Monday, October 24, 2011

angry up the blood

I've been warming up to the class a lot more, though I wish we were in a room with ten of the people who don't talk as much but when they do generally have more to say, and that we could go more in depth than we do sometimes.

I used to wonder how we got so stupid in this country and I understand more and more that there are people out there who consider themselves decent and open-minded human beings who due to a sense of exceptionalism and superiority, seem to have no problem with blowing places halfway around the world to smithereens with 7-year-old-level answers like THEY STARTED IT, or THEY DID IT TOO WHY CAN'T WE.

Right.

You can still be on the theoretical good side of history and be very, very wrong. There's two people in the class who are German, one whose father had to walk home 5,000 miles from a POW camp in Stalin's Russia and whose mother survived the bombing of Dresden, and another who was 15 when the war ended and fills in the names and dates with striking details pulled from his memories.

And we can talk about genocides and gulags as something other people do, but maybe we don't have death camps, but we have black sites, we haven't nuked anyone, but someone can push a button and predator drone someone halfway around the world. Are we as a country morally superior to our enemies? Everyone thinks they are, be they AMERICA OF GOD AND FREEDOM or those who want to take out the Great Satan. Everyone thinks they're the heroes and they're willing to send out schlubs to get themselves killed while they sit back and watch.

I'm sick of hearing about Occupy Wall Street because it's so fucking self-absorbed. Yeah, life is hard here, trust me, I know this, but your lifestyle makes liFe pretty damn hard for everyone else who ends up with a lot of suck because your car needs gas and you need the new iPhone whose metals come from Congo. We are the 1% of the rest of the world, people, especially white people with college degrees and parents with some means.

We'd do a whole lot better we stopped occupying all these other places all over the world, but that won't happen because the government (does it really seem to matter anymore if it's Bush or Obama if you really step back and look at what's actually going on) and their tandem corporations have a lot to gain from our adventuring.

It's getting better all the time someone tells me, and maybe it is for him personally, but how can you really look at the downward spiral and see that, is your myopia so strong you can't see past your immediate experience? I just don't know.

6 comments:

Randal Graves said...

IF YOU WANT TO BEAT MONSTERS YOU HAVE TO BE A MONSTER YOU HIPPIE, I mean, I'm not sure what I love most about your rants, that you're right at least 94.85% of the time, or that since you penned them I can continue to avoid doing so.

Given that H, unlike some, offers thoughtful answers, I think we can rule out the generational as explanation for the Billy Stole Cookies Too shtick.

that girl said...

It could have been worse. I was reading Hannah Arendt about lying politicians and Vietnam on the way home.

I think I might sign up for whatever classes he and M end up taking next semester so I can listen to him say good things and snark with her.

word verification

acationd (as in, not taking a vacation).

Randal Graves said...

The politicians shouldn't have lied and told us earlier that hippies were screwing everything up.

Do you know what they're taking?

Heh. Where's the V? It's my hand, giving the Merrie Ole to not taking one.

Anonymous said...

are they teaching Arendt or is that something you picked up on yer own?
http://being.publicradio.org/programs/bonhoeffer/index.shtml

that girl said...

Randal,
Yeah, we can't chalk this up to age or smarts or whatever. I think she's taking a Tuesday-Thurs class (Middle East and Asian history), I don't know about him. Does this make us stalkery in a noncreepy way?

dmf,
I read a smidgen of Arendt my last year of undergrad and my brother-in-law's been working his way through her work. I'm finally taking the time to dive into it.

Anonymous said...

very good, absurdbeats is a reader of Arendt as well (I just left her this: http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en)
will be interested in yer take on what Arendt offers.