Just asking

Do humans require society?  Does society require artificial distinctions?  If so, why do they seem to require codification and why is there variation in the codification?   Is codification of the hierarchy an epigenetic part of being human?  Are all codifications necessary evils?  Laws seem to be the code in place to maintain existing inequalities.  Must the top of the hierarchy always be rotten?  Can real justice be codified?  Can it replace hierarchy? 

The West has a reasonable claim to being the champ when it comes to hierarchical ordering of society.  But there are still hierarchies in Chinese society (and Japanese and Aztec and Hawaiian and etc..).  Makes one wonder, do we need hierarchies?  Why is hierarchy not a subject of our philosophy (other than as something to codify)?  Why do we not view it as a problem to solve? I understand those at the top of the hierarchy exert undue influence on our institutions of learning and knowledge, but why are our best minds not obsessed with how to flatten the social structure in order to benefit from the vast and varied deep bench of human experience and wisdom?  I know those at the top don't want us to solve this problem , but why do we listen to them?  They aren't the boss of us.   I’m just axing questions.   I know there are or have been societies without hierarchies but not at the level of state or city-state it seems.  I feel sortition could be a way to “solve hierarchies”.  But if people “need hierarchies” I may be wrong about that. 

I’m obsessed lately with our inability in this country certainly to ever do the right thing.  Inequality we can do.  Injustice we got down. Imperiling the planet?  We got this!  Genocide assistance?  You betcha!  Repeating the worst hits of history? Hold our beer! Outrage over appeals for decency?  Check check and check!  Ban the most popular platform for creativity and free expression among young people?  Smell us! Universal healthcare?   No can do!!

I almost wish we had the luxury to get this wrong-- that some selfish assholes were gonna be assholes basically and those were the billionaires or the billionaire wannabes, and it’s a big world-- room enough for everybody including the socialists so just blow the assholes off.  But we don’t have the luxury because it’s our planet’s destruction and the misery of billions that enables their assholery.  (Happy New Year by the way!  ^_^)   

I also am obsessed lately with this imbalance of power between thoughtfulness and munitions.  Those wannabes and billionaires have guns and will use them and do.  We just have our thoughts.  When they figured out they could win by threatening and carrying out violence-- and that as long as they kept winning the arms race nothing bad was going to happen to them-- the game was lost for the rest of us.

So we're just going to let them win?

Two Tsintsadze Miniatures

The following is a performance by Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital with a Korean chamber orchestra of Song and Sachidao, two of Sulkhan Tsintsadze's 1988 Eight Miniatures on Georgian Folk Tunes.  The piece was composed by Tsintsadze three years before his death in Tbilisi in 1991 at 66, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  You don't need to know that Sachidao is a traditional accompaniment of the ancient Georgian Martial Art of Chidaoba to enjoy it.

Nanana

I suddenly can't get enough of Peggy Gou's (It Goes Like) Nanana 

Seems like just what the occasion calls for.  Once more, for longer.

Bonus jam - Lobster Telephone 

Things I Learned

In no particular order, here are 8 things I learned* in 2024.

1) Gagauzia is a region of Moldova that is the homeland of an enclave of about 135,000 Turkic speaking Christians called Gagauzians.  (Another 30,000 live across the border in Ukraine.)  According to Wikipedia, it is presumed they were already in the Bulgarian Balkans and converted to Orthodox Christianity before the Ottoman conquest of the area in the late 1300's.  Following its defeat of the Ottomans in 1812, Russia relocated the Gagauzians to Bessarabia in the early part of the 19th century where they have lived ever since -- although they have switched countries several times due to the vagaries of history.  Their capital is Comrat.

2) [Earth shattering trigger warning]  Theodore Geisel pronounced his nom de plume Dr Seuss as Dr Zoyce (zɔɪs) to rhyme with 'Joyce'.  (It was his middle name and also his mother's maiden name.)  It became his penname in college at Dartmouth as a means of avoiding suspension for satirical cartooning.

3) There are seahorses in the western Atlantic from Nova Scotia to Venezuela.  I thought they were exclusively tropical and probably on the other side of the planet.  (I somehow already knew it's the male who carries the fertilized eggs in his pouch and gives birth to seahorse young, so-- I'm redeemed?)

4)  Scientific discovery of the year: Uranus smells like farts.  It's a fact you can spring on anyone at any opportune moment.   E.g.:

    Boss: Henderson, where's that report?
    Henderson: I don't know, but did you know that Uranus smells like farts?

Prediction for 2025: Next thing we'll discover is that Uranus sounds like farts.

5) Screenwriter Buck Henry envisioned the role of Benjamin Braddock in the Graduate for Robert Redford.  Redford wanted the role but Director Mike Nichols vetoed it on seeing the screen test figuring he would be unbelievable as an angst ridden lost soul unhappy with the default choices of young upper class men in the late 1960's.  In spite of his own California provenance, Dustin Hoffman's ethnic East Coast agita in the middle of all that  WASPy So Cal suburbia was just what the movie needed.  Runner up in the weird dodged bullet casting department: the role of Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining almost went to Robin Williams.  ("Too psychotic," Kubrick ultimately decided, before giving the role to Jack Nicholson.)

6) Learned from Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling (1987):  Apparently, I did not dream that when I was a kid in the late 60's and early 70's it was taught in school that even more than the Soviet Union was rumored to be, America was a "classless society."  According to Ehrenreich the point of this truism preached as a fact in that era was to make it common sense to minds at their formative stage that  America was a completely equal and free society in which some people simply chose to be the heads of corporations, some people chose to be janitors, some chose not to work-- it was all a matter of personal choice.  Our economy was not planned, unlike the Soviet Union's; it was chosen by each of us.  Social upheaval in those same years belied the propaganda, which fell out of vogue by the Reagan era.  No wonder I hadn't heard that bullshit factoid in years.

7) I am the age Karl Marx was when he died.

8) "Hearken (to)" is no longer a word.  And when it was it didn't mean what I thought it meant which was "be reminiscent of."  It meant "heed or pay attention to."  I wonder what word I thought I was using all these years.

~~~~~
* Alternatively, 8 things I managed to live this long without knowing.

Violence is Not the Answer

Michael Moore embarks on a voyage seeking (and getting) free Cuban healthcare for a flotilla of chronically ill US 9/11 responders and others in his 2007 film Sicko

But sometimes it gets the attention.  I can't recall a case in my lifetime when the murder of a stranger evoked such a visceral intrigue.  I could sense my conscience giving up before it could muster an ounce of obligation to the dead guy's memory.  It may have been the identification of the victim as UnitedHealthcare CEO that clinched it.  I didn't know who that was, but the title itself has a built in villainy to it, like Chancellor of the Third Reich, Grand Inquisitor or State's Executioner.  Judging by the comments the little snot Ben Shapiro is getting on his videos chastising the left for its (involuntary) unabashed glee over the man's murder, it's a sentiment that is shared across the political spectrum by workers (and the under- and unemployed) of every stripe.  The contradictions have never been sharper than the media's predictable obtuse puzzlement over the outpouring of glee that they mischaracterize as "online" while showing graphics demonstrating UnitedHealthcare's outlying offline superiority at denying its customers claims even among the shameful dozen or so megacorporations nominally providing insurance to the American masses whose society is alone among so-called developed nations in refusing to see the health of its citizens as a right and not an expensive privilege-- an overpriced and undelivered commodity profiting its entrepreneurial and shareholder classes by withholding care from those who need it most.

Michael Moore has made his 2007 documentary on the topic, Sicko, available for free on YouTube.  It was made at the end of the Bush Era, before the financial crisis, before the election of Obama and the implementation of the insurance-giant-friendly Affordable Care Act conceived by Mitt Romney but tarred by Romney's fellow Republicans as Obama Care as part of a long term strategy to have it clawed back from the Americans for whom it has been better than the unaffordable care that it replaced and that the Republicans would like to return them to.  Surprisingly (or not) Obama Care does not appear to have made a difference in the relevance of Sicko to the American situation with respect to health care (but also to family leave, post-natal care and  secondary education) available as a human right in much of the rest of the world.  As Moore demonstrates, the quality of life of those living in Canada, the UK, France and Cuba is demonstrably better for those burdened with footing the tax bill for these universal rights that Americans alone are deprived of.  It seems the free care and services their taxes make available to all relieve the burdens that Americans are beset with that make forking out the taxes that are designed to give nothing in return such a hassle to come up with here.

The beauty of the act that is on everyone's lips, that inspired Moore to make his film free to watch when he learned that it had been some inspiration to the assassin, is that it has become a fulcrum around which you can learn who your enemies are.   They are the ones whose priorities and sympathies lie solely with the fat-ass MBA whose fiduciary responsibility to UnitedHealth's shareholders made him blind to the death, disease, grief and misery his profit-seeking policies routinely and purposely inflicted on his unwilling customers.   They are the ones responsible for the arrest of Briana Boston, the 42 year old mother of 3 in Florida who in a fit of the very relatable rage it's easy to imagine being provoked in her in the course of trying futilely to reverse a claim denial for one of her sick children told her own insurance company over the phone that they were next.  We can well imagine the mindset that would view this woman's rage as an opportunity for the state and the corporatocracy to set an example to anyone else emboldened by the conversation the assassin's act has inspired rather than as a chance to turn the tide and start acting like humans.  The consolation to take from the tone-deaf tack they have taken so far in an effort to miss the point is that it's not outrageous to think it's a sign of a deeper panic. They are talking to themselves within earshot, beefing up security in case this is the start of an epidemic of customers taking matters into their own hands. Could the story get away from them this time?  When our judges, police, media and politicians reveal themselves to be the enemy on a matter so essential to most of our lives, it's a sign that the whole structure on which their power is based is on rather wobbly grounds.

It's a shame it takes the blood of a CEO to get some attention.  It's a shame they will do their best to re-write the MBA's death as the tragedy, when the tragedy happens every day to UnitedHealthcare's customers.  They always seem to succeed in making sure we all miss the point as well; and they could very well succeed this time too in making us forget this ever happened so that they can more quickly get back to screwing us as before.  But until they do, it's a pleasure seeing them squirm.

Last Ramble on the Topic

I found myself getting super annoyed this cycle with people thinking parties and voting were the answer to our problems. I too put too much stock in the outcome of this election, but I also have come to feel that voting is a mere maintenance project to try to survive the evils of electoral politics until an actually effective system of self-governance can be implemented.  I do have high hopes for that effective and representative system of self-governance--- even if just in the immediate solution it poses to the worst excesses and dangers of electoral politics.  If I were starting a career in academics I might want to study Self-Governance and the Art of Politics – namely how does a fluid self-governing body navigate the challenges of this world imposed by the remnants of electoral politics, oligarchy, careerism, authoritarianism, elite ownership and capture, surveillance, the deep state and the military industrial complex, among other things.  (How does it do international affairs with non-self-governing bodies- etc.)   Getting ahead of myself, but anyway, I don’t feel like wasting my time with politics anymore (unless something appealing pops up—because I think political groundswells are still more likely than the world suddenly coming to its senses about how fucked things are by politics and how much better they’d be if we just governed ourselves which is what we all proceeded to do.

I don’t think the American people know what they want.  On purpose I’m sure. They don’t even have to wait for Jake Tapper to say How are we going to pay for it?  It’s already formed in their heads.  They had change dangled in front of them in the form of Kamala Harris—an actually young attractive person and they went with the guy they figured they knew, mostly because he was a Dad.  That’s the change people want.  They want their Dad to love them.

It’s not their fault, I hasten to add.   Their isolation from each other, their alienation from what’s going on, and from a sense that they can do anything about it has been inculcated in them.  They may wish things were different, but they are only too happy to pretend that things can at least get back to that last time they thought everything was going fine.  Maybe Dad can get us back there.  That’s what his hat says.

I am getting irritated by the non-sense and bullshit being shat out about what this election means.  I’ll tell you what it means, it means we are a very confused and fucked up and complicitly powerless people. Election Day is not an opportunity for change (unless it is—but that takes some serious planning.)  What Election Day is in my opinion is an obligation to make the best that you can of a terrible choice.  I honestly think for a complete unknown with dark skin and a vagina Kamala Harris did a creditable job given the short time span she was given and these unprecedented circumstances.  I’m not saying she was faultless.  But I think it’s ridiculous to assert as though it’s the truth that if she had pandered to my tastes instead of Liz Cheney’s she would have won.  We have no fucking idea.  Likewise, I think it’s absurd to say that people actually meant to make this incredibly poorest of 2 possible choices on purpose.  People are doing their best in the voting booth.  Fractions of people on both sides are true believers in what they’re voting for.  The rest are just doing the best they can and hoping for the best.  Not enough people understand the con job that Trump and the oligarchs are pulling.  It looks like Dad level stuff.  Dad makes me vomit (not my Dad necessarily but the concept of Dad) but a lot of Americans feel safer with Dad than with some dark skinned person with a vagina.  (apologies to KH for harping on her genitals.  Anyhoooo!11)   This is a classic example of what’s wrong with electoral politics – it is not intentional.  We’re not choosing healthcare and income equality and peace.  We’re choosing a celebrity and hoping for the best.

People who think this was like 2016 or even 2020 are dead wrong.  We’ve never had an election like this before where a known entity, a former president who lost his re-election, a charismatic asshole tv celebrity with a well-established propensity to get away with anything was up against a virtual unknown with an apparently unpronounceable name who 3 months before got called on by unseen hands to substitute for the current (Carter-like) president in his bid for re-election due to the public catastrophe of the president’s spectacular decline on full display to all.  The task of this substitute was really Herculean.  I thought she might actually do it which is what makes it extra disappointing—devastating—to me.  I was placing my dreams on that blank canvas of my imagination of what her administration could be capable of.  Foolish of me.  And foolish as well to bear a grudge against anyone who didn't adopt my fantastical hope in the unknown one.  But in truth, I am always hoping for change.  I am always voting for Revolution.  I just know that that kind of voting if it has any effect at all has it in the primaries.  Until the operatives get their hands on it.  But in this case, I was hopeful that there wasn’t enough time for the operatives to get their hands all over it.  I also believed (maybe too credulously) that she was being advised to not reinforce stereotypes about her demographics, which was why she was over-compensating with the republican bullshit, which made sense since her campaign was being run out of Delaware with Biden’s people.  I hated that she missed the dumb easy opportunities to reassure the left wing of the base, but I had been convinced that there was method to her madness, and I’m not convinced there wasn’t something to the strategy.  There just wasn’t enough time (or Bernie people behind the scenes.)

One reason people don’t like liberals  is that they are huge fuckin’ unself-aware hypocrites.  They are clueless about themselves:  they're just as cretinous and mean as everyone else but they think they intend better.  I don’t like the US being like Hungary.  I don’t like having to live with the Hungarian dilemma.  How do you keep being a Hungarian when the uber Hungarian has made that awful.  What good is being cynical (which you can’t help being) when people are being deported and Israel is being encouraged to turn Gaza into beachfront real estate for Israelis and other investors.  How evil is it that the coolest way to be dissident is to be ironically complicit in fascism in the name of accelerationism?  I do believe the US has to fall but that ain’t happening.  It’s just turning into Hungary.  So giving you the benefit of the doubt, what you might have intended originally with your oh so clever cynicism was to be accelerationist, bur what you are in point of fact is merely complicit in fascism.  What I don't think is forgivable is that through your eagerness you've made every one else by virtue of their own ineffectualness necessarily complicit as well.

The Answer

The Answer from Erik Stephens, recording as Apollo Brown, on his 2014 soundtrack in search of a movie, Thirty Eight.

Stephens sampled this exotic novelty from the Carpenters' Crescent Noon (words and lyrics by Richard Carpenter and John Bettis) featured on their second studio album, 1970's Close to You.

Ramsey Lewis must have covered it first, in 1971 on his Back to the Roots album.  Cleveland Eaton is bowing the melody on bass.