Category Archives: Statements

Male sexuality post-Weinstein

22 Wednesday Nov 2017

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I usually keep my personal life out of my writing, but it’s impossible to write about the flood of men accused of sexual assault without some reference to my own experience as a male in the 90s and 2000s.

It’s weird—ask any guy and they’ll agree that of course (of course!) sexually assaulting women is wrong, but there’s a feeling in the air that this surge of men being accused of doing just that is dangerous or somehow bad.

I’d like to try explaining this.  Men have taken a hit lately, and for good reason, but I don’t want my explanation to read as an attack on men, or an apology / justification for assault or bad treatment. Just perceptions in a difficult time.

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Some men are (understandably, but regrettably) confused now because we grew up in a hyper-sexual world predicated on male sexual desire, and we are being bombarded with incontrovertible evidence that this world was anything but innocent. We, men, are and feel implicated in it.

Let’s be clear, women have been describing what‘s currently in headlines for years, and we didn’t listen. We didn’t want to. That world was very fun for us, and we didn’t want the party to stop.

Imagine existing in a world that accepts and caters to the deepest impulse raging through your body. That’s what it was to be male growing up in North America in the 90s and 2000s.

Imagine, the jokes, movies, the socially acceptable professional / unprofessional dynamics in so many ways all reflected and encouraged precisely what you most badly wanted to do. Both nature and nurture said the same thing: go for it.

Would anybody turn this off voluntarily?

This is about power—the reason good men (not Nice Guys, actual good men) may be uncomfortable today or even worried about women publicly describing how men have assaulted them is, for the first time, the world is making a demand on men, and we’re actually being expected to obey it.

That the demand is an ultra small demand—don’t be greasy let alone actually rape women—doesn’t change the fact that it’s a demand. It’s not the substance of the demand causing discomfort really, it’s that there’s any demand at all. (This is an explanation, not a justification for the discomfort.)

Male impunity is gone in the present and the past, and there’s a backlog of behavior being held accountable that was never supposed to be held to account.

In short, for the first time, men are not in total control. Ceding power is perceived by some men, MRA types or alt-right fuckers, as weakness. The connection they make between social power and sexual prowess is explicit in their use of the term “cuck” (from cuckold, as in a male whose wife has sex with another man) as a general pejorative. Males who don’t dominate are weak, to this type. Trite, brain dead alpha macho shit flourishes here. Of course progressive types can be misogynists who assault women too, which only shows that this transcends politics: it’s a male problem.

But every normal person across the political spectrum agrees that sex crimes against women (or men) are wrong, so I want to look at the culture of my youth, which at the time I (like everyone) enjoyed but now seems incredibly unhealthy and toxic.

In one of countless examples I can name, my friends and I lamented what we perceived as a crackdown on fun, when the summer camp I went to ended a staff rec tradition of the “Sex Olympics”, where among other things, female staff (16+) competed to see who could best deep throat popsicles. That this ever existed seems as ridiculous now as cancelling it did then.

But of course the Sex Olympics seemed like a reasonable thing to do in 2001. That was for staff. As campers we were brought up in this culture, and if 13-year-olds could inhabit a milieu that was near in spirit to hardcore porn, why shouldn’t people 16 and up? I called this the pussification of society. Casual misogyny abounded here. At the time, it was life and life as a young man then was fun.

I wonder about people who read my facebook posts supporting the female accusers, who saw me drunk as hell on a dance floor grinding with a random or telling or laughing at obscene ribald jokes, and think me a hypocrite. Well, I doubt anybody has an unblemished record, and this isn’t really about me. Every guy should be frantically searching their memory for bad shit they might have done, otherwise they’re inexperienced or part of the problem.  I leave it to them.

Women have described what’s in the headlines for years, but it’s reached the point where it’s simply impossible to deny. Thankfully, women are finally being believed and the public is getting a feel for the scale of the problem.

So, how to move forward?

Civilization is, in essence, order imposed on the lizard brain. Civilization is the collective act of using human intelligence to lift us above the conditions of feral animals, and choosing how life should be then enforcing it. At its root, art is ordering chaos. Laws do the same. Art and laws are civilization.

But, that we have the capacity for rational thought obscures the fact that rationale is not what primarily motivates us. The lizard brain has a much larger say than we want to believe. That’s why progressives can prove to be just as sick fucks as anybody else. Not having principles and setting them aside amount to the same.

The facts are as follows: human beings survived because of evolution, and evolution implanted in us the innate desire to want to fuck. It’s why we think of sex every seven seconds. Among other things, this sex drive led to the survival of our species (good!) and terrible consequences for women (terrible!).

I’ll say something my leftist friends have given me shit for: males and women are hard-wired differently. To be crystal clear, I believe nothing is more important than an individual’s right to be / do whatever they want, and I hate narrow or even broad gender stereotypes. The idea of telling anyone how to live, or of being told, repulses me. But can it be coincidental that over the course of history, the physically dominant gender has dominated?

I took a course in evolutionary psychology (EP) where the class text was written by a female feminist named Anne Campbell. This was by design, as leftists are suspicious of EP because they fear (sometimes correctly) hard-wiring is invoked in an attempt to justify male superiority, or the naturalistic fallacy, that something is desirable and maybe even inevitable for being natural. No. 

EP just posits that something can be said to fit into “human nature” if it is found to exist across time and across the planet. In other words, to qualify, an underlying behavior must occur basically always and everywhere. Can anyone name an era and place where women held real power? Sure, Google may turn up an isolated indigenous matriarchal society, but what does it say that you need to Google it? In the enlightened West women couldn’t originally vote. Same with celebrated Ancient Greece. The leading military figures and robber barons, the people with real power, have all been men.

The notion that women are people does not come naturally to men, who categorize them in two groups, women to be and not to be fucked. Hot or not. People need to unlearn a lot of messed up ideas they inherited, and ones pre-programmed in their brain.

It’s not for me to condemn male behavior—every person only knows what they’ve done in their life and that’s their responsibility. Of course women are the victims of patriarchy, but there isn’t one social institution that fosters any real sense of philosophy for its own sake. How to be friends with people, how to feel and be, how to love. Men suffer from this too, even the ones who behave badly and impose suffering on others.

Chivalry is essentially rituals around men ceding power to women—holding the door open, pulling out their chair, taking off a coat to warm them when it’s cold. Subconsciously, the idea boils down to: I’m physically more powerful than you, but I will use my power for you, rather than against you. Men must continue doing this, but writ large rather than in small isolated and ceremonial acts, and in ways that don’t directly benefit men. If chivalry is just a way to fuck a girl, it’s not really chivalrous.

The point is to give up power because it’s the right thing to do. I doubt this will happen. Even as more guilty men fall, I doubt things will fundamentally change. I hope I’m wrong.

The beast is in so many social institutions and reflected back at us because it’s in us in the first place. Men. The cycle moves in both directions. It’s in our lizard brain, so it’s in our movies and conversation, the office, the streets, the home. Everywhere. Men haven’t been asked to reckon with this, to amend our behavior.

Well of course we were asked, but we denied there was a problem. We denied we were the problem. Denying it was wrong then, but it’s impossible now. No guy can claim innocence ever again.

Every guy is hopefully having a private reckoning, assessing how they behaved in the old world by the new standards. Assuming your conduct was just gross or shameful and not illegal, there were excuses, even if bad ones.

But what you do now moving forward in the post-innocence era is up to you.

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Keep weddings chilled

05 Tuesday Jan 2016

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Planning a wedding is a bitch. I assume people love the idea of marriage way more than the cost and aggravation of planning the wedding. If you’re wealthy and you love planning parties, have fun and please invite me. But for many, the money, time and anxiety spent on planning a wedding would only make sense if the success of the party determined the success of the actual marriage.

I suspect many would elope but for their disappointed mother. No matter how much the bride or mother (or some modern, heroic man) claim they want to plan a wedding, doing so is a huge burden. I imagine people feel pressure not to have the most basic party of their circle of friends, and to hover at average or higher. Elaborate flower arrangements are not the heart of the party—money is best spent on food, booze, music and plus ones.

The Wedding Business knows how much people value their wedding day, and they extort accordingly. In the way governments unshackled from the gold standard print their own money and determine the value of this currency, so the wedding industry says that actually a room, a band, a photographer no longer costs Y, but Y x 3. Love causes inflation and attracts vultures.

To be fair, the bride and groom can be the source of wedding mania as much as its victims. People getting married are liable to get swept up in their own self-importance and ask friends to spend hundreds, if not thousands, on things like a dress or the bachelor/ette party before the wedding even starts. If your people have Vegas money, cool, but often some in the group don’t, and feel pressured not to miss a friend’s celebration. This pressure breeds. People become inwardly resentful, if not outwardly, and suddenly there’s a beef where there should be love.

In my experience, bachelor parties are best inexpensive and core-focused: go up north, drink whiskey, smoke hash and play guitar. Indeed, this would make a flawless wedding. The lucky people attending such a party are grateful they weren’t asked to shell out, and can just chill meeting the good friends of whoever’s getting married. Then they know each other at the actual wedding, which is the point.

Also, spending several hundred so a circle of guys can watch their friend awkwardly deal with one or more strippers is just weird for every single person involved, and can be safely done away with. The formulaic bawdiness is trite and played out, and that everyone needs to be very drunk to endure the thing says it all.

I have no first-hand experience with bridesmaid politics but understand it can be a world of pain. After we help Syrian refugees, Canada needs a national strategy to save the victims of bridezillas.

Co-ordinating all the moving pieces surrounding a wedding and all the accompanying parties is hell, so remember this and be generous if an aspect of somebody’s irks you. Getting invited to a friend’s is an honour: I’ll do my part by cracking jokes with strangers at my table and getting drunk enough to actually dance. But if I get left off the invite list, it’s one less present to buy and I will continue to be your friend. We’re grownups. In return, don’t ask your people to do stuff for your wedding they really don’t want to do.

Some associated costs need to be graciously sucked up, even if you don’t love them. Maybe the people with expensive bachelor/ette parties are exacting revenge on friends who gouged them, or if their wedding comes first maybe they want to ensure they squeeze people before they get squeezed themselves. This perpetuates cycles.

I wish people in love nothing but continued love, however they celebrate it, and hope everyone, those who are single or who are in dubious relationships, finds the happiness that people appear to have at their wedding. But just because two people are in love doesn’t mean everyone needs to lose their mind.

Charleston Church Massacre and White Racism

26 Friday Jun 2015

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Nine totally innocent black people in a South Carolina church were murdered by a 21-year-old white man intent on starting a race war. For normal people there can only be one reaction–grief. Publishing this response when there can be no second might seem trite, as in why make a point of saying something when only that one thing can be said. But the only other option is not airing any response and I find that unacceptable.

When white people write about race they literally don’t have skin in the game. It often feels like philosophy play. No matter what conclusion they reach, the white writer’s safety is never in jeopardy. The implications of the article only affect them insofar as they care about the lives of the people who the article is about, ie non-white people. Black people are being killed in the street by citizens, and those ostensibly there to protect them, police.

I have a dual sense of race. In a cosmic or existential sense, there is no god and all people’s lives matter equally because we’re all bumbling about on this planet trying to have a good time living decently. Race is a social construct, skin pigment should be irrelevant. Except of course it isn’t.

I think racism stems from the unfortunate flipside of the drive that makes a mother instinctively love her baby. In evolutionary terms, 10,000 years ago in the Pleistocene, it’s easy to see the advantages of being close with one’s own tribe. Danger was everywhere, trust was necessary, and at a time when we spent life mere kilometres from where we were born we didn’t encounter even a fraction of the diversity we do today.

All humans have an ineluctable, diabolical genius for automatically sussing out people like them. We sort them into various categories based on blood, ethnicity, geographic ties, gender, religion, race, nationality, class. But ultimately these are subdivisions of two largest categories: alike and not alike. How similar is this person to me, and how are they different?

That’s why most people are disproportionately friends with people like themselves, and why the quaint liberal notion that people be judged solely according to the content of their character instead of these factors doesn’t really play out much in reality. It is a lovely notion, but it’s not usually how things go. We surround ourselves with people like us. (Cosmopolitanism has increased due to internet and cheaper flights–we see different people as less different or even as the same as us, but it didn’t start out this way, we had to climb out of our natural state.)

Loving your family because they’re family (or have some other of the above commonalities) can often be a lovely thing, or at least benign. But on a large-scale, a world of people preferring those like themselves inadvertently makes them opposed to those who are different as a byproduct. If you add this dynamic to crowd-think, racism is easier to understand.

It’s a fact that people are people irrespective of their skin colour, but saying this to a victim of racism is like telling someone with dead lost to a Holy War that there is no god. The underlying fact of it is irrelevant when in practice it can mean life and death.

I’ve heard Jews here scared to publicly criticize a provincial or federal policy lest they get audited say they’d feel safer hearing Muslims, perhaps living in arms-range of Hamas or ISIS, publicly denounce these two barbaric groups, even if the consequences for doing so has been death or worse (death of family members to send a message). Many Muslims do publicly denounce these groups, but there are understandable, practical reasons why they may remain silent. Many people who hate ISIS don’t bother to claim so publicly because they never say anything publicly. Silence doesn’t equal consent. On the flip side I imagine there are racist CEOs of companies only begrudgingly removing Confederate flags from stores now out of profit motive, sensing shoppers (thankfully) want this. It’s Pride now, and I imagine homophobic CEOs realise rainbow flags are good for business. Knowing a person’s private heart is complicated.

White people often think everyone is in a race but us, so when a white person does something they’re just a person doing it, not a person of a race. Many white people don’t feel compelled to publicly denounce white crimes because it doesn’t occur to us that we should. This white guy killed people in my name, and that’s unacceptable. Many other white people also hate this shit but don’t have a public platform to denounce it, but I do so I will.

I get that white people bemoaning the conditions non-white people live in can sound like giving themselves a sanctimonious pat on the back–look what a humanitarian I am! Gushy white liberal guilt makes for poor reading. But seeing it exclusively in these terms makes it about the author when what matters is the article’s subject, in this case those murdered for not being white. Anyway, it doesn’t take an especially enlightened humanitarian to denounce race wars or the death of innocent people. It’s the right position and it’s important, but it’s mundane and basic.  

It’s hard to talk about this stuff without it devolving into platitudes. Both social justice advocates and those who lament PC censorship both speak them. But consider, there isn’t a single worthwhile principle or philosophy that can’t be reduced to a corny platitude. When dealing with these issues it’s easy to scoff at this or that often repeated slogan or pre-packaged phrase, but align yourself with the substance behind it.

Dizzy Gillespie used to say that “everyone’s my brother until they prove otherwise.” If I had the power I’d “extend the chill” to non-white people, a phrase I like because it has a light touch on a heavy subject and carries the idea of allowing everyone to do what white people take for granted, innocently wander about enjoying life without fear, oblivious to even the thought, that for no reason it might suddenly end.

For now and from afar, it seems this ghastly crime is doing anything but starting a race war. I hope I’m right and I hope that continues.

Misery: the city after canoe tripping

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

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I love Toronto, but since returning from a ten-day canoe trip all urban environments sicken me. The forests and rivers have placed the scourges of the city into sharp relief. I’m conflicted: I feel like I cannot readjust to city life without losing the serenity I built up in the woods. That nature recalibrates the soul is a cliché, which doesn’t make it untrue just simply vague, so let’s inspect this.

First, five buddies and I spent ten days in Northern Quebec, shooting the north part of the Coulonge and the Noir. Algonquin doesn’t have rapids as large as the ones we shot, and though there are sections of Algonquin where solitude is complete, we didn’t see a single solitary person from about day two to six. Now for what’s superficial about the city.

Author gets doused

Author gets doused, Noire River

The city offers many places for spiritual escape or release, some free, like parks, others not, like museums and other cultural institutions, gyms, or yoga centres where unilingual instructors speak ancient languages they don’t know, and more. That businesses in the city supply life-balance is not proof that the city cares about you, rather they exist to take your money while you recover from the city itself. This compacted parasitical dynamic, this secondary gouging as you seek solace from the primary gouging, presuppose that life in the city is so hostile it requires escaping. In a larger sense these releases from work serve a crucial systematic function, to prevent citizens and workers from going insane. It’s akin to the hip company with the office ping pong table—the company doesn’t want you to enjoy working, they just want you stress-free to increase your productivity for their sake, and really nobody wants to be seen playing ping pong because it reflects poorly. These institutions just seek profit, which is their prerogative and perfectly understandable. But self-interest disguised as selflessness is the commonplace, everyday lie of the city. City life is founded on guile.

In nature, there is no purpose or motive. Nature is neutral, and always will be. It demands and offers you nothing. The actual world is just…there. No ads offer happiness or spiritual respite for a price. It is the primordial world before systems of government or business made direct or indirect demands on people. In this physical and psychological space, free of bosses, solicitations and professional or social obligations, there isn’t total freedom, but the limits, restrictions and hardships imposed on you arise naturally. And not only are they reasonable but they are not subject to questioning; you can only bring the personal effects you are willing to carry, and you cannot blame your problems here on ignorant voters or The Man. Obstacles, whatever they are, simply arise and must be surmounted. There is no alternative. No excuse or complaint will change the fact that you must make it to your campsite or you’ll have nowhere to sleep, and must make a fire if you want heat to cook food, etc.

But let’s not romanticize things too much—camping is not merely you and the elements. If it was, a couple lovely days of reflection would be followed promptly by hunger and death. You bring equipment and food from the city and you do not enter the woods without an exit plan. The outside world is never hermetically sealed off. But life feels different because the nature of work is fundamentally different, and after all work is what occupies most of our time, both in the city and on canoe trip.

Strictly speaking, very few people do work in the city that needs to get done. Even teachers, doctors, social workers and other noble professions must be at least occasionally struck by the feeling that their work doesn’t have the impact that initially attracted them to the profession. Hats off to people who find purpose despite making money! These lucky bastards are the minority. Bureaucrats, pencil pushers, PR people and advertisers, financiers, the producers and hawkers of senseless tacky garbage sold cheaply or outrageous sums—all these should have the good sense to know their work is absolutely useless. The world simply has more people than useful functions; everybody needs a job, but there’s nothing to do. Having a job is useful, even if the job is useless.

I speak here in an existential sense. Of course workers receive money for food and crap to buy in exchange for their labour (unless they’re writers or are otherwise exploitable), but the cycle is roughly this: the economy, the largest determiner of “quality of life,” depends on employment, thus employment per se is a cause in and of itself. Thus, a low (or even high) paying job that actively harms humanity, destroys the worker’s soul, and consumes all their waking hours is thought to increase their quality of life. The economy is merely a measurement of the country’s collective financial affairs, and has nothing to do with the spiritual well-being of people. But politicians and polls see “quality of life” in these terms, and these forces and this mode of thinking hold serious sway in the city.

This faulty system would equally praise all wealthy people with access to healthy food and elite schools but can’t distinguish between someone happy and suicidal. It’s a blunt view that regards quality of life only in measurable economic terms. There is something to be said for having money, let’s not be dopey artists, but soul and spirit can’t be ignored when determining quality of life, even if they defy quantification. The Earth turned for millennia before jobs in finance or PR existed. Nobody would be the worse if these and several other industries collapsed. Indeed, their total demise would probably lead to mass-bliss.

Every single work task on a canoe trip has definite purpose. You don’t do anything on trip unless it’s necessary or fun. And rather than rely on the city’s abstract, arbitrary or vague work evaluation, on canoe trips your body is the arbiter of how hard you worked. You feel it. Employed people in the city might get a promotion if they’re related to the boss, or have worked for __ number of years, or they might get fired because it’s cheaper to outsource their job to China, or getting rid of their role entirely benefits the bottom line. It’s beyond naïve to expect a fair correlation between your fate and how hard you work. The vicissitudes of the city’s relationship between worth ethic and payoff can be opaque and corrupt, nor does it have the capability to factor in unquantifiable things like soul and spirit even if it wanted to, which it doesn’t.

Nature is different. Reward and work in the woods are always governed by a simple, incorruptible dynamic: hard work gets physically easier the more you do it, and do it you must. This is the natural law. Muscles respond to paddling and portaging, and gradually these become simpler and more enjoyable. More, these tasks are never pointless or arbitrarily assigned along a top down hierarchy—boss, manager, useless employee, more useless intern. Trip life has an unselfconscious equality because you’re all in the same position. You need to portage because you’ve reached the shore, and carrying your gear across land is the only way to get to water again. The necessity of the work gives it meaning, and the rewards and pains are always in perfect proportion to the work put in. But nature is refreshingly indifferent to your productivity or how your muscles hurt. There’s no ping pong table, but if you need to chill, then chill. Pontoon, stop paddling eat something, roll a hasher, jump in the river. Nobody offers you a break, secretly judging you for being unproductive. But the rivers gives.

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Delicious. When we gutted him a crayfish he ate popped out, so I put that on the line and caught another next cast. Oh, generous river.

Let me absolutely clear about one thing: nature can be milk and honey but also a motherfucker. The woods offers lots of ways to be killed, and while I’ve stated that the work on canoe trips is necessary for survival that’s only true once you’ve embarked on the trip itself, which strictly speaking isn’t necessary. But canoe trips are the best vacation there is.

A vacation has two functions for the urban worker: first, it alleviates pent up work-related misery, and second, the prospect of vacation during work is a carrot that makes time stuck at work bearable. In other words, city work basically cannot be endured unless there is promise of release from it. Pretty much everyone agrees work is shit, and somehow if the world flipped upside down, we’d rather not do it if given the option.

On paper, it makes sense that vacationers aggressively seek to do as little work as possible. Sloths gorge their faces off at all-inclusives. On beach vacations, bliss is attained by remaining dormant for extended periods of time. Vegas-type gambling excursions promise glamourous thrills via ill-advised bets, outsized stage shows, cocaine and hookers. I find these fundamentally unappealing and possibly immoral. What’s so attractive about spending vacation time on a canoe trip, working?

I can invoke Max Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic, that work per se is rewarding, but this emphasis on work might distract from a better reason: canoe trips are a vacation from so-called civilization, and work is just what you do on them. (Though there are flog trips…) Nature washes away the city’s spiritual pollution. The city’s disgusting advertising everywhere, the lies we’re numbed to through sheer bombardment, the disconnected people, the enormous stacks of windows that pass here for architecture, the crippling car traffic stuck on broken concrete, our caveman mayor, media reports of the latest international atrocities—these and more are escaped with wonderful effect. This might sound like a cop out, like naturalists flee their world because they’re weak, but in fact they’re returning to the actual world that the ghastly city supplanted. It was here first.

Computers, screens, and office buildings are so pervasive that it’s easy to forget how foreign they are to our species. The industrial revolution was very, very recent compared to our evolutionary history. Human bodies and minds are designed and wired to move about in nature. Doing so feels like an ancient memory stirred up. You sweat at first, because it’s hard and unfamiliar, but you adjust soon.

The handsome eagle with its shockingly expansive wings is a worthy representative of its majestic habitat. The city’s emblem is the pigeon, probably disease-ridden and definitely disgusting to behold, accurately described as a rat with wings. Even the city’s parks and green space we loudly applaud ourselves for maintaining are only a taunting simulacrum of what was. However well-intended to impart in us a restorative, Wordsworthian appreciation of nature, they are only a token, a paltry fraction, a castrated version of what used to be. For me right now parks are no help coping with the city’s heinous aspects (roads, buildings, smog, work). Imagine about what Toronto looked like 1000 years ago, then celebrate our abundant parks.

Nature might be so comforting because it is basically people-free. Go somewhere remote to increase your odds of being somewhere that hasn’t yet been ruined by the human race. The few people you do encounter camping are there to do the same thing as you. They know the guide book and the ways of the forest and water, in the same way it’s unnecessary to explain who Jerry Garcia is at a Phish show. But a Phish show has thousands of people, some primarily there for drugs. The woods only a handful, and it’s unforgiving to amateurs. It rewards experience and purer intentions, though of course nature lovers can die in the woods.

Many differences between city and nature are more obvious, and no less important. City lights kill the stars, which illustrates perfectly how nonchalantly, how easily, even if indirectly, the city ruins the wonders nature gives us freely. In the bush, water is fast on rivers, vast on lakes. We are separated from Toronto’s waterfront by a highway. The sun, the only source of light in the woods but not the city, wakes you up and announces bed. Electric lights cause irregular sleeping patterns. Animal chatter and gushing water is nature’s background noise, replacing car horns and pop up ads. You involuntarily digest these contrasts in thoughts and feeling and they accumulate somewhere deep inside you. It’s this interconnectivity between you and all these elements which causes that precious, impossible to articulate thing—spiritual bliss. Hopefully you’ve filled up a reserve of it large and intense enough to last a considerable time while you’re stuck in that godforsaken shithole, the city.

Dating in your 30s

05 Monday May 2014

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A friend suggested I write on this topic. While I’m usually averse to divulging views about more personal stuff, I’ll take her up. I’ve been 30 for five days now, so I’m qualified.

Dating used to be carefree. Two people were or attracted and interested in each other, and that was that. But aging brings complications, as we feel we must at least give a look down the road. Do I like this person enough to bother, or am I taking away from her/my prime years? It’s unfair, but women have serious complications in pregnancy after 35. Meanwhile, men can look hot with salt and pepper hair. Nature is a motherfucker.

Also, people all around us are acting decisively. As you’ve seen on Facebook, people are married. Nothing makes people freak out like a celebration of love. I suspect some people get married mostly for the Facebook status and the accompanying flood of pictures. These pics are the ultimate “humble brag,” proof the couple are socially well adjusted, evidence they will not die alone. I’m all for connubial bliss, and nobody roots for love like I do. Joyce: real love loves to love love. But single people can be comforted by considering how many marriages are filled with despair.

It’s well known that 50% of marriages end in divorce, meaning half of marriages are outright failures. But what of this other half? They fall somewhere between love at one happy end and I’ve-made-a-huge-tiny-mistake.

Starting everyday beside someone terrible can be avoided by prudence and patience while single. Many think looking for a “serious relationship” is the sensible, mature course of action, but finding a life mate is not just another thing to cross off the to-do list. It must be done right. Life is long. Judges consider “life” 25 years but it’s actually longer, meaning marrying the wrong person can lead to a lengthier imprisonment than murder.

The thing is not to look for a serious relationship, but to find a serious love. It’s hard to talk about love without sounding sentimental and corny, which is why in art it’s so often depicted horribly. It’s also wildly personal, so there’s no general way to talk about it, but maybe some things to keep in mind.

Compatibility is often thought of in positive terms—someone who accentuates your strengths. But don’t pick someone too high above you! It’s about balance. Don’t spend life paranoid and insecure about your better looking, richer, more charming partner. Compatibility might mean selecting someone as ugly, broke and dull as you. It’s not like you reach a verdict on a potential mate by consciously entering each variable into some kind of formal ledger, but you’ll probably be mutually attracted to someone who, if such a ledger were created, would come out about equal.

There are two related forces working against people finding real love: the unconscious evolutionary drive beckoning to just mate already, and social pressure. This latter world has different looks: your relatives asking if you’ve scheduled the start of a family, movies and TV about these problems, and of course advertising, which is itself a maelstrom of lies valuing love only because married people have predictable purchasing patterns (diamond ring, a home, stuff for the home, baby products, etc.)

Genuine concern for, or even acknowledgement of, an individual’s heart and soul is by definition banished from both these worlds, but these forces motivate many people all the same. So find someone who either does or doesn’t transcend this stuff to the same degree you do. Don’t be more or less self-actualized than the person you’re seeing.

There’s no formula for happiness. The famous dating blogger Sun Tzu says “know yourself and know your enemy and you need not fear the result of a thousand battles,” meaning you need to really know yourself and the other person.

Leo’s famous intro “All happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy after their own fashion” [Maude translation] sounds wonderful, until you think about it. Happiness has unlimited variations. 40-year-old Tolstoy was actually a proponent of the traditional nuclear family, and he thought passionate follow-your-heart Anna was just an alleyway skank, sympathizing instead with her steadfast, dull ex-husband. Later radical Tolstoy opposed pre and post-marital sex, joining him with other great thinkers like Dr. Tobias Funke.

In closing, in dating, chill. Not just because relaxing is less stressful than not relaxing. Chilling is crucial. When you focus hard inwardly, not only do you take care of your own life but you give off that I-don’t-give-a-shit vibe that’s powerful so long as you really don’t give a shit. Authenticity is key. It can’t be faked. Women call guys immature sometimes for not pro-actively seeking a serious relationship, but it might just be that they don’t give a shit in the way described above, and thus aren’t necessarily frivolous about matters of the heart.

And if you dodge trashy idiots, dating is basically just drinking, eating and talking with people who might be tolerable, even if you don’t instantly fall in love. Single people generally sleep alone and have to endure the stigma of being the single ones at parties filled with couples. This is nothing compared to how bad a bad marriage one can be.

At the base of Florence’s Duomo is a shockingly graphic depiction of hell inspired by Dante’s Inferno. Various ghastly devils cackle with laughter while engaging in heinous acts of violence: bashing human skulls in with clubs, impaling people with tridents, flaying naked people alive. Hellfire sizzles in back. This is the great Florentine poet’s allegory for daily life in a bad marriage. You don’t see this side of marriage a lot because, for some reason, people don’t post these pictures on Facebook.

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Toronto’s pathetic book culture

06 Friday Jul 2012

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Our city’s book culture is terminally ill, and there is no chance for its revival. Real book culture isn’t about glossy new $30 hard cover books about a woman contractually obliged to put out in sordid ways she never imagined, it’s about the books that are enriching as they are inexpensive. They generate rapture because they are written beautifully. I made a joke months ago after buying toilet paper and paper towel, “paper is only cheap if there’s literature on it,” but after learning yesterday that Frantic City is closing, perhaps my favourite second-hand book store, this joke now contains a very tragic note. Let’s not mince words: if we ever had a literary culture, it is dying slowly, emitting only a thoroughly ignored whimper.

The hardest thing for an individual to bring himself to do now is spend dozens of hours on a book nobody in their inner-circle is reading or talking about. It will in no way boost their status among friends or peers or society at large, and investing so much time given the esoteric pay off is uncommon, or eccentric. There are active forces against reading real books, great literature: we are inundated with friends telling us “you have to watch this TV series,” or we are glued to our various screens, or we read the lofty magazines urging us to try a series of gastronomic hamburgers.

Books are anathema to the marketplace and our consumer culture, and that will never change, and it’s getting worse. Any advertiser’s worst nightmare is the consumer who can cheaply think and entertain himself for great lengths of time. A copy of Anna Karenin can be purchased for $3, and you can spend incalculable hours (YEARS!) reading and rereading it. But this keeps you away from pop-up ads, away from commercials, away from stores, away from restaurants, away from spending money, and so all these things (their presence increasingly ubiquitous) pushes people away from lengthy reading. You earn funny looks if you tell someone you read this stuff. Perhaps they doubt your intention, high-brow scorn, like you can’t genuinely love literature the way people do Game of Thrones, that you’re putting on airs to appear intelligent.

The post-literate generation needs things fast, and the great tomes take time. “Caress the detail, the divine detail!” Nabokov urges us, but he is dead and nobody listens any more. So what we have is dying second-hand stores, and mainstream book merchants stocking t-shirts, various bookish looking kitsch, board games, and somewhere, if space graciously permits, books.

The decrease in real reading coincides with an increase in public bookish proclamations. The book as symbol. There are tote bags with pictures of books on them, people volunteering a love for books in neon letters all over social media, and there was a respectable hullabaloo when Ford, the philistine Goliath, tried to strip the library of funds. Yes, but people aren’t loud when they read, they are silent. Though the above is well and good, none of it convinces me in-depth reading is broadly taking place.

This is not an argument for reading the Western Canon exclusively. I believe reading should be done widely, according to one’s taste, and that there are only two schools of literature: the talented and the untalented. Ragging on a book because it’s popular is as wildly ignorant as loving a book because it’s in the canon. But for stores to be going out business because they choose to stock great but not in vogue authors’ entire catalogues instead of their number one seller, rather than schlock, is a bad sign, and I am lashing out at the risk of appearing like a snob. (Perhaps I am a snob: suck it.)

Think hard what I’m about to say, or it’ll sound perfectly deranged or offensive. Zizec describes Gandhi as being more violent than Hitler, in that Hitler’s unimaginable atrocity was actually much more within historical context than Gandhi’s unprecedented determination towards non-violence. In this sense, the real revolutionaries aren’t in the streets demanding change with thousands of other people just like them. The biggest act of protest now is to shut yourself off from everyone and read a book in silence without sharing it on social media. This private act is violent!

That my area is sooo hip and cool because of the glossy restaurants and the multitude of watering holes offering extremely local or extremely exotic beer is a sham. Shellacked culture, no rapture. It’s not just condo culture, but the so-called counter culture that’s inane, and I feel let down by it.

Don’t get me wrong: people can indulge in whatever decadent drivel they like, but it stops being benignly amusing when their world, the physical one I share with them, can’t permit for me only a cheap book store that stocks according to taste, not predictable money makers. I want very little, and I can’t have it! At the very least, the current pretence towards a bookish culture during this insoluble literary assault is salt in my wound. I am insulted.

The tomes are entombed. So long, Solon! I am not looking forward to the day, soon approaching, where I have this conversation:

Me: “Hey, do you remember when great books cost a dollar, bought from an actual store?”

Average citizen: “No.”

 

On status, advertising, and bottle service…something I know about

15 Friday Jun 2012

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Facebook has eroded the actual meaning of the word “status,” a real shame (and no accident) since I think the concept of status is an immensely important evolutionary psychological tool which helps us understand just about everything. This is an immensely loaded statement, so let me qualify and explain what status is, how inauthentic and contrived it can be, and what all this means in regards to advertising.

Status is ever-changing reputation that you wear or live. It has nothing to do with the person’s innate qualities. If you drive a Porsche, whether you can afford it or not, you get heightened status in most communities (not amongst bohemians though…you need rags and a record of activism, imprisonment a bonus, for that). If you’re rich but drive a Honda, your status is equal to all non-rich Honda drivers.

Perhaps you don’t want to be showy, but a CEO would look ridiculous, or have his authority undermined, appearing to work on a bike. Perhaps the guy in a Porsche is just a destitute man having a mid-life crisis. You cannot judge someone without knowing their inner reasons! This piece is about considering our own reasons for buying things, not judging others. But Porsches and Hondas differ hugely in performance, materials, and the quality of construction, so the increased price is warranted.

But the most pure example of headlong waste is bottle service. Nothing signals baller status like unnecessarily paying ten times the price for the exact same drinks. If bottles were sold at $30 instead of $300, they’d no longer be desirable. Obviously people would buy the cheaper booze, but not the same people, and for different reasons. $300 bottles reliably sends the message that the buyer can afford to waste, and this message is no longer sent if the bottle is reasonably priced. I have seen sparklers attached to bottles so everyone sees who ordered: if nobody sees them ball, they’re not really balling. The impression made is worth $270 to some–this is what’s really on purchase, not the alcohol, after all.

This is a silly, irrational remnant of the Pleistocene, where having an over-abundance of resources in harsh times meant guaranteed survival to cavemen and the people in their circle. But today, spending for the sole sake of wasting is tacky and everywhere in bad taste. The most essential thing when considering evolutionary psychology is not to conflate what is in our genes with how we ought to behave. Remember, too, there’s nothing wrong with buying expensive things that are worth the money if you appreciate them.

Facebook’s diabolical genius is letting people control and publicize their own “status” for free. Of course, it’s not really a status they’re posting, but just a message that appears to people on their list. But they called it that for a reason. Facebook is the sparkler attached to the bottle service, without having to buy the bottle. No wonder its mass appeal.

Understanding status is essential to understanding the horror show of corporate branding. To be certain, branding is so successful that any company would be crazy not to do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not absurdly irrational. They give out status by making us feel predictably good about ourselves (or stop us from feeling insecure or bad) or by making us feel like we belong to a desirable set.

To be a company in the present age requires a predictable image, a term I like better than “brand”; The word “brand” falsely suggests the company is innately and permanently a certain way, where “image” rightly sounds contrived and painstakingly designed in advance to appeal to certain masses.

Companies can’t exist now unless they are seen to be giving entities which help the world in some small, yet heartening or profound way. So they give a negligible amount to a high-profile cause and take possession of a moral posture. Moral qualities are not for purchase, yet companies lay claim to them and offer moral vindication to consumers as a reward for buying their product. The formula is roughly: Fight hunger by buying this chocolate bar since we donate to so and so.

While on the surface it seems only positive that companies benefit people who otherwise would receive nothing, it’s the exploitation of our craving for status working in their self-interest that upsets me, as well as the impurity of the hijacking of the genuine yearning to do good for only its image. It’s not unlike requiring high school students to perform community service in order to graduate; the charm and the actual moral worth of the action is removed from voluntary service when it’s obligatory. So when companies posture like they care about the world, even if it does help somewhat, it ceases to be charming or genuine when their “giving” is embedded in their price, or when it makes them appear advantageously compassionate. 

You can be certain no company will ever give anonymously, unless they also secretly leak to the right media sources that they were the ones who donated so freely. I predict this will happen one day, as companies seek to appear pure and genuine.

Imagine the CEO of a fortune 500 company venerating the company’s dedication to the environment, or towards humanity, on a jumbo jet en route to Las Vegas where a business deal will be concluded amid unimaginable excess. This blends the two strains of status–exclusivity proved by over-priced gluttony, and worldly benevolence proved by high-profile giving. While I made up the above CEO, no doubt he has many real existences somewhere.

When branding is safely ignored, it’s evident that we only buy products from companies, yet there is an immense chasm between the physical properties of the product, the price at which it’s sold, and our reasons for purchase. Companies increase our status by making us feel accepted in cliques they spend millions of dollars determining we seek belonging. Beer commercials are hilarious in this respect.

The notion of a beer being tastier for a certain demographic (undergraduate party animals, urban sophisticates, etc.) is absurd. People either like it or they don’t, but it tastes the same way for everybody. The combination of barley, wheat and water cannot love hockey or act as a national ambassador for the simple reason that inanimate grains cannot have thoughts or feelings. Yet companies try and convince us that drinking their beer puts us on the “cool male hockey guy” or “patriot” team.

When a celebrity claims to use a product, ordinary mortals who also use it somehow feel linked to their high status, despite knowing they’re paid for the endorsement and might not actually feel that way. But this works in reverse too. Andrew Coyne wrote well on how Magnotta’s picture drinking a Labatt shouldn’t really mean anything:

“The idea that Magnotta’s alleged crimes would somehow have been related to his fondness for drinking Blue is only slightly more tenuous than the idea that drinking Blue would cause hundreds of sexy girls to show up at your parties.”

I’m sure Coyne knows that people aren’t rational, but a brand has a strange hold on people. Nabokov describes a similar cynical humour of the falseness in advertising in even better terms, and I never resist quoting him:

“…the world they [advertisers] create is pretty harmless in itself because everybody knows that it is made up by the seller with the understanding that the buyer will join in the make-believe. The amusing part is…that it is a kind of satellite shadow world in the actual existence of which neither the sellers nor buyers really believe in their heart of hearts…”

But Nabokov wrote before there was a clear demarcation between the real life and the made up world of the advertisement. If this clear line between “ad” and “world” ever existed in Nabokov’s time, it has been fully eroded by advertisers who not only put ads into movies, but make sure their celebrity is candidly filmed consuming a product in the “real world”. The idea is to make the giving and taking of status more authentic by conflating the world of the ad, the art, and the actual world.

This deliberate obfuscation is the most pernicious delusion of all. It strikes me as unfair and as the most profound kind of lie imaginable, approaching the Platonic form of falsehood. The only reasonable response is to distrust every screen–no grain of salt is big enough. We cannot remain innocent in an age where everybody knows advertisers have hitherto unprecedented information about us, and they exist only to find new invasive ways to flatter us (“you’re so charitable and good”) or threaten us (“you’re not charitable or sexy enough”).  

And so, anybody who makes money by selling us something cannot be an impartial status bestower.  Measure your status on your own terms, or by the intimate people in your life who don’t benefit from praising or criticizing you. The people who think buying a product has any bearing on their status or character whatsoever is under a delusion not very different than the hypnotized man who makes love to a chair.

Imbecilic atheists

23 Monday Apr 2012

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My last article wherein I put forward some thoughts on my atheism shouldn’t suggest that I feel solidarity with atheists everywhere. Like anybody, atheists are not immune from stupidity and boorish behaviour.

Today’s National Post reports the story of Ashu Solo, a member of Saskatoon’s cultural diversity and race relations committee. Solo was at a dinner appreciating volunteers like himself when a city councillor made him feel “like a second class citizen,” and “excluded.” The councillor’s offence? Saying a prayer which included “jesus” and the word “amen.” Solo says municipal officers should not use their offices to “perform religious bigotry” or to “impose their beliefs on others.”

Solo is a fortunate moron. Fortunate because, in another era, Spanish inquisitors made atheists actually feel like second-class citizens. The torture Solo suffered, hearing gracious appreciation before a meal he was to eat for free, was infinitely milder than crucifixion. He is a moron for believing multiculturalism to be simply everyone behaving like him. When someone’s religious freedom is infringed (and they’re not seeking the religious freedom to kill infidels), it’s no longer a multicultural world. Multiculturalism is a careful balancing of diverse beliefs, not a wholesale expunging of them. Does this really need to be said?

I don’t pray because I am an atheist, but praying is not illegal; we are guaranteed freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Solo is the one in breach here, and he owes an apology. I couldn’t care less that he’s an atheist and so am I: for a member of a city’s cultural diversity and race relations committee to be in such an ugly breach of a basic human right is inexcusable. When idiots undertake noble endeavours, and human rights and cultural diversity people are frequently noble idiots, the results are ugly. The term “religious bigotry” loses all meaning when it’s associated with such irreproachable behaviour.

Solo is awaiting an apology from the Mayor and a promise there won’t be any more prayers at city events, or else he will go to the Human Rights Commission. Used this way, as it normally is, the HRC is just a tool for self-righteous fascists to impose their narrow mind on others. Freedom of religion is rightly one of the cornerstones of Western law. Solo has no case.

Randy Donauer, the alleged religious bigot, says he was surprised when Solo felt excluded, and never meant him any harm. His surprise is understandable. After all, Donauer never imposed his religion on Solo, he just imposed a prayer on some food. It’s a shame that the blameless Donauer will have his reputation besmirched. Being accused of a human rights transgression, even if wholly innocent, never does any good.

I hope his career as a councillor isn’t adversely affected by Solo in any way. Even though it would be understandable, I hope Donauer doesn’t bend before the HRC and issue an apology. He has nothing to apologize for. For being offended without cause, for airing his baseless grievances and threats so publicly, and for putting what seems like a good man through unnecessary hoops, I hope Solo comes out of this looking like the boor he is.

I hope we Canadians arrive at a collective understanding of multiculturalism  more sophisticated than this. Imbeciles should think twice, or at least once, before issuing threats and serious accusations, and it’s a shame there’s a climate that so freely encourages overly sensitive people to vent before the country whenever their feelings are hurt, however ridiculous their feelings are. To be sure, this is a better problem than having actual human rights abuses, obviously, and recourse for an actual abuse is a wonderful thing. But absurd spectacles like this deserve scorn and condemnation nonetheless.

There are tickets issued for pulling fire alarms without cause. In Solo’s case, an apology and an admission that he is a stupid boor would suffice.

Science and religion: less than BFF

19 Thursday Apr 2012

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Science and religion are wholly and utterly incompatible. Today, the religious ingratiate themselves with science at every opportunity as, quite rightly, they know they’ll look like quacks if they are seen denying basic science the way they used to. Deprived of their historical freedom to be pontificating tyrants disseminating ignorance, many have become yogis bending over backward to give science a reach-around. Scientists, on the other hand, are disproportionately atheists or some form of skeptics. This is not a moot point. It’s very telling.

To be clear, I’m talking about “religion” as taking literally any so-called holy book, though it’s even more dangerous to grant a book divine status while allowing that it’s only an open-ended metaphor to be decoded subjectively by some esoteric and arbitrary means that only certain people have access to. In effect, this both grants permission and emboldens people to do and believe whatever they want so long as it’s rooted in a religious text, even if it’s not actually in the text. It’s a shame that atheists can never be similarly licensed!

Actually it’s a shame people today are less acquainted with the bible than in past generations. I’ve read religious texts from Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and some christian, hebrew and islamic texts, but I haven’t learned or memorized any the way even illiterate people once commonly did. People used to take knowledge of the bible for granted. There’s a lot to be said for having a common source for stories, parables, and morals, and the bible still informs our collective psyche in profound and surprising ways. I would never say a text is without value because its subject is religion, but it must be understood that all so-called holy books were written by humans and have no more divine authority than this article.

For a while, the relationship between religion and science was strained because every time a scientist made a proposal the church didn’t like he’d find himself affixed to a burning cross. Thankfully, people today who objectively study our planet no longer suffer the indignity of being called witches or heathens. The new term is scientist, and they are respected members of the community. In an encouraging sign of progress, we no longer threaten these people with death, no matter how much they might contradict a decaying roll of papyrus.

The amount of ground ceded to the secular can be gauged by comparing how the literal and dogmatic interpretations of the past are giving way to loose metaphor, or are graciously revised all together. Unthinkable in another age, pope benedict formally absolved all jews from deicide, as christ-killers, though he stopped short of thanking jews for producing jesus in the first place. Still, many current editions of religions look unrecognizable to their former selves. The concessions are encouraging. The religious used to sacrifice lambs to god, now they sacrifice their own traditions to appear relevant.

Yet there are people who actually think that the radically different accounts of the universe’s origin put forward by religion and science can both be believed at once. In the beginning god created the heaven and the earth. Presumably somewhere in Genesis some see evidence for both the Big Bang and String Theory. To believe this, you’d have to believe that for centuries the bible yielded no knowledge of the Big Bang or String Theory to any religious scholar…until scientists did their work. Coincidence? Miracle? No, but think: if a scientist is required to gain an insight into the bible that eluded religious scholars for centuries, isn’t the scientist a better religious scholar than the religious scholar?

Like religious books, religious scholars have their uses. Many are seriously intelligent, bookish people (how could they not be? Their only job is to read books and talk), but they are not infallible, and they have no more authority on “why” we live than anyone else. “Why are we here?” assumes something or someone had plans for us, and anyway it’s a ridiculous question. I make my own plans. That life requires something mystical is totally bogus. The only reasonable thing to do here is love. Simple! I love art, bagels, chess, hockey, whiskey, and sometimes even people. Can anybody ask for more in life than love? Yes: greedy and self-entitled without limit, those for whom love is not enough want an after-life too…presumably surrounded by people like them.

Religion is often diametrically opposed to itself, and only a non-religious perspective explains how this can be. Perhaps the most flagrant example is the appalling wealth accumulated in the vatican, the spiritual centre of a religion that professes to exalt the poor. By christian logic the vatican makes no sense. But evolutionary psychology explains how humans are subconsciously magnetized by great shows of status, and the vatican is nothing if not that. They could sell a Michelangelo and feed a starving country, but they don’t. But nobody’s all bad. In fairness, the vatican, the embodiment of christian charity, exhibits their art to students under 27 at a reduced rate of eight Euros, down from fifteen.

It astounds me that this religion, or any other, still poses and is taken seriously as a moral authority. The vatican’s exorbitant wealth is a scandal that cannot be exaggerated, and sadly the scandal isn’t diminished by the considerable, yet insufficient, attention it receives. If this were the church’s only scandal it would be enough, but it certainly is not: the only thing worse than a child rapist is a child rapist who believes he is spreading god’s word. If there is a bigger, viler act of hypocrisy in the world, I’d like for someone to please write it in the comment section below. (Candidate: senator fans who call Hagelin’s hit on alfredsson dirty after applauding the gruesome hit from behind on Tucker in game 5, 2002).

Jesus of the bible would sooner visit dark alleyways behind disreputable establishments where crackheads incessantly scratch their face and speak in tongues rather than visit the vatican. Jesus, who healed lepers in st. mark 1:40-45, would feel repulsed by the pope’s impossibly lavish surroundings and custom Prada shoes. Jesus would turn the crack into manna. Anyway, what would a miracle provide for the pope that he doesn’t have already? He lacks nothing. This comparison isn’t just an easy or vulgar calculation to offend people. It’s the truth that’s offensive, not the comparison.

But science and religion do have a relationship: science is religion’s battered housewife only recently emancipated. For years, religion would come home drunk after a bad day and beat science to a pulp. Now more sober and realising it is losing its dominant grip, religion has bought a dozen pretty roses for science and sits on one knee, begging forgiveness. I know I slapped and imprisoned and burned you for centuries, but let that be behind us now. I love you. Let’s be together. I can change! But science is moving on. Unlike religion, science doesn’t have an embedded fetish for redemption. It values truth only. But religion is a persistent stalker, trying to appear credible by associating with science. Science needs a restraining order.

To be sure, I wish more people were inspired by books, the bible or otherwise. Let’s be clear about exactly who I hold in contempt: it’s not people who quietly derive inspiration and tradition and feel a more complete human being by living in accordance with religious teaching. I have admiration for those who live good quiet happy moral lives, and such a thing is so rare that it would be cruel of me to remove its source. I only have a problem the moment my opinions are devalued because they aren’t supported by an alleged divinity. I might be misguided, but my opinions are just as sanctioned by god as anyone else’s. I am tired of my world view being disqualified by the bogus remnants of Mesopotamia.

In a recent discussion, I put forward that the whole fight over whether Francis Bacon or Shakespeare wrote all the plays is totally inconsequential; authorship doesn’t matter, a play by any other name would smell as sweet. I’ll add here that the only exception to this rule is when the author in dispute is god. Whoever they were, the author of every religious text was definitely one thing.
A man.

Honest profane comedy, James Joyce, and jerking off

04 Wednesday Apr 2012

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As mainstream discussions in print, blogs and on TV panels increasingly feature a class of people unfit to talk and write, I felt not just pleasure but sincere relief after seeing live comedy for my first time. It was local amateurs performing in the basement of a seedy little bar last week, and though I expected the comedians to be worse than TV professionals they were upliftingly smart and engaging. After each of the first three acts talked about masturbating, it dawned on me: comedians are honest. I realised that while a certain amount of blunt exaggeration is built into the delivery, comedy must contain a resounding truth. If the audience feels they are being lied to, they will not laugh. Laughter doesn’t just signal empty amusement, laughter signals that a truth is resonating. Nobody nails personal truths like comedians.

Profane comedians are not simply vulgar boors saying inappropriate things to get an easy laugh from other vulgar boors. To be sure, stupid easy jokes infect this artistic genre, as no genre is immune from trash, but don’t let parlour manners prevent you from seeing that unrefined language is necessary to describe unrefined truths about our species. Yet because they’re regarded as “only” comedians, their insights aren’t taken seriously. Nonsense!

If you think the subject of masturbation is only the province of Jay & Silent Bob (who I love, by the way) and other juveniles, think again. In the 2004 Vanity Fair article “Joyce in Bloom,” Christopher Hitchens recalls some heavyweight writers focused on masturbating: Mark Twain in, “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”; in Money, Martin Amis reminds us that masturbation is thankfully economical (“overheads are generally low”); naturally, there is Philip Roth’s obsessively meditative Portnoy (“I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off!”). But Hitchens calls Ulysses the ultimate “mastur” piece because Joyce’s libidinous novel weighs in on sex and jerking off with unprecedented length, style and complexity. Included too, for good measure, are pissing, shitting, burping, farting, eating—anything bodily. This is fused with the minutiae of a single day’s happenings in Dublin 1904 as an alternative epic vision to the various falsely-enlarged ones entrenched in us by national jingoism, religion, and other myths.

Zach Bowen says in Ulysses as a Comic Novel, “The reader is left with the paradoxical impression that the every man in each of us is vital and unique, that the trivial aspects are in fact more rationally and meaningfully heroic than the rantings of tragic heroes caught in their own self-inflicted moral dilemmas.” Hitchens echoes this, “For all its soaring, Ulysses repeatedly comes back to earth in the earthiest sense, and reminds us that natural functions and decay and frustration are part of the common lot.” This is the mark of a serious writer who cannot be dismissed as a juvenile vulgarian, yet Joyce’s territory overlaps immensely with the comedian performing in the seedy basements of downtown bars.

We tend to take too seriously any so-called highbrow author we don’t know and attribute to them an air of solemnity that doesn’t fit them at all. Hitchens recalls Joyce’s well-known quip: after a stranger in a café in Zurich seized him by the mitt and asked, “May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?” Joyce responded, “No—it did a lot of other things too.” Hitchens saw this as evidence of Joyce’s personal pride in the department of masturbating. Perhaps people expect men in togas and long white beards to descend from the mountains and issue grand profundities about life. More likely these days, people prefer neatly packaged pseudo-mystical truths written on the lining of their yoga bags. But there can be no fundamental truths about the human condition that ignore the fact that we have human minds and human bodies, and all the low, sordid things that entails. Like Joyce, comedians nail this.

So, humourless people who think being grotesque automatically makes you ineligible as a serious thinker have it exactly backwards: we can’t talk about our species honestly if we exclude the bodies’ various functions and impulses—our prime motivator. The refusal to stare our human condition in the face leads either to the abhorrent repression of sex found in various cults and basically every religion, or to agonizingly naive formulations like “racism is bad” or “world peace is good.” Good comedians ignore these hollow clichés and address more complex, less-immediately uplifting formulations like, “our hidden, subconscious motives are coarse, irrational and fundamentally absurd.” Unlike banal pundits who risk nothing and say only what their audience expects, comedians are refreshing because they are disproportionately atheists, cynical, irreverent, and incredulous. Louis CK isn’t just hilarious, he’s a courageous and relentless thinker who confronts the uncomfortable aspects of family, work, life and sex head on. I’d way rather hear his perspectives on life than those of pious strivers or media “experts,” usually self-proclaimed or endorsed by Oprah. I think Joyce would agree. It’s no coincidence that comedians have always been some of the most forward-thinking, hate-free people out there. Rather, they don’t hate people for their race or gender but, quite appropriately, for generally being stupid and barbaric.

It’s a shame that Joyce, the certified genius, is needed here to show that humour and frank examination of our bodies is a required element of being a serious thinker. Dismissing the honest observations of profane comedians for being obscene is no better than banning Joyce’s work, which was indeed internationally banned until it was internationally hailed as a first-rank masterpiece. Calling a comedian merely “funny” is a backhanded compliment. Any stand-up act is only funny if it’s truthful. So any time a comic or satirist, anonymous or famous, makes a keen observation we all recognize about our irrational impulses and bodily functions that everyone is afraid to say in public, don’t just call them funny. Be grateful for their honesty and call them a hero.

Also, as a rule, ignore anyone who tries to sound profound when talking about the human race if they’re incapable of discussing jerking off.