Confessions of a Philistine

A Thuringian

I don't read novels.  I have to be dragged to museums, live concerts and shows.   I think Public Television sucks.  I no longer read newspapers.  I don't travel except under my own power and generally to places I've already been. And I'm happy with that as long as I don't have to get out of the car.  Food doesn't do anything for me other than get me to the other side of a meal.  I don't live for sparkling conversation with the interesting strangers you meet at a party.  And when I apologize for any of the foregoing, I'm insincere.

I can explain myself.  I stopped reading novels because they started to reliably underwhelm me, especially the newest most buzzed about titles. Reading them had become a meta experience of endurance that I got tired of.  I got those titles from reading newspapers, a habit I acquired from a young age and maintained faithfully until I had had it with the guaranteed rage that their complicit neutrality toward our revolting age would never fail to arouse in me.  Their apologetic coverage of Iraq and the consequence-less financial meltdown were the last straws.  (For that matter, their promotion of the precious novels of the writing school era of fiction was really of a piece with the consensus-mirroring conventionality of their journalism and editorial positions.)  Deregulation of the airlines made travel to any place I couldn't drive to intolerable.  I just won't put up with that shit anymore and nothing, not even the possibility of some exotic paradise at the end of it is worth it to me. As for the rest of it, I'm a hermit; and when it comes to food, I really am a Philistine.  Good food is wasted on me.  And I'm aging.

But if you are not a Philistine, I'm okay with that.  In my circles, the assumption is that a person is trying not to be a Philistine, so conversations overflow among my cohort with illustrations of one's culture and worldliness, and to round things out, say, their gardening abilities and home improvements.  I am genuinely interested in hearing other people's experiences and cultural recommendations (to the extent that they are genuinely interesting).  It's just that being a Philistine myself, I'm not overly impressed by them.  I know that's rude, and I wouldn't mention it at all but after some recent experiences of sensing that the lopsidedness of these conversations -- my inability to contribute more than an occasional "oh" and a head nod and a "is that so" or two-- could be mistaken for my withholding of validation, I am compelled to explain to anyone who will listen that I don't have validation in me to withhold. 

To be honest, I am a bit suspicious of the drive to be cultured and worldly.  I am all for culture, and deeply grateful for the best examples of it when I come across them in the wild.  I am pro worldliness and anti xenophobia.  But I will admit that travel for the sake of worldliness and consumption for the sake of culture gall me just a little bit.  I am suspicious that on some level they are a submission to the neoliberal promotion of the individual as Homo economicus-- not a human being but an economic project whose purpose in being is to grow the portfolio.  I'm suspicious of ostentatious yielding to the pressure to succeed at being the market to whom the commodities of culture are sold.  But having admitted that, I don't fault anyone who came up in our confusing age for the compulsion to demonstrate their worthiness of belonging to it.  I wish them fun and enrichment in their pursuits as I pray for their souls.

The term Philistine, used to describe a cultural boor is a gratuitous slap at a people of the Levant whose name comes to us filtered through Latin translation of the Bible.  They are the tribe of Goliath, the citizens of Gaza,  as you might suspect, the forebears of modern Palestinians-- by circumstances forced upon them, a people of the World with a beautiful, highly advanced culture of their own.  The biblical reference that the term is derived from is in Judges 16, the story of Samson and Delilah, and specifically the repeated refrain "The Philistines are upon you"-- a scare tactic invoked by Delilah nightly to test Samson's extraordinary strength which she has been trying through various means to sap in return for a reward from the Philistines, and at which she is unsuccessful until she cuts his hair.  According to Google's Oxford Languages algorithm,  the term in the modern sense is from

early 19th century: from Philistine, originally with reference to a confrontation between university students and townspeople in Jena, Germany, in the late 17th century; a sermon on the conflict quoted ‘the Philistines are upon you’ (Judges 16), which led to an association between the townspeople and those hostile to culture.

It's yet another example of Europeans commandeering a neutral non-European concept to insult their own.  I can't find a demonym for the citizens of Jena who are the true target of the insult, but there is one for the state where Jena is situated, which I unilaterally declare to be close enough.  The term is "Thuringian".  I shall henceforth wear it in the proper shame.

Corrections

In our March issue, we stated that former Trump chief of staff General John Kelly is an ass, a loser and an inarguably unmitigated disaster of a human being.  We have since learned that through no fault of his own he was born in Boston, which makes him a somewhat arguably mitigated disaster of a human being.

In an argument with my wife recently, I claimed that pink socks did not really go with the black slacks she was wearing.  In fact, when she wore them anyway, they actually did look really cute with the black slacks she was wearing.

When my boss said in our meeting that deciding what format I should use for a report he had asked me for was "above [his] paygrade" and that I should do what I thought was best, I was wrong to mentally roll my eyes at him.  I actually do deserve more pay than he is currently making.

In a comment to a Juice Newton video on YouTube, user FlashGriddle76 stated that the 1980s was the best decade for music. In fact, the best decade for music is the 1350s.

Officer McCluskey said that I blatantly flipped him off as he walked away from giving me a speeding ticket  for driving 5 miles over the limit on Friday afternoon.  Actually I was trying to conceal flipping him off.

In the 6th grade, when Jessica Flanagan asked me if I liked Sally Minsky, due to embarrassment and shyness I said "No."  My response was inaccurate. 

In a recent post, I claimed that the sky was not blue and the grass was not green.  The sky is blue and the grass is green.

You were wrong just now to think that this is the worst idea for a blog post imaginable.  There are in fact worse ideas that I rejected.

We regret the errors.

One Angry Man

I had virtual jury duty today. I only found out it was virtual last night when I called the automated messaging service to check in, though it turned out the news was on my official summons if I had only bothered to read it.  I hadn't read it because I've had jury duty before and thought I knew the routine.  But that was pre-COVID.  Post-pandemic or pre-, it is not my favorite activity, which is probably not a revelation to anyone, but I have known people who get it into it for legitimate reasons-- the best among them perhaps genuine civic duty, and enthusiasm about an opportunity to participate in the assurance of justice.  My feelings about it are always a bit of a mess, and I was able to experience just about all of them today.

The last time I was summonsed to jury duty was about a week before the pandemic hit.  Though my colleagues at work expressed doubt that it would actually happen in light of the lockdown, this is not the kind of luck I generally have, so I made my plans to go and dutifully checked in the night before fully expecting my desire to get out of jury duty to be trumped by my okayness with being in lockdown-- but wouldn't you know for once the universe granted me a break and cancelled my jury duty.  

My karma with jury duty is a bit more anomalous -- and weird-- than it is with everything else in my life. The prior time I reported to jury duty was the day that Beto O'Rourke announced his candidacy for Senate against Ted Cruz in 2018; I got dismissed early due to a continuance in the trial I was waiting to be selected for.  The prior time, after being rejected for one jury, I learned that my wife, who had been forced to take public transportation because of my extraordinary need for the car, had stepped into a pothole, fallen and broken her ankle on the way to the bus stop so I got dismissed from jury obligations for the rest of the day to attend to her.  In short, jury duty has always been eventful for me but never resulted in my being selected for a trial.  

That day that my wife broke her ankle-- as I sat in the voir dire dreading the interview, I thought about how my personal experience as a victim of a mugging some twenty years prior had been a sort of get out of jail free card (so to speak) in prior voir dires and searched inside my soul to interrogate myself about whether this experience had truly prejudiced me in a way that would inhibit my impartiality or prevent a fair and just hearing on my part in a criminal trial.  I had healed from the trauma, and in any case, I had never generalized my feelings about crime as being that of a victim in search of vengeance from any criminal. I decided that, on the contrary, having searched the depths of my heart I had concluded that I would be able to separate my own experience from the facts of a case to such an extent that I could truthfully state that I could serve impartially.  But when I had made my case to the judge for my fitness to serve, the defense attorney decided to use one of his free passes to reject me without cause.  Justice's loss!  But I felt I had dodged a bullet.

For this reason, I was almost certain that today was not going to be my lucky day.  Even though virtual duty meant I did not have to drive an hour to the county courthouse at an ungodly hour of the morning.  Even though when I got called into a voir dire for a civil case, I was given lucky 21 as my juror number out of 30 in the running for 6 juror slots plus 2 alternates.  As I sat  in the zoom waiting room looking at the live muted feeds of my fellow prospective jurors, I observed that one of them was actually connecting from his job behind the wheel of a delivery vehicle, while others were shuffling papers and obviously multi-tasking both jury duty and their jobs.  Did they forget to get excused from work for jury duty or were their employers not compensating them for attending to their civic duty?  The gods were not smiling on the prospect of me overcoming my jadedness.  To pass the time I made a fateful decision to browse through my brother's twitter feed, scrolling through what was a particularly contentious morning of tweets fully emblematic of the decrepit state of our current society and particularly with respect to our judiciary and system of justice.  

In the virtual jury room, the visual chaos of the muted jurors was suddenly broken by the commanding voice of a new face that materialized toward the center of things.  I quickly gathered that this was the judge and that the selection process was beginning.  The judge  told us about the nature of the case (a civil suit between a gentleman injured in a crash and the gentleman who drove the other vehicle) and went through the initial survey of all participants.   I raised my hand to the questions about law firm employment (though not as a legal worker) and medical training (sleep lab technician), but sat on my hands for the question about beliefs, opinions or other reasons that would prejudice and impair me in the performance of making a fair decision on the basis of the evidence.  When the judge left the jury room, as I waited for my interview with the judge, I realized that it wasn’t my law or medical experience that made me suspect as a juror, but in fact my belief in Universal Healthcare and in the notion of restorative justice in which there aren’t winners and damages and losers and penalties but the restoration of justice between two parties in what even our language recognizes is an accident.  The more I waited the more I stewed in the juices of anger that in order to get your life back after an accident this is what you have to go through.  How else could you afford the rehabilitation and work loss in this rotten system than to hire a shyster lawyer to take it out of some other sucker's hide in court?  That’s what prevented me from believing that I could give justice by going along with this charade.  

And when I found myself suddenly virtually materialized by myself before the judge, a clerk and the two lawyers in the case, that’s what I told the judge when she questioned me.  Though she begged to differ with me that the outcome of this one case had anything to do with the failures of our system of healthcare delivery and justice,  she was very kind to me about my honesty in expressing my opinion (and I was not rude about it, though I did get inspiration from looking at the turkey lawyers while I was expressing myself.)  

After I was dismissed, which consisted of being popped out of the virtual judge’s chambers like a cartoon character and back into the waiting area, I did not know how successfully my spiel had gone.  I mean was there a chance that rather than be convinced by my self-assessment they would be so impressed by my honesty and argument that they would want me on the panel to try to enhance the possibility of actual justice happening?!  But assuming it had worked, part of me thought, ok, I was clever enough and angry enough at society to perhaps get the chutzpah to make this kind of ploy, but what if everyone else had my attitude about our fucked up systems of healthcare and justice?  Was it fair that I got to cleverly get out of it just because I was highly motivated to come up with such a scheme?  I didn’t know!

As it turns out it worked.  My number was passed by when they called the selected jurors. At the time I was proud of myself and felt I’d spoken some truth to power and perhaps maybe increased justice just a tiny bit in the world, but in retrospect I'll bet they just looked at me as one of those kooky old cranks who was better sent along back to his bat cave (and maybe have NSA check up on his surfing activities just to be on the safe side, mk?)  

Whatevs am I right??  Out of it for 3 years at least they said!

Reminder

 As one world leader falls seemingly out of the blue, just a reminder to you, dear reader, and to me, that we deserve a world better than we are getting and that we can have it.  It is just one collective action away.  Perhaps the doom and gloom that is enveloping us is a sign that we are overdue for a societal overhaul. I don't need to run through the whole list, do I? It's not just the usual suspects-- the mass shootings, the endless political debates about nothing that go nowhere, our eroding personal and civic rights, not least of all our privacy, the rising prices, the falling prospects, the rising temperatures, the falling bank accounts, the rising inequity, the falling discourse, the rising health care costs, the falling health.  Well maybe it is to a large extent, the usual suspects.  

But let's turn that noise off for a second and seize hold of what's really going on.  We are being played.  We are still being played by the tiny sliver of us who by sheer luck and swollen balls call the shots on our planet. And by their minions, the executive and managerial and administrative ministers of wealth, and their cheerleaders, the press.  And the story we are being told is that things are the way they are because it's a small shrinking dying world and it's always been this way and we do not have any choice.  What little there is to do about it is being done.  Hold their beer.  And what choice do we have but to trust them.  So every now and then we have elections to try to prevent the worst of them from rising.  And sometimes that seems to work. Until next time. Same time next year.  Year in, year out.  And we start to blame ourselves and each other for the way it is.  Which is no way to live, but what is the alternative?

So as long as you are still here, I just wanted to remind you that the alternative is to say no to the bullshit.  To stop pretending we don't have a choice because that pretense only serves them.  Yes it's scary to take this meager life we have built for ourselves from the scraps that we have been allowed to have and roll it up into a little ball, wipe our ass with it and flush it down the toilet.  But just imagine the rush you'll get watching it disappear with the whoosh of a whole new order.  The order that we will all build as we go out into the streets where we will find each other and make our world new.  It can be done.  It is the only way forward for us. There is no way forward for them.  The only way forward for us is the end of the road for them.  (For the squeamish, don't worry-- the class may be going but the people aren't going anywhere.  They'll just become more of us.)

We don't have to rip the band aid off all at once.  We can start small, by insisting on our people at the top for a change.  Not dandy con artists trying to bullshit us into believing we'll get something for enabling their rise to power.  We need people like us.  The more smart but reluctant the better. 

Let yourself imagine a hundred thousand Boris Johnsons across the globe voluntarily stepping aside from the reins of power to make room, not just for more Borises, but for us. Because the problem isn't how much more has to come out of our hides to keep their dog and pony show going.  The problem is how do you and me and all of us finally start to get ours.  Because something tells me when you take care of us, you take care of the planet.  You can't find the answer to how we get there by looking in the same books.  We have to start writing our own books by living in the pages.  

If we can put up with their shit and keep smiling, we can do anything.

*****

For some ideas of how different things could be for us, I've started a list.