Last Days of a Great City

Robertson Leg-Presses for the Lord

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Pat Robertson’s age-defying protein shake enables him to leg press 2,000 pounds, beating the all-time record by 665 pounds.

What would Jesus have pressed?  The mute button, most likely.

Size Queen

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From the Washington Post:

At Saturday’s commencement ceremonies, McCain and Falwell marched side-by-side onto the stage in the university’s basketball arena. After a sometimes raucous faculty processional, in which students and faculty doused one another with aerosol cans of string, Falwell warmly praised his guest, saying, “The ilk of John McCain is very scarce, very small.”

But did Jerry Falwell actually see John McCain’s ilk?

They Do It With Mirrors

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Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

                    Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Or to put it metaphorically: the bracketed matter is not wiped off the phenomenological slate, but only bracketed, and thereby provided with a sign that indicates the bracketing.  Taking its sign with it, the bracketed matter is reintegrated in the main theme of the inquiry.

                   Edmund Husserl, Ideas

Got Wood?

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Should straight men find Condoleezza Rice sexy?  All right, she’s arguably on the dog side of the beauty spectrum.  But her looks don’t cause people to flee in panic, and many women find even ugly men sexy if they’re wealthy or powerful.  So if you’re a straight man, shouldn’t you get wood thinking about Condi sprawled out naked on a bear rug?

This is essentially the question raised by Pete Wells in the May 2006 issue of Details magazine.  Without so much as the benefit of a straw poll, Mr. Wells assumes that the wealth and power of older women like Hillary Clinton, Martha Stewart, and Oprah Winfrey fail to get a rise out of most men.  It’s an odd non-argument, appearing in a magazine brimming with fashion photos of hunky shirtless guys.  One might assume the magazine’s readers would rather be thinking about something else.

Like all mortals, we gay philosophers experience the power of sexual attraction.  Yet despite all our warnings about the unexamined life, we seldom think about sex—in a philosophical way, I mean.  These are, after all, very, very hard questions.

1.  If women are from Venus and men are from Mars, where is Eugene Levy from?

2.  Why is it, if men raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition care so much for sex, that it’s missing from their descriptions of heaven?

3.  Eros, agape, philia.  Is there a fourth kind of love that makes it possible to find Madeleine Albright attractive?

Outline Of A Proof That P

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I keep turning up new treasures in my father’s old philosophy papers.  Last time I looked, I found what looked like a lost fragment of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.  My father knew Wittgenstein, so I assumed it was genuine.  Last night I found a dusty old monograph attributed to Saul Kripke.  I reproduced the full text below.  Although unusually short (even when you include its extended footnote), it’s fairly typical of arguments in the tradition of analytic philosophy …                                          

Some philosophers have argued that not-p.  But none of them seems to me to have made a convincing argument against the intuitive view that this is not the case.  Therefore, p.*

___

* This outline was prepared hastily—at the editors’ insistence—from a taped transcript of a lecture.  Since I was not given an opportunity to revise the draft before publication, I cannot be held responsible for any lacunae in the published version of the argument, or for any fallacious or garbled inferences resulting from faulty preparation of the manuscript.  Also, the argument now seems to me to have problems which I did not know when I wrote it, but which I cannot discuss here, and which are completely unrelated to any criticisms that have appeared in the literature (or that I have seen in manuscript).  All such criticisms misconstrue the argument.  It will be noted that the present version of the argument seems to presuppose the intuitionistically unacceptable law of double negation.  But the argument can easily be reformulated in a way that avoids employing such an inference rule.  I hope to expand on these matters further in a separate monograph.

The FOX News Report

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Roving Last Days reporter Rachel Tension watched FOX News for fifteen minutes today and filed this report …

“Well, Felix, it’s looking pretty Right Wing on FOX News tonight.  The lead item on Iran was clearly written to stir up anti-Iranian sentiment.  FOX News reported that Iran had essentially dared the United Nations to impose sanctions.  ‘Prices at the pump will rise,’ taunted the Iranian Foreign Minister.  Looks like they’ve got us by the balls.

“There was a story on the ‘Day Without an Immigrant’ protests planned for May 1st.  As you know, Felix, pro-immigration activists urged immigrants and their supporters to stay home from work on May 1st to underscore the importance of immigrants to our national economy.  FOX News reporter Adam Hauser pointed out that ‘May 1st is also a Socialist-Communist holiday, and that may not be a coincidence.’  It isn’t every day you hear reporting of this caliber.

“I sat through the commercials at the break, Felix, and I noted that sponsors included Ditech Financial Services, Bayer Aspirin, a dietary fiber company, and the manufacturer of a product for head lice—giving the impression that FOX News viewers are constipated, heavily indebted neuralgics with head lice.

“Back to you, Felix …”

The South American Way

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An eye-catching item from the May 1, 2006 New Yorker:

In the ongoing South Americanization of political culture north of the border—a drawn-out historical journey whose markers include fiscal recklessness, an accelerating wealth gap between the rich and the rest, corruption masked by populist rhetoric, a frank official embrace of the techniques of “dirty war,” and, by way of initiating the present era, a judicial autogolpe installing a dynastic presidente—what has been dubbed the Revolt of the Generals is one of the feebler effusions.*

South Americanization.  It’s a wonderful conceit that will no doubt make the rounds of dinner parties and earnest discussions of the failings of the current junta.  Of course we can expect our overly sensitive neighbors to the south to object to this characterization.  They’ve not forgotten, like we have, Allende, Arbenz, and the other democratically-elected Latin American leaders we removed from power—all of this before we sank into the depths of our South Americanization.

But what progress this new political culture represents!  Before we were South Americanized, “dirty war” was out of the question and we had to resort to killing people like the Vietcong by tidier means.  When we enslaved the Africans and interned the Japanese we were no doubt forced to use a purer, more nuanced North American form of state brutality.

But now it’s cojones all out, people.  Ay, caramba!

From my vantage point here in the heartland of America, I see, quite frankly, more signs of Disneyfication than of South Americanization.  I see field after field of anaesthetized, consumerist sheep only vaguely aware of the nefarious forces that maintain the flow of corporate profits and, by logical extension, our American way of life.  The Devil may doff his hat and show us his horns because we’re simply much too sated to care.  Baaaaa!

If our country is headed South, it simply doesn’t have far to travel, so let’s enjoy the ride because detrás de nosotros viene the fucking lluvia.

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* “Rummyache” by Hendrik Hertzberg.