Maybe "Get Over Yourself" Can Be a Koan?

If I never hear another pretentious American talking about "the Zen of this" or "the Zen of that", I will have had my fill. "The Zen of X" always comes down to something like, "I've found that such and such activity is relaxing" or "I do this seemingly simple thing, but I pay attention when I do it, so I'm more spiritual than you non-attention-payers". Yes, yes, repetitive physical activity is relaxing and allows the mind to quieten down and come up with creative ideas; you, I, and our elderly Aunt Edna all know that, but Aunt Edna never applauded herself for it or attribute its effect to a religious/philosophical system she didn't practice. And paying attention to clipping your toenails may give you a greater quality of experience, but in the end, you're still just clipping your nails. And, if I may go so far as to contradict any number of women's magazines, clearing the clutter out of your living room doesn't make you or your living room Zen--the room looks better and it may be easier to be in it, but odds are that while you sit looking at your empty table, enlightenment will remain as elusive as ever.

If I were Buddhist , whether Zen or not, I think I would find it a bit offensive that non-Buddhists think they can become Zen masters just by deciding whatever they're doing anyway is Zen--and coincidentally they can sell books about it to others who want to think their pleasant hobby is deeper for them than for other of its practitioners who haven't bought the book. I think if I were from a Buddhist-heavy country, I think I'd petition the UN or something to stop this. But maybe they're all being philosophical about it--i.e., rolling their eyes and getting on with their lives, like sensible people. They can probably find some inspiration for that by studying American Indians, who've long had to endure Americans of European heritage enthusing about how they're "genuine Native American shamans" because they once attended a weekend seminar on it and got a certificate; selling "authentic" plastic dreamcatchers; lecturing Indians of Tribe X on how to build an X sweatlodge; channeling Indian spirit guides, etc.

Me, I'm not so sensible. I think I may start involuntarily channeling Lewis Black when I hear "the Zen of showering/embroidering/soldering/licking popsicles/whatever". And that can't be good for my blood pressure.

If only I could meet some of these people, I could sneak up behind them while they're doing their Zen thing and whap 'em upside the head. It would make me feel better, and I'm sure, being Zen, they'd appreciate my efforts on behalf of their enlightenment.

Maybe It Was the Violent Video Games--Er, Cave Paintings?--That Caused It

Here's something from the BBC News (link via The Corner):

Early Neolithic Britons had a one in 20 chance of suffering a skull
fracture at the hands of someone else and a one in 50 chance of dying from their
injuries. ...Blunt instruments such as clubs were responsible for most of the
trauma. ...

Rick Schulting of Queen's University Belfast and Michael Wysocki from
the University of Central Lancashire looked at 350 skulls spanning the period
from 4000 BC to 3200 BC.
"We generally think of Neolithic people as living
peaceful lives - they were busy looking after cereal crops and rearing
livestock," Mr Wysocki told the BBC News website.

Well, I guess that's what they get for turning to agriculture and sky god religions. Just a few thousands of years before, when everyone hunted & gathered and worshipped the Great Goddess (which worship is proven by their having scratched chevrons into rocks), human nature was completely different and no one hit people in the head with clubs at all.

Surely This Kind of "Parade" Is Worth More Points Than a Marching Band?

An AP news story from Saturday says 17 counter-demonstrators were arrested before and during a neo-Nazi march through a predominantly black neighborhood in Orlando, Florida. A few points:

* If the marchers really want to encourage white people to unite, as their signs suggest, shouldn't they be marching through predominantly white neighborhoods?

* I don't know about this particular group, but many neo-Nazi and white supremacist types portray themselves as patriotic Americans. If they're such loyal Americans, why do they align themselves with the National Socialists--enemies we fought and defeated, but who claimed many American lives while we were doing it.

* In a time when America faces real enemies around the world, why are these people wasting their time on this crap? If they must hate, why can't they focus it on the people who want to kill us and destroy our way of life?

* According to the article, 14 of the 17 counter-demonstrators arrested were members of out-of-town groups and the marchers were part of a Minneapolis-based group. What were these outsiders doing in Orlando? If Orlando really wants this sort of thing in its city, can't it DIY it?

* The article said police said the arrested faced charges "including disorderly conduct, battery on a law enforcement officer and wearing a mask". I don't know if it's my proximity to America's Mardi Gras Central or if it's my con experiences and enjoyment of live theater, but one of those charges makes no sense to me.

* To paraphrase the Blues Brothers, "I hate Minnesota Nazis." (And Florida ones, and German ones, and Arab ones... :-) Actually I just hate the ideology; the individuals involved are still God's children, of course, and their souls should be prayed for.)

Why Gen-Xers Can't Win

People have a tendency to hang onto the hair and clothing styles that were popular when they were young. This means that when the Baby-Boomers have finally died off, so we don't have to hear about them any more, and Gen-Xers are finally king of the playground, the people who are now eighteen or so will join us in our nursing homes--and many of them will be sporting low-rise pants that give us a highlighted view of sixty five-year old butt cracks, saggy bellies, and wrinkly tattoos. And we poor Gen-Xers can't even depend on poor eyesight to obscure it; the pace of technology may have given us all 20/20 vision by then.

'Tis pity she's a person of negotiable affection...

Why are so many people nowadays so obsessed with whoring? It's as if no girl nowadays can say, "I like yarn" or "I really enjoy cookies"; no, it's "I'm a yarn whore" or "I'm a cookie whore." And don't even get me started on the fact that a large segment of the American population now uses the term "pimp" to refer to good, or at least innocuous, things.

Is it that the consumeristic, materialistic mindset has now been carried so far people no longer mind admitting they are for sale--and for cheap too. And does the same materialistic mindset mean they see no longer see any reason even to pretend to find exploiting people wrong? If that's so, why not go the whole hog and start talking about being a "yarn slave" and "slavemastering your 'ride'"?

Are some of them trying to shock people? If so it's not working, because everybody says it; maybe they could get a reaction if they talked about "lynching" instead of "pimping".

Or is all the whore and pimp talk just rampant crudity and no one using it is thinking about what they're saying?

Probably.

But I wonder if the whore thing--and the slut thing, too, as "slut" is used a lot and in a similar way-- isn't part of our modern anti-goodness. People nowadays are less apt to believe in goodness. When we see it depicted in fiction, we scoff at it; when we see it in life, we suspect it; when we hear it promoted, we mock it. We want our heroes not just
"warts and all", but nearly all wart; a strangely large number of us now prefer villains. Maybe this whore thing is a related phenomenon? People don't believe in virtue any more, but think if it did exist, it wouldn't be egalitarian to reach for it, so we're all more in tune with the times if we embrace vice instead. No girl believes in the idea of or wants to be a lady, but any girl can call herself a whore or a slut, and who's going to contradict her?

It's probably just crudity. But whatever it is, crudity or sign of deeper problems, couldn't people at least mix it up a little--say "pander" or "procuror" occasionally instead of "pimp", throw maybe an occasional "prostitute" or "madam" or "bawd" in there; I have seen a "harlot" or two, but that doesn't provide much variety. Even crudity needs originality! Get with it all you yarn/cookie/whatever cathouse denizens--pander your language!

And while you're doing that, maybe you could come up with some sort of ranking for the various whores? Just so we know where we are. I mean, is a two-skein whore the high-priced yarn whore or the cheap one? Do cookie whores come in two-chip versus blue-chip varieties, or is it a chip versus chunk scale? I just want to know so I don't inadvertently insult someone by suggesting her price is lower than it is--say calling a woman a styrofoam cup of instant Folgers whore when she's really more of an overpriced espresso kind of whore.

Go Not Genderly Into That Good Term

In the 1970s, a small number of people got all het up about language, and we got a lot of terms like "fireperson", a sudden surge in slash usage (s/he, his/her), and the beginning of quite a lot of other pronoun nonsense, especially people being so afraid to appear sexist that they began to use plural terms where a generic "he" or "his" was called for ("Anyone wishing to survive the crash should put on the lifejacket stored beneath their seat. Anyone without a lifejacket may wish to put their head between their legs and...") A lot of the anger among the very few people in the population who actually cared was over the fact that English uses a male term as the generic--"mankind" rather than "personkind", "his" rather than some sex-generic term like "shis". That "man" can refer to a male human or to everyone, while "woman" can refer only to a female (or, more rarely, to females generally) but never to humanity as a whole, was supposed to be offensive.

I'm a child of my time, so I understand what they were saying: "The male is made the standard of all things, etc." But really now, couldn't it be interpreted exactly the opposite way? "A man is just a man, but a woman is something else! WOman is man-plus, man the deluxe model, man with extra. We say 'his'or 'he' for people within mixed groups, because while anyone can fit the basic model, not just anyone can be the luxury model."

Well, it makes as much sense as what the '70s language police were saying.


I'm about to go off to have my dinner, but it occurs to me that there's another oppressed group whose concerns the gender-in-language people were not concerned with: the animals. Won't somebody please think of the animals?! Language tradition wasn't much concerned with them either. How else do you explain the fact that there is no way to refer to members of a mixed humans (both sexes) and animals (both sexes) group? If I wanted to say that all the members of a mixed household were about to have dinner, but I started off with a singular term, how would I continue? "Each member of the Jones household is about to have her/his/its dinner." Rather awkward, don't you agree? So far the only non-sex or species-specific terms I can think of to substitute are "shirts" or "shits"; as the former may be somewhat more appropriate, I propose we use "shirts" for "her/his/its" and use "sheet" for she/he/it. I leave the question of why the Jones household is called by the name of its human oppressor rather than by the name of one of its animal members to someone else.

What Is It About Places Named Berkley?

A school in Berkley, Michigan has pulled a song called "Pick a Bale of Cotton" from a middle school concert. I am not familiar with the song, but apparently it contains such racially charged lyrics as,

"Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton. Gotta jump down, turn around, Oh, Lordie, pick a bale a day."


Oh, the horror, the horror.

The song was pulled after one parent complained. The child of that parent explained their problem with the song thusly: "They were bringing back the memories of how African-Americans picked cotton, and it wasn't a good memory. It was disrespectful to African-Americans."

Should there be any kind of pain and suffering settlement out of this, I hope I can get in on it. Reading the above statement made me remember how my European-American grandfather made his European-American children pick cotton on their small farm. It's wasn't a good memory. It was disrespectful of the Berkley School District to force me to remember these events, and I hope that in future they will be more sensitive.

To further that aim, may I suggest that the Berkley schools also remove "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" from any future inclusion in its concerts, as the line "Well, you get in that kitchen, make some noise with the pots and pans" brings up painful memories of how female-Americans have been forced to labor in the homes of their male oppressors for low or (more often) no wages?

This Makes Me Very Tired

I don't know why but I skimmed an article about the state of trendspotting or "coolhunting", and the whole thing made me want to lie down with a book--preferably one that hasn't been on a bestseller list for a hundred years or so--and forget about the outside world. But someone might spot me, and then EVERYONE would be doing it.

Today, fads ping across continents and disappear so quickly
that the coolhunter, even the whole notion of "cool," has become
passé.

Fortunately we can show our contempt for "cool" by buying the brands favored by the all the other people who are also immune to the lure of cool new fads.

Every big-city scenester or bored teenager on the planet
has a blog or mass e-mail anointing the moment's hot restaurants, hobbies and
handbags. Add to this, mass obsession with celebrity style and global
corporatization and you can get nearly the same chai latte or
straight-off-the-runway skirt in Columbus, Ohio, that's available in Manhattan
or Milan.

One nation, under advertising, with liberty and blandness for all.

Trend-spotting has, in essence, become just another trend.
Consequently, the most successful trend forecasters are repositioning themselves
as something more than mere arbiters of taste. They're now social scientists
with a hipster edge.

So they're no longer people who spend every waking moment trying to stay a few weeks ahead of rapidly passing fads, they're cultural anthropologists.

IN a way, this desperate need among advertisers to "divine"
our intimate truths has indelibly linked consumerism to culture. Now, there's
hardly time to discover and explore a new experience or a new approach to living
without also considering the new line of products, technologies or services that
has been tailored to that discovery. Life is being captured, repackaged and sold
back to us as quickly as we live it.

How can the effectiveness of trend forecasting be measured,
anyway, when the line between a genuine societal trend and one manufactured by
media and advertising is now so blurred?

Am I the only person who finds this scary? No, not the possibility that corporations may find it hard to assess the effectiveness of their trend forecaster, but the linking of culture and consumerism. Why do so many of us now equate who we are with which trends we choose to follow and what we buy to show we're in on that trend?

And if we are going to define ourselves by what we buy, do we really need the Color Marketing Group to tell us what colors to buy it in?

The value and lifespan of information changed rapidly in the
late 1990s. Just as Internet access and download speed rocketed, so did the
transfer of ideas, making what was "cool" obsolete from the moment it was
discovered.

"It used to be that you had to have the Louis Vuitton Murakami
purse," says Buckingham. "Well, now you can get the $10 version on [Manhattan's]
Canal Street. So when you talk to teenage girls, they say they buy the fakes
because it's all about just showing you know the trend — not even the value of
the trend itself."

I can't say that I'm bothered by girls opting for cheap knockoffs bags over the genuine overpriced handbag (although making your own version seems better than buying the knockoff), but why buy even the knockoff (or make your own copy) if you don't genuinely like the thing? I guess if your life is all about following trends then it doesn't matter what you like, only what other people like; and with our current ten-second attention spands causing trends to change so quickly, anything you can do to save money so you can afford to buy the next trendy purse a few weeks from now is okay.

But as for grumpy old me, I'm starting to wonder if, as a nation, we're not either too rich or too shallow. If we weren't so rich, we couldn't be continually replacing handbags, decorative kitchen canisters, etc. as the next trend comes in. And if we weren't so shallow we wouldn't care whether our neighbors think our stuff is out-of-date or not.

Reading this article and contemplating the speed of fashion not only made me tired, it put me in mind (as so many things do) of something G. K. Chesterton said: He said that the Catholic Church is the only thing that can save us from the degrading slavery of being a child of our times. Of course he was talking about succumbing to intellectual fads, but I think it still applies. If we focused more on eternal matters, we would care less about the passing trendiness of a particular kind of coffee or style of slacks; if we defined ourselves in light of eternity, we wouldn't need to define ourselves by the kind of cologne we buy or purse we carry.

A New Fantasy Author on My "To Read" List

Ignatius Insight has an interview with Tim Powers:

http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/tpowers_intvw_sept05.asp

I've heard the name before but never come across any of his books. But his novels sound interesting and one comment of his made me suspect I might like the man:

I was on a panel once in which a woman said, "Dracula is
actually about the plight of 19th-century women," to which I replied, "No,
it’s
about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood – don’t
take my
word for it, check it out."

Our public library is still closed and its online catalogue is down, but I'll be checking for Powers as soon as I can.

Humans in the Mist

The London Zoo has a new exhibit.

Caged and barely clothed, eight men and women monkeyed around
for the crowds Friday in an exhibit labeled "Humans" at the London Zoo....The
exhibit puts the three male and five female "homo sapiens" amid their primate
relatives....the humans were wearing swimsuits beneath their fig
leaves.

Gosh, I wonder what the point of this exhibit could be.

"Seeing people in a different environment, among other animals
... teaches members of the public that the human is just another primate,"
Wills[a zoo spokesman] said.

and

"A lot of people think humans are above other
animals," [one of the displays] told The Associated Press. "When
they see humans as animals, here, it kind of reminds us that we're not that
special."

Ah, yes, animals=humans=animals. No difference at all. Except of course that the displayed humans have made and put on clothes, something that has never occurred to any animal in all of time. No animal has ever invented something new to give itself protection against the elements or to protect its modesty--or for that matter had feelings of modesty about displaying its genitals. Could it be that there's something going on inside humans that doesn't go on in animals?

Some people might even point out that the humans writing and reading this news story are engaging in an act that no animal can--the writer taking information from her environment, coming up with words to convey it, translating those words into abstract symbols on a page, and the readers then translating those marks into words which convey the information. (This is not even getting into the invention of paper or vast computer networks to print the marks on, or any editing for aesthetics or logic the writer may have done.) But people who would point out such things are obviously spiritually unevolved dupes of the patriarchy's humanity-uber-alles mentality.

"It turns everything upside down. It makes you think about the
humans in relation to the animals."

It might if I hadn't seen the same thing in a Charles Addams cartoon more than twenty years ago. Besides, if I were to think about how humans stand in relation to animals, that would only be emphasizing the difference between humans and animals (since animals don't think about it) and thus prove my lack of empathy to our oppressed animal brothers.

Things I'm Sick Of -- A Mean-spirited List

People who hate Wal-Mart and won't shut up about it, yet who continue to shop at other big chain stores. I don't care where other people shop, but I get tired of hearing about it from self-righteous snobs (yes, I'm generalizing). It wouldn't be so annoying if more of the complainers shopped only at small businesses or secondhand stores. If Chain X is the source of all evil, how can Chains Y & Z--not to mention A-W--who do the same sorts of things, not also be evil and worthy of ire?


Low-rise pants. They look okay on some super-thin girls, but they flatter no one. Most girls look very bad in them. Women of, as they say, a certain age shouldn't go there at all. (Especially when they're pairing their low-rise pants with a cropped top that shows off their wrinkly, stretch-marked, fortyplus-year old bellies and bellybutton ring or tattoos.) I'm not so lookist to care if people look good or not, but most of these sad people are obviously trying to look good and failing really badly.


Visible bra straps. When I was a girl, only the trashiest of the trashy went out with visible bra straps, and even then it was usually the result of extreme carelessness. Now some girls do it deliberately. It still looks trashy.


Flip-flops. They're great for the beach or for public showers, and they are economical (at least they used to be); but if you're a middle-class girl in one of the most prosperous countries ever to exist and you are wearing a nice dress, buy some shoes or a pair of decent-looking sandals. Hot gluing an artificial flower or some sequins to your flip-flops do not make them formal wear. No, not even semi-formal.


The use of the word "pimp" to mean anything other than a procurer, a pander, a low-life trafficker in human flesh, an exploiter (usually of women.)


The use of the word "ride" to refer to automobiles. I first heard this word in the early '90s. It sounded stupid then and it still sounds stupid.

A word on the title of the last post...

I in no way mean to malign a noble animal by comparing it to bureacrats and "educators"; the term was used in lieu of more accurate, but less flattering, ones as a way of softening my comment. One must be ladylike, after all.

When Nativity Scenes Go Wrong

Cavalcade of Bad Nativities

There's so many horrible Christmas decorations out there that none of these surprised me (okay, maybe the rubber ducky Jesus, but not much), but I give the author full credit for having found photographic proof that there is indeed something worse than a Precious Moments Nativity--namely, a Precious Moments knockoff Nativity where all the figurines wear lipliner that looks like bad 60s eyeshadow. God forbid those people should, like the Precious Moments people, put out an illustrated Bible.

In case it's not obvious, I despise the Precious Moments things; I loathe, despise, abhor and have theological problems with the Precious Moments nativities; and I harbor grave doubts about any woman--and it's always a woman--who would buy Precious Moments crap. (The latter's neither here nor there, though; I could wonder aloud about people who pay good money for Thomas Kinkade's creepy, creepy pictures, too, but we're on the nativities now, anyway.) You notice the Precious Moments people mostly make Nativities. The incarnation of God in a human--i.e., crying, pooping, prone to cuts and sores--form is just a ripe oppurtunity for cutesey-ification, for these people. And all those other funs stories from the Bible go down so much better when depicted as happening to teardrop-headed kids with serious pastel fixations. Noah, the affliction of Job, the whole Sodom and Gomorrah thing? Hey, they were all Precious Moments moments! The one thing I have yet to see, thank God and knock wood, is a Precious Moments Crucifixion.

I have to admit, though, that a crucified Precious Moments kid is something I could let my gaze linger on with pleasure, even as I shuddered in horror at the ghastliness of it all and wondered if there was any point in stockpiling food and weapons when I'd just seen one of the signs of the Apocalypse.