Nascent Ideology: Can Atheism be Saved… From “New” Atheists? Monday, Jun 8 2009

Nascent Ideology:

Can Atheism be Saved… From “New” Atheists?

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Is there anything original to “new” Atheism without disparaging religion, its holy dialectical “other”?

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Charlotte Allen, heretofore unknown to me, has received considerable criticism for a recent L.A. Times opinion column criticizing Atheists (yes, welcome to 21st century newsitorialism; criticizing criticism, ad nauseum):

The problem with atheists — and what makes them such excruciating snoozes — is that few of them are interested in making serious metaphysical or epistemological arguments against God’s existence, or in taking on the serious arguments that theologians have made attempting to reconcile, say, God’s omniscience with free will or God’s goodness with human suffering. Atheists seem to assume that the whole idea of God is a ridiculous absurdity, the “flying spaghetti monster” of atheists’ typically lame jokes. They think that lobbing a few Gaza-style rockets accusing God of failing to create a world more to their liking (”If there’s a God, why aren’t I rich?” “If there’s a God, why didn’t he give me two heads so I could sleep with one head while I get some work done with the other?”) will suffice to knock down the entire edifice of belief.

Days later, outspoken—Outspoken!—biologist and transparent bigot Paul Z. Myers, a primary target of her column, made the necessary and rote new-Atheist response:

Charlotte Allen is very, very angry with us atheists — that’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from her furious broadside in The Times on May 17… She should drop the pretense that the objectionable part of our character is our lack of excitement. What really annoys Allen is that in our books, blogs and media appearances, we challenge religious preconceptions. That’s all we do. It’s admittedly not exactly a roller-coaster ride of thrills, but it does annoy the superstitious and the fervent true believers in things unseen and unevidenced. We are also, admittedly, often abrasive in being outspoken critics of religious dogma, but it’s also very hard to restrain our laughter and contempt when we see the spectacle of god-belief in full flower.

What’s notable is that Myers’ opening line preempts Allen’s accusation of the shallow and vindictive philosophical views of Atheists, and, to the exclusion of answering those philosophical challenges, immediately hinges his entire column upon a bald ad hominem: “What’s wrong with that surly Charlotte Allen?” This is where the overt bigotry and typical smugness of the “new” Atheist dance-comedy-musical begins, by fulfilling every criticism leveled against them in their own responses to external criticism.

What is immediately suppressed by the Atheists’ many retorts is the fact that Allen’s own views on Theism or Atheism have no fundamental bearing on her argument. She could very well be an Atheist and still validly take the position that many other Atheists are shallow, openly prejudiced, and more engaged in kitsch cultural logic than actual philosophical discourse. Atheists are shallow; not necessarily because of some personal defect or fault, as Myers quickly assumes, but because the Atheistic philosophical view is itself incredibly shallow, simplistic, and presumptuous. That is, “if and only if” one is willing to submit such matters to logical examination. No!, Myers characteristically exclaims while arguing to-the-weakest,

What really annoys Allen is that in our books, blogs and media appearances, we challenge religious preconceptions. That’s all we do.

Indeed it is, Professor Myers—and that is exactly the point you would have discovered if you had bothered to read Allen’s column. In fact, such a reaction was the very point of Allen’s central theme: that so many “new” Atheists are smug, overtly bigoted ideologues endowed with more than a subtle twitch of messianic victimhood. I mean, without a vocabulary inclusive of the words, “God,” “religion,” or “superstition,” could the Atheist-dialectic read, write, or interpret whatsoever?  Is there anything original to “new” Atheism without disparaging religion, its holy dialectical “other”?

Mr. Myers, your closing statement?

Allen requests that we atheists take religious belief seriously. We do; it’s hard not to take seriously a bizarre collection of antiquated superstitions that are furiously waved in our faces in our schools, on television, in our politics and even on newspaper editorial pages. That we take the intellectually bankrupt beliefs of religion seriously is precisely why we do question it, and will continue to question it, in our boring way: by simply speaking out.

Oh my gods, will the frothing, uni-dimensional ghoulishness ever stop? When I read this sort of trash the only voice I hear is Keith Olbermann’s cartoonishly sinister impersonation of Republicans—that of some drooling Disney villain with loose bag pipes full of hot air and veiled threats. Honestly, must one’s ears bleed before they stop stuffing them with so much messianic chaff from some elevated—and, utterly mythical—position of sovereign authority?

Per the title of this post, this all begs the question of whether or not real, philosophically-informed Atheism—or some semblance of Atheist-Existentialism—can survive such environs without being abducted by the pseudo-scientific inverted theology espoused by “new” Atheism. With their blogs and websites reaching into the thousands, their backs tired from shoveling so much bullshit literature, swag, and lame bumper stickers—these pseudo-philosophical charlatans and unapologetic bigots (many of whom were once members of the very fundamentalist religious sects which they now so freely accurse) have co-opted and abducted any viable Atheist perspective to the point that actual discourse is suffused with toxic levels of ressentiment, bigotry, and reductive cultural binaries. Any intellectually informed view of Atheism (or religion, for that matter) is in full refugee-exile from contemporary Atheism.

As a writer who once publicly defended Atheistic perspectives, I no longer see any [read: post-teenage] reason to hold Atheism in any esteem. In its transition from a speculative philosophical position to bourgeois, pseudo-scientific bigotry, and now hopped up on the steroids of its typical white, phallogocentric, colonial arrogance—Atheism has been plundered of the moral groundwork that once inspired it as a response to the encroachment of religiously political ideology. And to be replaced by a debate about… what, exactly? Book sales? Spaghetti Monsters? Hating daddy and tearing your jeans?

Where can this path lead?  More importantly, where can it not?

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IV. Diet Atheism: Dawkins, “New” Atheist Authors, and the Hyper-Reductive Gods of Book Sales Friday, May 1 2009

*Revised briefs from a conversation with a Richard Dawkins fan; an explication on the morphology of “new” Atheist arguments about religion, on behalf of their leading authors

(I’m saving you the money; consider it a favor)

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IV.  Diet Atheism: Dawkins, “New” Atheist Authors, and the Hyper-Reductive Gods of Book Sales

Lessons in Throwing Out the Baby, Whilst Keeping the Bath Water

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“Dawkins’ entire argument is very simple (it also happens to be intellectually irrelevant, and purely a product of sensationalist religious demagoguery):

Religion necessarily causes individuals to do malicious things, because religion is innately malicious.

Not only does this argument appeal to a specious, circular, and in itself malicious definition of an incredibly complex thing (religion), it also chooses to conceal the fact by conflating belief and action (hypostatisation). In other words, Dawkins, in true absolutist fashion, reduces actions and belief to the same, monolithic entity.  For him, every Christian is a literalist, to such an extreme degree that thought is extinguished and expelled from being any part of the equation. If you’re religious, you are inherently a bad person and you will do bad things; you could not do otherwise.  It is the innate, naturalized quality of religion.  And so, my problem with Dawkins is the same as my problem with Southern-American racists of the early 20th century: not really so much that they are earnestly racist, but that they conceal the rationalism by which they obtain a free pass for being outwardly, categorically judgmental and repressive.  And considering the repressively-colonial attitudes of authors like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, an incipient pattern begins to emerge.

Dawkins is another example of an ex-idealist who—in the mythical, positivist-polished totalities of “science” and “logic”—merely found a surrogate for his own smug, fundamentalist attitude toward society. From some non-existent intellectual high-ground, he, as the rest of these “new” Atheists, arrogates immunity from criticism by stereotyping his critics: anyone who disagrees is automatically a “theist.”  Ah, absolutist cultural binaries. An unbiased observer ought to look at them and ask, where do they get the free license to formulate such overtly judgmental and democratically-corrosive arguments? Where do they get this hyper-real depiction of scientific reduction?  Some pre-Kantian, empiricist “pure reason”?  Some ironically contradictory materialist-idealism?   The harshest criticism leveled against these guys doesn’t come from the “theists” conceived by their own religious delusions, it’s coming from other scientists and (actual) philosophers…”

“What gives Dawkins out is that he is a biologist, not a philosopher. Among other “new” Atheist authors, he’s become a sufficient reason to believe that Atheism has ceased to even be a philosophical perspective apart from just a cultural byproduct of political and social ressentiment leveled against religion, and now frequently just a surrogate form of populist counter-fundamentalism hiding under the avatars of “science” or “logic” or other unassailable (and thoroughly non-existent) totalities. A good benchmark test is simply asking any self-described “Atheist” to articulate a coherent, comprehensive philosophical view without utilizing any reference to “God,” “religion,” religious texts, and so on. The fact that so few will even consent to do so, instead of beating on religious straw men, kinda tells you that they are in some way just part of the same whole, the same pastiche of absolutes and disjunctive, technological hyper-realism.  At end, it is a schizophrenically solipsistic debate, constantly looping back on itself to moot points and trodden straw men.

The “necessity” issue is the core of the “new” Atheist arguments about religion; it is also its primary failing. Blaming religion is a perfectly normal jerk reaction to (supposedly) religious acts of violence, but the only justification for the argument is being able to say that religion cannot do otherwise. (That’s what necessity entails, and that’s also why its so useful to understand the all-encompassing potency of necessary statements.) As such, Dawkins—et al—have set out to prove that religion is inherently evil; that either directly or by implication, religion and religious people cannot do otherwise. So they apply a reductive logic to the situation; also to make empirical arguments about religion somehow binding (rates of immorality by religious folks, and such like).  Hence Dawkins’ obsessive focus on naturalizing religion as some arcane genetic defect or eugenic shortcoming.  However, even if parts of certain contemporay arguments are relevant (gene/meme arguments), they do not support the broader logic of scapegoating religion when religion is just a small part of an incredibly broad spectrum of factors influencing behavior. I find it startling that an otherwise keen scientist like Dawkins would assert that something as empirically indescribable and incoherent as “religion” can be applied as some static variable, at least not without realizing that doing so inevitably foregrounds ones own biases and preconceptions.

But I get the feeling that even Dawkins must have realized just how overly simplistic and outwardly bigoted the resulting argument ends up being, especially right around your chapter seven.  For these sort of reductive arguments to work, they must take an incredibly complex thing like religion and turn it into some occult myth; ignoring, of course, that the same arguments can be leveled against what Dawkins is doing, and also against the elevated definition of “pure science” from which he argues. Likewise, they have to hypostatize belief and action, pretending that religious belief/scripture is mechanically prescriptive and completely indistinct from personal action. Dawkins’ idea that we don’t get our morals directly from scripture is an excellent example of this hyper-reductive mentality of reifying your opponent’s positions in order to make your own look comparatively better, and therefore right by default (the burden of proof fallacy). I’m not religious and I could very quickly make the argument that scripture, or the religious institution in general, is not literally prescriptive. Of course it’s not; it is only one component, one voice amongst a community of fluid interactions involving a religious individual’s family, peers, traditions, spiritual authorities, etc. Say, if a car doesn’t run, you don’t just check the gas—you inspect the engine as a whole, the dialectical set of relations that transforms the gas into complex motion. But if Dawkins’ only notion of literary interpretation is that of some direct causeway between actions, I’ll gladly push my car to the next mechanic.

So if Ch. 7 truly says that, it is absolutely leaning toward a necessary argument in order to assert the strength of one, then subsequently scurrying from the burden of proof of the “cannot be/do otherwise” clause. It’s a recurrent pattern with these authors. Overall, I think it is incredibly negative because they forgo the inconsistency of their positions in order to unilaterally assert an argument belittling a specific group.  It is an ironically anti-existential act of bad faith on behalf of a bunch of dudes who seem to have skipped the whole era of philosophers like Sartre, Camus, or Merleau-Ponty.  That society as a whole somehow legitimizes these sorts of arguments shows how little we interpret ourselves through the prism of social contract, the “golden rule” of democratic social politics.

So are there still adequate reasons for being an Atheist or exploring Atheism and Atheist-related positions? Absolutely. But anymore, the endeavour seems to run precisely opposite the direction of this public “new” Atheism; its most vocal advocates are also its primary obstacle.  Necessity and hypostatisation: that bad juju, as an Army instructor of mine used to say.”

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Does Torture Work? A Brief Consideration of American Nihilism Thursday, Apr 23 2009

Does Torture Work?

A Brief Consideration of American Nihilism

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“This is why, in the end, the greatest victims of torture-as-usual are the rest of us, the informed public. A precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.”

Slavoj Zizek, Knight of the Living Dead

“And beyond this distribution of roles operates a theoretical disavowal: do not imagine that the sentences that we judges pass is activated by a desire to punish; they are intended to correct, reclaim, ‘cure’; a technique of improvement represses, in the penalty, the strict expiation of evil-doing, and relieves the magistrates of the demeaning task of punishing… One no longer touched the body, or at least as little as possible, and then only to reach something other than the body itself… There is no physical confrontation; the executioner need be no more than a meticulous watchmaker.”

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

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Does torture work? The question, many vocally assert, is incredibly topical and important. It requires evidence of positive and negative outcomes, and their subsequent comparison. Subtractions, additions, balances, and other neatly mathematical reductions of physical violence committed against sovereign citizens. Witnesses must be summoned, subpoenas issued, diagrams and demonstrations prepared, the snapping of photographs and lots of the necessary theatrical posturing and the authoritative pounding of gavels resonating into the nameless dark enveloping the lost and sordid reality of the members of this discourse.

Does torture work? I am asked. Images coongeal in my mind from the introduction of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: Damiens, a man accused and convicted of parricide—the murder of a clergyman—sentenced to amende honorable: to be publicly displayed on a specially-constructed scaffolding, to have the “flesh torn from his breast, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand…burnt away with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the wind.”  But his torture and subsequent execution do not go according to the inherent schadenfreude of such tidy plans.  The body does not so easily succumb to the state’s punitive contrivances. It turns out, it is not so effortless to tear flesh from the body, to dissolve appendages with sulphur, nor lastly, to draw and quarter human bodies with anything less than a dozen packhorses and an axe for hacking apart those stubborn joint fibers. Subsequently, for the sake of public appeasement and legal spectacle, the “patient” (as Damiens is addressed) endures this ordeal and all its technical frustrations late into the night, strangely silent but for a few pleas to his god, until finally his torso is cast into the flames, reportedly still alive, his jaw moving and lolling in mock speech.  The intended narrative is ultimately inverted; the main character is the public and its satisfaction, the mold of “the patient’s” fate—our fate.

Does torture work? What is interesting about the question is its Orwellian, stealthy play of language: the question cannot be asserted without the prior acceptance of the legitimacy of torture as such.  That is precisely its intent, after all.  Its admittance to analysis automatically defaults any answer to the realm of calculation and reduction to political or nationalistic efficiency. Likewise, after centuries in exile, it represents the return of state-sanctioned violence to the arena of public spectacle and banal cable discussion. Can anyone ask such a question without revoking their claim to any position of moral authority? It is doubtful. What does it say about our society, that these sorts of framed questions hone our notions of identity, of our actions, and ultimately of our willingness to commit or rationalize atrocities? To me it says, once again, stay the far away from your fellow man: he will sell your life for a pair of boots to get him down the road a mile or two, just for some illusory peace of mind.

Does torture work? Does ipecac work? The discussion of torture’s “effectiveness,” its reduction to some utterly perverse utilitarianism, reflects the apathetic desertion of acts which we (collectively) view as morally sacred: “this we will not do, under condition of ceding our moral identity.” I side fully with Zizek, such that “those who refuse to advocate torture outright but still accept it as a legitimate topic of debate are more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it.”  Those who legitimize torture as a topic of debate are the truly morally reprehensible actors in this debate—republicans and democrats alike. If I could not personally torture another human being, then I would be a hypocrite for advocating it; and if I could torture another human being, then I would lack the moral capacity to perform my duties as a responsible democratic citizen. The mere discussion of the subject, its admittance to discourse as a legitimate and worthy topic of debate, in a metaphysical sense this act alone may likely be more reprehensible in magnitude than the actual act of torture itself.

Does torture work? Should straight jackets be issued to the participants of this “debate”? To those who presently influence and control discussion in this country?  There is no such thing as a democratic debate regarding the effectiveness of torture as a course of action. The two are mutually exclusive. The concern is the debate itself; as Foucault might argue, therein lays the ultimate origin of it, and all acts of evil: its acceptance as a possible course of action, and the cultural projections underlying such an amoral and unilateral assertion.

Does torture work? They should all hope that hell has blogs.  But, one sees little to indicate otherwise.

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BRACE YOURSELF, SEATTLE: The Atheists Cometh With a Vengeful Tolerance, and That Right Quick! Wednesday, Apr 1 2009

CAPITAL LETTERS AND E-TUBES NEWSITORIALISM!

BRACE YOURSELF, SEATTLE!

The Atheists Cometh With a Vengeful Tolerance, and That Right Quick!

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“‘Tis the bane that gives them out: these Atheists become utterly ineffectual when called upon to articulate any particular view without citing religion in some way.”

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For those of you not in-the-know, the Seattle area Atheists—those sorrowful martyrs we’ve recently witnessed being bludgeoned in the streets, pillaged of their right to free exercise, and harried from their modest hovels as doctors and lawyers and professors and journalists and unassailable social engineers—are at it again, this time with a bus advertisement campaign intended to “put a positive face on atheism” and not in any sort of “militant or anti-religious” manner—you know, in spite of the fact that the sole occasion for the act is overtly anti-religious, negative, overtly militant, and, ultimately, pathetically reactionary.

In speaking with Atheists, it has come to amaze me how many of them once belonged to the very rabid sects of fundamentalist Christianity which they so outwardly abhor. They are eager acolytes of a new faith, readily telling you of their conversion or “deconversion” from Christianity. The leader of the Freedom from Religion Foundation himself, Dan Barker, is an ex-preacher. Paul Case, the president of the Seattle Atheists, was once a self-described “hard-core Christian.” (All I have to say is, LIKE, TOTALLY CROSS-BANGIN DUDE!!!)

Inevitably, these encounters reveal that sober, comprehensive philosophical analyses did not lead these people to become Atheists; instead, passing cultural climes precipitated their direly contradictory political values and their ersatz philosophical views. Rather than logical argument, it seems their “atheism” is based solely on yet another tired, messianic narrative of the downtrodden: the binary logic of us-and-them so rampant in the West, and an overbearing smugness with regard to the inherent diversity of democratic opinion.

While the origin of many “new” Atheists’ “atheism” continues to amaze me, what has ceased to amaze me is how few reconciled their fundamentalist attitude toward society, but instead found a new, self-excepting surrogate for their fundamentalism in so-called “new” Atheism. Ask these folks what their priorities are, or what their constitution entails, and they will not say.  Justifiably so. Instead, blame those ignorant Christians, those Islamic radicals, those tolerant hippies: deflect counterargument, defraud history and science, and “default” from asserting your own worldview without the epithets (lest it be subject to the same harsh degree of criticism).

And—Oh!—how the Atheists can make their philosophical sputterings look like feline pirouettes.  ‘Tis the bane that gives them out: these Atheists become utterly ineffectual when called upon to articulate any particular view without citing religion in some way.

Visiting any “new” Atheist and/or “secular humanist” blog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, …….to infinity, and beyond!), one finds little to no discourse on the subject of Atheism, its ethics, its critiques, nor any definition not based on religion; instead, you will discover only the worn-out straw men of religious demagoguery and disaffected zeal. Existentialism? Bad-faith? Ontology? Dasein? Difference? Polysyllabic jargon!  What good are those, when you can just browbeat the slowest prey? Do they never tire of this exercise in ressentiment, this overbearingly oppressive attitude toward society? So long as it sells books and generates web traffic, it seems not.

Your “beliefs” and values are plain to all: credit is dealt not to whom it is due, but to the village atheist that rattles loudest.

So, I hope that offers some introduction to the egalitarian promises of Atheism and its political counterpart, secular humanism. Well done. The security of Western democracy, the assurance of liberal rights, and the plenitude of resources in our society yield to the only cultural agencies to have any transhistorical agency in America: those which amplify the most irrelevant social distinctions to the over-arching pandemonium of weekly shootings, riots, looting, racial conflagrations, prevailing social disequilibrium, and the anthropocentric domination of nature.  Friggin grand.

For any Atheists reading this with any part or endorsement in the advertising goings-on of “new” Atheism, the Seattle Atheists, or the Tacoma Atheists, congratulations. You are currently the hypocritical, unoriginal, philosophy-mocking complaint-fairies of our town, and we’re a town with many to spare. Think you’re a downtrodden minority? Puhleaze. Can’t bear to see another Christian sign? Have your eyes been defiled by your choosing to read them and pay them mind?

While you grow a pair, you can spend your money on better causes—such as going back to school (though not anywhere near the playground).

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III. Diet Atheism: Discourse and The Rhetorical Stratagems of “New” Atheism Thursday, Feb 26 2009

Dan Barker, co-prez Freedom From Religion Foundation and rawesome speaker

“However, the fact that generally the ascetic ideal has meant so much to human beings is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui [horror of a vacuum]. It requires a goal—and it prefers to will nothingness than not to will…  Science is in fact the “most recent and noblest form” of the ascetic ideal. It has no faith in itself, and acts only as a means of self-anesthetization for sufferers (scientists) who do not want to admit that they are such. In its apparent opposition to the ascetic ideal, it has succeeded merely in demolishing the ideal’s ‘outworks, sheathing, play of masks, [...] its temporary solidification, lignification, dogmatization.’ By succeeding in dismantling the claims to the theological importance of man, it has merely come to substitute the self-contempt of man as the ideal of science.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

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III.  Diet Atheism:  Discourse and The Rhetorical Stratagems of “New” Atheism

Cherry-picking and Mutually Assured Ignorance

Last year I had the pleasure of seeing Dan Barker debate an over-matched local pastor on the question, “Which is a better worldview, Atheism or Religion?” (The following week, “Hyperbolic false dilemmas: American past-time or second Holocaust?”) An ex-preacher, Dan is a wily orator and a witty entertainer. Gods spare me ever to stand before such a one-sided crowd arguing for either side of such a polarizing topic—honestly. Adding to Mr. Barker’s skills as a speaker, the majority of the crowd was not students, but mostly ultra-conservative members of the local megachurch, “Living Faith Fellowship” (Drive-thru/live-action Nativity scene, anyone? Does McJesus get any better than that?!?  Sorry, I lived there four years—it’s a twitch).

But they covered very little ground, and none of Barker’s points had any philosophical validity in the realm of Existentialism, Deconstruction, Marxism, or other strongly Atheist perspectives. Instead, Barker traversed the usual territory of debunking myths about Atheism and contradicting the coherence of the Bible by “brow-beating Leviticus,” as James Wood described the cliché. His interpretations (they were many) of Atheism only resembled its uniquely American formulation as merely a “virtue of selfishness” anti-religion catharsis.  There was nothing affirmative, there was no coherent understanding of what Atheism could be or the ethics it might entail. Instead, Barker had given his audience exactly what they’d wanted: the pre-existing, negative artifice in the minds of so many pseudo-Christian, neo-conservative nihilists.

Granted, this was the fault of audience expectations rather than Barker’s refutation, and he did a fair job pointing out the positive attributes of an Atheistic lifestyle (or, its “selling” points in a purely American, consumerist context). I even had one of the most surreal experiences of my young democratic life, when I was the only one in an auditorium of some thousand people to stand and applaud Barker’s endorsement of gay marriage. It was something like a Norman Rockwell scene, only far less heroic than terrifying to stand amidst others who actually believe there is a patriotic fiber woven into the deranged, anti-pluralistic software of their minds.  However, Barker’s descriptions only amounted to reflect that Atheism has become outdated as part or whole of any philosophical perspective, and that it is currently undergoing a transformation into a purely social, political, or cultural movement stuffed with loose ends and hasty logic.

Less than half way through these Sixty Minutes Hate, I started to look around the auditorium: a Platonic cave filled with a thousand red-eyed prophets of gloom, pens and paper in their hands as if their deity should suddenly reveal to them an answer—The Answer!—to Barker’s claims.  Hundreds of pens arrested over those sheets of paper and the interceding air denser than granite, portending words that—God save their longing—would not reveal themselves from any whirlwind that they might contradict another puppet in the dumb-show of life.  Nothing happened but what was purposed to happen: to sit and grind on one another’s convictions and to leave a little worse than before.  It was just sad.

Then I finally realized that the occasion to come to such events was never to become informed, or to engage in civil dialogue—anything but. There was no conduit of exchange or mediation; no interest in creating common articles for dialogue, only their slow strangulation by bipolar cultural logic.  It felt the way an attorney must feel between two smoldering spouses, whose mutual bitterness is their only resolution: mundane, yet continually strange.  C’est la vie. The occasion to attend these spectacles was to not to examine new possibilities, but only to reinforce pre-existing beliefs; or, to ritualistically reinforce for oneself that one was indeed reinforcing truths which used to be true, if they’d now scuttled past the horizon. Like a Samuel Beckett narrative: ad infinitum, reinforcing that one had reinforced a prior reinforcement reinforcing the reinforcement… If that is the manner in which one looks for truth, how to ever find it? If “truth” is predicated on prior truth-statements which are obviously guided by nothing more than institutions of power (”A exists”; “A does not exist”), then don’t such prior interests preclude one’s opinions (and they are, purely opinions) from having any forum anyway?

But I think the concealment of these underlying issues is a fault for which “New” Atheists are as responsible as the most rabid exceptionalists of American Evangelicalism and McReligion. The context of the discourse contradicts dialogue; it prevents it before it even has a chance—nipped in the bud. Debate? What debate? I witnessed a childish altercation cloaked in false propriety. And the contrarian, snarky attitude of “New” Atheists only forms a self-fulfilling stereotype of negativity on behalf of other (frankly, legitimate) Atheists. So thanks for that, jackasses. Honestly, if a person does not understand this, they have no public claim to represent Atheism in the public sphere. So-called “New” Atheists are unlicensed contractors, and their work is just as shoddy, truant, and, ultimately, regressive.

*

So here’s what I believe frames the rhetorical stratagems of “New” Atheism:

1) Presume you are only debating an American fundamentalist Christian audience; if they are not, characterize them as such. (Binary cultural logic)

2) Make no appeals to the wider democratic and philosophical context in which you have to answer for your claims, because you haven’t considered that whatsoever.  In every case so far, speaking with self-identified Atheists and asking them to account for their philosophical views only leads to frustration and backlash against the questions.  Two things immediately become apparent:

(A) a total lack of experience or formal knowledge of philosophy or religion

(B) A willingness to over-represent or (regrettably) lie outright about one’s philosophical credentials.

[2/28: one excellent example of this and probably the rest of these points; moreso the comments than anything]

[3/2: And one more here, on Daniel Florien's daily dose of demogoguery and ressentiment]

3) March out the usual straw men and tired anti-religious demagoguery to take the focus off the inherent flaws of your position; focus on shifting the burden to Christians like a big brother who won’t do his chores, or a child needling defenseless animals.

4) Appeal to equivocating definitions of “Atheism”:

-First, argue from strong Atheism/Pure Physicalism to debunk rote Christian claims (literal interpretations of the Bible, intelligent design, theistic rationalism, etc.)
-When the burden shifts back to you, dangle out anti-religious epithets (in an anonymous internet context) or shift to weak Atheist/Agnostic definitions of Atheism.
-Repeat, loosely shifting from Agnostic-Skepticism and Strong Atheism/Physicalism without drawing attention to the difference and the enormous gulf between the two, a gulf which happens also to dwarf that between Atheism and Theism.

5) Keep dancing; debate is entertainment afterall, not informed, uh, de—bay—t.

6) If anything asks you what substitute organizing institution you would suggest for the huge religious strata of society—the Hegelian collective spirit—spout off some loosely libertarian crap about individualism and unlimited personal freedom. Americans eat that shit right up.

*

“Just” Desserts: How I “stopped worrying” and learned to love “new” Atheism

Barker’s diatribe against religion was based mostly on the argument that if taken literally, the Bible is inherently contradictory and inconsistent—which really represents his own lacking knowledge of interpretive paradigms, but that’s a separate subject. By recognizing such contradictions and inconsistencies, he was merely setting himself up for the usual argument that Christians cherry-pick scripture according to the whims and desires of their sectarian ideology. But when asked what ethical or moral view of the world Atheism offers, Barker faltered and only cherry-picked from the heterodoxical and varied nature of Atheism (via 4, above). There is no universal form of Atheism, but obviously Barker—an ex-minister/ex-Christian himself—is still employing the universalizing and colonizing strategies of Christianity. In the end, the only consistent ethical view was the usual assumption-laden “new” Atheist view that religion is no longer necessary for deriving ethical imperatives: the sentiment of “common sense” modern/technological ethics, the ethics of “C’mon—we don’t have a coherent alternative view, but we don’t need one because people act sufficiently moral according to other cultural factors.”

My response: what the douche? Once again, Barker—still somewhat the Christian—demonstrated, in the honest form of bourgeois, colonial “new” Atheism, and in accordance with defenders of a pre-Nietzsche project of Enlightenment humanism, that there are perfectly good non-theistic grounds for being moral. Naturally.  The lack of sufficient evidence of a purely Atheist or purely Theist view, in my opinion, presupposes that our values come from elsewhere in a significantly, though not exclusively, utilitarian fashion. But without succumbing to any of the assumptions that only theism provides such a unified moral system, the assumption behind Barker’s formulation of the view is terrifying: submit moral imperatives to a culture of abiding nihilism, let late capitalism and other ideological apparatuses sort out the imperatives for us. Kafka? Orwell? Camus? I guess you’ll be wanting your books back.  Big Brother corporatocracy just found his new host.

Forget morality with a capital “M”—leave that to the awkward, ersatz, pseudo-enlightenment, postmodern lesson in groupthink indoctrination project of “secular humanism.” I mean, we all just know our imperatives, right?  Good is self-evident, eh?  I mean, who needs to give people an inward understanding of why killing is bad, when you can just expediently murder them through the legal system?  Who needs cultural education and collective autonomy when Sam Harris can just torture those cultures into submission like a good little colonial Western sadist?   Who needs paradigms of internal constraint when you’ve got external coercion at the finger tips of every state apparatus and a passive, complacent electorate to submit to them? After all, education and skeptical inquiry is the extraneous province of elitist prudes—I meen, c’maw.  Ah, how wonderfully humanist!

This is the same ethics-of-the-void of the new Atheist bus-billboard campaign in Britain:

“There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

While most folks obsessed over the weakness of the “probably” clause (they had to say “probably” or the ad agency could not run the ad), I’m more interested in the poorly disguised voice of a passive aggressive and unqualified parent: “Now stop ___ and do ____.” Really? “Now” is the operative argument? These billboards reflect the browbeating of postmodern propaganda to the worse degree possible; the intention is purely for effect; for the buzz, the cultural spectacle, and aggregate market returns. The syntactical meaning of the actual phrases on the billboard doesn’t inform or advise—it doesn’t even make a logical argument—it simply unilaterally directs people t—WE’RE RIGHT NOW  FUCKING STOP FUCKING WORRYING. Okay! Jeez—I’m not worrying.  Well, I’m worried that I may not be worrying.  Or that I am, or—just please don’t hit me!

But the marketing aesthetics of the billboards are separate from what really concerns me: “now” is the designer’s substitution for “just.” “Just stop worrying.” Just? It is the same lackadaisical attitude of Barker’s ethics of mechanization distilled into a marketing ploy: just do X.  Don’t ask why, and never mind that we don’t have a logical argument.  Rely on automatic dispensation. Ah, the ethics of presumption return for their flesh-bounty: the human heart and independent subjectivity. The just-ification? “Enjoy your life,” i.e., an awkward red-herring of nihilistic hedonism. Wow. Honestly? That’s how you incompetent jerks expect people to respect your views, by co-optively cauterizing any alternative view, and imposing nihilism as the viable replacement for “old, rationalist dogma” of which you are the very best example? Well, sieg-fucking-heil, Dawkins. *Kneels* Noble Caesar! May I kiss thy hand, that you spare me?

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II. Diet Atheism: “New” Atheism Bullet -Pointed, -Riddled Tuesday, Feb 24 2009

Black is white, white is black... and still no toilet paper. A. Rodin's 'The Shitter,' 1902.

This brand of public atheism is very good at the necessary disrespecting of religion, and it has a properly hygienic function. But how worthy of respect is it itself? The problem is that its bright certainty about the utter silliness of religion leads very quickly away from philosophy and argument.

James Wood, teasing himself into thinking that he’s cool and/or relevant

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II.  The Metaphysics of “New” Atheism: New Atheist Fallacies Bullet -Pointed, -Riddled

Ah, to saddle once more and paint the Ivory Towers red in the electronosphere.

I don’t really mind what James Wood called the “hygienic effect” of “New” Atheism for scrubbing the predominant, exceptional position of Christian Rationalism in our society, and I certainly appreciate anything which energizes cultural dialogue. But the real question is whether or not “New” Atheism co-optively prevents the dialogue it supposedly opens. When you begin calling yourself “the brights,” it can only be taken ironically for a reactionary cultural entity which has ceded nearly any coherent philosophical basis for the sake of “opposing Christian dogma,” and other such grandstanding.

Without further adieu, and because later parts of this critique depend on it, I have distilled “New” Atheist arguments (doctrinal/ideological beliefs) to their most recurrent aesthetics:

1) A reactionary and purely cultural entity that cathartically points out the “inherent” wrongs of religion, poses a false dilemma between religion and Atheism, but refuses to offer an alternative of its own.

A belief system which…

2) Is for jagoffs and pseudo-philosophers—mostly petty, bourgeois, hyper-judgmental, colonial, white intellectuals—who don’t know the meaning of the word “bad-faith.”  But I get it, they are the exception to their morals since so is everyone else on the playground—long live antinomianism!  Long live Robespierre! Long live Condorcet! Er…what became of them again?

3) Hyperbolically posits religion and religious modes of life are exclusively, necessarily bad (such that they cannot act otherwise, save for “exceptions”).

4) Asserts Physicalist/Materialist arguments and the utility of scientific reduction as a viable alternative to religious thought; never mind the whole of sociology, history, psychology, Marxism/post-Marxism, feminism…

5) Often referring to things like “logic” and “science” as mythical totalities with unlimited applications; despite that such views are fatally limited to the virtual sphere of human knowledge from which they originate and beyond which they cannot grasp, and that anyone with any knowledge of the philosophical or scientific problems of the last 150 years knows to be blatantly, even maliciously misconstrued.

6) Conflates religion and belief; when in fact, most people attend church not because of a philosophical position, but because of the communities they create.

6*) Sub-fallacy: The conflation of religion and belief is a reflection of the absolutist cultural fallacy that people and ideas are somehow inseparable; that one’s ideas necessarily drive one’s actions, which is unprovable and intellectually retarded.  More so, it reflects the thinking of an ideological drone who cannot make the self-reflective distinction between ontological reality and ideas.

7) For folks who don’t understand all or most of the following: the problems of philosophy of the mind, pluralism, indeterminism, entropy, irreversibility, the limits of scientific reduction, the utilitarian and exclusively processual nature of scientific apparatuses, relativism, postmodern relativism, deconstruction, quantum mechanics, particle physics…

8) For folks who presuppose the existence of a quasi-religious “Theory of Everything.” All well and good that such a physical Theory may “inevitably” be discovered (I smell a teleological rat!); unfortunately for “new” Atheists, prior to its provability it is just as mythical and characteristically “universalizing” as belief in any deity.

9) Unilaterally ignores the inherent pluralism and ethics imposed by an Atheistic worldview: If there is no God, no external organizing agency, then each person is responsible for and known only to him or herself.  How a person, group, or political movement can claim to publicly represent Atheism—via billboards, group blogs, protests, etc.—has successfully proven they have no understanding about philosophical Atheism or its history.  “Atheist group” is an oxymoron.  Likewise, how any such “responsible” individuals can delegate that responsibility to the religious through smug prejudices and transparent bigotry is equally absurd.  Good riddance.

*

There was a recent scholarship essay contest at my alma mater which posed the question:

“In An Introduction to Metaphysics, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger argues that religion, since it presumes to have absolute answers to the ‘ultimate’ questions of existence and the cosmos, is fundamentally at odds with philosophy. Do you agree that a philosopher cannot be religious?”

The question is an interesting one. Sparing some interesting but high-altitude arguments from postmodern pluralism and process philosophy, it is an arduous hike to counter-argue Heidegger’s position. At face value I agree with it, as (most) religions make ‘things’ of an irreducible universe; good becomes angels and animating agencies, evil becomes demons and tricksters, and all is organized within absurd heirarchies to explain the inner workings of the universe. While it is a straw-man to say all religions are so superstitious, theologians rely on prior truths about how the world is structured—how it all “works”—which contradicts the existence of anything outside such prior truths, and precludes or denies the empirical introduction of new evidence to the contrary. They make an objective “thing” of Being (manifold, irreducible, and only local in our experience in-time), and pollute ultimate questions with assertions lacking evidence (Hell, Heaven, God, etc.) or are invalid and/or unprovable (omnipotence, omniscience, teleology, etc.).

But since a philosopher cannot be religious, and if religion and philosophy are mutually exclusive of one another, does that mean a philosopher must be an Atheist? Absolutely not, as Atheism is merely the reflection of religion, both philosophically and as a cultural receptacle for oppositional ideology. The Strong Atheism of physicalists and materialists (”There is no God, and we can know that it is such and cannot be otherwise”) makes a universal, all-encompassing statement which (for lack of evidence and the unprovable nature of such an all-encompassing claim) is itself a prior, faith-based truth that contradicts Heidegger as well. In the absence of evidence, even if indeed it is merely pending evidence of an exclusively physical/material worldview, the position that there is no God is as much a Kierkegaardian leap-of-faith as Theist views that there is; in fact it may even be worse because it does not support or engender any coherent ethical system. As such, Atheist views must be formally dismissed because they are reliant on beliefs and prior truths which are only loosely contingent to a mostly incoherent logical system and an incomplete worldview: absence of evidence of a thing does not constitute evidence of absence, which itself only applies if God is incorrectly interpreted as a “thing” of human manifestation and temporality.

So if Atheists are wrong and Theists are wrong because of their deterministic impositions, and likewise their oppositionally-leveraged ressentiment, then who is right? I think it’s time we accept that the question is continually open, and that the public claim to the certitudes of absolute “rightness” absolutely precludes its possibility. Amidst continually variable, contingent, and arguable conditions, civil and free discourse is the only sufficient means of addressing (and not overcoming, mind you) collective and individual conditions.

Moreover, we should note that the question of whether or not “new” Atheism or classical Theism are either 1) “right” or 2) sustainable models of the world—the question presupposes that neither is currently the case as universally-binding conditions, nor that they ever were.  We are already not dealing with truth of the pre-existent, but of representative interpretations and reinterpretations.  Atheists like to point to the Inquisition as evidence of the evils of religion, while Theists like to point out atrocities committed (albeit, very loosely) under the banner of “Marxist-Atheism,” French Revolutionary zeal,  or other “secular” regimes; both accusations bear the assumption that the ideology of whatever group of people was what committed the atrocities at-hand, and not the people themselves who were truly to blame.  Their historical circumstances were certainly mitigating factors; but it is a leap-of-faith to claim that they were the only factors without ceding one’s own historical position to the very same notion, and without giving up the purely egotistical prominence from which “new” Atheists claim witness in order to judge such matters so efficiently.  Only extremely ideological people could make such assumptions of their own retrospective authority, as they do so only as a groundwork for substituting their own stealth ideology.  This political action is what forces their inevitable conflation of people and ideas/beliefs and all ensuing reifications and hypostatisations.

Further, the presupposition that neither worldview is the case as a universally-binding condition begs a certain question: if neither position—Atheism or Theism—is what sustains the social order of the human world, then what does?  Prior cognitive concepts of the soul or genetic/biological predispositions toward social behavior and altruism?  Absolute moral authorities, or a sum-of-parts heterodoxical cultural, political, or legal force?  If Atheism or Theism are merely arbitrary ideas without necessary bearing on one’s actions—with only a tenuous relationship between one’s moral actions and one’s ideas—then from what or where does moral behavior arise in its individual or collective order and its self-organization?  Can we even know?  Does the question disguise assumptions of its own?  Does morality even have a quantifiable calculus in its own domain, let alone a physical mode?  Do we need to know, except to contradict that we may act morally and in a civil manner toward one another, by necessarily assuming the fallacy that ideas and people are indistinct as a condition of such a discourse, and categorically dividing people into -isms and ideological categories?  Does either view do anything except to contradict and prevent moral behavior, thereby?  As such, is “new” Atheism anything but merely the reverse image of religious certitude?  Uh-oh, here come the Catch-22’s…

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I. Diet Atheism: Is “New” Atheism Either? Tuesday, Feb 17 2009

*Few of us “radical” skeptics care for philosophical debates which are far less philosophical, and far more the sparring of ego’s and the clashing of dehumanizingly totalizing institutions of power. Want moral knowledge? Frankly, you have already failed by seeking to find it in a “new” Atheist/Theist debate. Despite my nausea, I owe it to fulfill a promise to write a critique of the purely cultural phenomenon called “new Atheism.” Like any of my writing endeavors, I expect it to be an ever-expanding and overly comprehensive topic, so bear with the inevitable loose ends, jabs, anecdotal digressions, and my uncondensed mode of writing. My interest is to interrogate “new” Atheists as much as possible, but not without answering for my claims against those who seemed to stop questioning themselves the moment they took up such blatantly false and mythic notions of the “completion” of scientific positivism and their vehement—and outright offensive—repudiation of other views.

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I.  Initial Thoughts: Names, Identity, and Possibility

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either/Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities…

For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities…

-John Dewey, Experience and Education

I attended school in one of the most conservative regions of the country during the most irrational, reckless, hyper-conservative governmental regime in modern history. If the place got any redder, blood geysers would have boiled up from the sewer man-holes like a bad Steven King movie. And in light of the almost daily proselytizing by apocalyptic, homophobic Christians on the university mall, and the almost daily theocratic editorials of the worst college newspaper in the nation, it was a spectacle one would be foolhardy to deny. The lesson of my school experiences: if we are a democracy, it is a plurality of screaming, resentful, sensationalist contrarians amongst whom only the least flawed view prevails. (Though on the other hand, undergraduate level schools have been systematically converted into playgrounds for young, entitled, white suburbanites—but, that’s a peripheral issue.) The current stimulus debate is only the latest reinvention of a perennial human problem: amidst circumstances of imminent danger, there are those who cling to narcissistic soliloquy aboard a sinking ship—what is it with humans and mirrors?

So welcome to the 21st century, the dream of our grandfathers and theirs before them, a thousand generations.  The most irritating thing about America in the year of our Lady Time, 2009, is the prevailing shrillness in our culture. When you ask most folks basic questions, not even the complex or polarizing ones, you will receive a cookie-cutter answer deployed by a handful of ideological power monopolies: abortion is murder but sending soldier’s to die in blatantly unjust wars is the will of their deity, the environment is an obstruction, and self-reflection is the ultimate existential threat; or, chemical-laden hybrid automobiles will save the Earth instead of changing behavior, Republicans are evil (a tautology?), democrats and minorities are blameless messiah’s, people give a shit about your humorless bumpersticker politics, and so on. History is dead, the continuum of time is the distance-rate between shopping malls, and cognition is virtually absent as anything but an occasional and punctuated process—I mean, we’ve got institutional and technological apparatuses to think for us, right? We’ve got collective ressentiment to leverage identities which otherwise we would not have, eh? Honestly, marketers must absolutely drool over the passivity of our cultural engineering. Welcome!  Coffee table Atheist book, anyone?

One of the funniest things about not giving a shit in America is being able to see the simplistic insularity of American modes of identity. Your identity is shaped, controlled, and informed by C-movies, the prescription drugs you inhale, the kind of car you drive, your music, your religious/anti-religious creed, where your house has been arbitrarily located by economic disparity, what party you vote for, and how well you keep up in utterly perverse conversations about the most recent shooting and other incidents of mass violence and cultural hysteria. Not a drop of ink is spilled over whether our problems are not born from their expectation, if not simply from boredom. Gnomes like myself can only sigh as we descend from the mountains back into the city, where even the examination of the natural world leads to its substitution with the mythic totalities of religion and science alike.

What is simplistic about the modes of American identity-states is that most folks fail to realize that their numerous identity oppositions are not part of the same whole. Whether you’re a democrat or a republican is ultimately irrelevant, contextual, and usually a completely unexamined pastiche of high school experiences, labor conditioning, and cultural iconography. Most folks are only such—”D” or “R”—because of some red-eyed political analyst of yore data-mining metrical data at two a.m. the night before a pivotal election—and, to the victor goes the moral vindication? (Or, the “moral vindication” of a few hundred votes and a miniscule fraction of the electorate, an emerging electoral phenomenon.) And yet such miniscule and arbitrary markers—”D” or “R,” white or black, carhartteer or whole-foods freak—codify entire modes of being; inescapable social identifications which articulate the entire spectrum of one’s being.  Interdependence between such oppositions?  Mutual “others”?  Preposterous!

For most folks, political or social identification has less to do with any manner of coherent philosophical view than with the continual reaffirmation and entrenchment of prior modes of identification. Elections are not won by thoughtful argument, but through market saturation, data-mining psychometric data, icon-narratives, and disinformation campaigns. In the relative world of movement politics, you’re a democrat or republican because you have repeated it to yourself so many times, have argued insignificant issues to their uttermost end so many times that they become the scope of your familiarity with anything else, but that very familiarity is what makes the world intelligible. I, a far-left Democrat, actually believe that—hold your butts—certain socially conservative ideas are fundamentally valid and necessary, albeit if their messenger is a tad off its meds. But I succumb to my libertarian impulse and fully contend that the partisan debate in America is defined primarily by a pathology of small differences. It is not grand differences that matter, but the fact that self-pitying lefties and righties are so much the same that they act so indignantly toward one another.  And thus, in a general way: one’s identity is predicated on issues and events with which we have only a tenuous or miniscule involvement; we are merely configurations of arbitrary identity markers: a vertical integration of inherited beliefs and practices, and a horizontal integration of our limited available experience.* Reality transcends our knowledge of it at every step, yet society demands us to stand for absolutes which have neither referent nor antecedent.

What’s this to do with New Atheism, you ask? We’ll get there, but you ought to be able to see the parallels between the totalizing, anti-philosophical hazards of identity and the abduction of Atheistic thought by a purely cultural mode of identity and wedge-politics. I’m drawing you into a world—not “the” world mind your prejudices, only “a” sketch among other sketches.

*In reference to social identification as interpreted through virtual/collective institutions, without excluding the common definition of “identity” in its personal, peer-to-peer subjectivity.

*

American culture abhors a vacuum. Despised are those who peer behind the curtain at the structure underlying fates which are perceived as destiny. Bits of information are but passive truths; the sky is blue without argument. But in America, the sky being blue is an opportunity for contention, a site for pitting ourselves against one another in semi-metaphorical combat. This pitting of ourselves against one another serves only to pit us collectively against the real, the things which evidence does not allow us to deny—the sun also rises.  The sky remains blue, but not so if we turn from it to argue the fact with one another: whose blue? what blue? In a sense, the sky ceases to be blue when we give blatantly false views (”the sky is purple”) a franchise within the discourse—and who among us would argue that media-driven American lobbyistocracy is anything but just such a collection of lunatic franchises?  (Last sentence brought to you by our friends at Exxon-Mobil.) Who can argue that mediocrity is not the built-in ceiling of our current political system and its surrounding cultural mode?

Yet, Americans of every political persuasion argue their views as if they are essential truth, even scripture. I qualify as a far-left democrat, even a “communist,” but I am fully aware of the ambiguities and contradictions upon which folks—right AND left—only pile more certainty. Certainty, stagnant certainty; everyone’s got it, and no one knows why or even what it’s for.  An asteroid might strike the Earth tomorrow, engulf the world in a firestorm routing out every last record of organic existence—but hey, at least we’ve got our certainty!  Meanwhile, back in the real: the sun rises anew in a sky that is still blue, God is dead (…when convenient), we go to wars with prior motives and without really knowing why, and that guy who murdered a dozen or so shoppers at a mall last weekend in Somewhere, Texarkanatah is just an inner manifestation of our inner consumer angst; he (and always he) is a manifestation of a collective expectation that the past is the only world, and that there is no alternative. Nature abhors a vacuum; the circus goes on:

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is… a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. / The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part what exists in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among the others.

-Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

All this describes the current of American society at a moment in time that is universal, but also very particular. The failure of old dogmas has become an unfertile and unstable ground for regeneration. The post-election warmth in America is really a street-bonfire of playbooks—that pungent tingle of singed pin-stripes is the putrid odor of financial journalists jumping in headlong in a last-ditch attempt to recover their careers. The problem which so many fail to realize is that the instantiations of old dogma themselves have failed considerably, if not entirely, and prevent the kind of cyclical regeneration that has occurred for the last half century. Naturally, conservative views are virtually without a referent; their hegemony is collapsing under its contradictions—you cannot straddle the politics of the industrial ultra-rich and the implicitly racist politics of regional rubes forever. At some point, the whistle is blown. It would just be nice if it wasn’t blown only after millions of people had been injured by an economic model of over-production, entitlement, and self-exemption (Jesus, torture, and tax cuts for everyone! Huzzah!).

In a broader sense, and in reference to rising legal secularist movement within the Democratic Party, the failure of old dogma does not mean the end of dogma. On the contrary, it is that dogma—of a religion, a political ideology, consumerist attitudes, or any organized system of belief—has merely adapted to conceal itself more efficiently. For consumer culture, the product is the humor of self-mocking irony in spite of the will to change the systems structuring and defining one’s world. For the religious, it is the abduction of “postmodern relativist” positions, but the subsequent denial of their logical consequence: rights of pluralism and personal autonomy. Who hasn’t attended some moral or political debate in which the diametrically opposed forces of debate did not end up in a match for the last word? Are such incidents manifestations of the efficacy of their moral imperatives, an example of civil discourse, or can we finally admit that evidently neither has it right, and that there are tertiary issues at hand? And what is worse than evil itself, self-proclaimed and proud, than evils cloaked as good and righteous, regardless of their color? Does the tendency toward “might makes right” illuminate an essential danger in obscuring self-justifying dogma?

Nope.  Religion did it.  And that is all.

As Nietzsche said of ideological interpretations of the world, “Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power not truth.” By proclaiming the non-agency of dogma in the manner of a self-described “secular humanist,” isn’t one merely covering one’s tracks? Isn’t the most efficient form of dogma that which conceals its operations from its adherents, and obtains transparency with those whose experience derives via its lenses? Finally, isn’t the claim that dogma does not exist the very envy of Dogma? Isn’t that its primary provision and end? Isn’t its perceived absence a necessary step toward an automatic dispensation of attributes upon all objective phenomena within its sphere? Hmmm… Guess you can shred your DNC card and cancel your subscription to ‘The Nation.’ It’s two a.m. in postmodern America: do you know where your democratic plurality is?

… It’s unconscious. Dead in a ditch covered in a shower of coupons, spent Blackwater bullet casings, pharmaceutical pamphlets, and advertisements for a new Buick. In thousands of years, the next sentient beings to uncover traces of our brief existence will only find discarded McDonald’s wrappers and the gaping hole in the fossil record denoting the greatest biological mass-extinction in history contrived by its most “intelligent” species to have yet risen by random selection.  Oh wait—there won’t be any such mythical beings, and this is the only chance we’ve got, and yet we are massively fucking things up by treating the problem with more of the problem. So God bless SUV’s and do-it-yourself religion. God bless America; or, man bless God blessing America and blessing blessing beyond its homocentric boundary, and so on in circular fashion, on and on we go, merrily, merrily, merrily… life is but a dream!

*

Rene Magritte, The Treason of Images ("This is not a pipe"), 1929.

I admit, coming from an Irish heritage seems to gives one a fatalistic immunity to the cynicism in those prior statements. But it’s a cynicism pressing a certain point about the danger of names: their perceived reality is mythical, but ultimately controlling. Names become points of actuation in reality for things which have nothing to do with philosophical matters at hand; words themselves are like metaphysical acts of violence. I often work on cars, and one of my most valuable tools is the drift, which is simply a hardened steel cylinder used to drive parts from their settings with a solid whack of the hammer. But “drift” is the old-school name for what is also called a “billet,” “casing,” “rod,” “drive,” “pull,” and so on. And a coaxial name like a “drive” is also an umbrella term for different rotary tools and components, a verb for piloting an automobile, or even a metaphor for the will. A single tool shares a thousand different overlapping names in hundreds of different languages, meaningful only in certain contexts, themselves not static and unchanging but constantly in a process of change and becoming.  Words exist at a continually destabilized border between the chaos and entropy of infinite space, and the domesticating attributes of metaphysical place. Even after years of automotive work, I refuse to use the word “Philips” for a screw-driver; some think it means flat-blade, others four point, and all refuse to back down from the “essentiality” of what they believe “Philips” bestows upon a screwdriver.  They cannot relinquish the domesticity of the name “Philips” for the utilitarian recognition that the name is arbitrary and purely referential.

Each name is merely a descriptive, utilitarian reference to the thing-itself, which is why so many people compensate with novel phrases like “doo-hickie” complimented with a referential grunt or point of the finger, and likewise with generalized torque specs such as the German gewd-n-teit or acronymic condition reports: “F.U.B.A.R.” Names are always in a state of emergence. In actuality, my “drift” is a piston pin from a large-displacement diesel engine. Yet as soon as it was adapted to a new purpose, it metaphysically ceased to be a piston pin, and became a “drift,” with all the ambiguities the name entails.  Its the same object, but in some ways it is actually different.  A new name bestows a new set of possibilities and supplants the old. This is the very reason I respect those who have the creativity to create new names for things within the context that shapes and hones them. As many point out, Shakespeare was as much a playwright as a wordsmith (a few examples: eyeball, doorknob, full-circle…). Even the common words which he used were only chosen because of their localized, contextual, and oral meaning. Likewise, names are completely non-essential and local. They only describe things, and their inherence in actual objects is constructed, equivocal, and ultimately illusory.

However, even if referent and signifier (the real object and its name, respectively) are physically divorced from one another or merely proximate, this does not make names arbitrary. Within the virtual domain of language in which they operate, the value of a name is in its potentiality to resolve the ambiguities of an object (by giving things common, descriptive meanings), but without closing the possibility of new meanings or the inherent potentiality for one thing to become something else all together. The latter clause is important because it allows for the adaptation of names to their surroundings and context, as well as for the creation of new names. Languages are always changing, incomplete, and in-progress in the sense that they hybridize and create new meanings for phenomena which were heretofore undescribed. Blackwater gets bad press, so they change their name to “Xe,” as if the name itself transmogrifies the “essence” behind it into something else—even in full view of everyone?  There’s change we can believe in! Some see this as the failure of language, which really only represents a failure to recognize its coincidence with the nature of our own being-in-time: incomplete, in-progress, changing, and circumstantial.

In the realm of late capitalism, however, the drive to name things meets its most collectively sociopathic end in the form of a hyper-reductive impulse—receiving its full-throated endorsement by “new” Atheist authors—in the belief that all things can be mapped and named in a static, self-contained fashion via scientific reduction. I learned this last New Year’s Eve, in which a futile debate against the nihilism of free-market economics ended up as a discourse on the “nature” of a beer can, and the subsequent angst-filled reaction I was dealt for refusing to see the word “can” as magically bearing the thing itself (believe me, if saying the word “beer” laid a beer in my hand, I would not be writing this right now). These names, and the ideologies which dispense them, close possibilities; anything which assumes their flexibility—namely philosophical discourse—is despised as a dire existential-threat. In the realm of biological science for example, names are dealt in Latinate designations, species and genus, implying the static, hierarchical, and unchanging nature of a given species or genus, and much the same as any level of a taxonomical tree for that matter. The Latinization of real objects presumes a static and hierarchical “universal” language for describing the world; although that world, and its various species of organisms, are in a constant—not incidental—state of change. This is making a straw man out of the goals of biological science for certain, but not in the sense that “new” Atheists abduct the descriptive nature of all sciences not as limited descriptions, but as certitudes that cannot be questioned, except by “superstitious Xians.” In the sense that “new” Atheists and “secular humanists” claim unlimited logic and hyper-rationalist mechanisms as the all-encompassing explanation of the world, they are merely one pole of a hyper-reductive drive to name all things, to rout out all “essences” from the province of social competitors. What you get, inexplicably for a “reaction to the mythical, superstitious explanations of a religion,” is exactly the same thing, merely with opposite attributes: a self-rationalizing, reflexively-universalist system of belief which evades criticism by “naming” its opponents in the form of abundant epithets and scapegoats.

As much as they will deny it, what “new” Atheists and religious fundamentalists share is a mode of thinking which totalizes the world and imbues it with a universalism neither can prove, as yet they have tried again, and again, and again, down through the generations, without resolving to simply live and let live as the prior imperative of one’s life—you know, as MATURE FUCKING ADULTS.  These people are just so many Marlowe’s, harried this way and that trying to put shrink the natural world into a book, the “mind of God” into some equation.  And in so far as they are poles of the same problem, their dialogue is nothing more than the playground *name* calling of children, structured mimetically by this jealous, Lacanian desire for a mythically self-contained apparatus to explain away the phenomena of the world and one’s limited situation in it. Throw in a heavy dose of capitalism in the form of shitty books and transactional social relationships, thereby liquidating all ideas into their free-market exchange value, and suddenly everyone’s identity becomes a coerced outcome on a continuum between two identically-dogmatic poles. Wouldn’t our grandfathers be proud of our plurality?  What would they think of the achievement of a domestic and civil nation squandered in narcissistic infighting and artificial polemicizing?

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What Will Save the Suburbs? Monday, Jan 12 2009

The Man in the Gray Flannel Straight-Jacket...the most realistic suspense film you will never see!

To most folks, this post will have little to no relevance.  And after the lewdity of the other day’s Gran Torino review, I would like to further demonstrate the limited scope of my intellectual and moral capacities by deriding the abundant self-victimization of the recession.

To such an end, I came across a wonderful article in the NY Times, an article that I have waited for all of my adult life:

“What Will Save the Suburbs?”

And the answer:

…Give them that which they give to the world.

The “American suburb” is an oxymoron.  Having grown up on the border of one of the most over-excavated tracts on the crust of the Earth, there’s really only one solution.  To quote Lamma, “Nuke ‘em all!”  Throughout my youth I watched woods plowed and turned into labyrinths of undifferentiated suburban anonymity, subdivisions named after the trees they’d cut down to build them, land stripped and reconstituted with a new form of human being who thinks its patriotic to slap a Chinese-made ribbon magnet on their SUV while pretending they are the organizational moral authority of the country, of which they are the very antithesis—democrat and republican alike.  Instead of growing up among folks with working class ethics and a moral identity, my siblings and I got to go to school with the pomo crowd-culture of McReligion, McPersonality, McPolitics, McDivorce, and McApathy, folks who thought you were a full-blown mechanic if you knew how to change your oil.  Styrene-lined plastic coffins with two foot faux lawns are not the American dream, and they never were, so stop whining.  In nearly every regard, as old as the cliches of suburban culture are, the suburbs of America are the persisting vindication of every last Marxist or Freudian principle in the book, and that’s not such a good thing.  Irrefutably, they are where America goes to die, so it is one or the other, and time to choose…

… But thankfully, it seems the “free” market has chosen for us and opted for their extinction.  Good riddance!  At least we get to save those nukes for the next asteroid movie!  Hooray!

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Gran Torino is a Warm Pile of Pretentious Excrement: The Anatomy of an Eastwood Movie Saturday, Jan 10 2009

LANGUAGE/CONTENT WARNING

*A gentleman’s neutral consideration of the finer points of Clint Eastwood’s new drama, Gran Torino. If you happen to disagree with the author, and took pleasure in the movie, the gentleman would first ask you to shred your voter’s card, absent yourself from human affairs, and promptly cast yourself from the nearest bridge.  Your comments are very much welcomed, but please maintain some measure of common civility and use no fewer than five or six F-bombs to imbue your opinions with their fullest expression, for otherwise the gentleman, being quite illiterate in the manners of modern men, may not apprehend the justification of your views.

Uh… can I help you?

—~—

‘KHoyyyy-TOOO!’ [spitting in his hand and wiping it on his jeans]

‘You know, I don’t care much for movies, but I’ll be the first to admit that lately I’ve seen quite a few.  This places me squarely aboard the fool ship for sorry putz’s who have, of late, been thoroughly exposed to the fact that Hollywood has become indistinguishable from its stereotype as a cesspool of narcissistic drugees, Scientologists, personality cults, and pretentious asses who couldn’t distinguish a good movie from colonoscopy footage.  Yeah, I know—what else is new? Saw the new Ford commercial—I mean, Bond film. Holy genre-confused shit. I also saw Tom Cruise preen like a Nazi in Valkyrie, a real snoozer whose laser-linear “suspense” plot seemed like it was lifted from a poorly written wikipedia article. So for tonight’s latest addition to the compost mound, I went and saw the new Eastwood flick Gran Torino with a half dozen buddies of mine: Scabs, The Tijuana Surprise, and a jolly bundle of open-mouth tallboys. I didn’t think they allowed dogs in movie theatres, because I came out smelling something peculiar, some universally identifiable pungence—in brief, like I’d been rolled in dog shit. But most quickly I was corrected that no, I’d just seen Gran Torino.’

Admittedly, I laughed during parts of the movie, but the last laugh is that it is a horrible piece of racist, revisionist trash. It’s so-called intergenerational insight is a dog barking at its own reflection, and it is about as culturally retarded as seeing Sarah Palin on an American political ticket. It is that movie, the one re-initiating a passive boycott of an artistically bankrupt and self-flattering industry of lunatics, drugees, and college dropouts. It epitomizes the over-rated bullshit that Eastwood is able to fork over to movie-goers who stand in their circle jerk and call art, because, you know, fucking Dirty Harry made it, and stuff. But since words like “racist” are so loaded these days—and often preloaded—hear me out.’

The anatomy of an Eastwood movie:

1. Follow the life, or lives, of primary characters whose only mode of existence is self-pity;
2. Dress up their insecure and overtly racializing self-pity as a positive social model by growling and smoking and generally accounting for every vice of an inwardly self-destructive (and questionably male), self-martyring culture;
3. Don’t have a real plot. Just don’t. Use buzz words like “character-driven” to cover up cliches that top the worst pulp fiction. Your viewers are too fucking insulated to notice anyway;
4. Convince people that remarkably sado-masochistic characters are in fact art, and that others just don’t understand “art” if they don’t get it;
5. Replace any real character progress with a turn of melancholic piano music, throw in some crucifix/Christ symbolism, and kill your main character like a bored 9^th grade Creative Writing student;
6. Sweep up the awards by jerking off the suburban legions of nostalgic American idealism, those gentle folks whose actions have thoroughly and unrelentingly done everything possible to undermine the American democratic legacy, all while reaffirming cartoonishly-portrayed modes of American life and culture which, uh, never really existed;
7. Lastly, cash your checks and repeat, destroying the possibility of original and interesting ideas by imposing overtly Christian horse-shit nursery themes basted in self-importance and mental instability.’

The movie starts with a theme-setting funeral in a church which shows ‘ole Clinty growling as he pans around at his family punching away on their cell phones, twitching in their seats, and giggling as the young ginger priest recites a rote eulogy speech for his deceased wife. Honestly, with very little editing and minor musical adjustments, this scene neatly frames how easily the entire movie could have been converted into the comedy that it should have been.  The subordinate characters—emphasis squarely on subordinate—recited their lines as if Mr. Eastwood had to physically move their jaws for them. And that opening scene is basically the extent of the depth of this movie, which even then is a ridiculously comical framing of the apathy of the younger set compared to the lying greatness of the fuck-me-in-the-deficit-ass “Golden” Generation, to whom we owe it all for the reflexive cultural regression and ignorance of twentieth century “traditional” values, and the ground that the rest of us no-carin’ youngens have to recover just to keep the country from falling to pieces within a generation. Top shelf, fellas. Your social security’s in the mail, never mind that none of your children will ever receive any once you’ve bankrupted it and co-opted the political process with AARP lobbyists who assassinate the character of any politician who would dare utter a word about defusing a national time bomb.  Vote Hoover!’

Then come the epithets, one by one, then by two’s and three’s, until you can hardly even differentiate them from the trademark Clint growls (his name is Walt in the movie, which is irrelevant because everyone knows it’s Clint-Dirty-Harry-High-Plains-Eastwood playing out another stupid narrative fantasy because he has the means, the reputation, and the Academy jizz to get whatever the hell he wants from a gleefully exploitational Hollywood). Seriously. I can’t even describe the extent to which this movie’s racial epithets crossed the line. But its okay, because, its like, nostalgic and stuff, and, you know, everyone at their prime in 1950 must have been Bull Fucking Connor, right? See the Pabst Blue Ribbon? See his classic cars? See Clint take a dip of Red Man and make some over-jawed speech about the war days, the Mainstreet days, of which Clint doesn’t know a goddamn thing?’

From the first growl, I knew this movie was going to simply worsen in its extraordinarily superficial criticism of American superficiality, or some “loss” of traditional values plot scheme, or any other masturbatory neo-conservative bullshit theme glorifying the mythical fifties and the exceptional impunity of the “Golden generation” for leading the country down years of regression and into turmoil from which we will not recover for decades—you know, IF WE EVEN FUCKING DO. But seriously, even half-cocked and in the company of the Bawdy Bunch, I found this movie nauseatingly offensive, and I’m a tolerant motherfucker when it comes to intolerance. You could give the Nazi salute and say you screwed every member of my family, and I’d politely ask if you’d remembered to cover up. In fairness, at first I thought the comical framing of the epithets was supposed to lead to some form of criticism; an intentional elicitation of pleasure from racial slurs in order to implicate the audience themselves and place them squarely within the movie—Some modest form of social commentary to balance out the one-sided (well, blind-sided) stupidity of this movie and its enthusiastically ignorant views of American history over the last eighty years. But once Mr. Eastwood had the crowd warmed up hotter than a Palin rally on Martin Luther King Day, I realized that that was simply not the case.’

Strung end to end, you could ride a bicycle over the celebratory “gooks,” “nips,” and “paddy niggers” written into the script solely to flatter the racial, ethnic, and cultural insecurities of depressed suburban white folk whose definition of existence is accounted for by how much useless symbolic shit they can consume (Gran Torino, anyone?). And of course it’s not the words themselves, but the meaning in the responses which they intentionally elicit.  The exurban Woodinville-Washington crowd of fatass, botoxed, pilled-up weekend soma-addicts guffawed and chuckled, ascending to new levels of socially-masochistic schadenfreude at each new and novel turn of phrase dispensing some innovative way to call someone a “nigger,” or to see ‘ole Whitey Clint assert himself over the neighborhood toughs (none of whom are white, naturally) through superior firepower in the manner of a seventies Charles Bronson C-movie.

Honestly.  I was surprised images of Emmanuel Goldstein didn’t start flashing on the screen. I can’t think of a more vile way to spend an evening than to sit in a theatre and have some old, SUV-driving hack techie nearly blow his load on me while watching Clint Eastwood FUCK TRADITIONAL, CULTURAL DEMOCRATIC VALUES IN THE ASS while portraying himself as their pseudo-individualist vessel—and then screw them again, and again, and again, all so the insecure folks, most of whom just lost a major election, can get off for two hours pleasure while scapegoating the “loss of traditional values,” and not their own utter void of personal or collective responsibility, for the loss of a worldview that is rapidly collapsing upon itself.’

Good goddamn riddance.  You can have your movies, your media, your over-bred labs, your Whole Foods, your passivity, your manufactured realities, and your creeping unhappiness in all its perverted manifestations; and you can have your nostalgic memories of a glorious, opioid American age that never was, and all that goes with it—which is to say, everything you project into another fiction on a television screen.  You—yes, YOU!—can have it all, because the price of democracy, of civil dignity, of knowing one’s neighbors and helping others, of believing in the right to self-determination and the virtue of thrift, of modesty and the charms of an idyllic beauty, has been cheapened to eight fucking dollars and a cocktail of injectable stereotypes. And no less, than by the “conservative” social critics whose public argument is always from self-righteous moral goodness and tradition.

And they have been at it for some time now. Probably since before the end of the “great” wars—and, ah, war, that wonderfully efficient industrial enterprise that allows anonymous folk to differentiate themselves because they really seem to have no prior cultural or personal identity; to receive honors for covering one’s face with “duty” while pressing buttons, blowing up civilians, and being put in parades for it back on Mainstreet. Dulce et decorum est.  Ching—ching—chinking away at history, one movie ticket at a time, because democracy is such a big thing it would take such a very long time to destroy it from within, so no one cares.  Then suddenly there is nothing left but a few crumblings in the dust, and the instruments of destruction lying idle at your feet in the cold, black void.’

I digress. In fact, the only true line in the movie was old Clinty pointing out his own insecure ability to identify without external coercion: “The hardest part about war isn’t taking orders—it’s after war. It’s knowing what to do when there aren’t any orders anymore.” Ah yes, responsibility’s a dyin’ bitch, ain’t she? There’s our Existential hero for the 21st century, the one out bludgeoning responsibility with a rifle butt, or whatever other object of symbolic re-enactment of the times that never were.

Ultimately that was the utterly repulsive heart of this movie, the expression of a generation pardoning itself, of gleefully disowning communal responsibility while asserting its organizational management.  Otherwise I’d not have given a damn about just another bad Hollywood enterprise, but for the hypocritical void in the inmost the heart of this movie.  This literally made my body tingle; like a feverish warmth pressing against the front of one’s head, the low humming current of slow electrocution traveling down your neck and into your knotted gut where it sits like some reverse catalyst, a pile of metallic slag, a thing which ceases all reactions, mental and biological, until you force yourself to vomit a spume of caustic bile fedex’ed straight to your digestive enzymes by Clint fucking Eastwood via Christian-American exceptionalism, though yet your eyes continue to feel as if they ought to emit a neon afterglow for the swarms of electrons scouring your limp and moribund neurons like armies of sand fleas.  If this is the mythology that we’ve got before us at the twilight of American culture, just cut the lights already.’

There’s so much more to say about this movie, but it’s pointless.  No one’s going to hear me thus far—nor would I expect them to, or not unless somebody charges them eight dollars for it. The movie is a horrible pile of hypocritical dog shit, which I say as a person who is targeted to enjoy this sort of attempt at examining real paleoconservative values, not just their bastardization by the self-victimizing fucktards of the right. So this review reflects a pathology of anticipation and small differences, of things once enjoyed—of expecting something good and feeling betrayed, then turning the sharpest edge of one’s ire toward a prior pleasure.  Of this fault, I freely admit.

Yet something remains that is even greater than my own discomfort with Gran Torino. As Eastwood’s last work, if this “drama” is supposed to encompass the tragic loss of a mythological American idealism, then its death knell is not ole Wally’s martyr-death at the hands of gangsters, nor is it the victimization of his neighbors by those same flat “others,” it is the movie itself. And if you still go out and see this movie, well done.  Bueno trabajo, amigo. Good job contributing to the gradual erosion of any cultural identity, whatever autonomous bits may have remained, and all to the steady, regulated sound of Chink, Chink, Chink, and your own uproarious applause:

And the award goes to:

Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

Oh, Wilfred Owen, you saw the truth of the old lie, but could you not foresee its offspring?  Fitting and sweet it is, for one’s country to die for one’s entertainment.‘

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The Gnome Puts Fifty Bucks Back in Your Stubblefield. Merry Festivus! Tuesday, Dec 16 2008

Recession pains? Don't cut your veins, use Burma Shave! ...And uh, oil.

For the guys and gals who use razors regularly:

Extend razor life exponentially!

Unlike annoying and super obvious “behavioral” methods of saving money written for folks with zero impulse control, here’s a method with direct use-value. Take a small glass jar, fill it with a half-inch of mineral oil (available at your local pharmacy), and keep your razor submerged in it when not in use. That simple—the end!

For dupes like myself who buy the higher end razors (mach III and the like) at twenty bucks a pop for a tiny “bulk” pack of razors, this will save you oodles over the years.  For me, it is the grown-up equivalent of the Willy Wonka ever-lasting gobstopper.  The reason it works so well is because razor wear is caused by corrosion, NOT use. Read the ingredient label on your shaving cream/gel: the first primary ingredients are all corrosive acids. Go figure, as the companies that produce shaving cream are also the same collection of companies who produce razors!  But those who use razors are all too familiar with the exploitive, monopolized, and unchallenged business models of the razor companies and their partners: selling non-interchageable razors and handle apparatuses, normalized price gouging, adding another teeny rubber “comfort strip” while pretending its an entirely new razor (naturally jacking up the price, and forcing you to buy a new handle).  It is long passed due to square odds with the capitalist oppressor razor barons.  Gentlefolks, the era of the Shaveletariat cometh!

'Man, if only there were a camera, some stupidly over the top F16 graphics and a young female with a cheek fetish to accommodate the photogenic manliness of me shaving. Oh--why hello!'

This really works. I do some light machining, and machinists always store and use their tools in conjunction with oils to keep them sharp.  So one day it just clicked, or rather, it duh’ed on me. I’m an every other day shaver and I used to go through blades about every ten days before they’d get coarse and shanky. Now I’ve been using the same blade for over three months.  At a 10 day razor life, that’s about 37 razors a year, amounting to over $60 (a conservative, wholesale estimate).  Multiplying razor life just by six amounts to only six razors per year, factoring to about four bucks a year total for the expensive razors.

Notes on use:  For sanitary purposes, change the oil once in a while. Also, when done shaving rinse the razor well and blow as much water from the razor as possible as H20 droplets will cling to the razor even in the oil, negating the benefits (negligibly, but do it anyway to keep the oil clean). And before shaving give the razor a good rinse to remove as much mineral oil as possible. With a lot of mineral oil on the blade it can give you kind of a weird, “un-close” shave because of the lubricating effect of the oil.  And no, mineral oil is not a shaving cream substitute it is just for preserving the blade when not in use. Other than that, fill-out the details for yourself. And if you don’t like the look of a sauce jar on your shelf just find a suitable vase, and there ya go.  Stick a wick in it, ya gotta nice slutlamp to keep the roaches away in your closet apartment.  Gulp it down and you’ve got an emergency enema—and not without those protein and fiber-rich shave trimmings.    All in all, its a fairly green concept too, helping people to reduce their environmental footprint while saving money.

The price of receiving this tip is passing it on to others.  If two thousand people do this, it equates to over $100,000 dollars collectively saved per year; if it becomes common knowledge, that amount will quickly swell into the millions!  I was thinking of turning this concept into a variety of products, but there are pre-existing patents, and I’d rather just like to help others save money anyway.  However, by record the rights to the concept remain my own, so when that sweet Sally little plastic razor preserving unit shows up on the store shelf, you’ll know whose gonna get a call from a certain lawyer.  If not myself, then this idea belongs to everyone, and not some profiteer.  So why do it?  F*** you, those questions are why.

So, screw “happy holidays”—have a wonderful Christmas, a merry Kwanzaa, a disappointingly satisfactory Festivus, a friggin sweet Hanukkah, and whatever else.  Heck, celebrate every single one for all I care, just don’t forget the winter lager.  Ignore your right-wing Uncle Cody, your smugly victorious liberal cousin Kerry, your lordy reformed-alcoholic dog Kibbles, and your two-inch-comfort-zone half-brother Larry.  You’ve got fistfuls of ham and everlasting razor blades, and they ain’t got squat!

Life truly is beautiful.

-Jesse, aka The Gnome

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