Stephen Roney's Blog, page 188

Britney Spears Update

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

How to End Homelessness

 

Moby Grape. Bob Mosley, bottom centre.

The cost of housing in Canada and across the developed world has grown unrealistically high. Tent cities are sprouting up. 

However, the main cause of homelessness is not poverty, but mental illness.

The mentally ill cannot get organized enough to go through the proper channels to get aid. But that is not the only problem. Tim Poole recently observed that he has worked with the homeless, and he found that most often, they will refuse shelter if offered. Toronto mayor John Tory has recently made the same observation. He asked the police to clear the local parks. He thought that arranging for accommodations for everyone would fix the problem. He has been blindsided by this all becoming controversial, because the tent-sitters refuse to move.

I read long ago about the bassist for Moby Grape, Bob Mosley. He went schizophrenic, and was found years later sleeping under a bridge. He refused to rejoin for a band reunion or to come indoors. “He felt he’d earned this.”

"We went to find Bob, and there he was, living in this cardboard box. He had these friends, the squirrels and the lizards that he had. And I brought this guitar, cost me a hundred bucks, you know, and I left that with him and a tape of Moby Grape songs and a tape recorder with batteries in it and some extra batteries. So the next weekend, I came back, and there was no guitar, but the cassette case... He had tried to tear all the tape out of it and had left it, you know, down there in the bushes.”

Generally speaking, the “mentally ill” are people who have seen the madness of the people around them, and, one way or another, want nothing to do with it. They are doing what they can to escape the matrix.

My own brother suffered chronic depression. He owned a house in the city, but preferred to live out in the woods in a cabin without running water or, I believe, year-round road access. He felt calmer there.

This explains the stigma of mental illness. They are heretics. Their views are potentially contagious. They might make sense.

The solution to homelessness is simple, and cheaper than what we are doing now. Set these people up in cabins in the woods. 

Or revive the monasteries.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Oh, Canada!

 

Freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and property rights all under violent assault. The news media seems to sympathize with the aggressors.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

A Day that Shall Live in Infamy

 

The actual situation in Afghanistan is rapidly looking worse. Geraldo Rivera, who is Fox’s representative for the Democratic Party viewpoint, is condemning Biden’s handling of the matter in unambiguous terms. Kamala Harris is nowhere to be seen. It is all looking bad enough that other Dems do not want to be associated with it. They are starting to turn in order to hang it all on Biden.

This is, I think, a historic debacle. The fall of Kabul is something everyone will remember for generations, as a watchword for incompetence. People will remember it the way they remember 9/11, or Kennedy’s assassination, or the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are now hearing that on top of perhaps 40,000 Afghans and their families who have legitimate claims to US protection after having aided the US and allied forces, perhaps 10,000 or more American citizens are stranded in Afghanistan. Are they all now abandoned to their fate? People are angry.

The Taliban may turn out to be a bunch of softies. But that is not the lesson of history. When an army conquers, the first troops in are usually well-disciplined and well-behaved, but after a few days, realizing victory is won, discipline breaks down and the troops are inclined to celebrate, rewarding themselves as they see fit. Even if the Taliban leadership wants to act nice to the Americans—which is unlikely—I doubt they will be able to control their ragtag forces. A series of atrocities is more likely.

Biden is now trying to blame the Afghan army and the intelligence agencies. Bad idea. People are going to feel pretty sorry for the Afghans who supported the US and were abandoned. Blaming them looks monstrous. Someone has pointed out that the Afghan army lost 60,000 soldiers in the fight with the Taliban—more than the US in Vietnam. And everyone in the military and intelligence now has an urgent need to leak to the press how it was all Biden’s fault, to cover their own stern parts. If Biden were a little more intelligent, he would have chosen one fall guy. Now it has to be him.

I think this has to end with Biden’s resignation or removal under the 25th Amendment; failing that, impeachment. Incompetence can’t be the charge, but between Hunter’s laptops and Biden’s extraconstitutional eviction moratorium, there are obvious grounds on which he could be impeached if necessary.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Fall of Kabul and the Fall of Saigon

 

Folks are referring to the situation in Afghanistan as “Biden’s Saigon.” But in almost every aspect, this is worse than the fall of Saigon in 1975. This is an incalculable blow to American prestige.

1. The collapse was much faster: a week as opposed to two years.

2. The enemy was much less substantial. In Vietnam, the other side had major backing from the Soviet Union and China. North Vietnam itself had a large population and a stable government infrastructure. This time, the US was beaten by just a band of guerillas.

3. In the fall of Saigon, the most disturbing image was people trying to get onto a helicopter leaving from the embassy roof. In Kabul, we have already seen people trying to grab onto a cargo plane as it tried to take off. This is worse in both numbers and in apparent desperation.

4. In the fall of Saigon, the Ford administration could rightly claim their hands had been tied by Congress. In Congress, blame was spread out; and Congress was not equipped to make any snap policy shifts. This time, it is entirely the Biden administration’s decision to pull out, and they planned it without any restraints. Nor were they particularly constrained by public opposition to the war, as Congress and the Presidency were in 1975.  They are holding the bag.

5. The US invested nine years in Vietnam, to no purpose. They invested twenty in Afghanistan.

Shockingly, Biden has now sent more troops into Afghanistan to try to secure the evacuation than he pulled out. Surely that is a mark of signal incompetence.

And it looks callous, cowardly, and chaotic that neither Biden nor his press secretary have yet been available for comment. It looks like chaos.

Were the US a Westminster parliamentary system, I think Biden would now have to resign.  The American system is less flexible. Incompetence is presumably not an impeachable offense.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Loves and the Wilsons: A Family Case Study

 

Left to right: Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Brian Wilson

Mike Love, of the notoriously dysfunctional Wilson clan, is a puzzle. Everyone hates Mike Love, because he is an obvious egotist. Yet usually narcissists, true egotists, escape such condemnation; because they are skillful manipulators of their image. 

I think the solution is simple. Mike Love is stupid. He is not smart enough to put on a good front. Most narcissists are better at it.

There is evidence enough that he tries. He wrote the lyrics to most of the early Beach Boys songs; he is responsible for their obvious simplemindedness. He was tailoring them to an intended audience as calculatingly as an ad copywriter.

“She’s gonna have fun fun fun ‘til her daddy takes her T-bird away.”

“I’m picking up good vibrations. She’s giving me those excitations.”

When Brian Wilson tried for more meaningful lyrics on “Pet Sounds,” Love was reportedly upset at him “messing with the formula.” Even though the formula no longer worked: the Beatles had ended the “surf music” craze. He had the intent to manipulate and create a false image, but lacked all imagination in doing so.

His ever-present hat to conceal his baldness is similar. He never appears without it. This suggests the personal vanity and concern for appearances that mark the narcissist. Yet it also suggests a surprising lack of imagination, or initiative. If it matters so much to him, why not get a follicle transplant; he surely has the money for it. Nobody remembers that Joe Biden was bald, or Frank Sinatra. But with the hat, everyone realizes Mike Love is bald.

Looks like stupidity.

His mother Emily was sister to the Wilsons’ father, Murry. Reports are that they both had similar, “dominant” personalities. In other words, they were dominant narcissists. It runs in families.

However, Love got a treatment different from that of the Wilson boys. The instinct of the narcissist is to either possess or destroy. Being of the opposite sex to the dominant narcissist, and good looking, Mike was marked for possession. That means he would have been spoiled, thus groomed for narcissism himself.

Love fell out with his mother when he got some girl pregnant. His mother threw all of his things onto the driveway, and he was forced to find new lodgings. 

This was entirely predictable; but the issue would not have been morality or getting the girl pregnant. It was sexual jealousy. He was two-timing his mother, to her way of thinking, and she was reacting just as a wife classically would if she found that her husband had been cheating on her. 

This is what happens to the golden child when they reach adolescence; especially if they are of the opposite sex. The narcissistic parent sees themself losing a possession, and accordingly their objective often shifts from possession to destruction. The syndrome is modelled in Shakespeare’s Cordelia and King Lear. The narcissistic parent will always resent the partner of the favoured child.

Now let’s turn to the Wilsons. 

The fact that Murry Wilson physically abused and terrorized all three of his sons is well-known. We even have audio recordings of him berating them in the studio. Murry too was a narcissist, and, like Mike Love, a stupid one, who made his abuse too obvious.

Murry would have particularly hated Mike Love, because he could not control him or take credit for what he did. And Love was good-looking, too; the narcissist runs on envy. This explains why Love’s contribution to many early Beach Boys songs was not acknowledged. 

Brian, showing obvious early musical talent, would have been his father’s trophy child. He was driven mercilessly to excel.  Dennis, second in line, was excess to requirements, and dangerously handsome, making him look like a sexual rival. So he was forced into the role of black sheep. Dennis would have been implicitly encouraged to engage in and rewarded for bad and irresponsible behavior; but then “Out of the three Wilson brothers, Dennis was the most likely to get beaten by their father.” 

My own brother was forced into the same family role. I immediately see the parallels. Brian once said of his brother Dennis, “Dennis had to keep moving all the time. If you wanted him to sit still for one second, he's yelling and screaming and ranting and raving.” My brother Gerry was the same way. You could get seasick from sitting next to him on a couch.

Dennis Wilson dissolved into sex addiction, alcohol, and drugs. He died age 39. My brother fairly narrowly managed to save himself from a similar fate.

Carl, as the youngest, short, and baby-faced, was probably the golden child. He looked most like a possession. His father bought him a guitar and music lessons at age 12; and a really good guitar, a Fender Stratocaster, at age 15. This in a poor, working-class family. Despite Brian’s obviously greater musical talent, Brian was not bought instruments. He learned what he learned on the family piano, which was primarily for his father. It is probably no accident that Carl ended up as lead guitar, and the original name of the family band was “Carl and the Passions.” Their father would have insisted as much.

To his credit, Carl Wilson does not seem to have become a narcissist. This is a tribute to him personally, and makes the vital point that nobody is simply made a narcissist by their upbringing. It is always a choice, and the individual should be held responsible for it.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Sermons from Nature

 

Old growth forest, Alaska

My distaff buddy Xerxes has been on vacation, hiking happily through the high coniferous forests of Vancouver Island. They have inspired him with religious insight. He uses the term “cathedral.” 

His insight is that all nature is interconnected:

“A forest is more than the sum of its trees. The forest itself is a living, breathing, organism.

“The forests challenge our obsession with individualism. We have made cult of standing alone, of being ruggedly independent. We are so immersed in the cult of individualism that, as Robert Bellah noted years ago, when we think of breaking free of individualism, the only route we can imagine is to be more individualistic.

“No matter how tall it stands, a Douglas Fir, towering in lofty isolation over a clear-cut hillside, will never say, ‘Every tree for itself.’ Or, ‘I won! I won!’”

This falsely conflates individualism with selfishness. While that is a possible sense of “individualism” in common speech, it is not a fair account of the Western philosophy of individualism. Here is Oxford’s (OED) definition:

“The principle or theory that individuals should be allowed to act freely and independently in economic and social matters without collective or state interference. Opposed to collectivism, socialism. Cf. LAISSEZ-FAIRE n.”

Here is Merriam-Webster’s:

“A theory maintaining the political and economic independence of the individual and stressing individual initiative, action, and interests.”

Nothing about that implies selfishness.

The “cult of individualism” which he refer to as permeating Western thought is, in fact, Christianity. That is where it comes from, and why the West is different from other cultures here. The Catholic Church teaches the principle of “subsidiarity”: that is, decisions should always be made at the individual level, or as close to the individual level as possible. As little as possible should be left to the state. For only the individual is a moral agent. God creates individuals, in his image. Social structures are created by man: they are, as postmodernists will aver, “social constructs.”

But Christianity also and more adamantly holds charity to be the highest virtue. It would condemn such sentiments as “every man for itself” or “I won! I won!”

Christianity holds it to be morally evil to go along with the crowd, rather than take responsibility and act as an individual—the proper sense of “individualism” as a social or political philosophy.

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

Salvation is individual, and cannot be reached by following the crowd.

“The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to.’”

Political and social structures are under the control of the devil.

“The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”

“This world” means the social world, for the physical world is not sentient and cannot have idols. What the social world values is idolatrous and antithetical to the teachings of Christ.

Christianity’s essential opposition to social conformity is probably best illustrated by the fact that its God is condemned to crucifixon by the civil authority and the social elite.

Does the interconnected forest offer us a good model for society? 

No. 

The group is intrinsically more likely to be selfish, not less, than the individual. The group avoids personal responsibility, and so can give the individual cover and sanction for selfishness. After all, everybody else is doing it. In the magnificently interconnected forests of Vancouver Island, the high conifers kill all undergrowth with their acidic needles. Their high canopy denies the light that might be necessary for competing species to emerge; they kill off all diversity. Like most groups, the high conifers cooperate in their own self-interest against outsiders or those judged “different.”

It is the fascist model, that “the forest is greater than the sum of its trees.”

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Last Helicopter out of Kabul

 

Mohammed Zahir Shah, last king of Afghanistan, 1914-2007

The American war in Afghanistan is ending badly for the US; it looks like a debacle, evoking memories not just of the rise of ISS in Iraq, but of the fall of Saigon. A massive blow to American prestige.

Could it have ended differently? Was the US mad to go in at all? After all, Afghanistan had already proven too much for the soviets, and for the British Empire. Could they have improved matters by staying longer; or would this only have delayed the inevitable?

I thought in 2001 it made sense to go in; but only for a fast, surgical operation. My thinking was to they go in, overthrow the Taliban government, punish the ringleaders, and pull out. Then let the chips fall where they may. Rather on the model of how the British reacted to the Boxer Rebellion in China. I thought the same about Iraq. And I still think this could have worked.

If the Taliban then regrouped and retook government, as they now look about to do anyway, it would not have looked like a debacle for the Americans. A punishment would have been delivered, at relatively little cost to the US. Its power would have been asserted.

And there was a second easy and obvious step, that the US could have taken, which would have made this outcome much less likely. 

The Americans cannot seem to understand that Afghanistan is not now, and has never been, a nation. It is geographically like the Balkans, each valley developing an independent culture, with purely local allegiances. There is no ethnic unity around which to build a national consciousness.

In Afghanistan, therefore, there are only two ways to unify the country: either around a shared religion or ideology, or around allegiance to a royal family. The latter exploits the instinctive attachment to family—the king becomes everyone’s father. That means, either the Taliban, or a king. 

Convert the entire country to liberal democracy instead? Not a realistic goal; if possible, it would take generations, and in the meantime you, an alien, are attacking the one thing that holds everyone together, that everyone agrees on.

The US had available to them a candidate with legitimate historical claims to the throne. The former king was still alive. It could have quickly and easily been done, and they might have made an early exit.

They should have done the same thing, for roughly the same reasons, in Iraq. 

Americans hear “king“ and think it means an oppressive, authoritarian government. This is obviously, objectively, wrong. Some of the least authoritarian governments on earth are monarchies: the UK, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain. The most stable, benevolent, and least authoritarian governments in the Middle East are monarchies: Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Jordan, Morocco. 

Indeed, under Zahir Shah, by the 1950s, Afghanistan was peaceful, developing economically, and becoming a modern constitutional monarchy.

It should have been a no-brainer.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Limerick

 

Bacon and Newton and Locke

Went to fish from the Bay Street dock;

Instead of a worm,

Used a variable term,

And could not digest what they caught.

-- Stephen K. Roney

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Clerihew Too

 

Amelia Earhart

Couldn't fill her dance card;

So she thought it would be terrific

To transit the Pacific.

-- Stephen K. Roney'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.