Well, let's tell the whole story here, King Henry VI, Part II, Act II, scene i, starting at line #795.

Simpcox, the alleged formerly blind man, comes on stage borne on a chair and is met by the nobles. He (Simpcox) claims St. Alban cured his blindness. He now sees but still can't walk. (He fell out of a plum tree.) He does too well on the vision test which the Duke of Gloucester administers, and is next tested on his lameness by the Duke. A beadle is summoned to whip Simpcox until he jumps over a stool. It takes no more than a stroke of the whip to bring Simpcox to his feet, and he runs away. Simpcox and his wife are ordered to be whipped for fraud. His wife pleads that they did it out of need.

In a more complete telling, does this scene still seem like a philosophical party trick? How does this scene between the King, Earl, Duke, Queen Margaret, and these two peasants fit into the play? (I haven't read the play, so can't say myself. But I would guess a philosopher's party trick wasn't just tossed in at that point.)

Agreed. To make a short story very long...

It's very difficult "to think straight" about race, class, and culture in the United States because of an unusually turbulent history. As is the custom around the world, the facts of history get paved over by stories with better PR value.

"Meaning what?" you ask.

Well, there's the actual history vs. the myth, to start with. The first chapter of American history was about colonialization by the English ruling class of the "wasteland" (meaning 'not developed') of North America. The business about pilgrims and puritans happened, but it wasn't the main event. Most of the white English folk that were shipped over here were riff-raff that the English RC wanted to see less of in Merry Olde England. Today they'd be called 'white trash'; they were indentured servants, low paid workers, etc. Then there were the English overseers, who were here to make sure production got and stayed underway.

We're still a long way from 1776; the English have already imported African slaves, already displaced and started killing off the natives. A lot of the indentured servants wandered off on their own to do whatever disreputable activities they could find. Meanwhile, the cavalier class of English overseers started turning into the southern planters, midatlantic merchants, German farmers, etc.

Once we wrested independence from England, and were soon sitting on this huge swath of land, we started receiving a lot of immigrants from Europe, and that lasted for about 150 years, into the first Qr. of the 20th Century. By this time the African Slaves had been freed, sort of, and were put under a reign of Jim Crow Fear Control. By 1918 we were a mixing bowl of Asians, Jews, Russians, Scandinavians, Italians, Greeks, Croats, Poles, Irish, Blacks, some South Americans, Native Americans (not too many left), and more besides.

Here we are, a century later, 2018. The myth has been stretched thin, and we have a not too large but very vocal batch of white people who feel guilty about not being a member of an oppressed colored group -- African, Asian, South American, Inuit, Tibetan--something--who self-flagellate over racism, sexism, classism, militarism, consumerism, capitalism, Marxism, and more. They could call themselves "white trash" -- in the minds of the plutocracy they are -- but they don't want to be oppressed that badly.

Are they to be believed? Are these social constructionist, SJW, leftists, college educated privileged SOBs to be taken seriously?

Well... they aren't entirely wrong. The US, like most nations, is run by a power elite that puts its interests first. Most power elites, red, yellow, black, or white, all follow that principle. There's that 90%/10% or 99%/1% income divide. The golden rule: them with the gold make the rules. Some people are oppressed. Actually, most people are oppressed, but the plaintiffs focus on certain oppressed groups -- everybody except straight white men, pretty much, because SWM couldn't possibly be oppressed.

They get some things wrong...

because "nation" is still largely about where you were born, and about living with people who are somewhat like you (because born from the same soil) - either in terms of genetics, ideas and culture, or both. — gurugeorge

The leftist-SJW-PC-types don't get right is the rootedness you are talking about. They are not, for some reason, rooted in the soil in which they were planted. What they share, but perhaps do not want to acknowledge, is:

They themselves are guilty of being a privileged group who have not surrendered their privileges.
Rational people do not surrender whatever few advantages they have.
People do not come to the US, legally or otherwise, to be leftist-SJW-PC types. They come to make money, mostly, by whatever means. That's pretty much the history of immigration.
Most white people, male and female, are as fucked over about as much as the various colored folk are.
If they want to talk about privileged people who really have something to give up, it's the 1% who have control of most of the wealth, or even the 1/100 of 1% in the world who have most of the wealth, many of whom are not white. There's no risk of that happening.

The United States is very much like other countries. Our mishmash of problems, virtues, and values is like--like, not the same as--other nations' mishmash.

A Somali couple recently from Finland visited the church and asked about teaching Finnish in the Finn's school. That's America: A Moslem couple from Somalia, living in Finland long enough to become fluent offering to help the American Finns recover and maintain their culture in America.

I do think he’s right that we are, at the deepest level, alone — Vinson

Yes, "alone" but not necessarily "lonely". We are "alone" in that we can not merge with our fellow beings, because we are not a hive creature. But then, even ants have some individuality -- not much, but a little. That we are "alone" is a universal idea.

Gibran is one among many who have described persons, people, as "lonely". Maybe "longing" would be another term for our very common low-level dissatisfactions. We long for more connection, more community--usually with others of our kind, sometimes with deities.

Life is an island in an ocean of loneliness, an island whose rocks are hopes, whose trees are dreams, whose flowers are solitude, and whose brooks are thirst. Your life is an island separate from all the other islands and regions. No matter how many are the ships that leave your shores for other climes, no matter how many are the fleets that touch your coast, you remain a solitary island, suffering pangs of loneliness and yearning for happiness. You are unknown to others and far removed from their sympathy and understanding. — Vinson

Gibran's language is kind of romantic. By 'romantic' I mean he is elevating loneliness and solitude in the manner of Romantic period poets (Blake, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth). Personally, I can't stand too much romantic poetry or prose, but it's a matter of taste. Some people lap it up. Gibran doesn't belong to the Romantic Movement, but that sort of style does. (And I don't mean to imply that Romantic poets were all about squishy, mushy emotional language.)

Here's an earlier poet's take: John Donne, 1572-1631:

'No Man is an Island'

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The Greeks thought there were several kinds of love:

philia - deep friendship love
Philautia - love of the self (good self-love is essential; bad self love or narcissism is harmful)
eros - love as sexual passion
philia - deep friendship love
agape - love for everyone (unconditional love)
ludus - playful love -- young love
Storge - love of parents and children
pragma - the deep love between longstanding relationship partners

Point is, love isn't one thing.

I believe love is an expression of the mind. I do not see it as an emotion but rather a will to act and by act i am referring to the act of giving. When you exercize your mind creatively and intuitively in the presence of a lover, you will be rewarded without fail. — Gord

Sure, love is expressed by the mind; but if there is no emotion, no passion involved, it's just not worth thinking about.

The passions, the emotions, are not a lesser or junior part of the mind. They are the mainspring of the mind, will, and body. You just can't have "love" as a mental process without emotion. To get biological here, the mind isn't some stand-alone pristine program; it's a product of a body with physical needs, pains and pleasures, emotions, drives, appetite, etc.

I'd like to make sure we include biology in the mix. Human beings evolved as social animals. — T Clark

Philosophers, janitors, city planners, auto mechanics -- everybody--ought always and everywhere to include humanity's animal nature in their thinking, doing, planning and being. We are never disembodied beings. We are all body all the time from which comes mind. No body, never mind.

Welcome to the philosophy forum.

I have not studied comparative moral systems, so I'm speaking without any authority of knowledge here, but I am guessing that if you did a survey of the moral systems of which we have a record, you would find that there is a normal distribution of moral prohibitions, moral requirements, and the like. For instance, I think you would find that most moral systems disapprove of arbitrary killing. Most moral systems are going to disapprove of theft, and so on.

Is there some universal source? Yes -- human beings. People living in groups face common problems, which is why moral systems will require similar things.

Since morality isn't a matter of physics, we can't say that any moral system is "objective" the way we can say that a principle of physics is objectively true, whether you like it or not. But morality isn't individually relative. (Well, morality could be individually relative for somebody who lives on a planet by themselves.) People live in societies, and societies devise rules which they expect people to follow. The society's morality really isn't optional. The morality of a south sea island people may be quite different than the morality of the French or Irish, but that doesn't really make morality "all relative". Let's say that specific moral systems are applicable to the people who live within their domain.

As Jesus said, "You'll always have poor people." Even successful societies have beggars. In the normal distribution, most people will be at least somewhat successful in life, but there is that narrowing tail of bell-shaped curve on the left side that locates the people who don't and can't succeed. The less society accepts the fact that there will always be people on the bottom that need help, the more beggars there will be.

All good points.

Bourgeious — StreetlightX

Were you aiming for "bourgeois" or "bourgeoisie". That a moderator would misspell such an important term--scandalous.

But yes, bourgeois escapism--and proletarian fantasy.

depression — SherlockH

I think 'depression' is an overworked concept. Does it exist? Absolutely. Is the claimed depression real? Sometimes it is something else: anger, resentment, alcohol and drug abuse, poverty, bad mental habits, unpleasant transient circumstances in life, etc. These problems are also real, they are just not depression and taking anti-depressants isn't going to help. Angry, resentful, bitter people need to deal with those feelings and the underlying causation (maybe delusions). Same for the rest of it.

As for the race card... It's like depression. It's real some of the time, and some of the time it could be something else. One should deal with the something else that is within one's capacity to deal with. Sometimes blacks display distinct styles of clothing, speech, and general demeanor that are simply not acceptable in a business environment. Racism is real, but so is acting like you don't and won't belong in the kind of environment in which you want to work.

I've talked to quite a few people who have opted to beg. Some of these guys seem to have their lives somewhat together. Not too together, though, because standing by a freeway entrance all day has to be a fairly hard way to make a living. Similarly, begging on the street in Minneapolis in January is not taking the easy way. I can see how it happens: They are disabled, and/or social idiots, anti-social, or... whatever; chronically drunk, on drugs, disorderly, and so forth and they get kicked out of the programs and housing they are in.

Once you get kicked out, there are often no options. So... you beg. Begging is a tough disciplinarian: you have to stay at it, be nice to people who want to talk to you (and might give you four or five dollars rather than 35¢, look penitent and harmless, and so on. If you don't stay out there, heat, cold, rain, sleet or snow -- you won't get enough for a meal and a bed for the night.

The advantage to begging is that you don't have a boss, you don't have to deal with co-workers, and you can take a passive attitude: it isn't MY fault that I AM where I AM. I AM an unfortunate victim of ... whatever. And sometimes they are.

there are some people who insist on being helpless and seem to want to suffer. How does one help a disadvantaged person Who enjoys suffering — SherlockH

If someone appears to prefer being helpless and prefers suffering, it is likely that the appearances are misleading. Quite possibly there are some advantages for the individual that their helpless suffering stance obtains. A person might prefer to be judged disabled and receive an insufficient income benefit than work for a living and still not have a lot more than an insufficient income.

Sometimes people are just too stupid to understand and resolve their own problems. Too stupid or too addled by drugs and alcohol to figure it out. Or, sometimes too sick to do anything about it.

Could you be more specific about the type of people who insist on being helpless and seem to enjoy suffering? Yes, there are parasites who depend on ruses such as helplessness to get by. It isn't clear what exactly you are referencing.

I suppose taking both extreme positions could lead to an impasse. — Andrew4Handel

Impasses might happen between two wishy-washy people, but it's more likely to happen between people with very strong beliefs and opinions. In any case, loving or hating Trump was just an example--I intensely dislike the man, but I had no idea what your opinion was (until you said so, above).

Impasses, by definition, occur when there is no practical, politically acceptable, personally acceptable compromise on a polarized issue. The US and the USSR were able to conclude some treaties on nuclear weapons because both sides recognized that their risks were far greater than their benefits. I doubt very much if North Korea will hand over it's nuclear bombs and nuclear bomb-making equipment. We have reached an impasse. Closing down their bomb testing field just means that they have now learned how to make bombs and don't need to test the technology again.

The US and the USSR, now the Russian Federation, have not been able to eliminate their weapons systems because neither country wants to give up the significant leverage derived from possessing a fleet of nuclear arms bearing submarines and missiles. India and Pakistan aren't going to give up their weapons either. Neither will Israel. Having a stock of nuclear weapons is one of the things that keeps Israel in business. Their enemies do not have nuclear weapons, so far.

In my apartment, I have a noisy upstairs neighbor. — schopenhauer1

I've had noisy neighbors upstairs and downstairs. (It doesn't matter a lot which). I, sad to say, have also been the noisy neighbor upstairs. When people complained, I quieted down.

One would like to drill a small hole into their apartment floor and while they are in the middle of their games pipe in a nice fresh breeze of carbon monoxide. Noise stops. Remove all evidence immediately. Think about how you will get rid of it. Hint: Don't put it in nearby residential garbage. Do an extra good job fixing the hole in your ceiling. In advance, establish a good alibi that you were somewhere else that day. (Plan ahead, in other words. Think like a police detective. "How could this possibly have happened?" Like, leave an empty CO tank in their apartment, valve open. Make it look like suicide. Or extreme stupidity. Wipe your fingerprints off.

One can put up with this sort of thing for a while (the noise, not the CO) weeks or months, but not years) but then something has to give. Moving to some other location is always a gamble because sound-insulated buildings just aren't very common, and 30% to 50% of the population are assholes, so... noise might await you.

Some other solutions: You could buy them some cheap carpet with a very thick carpet pad; you could have your local mob boss pay them a visit; you could let yourself into their apartment and put their game device in their oven, turn it on, and leave.

I solved the problem of noise-getting-under-my-skin on mass transit with noise-cancelling headphones. Helped tremendously. How well does the noise cancelation circuitry work? maybe 5% of steady noises are eliminated. Most of the sound "cancelation" is the result of good padding on the headphones. But it does help.

Always live on the top floor.

There is no escape from assholes. (It's one of the burdens of existence.) Be a greater asshole.

THEIR RUT LOOKS LIKE A LOT MORE FUN THAN OUR RUT.

Dearly belovéd, you are a broken record. Well, not broken--you have something stuck in a groove that causes the needle to jump back in the groove it just completed.

Still, fragment-of-macaroni-in groove or broken record, I think your plaintive posts about the burden of existence are better philosophy than "Germany receives Marx statue from China. Why?" or "Is objective morality imaginary?" and so on. Some threads generate tons of responses (like the current one on eating meat--I haven't read any of it, nothing new to say about that on either side.

Like life itself, the burden remains, and you keep asking what the point of it all is. Though I don't think you are really 'asking'. You are more 'telling', which is fine. That's how you see the world -- tell it like it is, as they used to say.

Whether burden or opportunity, life will go on until it doesn't. If we work just slightly harder, I think we have a good chance of eliminating ourselves from the equation maybe in the next century. The fewer people then remaining will hail your "GIVE UP" sign that flashes on off in bright neon colors in the middle of the desert that used to be Iowa as THE TRUTH, WORLD JUST ABOUT OVER, AMEN.

1) The labor theory of value is false. — Uber

I'm relying on Value, Price, and Profit (K. Marx). It doesn't seem false to me. Granted, production has changed since Marx's work was written. Automation (computers, robots) have greatly reduced the amount of labor required to create wealth. A great deal of wealth is produced by the manipulation of currencies, stocks, bonds, etc. -- which went on in KM's day too, but it was more localized, wasn't instantaneous (programmed buying and selling several times a second) and it wasn't globalized on line, as it is now. Wealth from finance, which isn't very closely linked to any actual physical process, is a primary source of wealth for the 1%, as Piketty showed (haven't read him, either -- just about his book).

Still, outside of the automated factory, or the automated egg laying operation, labor is still required to produce wealth; it doesn't appear without labor being applied to material. The share of the value that labor receives is still smaller than the share of the value (wealth) created.

What is wrong with that understanding?

When two people fundamentally disagree on an issue and will not back down where do you go from there? — Andrew4Handel

Why should there be any way out of an impasse? If two people fundamentally disagree, then they disagree and there probably won't be any change in either persons opinion, until the facts of the matter change.

I hate Trump. You love Trump. We are going to maintain our views until something totally new and unexpected is revealed about Trump (like, he is able to bring peace and justice to the Middle East or orders the Statue of Liberty and the Golden Gate Bridge destroyed).

Why can neither person change the other persons mind?

a. Neither of you has a compelling case for your own view
b. Both of you would rather die than agree with the other one.

Is one side of the argument right or neither? Can both be equally rational and informed?

Of course one side or both can be right or wrong and both can be equally rational and informed. Actually, this is probably the state most impasses exist in. So why don't they agree?

Because people can be obstinate, territorial, egotistical, rigid, and all sorts of other splendid things. "I said the sky is red, and just because you say it is blue is absolutely no reason whatsoever for me to grant that you are right." A synonym for 'impasse' -- deadlock -- gets at the situation better, perhaps. The two sides are locked into their positions.

This usually comes with a kind of sadism, and she does seem sadistic. — csalisbury

. Not because she was racist, but because she saw all people as equally awful. — csalisbury

O'Connor was a faithful pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic. She saw people unavoidably falling into sin; we can't avoid it. On the other side of falling into sin is God's grace. She gets into the "nice stuff" in a story like "A Good Man is hard to find". However, the moment of grace--as profound as it is--is short. Very short. But yes, her characters are decidedly fallen.

Someone asked O'Connor why there are so many freaks in southern literature. She said there were so many freaks "Because we can still recognize them." (I don't know whether there are more freakishly awful people in the American South than in the American North or in London, England or Shanghai. "Freakishly awful" isn't a category that demographers track, unfortunately.

This is going to sound petty, but you're leaving one thing out, and petty as it is, I think it's relevant. O' Connor was unattractive. She wasn't a good-looking person. — csalisbury

Two questions: was she unattractive? Shall we have a poll? Was she too ugly to have a normal romantic life?


Hair and glasses can undo one, and the glasses she was often photographed in (1940s-50s black plastic) were not flattering. She had a receding chin which some people like, some people don't like. But, really, she didn't need to wear a bag over her head when she went out in public.

I dislike the theory that a lack of physical beauty or the presence of a physical deficiency (like a degree of deafness) determines the kind of people we are. Of course, it has something to do with it, because we live in a social context and it will affect us. But it shouldn't. Really, it shouldn't.

What else in her life may have kept her out of the dating/mating game? For one, she was afflicted by Lupus, a painful, not-too-common chronic autoimmune disorder that can result in organ failure (which was the cause of her early death at 39). She also needed to use crutches to get around, because of lupus. I don't know when she was diagnosed with it.

To get a better grasp of her literary work one would probably have to read her substantial literary criticism writing, which is quite interesting--as little of it as I have read.

It's been a long time since I read all of O'Connor's works (maybe 40 years, give or take). I just don't remember enough about most of them at this point. I don't remember any stories where the warm sun shine of grace pervades a whole story. And I haven't read her work in sequential order to measure how her writing changed over time.

Here’s a thing: does this story correspond to a particular stance on 60s civil rights? — csalisbury

That's a very good question. She was dead by 1964 (age 39). As far as I know, O'Connor wasn't a civil rights campaigner. Her world was fairly small, I think. She had lupus (from which she died) and stuck pretty close to home. She was a Catholic southerner, something of an outsider. Most of her characters have glaring faults, whether it's spiritual faults, false pride, predation on the simpleminded, or what have you. People trip over their own delusions. But O'Connor also understood Grace.

My impression is that she was unlikely to look at black people as an amorphous oppressed group. She was a very sophisticated, educated woman. A black character in her stories is likely to fall prey to self-delusion, just like their white brothers and sisters. She probably viewed real blacks that way too -- as likely to be as full of bad faith as her white neighbors.

Also interesting that of the four stories recently talked about here, two (the other is the Oates) involve domineering mothers and a “be careful what you wish for” tragedy — csalisbury

As somebody once said, "Your mother knows which of your buttons to push; after all, she put them there.

So, my dad was raised in an ultra-WASPy family, disdain for blue-collar people through and through. — csalisbury

We don't talk about it much, on TPF or in real life, but as some people say, "The only war is the class war." Most people don't see class as a problem because they think class is a dead issue. If you think we are in a post-racial society, as some people do, it's also possible not to see racism. Or, for others, it's possible not to see racism because it is ubiquitous.

The mother thinks about class as well as race. If the son thought about class much, he would realize his status is uncomfortably ambiguous: maybe he has an education (which is a leg up in class) but he doesn't have the connections or the ambition to go with it.

Given her class inheritance, she's pretty much compelled to construct a fantasy in which she is not as humbled as she in fact is. (Who the hell does want to deal with all that?) The son is going to have a harder time of it. He's not going to be have the shelter of a fantasy world, and he won't have many means to make life better, either.

Why does the son have such poor prospects?

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The greatest irony of course was that: "He could not push her to the extent of making her have a stroke". Funny!
Missed that, so good. — csalisbury

Funny until the last line of the story when actually she had the stroke (or heart attack):

The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow. — ETRMC

Propositions beginning with 'all' and 'never' are always suspect because nothing is ever true in all circumstances. However...

Luck certainly plays a large role in individual success and failure. Like...

...When and where a person was conceived, gestated, and born
The genes of the ancestors are a matter of luck, as is the manner in which the parents genetic contribution combined at the time of conception.
...An unlucky child will be gestated in the womb of a woman who drinks, smokes crack, shoots up heroin, has AIDS and lives downwind from a lead refinery.
...If everything else is favorable, it makes a difference where one was born. It's one thing to be a genius born in Manhattan, something else to be a genius born in the middle of the Sahara desert.
...An otherwise favored person may lack the psychochemistry that yields a calm, steady, enthusiastic, ambitious worker.

Time and chance happen. Life sucks. It's not fair. Get used to it.

The global economy is not in an immediate crisis — Uber

Two things... #1, we aren't very good at predicting the next economic crisis. Only in retrospect have we seen crisis coming.

#2, somewhere down the line is the diminishing supply of petroleum that can be extracted by less energy than the oil itself contains. This won't be a "falling off a cliff" crisis, because the returns on drilling and extraction will taper off. The petroleum crisis will also not happen in the next 5 or 10 years. But at some point in the not-distant future, the "secret sauce" that has driven the world economy for the last century will become more and more difficult to get at a reasonable cost. The collapse of the petroleum industry will be a very big crisis. [There will be lots of oil in the ground as we slowly fade into the sunset, but economic feasibility will rule out spending $1 of energy to get 40¢ worth of energy out of the ground.]

It will be a very big crisis for two reasons: #1, petroleum and natural gas are the critical feed stock for transportation, chemicals, plastics, heating, and manufacturing of all kinds. Without inexpensive petroleum, the current world economy will pretty much grind to a halt. (Coal can't take the place of petroleum, and all the renewable energy in the world won't produce chemical feedstocks.)

Then, if that wasn't crisis enough, there's global warming, population, etc. And there are some less well known potential problems too. Peak phosphate production is about 20 years away, and without a growing supply of phosphate, everything else being equal, there won't be enough fertilizer to maintain crop production for 8+ billion people.

I'm 71, so I won't be around to see the denouement, but the interplay of these various factors -- too many people, too much heat, not enough petroleum, fresh water shortages, agriculture shortfalls, industrial problems of supply, and so forth, should produce synergistic crises that will be hell on wheels.

Whether Marx was right or wrong will be the least of our concerns.

Maybe a thread, yes. You should start it. I don't subscribe to the "great man" theory of history. There are great men and women, yes, but as you said, major developments come from a community more than individuals, process more than event. Even if a maverick comes up with a 100% unique idea of great significance, a community has to respond or... pffft, it disappears.

Good intellectuals borrow. Great intellectuals steal. — frank

That may be true. But maybe this famous quip is more appropriate for artists. Pablo Picasso is widely quoted as having said that “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

I really don't think that the story is about racism as such. It is about peoples ability or lack of ability to adapt to change — Sir2u

People have difficulty adapting to change, true enough. But which changes were going on in the south in the late 50s, early 60s, that an author might have found significant for a story? Hint: it wasn't changes in agriculture or industry.

mass sociopathy — Akanthinos

I don't think what Europe went through in the 20th century was "mass sociopathy". Certainly there was some substantial mass sociopathy going on in Germany from 1924 onwards, but it emanated from very specific sources.

Most Europeans were not sociopathic; they were driven to a state of "craziness" by war, depression, agitation, and war again. War in Europe didn't well up from the masses, it was imposed on the masses by their various governments.

Similarly, Americans aren't sociopathic either. We, like billions of other people, are subject to the dubious policies of state and corporations, and their propaganda. Some of these policies are "crazy". Trump isn't the first president to promote crazy policies, but he is certainly doing it now in a big way.

Either pulling out of, or threatening to pull out (coitus interruptus) of Paris Climate Change Agreement, NAFTA, the Pacific area trade agreement, the Iran nuclear agreement, and so on, are all "crazy" and further destabilize social congruence. His huge tax cut (mostly for people who are already wealthy) and cuts in social spending (which benefit the poorest) are more of the same. I do not have a lot of confidence and affection for some of these agreements, but I don't like the rash way they are being threatened, ignored or exited. Brexit is destabilizing too -- to more than just British retainers.

Hopelessness among semi-skilled middle aged workers is one of the drivers behind the opiate addiction epidemic. Pushers are doing their bit too, of course, as are suppliers.

That's the sort of thing I meant.

Uber had suggested Marx was one of the most influential intellectuals in human history. Human history is in the range of 5000 years during which time the most influential intellectuals were those who devised the solar calendar, initiated irrigation for crops and learned to smelt copper and iron. Is Marx a member of that club? Not yet. Tune in a thousand years from now for a reassessment. — frank

This reminds me of the apocryphal story about Chou En Lai, Premier of the PRC between 1949 and 1975. Asked whether he thought the French Revolution was a good thing, he said: "It's too early to tell." There's no evidence that he actually said any such thing, but it is a good story.

Come now. Irrigation wasn't invented by a brilliant intellectual. Neither was smelting and alloying metal, making glass, inventing stirrups, the wheel, the plow, etc. These were collective developments made over time. Very smart, inventive people have always lived, certainly. Maybe some Neanderthal and homo sapiens geniuses both discovered the method of making a very strong pitch-glue out of birch bark, but it is more likely that this knowledge was collective. We don't know, and will never know how these technologies came about.

No western thinker in the last 5000 years belongs to the age when basic technologies were invented. There are Greece, Rome, Babylonia, Egypt -- but then there is a long hiatus. Intellectuals from the Renaissance forward belong to the current epoch, not to the classical ages.

Where does Marx stand? He stands tall among the tall social thinkers of the Enlightenment. Is Marx the greatest thinker of all time? Of course not. Neither is Adam Smith, Ricardo, the various stars of the Enlightenment, and so on.

Marx brought some new insights into history and economics. They are important. Marx was also a preacher offering a salvation program. Unfortunately, Saint Karl didn't have the opportunity to vet the evangelists who picked up his testament and ran with it. I doubt if Marx could have stomached Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. He would probably have liked someone like the American marxist Daniel DeLeon better--DeLeon wasn't interested in having a blood bath of a revolution.

Dual citizen or resident alien? The American culture tends to drive Europeans insane. Have you suffered from that? — frank

You are probably aware that European culture was driving people insane in the 20th century -- WWI, WWII... Europe's craziness doesn't make anybody else's craziness better, but it can give you some perspective.

Does American culture drive people insane? Fromm thought so (The Sane Society, Erich Fromm).

Glad we ended up lucky in the end. — Posty McPostface

Not too lucky: The United States and Russia still have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out civilization. (Plus what the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea have).

Well said.

What would you name as significant examples of that influence? — frank

I don't know at this point whether you agree or not with the points Uber made above.

Another significant thing: Marx identified class conflict (between workers who produce wealth and the rich folk who accumulate it) as one of the drivers of history. Class conflict is a dangerous thing because it has the potential to topple political and economic structures.

One of the dominant features of the American economic and political system is and has been the suppression of class conflict. The result (so far successful) has been the sharp surge of economic inequality. During the progressive era on up to the end of WWII, when class conflict was more intense, the distribution of wealth was somewhat more egalitarian. Now we are back to the conditions of the Gilded Age of the robber barons (late 19th century).

Supposedly the campuses are infested with militant Marxists. I don't believe it. The Marxists in their ivory towers are a very, very long way from the reality of the working class. If the best our current marxists can do is riot over transsexual pronouns and other identity issues, they might as well be sent to far northern Siberian coal mines to rot.

When we read a published story that has become 'accepted' as a good piece of literature (or history, science, psychology...) we are generally inclined to believe that the author is offering us an insightful, true or real picture. Quite often, of course, the author has gotten things right. But we shouldn't take it for granted.

In this week's Guardian book review, Joanna Trollope says that "Most well-known authors seem to have got married life unbelievably wrong; they could write about it, but couldn’t do it." She was talking about a book that explored the marriages of some famous writers during the inter-war period (20th century).

No one should read Cat Person or Babysitter (and truck loads more) with the assumption that the authors offer exceptional insight into human experience. They may, but just as likely, they may not. We have to test the story against such experiences as we have, for whatever they might be worth.

I haven't been able to interest anyone in reading Flannery O'Connor, who did offer pretty good insight (imho). I could also suggest Muriel Spark, who some people think was very insightful, and others thought was not. But I won't. I'll just add this from O'Connor's critical writing:

"There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." and "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

The short story as Rorschach Test. One can read all sorts of things into the story. Everybody does this; #metoo. I tend to prefer stories that clearly reflect the author's understanding of the world. Babysitter doesn't do that particularly well. But that is my preference, not the last word in Lit Crit.

(fwiw my copy - used bookstore - has all sorts of sober, analytic notes (feminine handwriting) in the margins, but under the final paragraph it just says 'What the hell?!') — csalisbury

"What the hell?!" probably applied to the whole story. Buying used books is good ecology and economy.

if open-endedness is too much, then - and I don't mean this flippantly - there's also a robust guideline-centric community when it comes to casual sex - the sadomasochism community. S&M gets a lot of caricatur-y bad press (and I'll admit that I have trouble seeing it as a final resting point, relationship-wise) but it seems like a potentially healthy way to unambiguously structure the otherwise-confusing power dynamics of sex and romance. — csalisbury

This sounds reasonable in theory. Any reasonably intelligent, slightly psychopathic person could learn how to inflict the requisite blows (and they are real blows) and humiliations as the "master" in the S&M scene. Maybe one could accept being tied up and beaten, whipped, etc. as a "slave" but one would have to be extra-extraordinarily tolerant of abuse.

S&M are a pair of "paraphilias" that happen to be complementary. One either is born with or learns very very early whatever it is that leads to sexual satisfaction being connected to something non-genital (like people who have a sexual fixation on shoes). For the most part, paraphilias are not a social problem because participants are self-selecting. (This does not apply to paedophilia.) S&M isn't a problem, but unless one is endowed with that paraphilia, 99.99% of the population are not going to enjoy being whipped--literally, and most people will not like doing the whipping either.

S&M is a specialty, except that one is more born with it than gets a degree in it.

Otherwise, it's a great idea. There are lots of rules and regs, there are organizations one can join, various web sites that sell S&M supplies (whips, chains, slings, hoods, paddles, tit clamps, ball stretchers, etc.), and arrange hookups. Just be sure you are totally turned on by this scene before you show up for a beating meeting.

a complex deconstruction — Baden

fabulist — Wikipedia

metafiction — Wikipedia

Alarm bells ring.

I will admit to not being fond of complexly deconstructing things, metafiction, fabulism, and such. This isn't the first piece of fiction of this species that I've read, and I just don't happen to like it very much. I usually prefer a much more linear plot.

09"]And though I agreed with you about "Cat Person", I now think you are a complete philistine. How things change![/quote]

And right you are. Some days I'm a genuine Renaissance Man, other days an idiot savant, and every now and then, a philistine--and more besides. I should note, I've enjoyed some very non-linear movies--just to let you know I'm not a complete philistine, and some of them were not in English and I still thought they were good.

If you, Gaelic fellow, haven't read and enjoyed -- actually marveled at -- Ulysses, you are not eligible to call me a Philistine, or a Palestinian, either§ I'll have you know I attended and enjoyed the opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, libretto by Gertrude Stein. En Gard:



Hey, I've even seen this quoted in a political opinion piece and got the joke:

CHORUS I
Saint Teresa seated and not surrounded. There are a great many persons and places near together. Saint Teresa not seated.

So, I'll retract the sentence "The characters seem to be vehicles for the author's masturbatory fantasies", and I didn't say the author went "to all that trouble simply to reveal himself as some kind of a perv". Even if these were masturbatory fantasies (a statement I withdrew above), I don't find anything perverted about them.

In my days as an English Major, Babysitter could probably have been described as a "literary travesty"--travesty not being a pejorative term.

My guess is that future posters will laud Babysitter as "well written" "inventive" (probably not innovative, since he didn't invent this form), perceptive, insightful, even if "laud" is a word they never use. I can stand it.

The scene where the partygoers attempt to stuff Mrs. Dobson back into her girdle (using butter to lubricate the lard) is nothing if not burlesque. Girdles used to be a bigger thing than they are now. My mother (born in 1907) wore girdles. I think by the 1970s the policy was more along the lines of just let it all hang out.

I'll also grant that as a plot slicer and splicer, Coover does manage to keep control--the spliced material "works". That doesn't make it a landmark in literature, but it works. In less unskilled hands the technique would end up produce an incomprehensible mess.

§I tried. I really did. It, like St Theresa, is not surrounded.

This is off topic, but this is the way I think we are: Layered.

READ FROM THE BOTTOM UP

[5] Adults are biologically complete, have more

and less mastered the parts of culture most relevant to them, and gradually integrate unique self and specific culture as they age--a never-ending process.
[4] Infants are born into the foundational levels of animal existence and swiftly progress both in individual learning from their unique standpoint and in their appropriation of the culture surrounding them.
[3] Our species creates, transmits, elaborates, and learns culture. This layer builds on the previous two layers, and is as dynamic and complex as the biological layers.
[2] On top of the foundational layer of biology are the characteristics of the species: still biological but bearing features unique to that species.
[1] The foundation layer is biology; the untaught, persistent, insistent drives that keep individual animals and species in business.


Your "giant Samoan gay man" closest friend can choose or not choose to have casual sex, as he pleases. This is a choice individuals can make. I have gay and straight friends who also chose not to have casual sex. Quite possibly, they couldn't find the opportunity, were too risk averse, accepted a cultural rule that says 1 sex partner per lifetime, or some other such sick, perverted thing.

When gay men (who are created by and raised in a heterosexual milieu) step into the envelope of gay culture, a different set of values, behaviors, expectations, and so forth comes into effect. Because it is not mediated by broad, long-standing cultural norms gay cruising tends to serve the fulfillment of basic urges. (But it isn't entirely chaotic. Norms are established.)

To the degree that families do not prepare men and women to competently seek partners in the required, approved manner, straight people also find themselves in an envelope where official guidelines do not apply. A straight bar full of young men and women on the loose is a much more chaotic envelope of social interaction than a Baptist church social or a cocktail party for the Sydney or Adelaide Bar Association.

The characters in Cat Person were both operating within an envelope where vague rules are mixed in with vague romantic notions common in our culture. When things don't work out well, (as they often do not) individuals tend to interpret the poor outcomes in terms imported from the main culture.

So, two people fumbling in the dark (literally and figuratively) who fail to have a good time may seize upon interpretations from the culture at large which aren't suitable within the envelope. The author, in this case, applied exterior standards, the way many people do, and arrived at a yet more unsatisfactory resolution.