come_to_think | Entries tagged with art

Evidently, if the appeal to nature is foolishness, it is natural foolishness, and as such deserves some attempt at sympathetic understanding. A notable attempt at a balanced view is provided by Bertrand Russell. In "What I Believe" he says

There is a certain attitude about the application of science to human life with which I have some sympathy, though I do not, in the last analysis, agree with it. It is the attitude of those who dread what is "unnatural."... I think there is a mixture of truth and falsehood in the admiration of "nature" which it is important to disentangle. To begin with, what is "natural"? Roughly speaking, anything to which the speaker was accustomed in childhood.... Clothes and cooking are too ancient to be denounced by most of the apostles of nature, though they object to new fashions in either.... [T]hose who preach "nature" are inconsistent, and one is tempted to regard them as mere conservatives.

Nevertheless, there is something to be said in their favor.... [I]n the absence of knowledge, unexpected harm may be done by a new departure from nature; but when the harm has come to be understood it can usually be remedied by some new artificiality. As regards our physical environment and our physical means of gratifying our desires, I do not think the doctrine of "nature" justifies anything beyond a certain experimental caution in the adoption of new expedients. Clothes, for instance, are contrary to nature and need to be supplemented by another unnatural practice --- namely, washing --- if they are not to bring disease. But the two practices together make a man healthier than the savage who eschews both.

There is more to be said for "nature" in the realm of human desires. To force upon a man, woman, or child a life which thwarts their strongest impulses is both cruel and dangerous; in this sense, a life according to "nature" is to be commended with certain provisos. Nothing could be more artificial than an underground electric railway, but no violence is done to a child's nature when it is taken to travel in one; on the contrary, almost all children find the experience delightful. Artificialities which gratify the desires of ordinary human beings are good, other things being equal. But there is nothing to be said for ways of life which are artificial in the sense of being imposed by authority or economic necessity....

To the charming example of children in subway cars one might, in our day, add the potent one of children using computers.

In "Scylla and Charybdis, or Communism and Fascism", tho, he loses his balance:

...Where living beings are concerned, and most of all in the case of human beings, spontaneous growth tends to produce certain results, and others can be produced only by means of a certain stress and strain. Embryologists may produce beasts with two heads, or with a nose where a toe should be; but such monstrosities do not find life very pleasant.... It is possible to cut shrubs into the shape of peacocks, and by a similar violence a similar distortion can be inflicted upon human beings. But the shrub remains passive, while the man...remains active, if not in one sphere then in another. The shrub cannot pass on the lesson in the use of shears which the gardener has been teaching, but the distorted human being can always find humbler human beings upon whom he can wield smaller shears. The inevitable effects of artificial moulding upon human beings are to produce either cruelty or listlessness, perhaps both in alternation....

...The ultimate psychological argument for democracy and for patience is that an element of free growth, of go as you please and untrained natural living, is essential if men are not to become misshapen monsters....

I fancy there are better arguments for democracy & patience than that. One might retort that nature can produce monstrosities without the help of embryologists; that they need not find life any less pleasant than their normal parents do, and may even be the beginnings of new species; and that we can hardly avoid artificial molding of human beings, which are (as Skinner points out) the most domesticated species of all. In this respect even the earlier passage is somewhat incoherent. People's "strongest impulses" are not necessarily the natural ones.

Mention of children, however, does bring up one fact about human nature that is of great moral importance --- tho more for the problems it creates than for the guidance it provides. That is the fact that as infants we need to be taken care of, and so as a species we have to be provided with instincts for caring and for being cared for. We share that program, of course, with other mammals & with birds, but we have carried it to an extreme. A vast range of habits, including especially those that enable us to live together, is left to upbringing. As Isaac Asimov ("No Connection") imagines an intelligent bear describing us, we are "gregarious without being social": We have an inborn need to live with each other, but no inborn ways to do it. That means, in particular, that the notion of liberty has to be reconstructed in each individual over a period of years. (From the way some libertarians talk, you might think they had hatched & walked away on all eight legs.)

IMO nature deserves far more respect in esthetics than in ethics. It is odd that people tend to think of esthetics in connection with art; it seems to me that most of the ugliness in the world is due to art (e.g., make-up, motel signs, Mylar balloons, newspaper advertising supplements, rock and roll, small-business storefronts, and station breaks on vulgar radio stations), and most of the beauty is due to nature. Except for music, I see little use in trying to create beauty; it is more important to find it & try to avoid destroying it.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Most recently, rounds

Some of the following first appeared in the defunct apa GAPS & on the Mudcat.

Reading: How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music by Elijah Wald (Oxford U.P., 2009). The subtitle gives the actual subject; I dare say the main title was tacked on by a promoter at Oxford in the hope of selling some more copies by making a scandal. Bought, in December 2011, at a lecture by the author at MIT. The lecture was part of a course (open to the public) in folk music, about which he knows a great deal; but I was attracted to the book because his tastes & interests are much broader, and I hoped that it would contain some data that might check my own opinions on its subject. Data, not arguments: my own tastes & interests are so deviant that I cannot hope anyone else would countenance their existence to the extent of presenting arguments. (My subhuman response to the arts is documented at http://come-to-think.livejournal.com/28660.html, https://come-to-think.dreamwidth.org/24249.html.)

Briefly, in my book popular music peaked about 1900 and became vile about 1940. Jazz was the beginning of the decline --- but of course, the best of anything includes the beginning of the decline. The fact that one cannot say such a thing without sounding patronizing shows what is wrong with the rest of you, and with reading histories. The value of a piece of music is determined, not by its place in the history of music, but by its contribution to the pleasure & edification of the performer & listener --- most particularly, of me. (Jazz got its start, innocently, as music to wait for whores by. By the time I was born, the gangsters had gotten hold of it & turned it into music to beat up whores by.)

The deviance of my tastes is easily accounted for: I was not brought up in the popular culture. I learned my first songs from my mother, at age 2, and they were a great variety, from the various stages of her life (b. 1908). In childhood (1940s), we did have the Hit Parade on the radio, but that was not as important as Burl Ives, whom we had both on the radio and on records. From 1950 to 1954 I was in a boarding school in Vermont that forbade private radios & phonographs and that had a vigorous official tradition in classical music & a vigorous unofficial one in folk music. So by the end of adolescence my mind was permanently warped. Also, in case you want to psychoanalyze my hostility to mass entertainment, you might start with the fact that my father was a screenwriter.

Alas, the book merely confirms & informs my prejudices. It tells in detail a story whose outlines I already knew. In the 19th century a hit was a song that sold a lot of sheet music, so that people who liked it could play & sing it themselves. Sales, even of hits, were modest & unpredictable. Then, in the 1890s, "After the Ball" became unprecedentedly popular (with the help, it seems, of John Philip Sousa at the Chicago World's Fair), and the smell of the money attracted all manner of vermin to the business. It couldn't have happened to a nicer song, and Sousa's role in the process is tragic in that he himself was a vigorous opponent of it. (Wald compares him to Pete Seeger!)

I found the later parts of the book tiresome, not only because I do not care for their subject, but because Wald takes for granted an assumption that I find dubious & in need of defense: that commercial statistics (record & ticket sales, ratings, etc.) are a good index of listeners' tastes & entertainers' accomplishments. He mentions the payola scandal disdainfully (how silly to be shocked at what had always been going on!), without taking note of the abiding scandal it displayed: the market is dominated by cowards --- people who care more about choosing like other people than about anything they might choose. (They do not have to be anywhere near a majority to dominate the market. As Norbert Wiener sagely observed, "where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves".) If they had more self-respect, plugging a song would be profitless, and the charts (if people bothered to compile them) might have looked different. Consequently I have trouble taking the parade of actual sales figures seriously.

There is no reason to suppose, either, that the size of one's audience is a measure of how much good one is doing, even if "good" is defined as some increasing function of individual preferences, with no intrusion of morality. The marginal individual who is induced to buy into an audience might well have received more satisfaction in another, smaller audience. It is true that large audiences sometimes support valuable works that require great labor, but no sane person would confine himself to such fare. For particular persons at particular times & places, the best audience size may be zero (whistling or masturbating), one (singing a lullaby), or some other small number (singing rounds, playing bridge, proposing a toast). The tendency of the market to horn in on such pleasures deserves all the resentment & resistance that is owed to depravity.

From my point of view, the great engine of degeneration in popular music has been the microphone. First people learned that they could croon into it (the Gangster Sleaze era), and then they learned that they could yell into it (the Mechanized Tantrum era). But, as we have seen, the microphone only set the seal on the alienation of production from consumption of music that was already underway for economic reasons. Already, around the turn of the century, Chesterton was complaining that men no longer sang around the table, they sat & listened to one man sing, "for the absurd reason that he could sing better". That's the spirit! It's not just oldfashioned music that I like, but especially low-class oldfashioned music. "Back to Bach!" Mencken used to say. Well, back to Bach, by all means, say I, but even more, back to campfire songs, to Gilbert & Sullivan, to dirty blues & Welsh hymns, to beer-hall choruses & barber-shop quartets, to vaudeville & music hall, to Sousa marches & Strauss waltzes, to Child ballads & Christmas carols, to dominant sevenths & tonics! Probably 9/10 of the songs that have ever been written were written in my lifetime --- & possibly 1/10 of the songs I have bothered to learn.

There are always exceptions, and I will stipulate that I own many Marlene Dietrich records. I suppose that is mostly due to the charm of her foreignness & to her making fun of the conventions of sexuality, but it may be partly Oedipal --- my mother was tall & blond. I do wish, tho, that I had a way to filter out those slimy whiny grubby thumpy orchestras. Also, come to think, my Fugs record was classified as "rock" in the collection at Twin Oaks, but I don't believe it: they seem to be having too much fun. If real rock bands are enjoying themselves, then so are professional football teams.

Another of Wald's accomplishments was to complete Dave Van Ronk's posthumous memoir (The Mayor of MacDougal Street, 2005). A repellent tho not surprising story appears on pp. 92--93. Several of Van Ronk's Folkways records had (to his observation) been selling pretty well, but resulted in only derisory royalty payments. He was bitching about that to his lawyer, who volunteered to fire off a nasty letter to Moe Asch, threatening to sue. Presently, sure enough, Van Ronk received a check representing at least a much larger fraction of what he was owed. He was afraid he might have offended Asch, but the next time they met, Asch merely said "So, you're finally getting smart". So, the folkways of Folkways were the same as those of the rest of show business: lie & say "So I lied", cheat & say "Sue me".

I have listened to the Smithsonian's Web page on Moe Asch. It & the rest of Van Ronk's book both confirm that impression. I did not like seeing Van Ronk excuse Asch on the ground that he was a soft touch for small loans. (I'll bet he wasn't terribly fussy about repayment either.) Be generous with the people you've swindled; with a little luck, they'll feel they owe you something. Reminds me a little of what I've read about the relationships between pimps & whores --- and also about the way professional poker players manage their suckers.

Likewise, earlier in the book (pp. 188--189) we read:

John [Hurt] never had a bad word to say about anyone, not even people who really did deserve a few bad words. We were sitting around one night, and someone brought up [...] Tom Hoskins, the guy who had rediscovered him.[...] Hoskins had signed John to a contract where he earned a ridiculous percentage of John's wages, owned his publishing, and controlled all his business, and John actually had to go to court to get out from under his thumb. Naturally, we were filled with righteous indignation, and I was cursing Hoskins up hill and down dale, and John was just sitting there[...]. Finally, I paused[...]. And John said: "Well, you know...if it weren't for Tom, I'd still be chopping cotton in Mississippi." No way to argue with that.

No way to argue with it, in that the bargain was within what game theorists call the negotiation set: it was Pareto optimal (it could not be made still better for either party without making it worse for the other), and it was better than the status quo ante for both parties. Nevertheless, there are ways to avoid approving of such bargains, and I am happy to know that Van Ronk & some judge happened on one or two of them.

Of course, if you are a communist, as Van Ronk & I used to be, you ought to argue that talents do not belong either to their possessor or to their discoverer, and any bargain over the division of their proceeds is illegitimate: They belong to the community (perhaps by the grace of God), and the possessor will be happiest, & the community best served, if they are exercised for the pleasure of giving pleasure. It is possible to take that attitude, and people who manage to do so are much to be admired; but there seems to be no way to institutionalize it or to teach it to children --- least of all with the instruments of government.

Asch's video does, however, argue against one favorite notion of mine, concerning the origin of the vileness of entertainment business relations (as described also in other books such as What Makes Sammy Run?, The Love Nest (Lardner), & The Revolt of Mamie Stover; essays such as Mencken's "Valentino" & Calvin Trillin's "You Don't Ask, You Don't Get" (New Yorker, 25 Feb. 1991, pp. 72--81); and even movies such as Ace in the Hole, A Face in the Crowd, & Once upon a Time). I would like to blame it on mass entertainment, by which I mean entertainment in which the chief measure of success is the size of the audience. To maximize the audience (& thus sales, or ratings leading to advertising revenue), it is no doubt helpful, and perhaps even necessary, to produce something that large numbers of people will enjoy. But it is not sufficient. People have different tastes, and are in different moods at different times. In order to drive them into a huge demand herd while supply is short, extraneous motives are required. The most important of these, in our era, are peer pressure & intergenerational hostility, that is to say, fear & hate. Those are emotions we cannot escape, and devising harmless ways of enjoying them is a public service; but as motives they are base, and the business of exploiting them is bound to attract bad people & make them worse. No wonder, etc., etc.

That, clearly, does not account for Moe Asch. Of course, he wanted to sell records, but that was only a means to an end, which was to record things he thought were worth recording. In that, he resembles, not a movie mogul, but a book publisher of the old, respectable sort. Get the stuff printed, and then, even if it sells very slowly, it will get its chance in the long run. People with that attitude can be immensely valuable in distorting the market to mollify some of its vices. But one would think they would also be moved to do without lying, cheating, & stealing. Well, maybe Mr Asch was so moved, until the advent of the Folk Scare put visions of sugar plums in his head. Or maybe he had to make obeisance to the foul canons of his profession in order to preserve his self-respect. Stranger things have happened. But most likely, I am missing something, as I generally am when I try to think about human beings.

In the mainstream there is no need to make excuses. Let us now dispraise famous men. Here is Pete Hamill, in "Sinatra" (1980), in Piecework (1996):

     One rainy evening in the winter of 1974, I was home alone when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, looking out at the wet street, and heard one of the most familiar voices of the century.
     It was Frank Sinatra.
     "What are you doing?"
     "Reading a book," I said.
     "Read it tomorrow. We're at Jilly's. Come on over."
     He hung up. I put the book down. I didn't know Sinatra well, but despite all the rotten things I'd read about him, I liked him a lot and was sometimes touched by him.[...]

Mr Hamill took no notice that he had just added to the corpus of rotten things one may read about Frank Sinatra. I have never experienced precisely the social interaction he recounts, but I believe that among decent people it goes something like this:

     "Hello, Pete. Are you busy?"
     "Not particularly. Why?"
     "Well, I'm at Jilly's with some friends of mine, and your name came up. I wondered if you'd like to join us."

Now look at how Sinatra does it. He cannot invite a friend out for a drink without turning it into a command performance, preceded by a determination of his friend's activity so that he, Sinatra, can judge its importance. He hangs up without even giving his friend time to say "Yes, sir".

As noted, Hamill was not offended. He is part of the same racket as Sinatra, on a lower (print) level --- several best sellers, a spell as editor in chief of the New York Daily News. He is probably proud to have been ordered around by Sinatra (as Dwight Macdonald was proud to have been insulted by Trotsky). The two of them are entitled to their folkways. But equally, I, from the vantage of my one-thread fringe, am entitled to judge that the creation of such monsters as Sinatra, and the holding of them up as objects of admiration & envy, is a high price to pay for his artistry, which I gather involved the ability to seem as if he didn't have to breathe. I have to put up with such people, and what is more, I ought to have to put up with them, for liberty's sake; but I do not have to pretend to respect them.

I think this would be a better world --- better entertained, and morally better --- if it somehow became extremely difficult to make a living in the arts & entertainment, and flat out impossible to get rich. I have no scheme for bringing that about. However, as old technology facilitated the massification of entertainment, I have some faint hope that new technology will help undo it. It is refreshing to notice that there is now a substantial subculture in which "Hollywood" is a curse word. The Internet not only subverts property interests in entertainment, but also helps people who are interested in hospitality & conviviality find each other. To the confusion of our enemies!

Current Mood: Jittery
Current Music: Most recently, Dave Van Ronk

At http://come-to-think.livejournal.com/24283.html (here) I recorded my peculiar anesthesia to art. What seems to be missing is its link with emotion that most people take for granted. As a result, most writing about art is baffling to me---the more so in that a great deal of such writing is open to a legitimate suspicion of bluffing, which I am badly equipped to evaluate.

Here, for example, is an aside in an essay I greatly admire---Mencken's obituary of Valentino:

Was the fame of Beethoven any more caressing and splendid than the fame of Valentino? To you and me, of course, the question seems to answer itself. But what of Beethoven? He was heard upon the subject, viva voce, while he lived, and his answer survives, in all the freshness of its profane eloquence, in his music. Beethoven, too, knew what it meant to be applauded. Walking with Goethe, he heard something that was not unlike the murmur that reached Valentino through his hospital window. Beethoven walked away briskly....

Now, I can well imagine that walking away briskly, in context, might express the emotion of contempt for fame. But how the devil can music (I mean, as I suppose Mencken did, music without words) do that? When I listen to instrumental music, the chief emotion I feel is sympathy with the fun the composer & the performers must have had in making it come out right. That is no doubt amiable, but clearly it is not, primarily, what Beethoven had in mind. Maybe he really did have contempt for fame in mind. It would be absurd to discount this kind of talk, which is common among people I respect. Evidently I am missing something big.

However, I have to draw a line somewhere. Here is a quotation, in the New York Review, from somebody named Robert Hughes about some pictures by somebody named Roy Lichtenstein:

They are the closest thing to the only kind of life drawing one can imagine Lichtenstein doing, an image of a blank white page. They acquire poignancy from the fact that they are empty. One gazes at them frontally, as at a real mirror, but nothing shows up in their superficial depths. The spectator is a phantom. These icy, imperturbable tondos and ovals may say more about the nature of Lichtenstein's imagination than anything he has painted since.

Poseur Alert, as Mr Andrew Sullivan would say. Superficial depths! Surely I am missing nothing by ignoring such stuff. I have not even bothered to look up "tondos".

In painting & music, at least, such pretensions are confined to places where their admirers can pretend to admire them. In architecture, on the contrary, they get to sock every passer-by in the eye. Here is an appreciation, from the Boston Globe, of an ugly, expensive-looking building at MIT called the Stata Center, which opened in 2004:

The Stata is always going to look unfinished. It also looks as if it's about to collapse. Columns tilt at scary angles. Walls teeter, swerve, and collide in random curves and angles. Materials change wherever you look: brick, mirror-surface steel, brushed aluminum, brightly colored paint, corrugated metal. Everything looks improvised, as if thrown up at the last moment. That's the point. The Stata's appearance is a metaphor for the freedom, daring, and creativity of the research that's supposed to occur inside it.

Needless to say, it won prizes, and the roof leaks.

In contrast, there is a pair of soothing buildings (62 & 64) that were built in 1925 and are used as student residences. I pass by one of them once a month on Ames St. on my way to the sailing pavilion for the chantey sing. They are rectangular with some rhythmic excursions. The only ugly thing about them is the air conditioners in the windows, but those seem to be disappearing, so perhaps central AC has been installed. If I had been given the Stata job (God forbid!), I would have scaled them up.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Most recently, ZZ Top

From my old handwritten journal:

Tuesday afternoon 11 April [1972]

East Setauket [Long Island, N.Y., where I was visiting some friends on my travels between a failed commune and a successful one]

I got up very late this morning. It is a gloomy day outside, & still cold (when will spring come?). Across the living room from me, partly obscured by the glare from the window behind me, is a reproduction of a painting of a girl sitting with one hand bridging her chin & her lips. She looks as if she were made of golden haze. Renoir, I thought when I first saw it, & got up & walked over & looked at the corner; and so it was. Where could I have possibly learned that? I have never been interested in art. Only, one spring vacation at Caltech (1958?) I read thru an excellent history of painting that I had borrowed from a friend whose name I have forgotten. It was my dinner reading for a couple of weeks, & it made a strong impression on me, tho all I remember now is the impression, & cutting up slices of pineapple on the lid of an old cookie-box & eating them while I read.

The impression was: "Art" was once the general name for what we now call engineering or technology (in fact techne = ars). The particular art of making effective 2-dimensional images of 3-dimensional objects progressed extremely slowly until the Renaissance, when the practitioners assimilated the necessary geometrical insights. The results were spectacular & became fashionable among wealthy persons as a means of ostentatious amusement & decoration --- one that was capable of considerable refinement & therefore particularly appealing to the intelligent & those who wished to think themselves so. The guild of painters became rich & its morale became self-sustaining, so that artists became emboldened to put their own & their peers' judgement above their patrons'. Refinement of technique & appreciation became an end in itself, & painting became one (the chief) of the "fine arts" as opposed to the "useful arts", which (in this century) lost the name of "art" altogether.

In the meantime, mere fidelity succumbed to tedium & increasingly successful automation. So (with great struggle) the artists gradually relaxed their commitment to mimic the ordinary input to the human retina. As with the earlier increase in the variety of permissible intervals in music,*
----------------------------------------------------------------------
*Indeed, this whole line of thought recalls Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus, which I read with great enjoyment in 1958. [June 1973]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
the effect was at first enrichment; but each successive relaxation produced less enrichment & left a shorter time till boredom, so that for the last 50 yr we have had only fads & solemn self-parody.

Imagine a man with a gigantic checkerboard with 10^6 squares, and no checkers on it. All he can do is stare at it. If he has a few checkers, he can make a few patterns on the board & move them around. With thousands of checkers he can make complicated pictures & even write treatises about them. Every new checker he is allowed to put on the board multiplies the number of patterns available to him --- until half the squares are filled. From then on, he can only make "photographic negatives" of patterns that were already accessible. When the board is nearly filled, all he can do is make little patterns of the unfilled squares & move them around. When it is all filled, allhe can do is stare at it. (Remember thy creator in the days of thy youth: Thy creator is death.)

I am writing this partly because the feelings of a person about a subject he does not take seriously are seldom recorded in detail or with much sensitivity. There is a lot in print by those who have been offended or enriched by Renoir's accomplishment, & very little by those like me from whom he can barely get a sentimental glance on a dull day. And yet, it is clear that uninterested people must have quite an influence on art --- less than on politics, say, but a good deal more than on science. Therefore I am providing this deposition of a philistine.

*

All the decorations in my apartment are sentimental (pictures & gifts of people who have been kind to me, mementos of scientific subjects, etc.). I don't have much wall space for big things, tho, so I have a place next to my desk that is rigged to put up a poster from my collection, which I change on the first of the month. It recently occurred to me that, in view of the above, Renoir's painting would qualify. I had only a little trouble finding it on the Web. Its name is "Portrait of a Girl (in Thought)", tho the parenthesis is variously translated. Weirdly, one of the Amazon vendors offers it for 1 cent (shipping & handling, $4.99; total, $5.00). I ordered it, and afterward wondered if the weirdness betokened a scam; I actually worried about it to Amazon in email, and received an unresponsive answer. So far, however, all that has been charged to my credit card is the $5.00, and the article arrived yesterday in a mailing tube. It is not very big (11x17 in.), so it occurred to me to start a new art location on the wall over my bed, which by chance is already rigged for hanging pictures, on account of the catenary of a disused audio cable. I have a painting of my father's that will fit in the same queue.

However, the Renoir looks wrong. It looks stretched in the vertical direction, so that the girl is too thin & not as pretty. To check that impression, I found three other reproductions on the Web (none of them cropped) & measured them on my screen. The ratios of height to width were 1.33, 1.40, and 1.26 --- substantially smaller, indeed, than the value 17/11=1.55 for my print, but differing significantly among themselves. So it seems the poster people stretched the image to fit a standard 11x17-in. sheet; but it also seems that other vendors perform similar operations, and mine merely overdid it, whence the drastic reduction in price.

Back to square 1.

Current Mood: sentimenal
Current Music: Most recently, Fish singing Kipling

I could go on for quite a while listing arithmetical statements that I believe, but I suppose it would be more exciting to mention things that I believe and most people don't:

This would be a better world to live & die in if suicide could be made the most common cause of death.

The stock market has very little to do with the operation of market capitalism.

The economists, who have taught the biologists so much, would do well to learn something from them: that successful systems accumulate parasites. Among the vilest institutional evils in the rich countries are the promotion industry (parasitic on the market) and the drug laws (parasitic on the government). Right, shmight! Left, shmeft! Markets and governments are both too powerful; far more of what people do for each other should be done for fun, without the mediation of either.

To understand oppression the second thing one should always do is blame the victim; the taboo on doing so is stultifying. In particular, people who let themselves be influenced by television advertising are asking to be swindled, and by thus creating a market for swindlers they poison the entire body politic.

Mass entertainment (by which I mean entertainment in which the chief measure of success is the size of the audience) is a morally depraved activity. In order to maximize the size of an audience, one must make use of fashion and intergenerational hostility -- that is, of fear and hate. Those are base motives, and the business of appealing to them is bound to attract bad people and make them worse.

Many undoubted evils are irremediable. (It must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!) In particular, the problems posed by ethnic pest zones such as the Middle East and the Balkan peninsula are insoluble.

Neither art nor nature is a moral category; they are merely the interior & exterior of the region that has been altered by deliberate human activity; they have no more moral content than indoors & outdoors. In particular, to call behavior or food or rights natural is not to recommend them.

That should do to go on.

Current Mood: angry

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