Saturday, January 19, 2013

Not Things: Words on W. C. Williams’ Birthday


James Watson once answered that he couldn't lose what he didn't have,
The callow questioner brought up gaining the world and losing his soul,
Candy taken by a famous self,
his answer dutifully applauded by an audience not experienced in enthusiasm.
Watson is the kind of ass who could look in any optical instrument
and see his pasty face in place of any universe.

And a university poet whines out his choice to not live,
inactual stasis, the convenience of faculty life, his pale blues not dead because not lived,
left with insipidly longing for a movie desideratum a billion ad men could have written.

But we here in love, would be ridiculous for watching.
Paltry to onlookers. No penetration, roles, danger, parallels to literature or criticism.
Undocumentable, needless to say, non-fungible.

Did people think about how their life looked before TV or movies?
Does the constantly sensed audience lead to how anxiously we face just life?
Always observed by the absent, the tacit audience always present,
and we, never so here as watching them, and so miss our own lives.
Even love the most Unexplainable and Entirely Sufficient Reason To Be at All,
a performance for the memory of our place in a bored or jaded or, worst of all, pleased audience? The loved as cast rival.

How could we ever consider this through an observer? Not an act but

There isn’t a word conceivable in any grammar.
Not for this, both now, together, pleasing by pleasure by pleasing.
Our bodies not symbols but incident to the deeper sex of coupled souls, beyond things.
It not beyond but essentially separate from transaction.
One at once both, not element’s of any Set subject to the properties of even addition.
No subjects or objects, no act or any other nouns, or transitive verbs, or conditional statements or Boolean scribbles, or geometry or political theory or praxis.

The very naming and saying a violation and nullification of even what happens in time,
Intending rigorous examination, virtuously hacking away the inaccurate words
you would be left with a nothing to explain what most is, of all and everything.
Mistaking your failure as confirmation of a nothing and for publication so turn to analyze the illusory audience’s imagined reaction to the residuum of your failure. Missing it all.

In no way describe, but meet it Both in silence. It beyond pronounness.
The love transfigures us together outside it and ourselves, this time, many others, many to come,
many as the times become the deepest sex of souls beyond transaction or distinction or time or words or even songs.

For the love of very being, why would anyone want it any other way?

A Point of Clarification on Comment Moderation

Moderating comments doesn't mean I've banned anyone, though a blog owner is within their rights to ban anyone they want to for substantial and valid or entirely frivolous reasons.   It means I've decided to put off the task of removing stupid, time wasting, 8th grade level stuff while avoiding having it appear, lowering the content of the blog and wasting peoples' time with what they concluded was the sign of a jerk when they got over thinking like a 12-year-old.

Hope springs eternal and even the most arrested case of development might nudge up to 10th grade level and, in a really serious attempt to grow up, produce something worth having on my blog.   But I'm not waiting up nights.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Dump The Play Left

"We wanted to end the silly censorship which kept Joyce's Ulysses in a brown paper wrapper. But we have ended up with a pornographic culture and a society that no longer blushes."

Shirley Chisholm, one of the founders of The National Organization for Women

I can only imagine what she'd say about the direction NOW has taken on that issue. I'd begun a project of reading her books, articles and speeches last month. I'm convinced Shirley Chisholm, with her feet solidly on the ground of real politics, founded on the hard rock of equality, rights and moral obligations has more to offer the future of the left than almost all of the other, theory based, academic pseudo-leftists who are more valued today. Those people have brought us into the political wilderness years longer than Moses had the Israelites.

When I see how far the left of the early 1970s has degenerated, it's time to dump those who have brought us here.

------

Happening to look at the 2011 program of the Left Forum at Pace University, the most recent listed on its website and saw a forest of the same blather I've seen on the left since the early 60s. If that was going to work, it would have by now. I searched the long list of programs for terms relevant to the lives of people today, “Poverty”, “homeless”, “children”, “HIV” and came up with nothing.  I will assure you that those are more important to just about everyone, including those participating in the Left Forum than the absolutely dead as a door nail issues of Marx and Engles ( The Bourgeois Revolution: from Marx's point of view, really, The Bourgeois Revolution:  from Marx's POV) and the rehashing the  Rosenbergs for going on sixty years.

“AIDS” got one hit and that was only because the letters appear in "Laughing Left: Spreading The Word With F-bombs, Oily Mermaids and Clowns On Bikes".  I'd gone there as part of my ongoing blog brawl with "goldmarx" a porn-prostitution industry shill pretending to be a feminist.

Looking at the people who present themselves as the left and you see mostly academics who have little to no record of actually doing anything except writing papers and getting them printed in journals read by other academics in their field.  They will join many others of their kind who did nothing else and died.  While the left is certainly right to value education, that kind of stuff is totally useless.  The political effect of Marxism today is mostly to discredit democratic socialists who know that real socialism is found in actually making peoples' lives better and sustaining life.   I'm absolutely done with pretending that in the United States the Marxists and their fellow tail chasing ideologues are anything but one of the saddest jokes that did many times more damage to the left than the red scare of the 1950s managed to accomplish.  Their attractively academic distraction and anti-democratic political religion are not redeemed by their persecution by fascists, actually their cousins instead of their polar opposites.   The never ending recitation of that persecution, reminiscent of what you'll find on a YouTube comment thread about some incident in the Balkans from many generations past - reached the "enough already" stage a long time ago.  You'd think that more of the persecuted would have learned more from the experience than they seem to have.

I'm done with it.  We don't have time for the dialectic to pivot and slowly go in the other direction, there is no dialectic, it is imaginary.  Marxists, stop wasting our too little time and non-existent resources.  Your ideology is on the scrap heap of history now.  Look at its corpse, rotting with no crystal casket and scientific embalming operation to keep it intact.   Having "goldmarx" the porn shill spouting badly paraphrased lines of that play left at me mixed with libertarianism and neo-classical Chicago school economics this week was the one thing I got out of that brawl.   Marx had no use for the Marxists, having famously declared himself not to be one.   Marxism is a joke deader than dead.



Thursday, January 17, 2013

Notice

Comments will be moderated from now on,  my blog is under twit attack and I'm not interested in sweeping the droppings anymore.

The Curious Blind Eyed Liberal Acceptance of Objectifying People

There's really nothing complicated about it,  prostitution turns the bodies of prostitutes into a commodity for sale and since the body of a living person is inseparable from the person,  it turns people into object of commerce.   Prostitution turns people into a thing that is rented out to be used by men - almost always - and like any rental appliance, the prostitute is injured in use.   Pornography is just prostitution filmed or photographed, sometimes paid for by the photographer, sometimes not.   That isn't when it's not actually filmed rape or gang rape, which it so often is.

But people are not objects.  Unlike furniture or appliances you can use through Rent-a-Center, prostitutes can be infected with pathogens that will injure and kill them.  Prostitutes also feel pain, which makes more than a few of those who rent them able to find sexual satisfaction by hurting them.   This is, of course, gratifying to the customer because it is related to a feeling of power over another person,  something that in our incredibly twisted sexual culture is a predominant trait of a large number of people.   That twisted sense of entitlement to treat people as objects, to dominate them and to use them, especially against their will,  is what prostitution is really all about.  You can use a prostitute without any obligation to care for them or risk legal obligations to them.  Men who use them not infrequently lie to them and cheat them, refuse to pay the agreed to rental fee and prostitutes are usually powerless to do anything about it.

If a boss in a factory or  on a farm treated workers like objects for use, exploitation, abuse, and disposal like that, liberals would be expected to see exactly what the situation was and they would champion the workers.   The objectification of prostitution and pornography isn't restricted to mental cruelty and disrespect, it turns people into objects as surely as the Nazis did the harvested hair of those it murdered or the corrupt officials of the Chinese government does those from whom it kills to sell their organs.  When it's prostitutes and porn actors turned into objects for use and sale, they go all libertarian, pretending that prostitutes are in some position to set the terms of rental. They might point out to some accounts, generally unverifiable, of elite prostitutes who claim to have had that kind of power but the vast majority of women, children and men who are prostitutes, that story is a total fiction.  That is the case in countries where prostitution is illegal, it is the case in countries where prostitution is legal.   The claims made about legal prostitution being some kind of guarantee of the safety and dignity of prostitutes is dependent on the most careful of choices of stories to tell and, in some cases, is based on leaving a lot of that story out.

What is it about prostitution and its flip side, pornography, that makes liberals go all stupid, supporting industries that violate their most basic metaphysical foundations, equality, an assertion of inherent rights and dignity, and the moral obligation to respect rights equally and entirely.   Without those liberalism is meaningless, it devolves into something little different from right wing libertarianism pretending to be liberalish.  

I've thought about that question a lot over the past decade as the gay porn it's impossible to avoid online has grown increasingly a celebration of all of those things mentioned above and more.   Online porn is an open invitation to use and destroy women, children and men in increasingly violent and destructive ways, to rape them and degrade them, to turn them into objects to be used like a bratty little boy would gleefully destroy a doll and deface an image.   And liberals, championing that feel a sense of virtue due to their superior free speechiness.   That idiotic, preening sense of virtue at enabling some of the most degrading and destructive use of real human beings is a symptom of a fatal flaw that was introduced into post-war liberalism.  As it has taken hold liberalism has become ineffective and has failed at the polls.   We are in a time when the the liberal presidents,  Clinton, Obama, have been less liberal than President Eisenhower was.  That is more than a symptom, it's a crisis of liberalism that has destroyed it.

There is something downright prissy about the demonstrations of virtuous free speech absolutism on the left today, an inversion of a theatrical stereotype of a purity campaigner as seen in comedies of the 1950s.    There is an unthinking assertion of an official virtue, a self-righteous demonstration of an opposition to any kind of criticism of the industries of prostitution and pornography that would be comical in itself it it wasn't such a serious lapse of morality and reason.  It is a bizarre thing to recognize for what it is.  The insistence among the self-appointed free-thinkers that everyone ignore what they can see clearly and get in line with the official line.

A lot of it is based in a rejection of traditional morality, it being sex, blinds liberals.   They idiotically miss that the "sex" involved with prostitution and pornography comes with an objectification and commodification of people, something they can usually not miss when "sex" isn't a part of it.   Many liberals have an easier time seeing the moral atrocity of the abuse of animals in farming than they can of people as horribly abused in porn and prostitution.   The secret videos of chickens and pigs released by the animal rights people get a reaction that the thousands of times more numerous videos and photos of women, children and men that they can hardly avoid in a day of google searches don't.

This is a situation that can't continue if there is to be a left.  There is no coexisting with an industry that does what porn and prostitution do,  the championing of the "rights" of those industries is destroying the left.  The pornographers buy off the left at times with "free speech" awards.   They co opt the media which sees the benefit to them of the same "free speech" language and legal framework.

Either the left acts as if people are more than merely objects of commerce, or it doesn't exist.  It can't pretend what is really happening in pornography and prostitution isn't real.  Today, online and off, "liberals" conform to a rigid line of free speech absolutism that sees the use and destruction of women, children and men by industries that destroy them as a price worth paying so they can ply their trade without having to wonder if they're crossing a line hardly any of them ever would cross, anyway.   They see any restrictions on the most extreme and depraved pornography, of prostitution as it really is in the real world instead of in their fantasies,  as a slippery slope.   Well, there's another side of that slope from the inability to use casual profanity in a feature story or showing a married couple with a double bed on TV and it is into the kind of pit of depravity that is a websearch away.   The pro-porn, pro-prostitution side, which has developed into an industry in itself, will mock the phrase "pit of depravity" but that's what so many of the pornographers advertise their product as being.   The same people would jocularly gloat in the same terms if someone hadn't brought up these issues and ruined their boy bonding fun, delighted in their puerile wickedness.


Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Affluent Agents of the Porn and Prostitution Industries as Liberal Bloggers

Getting into blog brawls should never be done without the opportunity to learn something.   I've been having one on the issue of porn at Alternet.  I'll be posting about porn in the near future.  I haven't learned much but I have been able to organize some of what I've known before.

For now, I'm getting sick and tired of middle-aged white, affluent men, mostly, but women too,  talking about how having an unregulated porn and prostitution market honors the "agency" of the women and men used by the porn and prostitution industries when the fact is both porn and prostitution are related industries based on the use, abuse, degradation, exploitation, disposal and, yes, deaths of those very "agents" for the entertainment of, generally, men who have more money and more power than they do.   Often those using the "agents" in that way are also stronger and more brutal and enforce their will on those "agents" with violence, intimidation, coercion, manipulation, lies, fear of death and other means.

The pseudo-liberal line that so many liberal bloggers and commentators take on porn and prostitution is everything that liberalism, real liberalism opposes pushing a line of ultra- Milton Friedmanian economic blather.    Porn and prostitutions are industries that lie about the "agency" of those who it uses, pseudo-liberals who support their legalization and deregulation are either ignorant or stupid or, more often, they are libertarians who are posing as liberals.

Here's a challenge I issued to the porn shill I got into the blog brawl mentioned above, it's a question that any supposed liberal proponent of pornography and prostitution should be forced to answer, questions they should have to confront.

"goldmarx" do you have children, sisters, brothers, a mother or father you would like to see choose a career as a porn actor or prostitute?   Try to make me believe you really mean yes when you claim that. 

and in a follow up when "goldmarx" didn't answer the question:


So, you don't want any of your daughters or sons, or brothers or sisters or your mother or father to choose these two fine professions you think are so wonderful. Why not? If there's nothing wrong with those professions why wouldn't you be happy if your family decided to make money by letting men pay to stick their phalluses in their mouths, or anuses or vaginas or any of the other places they do in porn or prostitution? If it's OK for the people involved in it, why wouldn't that be a perfectly good way for your family members to make money?

Let me take it one step farther, would you be willing to have your daughter or son or brother or sister or father or mother penetrated by a random sample of the porn professionals in LA? Or penetrating them? Oh, yes, that penetration will be without condoms because it will be legal for the director and producer to decide that in that scene there will be no condoms. Would you like your son, daughter, sister, brother, mother, or father doing a bare back sex scene with, say ten randomly chosen men or women who make movies in Los Angeles?

Answer the question, "goldmarx". If bareback sex at the say of a porn director or producer is OK, why wouldn't you want to have your family member on the receiving end of it? Or how about any of them under similar conditions, alone in a hotel room with a random sample of the unknown johns who frequent prostitutes of one or another or both genders in Los Angeles. Would you want your child to be in that situation right now?

I wish I had thought to pose those questions to the white, affluent, Ivy level PhD holding, middle aged male blogger and economist I first got into the "agency" issue with.   I know he doesn't have children but he has parents and a wife.   I will not fail to ask those kinds of questions in the future.

Monday, January 14, 2013

A Comment Made at Alternet This Morning


I'm always so interested in how the pro-porn people always claim that watching people turned into objects for use, abuse, disposal and murder couldn't possibly have any effect on anyone.  Well, the media knows pretending that repeated messaging isn't unrelated to behavior is a lie.   They act on knowing it has an effect even as they pretend not to know that  because they're always selling time and page space to companies for advertising designed to do exactly that, change behavior by repeated messaging, most of it using people's bodies sexually to effect that change.  As I am typing this just such commercial messages are appearing on the side bar.

In my lifetime there has been a definite change in gay sexual behavior led by the porn I've seen since the early 1960s, promoting anal sex and making it a far more common form of sex among gay men than it was when I first came on that scene.   After the AIDS crisis when porn was used to encourage a change of behavior, promoting safer sex, when "AIDS Is Over" was proclaimed by one of the more idiotic and visible gay men, porn once again sold unprotected anal sex as being desirable and HIV infection rates started rising again.  I'm sure no real and valid studies have been done to "prove" a connection but I think anyone who claims to not believe there is one is stupid if not lying.

I'm sure not everyone who watches a lot of porn goes on to commit some sex crime but most people who smoke don't get lung cancer and most people who have an arsenal in their house don't climb a bell tower and shoot down people.   Claiming you can't prove a causal connection to watching porn and crime because studies of the general population can't find one (controversial in itself) is stupid.  You have to study people who are convicted of those crimes to find any causal relationship and, let me break this to you, I wouldn't trust a rapist to tell me the truth on that count.

I've got every confidence that a society that watches a lot of porn debases people, women, gay men, etc.  because porn teaches its viewers to see people as objects for use, abuse, disposal and, yes, murder.

There is nothing liberal or leftist about porn, it teaches the values of the far right, of slavery and oppression.   

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Mauro Giuliani Variations on La Folia

Antonio Rugolo plays on a reproduction of a Panormo guitar