A Conversation About Morality
Scene: A classroom at Brooklyn College
Time: 4:00 p.m., May 24, 1989
Characters: An old man. Myself.
Note: This is fiction.
“As soon as a person becomes aware of the objects around him, he considers them in relation to himself, and rightly so, because his whole fate depends on whether they please or displease him, attract or repel, help or harm him. This quite natural way of looking at or judging things appears to be as easy as it is necessary. A person is, nevertheless, exposed through it to a thousand errors that often make him ashamed and embitter his life,” said the old man.
“That sounds fa-goddamn-miliar to me,” I said. “Wasn’t that written by…Hume? In his “On Personal Identity?”
“No,” said the man. He turned slightly from me; he lowered his gaze. “That was Goethe.”
“What was that you said?”
“I said Goethe. He wrote that.”
“Thought it was Hume. I’ve only read Goethe’s poetry and plays, not his pronouncements about philosophy. Anyway, it sounds okay. I mean, how can we deny the element of the subjective in all things sentient? And yet, where is the delineation between subjectivity and self-indulgence, selfishness? Surely the latter have clear moral implications, where subjectivity does not. So when Goethe says, “a thousand errors that often make him ashamed and embitter his life,” is he not also implying that, since shame is a form of moral self-judgement, subjectivity embraces morality also? If, then, morality is purely subjective, it is independent of judgement. This, you will agree, is —”
“A reductio ad absurdum,” the man interrupted. “You are making light of Goethe’s words.”
“Quite the contrary, old man,” I said, rising as I spoke. “I intend to be serious. If there is only a subjective base, if that base is both ‘easy and necessary,’ as Goethe says, then all moral judgements are founded on nothing. Nothing! Does that not disturb you?” I was standing now, not at all in a menacing manner and yet the man sank down lower in his chair.
“Of course,” he began. “I have had those thoughts. They are inevitable.”
“Then I am not reducing Goethe to absurdity,” I said, dryly.
“But what can we put in place of morality?” he asked, still sunken. “Where is the authority, where is the soul’s policeman? How can I write with conviction about the squalid immorality of Klein’s Nursing Home for Adults on Coney Island Avenue, where the warehoused aged sit, tired from fear, behind dulled Plexiglas panes, suspiciously, nervously eyeing every ambulance that pauses outside? Suppose I end up there, without morality as a bayonet to support the white flag of truth?”
“So you compare truth to surrender,” I said, staring at the wall.
“Well, damn it, it is an equation that has caused me much pain,” the old man said.
Without speaking, he got up from his chair and shook my hand. He stood there for a long while. At last he stepped back, put on his hat and coat and, turning to go, said to me, “You know, I really do detest you.” He quickly left.
Whee! This isn’t just a win for the Democrats. But let’s crow just a little bit. Democrats haven’t had anyone representing this area of New York since Lincoln was President. So, in that sense, Fox News and its acolytes should be pissing in their pants rather than passing the pizza and Pepsi. All they can say is that Virginia and New Jersey prove that Obama is politically toast because those two states elected Republican governors. Well, I ask you: which do you think would get the attention of historians? A typical see-saw of local politics as exemplified by those gubernatorial races, or a sea-change like we saw in the 23rd Congressional District of New York?
Just in case some folks are deaf, here’s what we said, among other things:
We don’t like Sarah Palin.
What makes you think we listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh? You think we have time for this crap? (And, uhh, you think we get radio reception?)
We are not Party Republicans. We became Republicans back when being a Republican meant opposing slavery and seeing America as a strong federation of free states.
We really don’t like being told what to do. And you call us parochial at your peril.
We’re not against government spending. Our biggest employers are Fort Drum, two major prisons, and a psychiatric center. That’s how we pay for things.
Ah, ’tis a wonderful morning to be in New York State. Suck it up, Beck!
Okay, I don’t live in the 23rd Congressional District of New York, but I do live just a few streets outside of it. That puts me closer to it than the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, who lives in Lake Placid, 8 miles away. Oh, but his campaign headquarters are 400 feet inside the 23rd, so hey.
Hoffman has said nothing about local issues, and appears to have no idea what a Representative does. Then again, he has no idea what he has done for the past, oh, 30 years or so. Ah, here, Chris Kelly from Huffington Post puts it better than I can:
I was a man who had many friends,
And many friends had me.
I used to pump gas about an hour north of where Doug Hoffman used to pump gas. I don’t know if that makes us kindred spirits or ancient enemies. I know it makes us both old. (“What do you mean, you used to pump gas? For who? The Romans?”) Now Doug Hoffman is the Conservative Party nominee for Congress in New York’s 23rd District.
And I hate to say this about a fellow former pump jockey, but he’s hooked up with some really loathsome people.
Doug Hoffman didn’t want to be in the Conservative Party. He’s not crazy. He wanted to be the Republican nominee. He applied, but the party chose someone else; a woman named Dede Scozzafava. Doug Hoffman was shocked by this decision, since he had that gas station experience going for him, and all Scozzafava had was six terms in the Assembly and four years as Mayor of Gouverneur. So he did what any modest, principled, grass-roots-centered, we-the-people-type citizen legislator would do: He got in touch with a fringe party and told them he was wiling to spend $250,000 of his own money to run.
Because that’s what it means to have a servant’s heart.
And a midlife crisis.
Barack Obama got 52% of the votes in the 23rd in 2008. Dede Scozzafava had the Republicans. Where could Doug Hoffman turn?
To a traveling freak show of evil creeps who want to use a misguided mediocrity to jerk around the people of upstate New York for shits and giggles.
To Glenn Beck, Gary Bauer, Sean Hannity, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Malkin, Dick Armey and, yesterday, like the churning of milk bringing forth butter and the wringing of the nose bringing forth blood, to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page.
It’s like Commissioner Gordon lit up the batshit signal.
He also has the support of the Club for Growth, the National Review, the Weekly Standard and Human Events. Or, as Sarah Palin puts it:
And best of all, Doug Hoffman has not been anointed by any political machine.
She’s still got it.
He hasn’t just been anointed by a political machine. He’s been kidnapped by drifters.
Of course they’re a machine. They’re also rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers and horse thieves. And worst of all, they’re not even from around here.
They’re all from out of state.
According to the Watertown Daily Times:
Aside from his own personal wealth, Mr. Hoffman has paid for his congressional campaign almost entirely with money from outside New York…
The Club for Growth PAC, based in Washington, has contributed more than $95,000 to Mr. Hoffman’s campaign through bundled funds, out of $307,888 he has raised, according to the FEC report. The Citizens United Political Action Fund, a conservative group, gave $10,000.
He also accepted $1,000 from the God is Not Government PAC, based in Washington, which describes itself as a “real religious right Political Action Committee” that can “run radio and TV ads favoring conservative Christian candidates” and requires its recipients to affirm in writing that they “are pro-life, pro-family and stand firmly against the unbiblical welfare state that is destroying the spiritual and economic greatness of our nation.”
Sure, if you believe the liberal elite drive-by media, like the Watertown Daily Times. And not the feisty local little guys, like Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, where the editorial page has called for Scozzafava to step aside for Hoffman or risk turning America into “Dede’s Police State.”
Don’t say you weren’t warned, Oswego.
Listen, I’m in no position to say the people of upstate New York shouldn’t vote for Sarah Palin’s candidate. What do I know? My grandfather left Watertown in the 1930s, so we’ve never lived under Dede Scozzafava’s iron heel. My step-grandfather, stepfather, mother and sisters all settled in the chilly Diaspora of Cortland, miles over the county line. If messages are smuggled to my cousins in Malone, I’m not endangering them by telling you.
And Doug Hoffman can do what he wants, including go into business with unspeakably sleazy characters.
But no one in New York should get the wrong impression, like that he’s doing it for Watertown.
I was a man who had many friends, And many friends had me. I used to pump gas about an hour north of where Doug Hoffman used to pump gas. I don’t know if that makes us kindred spirits or ancient ene…
I was a man who had many friends, And many friends had me. I used to pump gas about an hour north of where Doug Hoffman used to pump gas. I don’t know if that makes us kindred spirits or ancient ene…
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/sarah-palin-friends-doug_b_331675.html
Hello, my fellow Alaskans, who really — well, those liberals there, they’d have you — and those taxes, whooo-hoo, what makes us Americans? Not on my watch, and that’s why I — my refrigerator, we call it a fridge, like most American families, and that is where the goodness in this nation is — we have a picture of Trig on the fridge and he — we all need a boy like him. So that’s why I won’t be governor any more. That and — well, you can already smell the eastern press all over this, but — and the taxes, we kept ‘em down, so that’s a good job, I think, in anybody’s book. And the health care, that’s got to be, too.
Thank you and goodbye.
Sarah
How does one make more than one WordPress blog on the same website, if it’s installed remotely?
The question I’d like answered is this: Why is a minor illness like this, which has so far killed 1/32000th of what the standard flu kills annually, gotten so much attention?
I have to get this off my chest: I don’t give a fat rat’s ass how many times Abu Boo-hoo or Khalid Shit Moo-moo got water boarded, had sleep deprivation, or were forced to watch re-runs of Gilligan’s Island. Left to me, I could see putting hot reeds under their fingernails. Sewing scotch bonnet peppers into their buttocks. Sanding their foreheads and tying a headband soaked in salt water around their heads. You know, nasty stuff.
But that’s why I never ran for President, among other reasons, of course. And it’s why vigilantism is a great idea in the anger of one’s private thoughts but a lousy one when actually practiced. There are just certain things you don’t do, not even to an ant.
Ganz abgesehen davon (Aside from the fact — I don’t know why I had to suddenly put that in German; let me start this from the beginning.) Aside from the fact that torture is nasty and childish, it’s pretty clear that truly crappy techniques don’t work. The He-who-is-not-to-be-named Administration’s justification for torture is that “it produces results.” Bullshit it does. I suppose that’s the lesson they learned from the Korean War (where waterboarding was first introduced to an eager world) — so that when American soldiers, so fearful of drowning, admitted on North Korean television (all two of them) and on radio (lots of those) that Golly, they’d been so badly mistaken, that North Korean Communism really was the dandiest thing on the planet.
Me, I’m a poor choice as torturee. Threaten me with anything more than having to eat liver, I’ll tell you anything you want to hear. Who gives a crap if I tell the truth or lie if it will save me from gagging on liver?
Blech.
CPAC — the Conservative Political Action Committee met last week (and no, I don’t care to find out where and precisely when, but it was in February 2009 if you’re curious.) Every Republican who wants his name in the paper was there (oh, and I am deliberately being non-inclusive in my choice of pronoun here, despite John McCain’s Great Outreach Program.) The new Bush is Rush Limbaugh; not that Limbaugh wasn’t deserving of his status as Major Irritating Asshole before, but now he occupies a really special place in hell. But the convention deserves particular designation by whoever is responsible for the Universe as perfectly worthy of the furthest reaches of Hell.
Some 13 year old kid, Jonathan Krohn his name is, was the star of the show. Little man, big words. The crowd went wild. One suspects that, as Republicans and Conservatives, half of them did so out of homosexual lust, but that still leaves half of them, a good number, who applauded because they thought this kid was really it, a rising star with absolutely no baggage to tarnish his golden boy image. (See how desperate they’ve gotten?) The worst of it, though, is that they’ve exploited a 13 year old who is developmentally unable to understand what is happening to him. Maturity, shmaturity, you just can’t be 13 and suddenly get elevated to Messiah status. That kid has had his childhood robbed from him, and they just ate it up.
Like pig-dogs. Schweinehunde. Shameful, mysogenistic, Southern-strategy-loving, Bible banging, gun-toting, creationist assholes.
Well. It seems the world is once again learning the true nature of Capitalism: it’s boom and bust, over and over. The good thing about it is that we live under a generally comfortable but totally misunderstood version of freedom. The bad thing is that when the economy busts, we gain a clearer conception of this sort of freedom, and it is as startling as if we were just waking from a vivid nightmare.
We all want to live in a world where we can live better year after year. A new washing machine, a better refrigerator, a flat screen LCD television, and we’re all set for Nirvana — not now, but later. It’s always later. We chase a vision as if it were an image captured in a disappearing dream, and just when we think we have it, it slips away, taking with it our fanciful delight at the new, turning it into the mundane. This is overcome by new desires, new purchases: which in turn slip away from fancy. Then the world comes crashing down, a neighbor loses her job and might lose her house, we can’t get financing for a new car, and it suddenly dawns on us that we really must do something about our credit card debt.
Problem is, we never have quite enough to get the things we want that will sustain this version of personal freedom. During distressing times such as these, this is a starker reality for those who have been directly affected, yet it should be plain to anyone: this is, we uncomfortably admit, not freedom. Were we free, we would have unfettered access to credit; we would see prices continuing to drop on things we want to buy to make our lives more interesting; we would not have this nagging impulse to consume.
Isn’t it odd that we always equate freedom with bourgeois society? Freedom to us is the freedom to open a business, essentially. Freedom to make money. Funny how we’ve never been taught to look at tribal societies as free. We’ve never thought of the Yanomani as free. Are the Bedouin free? They needn’t go to school; they needn’t have televisions; they have no bank accounts, no credit cards. They also have no health care, no retirement plans (oops, maybe that’s not such a bad thing, given how many 401k’s have imploded recently.) But I’d wager that a nomad would make a convincing argument that he (or she) is more free than a family tied to a school schedule; more free than a couple opening a restaurant. But not many of us would shed the lives we lead to take on the new skin of the Yanomani. It’s just not our version of freedom. Our version of freedom is replete with manufactured possessions. We measure our wealth by the number of artificial things we own. Freedom, measured by this, is far greater for us than it is for anyone living in the absence of an industrial society, because the Earth provides far fewer things than we can manufacture, unless, of course, one thinks of rocks. No two rocks are exactly alike, but who wants to fill a house with different rocks? They don’t do anything! Of course, neither do paintings, 99% of books, clothes, and so on. But — these are the very things that make us free. Rocks would not make us free. See?
I sure don’t have any answers. I’m just as deluded as anyone else.
The End of Bipartisanship: it’s the headline all over the world, describing the curious absence of Republican votes in the House for the stimulus bill.
Well, to hell with them. The whole GOP strategy revolves around defeating every one of Obama’s efforts. It is only this that can ensure that the GOP gets enough House members in 2010 to have control of the redistricting that will follow the Census.
Scheming bastards. I hate them.
