A Quick Note On The Kavanaugh Hearing

I’m currently watching the Judge Kavanaugh hearings and it is beyond bizarre. Judge Kavanaugh is Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court and Christine Blasey Ford is a lady whom Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulted when he was 17, although the Republicans are not willing to let the FBI investigate the claims or let a witness testify. Ms Ford has just given a wonderful, earning praise from both sides of the isle, performance in recounting her testimony, even if the lady asking the questions seemed obsessed with trying to prove it was a Democratic conspiracy. Senator Graham seems hell bent on proving that Ms Ford is a liar, a Senator who is very dependent on Trump to support his re-election.

 

Mr Kavanaugh is yet to testify so it would be premature to judge the outcome, but three things have already been shown. 1) Women are united, in general, as are most fair minded people, so, as a general rule, there might be a stronger stance against sexual assault, one good step would be not televising the hearings in a public forum, 2) If Senator Lindsey Graham was to step on a rusty nail I’d hope his insurance tears up his policy so he can’t be treated and 3) It seems that the heroic struggle in overcoming sexual assault and testifying in public is nothing compared with the struggle to overcome being privileged and entrenched in views in which human life is deemed less than one’s prejudices.

 

I have no idea how this will turn out, and I hold little hope (Ms Ford has already received many death threats and had to leave her family home to hide)  but I can only hope that justice is done, after all that is what the Supreme Court is supposed to be about…

 

‘till next time

Time And The Novel

 

Many years ago, whilst studying, I was reading a book for my class. I can’t recall the book or even who I was but the story was about a lady. One could see that things were not going to end well for her, but having developed an emotional bond with the said lady, even only superficial, this troubled me. By the time the book ended the lady would have suffered and may, very well, be no more. Then it hit me. The lady didn’t have to suffer, I had the control over her fate, for although the events in the book (and all books) are laid out with a precision almost like fate, there was no time in the book! The events were, although preordained, frozen, timeless and, unless I read the book, could not unfurl. Thus the lady was trapped forever in a timeless state of tragedy, one might think, but by not reading she could not move forward and thus would not have to suffer. However, being to school for cool, I finished my assignment and the lady suffered.

 

The physicist Eddington stipulated that events are frozen in place and only by coming across the events are thy given time. It seems that Eddington could see into my juvenile brain and understand the conflict of the fate of a character, as predestined by a narrative and the projection of time, by the reader, into the book making the events come to pass.

 

But, what if, the character in the book became aware of time, not in the sense of the reader projecting time onto the events, but rather that the time they were experiencing within the novel- be it projected or written in. Jean-Paul Sartre’s quadrilogy The Roads To Freedom centres on the life of a man called Mathieu from the lead up to the second world war, to fighting in the war and being killed (it was assumed that he was dead until the unfinished fragments of the fourth novel emerged)  to being a prisoner of war. Mathieu, as with the reader, has a detachment from both the events and the time in which they take place. Whilst, set aside from time, Mathieu can be conscious of what is happening and can even do what one would assume impossible without time, and that is change. As the series starts (the series seem very autobiographical) Mathieu is a Marxist yet as the road unfurls Mathieu, from a vantage point without the confines of the text,  starts to question as he can see things, as the reader, from an external vantage point and thus he can see the silliness and folly of his beliefs and of those in the prisoner of war camp who still cling to their ideals, such as Marxism and Freedom (in the sense of escaping from the camp).

 

In order to see a picture clearly one must sometimes step back (or as Homer Simpson says ‘wayyyyyy back’) as we often find ourselves trapped within ourselves, our circumstances and our times however, if one was to take a perspective from without then maybe one could see the world, and one’s self, clearly and devoid of the prison of time, do what is rarely done and that is change. Great change, it seems, must happen from without time (in the many senses of the word including the zeitgeist) for if we are only, to paraphrase, brief candles, walking shadow strutting and fretting upon the stage and then are gone, signifying nothing then we must become the readers of our own novels and instead of letting the novel happen to us we must inhabit the novel. How? Ah…

 

‘till next time!

Between Knowledge & Wisdom There Lies A Lifetime

 

Something which I have noticed time and time again is how, for some, their ego seems intrinsically linked to their notions of knowledge. Knowledge is one of those things which anyone can acquire, and such is the ego of the homo sapien we assume that knowledge is truth. Right, truth? Ok, let’s unpick this knot.

 

Many mistake facts with knowledge. A fact is an opinion that enough people like to call a fact which is why you have arguments about the validity of facts and whose fact is true. This, as you will have already noticed, is nothing to do with ‘truth’ in the all-consuming abstraction of what truth is (something beyond our limited comprehension and perception) but rather is something which is often mistaken for ‘truth’ and that is judgement. A judgement is a wholly subjective thing. Yes, in legal cases and others, you can look to a collection of laws created by previous judgements but these laws as themselves are only judgements, attempts to understand and find reason and, in some cases, justice. Ah! I hear you say, if this is the case then you are essentially saying that it is the equivalent of building a house of cards on an imaginary table, a table only there by the strength of belief and if one was to stop believing and see that there is no table the whole house of cards, one would realise, is imaginary too! Dear reader, you are far too smart for me! And this seems to be the case. Judgements are only opinions and all opinions, no matter how much we lie to ourselves, are subjective. Judgements can only be true or false in a superficial manner meaning that they can never be a ‘true’ truth of that being judged. Similarly philosophers, such as the great Immanuel Kant speak about things as they are and the appearance of things, ‘What might be said of things in themselves, separated from all relationship to our senses, remains for us absolutely unknown’ which simply means that how we perceive things is not how things are, the same way that in physics there is what is known as the observation bias where by observing something you change its properties, but we are getting off topic.

 

Knowledge is something that someone acquires over a life time, understanding then comes when one knows what one has observed, and then wisdom comes when one understands the full context of what one has observed. For example:

 

Knowledge: Water is wet

Understanding: Water is created of particles, oxygen and hydrogen combined. Water is essential to life

Wisdom: Water in the context of a dehydrated person is a life giver, but if too much is consumed at once it may be worse so in order to take into consideration the wider contexts I can take my knowledge & understanding and combine them to be used within the wider context and from that make the best possible decision of what to do, in this instance the body needs water so I will administer small amounts of the said water to the said person to aid their recovery however, this will not be enough alone, I will also need to care for them in terms of their body, mind, spirituality and so on and so forth.

 

It seems undeniable, as suggested in my title, that the last stage can take a life time to achieve, sometimes more, and can only stem for experiential and empirical knowledge and understanding. The example I like to give is of Marx sat in his room scribbling about the ‘workers’, his work then becoming academic cannon and teachers and students passing the agreed interpretations to one another and so on and so forth when in reality if a Marxist went up to a ‘worker’ and said ‘brother, I sympathise with your struggle’ the said Marxist may soon find himself with a black eye. In his memoir, the psychiatrist R.D.Laing speaks about when he was in his thirties he was the head of an institute and one day a group of priest (the perfect set up for a joke) came to meet him. He observed them before hand talking to one another and realised that they knew more of psychology than he himself as his knowledge stemmed from academia and controlled circumstances whereas theirs came from life, thus indicating that to be a psychologist, sociologist, philosopher and so and so forth one must first live otherwise one will just be one who acquires knowledge but never transcends to understanding let alone wisdom.

 

‘till next time

The Social Experiment

 

In French New Wave director François Truffaut’s 1966, only English, film, Fahrenheit 451, an adaptation of the novel by Rad Bradberry, he depicts a future where the centre of life is a TV screen, not just a TV screen but one which features a family, indeed everyone in the world is part of the family, and every person is ‘chosen’ to take part in the family (sort of like a soap opera). You are told when you are chosen and when you have to interject your lines into the show a red light flashes the tv characters ‘look’ at you and you give the answer they expect. This is immediately rewarded by them saying ‘see X agrees with me’ or ‘X says let’s do this and I agree’. In this Truffaut portrays visually the need and desires which have gone on to shape what we would call social media.

 

Social media is a platform in which the likes of the President of the United States can divulge his thoughts on policy and ‘cool, hip’ CEO’s can tell people about stock plans etc. The actual media, quick to catch on, uses social media to boost readership and employ what is known as ‘click-bait’ to generate more ‘clicks’ (opening of links to their parent sites). Even reputable organisations such as the AP, Reuters and the BBC employ such tactics, one might se a headline ‘Man Found With Children’ and one clicks expecting  delightful story of paedophilia but instead reads about an 80 year old man with dementia who went missing form his care home and, as he was a primary school teacher for 50 years, went back to where he felt comfortable, in a school with children.

 

However, one must ask the question, what exactly is social media? The recent hearing in the US Congress with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg showed two things a) the members on the committee (mostly old white men) have no idea what social media is (I like to satirise it as ‘So, Mr Zuckerberg, what is this book and why is it full of faces?’, ‘do you have the book with you now? Can I see it?’, ‘how do you cut off the faces to put in the book? Are you a serial killer?’ and so forth) and neither, more concerningly although not unsurprisingly, does Mr Zuckerberg. He has no idea what Facebook has become, what it will become and how to control it and scarily enough he is not alone, no one really does.

 

Social media responded to the hearings by, mostly, making personal comments about Mr Zuckerberg’s looks and height, something even the actual news did, and no one I saw/heard/read spoke about anything of substance. Social media is this nondescript entity with good and bad points. MSN had/have a campaign to tackle teen loneliness caused by the illusion of contact which can come from social media and social media has been seen to have played a big role in political dissent in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and in China. From this one can conclude that social media is neither good nor bad. It is, like many other things, just a tool. Likewise one must ask, if social media is a tool like a hammer or a gun or a pen etc why can it, like those things, be used to do great harm to people? And the answer is simple. Social media is an experiment which is only as good as its participants so if social media has been seen to fail it is not because it has failed, rather, it is because, we the users, have failed. Social media has drawn back the curtain of our public and private selves and many might not like what we find, possibly answering a question, what is the true nature of people?

 

‘till the next time I use social media for my ramblings!

 

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A Note On A Different Topic

 

If you have been following the elections in the US you will see that a change is coming, ten-term established Democrats are being replaced by new (in many ways new to politics) Democratic challengers, many from the Ocasio-Cortez/Sanders wing of the party, the far left (or in real terms, just left of centre). Whilst this may seem a good thing, headlines saying first this and first that to run for office be it Transgender or female or any other ‘minority’ in politics it is important to note two things. 1) Many of the ones being replaced are exceptional servants to their constituents and have done nothing wrong except not being seen (although some are) to be as far to the left and will be missed in Congress for their service and experience and 2) This grassroots movement is not a new thing. After the 2008 election of President Obama to office a grassroots movement called the Tea Party sprang up. Ten-term Republicans were ousted by the challengers and Congress was filled with these new republicans, republicans who thought that those in the party were not far enough to the right. Thus, grew the power of Mitch McConnell the nominal leader of the new Republicans (bankrolled by the Koch Brothers) and instantly things changed in Congress. Confirmations which usually were confirmed or at least had hearings on were refused simply because the Republicans had the majority and they did not like Obama. The Democrats started changing procedural rules, although refused to employ the nuclear options, and yet still were blocked (Obama has a seat on the Supreme Court denied as Mitch McConnell said you cannot have such nominations during an election cycle, something he is doing at the moment with Kavanaugh) and once President Trump was elected McConnell changed the rules so that Judges, indeed all decisions, need only 51 instead of 60 votes meaning all decisions can be made along party lines. There is much more to say but to keep it brief it is increasingly becoming clear that all of these issues are being done along ideological lines and it seems increasingly clear that people do not realise that ideology is not politics. Politics has necessities which fall on all sides on the political spectrum and is about serving people, a form of humanism. The longer policy is decided and elections are decided along ideological lines the more those who need the government most will suffer.

 

 

 

Something to think about

The Truth!

 

This week we’ll have a double whammy, as the kids never say, two entries both about that elusive of all things, the thing we think we alone know, the thing we demand from others and the one thing we dislike revealing about ourselves, the thing we even conceal from ourselves more frequently than we do to others, of course, I am talking about the truth

 

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The Truth And PR

 

‘Truth isn’t truth’ spake the former New York and now President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. The quote came in the midst of an interview, most of the interview was nonsense, for sure, but this one quotation which the world seems to have seized upon was one of the few parts of the interview which made sense. Within the context of the interview, Giuliani was saying that if you have two people in a room (Trump and Former FBI Director James Comey (remember him? He seems hell bent on you doing so)) and they have a conversation there is multiple sides to the story as one can only achieve a subjective account and then that subjective account cannot be seen as being objective even to the person who believes it to be 100% true. Why is this?  ‘“Because,”’ as Dicken’s wrote ‘said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”’ meaning that the slightest change in the body and mind can affect how one perceives what is happening. Comey may have been uncomfortable and misinterpreted comments and body language and vice versa. Fine, I am not here to defend either of them. Mr Mueller will do his job, his job which, as with juries, is not to find the ‘truth’ per se but to prove beyond reasonable doubt.

 

This comment of Giuliani had a strange effect. The ‘liberal’ media attacked him, calling him ‘Orwellian’ and the ‘conservative’ media responded by trying to find excuses for him. People believed whatever media outlook agrees with them and thus this throw away comment which is, in my opinion, ultimately true became a media and social media hotbed. The question must be, why has this happened?

 

A trend that I have noticed recently, maybe it has always been there and I am just very dumb, is that what we take for granted as ‘news’ is actually ‘PR’. Yes, in countries such as Russia, China, The Middle East you expect it but in the West? Since CNN was called ‘Fake News’ (which it isn’t) it has had news anchors talking into the camera to prove that they are not fake news (huh?) and many of its shows seems now to be to prove that it is legitimate. It is not, nor has it ever been, Clinton Network News, but it is something run to make a profit and many of the presenters seem very vain.  I have spoken about all of this before so will not repeat myself, but the sad truth is that in this PR war between the left and the right it is the truth, the truth that people need healthcare, need food etc that gets hurt. This PR war just hurts those the media is supposed to represent, not the politicians, not the shareholders, but the people. Let’s be clear here, the media is very powerful and can make and break people. This story alone:

 

‘Aung San Suu Kyi is set to be stripped of her Freedom of Edinburgh award for her refusal to condemn the violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar. This will be the seventh honour that the former Nobel peace prize winner has been stripped of over the past year, with Edinburgh following the example of Oxford, Glasgow and Newcastle which also revoked Suu Kyi’s Freedom of the City awards.’

 

is very interesting as Ms Aung San Suu Kyi was built up by the western media who are now tearing her down but don’t forget, Aung San Suu Kyi won the election in Burma and then was put under house arrest by the Military Junta, one supported by China and because of the need in the West for Chinese money she was left to rot, the democratic leader of a country, under house arrest. Only after she was freed after the Velvet Revolution did the West cover her in more things than one and yet it seems more than happy to tear her down now (in government and media) that she does not fit the ideals of those who sat by and did nothing whilst she suffered unimaginable torture which, I’m sure, would change all of us. As the media has shown that it cannot even handle being called ‘Fake’ so maybe the ‘truth’ of Aung San Suu Kyi is something which must be buried as it reveals far more of the truth of us than we want to be seen…which leads us onto…

 

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The Truth!

 

Cy Coleman’s Broadway musical Little Me features a song called The Truth which is about writing autobiographies and what people want:

 

PATRICK

The all-revealing truth!

 

BELLE

The mass-appealing truth!

 

PATRICK

The blood-congealing truth!

 

BELLE

The irregardless truth!

 

ALL

The truth!

 

BELLE

As through a haze,

I see a Doubleday’s,

And shining in a window full of Arthur Miller plays:

The truth!

 

OTHERS

The truth!

 

BELLE

An odyssey

Entitled “Little Me,”

As told to Patrick Dennis in its whole entirety

By me!

With the areas I’ll expose,

I’ll annihilate Gypsy Rose,

As for practically Proustian prose,

Mary Astor,

Meet your master.

Stack me up with all three Gabors,

I’ll reduce ’em to cut-rate stores,

And Louella, dear, you’ll get yours

With the end-all,

Casey Stendahl

Truth!

 

OTHERS

Truth! Truth! Truth!

The D.H. Lawrence truth!

 

BELLE

With an index!

 

OTHERS

In blood and torrents, truth!

 

PATRICK

Illustrations!

 

 

I recently read In Order To Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park. The book, as you can guess from the title, is the story of a 13 year old girl (and her mother) escaping from North Korea to eventually be reunited with her sister in South Korea (they are reunited with her father earlier but he soon passes away from cancer- a rarity in North Korea as, Ms Park says, there are so many other things which kill you first) via a terrible journey including escaping into China to be raped and then sold as wives, working in a chat room, starvation, beatings, attempted suicides, crawling across the Gobi desert avoiding search lights, discrimination, bullying, being given up and many more terrible things. Ms Park is (at 23) an internationally known, reluctant (agreeing to go public to try to find her sister), voice for those in North Korea who live in famine and under constant fear of the Government, brainwashed against everything which is not North Korean to think themselves lucky and fear that without the borders (a typical maths problem in school: if I have two big-nosed American bastards and I kill one big-nosed American bastard how many big-nosed American bastards do I have left?) the book is wonderful and you should read it (easily available on Amazon) but my question is, why do we need sensationalism to care about other people? Why do we need the ‘whole bloody truth’ with pictures and indexes to feel engaged by others? Yes, books about ‘normal’ people are dull, Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody is unbearably tedious, but surely we don’t need books to see other people? Other people litter our lives yet we ignore them and give money and attention only to vogue suffering (Africa, popstars being shot at etc.)

 

We are interesting contradictions, we demand our privacy and yet want everyone to pay attention to us, we sell our anonymity for nothing, and when we can’t sell it we desperately try to give it away. Yet, what we try to give away, what we want to absorb from others is the superficial, the meaningless, the lack of humanity.

 

My favourite part of Ms Park’s book is when she is woken up by her mother giggling as the fridge (their first electric fridge) has just turned itself on. This is the real people behind the story, these are the people we should care about. The events of the book are tragic and heart breaking but only because underneath it all it happened to people for, under everything, we are all people and that, is the truth.

 

 

‘till next time