The Soldier

poetry

IF I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

— Rupert Brooke

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Skin in the Game

expertise

In light of the election result I’m amazed by the intelligentsia’s profound tone deafness in the run up to what has just occurred. As I’ve said umpteen times before (deploying surfing analogy), they superficially look at the swell and not the undercurrents. One can’t help feeling a little schadenfreude (I made a few bob at the bookies, my bets placed some 6 weeks ago). Had they taken the time to dig deeper and by-pass the traditional complicitous media gatekeepers and their own smug echo chambers, the outcome could have been otherwise. I again refer people to Taleb’s post of March this year and Eric Weinstein’s graphic below.

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Speaking of rent-seekers, it is worth reposting Eric Weinstein’s equally acute analysis of the now new reality, called by him in August. Who is Eric Weinstein I hear these a priori rationalistic phonies say?

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Walker Percy Wednesday 109

walker percy

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Don’t forget Frank Macon, old hunting pal, once a complex old-style sardonic black man, as compact of friendship and ironies as Prince Hamlet, as faithful and abusive as a Russian peasant. Now as distant and ironed out as a bank teller: Have a nice day.

*****

We inmates, or rather detainees—assorted con men, politicians, ex-Presidential aides, white-collar crooks, impaired physicians pushing pills, mercy killers, EPA inspectors on the take from lumber and oil barons—criminals all, but on the whole engaging and nonmurderous. And next door, Hope Haven, a community of impaired priests, burned-out ministers and rabbis, none criminal, none detained, but all depressed, nutty, or alcoholic, generally all three, who had not run afoul of the law as we had but had just conked out, and so had great sympathy for us and made themselves available.

*****

This pair and I were sitting in the prison library one afternoon, the Birmingham dentist reading Stars and Bars, a new New Right magazine published at Fort Sumter, South Carolina; the New York lawyer reading The New York Review of Books. I was reading a new history of the Battle of the Somme, a battle which, with the concurrent Battle of Verdun, seemed to me to be events marking the beginning of a new age, an age not yet named. In the course of these two battles, two million young men were killed toward no discernible end. As Dr. Freud might have said, the age of thanatos had begun.
These two fellows had argued violently at table about racism in the South and the crypto-communism of Northern liberals.

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Two super interesting brews

beer

Being a chili head (and brew head) it was a no-brainer for me when I had to try the Jalapeño Ale at the lovingly repurposed Steam Plant (see photo). My initial scepticism was assuaged by the nose which really had the smell of the pepper and on drinking, it wasn’t at all the bland half-heartedness of some beer infusions. Even got some to go. Another super but more complex brew was Punk Kid Pumpkin Ale at the also lovingly (albeit on a much smaller scale) restored Iron Goat building. This brew had a fabulous finish which I think comes from the bourbon casks they use. Contrary to their website, the ABV was 8.2. Bravo Spokane on all fronts (plus the food and booze at the Ruins) — Vancouver BC and Calgary have so much to learn from you guys.

Walker Percy Wednesday 108

walker percy

percycovercroppea

What’s going on? What do they have in common? Are they better or worse? Well, better in the sense that they do not have the old symptoms, as we shrinks called them, the ancient anxiety, guilt, obsessions, rage repressed, sex suppressed. Happy is better than unhappy, right? But—But what? They’re somehow—diminished. Diminished how?

*****

Then there’s the loss of something. What? A certain sort of self-awareness? the old ache of self? Ella doesn’t even bother to look at her own photograph, doesn’t care.
Bad or good?
For another thing, a certain curious disinterest. Example: Take the current news item: Soviets invited to occupy Baluchistan, their client state in southern Iran to restore order, reported advancing on Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf. What to do? Let them have it? Confront them? Ultimatum? Two years ago people would be huddled around the tube listening to Rather and Brokaw. My patients? My acquaintances? No arguments, no fright, no rage, no cursing the Communists, no blaming the networks, no interest. Enrique doesn’t mention liberals anymore. Debbie does not revile Jerry Falwell anymore.

*****

There’s a sameness here, a flatness of affect. There was more excitement in prison, more argument, more clash of ideology. In Alabama we were polarized every which way, into pro-nukes and anti-nukes, liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, anti-Communists and anti-anti-Communists, born-again Christians, old-style relaxed Catholics, lapsed Catholics, Barbara Walters haters, Barbara Walters lovers.
Nothing like Alabama!
The warfare in that quonset hut at Fort Pelham!
We inmates, or rather detainees—assorted con men, politicians, ex-Presidential aides, white-collar crooks, impaired physicians pushing pills, mercy killers, EPA inspectors on the take from lumber and oil barons—criminals all, but on the whole engaging and nonmurderous. And next door, Hope Haven, a community of impaired priests, burned-out ministers and rabbis, none criminal, none detained, but all depressed, nutty, or alcoholic, generally all three, who had not run afoul of the law as we had but had just conked out, and so had great sympathy for us and made themselves available. One of them, my old pal and exparish priest, Rinaldo, Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, sojourned next door to me on the Alabama Gulf Coast for a year to recover from his solitary drinking. (I must call him. Has he gone nuts again?)
At Fort Pelham we had discussion groups, seminars, screaming political arguments over meals, fistfights. In prison, ideas are worth fighting for. One also gets paranoid. There is a tendency to suspect that So-and-so has it in for you, to read hostile meanings into the most casual glance.

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Identity Politics or Marx vs. Mill

Jonathan Haidt

Here are two of the more sober, clear and nuanced analyses of the current socio-cultural-political shit-storm. The first from one of the few on the Left still retaining some semblance of neuronal activity — Jonathan Rutherford (Ben Cobley is also a very thoughtful and honest commentator). The only thing I take issue with is that progressive politics is NOT liberal — on the contrary, the sine qua non of progressivism is akin to a glacier relentlessly and ever trivially flattening the social landscape or the “crooked timber of humanity”. The second supporting piece (again referencing Haidt) summarizes the duality of the current university — activism or truth. It is quite amazing that so many who spout reheated marxism have never read Marx nor indeed marxist commentators such as Jerry Cohen or De St. Croix. I have always said, Marx was a profound diagnostician but things go dreadfully wrong in its application. On the practical side I’m with Mill because equality of outcomes notion is surely the most incoherent, impracticable and toxic of outlooks.

To reconnect with the country Labour has to recognise the limitations of its liberal progressive politics. It lacks the range of virtues to represent the depth and breadth of human experience. Progressive politics has become over-reliant on its abstract values that exist prior to people’s everyday experience and which it superimposes on their lives.

The political right has been making the running with its language of “our people” and its valuing of cultural inheritance. The liberal progressive left, with its deracination of culture and its rationalistic policy solutions for meaning of life issues, is shrinking into an electoral conclave.

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