Nattering Nabobs Of Negativism

 Spiro Agnew

I believe that is a Spiro Agnew-ism. He and a speech writer friend set a trend in conservative thought in his day by discovering the profound nature of alliteration, and how that phonetic phenom could briefly cover up the evidence in the case.

So, I was talking with a guy at AAA about insurance yester, and somehow we got onto the pervasive negative attitudes in the country. I mean, it seems as if when I open Yahoo News in to morning, there are five or six articles guaranteeing everything from the fall of the Dow to the four Horsemen of the Whats-is.

Back in 2007, nobody had a peep about doom and gloom; everything was light and bright... or fun in the sun. Certainly not a crowd of gloomy Gusses glooming in the gloaming.
But take one little enormous financial crisis and bingo! Everybody senses the End Of Days, and sees the Grim Reaper standing on the corner, watching all the guys and dolls walk by.

Our narratives, even the truncated and brief half-baked stories of staving off destruction by purchasing gold or the coming disaster for the Obama Administration, not only reflect our mentalities, but serve as guides for the roads our consciousness will take in the future.
Narratives create the world of intelligent beings just as much as do the Higg's bosons...

For example, there is a concept of "edibility", the ability to be eaten.
If there were no carnivores or herbivores, if somehow all beings gained nutrition through ingesting electrons from the Earth (as some worms do, apparently), there would be no "edibility".

However, there is "eating". Incisors rip apart plants and animals and molars grind flora and fauna.
Edibility forms part of our world.
There are millions of cookbooks about edibility. There are articles not just about edibility, but about haute cuisine and the like.

The Narratives and Sciences of Food are as much a part of the real world as the mountains and valleys. And they are as important, for just as the mountains may be made low and the valleys be raised, so also may we give thought or not to what we shall eat tomorrow...

There is the need for eating. Couple that with intelligent beings and you get a story. That story becomes part of the world and grows.

Therefore, always make the stories good.
The women should be strong and the men good-looking and all the children above average.
Otherwise, we end up with a katzenjammer of Narratives that are scarey and resemble those old timey children's books where the scissors man cut off the thumbs of thumb suckers. Brrrr!

Everything we do resonates throughout the Universe. Act as if you all were Eponymous!!!

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The Virgin Suicides

Watched The Virgin Suicides.
Having grown up in that locale, it was unsettling.

However, it all reminds me of the power of the Story or the Narrative, about which I have written before. This is the basic problem of games and stories of violence and sexual degradation: they do not cause violent situations, but when certain situations are encountered, the Story provides a Script one may follow.

Having a script to follow is a  big, big deal.

Everyone has a script to follow. The script is the source of how we dress - our uniforms of shirt and tie and jacket, say - and the source of how we speak - the idiom we use and the intonation and accent - and even how we tend to think.

 ...the Werther effect, named for Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young man who puts a gun to his head to end the agony of unrequited love and because he can’t find his place in the provincial bourgeois society of the day. The novel’s publication, in 1774, prompted young men all over Europe to dress like Werther and take their lives. It’s also called the contagion effect and copycat suicide: one person does it, and that lowers the threshold, making it easier and more permissible for the next. Like 10 people waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change, and one of them jaywalks. This gives the rest of them the go-ahead.

I disagree that one person's doing a thing makes it permissible. Rather, it makes it "Imaginable", and from being imagined, it provides a viable way of acting and doing - life threatening though it is.

Once again, I re-iterate, this is the very reason why good stories are so important. Narratives with indecisive endings and moral ambiguities that are never resolved are a curse upon mankind. And don't dare tell me that such things are "Realism".
We have created a wasteland upon the Earth, and we dare to call it "Realism"!

We accept Death-Actions as acceptable things to do!
Wars, guns, highway mayhem...
The fact that Scripts are life threatening means absolutely nothing to us.

The success of Life Threatening Scripts demonstrates the lack of Life Enriching Scripts.
If we had good and vibrant stories that glorify life instead of trampling it underfoot or focusing upon some supposedly sinful nature of mankind, the suicide culture would never have a chance.
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The Genesis of Narrative

People often speak of the difference between Narrative and Reality; mostly, other peoples' political beliefs are a "narrative", whereas our own politics are reality-based.

Certainly most religious dogmatic belief systems are narrative, which is to say there is no method to test them as a reality. If there were such a testing, there is always the possibility a religious belief may be found to be false, and that is quite impossible to people who invest heavily in "belief systems".
That is pretty much the meaning of "supernatural"; i.e., not subject to the laws of Nature.

Narratives are based on the Dream process. The Dream is the paradigm of taking seemingly random inputs and weaving a whole. Any entity which dreams will tell stories: histories, annals, fibs, lies, prevarications, fishermen stories, and tall tales...

An election year is usually a good time to observe the conflict of Narratives.
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Sound Byte City

I wrote the other day in Broken Threads:
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/12/broken-threads.html

I think that a good deal of the problem with Cable TV entertainment: to be precise, its decline into a pit of irrelevant posturings, is due to the growth of commercials. Commercials constitute a break in the thread of the narrative of the program being presented, and it seems there may be a critical threshold - which we seem to have crossed - beyond which the experience of narrative continuity breaks down.

Think about it... then think of Herman Cain. I mean, is he not the prime example of a lack of continuity?

Mr. Cain was superb with small, individual blurts, such as "9-9-9!", but when he was asked to explain things on a larger scale and at some depth - such as Libya - he said that everything began spinning in his head!
In effect, Mr. Cain, being a prime example of a successful 21st century American male, could not and cannot handle complex issues. In fact, he cannot even provide continuity with one woman... his wife.

The leading picture is the three standard stoppages by Marcel Duchamp, defined by 3 broken threads falling randomly upon a sheet of paper, and thus redefining Duchamp's experience of Art:

Duchamp would come to look upon the stoppages as one of the key works in his development as an artist. "In itself it was not an important work of art," he [Duchamp] said, "but for me it opened the way -- the way to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art. I didn't realize at the time what I had stumbled on. When you tap something, you don't always recognize the sound. That's apt to come later. For me the Three Standard Stoppages was a first gesture liberating me from the past.

The following is another redefinition of Modern Art by Duchamp, entitled "Fountain" and pulled from some bowling alley wall around 1917 and shown at an art gallery:

Similarly we ourselves as artists have redefined the meaning of "Man or Woman of Substance and Propriety" in the 21st century.

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. - Marcel Duchamp

Mr. Cain - and, by implication, the rest of the candidates - are the fruits of our labors.
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Tigers Beat Twins! 3 to 2!

A Mr. Inge, recently called back up from the farm system and batting .157 was up in the bottom of the ninth for the Detroit Tigers. The score was tied 2-2 and it was looking like extra innings.
I was at the game with my friend.

I had not paid much attention to baseball since 1994 or thereabouts. During the eighth inning I was looking from where we stood in the stands down on the fans below us, and there were numerous patrons wearing shirts with the names of players on.
One in particular was " INGE ", which I took for a joke meaning the playwright Inge. I thought there might be some people with "ODETTS" on theirs, or "ALBEE"... "WILLIAMS" would be good: there would be the ambiguity between "Ted" or "Tennessee".

So I enquire, and my pal, Mike, sez...

...and I do mean "sez"! He has kept up with baseball and has a familiarity, at least, with the players on the teams, whereas I only knew of the Tigers catcher, Avila... I knew he was a "cracker jack" player, too. That's about it.
But Mike was different. So being in a group of about 30,000 similarly minded baseball buffs for a couple of hours, Mike tended to get a case of "Subway Series"... which is what I call the tendency to talk like Leo Durocher when one explains the finer points of the game to the clueless.
It put me in mind of one of the cannier Dead End Kids - say, Whitey - trying to explain the complexities of urban life to his snobbish cousin - say, Percival, named after Percival Lowell, the astronomer -  from Boston whose "mater" had decided to visit Brooklyn on a one-day hop from the Cape for unexplained reasons....

...so Mike sez that Inge is either loved or hated. A great natural athlete, Mr. Inge has a dismal batting average which drove many of his erstwhile fans and allies to despair. In fact, he had been sent down to Toledo, the Tigers' AAA farm team, and had only recently been recalled for the push for the pennant.
There was more, but it was variation on this theme: sort of Beowulf had showed up at Hrothgar's Hall and had brought a hostess gift of the wrong vintage sword, and all the nobles and serfs now looked at him with considerable jaundice.

So Mike absents himself briefly after the Twins go down in the top of the ninth, comes back when the first two Tigers have gone down with two pitches, and up comes Mr. Inge. So I look and then rock back and forth a bit, wondering how long this game might last.
Mike says, "Are there two outs already?"
I nod.
He adds, "And Inge is up!"
I say "I think he's going to win it for them."
He says "More likely he'll strike out!"
And he did not really say that; he more snorted it... contemptuously... as a wild boar might snort contemptuously at, well, just about anything.
Less than forty seconds go by, bingo! Home run, game over. Mr. Inge is a hero again.


Moral:
Story is important and it is much stronger than people believe. Most people think Narrative is what chatterboxes do after the real, important, substantial... and MUTE!... stuff is done.
Not so.
The Inge story was Irony, an ironic reversal: just as we may reverse from riches to rags, we may turn from rags to riches. In essence, Horatio Alger wrote Irony, too, although we do not usually think of it that way. We usually reserve Irony for the fall from blessedness.

One hour before his home run, I had never even heard of Inge, but I took the story I had heard and made a reversal and a happy ending. Mike went with the already existing story of gloom and doom. Obviously, the Fates prefer happy endings, when they have gotten their fill of retribution!
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