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Miley Don't Matter

I feel that, in all of the hubbub and fooferaw surrounding this latest bit of acting out to create album sales by Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke the general public - or at least, the vocally offended public - may have missed something crucial about this whole thing.

It doesn't matter. Fuck all. It's a less-than-zero occurrence. There is nothing in this that matters even a little. A fart is more urgent.

I know we as people want to react - it's exciting, aerobic, and it gives us something to do - but often, we ought not. Quiet, internalized reaction is undervalued. For me, at least, I'm not entirely certain what it is we're meant to be reacting to, and I think when the "news" channels have Thicke's mom on, they might be confused, too. I mean, let's break this down:

This happened on MTV. MTV hasn't been relevant in a dog's age, and so it schedules stuff like this to happen once a decade or so that you will remember that they exist. The Madonna/Britney thing? Same deal. Further, it happened on an awards show. Short of the jobs they provide for the people who work on them, awards shows could not be less important. They don't matter even a little. If your enjoyment of a thing is affected by whether or not it wins an award, then you are shrunken on the inside like a dessicated amphibian, and stink of the need for validation and approval. I piss on your shoes. It was terrible, from Miley's drunken, new-born foal stumble from the bowels of the Cyclops bear to the twerkish gyrations - I've seen better Super Bowl halftime shows, and I'm ALWAYS just waiting for those to be over.

Maybe it's that you're scandalized by the age dynamic (which I'm not even going to cover), or maybe it's seeing Miley's ass. Nah, that can't be it. We've all seen Miley's ass. Miley's ass has been on parade since before it was legal, so that's old fucking news. Additionally, if you have gotten this far in life without seeing a 20-year-old woman's whole ass displayed like fresh fish, then you are not an American. Maybe you're icked out by Miley's parade of unusual simulated sexuality, like rimming & furries. True - the way she presented those things was icky, but get over yourself and read an article once in a while. It's apparent to me that somebody watched a bunch of porn and designed this sophomoric tribute to titillation - just be glad she didn't 2 Girls/1 Cup us with this.

Maybe it's Miley's tongue, but I think that we can safely assume that Miley has no sweat glands, and that this is how she cools off during a performance. This wouldn't be too much of a stretch - her dad is Billy Ray.

The second wave (I'm at least ninth wave, for those keeping score) of reaction seems to consist of those digging for deeper meaning - racism arguments, slut shaming arguments, double-standard discussions, sexuality on display, not copying her example, and so on. This wouldn't be a bad idea, except that it is. If you're still wondering if Miley's a backward-ass and probably mildly racist country fuck like her old man, then you missed the boat a while back. You can't even see the sail of the boat. It's not enough for you that this performance objectifies people, we have to talk about which ones specifically. Pretending to be shocked by this now demeans us all; just admit that you wrote the article in your diary or as part of a thesis last year and just waited for her (or really anyone) to fuck up so you could use it.

As far as the slut-shaming and double-standard stuff goes: Let me know if that works for you. Let me know what great change in those things you extract from this important goddamn MTV fake-ass moment, with MILEY CYRUS as your galvanic point. Your opportunism hurts my teeth; I understand the impulse to leap into any fray with such important ideas, but this is a severe miscalculation. Finally, if you're trying to get your daughters not to behave like this, showing them this, ALLOWING them to be aware of this, is a terrible idea - look how much apparent power Miley fucking Cyrus has right now. Terrible timing. Just awful.

We can talk about Robin, I guess, but if you think his song's anything but a frat-boy-level contribution to rape culture, then parts of your brain have gone AWOL, possibly due to MTV, bad songs, and ridiculous public discussions. The thing we're really avoiding here (although it doesn't much matter either) is how much this music sucks. It sucks. It's suck music, it's the musical equivalent of the filling in Oreos - cloyingly sugary, terrible for you, kind of unfulfilling on its own, and nothing to chew on. This music is not even interestingly bad - like, say, the Wesley Willis back catalog - it's just boring. It does not live up to the hype, or even rise to the status of ear worm. At best, it's an ear Wet Willy, surprise, it's in your ear, then you're pissed and looking to get it out. The Thicke song is so boring I didn't even finish the video with naked women in it. I suspect they're in there because Robin knows this will end up as strip club music.

If you people had let this go early on, it could have faded away. Now it's too late. It's among us like venereal disease, and the only way to keep it away is protection or abstention. I'm going to choose to abstain from Miley. And Robin. There's a new Goodie Mob album out, after all.

The Persistence of Living

How did you convince yourself that you weren't going to die?

You mean like, today. Eventually, sure, acknowledged, but if you really thought you were going to pop off today, you'd not do the fucking dishes or go to work, would you? So you're talking about how I keep going without being ground into powder by the weight of my eventual death.

I know for most people, it's that they simply don't think about it, or they convince themselves of some kind of continuance beyond death, and that's how they go on. Often, they go on and on.

"Not thinking about something" has always been the same thing as thinking about it for me, and I've never had the faith required to embrace an afterlife, so I had to employ other tools. Like most people, death would jump up and remind me it existed every so often; older people pretty much exclusively when I was younger, then people closer to my age once I hit my teens. The two patterns converged in my 20s, when older people and younger people would die around the same rate. You realize you have a tie you only wear to funerals. Anyway, so you can't just forget - it won't let you.

Basically, it kept not happening. I kept waking up and moving around and doing stuff and not dying. A couple of times I probably should've, and maybe even came close. Stupid stuff involving speed and heights and violence, though rarely all three simultaneously. Mostly, though, it is just the persistence of living - especially when you live through really terrible stuff and you think, "Okay. I survived that, so I should be good to go for a while, yeah?" Conversely, living through cool stuff, the good stuff, makes you glad you lived this long. Love is also tremendously life-affirming. When you share love with someone, you need to be around to love them, and their love buoys you along. A child's love is especially pure for this purpose. I didn't have them so they'd love me, but that is a pretty good perk.

You knew all of this, there's nothing new here; did I even answer the question?

Debate Two

This one was more fun.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, please refer to the previous entry.

In this one, our assignment was to show up and defend "authoritarian capitalism" (essentially, Hamiltonian economics and market systems combined with Gilded Age thinking) against a team who, when handed the ideology of "social democracy" went for a kind of Socialist Democratic Utopia that they elucidated pretty well except around some of the smaller nuts and bolts. My guys took the approach of straight up Gilded Age "God Wants You to Be Rich" thinkers - essentially, Carnegie defending his empire. Needless to say, we got hammered - I was shocked by the one vote we garnered out of five - and only in part because of our indefensible ideology; we also had a drama queen on staff who may have over buzzworded "communism" & "drinking" a little bit. Anyway, here was the fleshed out bit I got to use:

"Society, morality and spirituality exhort us all to be charitable. Within the limits of what we can achieve, we are meant to give, not only of ourselves, but of our monetary and material wealth. Individuals put money in the church collection baskets, into the buckets of bell-ringers, and donate their old things to the Goodwills and the Salvation Armies in the hopes that some person with less than they have will benefit from their act of charity. Hope is a big part of this process.

Charity, performed on large, impactful scales is called philanthropy. Philanthropy literally means a “love of humanity.” In the old Greek sense, it implies loyalty and a looking after something, Being a caretaker. Virtue is required to love something in this way. Philanthropy, then, is a virtuous love of humanity, expressed as a contribution to its overall well-being within society.

Average people are not capable of virtuous action on this level. While they may ache to give to their fellows – and even follow through in a limited way, as in the above examples – they simply lack the capacity to contribute large sums of money and resources to society, instead giving where they can and making little to no observable difference. A wealthy person, someone with adequate resources for dealing with a problem, is [by contrast] capable of contributing massive funds (on a level not even conceivable by the average man) toward a solution to a problem, a remedy for an ill, or simply an improvement to society at large. The average man cannot establish a foundation that funds public radio and television or efforts toward international peace like the various Carnegie endowments. Wealthy people engaging in philanthropic acts of this kind create an incontestable benefit for everyone – and in a tangible way that widespread distribution of that same resource in the hands of many would not. Not only does the proliferate giving by the less wealthy have less impact, it can also create harmful waste and deluded ideas about what works and what doesn't.

Peter Buffet, the son of Warren Buffet, made an argument relating to this phenomenon back in July for an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, in which he referred to the widespread small-change giving practiced by people with limited resources combined with the bloated state of the non-profit industry as a form of “conscience-laundering.” In effect, it allows the disparate charitable giving to spread without doing much good, while simultaneously allowing people to go on with their lives believing that they have done a great good. Picture a yard littered with trash which is then dusted by a newfallen snow. It's pretty & conceals the trash – but only for a while.

Philanthropy can make an impact like an avalanche, whisking away a great ill in an unstoppable torrent, or like the massive snowball that picks up speed and size as it rolls downhill – the size of the movement, and the way in which it is centralized make all the difference. That said, if you're someone who claims to truly care about our society and improvement of the world we see around us, you have to support great wealth in the hands a few very virtuous men as a concept we can all get behind. For the greater good of mankind, economic power must rest in the hands of those who will grasp and wield it to make a real difference."

And the great crazy speech I never shared because the opportunity eluded me:

"Adam Smith famously spoke of an “Unseen Hand” that invisibly regulates the economy as though by a natural process; We would argue that the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the few is the result of God helping those who help themselves, the result of an intervention by a “Divine Hand,” if you will. Andrew Carnegie wrote that society would be best benefited by the application of wealth not by governments or inheritance or bequests, but by the wealthy men who had the acumen and wherewithal to garner great wealth in the first place.

For them to achieve in this way, they have to have applied their gifts from God diligently and virtuously, or surely God would not have allowed them to succeed. In reality, he has placed the biggest challenges before the rich man: Jesus told of the likelihood of the camel making it through the eye of the needle being greater than the rich man making it into Heaven; unless you believe that God wants to exclude all rich men from Heaven, then you must believe that that He [the Almighty God] puts no challenges before us that we cannot handle, and thus what Christ means is that the rich man must work harder, has a rougher time of it, must contribute more, must carry the burden of the poor upon his back and truly be a boon and blessing to society as a whole if he seeks to enter the perfect and holy kingdom of God.

The Bible also says that “the love of money is the root of all evil,” and assuredly, that's true, but the wealthy man does not love his money, he merely loves what it can do for mankind. God has placed the wealth in the hands of the very few for the same reason that He does not grow tropical fruit in any place except the tropics; he knows that it will only flourish when cared for properly by men of skill and virtue."

Debate One

In this American Political Thought class I'm taking, we're scheduled to have four debates in five weeks - two of them are this week, though. I had to take part in two of them, and I thought I'd post my initial arguments here with the caveat that a lot got added to these when they actually got presented.

My first assignment (last Monday) was to argue on a team and with a team for the preservation of the Union against Northern abolitionists who wanted to secede in an act of protest. For some reason, the opposition (who lost to us by unanimous vote) thought that we would show up and argue from the perspective of the Southern states. They thought we would defend slavery, not only Biblically, but as a viable economic institution. They were caught a little flat-footed, and we degenerated into some yelling relatively quickly. Here's how we opened:

"Much has been made of how terrible is the institution of slavery here today. We are agreed. Slavery is terrible, and represents a blight on the human condition. We have the utmost respect for Mssrs. Douglass and Garrison, and above all, the Bible of the Lord our God, twisted as it has been to justify this deplorable practice. It has been said that the tragedy of slavery in the Southern states – the ongoing exploitation of the people we choose to call 'slaves,' which is a mockery of tradition and which is often unfairly justified by those with property for economic reasons (which is to say, reasons that support their economics) – is reason enough for the Northern, non-slave holding states to secede from these United States, creating at least one nation with true freedom.

Which would also serve to create another nation where slaves will continue to be owned and held by their masters, and there would be no checks on their behavior. This nation would be next door, and we would have no authority over them.

If this action, this secession of Northern states, is being suggested as a form of protest against this terrible form of human misery then let me contend that it would constitute an abject failure. Protest's primary goal is meant as a bulwark against injustice. This act would be the polar opposite of standing up for justice – it would be the North running away. Simply put, this secession would constitute running away from an injustice, a disassociation with slavery, a condition that which we can no longer stomach. The act itself – secession – embodies selfishness and cowardice, and is not appropriate for a civilized nation of people. Indeed, it dooms the victims of this practice, the slaves themselves, to eternal forced servitude and outright ownership of their persons by others.

But if the secession's primary objective is to end the practice of slavery in the South? Surely we have more influence over our sister states as they stand right now; just past the Mason-Dixon line, than we would over a sovereign nation – a Confederacy of slaveholding states, if you will – which lies beyond that same border? For example, in whose opinion of your garden do you place more stock – your neighbor's, or a foreigner from another land? Should we not bring the collective resources and influence of a United States to bear upon this problem rather than step away from it and simply hope by that act it will cease?

Additionally, since we cannot physically separate from the South – this secession has no geographic consequences – we will surely also create a buffer area unfit for people, a region fraught with tension, if not outright violence. My colleague who shares my first name is going to expand on that for you. This would potentially add to the human misery in total, rather than reducing that condition; if that is your intention in secession – the increase of misery – then go ahead and secede.

Finally, if we cannot solve this problem within our borders without secession, we risk two other potentialities; one is the continued fracturing of the Union; once the North leaves the South, what stops the North from breaking up even further over internal strife? Or the South doing likewise? While this would create a number of diverse nation states true to the identities of those communities, it would erode our national character entirely. If that should occur, what kind of message to we send to the world, and into history, when the globe's only functional democracy by consent breaks in two rather than solve a problem that belongs not only to us, but to humanity? Do we not have a responsibility to solve this problem together and create a beacon by our example, like the kind imagined by our Puritan forebears, for the world to follow?"

As I said, they tried, but they came armed with a quiverful of arrows to shoot at smoke. But wait, in my next debate, I suffer justifiable defeat! Stay tuned.