1984 Presidential Election

I have a memory of the night before the American president was elected in 1984. Amid all the flash and bang of election-night hustle I asked my mother what was at stake.

I was 7 years old, so I didn't actually ask her what was at stake. But I did get her to reveal her emotional investments behind the political process on display. The beauty of a moment like this and how an American democracy work is that the motivations behind the electorate are close to child-like simplicity and base emotional yearnings.

As was the case on this night in 1984.

I asked in my own 7-year-old way who she voted for and why, and she replied that she chose Walter Mondale. Why? Because he was for the abolition of nuclear weapons; Reagan was not. Shortly thereafter I was sent to my bed. That night, as was customary when I was distressed, I prayed to God. I prayed to God for Walter Mondale to be elected.

God's mystery "works" in many ways, and he pads this impotence against the God-chosen American electorate by couching it as such. Needless to say, my prayer went unanswered.

Then in the Spring of 1988 I was at recess at Jefferson elementary when a fellow student approached me with jubilant news: Reagan had met with Gorbachev and they decided to reduce their nuclear stockpile. I was happy to hear this as was he, this vector of world political news.

The forks in our personal decision trees pivot upon worldviews so simple in their comprehensibility that a 7-year-old can understand them. And we may go about our lives living like a child, manipulated in our beliefs and actions like a child, praying, crying, and rejoicing like a child.

to speak

Speaking removes us from the protection of silence.
Clothed in only our motives, we stand naked before others.

rape!

Rape, rape, rape, is what I do.

Because:

Foreplay is stressful.
Mechanical relations are much easier process than real feeling.
A monologue of force is easier than a dialogue of understanding.
Empathy is for gays.
Caring is for post-menopausal mothers.
Touching requires sensitivity, punching requires muscles.
Muffled screams or traumatized silence are "in" right now.
Raping means never having to say you're sorry.
I live in the great recession; courtship takes time and money.

It's not rape to me, and since we don't have a consensual understanding of what just occurred, then it didn't happen the way you said that it happened. And the way that you were dressed...

tick tick tock

Human thinking and human action is nervous activity. Among doing or shaping what is done, all action is performance. What is thought to inspire this performance or its reception is nervous activity. Performance is the phenomenal and hermeneutic sheen of action; it both exists and exists as such in our understanding of action and in our execution of it. Performance is a subset of action formed by our intentional understanding of certain types of action. Intentionality is itself at work here, as I write.

Action and thinking comprise a totality of human experience and our coming to awareness of it. The two form a distinct outline in our existence as a duality of being in the world and being in our heads, that is, as a product of nervous activity. This bifurcation corresponds to two points in place and time--the place of phenomena in relation to our understanding of them, coming into existence through nervous activity. Understanding lags behind an occurrence of phenomena; this suggests that, while essential to the meaning of the phenomena itself, thinking lags behind action as it comes into being. Thinking is in closer ambit to personally intended action, that action stemming from within the thinker's intention. This thinking also requires time to both initiate and complete its own action. Thinking is of the substance of the universe, categorically, but uniquely saddled across a temporal unfolding. Therefore, thinking as a phenomena itself exists in time but that its relevance to any specific instance of time only renders it as part of the stuff of the universe. The activity of thinking faces two logical planes, each of which contradict the other. The relationship that thinking has to the existing universe is indifferent to its phenomenal existence in the unfolding of time. Thinking becomes invisible to the material world as a phenomenon, thinking. Both thinking and the unfolding of a sequence of events that we may category as phenomena require time to unfold.

In this frozen moment as we regard the world and ourselves and we grant their aspects meaning those frozen bits of thinking digested into phenomena or facts are, themselves, historically emergent phenomena. The universe itself is supposedly the product of a primordial event that both unfolded time, matter, density, and the physical laws of the universe. While it signals a beginning, that beginning required time. And so we are now taking time to understand ourselves, our lives, the world around us. And you may be taking time to read this. But the things that we find meaningful take time both to understand and to occur because nothing simply existed forever. That unique seat goes to one entity who we call "God." God is prior to the reflex of neuron or the primordial mass that finally blew, creating the universe. God is also after everything has passed. But this God, especially as we commonly regard him through Christian theological teaching, has another specific purpose for our minds. God simply ends the question of why, not for everyone, but for many. And God need only serve that purpose for those that pursue answers out of an abject fear of nihilism. God also acts as a dam on our consciousness. At some point the powers of reason, of observation, of measurement, of calculation reach a barrier, a logical problem, a technical limit. God serves as a reminder at these junctures that nothing is essentially meaningless or ambiguous. It's all part of God's mystery.

Key word: mystery. Why? Because the insertion of God into a cosmology ends a mental exploration. God completes a method of inquiry by providing not only a noun but a whole grammar short-circuited around the significance of the term God itself. God is seen both in cause and effect. And God becomes a reflex word to stop thinking. God is the answer. For this reason God is used as a mental block. Instead of working past God as an answer, those who have procured great faith in this deity spend their time creating convoluted logical arcs to fit God into the pattern of life, society, and human behavior. God is the reason why some die and others kill.

street

This street hums with the lives of others.
The chattering of fluorescent teeth reveal the black tracing lines.
A shape, a form, a life lived, a life to live. 
Maybe a dog or a discarded pasta noodle there, obscene before propriety, sweating.
A silver shape, a silver man with silver scales.
He performs an autopsy on the body politic.
There, in the street, among the chattering of fluorescent teeth, the silvery augur reads for signs.
The body politic is a body without organs.
The body politic is a body of signs.

His teeth

His teeth were tombstones echoing the lament of ghosts.
These words are not your own.
They are human time's ghastly remains.

The anatomy of a troll

I receive few if any comments on my blog postings. Depending on the subject some posts get more views. And most are generated by a search, a search not for me or this blog but for something that I wrote about, which may have betrayed their search into uncovering.

So a lot end up reading about my MTurk piece perhaps for their own reasons or because they too have a beef with this Todd Dickerson fellow. And a lot end up looking for a passage from "With the Old Breed," which I quoted extensively and purposely to share the horror of war from the point of view of one sane man.

And then I get those rare posts that begin by contradicting me, and then conjure a piece of information out of their hazy awareness and pass it off as fact. I give you this:

Dave Hendrick was responding to a post I made about the Sifl and Olly show back when I was living in Muncie, Indiana, and still wrestling the academic ghosts that had possessed my body and mind. It was a lot of hogwash and dime story theorizing, but one thing I did get right was the dialogue that I included from a particular segment of that particular show.

In short, what Dave Hendrick stated was inaccurate. I checked and double checked the video of this segment and found that, indeed, Olly never says, "Well, you're a bock." See here:

Instead what Dave Hendrick does is invoke an alternate past, which allows him to assert his epistemic correctness about this past. In doing so, he then uses this assertion to insert a clever joke that did not exist in the original segment. It has several important organs: an assertion or dispute about a factual inaccuracy conjured by the poster, a follow-up word-related joke, and an assessment that reveals the underlying language structure that explains the joke's potency. In this case, the poster, Dave Hendrick uses his understanding of puns to reconstruct the Sifl and Olly segment to insert a joke about box being the plural of bock, which is never done but which could have been and which also could have been quite funny.

And that's the anatomy of a troll; it comes out of the randomness of word association and information management that punctuates online interaction. It stands upon a foundation understood and accurate--a theory about jokes--so that it only retains fidelity to its world, while it trespasses in yours.

The troll is an inescapable aspect of online interaction. Anytime someone becomes a blowhard someone will be quick to poach the perceived limelight and try to focus attention elsewhere. The easiest tack is to disagree with another and conjure up a convincingly accurate alternate version. Because owing to the information management and word association required to manage an online persona most are going to be won over by the logical argument and not seek out the information that is simply a search away. Information is performative.