Oggy Learns A Lesson

My joys in life are writing things that make me laugh and fixing my moped. The other day I wrote a simulated call and response between myself and two conservatives. That dialogue ended with this:

Oggy: Which of you fucking cunts gonna make me? What army from Bubba-stan could even find their fat fucking Whataburger ass under all those rolls of cheese colored ass, putrid illiterate Big Red drinking jock strap losers? You guys sit on your ass and beat off watching Honey Boo Boo prance around Bubba-ville in camouflage panties.

I seriously laughed for two days after writing that. It's offensive on so many dimensions.
And I'll let you in on a secret of my writing process. First of all, I never posted that on any comment. It's a simulation of the worst kind of comment I could make. Also, I did not write that whole paragraph originally because I thought it would be more accurate if I allowed the conservatives to have the last word. I don't try to drop hateful messages and then run. Come on. When I'm called a floppy cock liberal nigger lover then I usually back off. I know when I'm beat. But then I thought about the dialogue as a unit and decided by letting the conservatives have the last word I was actually making it seem like I was above throwing insults...and that's not true. I'm pretty clever when it comes to the He Man Internet rodeo so I decided I needed to write a response to the fake conservatives I had invented on a blog post no one reads. See? This is literally how I fill my sad days. So, I sat back down and wrote that passage, and even that went through three or four iterations and polishing. The three elements I knew it had to touch on were Whataburger, Big Red soda, and Honey Boo Boo, all symbols of Red State sloth and retardation. Once I got those involved it was only a matter of refining. I think I changed 'cunts' to 'fucking cunts'. and it was originally 'Honey Boo Boo prances around in her underwear.' Then I changed that to 'panties' because that 'played' better. And then the final word that I still am proud of...'camouflage'. You see? The statement simply is not complete until I qualified the panties as camouflage, because it's not only more descriptive, it also mocks the deer hunter mentality. I don't even know if camo panties exist but it fit the message. Lastly, I changed the names from "Conservative #1, #2" to more descriptive names. You may think it erupted exactly as you see it, like much of what I write, but that's not totally true. I got it in the ballpark at first but it still wasn't perfect. Usually I type something, read it once for typos, and hit publish. The next two days will require playing the guitar while mentally remembering every word in the piece I wrote and processing all possible combinations and alternatives and additions until it's right. Honey Boo Boo's camo panties are a perfect example of this process. The hard part is also trying to remember pieces I wrote two years ago and juggle all of those word combinations.

Punditry is awful awful awful. I hate myself for getting involved in it, but like a submissive who begs for the whip from a latex wearing dominatrix, I return to Fox News, return to Rush Limbaugh, like a moth to the flame. There's a lesson somewhere embedded in the gaping asshole that Bill O'Reilly calls his mouth. I'm trying to learn from the Ferguson protests, the daily news, the number of holes in Albert's Hall. I watched "The Mission" with DeNiro and Jeremy Irons the other day. GREAT MOVIE. Robert Bolt wrote it and the final 40 minutes of the movie have almost no dialogue. I mean, nearly zero dialogue. That's great writing. 40 minutes with maybe two sentences...both extremely important. 

The last exchange has a Portuguese slave trader shrug and say of a slaughter of Indians, 
"The world is thus." 
A Spanish Cardinal responds, "No, thus have we made the world."

40 minutes and that's all the dialogue. Powerful movie. Think of the restraint used by Bolt, a guy who wrote the epic screenplays for both Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. This is a guy who could write a whole miniseries...and he chose to write almost no dialogue for 40 minutes. The final act is 100% visual, in fact, the whole movie is so blatantly presented that the language is irrelevant.

I ponder this exchange constantly: is the world thus, or is thus the way we have made the world? One could easily argue for either conclusion.

I'm troubled, deeply troubled, and also mystified so I feel I must come to some conclusion on the nature of life and justice and individual responsibility and rights...and the color of Honey Boo Boo's panties is linked to everything. It's exhausting, but it's the work I'm obsessed with, work that I know can not modify anyone, but is nonetheless recognized as important. I read as many tilted opinions as possible and I reflect harshly on my own opinion, regretting past statements, editing the hedges of my mind's garden. Is it possible to be unbiased? This is an important question and the complications of political discourse are further complicated by how political parties are generally divided into red and blue...but my personal opinion might be violet or green...which means I'm fucked.

This is a complicated aspect that is separate from the political charge, it's more about procedure...and it's also separate from the question of my personal bias. If, for example, I was robbed and beaten by a gang of black men in Key West as I tried to buy marijuana in my youth...should that now influence my opinion of a fatal shooting by a policeman of a black man? Let us accept it will distort my bias...but actually has no bearing on the current situation...so I'm not a philosopher. A philosopher transcends his bias.

One lesson I've learned is that philosophy is 99% of politics and the other 1% is lobbying...and lobbying always trumps philosophy because the philosophical implications are actually not as important as the economic factors of power. Power can't be maintained by ignoring lobbyists, so the philosophical implications are irrelevant as long as political power is required to enforce the philosophical outcomes. It's a cycle of futility...I spend 17 or 20 years debating a certain topic and when I finally reach a conclusion a guy hands me a suitcase full of money and tells me that I must vote against my conclusion or I won't get elected. I vote against my opinion and then spend another 20 years trying to thread the needle to make it look like I'm voting against my conclusion...or maybe I switch sides so someone pays me to vote against the conclusion I claim to have reached when really I'll be contradicting my own contradiction.

It's exhausting...people play soccer with their kids, talk about which doll to buy their daughter for Christmas, chop pig uterus into taco meat, hunt for dinosaur bones, but Oggy plays mental chess with distorted analogies. But the good news is that I have had a breakthrough, and not a moment too soon.


I have determined that political discourse is an argument about the wrong terms. We have learned a procedure of debate based on affiliation and that loyalty to a party or clan or tribe outweighs the facts, or should I say affiliation is the primary fact that outweighs other facts. See, it's not a fallacy to bond with a racial group, but if that's a bias then you might as well not bother debating race issues. Our approach is all wrong; it's polarizing, counterproductive, divisive and damaging. It might be asking too much of 400 million people to agree on anything, but my quest is to deal with the theory of agreement. I know it won't matter, but my own peace of mind requires I reach a conclusion on the process of communication, of social harmony. Some people build rocket ships, some people open brains, but my quest is to find a theoretical equation that works, that does not lead to executions or strife or hateful remarks. No, it's not realistic, but it's like playing Jazz guitar: selfish, pointless but arguably important.

I'm not done with my analysis but I feel that the next series of experiments must involve abstract terminology...a hybrid of disciplines. When bound by philosophic traditions we fold over onto our own asses so I want to explore different dimensions. I was serious when I said that the non-intuitive physical laws of inertia might be the answer to an Anarchist's plight. We're debating the wrong terms.

Another lesson I learned today was that the size of my font is way too small. I happened on a blog about this area of Central America that had a cleaner and more readable font size that I want to work with. I only have normal and Large to choose from. And I also noticed that this chap's comment section had referential links to the blogs of people who were commenting. It's probably some kind of blog community that enables this but I went to another blog also about this area of Mexico and I noticed the font there was also bigger. I guess when the only people who visit my blog are Ukrainian Viagra shills who steal my posts for web content then they won't complain about font size but I'm a little surprised no one said anything.

6th place was Jupiter

Yes, you can use the [ctrl+] shortcut to magnify the screen but then you have to demagnify it [ctrl-] when you visit your cheerleader porn site. Anyway, I am going to use this font size until some reason makes me reduce the size again. It will take up more space so I have to remember to put the page break.

The next lesson I learned from those blogs is that there are some good writers out there blogging. I wouldn't call those two writers 'entertaining', but they are readable, and that's a compliment. I can read and understand what they are saying. They write not too much nor too little. They get the job done. No, they don't stretch the limits of their vocabulary nor hit me with a variety of punchlines, but their writing is harmless. And then it occurred to me that neither of them were writing about political issues. They seemed content to write narcissistically about their travels, like that was enough to satisfy their audience. Amazing. No hateful remarks about abortion, self-loathing rants, racial discord, villagers burned and ground into dust then dumped into a river, climate apocalypse. No, only food reviews and pictures of them smiling in pretty locations. The most horrible thing that punditry does to a person is it blinds them to the innocence that exists, the news cycle becomes life and life becomes the news cycle. 
I swear I was blindly reading some hateful comments on one neo-con site and I saw one that was overwritten, haughty, elitist, too proud, mocking and hateful all at once. 
"What fucking asshole wrote this," I thought as I mentally pre-wrote a scathing response. 
Then I read the author's name: Oggy Bleacher.

Jesus Christ, I was going to respond to my own comment? And my original snarky comment was based off a comment that was based off a careless rant that was based off another careless rant that was a reference to a remark by someone who died 80 years ago....you see the insanity? That's a normal day in the life of a pundit, they live in a meta reality where their own rants become the source for future rants, the refer to themselves, they incite themselves to incite themselves. Futility compounded by ignorance but I must unravel it all.

So, the travel blogs were harmless and escapist, unoffensive, asked no hard questions, and the lesson was reminding me that such innocent world views still exist. Thank you.

I've had an opportunity to have Internet access for a few months and to analyze these painful global phenomenons at my leisure and I have done my best to brand this virtual hide. Part of me wants to escape but I do not because the conclusions I need to reach are buried in dark places. Furthermore, the darkness will follow me everywhere, there is no blade of grass on the planet that hasn't been fought over and bled on so this is a long term project, to come to terms with the present and formulate a theoretical plan for the future. Is the world thus, or is thus the way we have made the world?

I am leaving this particular town soon because my goals of learning some Spanish language skills are seriously hampered by this philosophy project. I've written a few essays from the box of dusty music (my escapist fantasy) and hope the next place I land will have electricity at least so I can play some more songs but I will not complain if the Internet is not included. Peace be with you.

 

A Most Important Poll