Posted on 04/15/2008 8:06:22 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
Barack Obama has a point. There are a group of people who are seeing it all slip away. They grab onto what they can hold and use these illusory points of reference as a substitute for genuine power and verifiable free will. They indulge in bong hits of false consciousness to the point where they genuinely believe that reality is the wasteland for individuals not up to the task of handling the narcotic of intellectual self-justification.
Barack missed the metro train when he assigned these characteristics to small towns scattered throughout the American Hinterland of Central and Western Pennsylvania. America’s urban cohabitations are where people in America have lost the ability to direct their own lives. They are seas of anonymity and get as close as any part of America comes to being zones of hard determinism amongst The Land of the Free.
Part of this regimentation serves a valid purpose. By definition and intent, urban centers feature more densely packed populations. Theories of urban development describe how cities served to reduce economic transaction costs and allow greater latitude for professional specialization. Having more people per square mile has its economic advantages.
This mass agglomeration of humanity also offers profound social disadvantages. Large crowds of people require large doses of authoritarian control. This ultimately goes to the heads of those doing all of this controlling. Any modern dictionary definition of authoritarian control would do well to feature a portrait of Michael Bloomberg, Mayor, Dominus et Deus of New York City.
The overpowered authorities aren’t the only aspect of urban environments that saps the power of the individual. The sheer presence and scope of the humanity around you makes you assume the status of a pissmire climbing a tall, vast anthill. Bob Dole once described how seeing the unending Kansas Prairie could put a man’s place in the world in perspective and teach humility. Bob Dole probably never stood in the 360 Restaurant; high above Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, California, and gazed down at the gargantuan span of streetlights and neon that stretched on past all limits of human visual acuity.
When Morpheus described The Matrix to Neo, he said the following.
….standing there, facing the efficiency, the pure, horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth.
I have seen nothing that brought home my own total insignificance as a person so completely as seeing the endless miles of roads, cars and buildings filled with millions of others. I would feel much more in danger of suffering an accident, disappearing and never being found or heard from again in the maze of a modern city than I would in any Blue Ridge Mountain forest. Just having people and buildings around doesn’t prevent a place from taking on the aspect of a trackless wilderness.
So what do people do when they face the hideous eloquence of the truth that they have no power over the direction of lives? They reach out for something they can control. They look for a way to understand it.
Has someone in your family contracted HIV through careless behavior or intravenous drug use. Don’t accept the evil lie that they are responsible. Blame the US Government. They have it in for people like me anyhow.
This desire to blame others runs through the veins of modern urban fiction. Walter Mosely’s entertainingly paranoid foray into Science Fiction entitled Futureland begins with the following descriptive paragraph.
Life in America a generation from now isn't much different from today: The drugs are better, the daily grind is worse. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened to a chasm. You can store the world's legal knowledge on a chip in your little finger, while the Supreme Court has decreed that constitutional rights don't apply to any individual who challenges the system. Justice is swiftly delivered by automated courts, so the prison industry is booming. And while the media declare racism is dead, word on the street is that even in a colorless society, it's a crime to be black.
Mosely describes why he chose to write Science Fiction. In BarackObamaLand, this would be the one smart white kid stuck slinging hash in a retro Gettysburg diner. If I didn’t have tremendous respect for his Easy Rawlings character and his tremendous body of noir fiction, I’d have no choice but to accuse the man of clinging to things.
When I tell black audiences that I've written a novel in this genre, they applaud. And following this explosion will be the beginning of a new autonomy created out of the desire to scrap 500 years of intellectual imperialism. This literary movement itself would make a good story. The tale could unfold in a world where power is based upon uses of the imagination, where the strongest voices rise to control the destiny of the nation and the world.
When a man with the talents and abilities of Walter Mosely, allows himself to be consumed by theories of intellectual imperialism, expounded by tenured nihilists on the faculties of every university English Department in the land, I’m taken aback at how much the urbane son or urban Los Angeles sounds like the cardboard, Obamanesque, stereotypical hick in the Pennsylvania sticks. This leads me to wonder exactly who Barack Obama really just finished describing in his pitch to the Chi-Latte Elite of San Francisco, California.
As I’ve aged and hit my limits, physically, intellectually and spiritually, I’ve had to admit that determinism exists. Some days things will happen, no matter how well I react to it. However, I will never lose myself to the point where my belief in myself is subsumed by the all-encompassing cop-out that is hard determinism.
Not only do I wield certain power on certain days, I also lug the responsibility that implies like a soldier’s rucksack. I will continue to do so until I cross the dusty finish line of life’s interminable road march. On the subject of philosophical determinism, I ascribe to the fundamental notions of the Roman Stoic Epictetus. We may not be immune to the variables, but we almost always have recourse and life demands of us to use it well. Sayeth Epictetus:
I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?
Epictetus must not have lived in Western Pennsylvania. He has the audacity of adulthood and implies that the whole concept of false consciousness is false. We all choose to be bitter or happy. We play the ball where it lands and we pay our nickel and take our choice.
This sits uneasy in the stomach of the modern intellectual. Even the cursory reading of Barack’s statement on why small town Pennsylvanians disagree with his views shows his utter disdain and contempt for our ability to choose in the face of a partially determined destiny. Not just his disdain; but also his fear.
His remark failed for the reason his philosophy fails. We live in a quasi-ergodic world in which similar systems (or people) can inhabit a vast array of possible physical (or emotional, or philosophical) states. He cannot and should not be able to predict or control whether any American, urban or rural, feels bitter and clings to certain values out of fundamental ignorance. He shows his hubris-driven frustration when he even tries.
...and it's not pretty.
I tried to read this, but my eys started to cross after the first paragraph. Maybe I will try again if I can get my hands on something for my ADD/ADHD.
The only “point” this guy has is on the top of his head.
Very well pinned.
"Barack Obama has a point. There are a group of people who are seeing it all slip away. They grab onto what they can hold and use these illusory points of reference as a substitute for genuine power and verifiable free will. They indulge in bong hits of false consciousness to the point where they genuinely believe that reality is the wasteland for individuals not up to the task of handling the narcotic of intellectual self-justification.
Barack missed the metro train when he assigned these characteristics to small towns scattered throughout the American Hinterland of Central and Western Pennsylvania. America’s urban cohabitations are where people in America have lost the ability to direct their own lives. They are seas of anonymity and get as close as any part of America comes to being zones of hard determinism amongst The Land of the Free."
That's pretty good. But amidst the depersonalization, anomie, and alienation of Bobo malaise, they have found a messianic leader who will lead lead them to utopia.
It is doubtful liberals would be up to the challenge of a sociological and psychological analysis of their bitterness and frustrations.
Enter, Philip Rieff and The Triumph of the Therapeutic.
And his own resentments are basically fictional or imaginary, sucked up from reading about blackness in trendy books and from growing up in inbred leftwing academia, as he has grown up in exclusive privilege on the affirmative action fast track.
But it must be said that the style of this piece is unnecessarily impenetrable. The point could have been made much more simply and directly.
Well, Barack Obama does have a point. I am extremely bitter.....but only because a classless fool like him is running for the presidency.
Mr. Jefferson saw that this would happen — almost exclusively in the large cities. And isn’t that where these statists/collectivists congregate?
An astute student of history and human nature, one Thomas Jefferson, predicted all this after witnessing the run up to the FIRST socialist/communist revolution in France while ambassador there. He penned the following observations concerning what would happen HERE should that socialism come to the United States. He CORRECTLY predicted that we would become an increasingly contentious and litigious people as we shouldered one another out of the way to get OURS from the public trough and the trough would soon be empty.
He also knew where the bulk of the problem would originate.
That whirring noise you may hear coming from that mountain in Charlottesville, Virginia is Mr. Jefferson getting up to around 3600 RPM.
“The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” —Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIX, 1782. ME 2:230
I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” —Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. Papers 12:442
“I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.” —Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1800. ME 10:173
“Our cities... exhibit specimens of London only; our country is a different nation.” —Thomas Jefferson to Andre de Daschkoff, 1809. ME 12:304
“Everyone, by his property or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs and a degree of freedom which, in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private.” —Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:401
“An insurrection... of science, talents, and courage, against rank and birth... has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty, and vice, could not be restrained to rational action. But the world will recover from the panic of this first catastrophe.” —Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:402
“I fear nothing for our liberty from the assaults of force; but I have seen and felt much, and fear more from English books, English prejudices, English manners, and the apes, the dupes, and designs among our professional crafts. When I look around me for security against these seductions, I find it in the wide spread of our agricultural citizens, in their unsophisticated minds, their independence and their power, if called on, to crush the Humists of our cities, and to maintain the principles which severed us from England.” —Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814. ME 14:120
If this were written today, it would be labeled racist and dismissed without a thought by the ruling class and media.
Like Federalism, Constitutionalism and limited government for example.
BFL
mark
Projection.
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