There is a Light That Never Goes Out
Posted on | September 28, 2009 | No Comments
There’s always that pesky feeling of loneliness that stems, no doubt, from the persistence of an inability to relate. The Beatles are getting less play these days, and The Smiths are on the cusp of its resurgence as my popular authority: this is how I know I’m coming up on a personal shift (juvenile, I know.)
I’m not depressed by it like I used to be, nor does it dominate me in such a way that I make hasty and inadvisable social interactions out of desperation for connection I know I could never possibly gain from the convenience of my proximity. I guess this is how I know I’m growing up. It used to grip me so hard, and these days I see there is so much more out there than this one feeling — still, in spite of my overall contentment, it is at least one thing that’s missing in my life and no number of accomplishments could serve to compensate for its lacking.
I want to find someone I don’t have to just tolerate, whose company I desire and who makes me want to be something greater than myself. That I expect someone like this exists is another sign of past lessons learned, or maybe my recent optimism.
Life is just far too easy on its own to not find someone who challenges you.
Ambition Only Leads to Failure
Posted on | September 24, 2009 | No Comments
I tried my hand at swimming laps this morning. Kicked my ass. Fun, though.
Victory’s Sweet Even Deep in the Cheap Seats
Posted on | September 22, 2009 | No Comments
22:28 on my three-mile run this morning. A personal record!
I’m coming for you fast, 22.
Iran’s emergent revolution
Posted on | September 21, 2009 | No Comments
Protestors flood Tehran streets
By Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim, Associated Press
Tens of thousands of protesters swarmed the streets of Tehran and at least two other Iranian cities Friday, audaciously turning an annual rally in support of the Palestinian cause into the first major demonstration against the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in six weeks.
“Not Gaza, not Lebanon, I’ll sacrifice my life for Iran,” chanted the protesters as they stretched out along the capital’s wide boulevards.
This article is just so well-written, and so full of real, personal accounts of the anti-government marches that took place Sept. 18, which was supposed to mark this year’s iteration of an annual rally for the Palestinian cause. The student-led protests questioning the validity of Ahmadinejad’s presidency and the usefulness of anti-Israeli sentiments are even more astounding because they go in the face of three consecutive months of beatings and imprisonment for anybody recognized as sympathetic to their cause. Some of the state police apparently support their cause as well, according to AP, with one officer encouraging an opposition demonstrator, “Come on, don’t be afraid. Be brave. We die once, and this is worth it.”
When ever an event such as this one comes along and allows me to empathize with someone clear across the world, who may not share my heritage or skin color or religion, it reminds me how silly all these manufactured borders are which separate our common humanity. Absolutely a must-read.
I wish my Iranian brethren the best in their opposition to an invalid, out-of-touch regime.
I’d Be Running Up That Hill
Posted on | September 21, 2009 | No Comments
I ran my 3-mile in 23:00 this morning! I expect I’ll get at that elusive sub-22:00 this week, barring any unplanned plateaus.
The Unfeasibility of Plato’s Republic
Posted on | September 20, 2009 | No Comments
It’s seeming more and more to me that Plato was Socrates with bitterness in his heart.
All of his earlier work more likely attributable to the historical Socrates seems more forgiving, as though the teacher were aware of some kind of broader truth that put him at peace with the quarrels and flaws of his society.
But after his death, Plato’s characterization of Socrates became a kind of caricature of himself. He placed his beliefs into his mentor’s mouth as if he were assuming the man would speak this way if he were to look back on his own death and see his executors for what Plato saw them as. This is what scholars refer to as the “natural progression of the Socratic method,” but I wholeheartedly refute that the historical Socrates would have turned into anything like what Plato created.
After Socrates’ death, Plato’s works gradually became more about his own reflections on the failure of democracy (dealing with the sophists and his own formative years spent wholly during the Peloponnesian War) and the misfortunate annals of a philosopher living among what he saw as the intentionally ignorant masses.
He said of Socrates when his mentor died that he was the best, wisest, and most good. If that’s what he felt, then it wouldn’t be stretch to believe that, in his contempt, he created for himself an image of the humanity which killed his idol in which they were ignoble and self-destructive; that the many, given reign, would opt to kill the best example of their kind. And because of this, he saw the many as unfit to rule and the demos, or democracy, as a society of charlatans masquerading as rulers of that which they can’t begin to fathom.
It’s evident in even his chosen nomenclature for the caste system in his Republic. He calls the elite class of philosophers the guardians of his polis. The word “guardian” lends to the idea that there is something necessary not only to rule the city-state, but to protect it. And if he sees the state and the people as one without borders, then what would a guardian protect the people from but themselves? If he were truly trying to create an equal society, I don’t see why he would have to come up with a noble lie, as he named it, wherein every individual is taught a fundamental lie in order to keep them respectful of their place within the caste system. Just as a cobbler or a builder has the skill of cobbling or building, wouldn’t a guardian or an auxiliary have the respective skills of politicking or soldiering? Why treat them as entirely different classes instead of merely other trades?
What really gets me is that Plato never seems concerned with the fact that a man like Socrates wouldn’t make it out alive of his Republic. If he weren’t executed for relentlessly questioning the noble lie (which he absolutely would, given his concept of the examined life,) he would surely be killed or exiled for who he was: a poor man who transcended his given class in order to become one of the wisest philosophers to have existed. Under Plato’s system, his mentor would be forced to live his life in the class he was born to, lest he reveal his potential wisdom at a very early age. There is no room for intellectual late bloomers in Plato’s Republic. Think of all those men whose contributions to society occurred in their later years and think of all the lost potential.
South Africa’s black schools are still suffering from the effects of apartheid
Posted on | September 19, 2009 | No Comments
Keen to Learn, and Let Down in South Africa
Celia W. Dugger, New York Times
I am so incredibly disgusted by the perpetuation of that one relevant sin of a sentient species — what I call “uneducation.”
Hendrik Verwoerd, architect of South African apartheid, would surely be proud to see the vestiges of his Bantu education system thriving in schools wherein children are hungry to learn and teachers behave like children.
Of course, you can’t put all the blame on them as the majority were taught under the Bantu system, which, according to this article, Verwoerd described as being a vital stripping down of knowledge so that black students not learn of “the green pastures of European society in which [they are] not allowed to graze.”
Regardless of justifications and excuses, this is an atrocity and must be solved.
You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son
Posted on | September 19, 2009 | No Comments
I reached my initial 3-mile goal of 24:00 on Wednesday, and the next day I ran 23:25! Next up: 22:00.
Dead Languages Don’t Soften the Blow
Posted on | August 12, 2009 | No Comments
Nights were the hardest. After the sun settled behind confection homes, dark seeped in like monoxide and him here alone in a house full of mirrors again. The bourbon cap: another kept treasure lost, now only to physical reach. White-collared shirt undone two buttons down and his tie with slack, pressed against the back of his neck and around and hanging off the loveseat like a haphazard suicide he was too exhausted to complete.
Sprawled out there like a squatter in a familiar condemnment—the cable out, the phone line cut, the food rotted, spoiled, festered, putrefied—he alone with his thoughts and all of these goddamn mirrors. And the bottle (empty) and the mailbox (filled):
Letters from friends, from family, why haven’t you called? how are you handling? are you OK? and all the love and the guilt trips, you’ll get through this; late, second, third, final notices followed by notices of discontinuation of service; the grocery store coupons and notifications of subpoenas ad testifacendum and notices of court determination upon defendant’s nolo contendere plea. Outside there was a stack of papers hidden in tin and dictating in reverse chronology the past to which he’d refused to commit as far back as the first unopened postmark, dated July, 23, 2003.
That was when life stopped for Ever Brennan, almost three months back, and he fell into the same wasted position on the same piece of furniture on an evening as dark as this and him too.
The playroom was still littered with the toys his girls played with and his sink was still filled with the dishes his wife had stopped washing and his doorbell was still ringing with the lazy pleas of his prostitute for him to get off your fucking ass and open this fucking door ’cause I’m not coming through the window again.
On Animal Welfare and the New Culture of Cruelty
Posted on | June 30, 2009 | 11 Comments
Lately I’ve been struggling with the ethical concerns of farmed animals, because I’m of the increasing belief that our current regulations still allow for a significant amount of cruelty.
Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s in our nature to eat meat. I have no problem accepting that killing animals for consumption is a part of our human fabric. I don’t subscribe to the belief that all meat is murder and that death isn’t an inevitable part of life, be it through age, disease or the food chain.
In more primitive times, a man fought for his family’s meal. He took a branch and a stone to his potential meal and understood the hunter-hunted dynamic. Sometimes he may have even fallen prey to what he thought would be his capture. Cave drawings from this survival era show a bond between man and animals he hunted that exemplified our ancestors’ respect for this sacred rite. We’ve come a long way since then. Our technology allows for efficient mass-slaughter so that no family has to lose a member in the quest for a day’s meal.
But there is a consequence. Children are raised to consume animals and their byproducts for years before they understand where their meals come from. And by the time they’ve reached such cognizance, they are so well-adapted to the expectation that their meal isn’t a cow, but an unrecognizable red block, neatly wrapped and sold in quantity at their local market, that it hardly matters anyway. We’ve lost the earlier respect for our food that primitive man knew so well.
Of course we all eventually figure out that the red block is only the final part of a process, but it’s easier to ignore the more gruesome aspects of our carnivorous instinct through the guise that civilized society need not concern itself with such matters.
Hence my point: if we really want to consider ourselves civilized, we must recognize that with our technological advances comes the responsibility for a new kind of ethical concern for animal welfare.
I’m not suggesting that farmers blanket cows in down and leave chocolates on their pillows, just that we all recognize a simple fact: we farm our meals like vegetables without recognizing that they are capable of perceiving pain. We shave down our chickens’ bills to make them easier to ground, we suspend our calves in dark boxes to keep their meat tender, we crowd our fish in concrete vats rife with disease and pollution from their own excrement. In the transition from primitive to advanced, we’ve maintained the vestige of barbarity.
I’m no animal-lover; I’m a proud egalitarian. But in my exaltation of man above beast, I think its impossible to separate the two when our actions, in the face of our advanced understanding of an animal’s perception of pain, are so barbaric. When we know that we are causing prolonged and unnecessary suffering in the process of our normative predatory function, we are no longer hunting but instead consenting to a culture of cruelty.
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