All Right Is Not Alright

So I saw the move "The Kids Are All Right." I know this movie was the talk of last summer, but I knew I wouldn't like it then so I waited for it to be released on video to see it. I saw it in December on DVD, and I found it enjoyable. It is an entertaining movie. Contrary to my expectations I found it to be funny. The characters were well written and played, and the plot kept me guessing. I didn't realize there would be as much explicit sex, but that is--in the nomenclature of today's laid back acceptance--all good. But I still think the whole premise, at least insofar as it dealt with the male characters, is utter bullshit.

I hate message movies even if I am ineluctably drawn to them. I have some weird sense that I must keep up with what everyone else is talking about. So I see all kinds of movies. Christ, I saw "The Transformers" just to see what it was all about (It sucked). So I watched "The Kids Are All Right." I have no problem with homosexuality per se, but I find that strident defenses of it (like this movie) lack any sense of proportion, reality and reasonableness. "Milk" was similar, but a better movie.

So even though I'm writing about this film many months after its hype, it is still one of those movies like "Million Dollar Baby," "Chocolat," "Amelie," "Kinsey," "The Wrestler," "Wall Street, Pt. 2," etc. that I feel compelled to see because "everyone" is talking about it. It if it is too late to talk about it, then so be it.

The first thing to be said about this movie is that unfortunately it is not the great film documentary about the rock band The Who called "The Kids Are Alright"--a film which is itself named after a great song by the same band. I wouldn't mind the shortcomings of this film if it were at least as wonderful as the Who's "1921" from "Tommy." Okay, maybe this is too strong a criticism, but then why name this movie as such? If you don't want to be compared to the Who, then don't (mis)name your movie after one of their songs. Granted, I watched "The Kids Are All Right" not "The Kids Are Alright." I wished I had seen the latter. At least in that film, the alcoholism and social dysfunction was taken for granted, and as a result that band made some of the most interesting rock music of the last 50 years. Instead, in "The Kids Are All Right," we the audience are supposed to applaud this daring unconventional family that can't dare enough to let the sperm donor be a part of their lives. Instead they treat him like shit--or rather as a sperm donor, i.e., scumbag.

Yet I can't get over this ridiculous title. Remembering my 7th grade teacher--a woman whom our class secretly but collectively called Colonel Kampe (so named for her almost militaristic demand that we memorize grammar, punctuation, parts of speech, as well the Emily Dickinson poem "There Is No Frigate Like a Book")--all right and alright were important distinctions. Alright is a word that points to an adverbial sense of doing just okay or fine. After your boyfriend has broken up with you, I see you and ask, "Are you doing alright? " Whereas all right points adjectively to a collective noun where all are in the right. If I am a State Department spokesman after a terrorist blows up an embassy I say, "Everything is all right."

Already you may get the sense why I think the Who's music (and documentary) is alright, but I don't think the kids in the movie of the eponymously named film are all right. In fact I think this all right notion regarding this movie constrains any independent thought. Everyone must be all right, and this is not alright it seems to me. I don't want to be a part of all right (in this case), even though I'm doing alright. David Foster Wallace has a short story about "Good People." They are all right--all the right opinions, attitudes, habits, etc. Count me out!

This is a movie about confused sex. No one can make it alone. We need others to provide for us as we provide for them. The origins of the family stem from the basic needs that each of us demands. Whether it is simply providing for a home, or providing for the guidance of children who need many years to be instructed in the right way, the family is an institution that has been formed through the mists of tradition to help us in our life. In spite of these things, we're all confused.

This movie showed the ways in which these women could not provide for their children, let alone for themselves in a deep manner. The mores, character, education and culture that the family provides is seriously stunted in this family. These women, after many years together, and all the accoutrements that a yuppie lifestyle provides, are confused--and so are their children. This reality may be true of everyone in the movie, but call me the virgin in the whorehouse to exclaim that this family would be better off with man.

I enjoyed watching these fucked up people even as I knew I was being indoctrinated into considering the limits of what makes a family. That fact made the fun of the movie continually present as the nagging admixture to the shocking fact that Joni and Laser had two mommies (Jules and Nic) and an unknown sperm donor (Paul).

Why is Paul considered the bad guy here? At the end of the day, this is an anti-male movie--even as it shows that Paul has a good influence on Laser. Laser realizes that hanging out with his dope snorting, Michael Vick animal cruelty friend is not good after he has spent time with his "father." Apparently it is better to confirm the lives and "commitment" of two aging lesbos than it is in confirming the formation of a young man. In fact, these women want him to be gay, and they reject the only male figure--as limited and weak and irresponsible as he is--to be a formative figure in his life.

Of course, after all these years Paul can't be these kids father, but these kids needed a father and Jules and Nic could not provide this. Yes, they raised the kids well, but there is more to life than getting into a good college.

If anything, this movie confirmed my prejudice in favor of the monogamous mommy/daddy family.

As Harvey Mansfield pointed out, there is a lack on "manliness" in today's culture. This movie confirms that to the nth degree.

The Who may not be John Wayne, but when they sang about "The Kids Are Alright," they meant it. Roger Daltrey may have been short, but he was a fighter. A fighter for what? It is true that manliness must be coupled with things for which one should be manly. But let me give a song for Laser--not from the movie. It's The Who's rendition of a Mose Allison Song called "Young Man Blues."

Perhaps it speaks to manliness. Maybe this is the point of the whole movie, but I can't imagine Hollywood greenlighting a film with as reactionary views as mine. However, these days I don't know. Are the kids really alright/all right?

Update: Spoken more fluently than me is this review of the movie.

Update 2: Of course there was no religion or any relationship with God represented in this movie. Maybe in the sequel I could pose as someone who could show Laser that Christianity perhaps speaks to his deepest longings. I would have to be a professor/teacher type character. Maybe at a community college. Oh wait, I already teach at a community college. Don't worry, I'm not breaching the separation of church and state. As a Catholic I don't believe in the priesthood of all believers.

But that would require belief--see my Thoughts on Lessing below.

Lessing's Choice

I have been ignored for what I have to say is my whole life. I am ignored amongst family, friends and business colleagues. No one gives a shit what I have to say. So encountering blogosphere shunning should not come as a surprise.

I used to contribute posts to a blog that took its starting point the films of Brian De Palma. This was no ordinary fansite. It included film students, critics, and all sort of sundry film makers. The conversations extended beyond the apparent disconnected facts and data regarding particular De Palma films. It also avoided the typical issues of the life of celebrity film maker Brian De Palma. Instead it dealt with the craft, the themes, the issues of film making that Brian De Palma and his movies had raised. In a relatively intelligent manner, this web page brought up issues of philosophy, politics, history, ethics, aesthetics as these issues emerged in the films of De Palma (and ultimately elsewhere). Yes there were plenty of analyses of predecessors and epigoni. However, the site dealt with all sorts of issues that could really carry on the conversation (as an Oakeschott or a Rorty) could appreciate. When I first contributed, I found thoughtful and appreciative respondents to what I wrote. However, as time went on, I became more irascible, and I found myself in pariah status with the web site monitors as well as with the other contributors. Perhaps I made excessive statements. Perhaps I picked fights. Nonetheless, I found myself alone in my own comments. Other contributors began regularly ignoring my remarks, and I found that what I had to say became simple reactive inanities to what was not said. I found myself in a cyber world of solipsistic criticism that made impossible the necessary friendly criticism of me that allowed me to see myself. What I wrote became so distasteful to others that I was no longer worth acknowledging.

This is a tend with other sites I attend. Whether it is the Leo Strauss group or the Postmodern Conservative blog, my career as a writer has followed a similar trajectory. First, I am one of the most interesting an scintillating of respondents (even if I exaggerate my excellence). Then I become a writer to whom others refer. I become a benchmark of sorts for those who wish to offer a dissenting opinion. Then comes the remarks that "Presnall" sounds like something of a crank. Which is followed by complete disregard by the other writers and respondents, concluding in a complete silence to anything I write. All this leads me talking to myself.

I suppose my utter disregard for following the arguments of others in the name of what I consider where the truth leads me inevitably leaves me in my own solipsism. This of course makes it sound like I defend the radical questioning of convention. This is not necessarily true. Instead, I am a radical critic of such radical critique. This double critique confuses many as they naively wish to say something worthwhile in the surety of their own opinion. However, I tend to wish to deflate such ambitions to speak what is worthwhile. My own standards are ridiculously high, and these standards make me hated by those who speak persuasively to others in the terms that most can accept. In the best of rhetorical traditions, my friends and I--whether on the De Palma page, the Strauss page, or the PomoCon page--share a concern with the same questions. What motivates us to thought, wonder, or questioning is the same. We share a sense of the general parameters of the human problem--socially, politically, theologically, culturally politically. Not to sound like a sociologist of a Dilthey or Mannheim type, but we share the same content in terms of what is at stake in our questions. We are all Gadamerians here. Nonetheless, given what I write, they just don't care for what I have to say in response to these fundamental issues.

I used to think my shunning was due to my lack of learning. There are some huge big brains and some of the most erudite and thoughtful human beings writing on these pages. It is intimidating to find myself writing in such company. However, I came to realize that I am quite erudite and learned too--if not as much as or even moreso than some of the others writers frequenting these web pages. Hence, I judged that the shunning had less to with erudition than a judgment of my character. In this view I am not only ignorant but distasteful. I tend to state things wrongly or in a way that is not fitting. So it was all a personal criticism of me and my character.

What do you do in such a situation? Do I embrace myself and say 'fuck you" to all your shit-for-brains (SFB) accounts of the way you alll don't understand me? This seems too extreme and beyond my own sense of self-uncertainty. Do I try to figure out why I don't fit in and try to remediate the problem? I have given up on trying to fit in since I was in high school--at the earliest. I have never fit in and so I don't care for that. Perhaps all this is the problem, but it seems to me overly simplistic. I myself have no problem following the law, adhering to conventional morality, and performing the duties of family, career and country--in fact I have excelled in these things on several occasions.

I am only left to conclude that it is my opinions which are nefarious. I will admit that I cannot articulate my opinions in the best manner possible in every argument. I am not the best writer, wordsmith or rhetorician in the world. Perhaps I need more study more in order to speak my mind, since I do not know everything in literature, history and politics. Maybe I need to specialize more and then I could have a basis of particular authority from which I could speak to a more general audience. But I am pretty well knowledgeable of all sorts of specifics--much more than many people I know. I am too specialized. So, to state it again, it is my opinions that are dubious. Perhaps I'm specialized in the wrong things, but this assumes that there are specialists who can truly take their knowledge and translate it to the truth of the whole for what is needed to know. As if there were an important statement that could be made in a way that way others could assent to. I doubt it. Others simply don't like what I have to say.

So what is it I have to say? I doubt the things that people in my position think are important. I'm not stupid. I recognize the need to mask one's own opinions. In fact I do it all the time. I recognize that I don't hold the absolute truth in absolute knowledge. I qualify what I say--even if I am a student of Hegel. I may recognize that knowledge in the modern world resorts to knowledge or education in a circle--encyclopedia. But I never state it as such. I like to be an empiricist too. I stick to the facts like everyone else.

I think I become anathema because I call out the truth of all empiricism which is the dog philosophy of cynicism. This at least explains the basis of my rhetoric. However, the first thing I aim my cynicism towards is cynicism itself. I hate deflationary, self-spirited rhetoric for its own sake. This gets me into trouble because I like to prick the balloons of any and every cynic.

So I have no positive teaching. I am all negative. Admittedly I am no reformer. I cannot tell you how to lead your life. To be sure, I have standards. They are true and right too. But I have no way of making you live become what is the true and right life. I try to persuade toward what is called philosophy. In contrast to philosophy, coercion leads to an ignorant lawlessness which is lawful on the basis of the fear of punishment--but there is a tradition that one is dragged by the scruff of one's neck out of the cave. Is coercion itself the basis of philosophy? But who drags anyway?

Lacking someone to drag us out of the cave, or lacking the insight of one's own that images are images, it seems that we need a god who metes reward and punishment. Perhaps such fear--including fear of divine punishment--is our lot. I suspect a lot of our current moralizers (on the one hand) and philosophers (on the other) just simply want to keep fear of divine punishment in its place. I have no desire to destroy this belief either, but when I call out others of their obfuscating this issue, they get angry and then they ignore me.

So I will continue to think and write what I say, and I won't pretend to speak frankly of philosophy and god is dead while at the same time pretending that god is the ultimate judgment of one's particular and personal sense of life. Why not just say say--fideistically--that god is judgment? Why come up with so many sophisticated arguments in a post-theistic age?Don't worry about it. The cat is out of the bag. God is dead, and no matter what kind of rhetoric is deployed cannot cover the fact--this deadly truth as Nietzsche puts it.

So we should return to first questions. Reason and revelation. Ancients and moderns. Philosophy and poetry. Law and life. Rule and discretion. Theory and practice. Public and private. Individual and community. Progress and return. Transmission of the past and rejection of the future. Athens and Jerusalem--or Rome? or Mecca!

Lessing posed the question of God with two hands. Long before the red or green pill of the poplar movie The Matrix, Lessing picked up on the ancient myth of God offering two hands. One hand was the life of eternal questioning--the joy and adventure of seeking after that which can be known even to the point of never knowing it. This mode seeks after newness and is interminably unsatisfied. It maybe happiness, but it is unsatisfied in its answer. It thinks honesty, probity, redlicheit is what the best way of life is for a noble and true human life. One should never rest certain anything. In this hand, the knife edge of continual questioning the most fundamental things must be one's fate.

The other hand of God holds the answer to every deep question that stems from the deepest erotic longing. These are the answers to the kinds of longings that plague you in even in the midst of your own most self satisfaction. These answers provide relief to such an unspeakable longing that it is satisfaction in such a way that one need not nor ever wish to seek beyond what already is (or what has been given). Such knowledge provides the confidence of facing up to the challenges of this world because there is nothing that can challenge the ultimate truth of what one already has. This is not smugness, but clarity regarding what is truth. It is true enlightenment.

This is an eternal dispute between unbelief and belief.

Given the response to what I write, I guess I have an ineradicable unbelief. An ineradicable, ontological unbelief. I am not happy with such a situation, but that should be expected in such a mode of life. So be it. It makes no friends even if friends are what I desire. My probity says there are no friends even if my desire wishes for them to be. Derrida in his lectures of friendship liked to quote Montaigne quoting an old saw, "My friends, there are no friends." I guess this is where I am. Derrida in the same lectures then examines the question of the enemy in Carl Schmitt. Unfortunately, this is my position. I don't endorse Schmittian politics, and I whish to choose Socrates over Polemarchus, but I have no friends nonetheless.

The typical response is like a pop song, "You only give what you get."

This is my giving.

All of this navel gazing certainly explains my anathematic position regarding the De Palma, Strauss, or PomoCon blogs. Who would want to read such a self indulgent asshole as me?

Pinball Wizard

Truly a great song by the Who. But I always wondered what deaf, dumb and blind meant. Like the crowd I wondered how he did it. "How do you think he does it?"

But the more you think about bumpers and flippers, one wonders if one does not always stand like a statue playing by intuition. These things provide for externalized ways of living one amongst another. Pinball, blindness, deafness, and dumbness have no community.

Pinball is a pretty lame image to make this case insofar as it is dated--but pinball, with its jerky shuffling of the ball, may be a true image of how one must make one's way in the world in modern bourgeois, democratic, capitalistic, liberal societies these days. The pinball image may not hold up, but let me nonetheless hand my pinball crown to Pete Townsend for attempting to speak about what is true.

You may ask--what is true in a silly song about gaining recognition for mastery at something as ridiculous as pinball for one who is deaf, dumb and blind? Of course, it is easily answered in the see me, feel me, touch me, heal me refrain. But what does all this mean? Listening to you, gazing at you and following at you. Right behind you and on you I see the glory and get the story.

The you is surely important here, but so is the me that can't hear, see or speak.

This must be some sort of social psychology put to music. Is it typically Lockean in that we have no judge with common authority by nature? Is it Hobbesian in the ways in which Tommy's fame leads to the one answer to all questions?

Is it the typical British Marxist stance that popular culture serves as an anodyne for the suffering of the working class. The sigh of the oppressed in an alleviating opiate that shows itself in the new sensation of Tommy's fame?

Carlito's Way Again

Just thought I would return to the masthead image. I am thinking of changing it, but for now here's Joe Cocker. I wish I could find the dance scene in the Paradise picture.

Children

In my lonely single life, I find myself loving children more and more--especially in their impertinence. Children require adults to provide the loving guidance and education that only we adults can give them as they become themselves despite our best efforts. In the redundancy of the ordinary day to day life that we present, children are a blessing in their sheer newness.

It is true that we live in the present with our enlightened morality of free choice and individual self creation, and we are attempting to make the next generation so free that choice becomes an end in itself. We love something called autonomy. However, let's hope that "nature" will reassert itself and have nothing to do with our contemporary cleverness. The '60s and '70s and '80s were all about "rock 'n roll" and "punk rock" and thinking that one can make it alone. This thinking that one can make it alone leaves one thrown back on oneself, and in a strange Tocquevillian move leads one to follow what everyone else does. One's own self creation becomes conformity--how else to explain the ubiquity of tattoos these days?

You may say, "Presnall, you're full of shit. I've got a job, and it's important. I do (or even make) things, and in my activity (or productivity) I do something at least useful to myself. At least I make a paycheck." Let me suggest that your work is simply the flip side of the coin to your rock 'n roll autonomy. Your job is probably an abstraction--like most jobs these days. You can measure your life according to what television or other credentialized agencies consider to be rigorous self assessment. You and your company may even claim to "bring good things to light." However, what do you presently hold in custodianship that is worth holding for all time? What have you inherited that is worthwhile? What do you have to pass on--other than the skills which you yourself admit are damned for the planned obsolescence that you yourself have set up?

So, outside of theology or philosophy, children become the key to happiness in our time as it has been always. As one gets older--if there are no young ones around (especially young ones of one's own)--life becomes a meaningless game and one might as well commit suicide. Let me make a caveat for priests who find God, philosophers who find truth, and tyrants who find rule. The rest is pale pragmatism calculating the best way to stay alive for no other reason than that one fears death--it's a perfectly ordinary Hobbesianism.

Children--on the other hand--are by definition impertinent, and as a consequence they are a rebuke to any so-called postmodern self-creation. They're beyond the grandiosity of autonomy and production.

Children are fecundity too, and when they are one's own they provide an impermeable barrier to the seemingly inevitable growth of what Alexandre Kojeve called the Universal and Homogeneous State where each is recognized equally in his autonomy and productivity--a condition that Leo Strauss said had the potential of becoming a universal tyranny. So get philosophy, God, or children now! Fight the inevitable tyranny and defend one's own. Besides, with our aging population, who will care for us when we're elderly (i.e., dependent and unproductive) if not those impertinent children--whether or not they are our own?

Otherwise we're lucky if our fate becomes something similar to Sol's (Edward G. Robinson's) in Soylent Green. And this is a fate, despite its expressions of love, that is worthwhile avoiding.

Marshall Crenshaw

Listening to hipster music has led me to listening to music that is not worth hearing. It must be that I hear some tune that represents what is the most music on the edge. It used to be Radiohead as the most interesting. Coldplay, Dinosaur jr., or the Cure. There are New Zealand band which must be the latest of rock 'n roll. My friend Britt who eternally must be on the cutting edge of music (let's hope they are from New Zealand , and that they have done lots of heroin.)

So you may as well listen to that nonsense. Right now I'm listening to Allman Brothers. So that lame story can be made fun of, but I can change the song right now. For instance, I have now presented Matthew Sweet "Do It Again." Needless to say you guys suck regarding your deep meaning of making the lies about how cool I am.

Kalev Pehme's Blog: Poetry, Philosophy, Slow and Close Reading

Kalev Pehme has decided to blog. This doesn't mean that he will tell us every detail of his life. Rather it means that he will provide rich reflections on philosophy. He has offered an initial taste of what it means to blog in Pehmeian manner. Indeed, that manner is something he calls "anti-blogging."

What is an anti-blog? Mr Pehme has already indicated what it is with four slow and close readings of Leo Strauss' account of Plato's Republic--from The City and Man. In these posts he addresses important things Socratic and Platonic. In his running commentary, he stops to ask some obvious questions that are rhetorically implicit in Strauss' writing. For instance, the first piece has some instructive remarks about irony and the nature of Platonic and Socratic speech--a theme which Strauss himself makes explicit.

In sum, Mr. Pehme is providing some worthwhile blogging--or anti-blogging as he would have it.

I also like the picture of the tree lined path that he uses as the masthead. This picture is indicative of the kind of contemplative thought that one can only have while on a journey.

Check it out.