My Candidate for President

So, I have been researching Presidential candidates lately. It was a tough choice--I mean, come on, what with Clinton and Obama, McCain and Giuliani, sheesh, who can choose just one!

So I have chosen a compromise candidate. Perhaps you don't recognize him. That's OK, its not your fault, he's French. Nevertheless, apart from that one little problem, he seems to be the perfect admixture between what I'd want as a President--and what everyone else seems to want in one, namely:

What People Want
1--to be rich.
2--good looking (nice hair)
3--self-possessed ("confident")
4--seemingly competent (Levy is perhaps a bit too competent. I can just see his speech writers now, wearily chiseling down his famously voluminous, long-winded, magniloquent lectures/speeches to their bare bones--so as to become intelligible to an ever linguistically degenerating American public)
5--Presumptuous
6--Seemingly visionary

What I Want
1--to be so rich she/he has ceased to be at all motivated by profit.
2--actually competent and literate, so as to be a challenging mind to follow.
3--honest to the point of offense.
4--an idiosyncratic visionary that dreams her/his own dreams.
5--rational...that is, has the capacity to understand the impact of his decisions on the least of the humans under her/his leadership.

So I choose Bernard Henri-Levy because he fits both bills fully and precisely. We'll see--my hope is that Schwarzenegger will make a push to change the Constitutional prohibition on foreign born candidates for President, and that Levy will then jump on the band wagon, fight a blitzkrieg campaign, and take the field--with consultation help from Ralph Nader--as an independent. Yeah.

bhl for President! Vive la America! (my French is horrible!)

Good Marketing

If there were more advertisements like this in America, then I'd think about sticking around...

Heartburn

It's just after four in the morning and I am up with heartburn. When it gets this bad, sleep is simply not an option. Having heartburn in a locked jail cell in the middle of the night, with no prospect of getting relief until the morning, was perhaps the worst experience of my entire incarceration. It was complete torture. Gagging myself was the only option--but that was only a temporary cure that made the acid come back with a vengeance in the long run.

I am also up thinking about the woman who died yesterday in a car accident right outside my Church. I had just finished speaking before the entire congregation, when the all-too-familiar screeching of tires and crunching of metal came crashing through our ears. I rushed outside along with a cadre of other church-goers to see what had happened. She was hunched over the steering wheel with blood coming out of her mouth and ears.

Would we all be paralyzed by life if all of the suffering in the world happened right outside our Church windows? Is proximity the only thing that keeps us from feeling the true depth of human sorrow? Seeing is feeling. Not seeing, well...And we are excused if we do not see...and yet, what if we have missed the main part of the suffering in the world because we have in reality averted our eyes from it and erected walls against it?

And if we gag ourselves to find a moments respite from the pain...rather than find a real solution, then will it in the end come back to us with a vengeance?

Happy Animality

I have been in the thick of writing my senior thesis--The End of Liberty--well, actually, in the thick of trying to find the time to write it...anyway, in the course of my research I came across this picture of a sculpture ("The Young Family") by Australian sculpter Patricia Piccinini, which, although meant to depict a transgenic creature representing the biological "animalness" in humans, is in my mind a representation as well of the "animalness" (or potential animalness) of our non-physical identities. Could it be that our thoughts, our thought-worlds, our social organizations, are in fact shot through with animality on some very basic biological level? The point is mundane if taken in its simplest sense that we are, afterall mere mammals. And if we are in a very basic psycho-social sense animal, then what can this potentially say, for example, about some of our most cherished and enlightened ideas? Such as liberty. Such as equality. Such as democracy. Such as tolerance. The point I am trying to make in my thesis is not actually this point--but the more I study the more I realize that, even if we are much more than highly developed mammals (which I believe), I think that the state of the world makes a strong argument for the fact that human beings, under the guise of enlightened development and 'progress', are in fact becoming more animal-like everyday. Most importantly, we are becoming animal in the sense that we are losing our seemingly instinctive and distinctively human drive to self-reflect and critically engage the world as it is. In the course of this regress, I fear, we are losing the very freedom, the freedom to self-determine by critically engaging the world as a uniquely valuable and autonomous individual, that makes us most special as human beings--whatever, in the final analysis we happent to actually be.

More musings on freedom

Freedom. It can either be negative or positive. There is, at least with respect to the idea if not the reality, this choice.

So I am reading Isaiah Berlin, but I am also at the same time reading Hannah Arendt. They are fighting an epic battle in my head. The irony is that both Arendt and Berlin think that freedom is sacred for radically different reasons--rather, Arendt's passion is for a critical freedom, a freedom that is truly opposed to external positivity. Berlin, however, seems in the end to be a lover of the freedom that is.

Berlin and Arendt hated eachother--or in any case Berlin hated Arendt. This makes sense, considering their different approaches and final evaluations, really, of the march of freedom in the world.

In the end, I think their difference is in fact the most important difference within the liberal tradition--where to hang ones hat in terms of moral judgment. Berlin saw Arendt's judgment as fundamentally flawed because it lacked pity. Arendt certainly would have seen Berlin's appeal to pity as compromising a truly honest evaluation of the world. Berlin's judgment was a judgment informed by liberal principles of thought, like Arendt's, but with this fundamental difference--he accepted liberal democracy into his soul. I don't think that Arendt ever went as far. She certainly considered liberal democracy as the best system of government available, and as such morally legitimate, especially since it protected fundamental human rights. Nevertheless, it never became for her the internal structure of her soul as it did for Berlin. Michael Ignatieff notes that Berlin saw himself as "a cosy Russian tea-drinking Jew" and Arendt as "the qunitessential Yekke, the punctilious, exacting and charmless German Jew." Better: Berlin was content with the world he had escaped to and loved it as an end-in-itself; while Arendt appreciated the world she escaped to, but loved it enough to keep it brutally, painfully honest and growing.

Berlin and Me

I am reading the works of Isaiah Berlin at the moment. I began rereading his famed essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" last night in the bath. I really understand him. It is one thing to follow a phiosopher's arguments--to grasp what he is saying, to place his thought within the history of ideas, etc. But it its quite another thing to truly understand one. To understand a philosopher is to find that there is a part of one's own perspective that squares with his own. It is to recognize affinity, a kind of unity of vision. Nevertheless, this is a troubling thing for me because I am reasonably sure that Berlin has been rather misused in the history of ideas. Because he argued for a prevailing philosophical understanding of the world in a time when this understanding was acheiving fame and success in the social and political world wherein he lived and thought (in contrast, for example, to the New Left, whose philosophy, while popular and deriving force from the socialist/communist world, was nevertheless a critical, oppositional philosophy), his insights have been cheapened and streamlined in order to reflect the state of the world as is. My commitment, aboveall, is to change the present state of the world--and yet here I am looking into the soul of Isaiah Berlin and fnding a part of my own there.

Obviously, I can simply claim that Berlin is misunderstood. But that would be dishonest. In a real sense Berlin was a proponent of the liberal-democractic world of which I remain at best a skeptical critic. However, in a real way I need Berlin to remain a good skeptic, a critic committed to building up rather than simply tearing down. I really think that intellectual maturity consists in the simple ability to read and to understand disparate intellectual traditions, and to begin to think their concepts at the same time.

A Note to Self

A week ago I was sitting in a cell. Two days ago I was riding on this bicycle with Mer. Today...

Back in the USSR

In June of 1976 the Beatles released "Back in the USSR," a parody of Chuck Berry's tune, as well as of the Beach Boys, but actually referring to a particularly bad flight the band took from Russia back to Britain. When I was working at a sheet metal shop in prison I used to hear it a lot on the radio for some reason. Ironically, I have frequently described to people asking me what prison is like by drawing an analogy between the Soviet system and the prison facility.

Prison has it all--the Gulag, Big Brother, a tight, centralized, top-down, authoritarian government, a strictly regulated economy and repressive social and cultural system, as well as a thriving black market. It is also bleak and metallic ("Stalin" means "Steel"), homogenous and sparse--the product of an idolizaiton of sheer, raw power at it's most explicit.

Most of the time, responding to my friend's questions, I felt sort of like George Kennan, writing my long telegrams from this totally alien place, grasping for analogies that a member of the "free world" would understand.

Because it is not until one has lived in a totalitarian-authoritarian system that one fully understands it. Not until it begins to work on your identity, eroding away one's intrinsic sense of individual significance, that one begins to grasp the gravity of what it means to be controlled by a system.

When I got out I felt agoraphobic for a week. Men in black suits, or Crown Victorias were under-cover police folloowing me, waiting for me to slip up. Although these feelings were brief, and I immediately recognized them as silly and irrational--the fact remains that I actually experienced them. What were perfectly normal reactions in prison were silly and irrational in the "free world." This has been both profound and disturbing at the same time.

Coming back into the world of "freedom" has been an immense shock. More shocking however, for me, has been the realization of how consensual I had been to the state of the world before I was so abruptly rended from it.