’t have a chance against what I call the congregation effect; individuals disappear, melt, into Vietcongregations & go marching off to the war of all (us - always shifting) against all (them - always shifting).

One Tin Soldier may ride away, perhaps chastened, but massed tin soldiers are nodes in a super-organism, like locust swarms, like a mumuration of starlinks satellites, bent on conquest. Bent, contorted, twisted in/to conquest … so conquered? Yes. Everything’s gotta be what it is. There is no do, there is only be/ing. ~ Yoda, or something

(Wasn’t Gregor Samsa conquered, even before he metamorphosed into a giant cockroach?)

Responsibility is not taken. It takes.

And if it, responsibility, is merely imposed, it doesn’t take (mostly). That old “you can’t legislate morality” chestnut; like the Volstead Act … which in the dis/guise of good legislated criminality.

To be driven (to responsibility, in this case) does not mean one is driving.

Too much credit (debt) is taken - “I’m the driver!”- on easy lending terms, & not nearly enough responsibility (equity) is sweated, perspired, glowed. Some like to talk up “humility.”

Expand the relations that eventuate in responsibility if you like, as much as you want to, but here, just for simplification, put the terms-freight into “conscientiousness.” That’s a trait. Not a choice.

“Choosing” to go against trait happens. But not consistently, not often, not typically. For every 4 addicts (another grooved trait) that go cold turkey & never fly again, there are at least 96 who cannot do it.

The four do not prove the ninety-six “could have” either. The four prove that cold turkeys was what they already were.

Blank slate’s a blank check to blanket party “the discipline” (remember D’Onofrio, & all his many soap-swinging teachers, in Full Metal Jacket?) that anybody can do anything … no, not true. No matter the incentives, either.

(A fun one that slams the blank slate in the audience face is The Edge. The Competent Man* character, Anthony Hopkins, who is also a billionaire, to round out proving the point, tells the incompetent man, Alec Baldwin, that he’s going to whittle a point on a stick & kill the grizzly bear with it, & teaches/projects to the incompetent man that “what one man can do another can do” but meaning that what he, the Competent Man, says he can & will do the incompetent man can simply decide to do, too. Nope.)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Competent_man&redirect=no

Frontier … virtues. Sent the Ogelsby take on that. (With paragraph breaks - substack de-formatted into solid chunk, for unknown reason.)“‘Pioneering’ - never ‘conquering’ - the manifest destiny conquistadores of americano exceptionalism put it.

Conquered (not tamed, civilized, etc) - the preexisting indigenes were annihilated - by certain types of people, behind whom came certain other types of people, latter cohorts often/typically displacing the prior cohorts … until they are displaced in turn.

(The bison were annihilated. The North-South annihilation. Murder Inc/onquistadores r’us/a!, usa!, usa! …usa’ry. Too much credit-debt. Too many fiat liars.)

(And that rhyme continues: FL got colonized-conquered by people from NY; MT by CA & its satellites. AZ, CO, the Carolinas, on & on, spirochete-waves of taking turns conquistadores.)

Introverts are good people. The best. Photosynthesizers, so to speak.

Extroverts? You mentioned vampires, anti-sunlighters, & not inviting them across the threshold.

Most of what’s called “social” is actually the opposite, George (Costanza).

Or, accepting energy from the sun versus taking energy from “we are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon” … & “I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together” so what’s yours is mine so gimme my “social contract” due.

“Have”… legitimate having is side-effect of right how/be/do.

Again, tho, that inside-job is pre-crafted, that growing medium is already there - or its not. Educating, or even training, it in is not possible.

I’ve tried, in context of very physical & competitive domains, to clue in friendly fellow competitors & it was “no sale” every time.

The losers credo is, will continue to be, that “Winning is everything” - & how its achieved is irrelevant. The mere symbols/trappings of success are what will always matter to most, & especially to so-called “elites” that so many look up to. Cue George C. Scott’s “Patton”: “Americans love a winner & will not tolerate a loser.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS5yfhPGaWE

But Archie Bunker’s rendition is much better (& the Mike Curb Congregation’s “Burning Bridges” works, too):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et1SkVldiHI

James’s pragmatism is expressed by Milch a little differently, but ends justifies means utilitarianism is what it comes down to for most people, & most if not all other creatures, too; “pragmatism.” “I got mine…they got the shaft.”

Dying with toys, & for some, the most toys ~ material symbols - possession, say the possessed, is 9/10ths the law - by which they mean “the legal” ~ is the win, is the raison detre.

Sh/it’s hardwired. Biological imperative/compulsion/addiction. That should be faced & embraced by those lightly sprinkled-among that are wired differently.

But … Don Quixote, Sancho Panza & windmills are heavily selected for, too.

Day before yesterday was “Thanksgiving.” History, gerbil-wheeling in place, says the fare is cannibal pot, all the way.

Coffee is concluded. Switching to Darjeeling.

PS …. Part of the point that AJ Nock makes is that “education” is, must be preceded by educableness. The further point that flows from that pre-condition is that the educable self-educate (even in traditional settings). And from that also flows the shocking to many figure/ground that the educable are already educated, that what seems to show up from outside to inside was in fact latent, already there. “What you have to be before you can be a pole vaulter … is a pole vaulter.”

People want & need to believe (& have been inculcated to believe) they can buy (often on credit …debt) shortcut end-runs around themselves & can thereby traverse from uneducable to educated. The education “market” (racket, scam) is enormous in face of all the demand for shortcut alchemy - but that’s an impossible transformation being hope-sold.

Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan Magazine, “You can have it all.”

You can only have what you already have.

So its fun to think about people being sold what they already have, &/or what they will never have. Heads sellers “win” tails buyers lose.

Planned obsolescence plans in/for the consumer economy: whole lotta fraudiction going on. “Psst - the first one is, or few are, “free,” or cheap, or financed, kid ….

See the proper lightbulb built before the industrial revolution blightbulb went off (mass production & mass obsolescence are obverse/reverse of the same fiat coin); the consumers eat the junk & the “producers” eat the consumers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IMjamIX9Jk

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Matt Smith @ Crisis Investing's avatar

Kelly,

If you value what Mike does, it helps to support him. He’s doing great and it’s hard to make ends meet doing what he does.

If you can’t afford to support him, that’s ok and understandable. But you are technically a freeloader. You are receiving benefit (according to you) but not reciprocating.

I don’t need economic support, freeload all you want from any of my public work. But if you can afford to throw a little money Mike’s way by subscribing - it helps a good man doing good work. If not, that’s ok too. Most of us are just doing the best we can.

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