War, what is it good for? Buying property for cheap on the Mediterranean aparently

Just how much are condos going for in Tripoli these days? Cheaper than they were a week or two ago, so if you are looking for beachfront property, Libya is looking like a good bet, Tripoli if you are cautious, but you can probably scoop up something on the real cheap in Banghazi right now, as long as you are willing to clean shrapnel and the remnants of white phosphorous bombs and carrier missiles. As much as I hate anything I write here to be the least bit relevant, this whole mini-war or stealing of someone else's toys does allow me to partially vindicate, or better elaborate the position I brought up in the posting on fair trade (I am wholly ok with talking about contemporary political things as long as it has to do with me and what I think and what I feel).

Probably because it was the most boring, or least funny, I got the most (a whole 2) comments about the role force and will plays in the concept of fair trade. One person, the best read and smartest I know (smart enough to know she could, if she wanted to, comprehend Finnegan's Wake. She's also read Being & Time, in Nazi I believe, and reads attic Greek) thought I was flirting with an odd sort of blend of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, which I found extremely odd for simple gender reasons alone. Rand is like the female Nietzsche, or, she is to girls what Friderich is to boys (I once quipped, as an undergrad to a female classmate who was quite taken with John Galt and who was named Dagny after Dagny Taggart that the reason her mother loved Atlas Shrugged so much was it was the first time she thought. The obvious implication, which little Dagny did not appreciate at all, was that it was the first time she thought as well. It was a sufficiently chauvinist comment to rid the table of her presence which was generally to the enjoyment of everyone else at said table. Quite surprisingly, I actually had the reputation of being something of an asshole as an undergraduate, which was probably generally true, though I was a jovial, Fallstaff-ish ass(hole) in my own defense. I once, for example, got a classmate to leave a table after just sitting down after she had attended some multi-hour meeting about saving Tibet by asking her if she, "saved Tibet yet." Obviously, a whole bunch must have been in my tone, which my wife has almost always told me is often off. The girl who was trying to save Tibet would spend hours and hours on the phone with some Tibetan monk named Lop-Sang or something like that, where he would tell her how much he liked and loved her. It was always my point of view that little Lop-Sang really did love her, carnally, she contended that he took vows of celibacy so he wouldn't even think like that, but my point was that there really isn't much to do in Tibet, and that being a monk is like a default career, like becoming a lawyer for whitepeople. She would then recount his deep abiding 'spirituality', whatever that means, and I would point out that it is really easy to be celibate and spiritual in Tibet where the women are all 4" tall and don't really take any sort of care of themselves, but it gets a little harder in America when you have all these very well-kempt, attractive liberal Jewish girls svitzing over your 'spirituality.' I just hope old Loppy picked up the western habit of wearing underwear under his robes). I don't really see much difference than Ayn Rand and Nietzsche, except that one of her books adds up to all of his, and he had better facial hair. The other reader, equally smart, seemed to think I mischaracterized Thrasymachus in the Republic, and over-attributed the role his interpretation of justice plays.


    Given that it has been a decade since I've read the Republic, and I was a stupid undergraduate reading too much Nietzsche when I did read it, the reader is probably correct, or, at the very least, the text is a little fresher in her mind as she is reading it now. That said, from my poor-ish memory, I do seem to recall that Thrasymachus is left un-answered by Socrates, and walks away seemingly annoying at all the sophistry/dialectic. He has an idea about justice, and even if he is willing to admit that sometimes the strong do not know what is good for them, any Socratic contention does not seem to be able to shake his basic idea. I connected Thrasymachus with the later challenge offered by the whole ring of Gyges problem, but even if they are not connected, Socrates answers neither of them. The entire dialogue seems to offer no reason to not act not good (awkward Socratic phrasing, I know), and seems to me to be more about the monstrosity of being made or compelled by the state to act good, or whatever that state says is the good. Nobody wants to live in that city of words.

    My point about Fair Trade was not that force rules, which everyone from the Greeks onward readily recognized, Nietzsche just stripped it of anything but will to power, but that the West engages in this odd act of self-binding by using force to bring about what it sees as justice, often at its own expense. It was the slavish self-constraint that interested me, the world's super-power trying itself up because it sees it as 'right', and because who else could?  So now, we have the same country that is forcing itself into fair-trade, or forcing itself and others into fair-trade, openly violating the sovereignty of another nation, waging warfare on it. Of course, some vague, unfounded idea of universal human rights (or universal dog rights, or universal tree rights) comes up, but lets get real, nobody follows the Geneva conventions for a reason; to the victors the spoils, or, as Curtis Le May put it when asked by a reporter if he thought he committed a war crime after firebombing Tokyo, burning a quarter of the city and killing over 100,000 civilians, "depends if we win the war or not."

When Aristotle talked about the law in his Politics, he said it was part force, part convention, and that within that convention, some portion of it was reason. He never qualified things because that would be boring, but the fact that the founding fathers found him too idealistic, and his regimes too weak should speak volumes about his formula of the law. So I don't know if it is Right (or right) to bomb whoever we want to bomb and make trade fair for whoever we want to make it fair for, but I know that we can and where there is a will, there is a way.

Werewolves Have to Stand in the Back of the Bus

In terms of modern, Promethean punishments, nothing seems worse than being forced to read the fantasies of a sad, dumpy looking Mormon housewife who really just wants to have a threesome with a werewolf and vampire. I do not know if the werewolves are supposed to be soccer players and the vampires football players, or vice versa, or maybe one of them stands in for the lacrosse players (do they have lacrosse in Mormonville?) but it is pretty obvious that each group represents some sort of sports team.

The other aspect of the Promethean punishment (in this case having crows peck your brain out every night instead of your liver) is being forced inside the mind of a teenage girl, or being forced inside the mind of a dumpy looking Mormon housewife fantasizing about herself as a teenage girl having a threesome with a shorn werewolf/captain of the soccer team and vampire/point guard of the basketball team. I teach teenagers all day, every day, and though their dasein is surprisingly difficult to comprehend, any rational adults would not for all the bodily punishments in the world have their mind forced back into teenage ontology.

One of the things I do find most interesting as a teacher is the desire for the demos to possess Nietzschean qualities like personality, charisma, and creativity the desire my students have to be a Kierkegaardean individual as opposed to a particular. The ideas (not theirs, of course) are deeply flawed, we all do not have personality in the Nietzschean sense, or charisma, and most of us certainly are not individuals as Kierkegaard saw it, but also profoundly amusing to see in action (Note: I am well aware how horridly obnoxious adding the suffix 'ean' to the last names of different philosophers and apologize for the pretention; that I have found a way to avoid saying 'Kafka-esque' is a miracle of sorts). Our regime functions as a sort of Hegelean wet-dream where everyone not only has the respect he thought was essential to our being, but thinks themselves an autonomous individual, wholly liberated from material, ethical, and metaphysical burdens, able to manifest and create their being on a daily basis. Personally, I think that is simply a lot of work, and gladly leave it to the ubermench and glow worms like Churchill, but having taught both spectacular and frightening pedestrian students, this idea about individuality is the glue that binds them together. With the spectacular, it really does create something, particular humans capable of becoming an individual, and all the freedom from the material, tradition, and custom have certainly created more of these individuals, even if they have less individuality than the individuals of earlier regimes, but in the pedestrian types, the woefully pedestrian types, it leads to extended conversations like this:
Me (in a conference with a student about how she can improve her writing): "Jessica, the biggest deficiency (she didn't know what this word meant) in your essay is you did not have enough textual evidence of analysis, if you had more of both, you would have done better."
Slug (slug is a much more fitting name for Jessica because she seems to be closer to a slug than a person. It seems to take effort for her to blink her eyes, and breathe (through her mouth, of course) and she walks as if she is Atlas with the weight of the world on her shoulders, or just the weight of her head, which must be filled with rocks  for reasons you will see): "What's that?" (in a nasally, absent-minded tone where the words come without thinking, not that thinking would have brought forth any other words)
Me: "What's what Slug, I don't understand your question."
Slug: "What you just said."
Me: "Well, I just said that you did not do as well on the essay because you are missing both textual evidence, and, more importantly, analysis."
Slug: "What's analysis?"
Me: "What do you mean what's analysis? I mean like (I use the word like a good deal with my students. They seem to understand similes much better than anything else) analytical statements where you made deductions (take a guess asto whether she knows what a deduction is) about the text based on textual evidence."
Slug: "I don't understand."
Me: "You don't understand what Slug, what a deduction is or what textual evidence is?"
Slug: "Yea."
Me: "Yes to the first, or yes to the second."
Slug: I don't know, both."
Me: "Ok, well, here (handing her the book we were reading). Find me a piece of evidence from the text."
Slug: "Like where (again, the deep comprehension of simile manifests itself)?"
Me: "Anywhere, flip to any page and find some textual evidence."
Slug: "Ok, here." (flipping to a random as I told her to, but holding the book open and towards me, like a gift of some kind)
Me: "Ok, good, now read it and find something concrete in it that is textual evidence." (I don't know if she knew what I meant when I said concrete, like she could have thought I meant concrete as in the construction material, but she seemed to be able to grasp my meaning from either context clues in the sentence, or from the fact that she was holding a book, and not something hard and can scrape your knees on should you fall on it, which she must have done quite a bit learning to walk)
Slug: "Ok, here, it says the weather was bad."
Me: "Ok, good slug, now that is textual evidence. Analysis would be talking about why the weather is bad, or, even better, what the significance of the bad weather is."
Slug: "Ok."
Me (at this point, I feel I have won my Pyrrhic victory, which is an apt description because this little dialogue does not really capture the extended, dramatic pauses in between everything Slug says (one would think she is contemplating the celestial bodies they are so long), and decide to end the conference): "So you need more of that in your next essay, then you will do better."

This conversation is in no way misrepresentative of Slug, and really represents her grappling with something of relative difficult for her; it was certainly more difficult than the conversation I had with her were she asked me how to 'do' vocabulary, like how to complete a sentence with a missing word, or find a synonym for a word, or how to write a sentence with a vocabulary word in it. Heidegger thinks all humans having (or are) being, so she must too, but I could not in any way tell you what this girl's being is. Our orthodoxy about individuality and personality seems to have done this girl no help, and I get the feeling that a little noblesse oblige and condescension would help her more than telling her she's an individual, capable of selecting her own values and 'lifestyle', though until we outsource the re-stocking jobs at CVS, I feel comfortable there is a place for her in this modern world of creative beings.

500 years of Swiss democracy =

A cuckoo clock.

I have watched Carol Reed's The Third Man too many times to count, and have owned it on every format it has come out on. First the old, non-Criterion dvd that I stole from my father, then the old Criterion re-mastery, next the newer Criterion re-remastery, and finally, the Criterion Blue-Ray edition of the film now that I have a Blue-Ray player to match the HDTV my mother kindly bought for my wife and I to counterbalance the washing machine and dryer she bought for my brother (my father, of course, lacks this sense of equal distribution, and will do things like call me to talk to me about how he is tired of his current camera body, and wants to give it to my younger brother, despite the fact that my brother already owns a different make of camera, and thus lacks the lenses to attach to said body. I myself actually do own lenses that would work with my father's camera body, but when I point out to him that I would not mind using his old camera body, he immediately retracted his desire to part with it). I have read this book on it published by the BFI, as well as this one. I have even bought the remastered soundtrack of the film off of iTunes, and, unfortunately for my wife, make her listen to it on drives to her parents house (nothing like a little zither music to get you hungry for Sunday brunch!) I like the film so excessively I even bent the curriculum of a Humanities class I used to teach to show it to my students, who, generally, also loved it.

The movie has been consistently ranked number one by the British Film Institute (ahead of the under-edited but beautifully shot Lawrence of Arabia, the practically perfect 39 Steps, and the elegant The Red Shoes), and really is shot-by-shot perfect, clocking in at 104 minutes, with possibly the best, lowest brow score to appear in film (Yojimbo's almost matches it, except it takes more than one dude sitting in a hotel room to play its score). Herbert Dreyfus who teaches the movie in his Existentialism in Literature & Film class at UC Berkley 'reads' the movie from a Kierkegaardian perspective (he even has this handy chart to explain the four man characters positions in relation to the ethical and the religious), but I think he slightly misses the point, both artistically and philosophically.

The composition of the film, its very creation, is one of happy circumstance. The best speech in the film, this one: <

was made up on the spot by Welles, and the famous ending, where Anna simply passes by Holly after we have had to wait two minutes for her to walk towards him was not in the script. Reed and Greene disputed whether the film (or film in general) had the weight to carry such an unhappy ending. Thankfully, Greene won out. Personally, I find the ending deeply satisfying, as Holly is the embodiment of simplistic morality, American cocksureness, is an artistic cad, and Anna has previously told him, in what has to be the best kiss-off a man has ever heard, that if he were to call her up, she would not be able to tell him if he were fair, dark, or if he had a mustache or not. The entire film has a really lark-y quality to it, from Greene randomly hearing from an OSS officer about the importance of the Viennese sewers during the war to Anton Karas happening to be playing the zither in a restaurant Greene was eating at one night. This quality gets at the Dionysian heart of the film, and posits the superiority and necessity of chaos in artistic creation, and the possibly of evil coming from it (as Heracleitus says, "war is father of all, king of all. Some it makes gods, some it makes men, some it makes slaves, some free") over the false, Apollonian order that attempts to rule the city after the war. Harry is clearly the most attractive character in the film, despite his betrayal of Anna, and her choice of him over Holly simply confirms, to both him and us, the Higher Immediacy of his actions. The movie is also clearly aware of itself, and plays with the boundaries of Noir, from the false burial to the femme fatale to the small dog that always betokens the evil of its owner. It constantly and willfully rubs up against these low-brow genre barriers, much like Pnin rubs up against the wishes of his narrator for him to act in certain ways.  It is almost self-aware (Holly wanted to name his next book 'The Third Man', and the western, thriller-esque quality to the movie which cut against its higher philosophic and aesthetic composition) but never breaks character, instead constantly fluctuating between documentary, thriller, noir, and western, much like The Wasteland fluctuates between its different voices. Godard might be more joyful, but he's also more showy.

The title of the film is a pull directly from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, and has to do with science's desire for technical superiority over the truth, thus differentiating from theoretical man's (Socrates') search for the truth.  It is utterly impossible to watch the film, to see Vienna, the heart of intellectual Europe, bombed out, and not read it as a philosophic argument against the Enlightenment and 2,500 years of rational thought. If rationalism, progress, and technical development lead us here, where does that leave us? At our worst (and our best) it leaves us with Harry Lime, a man who has been freed from all morality, and stands either godlike above men, counting how many dots he can stop moving for $20,000 each (tax free, of course) or travels below them in the sewers, subverting all attempts at a rational ordering of the city between the various powers. Those sewers are always there, and as earnestly as the post-war powers (all powers) attempt to carve out a sphere where reason and techne can rule, Harry will always be there to break free. It is no small thing that Harry almost makes it out, his fingers (Reed's actually) grasping through a sewer grate before he dies, and it is also no small thing that it is Holly that shoots him. Satan needs to be given another mouth in the cold Inferno with which to chew him. 

A small note about favorite movies: My wife's most brilliant psychology professor, while lecturing about Freud, needed a copy of the movie Backdraft and asked the class if anyone owned a copy he could use. One male student responded that owned the film, and added that it was his favorite. The professor then proceeded to question the student about the movie, why he liked it,  what he liked about it, and how many times he had seen it. When the student answered (too many to count as well), the professor said something like, "all those big hoses and sprays of water." You can imagine the shame the boy felt, being so unpacked in front of the whole class with so few words. Why you would call attention to yourself in front of a man with such penetrating psychological intelligence is beyond me, especially in reference to a movie like Backdraft (which really is a bunch of men with big, flesh colored hoses spraying fires with massive jets of white water) is beyond me, but obviously that boy's love of Backdraft reflected his need to assert his masculinity, having been brought up in an effeminated, pleasure seeking regime. What The Third Man reflects about me I suppose depends on your own analysis of the film. Here's the wonderful opening of the movie, with the unknown narrator (making the movie a frame story like James' Turn of the Screw) and the actual documentary footage of the war powers policing Vienna. Enjoy.