And a cynic to boot

Not only am I an extremist, but I am also a Cynic.  

Today most understand cynicism as a sort of negative selfishness, but it has a much different, richer meaning in philosophy.  

Cynicism was a school of philosophy that came after Socrates but which preceded the Stoics (and in some ways led to Stoicism).  Although not entirely clear, the consensus is generally that the word cynic takes, as its root, the Greek word for dog (Baby Fatt did not take Greek, and so I'm unsure about this, but I did take Latin, and the Latin word for dog is canis).  The cynics were noted to live a "dog-like" lifestyle, eschewing materialism and petty self-involvement. They believed that the only good was virtue, and that virtue could only be attained through total self-sufficiency.  Anything else was frivolity, and they hated frivolity with a passion.  

The most famous of the cynics was probably Diogenes of Sipone, who wandered the public square in daytime with a lit lantern.  When asked why the lantern in the midst of the day, he would answer that he was searching for an honest man.  Diogenes is reputed to have also lived in the public square--eating, defecating, masturbating--doing everything in public because he had nothing to hide (he may have taken it a bit far, but there's something to be said for purity of principle).  Imagine a radical homeless person who would eat your garbage while berating you for your petty idiotic lifestyle--that's a cynic.  

And so when Baby Fatt cuts through the obfuscation--the idiotic sophistry--with which most in our time defend their frivolous, petty, pseudo-spiritual value systems, he's being a cynic.  When he lays bare the nonsensical ideas that form the worldview of most of our fellow citizens, then he's being a cynic.  When he refuses to manifest any form or sense of "respect" whatsoever for the dolts who wonder our modern public square, trumpeting their self-righteousness while selling their souls to Citibank et. al., then he's being a total asshole cynic.  

So let me just say to one and all:  you're welcome.  

Baby Fatt is an extremist

I was labeled an extremist recently.  After posting a comment to a blog post about the recent efforts of religious fundamentalists to oppose legal civil unions for same-sex couples (in which I referred to these fundamentalists as 'troglodytes'), the writer of the blog post replied that I was an extremist.  

After thinking about it for awhile, I think that the blogger was correct:  I am an extremist.  

To seek out the truth of things without recourse to superstition makes one an extremist.  To examine data in order to determine what evidence they provide as to the structure of the world makes one an extremist.  To seek--like Diogenes of Sinope wandering the marketplace in daytime with a lantern--the honest person who lives an examined life makes one an extremist.  

Those who believe in magic and miracles, who worship an anthropomorphic god who hears their prayers--these people are reasonable moderates.  Those who believe that a wafer in their mouth becomes the flesh of a man who died two thousand years ago--hey, what could be more reasonable or moderate than that?  And the belief that when we die, if we say our prayers just right, then we go to a heaven where the streets are paved with gold to live for all eternity (cosmology not withstanding)--absolutely nothing bizarre about that belief, right?  

Religionists rule the world, and yet see themselves as persecuted.  By whom?  By the minority of people like Baby Fatt who see in the world that which it actually is, not what ancient prophets and madmen wanted it to be.  Religionists are persecuted by truth-tellers, and their strategy is always the same:  to label the truth-tellers "extremists", and the truth they tell cynicism.  

So, yes, Baby Fatt is an extremist, and a cynic to boot.  

Nick Hughes hung himself

Today it was announced that Nicholas Hughes hung himself last week.  I've always felt that those who suicide are cowards and worse--that in their ugly narcissism they effectively take a big dump on those they leave behind.  Suicide as an insult to one's loved ones.  

I think it's different with Nick Hughes though.  He carried a burden that I can scarcely begin to imagine--he was the son of two of the greatest poets of the modern era, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.  But in addition to the burden of having two such notable parents, his family also seemed just plain cursed.  

His mother committed suicide while he and his sister were napping in the next room.  Later, his stepmother murdered his half-sister before killing herself.  What does that sort of childhood legacy do to one?  

I never saw his mother as many did--as some kind of proto-feminist who suicided in response to her husband's onerous patriarchy.  Not that her husband wasn't an onerous sort--it appears he was pretty much a total jerk in many ways.  But it always seemed to me that Plath's suicide had more to do with her own love affair with death, her obsession with the idea of death.  

In some ways the confessional school of poetry of the post-war period (Plath, Lowell, Sexton) was the logical culmination of Romanticism.  If Romanticism was the celebration of the imagining consciousness, then it makes a strange kind of sense that its terminus would be the actualization of the extinguishing of one's own consciousness:  suicide as the act of ultimate power over one's own consciousness.  Reading Plath's work I've always been struck by the almost sexual way she seems to imagine death ('its soft feathery turnings').  Plath suicided because she had to, she just could not say "no" to it any longer.  Whatever internal demons her suicide finally quieted, it was a terrible thing to do to her children, and for that there is no excuse (not even patriarchy will do).  

Ted--one of my very favorite poets--struggled with Sylvia's poisonous legacy all his life, and all while trying to raise their children.  He was condemned for years by those who blamed him for Sylvia's suicide, and essentially stalked by all manner of morbid weirdos who were obsessed by Plath.  His work in many ways was overshadowed by hers, and yet his poetry was truly wonderful.  

According to the papers Nick was a biologist who lived in Alaska.  He apparently lived a very quiet life.  But he also must have been very troubled, and finding out about his suicide today suddenly made one of Ted's later poems more sensible to me, particularly the last few stanzas.  From "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother"

"So leave her.

Let her be their spoils.  Go wrap

Your head in the snowy rivers

of the Brooks Range.  Cover

Your eyes with the writhing airs

Off the Nullarbor Plains.  Let them 

Jerk their tail-stumps, bristle and vomit

Over their symposia.

Think her better

Spread with holy care on a high grid

For vultures

To take back into the sun.  Imagine

These bone-crushing mouths the mouths

That labour for the beetle

Who will roll her back into the sun."

Nick's troubles are gone now.  It's really quite sad. 

Wendy and Lucy

I saw "Wendy and Lucy" tonight.  Easily the best movie I've seen so far this year.  Beautifully acted and directed.  A portrait of what it's like to be a have-not in the land of plenty.  Truth is, most of us are one or two paychecks away from living in our cars.  Our whole materialistic yuppie dream is just smoke and mirrors and credit cards.  

Baby Fatt drives a truck that's paid for, and which has a camper shell on the back. I always figured that if everything goes to shit I can live out of it.  One never knows these days...one never knows. 

Why the Tao is so difficult

The world is in constant flux--a principal likely understood since the beginning of imagination but first written down in the modern era by Heraclitus.  This flux, which I refer to as Chaos, is all the world that there is.  It is the sum of all that exists, as well as the fact of existence itself: it is Tao. 

As human beings (sentient organisms on a small planet) Tao is fundamentally beyond our ken.  We can never truly apprehend or appreciate it.  Even trying to "understand" Tao is per se a pushing against Tao.  The best we can hope for is to bring ourselves into harmony with it--to accept and affirm our lives as they present themselves. 

And yet, of course, bringing ourselves into harmony with Tao is the most impossible thing of all.  Nietzsche understood better than all before or since that human nature is will to power.  We constantly strive to take power over our environment--over the people in it, over nature, over all the things the limitations of our being allow us to perceive.  Thus, we fight Tao at every turn, and are constantly enraged that the world never satisfies or fulfills us. 

For example, one manifestation of our will to power is desire.  We seek that which we perceive ourselves not to have.  To desire some thing (a material possession, a relationship, spiritual salvation) is to make it an object and place it outside of ourselves.   By objectifying--desiring--we remove that thing (the 'object of our desire') from within ourselves and ensure that we will never know or have it.  Taoism reminds us that it was within us all along, and was only separated from us by our desire for it. 

That is why the Tao is so difficult.   

A small victory for civilization

Today the governor of New Mexico (to which state Baby Fatt happily decamped after being run out of Texas by certain neo-fascist police elements) signed legislation that abolishes the death penalty.  Good for Governor Richardson, and good for civilization.  

Back in Texas, meanwhile, they have a criminal justice system that's a veritable death factory.  Poor people go in one end, and corpses emerge from the other.  Some of the corpses are likely guilty of heinous crimes, but just as surely some were guilty of nothing more than being poor and in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Texans don't care, they just revel in the blood of it all.  

The Aztec empire had nothing on Texas.  

There will be blood

The State of New Mexico currently has a bill before the governor that would outlaw the death penalty.  Nothing brings out the whackos like a threat to their will to vengeance.  What's so interesting of course is that so many of these whackos consider themselves to be paragons of morality and virtue.  

Religion is the opposite of virtue--it is the vilest form of degeneracy imaginable.  But I will give this much to religious fundamentalists:  they have the courage of their convictions, unlike those mamby pamby wetpants who argue for some muddled-down, weak-willed version of Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam.  

Those who fashion themselves to be moderate (fill in the blank with your favorite religion) refuse to accept the scripture that is the basis of their faith.  Fundamentalists are true to scripture, and actually believe and accept as inerrant truth the ravings of some desert madman scribbled down a few millennia ago.  And what these desert madmen most wanted was to bring down the vengeance of supernatural justice Texas-style onto the asses of the heathen who derided them. 

But as I said, at least the fundamentalists have the courage of their convictions.  The moderate or progressive religionists what it both ways--to believe in scripture sufficiently to get them into heaven while not having to sign onto any of the more unsavory aspects that accrue to whatever "good book" they purport to believe (you know, stoning homosexuals to death, decapitating infidels, stuff like that).  

Most of the evil that humans inflict upon one another has at its core religion.  Out of terror (fear) of what happens when one dies (answer: nothing) people choose a sick worldview that allows them salvation (streets of gold, seventy-two virgins, etc) while also giving them the opportunity to deal death and destruction to any who dare to disagree.  

And yet these same sick people would label Baby Fatt to be an extremist.