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Once one’s ship has come in, and consequently the stick-thin Westerner begins sprinkling his speech with Italian, “class conflict” is “impolitic” qua unwise either direction it will go: back and forth against your “better judgment”, or up and down against your “best interests”. However, circumstances permit me to issue a piece of Trotskyist moralism on the topic: namely, that I am once again a member of the middle class and must move “forward in all directions”.
So many lies told on the topic, really: “We are all middle class now”, “We should all be middle class”, “We must defend middle-class values”, and so on ad nauseam. Who are “We”? We, the people of the United States of America? Of course it is a “normal country”, on pain of reductio, and normal countries mostly have other people in them: those “paid” to commit crimes against “property”, the proletarians asked to do it all and do it again for as little as possible; and those who commit crimes against persons, the bourgeoisie any degree hautenesse.
On the other hand we do not have the silver, we do not have the gold; the very idea eludes us, as does complete “satisfaction” in anything we do, including the utterance of speech acts. There is nothing to do except “ask after” various items of vital interest to the current day and posterity, and try to look brave as the truth (we already did way more than anyone ever has to do, and no “man” of woman born can do anything other than gently question their own authority as we effortlessly sail through whatever kind of life is, of course, possible for U.S. citizens protected by the law).
It’s the way I’m livin’, and what can I say? “Better” to be something else, at least other than a producer and manufacturer of “quality” goods and services all kinds at the right price — so wonderful, really, that “just war” went away and we could be.
Now, in honor of things only making sense to Peli Grietzer, an explanation of the traditional philosophy of Portland: Lukacseanism. Is there a joke? What joke? I wanted to catch her, and I did enough, or it must have been like that and I just don’t know, and now I spend my days among down-trodden workingmen trying to act like a human being: there’s something I don’t understand that they do, because they have to live, they have to, and no amount of “spanning” in the works can “fix” the reality of the proletarian intellect: the greatest thing on Earth, the source of all our works and days, and the smiles at the end of them and mysteries during “breaks” from some grind. And then there is history, somewhere; I guess it’s around the corner, enough, and it wants me to keep talking, singing, asking for money, giving people money, cigarettes, the time of day, fewer indications I “know what’s up” since I just have to; and there is Colin Powell, in the history pages, acting like someone who ripped off someone I knew and wasn’t pleasant enough to; we’ll understand him, all of us, and then the people will decide what is what. Lather, rinse, repeat.
However, when it rolls around to The Destruction of Reason and all the books you wanted to impress the girl who already cared with, or The Socialist Transformation of Society for “your good friends” in the Portland establishment and nowhere else nohow, better to move somewhere else — even five miles away is apparently enough — and do something else, something worth doing, something like living and less like what you ever wanted. Really, you know the deal: no questioning the triune God, or schmuetzige English. Not that you’ll ever hear the poison re: religion and liberality, or liberality without religion, or no religion and no liberality, or some of life and none of “the other guy” poured in your ear — rather than a tri-tip steak in your gut, or the proud and honest woman right on top of you: it will just become apparent, meaning literally unthinkable, that you would want anything before you were dead. Work all day, live on hey, let the chips fall where they may. It’s a vice capital, in its essentials, and you’re presiding: try, try, try again and live to write the tale.
This the 200th new post on this blog — that is, not counting earlier material reprinted from elsewhere. I wasn’t very assiduous for the first year of the blog’s existence, so most of it is relatively recent: and, I suppose, relatively trivial compared to previous efforts to Say It All. Future material is contingent on the uses people put the blog to (right now the art and music selections are popular, and people searching for Rothkos and pictures of Disco Stu are inflating the readership statistics a lot). Still, all in all these are exciting times to be demonstrating a basic grasp of discursive rationality, so I have few regrets about this stage of my Internet usage; perhaps I’ll celebrate with some of the excellent and Cuba-friendly Davidoff cigarettes, which are back in American tobacconists’ shops after years of being absent due to fears of liability lawsuits. Or do something entirely different.
On the topic of classical models: it sometimes occurs to me that if I were a Latin rapper, I ought to call myself “Montaigne”, for the purpose of putting together a “group” record called Montaigne’s Eses.
Well, it’s a wrap; this is the last post on Fortunes of the Dialectic. I’ve been signed up for a pilot vocational project, and so we’ll see who wants to hire a mentally ill socialist backed by the full faith and credit of the US government; but part of that involves acting less like a mentally ill socialist, and so I don’t feel that it’s wise to continue with the established tenor of the blog.
I think it more or less accomplished its purposes of giving those with limited academic opportunities some pointers on various disciplines and of providing me a forum to tell my life story more completely and lucidly than I’d previously been able to manage; with that in mind, and because I’m at least a little vain, I might be leaving the blog up until the recent contents get on the Internet Archive.
I want to thank the handful of people who read regularly, and the intrepid souls who blogrolled me and posted comments. I’d also like to thank the “blogosphere” in general for not tearing me a new one; things are changing, and it’s good to see that people think someone who’s been treading water for quite a while might possibly be able to grasp some of his time in thought again.
In the if-you-didn’t-already-know department, Weather Underground is a great way to stick it to the weatherman. Combining a mixture of National Weather Service information and data culled from personal weather stations, WU is a nice alternative to waiting through endless teasers for tomorrow’s weather on the local news. It’s not an ‘all-weather’ replacement: sometimes the NWS forecast requires a little critical analysis, as when they predicted 2-5 inches of snow accumulation for the Portland area one day in December, and information for places outside the US is thinner. But the site is fast and easy to use, and if you want to know just how damn cold it is outside right now there’s no better way.
