Fragmentary thoughts

It's truly astonishing how much I leave unfinished.

I may not write as much for this blog as I one did (though you can expect that to pick up a bit as the election draws closer) but I still occasionally try.  My problem is that I often begin writing articles that I never actually finish, for various reasons.

Sometimes I lose my direction and leave off writing. Sometimes I get frustrated trying to keep to a particular topic, and I finally bale entirely. Sometimes I get interrupted, or more often interrupt myself to cook or eat or watch something on TV, or to play n the Internet for a while. Whatever the reason, sometimes I take a break from writing then get distracted, and simply forget to return to whatever I was writing.

And often when I do return to a previous document, I cannot for the life of me remember what the hell I was trying to say.

So my computer’s desktop gets cluttered with partial documents that I am unable to finish, whatever the reason. Eventually I have to get rid of them, but often I simply cannot bear to just trash something I’ve spent time writing, so rather than try to keep the files occupying hard disk space (even though computer memory is really cheap right now) I’ll write an article like this one and include all of the accumulated crap that I just can’t bring myself to delete.

Here’s a few of them.


Educating Gunny

One piece I was working in dealt with education, or at least started out dealing with education. But it started getting awfully biographical, uncomfortably so perhaps, and I stopped writing. But it made a couple of points that I’d still like to make, so here’s the half-finished article.

“Education doesn’t exactly fuel our society, but it is necessary for our society to keep running. I suppose it’s like motor oil; it  doesn’t fuel a car but you won’t get far without it. (I know; I’ve tried.)

“That said, my own educational background is dismal.  I went to high school in rural Michigan then on to the local junior college, where I went full-time for a semester and part-time for a semester after that; for about a year after that I took an occasional class but mostly just hung out in the library.

“This might strike the odd hippie as romantically Bohemian (depending, of course, on how odd the hippie is and how badly you want to strike him) but trust me...it ain’t romantic. And while I’d have to confess that the major part of my college education was gained in that library I would also have to confess that that sort of unstructured education leaves you with a sort of unstructured education.

“My own haphazard education has given me a genuine appreciation for the process, when it’s approached properly. All too often, it isn’t.

“Once upon a time, back in the dim dark age when I was in high school (and my politics were well to the left of where they are now, if you can fathom that), I was convinced that the primary purpose of the American system of education was to prepare young minds for a future of mindless labor. School imposed a structure that I, as a liberal child of the ‘70s, felt compelled to rebel against. You were trained (I then felt) to jump at the sound of a bell, and to sit in your place and only speak when the person with direct authority over you requested that you do so. Your schedule, your diet, your attire, your recreational activities even your bodily functions were controlled, regulated, scheduled, and supervised. Or so I felt.

“I felt that education was being used to further stratify an already stratified society, to set that stratification in concrete, to prevent the changes that I thought the American educational system so desperately needed.

“That was a time of rebellion, a time of experimentation, in nearly all facets of American society. Education was no different. All manner of “alternative” educational idea were given a try; schools without an authoritarian structure, without classes, without defined subjects; no tests, no quizzes, no books (at least no traditional subject-specific textbooks). All of the old trappings of education were experimentally axed.”

And that’s where I stopped writing. Today I have no idea where I was going with this, or at least where I intended to go before my detour down Memory Lane. I don’t much like Memory Lane; it’s dark and scary and there are monsters.


...and that’s the truth

One complete sentence and a partial one; I have no idea where, if anywhere, it was going. Nor do I recall why I stopped.

“People are always quick to ascribe all manner of virtues to ‘The Truth’ that I’m not sure it actually possesses. The English language is littered with sayings like ‘The Truth will set you free!’ and...”

“And...?” And what? I have no idea, and that’s the truth.


Penn, and ink

For reasons I cannot now remember, I was writing an article about William Penn. I suspect that this was something that was unfinished due to interruption, something that I fully expected to finish but for whatever reason was unable to get back to before forgetting where the hell I was going with it. So it doesn’t actually go anywhere.

“It may seem the height of hubris for me to compare myself to William Penn; nevertheless, that’s what I’m going to do.

“William Penn believed that it was impossible for good men to govern badly. But I’m no William Penn; I believe that good people govern badly every day. But Penn would say that there are no good people in a bad government; that a bad government must either be made by corrupt people, or else it must itself corrupt them.

“Though he was clearly the better of the two, William Penn was, in his way, as much of an absolutist as Ayn Rand.

“I do not believe that all people in government are either corrupt or corruptible, or that all government necessarily corrupts. Nor do I believe that all government is corrupt. Though I must admit that the available evidence does not fully support these views; in this, I am more a man of faith than William Penn.

“Perhaps the real difference between Penn and myself is in where we ultimately place our faith. Penn was a Quaker and a man with an unwavering belief in the Divine; I am not. I do not believe that faith must make men and women good. I believe that faith can corrupt a person as thoroughly as any government, or any amount of money. I believe that faith is tempered by what the believer brings to the table; that  a person cannot be made good by faith or made bad by a lack of it, that it is their character that makes them good or bad, and that anything that would redeem them or condemn them must be there from the start for faith (or its lack) to work upon

“My own beliefs are as logically unsupportable as William Penn’s (though I doubt he would have seen his as such). But it’s not just where we place our faith that makes the difference, Penn in divinity and I in the character of people. My faith in character is far from absolute; not so Penn’s faith in the divine.

“Penn’s faith deserves a closer look. He was a Quaker from the age of twenty-two, and suffered religious and legal persecution for it. He founded the colony of Pennsylvania on his Quaker principles (he owned all of it)...”

Then again, perhaps I abandoned this article because it was a bit more autobiographical than I was comfortable with.


The long dark brainfart of the soul...

And then there’s this. I was writing freely (and rather darkly) and beyond that I’m not going to preface it.

“It’s 9 AM and I haven’t slept and there’s nothing on TV and there’s nothing for breakfast except oatmeal and my foot hurts and my back hurts and my elbow and shoulder hurt and and and...

“If there’s a point to all of this, I missed it.”
(edited; WAY too personal – MSR)

“I have spent the last several nights trying to write something—anything—that will make people think I possess a modicum of wisdom. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I have failed miserably.

“I have never been overly impressed with my own talent with the written word, but in the last few nights whatever talent I may have had appears to have deserted me entirely. I sit here hunched over my computer’s keyboard, typing away without plan or direction, hoping that something reasonably creative will come out of it.

“In the past, this trick has actually worked. Several times. I have always been able to distill my random thoughts into something coherent, something publishable (at least as a meme or a blog post).”
In this case, I stopped writing because I actually thought of something to write. I forget what...but as I recall I did wind up publishing it (whether as a blog post or a meme, I cannot now recall).


In conclusion (finally)

It there’s anything to be gained from all of this, it’s the realization that my creative process appears to involve a great deal of introspection. But that’s a two-edged sword, and I’m gripping it by the blade; said introspection often leads me down roads I’d rather not continue down, and ultimately the trip goes nowhere. (Is that a mixed metaphor? I can never tell.)

Though I really don’t think of myself as a writer, in this case perhaps there’s something to the old adage about a writer stabbing himself with a pen and bleeding onto the page. I must confess that it’s a relief to have this bloody article over and done with.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

Political Robots

The Three Laws of Political Parties

Decades ago, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov created his famous “Three Laws of Robotics” that he believed should govern the behavior of robots in their interaction with humanity. Those laws were:

One: A robot must never cause a human harm, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.

Two: A robot must obey all orders given it, except where to do so would violate the first law.

Three: A robot must protect itself, except where to do so would violate the first or second law.

In Asimov’s fictional universe, these laws were universal and were hardwired into every robot by the people who designed and built them, acting under the constraints of the laws of their society, the regulations of their profession, and the accepted morality of that fictional society.

In the real world, the world you and I live in, it would be naive to expect anything, real or artificial, to obey such civilized restrictions on their behavior. 

Political parties, for example, They seem to obey something similar to Asimov’s three laws, but with reversed priorities. These “Three Laws of Political Parties” can, I believe, be stated thusly;

One: A political party will protect its own existence, and its hold on power, first and foremost.

Two: A political party will obey the will its membership, except when to do so would violate the first law.

Three: A political party must act for the general welfare, except where to do so would violate the first or second law.

Political parties, like Asimov’s robots, are artificial constructs intended to service us. But unlike them, political parties have no built-in morality, no pre-programed constraints on their behavior that forces them to behave at all times in our best interest rather than their own.

It is hard to deny the fact that the two dominant political parties in America, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, have taken on an existence beyond anything intended by their founders. They appear to be working toward the preservation of their own power, their own hold on the people, rather than working for the benefit of those people.

I think that that is the reason that this is such an interesting year, politically. There are candidates in both major parties who are running very much against the established political order in their respective parties, and one of them (Donald Trump) appears to have all but locked down his party’s nomination. On the other side, it’s a two-candidate race between outsider Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, with Clinton representing the established order in her party (and make no mistake...there is an “Establishment” in the Democratic Party, no matter what Hillary would have you believe).

There’s one more point I’d like to make about my hypothetical Three Laws of Political Parties...parties that follow such laws ultimately fail. A political party cannot exist without a loyal membership, and a party that places its own existence above the welfare of its membership will eventually lose that loyalty and ultimately its membership.

That’s what we’re seeing in this political year; the people are deserting the established order in both parties in favor of outsiders who challenge said order. The very rules by which parties have always operated have failed them in the face of candidates who simply will not play the game according to established, though largely unwritten, rules and codes of conduct.

It is perhaps naive of us to expect our political creations to be anything but a reflection of our own values; whatever else political parties may be they are creations of human frailty and cannot help but reflect that frailty back at us. If they are ultimately self-destructive, what then of us?

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.