Divine Plagiarism

So it occurs to me that I wrote a bunch of serious stuff. Someone reading it might think I was some sort of philosopher, citing sources and speaking Latin over some half-caf double hazelnut macchiato. Tragically, that’s not me at all. I’m generally pretty retarded, and I find myself amusing nearly all the time, whether I actually am or not. In order to prove that beyond any doubt, in this post I’m just going to write about random, stupid crap that nobody probably cares about but me. In other words, it will read like a normal blog.

Kahlil Gibran was a famous poet from Lebanon. He wrote in the late 1800s. He looks a lot like Borat. He writes this book ‘Jesus, son of man,’ which describes Christ from the perspective of John, Pilate, Caiaphas and many others. And I can’t help but think about Larry Norman’s ‘The Outlaw.’ Of course, Gibran is one of the people Lewis talks about, hating on Paul but loving Jesus. He describes it like a proto-revolutionary who goes after all the king’s advisors, saving for the last step actually dethroning the king. But whatever. I don’t know Gibran’s heart. It just strikes me that two people from such different worlds and times end up saying the same thing in two completely different media. And it strikes me that a lot of the time the words are the same, and the words are what is important, not the medium. But most of the time, because we are arrogant, we spend a lot of time arguing why our favorite medium is cool and everybody else’s sucks.

Through a convoluted series of events, I was reminded of a post I read a year ago from someone who used to be my friend. They were talking about how unoriginal Top 40 stations were, and played two Nickelback songs simultaneously, where you could see that they used exactly the same rifs and chords. I’m not a big Nickelback fan, so whatever, but I think they’re actually hard rock, not top 40. Anyways, so I think its weird when people who are all ‘Im so multicultural’ only are sensitive towards the cultures they already like. After all, you can watch multi-culti dance from a safe arm‘s length, but actual multi-culturalism happens when the Manhattanite has to interact with the Campesino-American wearing the cowboy hat and boots, where people have to overcome actual prejudices, instead of jousting after institutional racism and the man. But that’s hard, so we do easy things that we want to do anyways and call them hard instead.

Things all have contexts. I can quote Durkheim or Weber or whoever you want, but it should be totally obvious. I think that citing sources is really just invoking power. It doesn’t add anything to the argument, really. Like saying ipso facto or q.e.d. It doesn’t say anything. It just invokes power. Like the court languages of the middle ages. A power language, used by the intelligentsia and the elites for self-identification. Language to power, would make an interesting post. Ill mull it for a while first. Regardless, I shouldn’t have to quote some guy to validate a statement. Judge it on its merits. Do the same for me. I get so sick of people looking at the groups I am part of and trying to do some freakin’ multi-variate regression, and then telling me who I am based on the results. Sure, people have backgrounds, and you can assume certain things. But leave your assumptions open to revision based on the data. If you think something about me because of where I’ve been or what I’ve done, than whatever. That makes sense. Just realize those thing may mean something quite different for me than they mean to an observer. And if you have a question, ask me about it. Ill be glad to explain. I’ve been trying to learn to do this with others. But I’m forgetful. So if I do that to you, please call me on it.

So the point, which I already forgot, is that I dislike snooty people who disdain things they don’t even try to understand. So Top 40 music is unoriginal to a Tchaikovsky listener. Kenneth Copeland’s works all sound the same to most Linkin Park fans. Baroque listeners disdained the early Classical composers for their vulgarity. So a passage of Rachmaninoff moves you? Social Distortion moves me. Who are you to tell me that my reaction is invalid? I don’t tell you your music sucks. I just don’t prefer it. But if you like it, and it moves you, then cool. Good on you. I hope you enjoy it. I am sure that Beethoven writes from his heart and from his passions in the symphonies he composed while deaf. I am also sure that Everclear writes with just as much passion when they’re singing about how their dad left them. Where do people get off illegitimating others just because their means of expression do not mesh with their own? So Brahms has stood the test of history? How many other people did he have to beat to win his recording contract (or equivalent of the time)? How many garage band composers were in competition with him? He was playing for the wealthy in courts. That’s a small slice of the population. The rest of the people were playing folk songs on improvised instruments. And the snooty types were looking down on them even then.

Yeah, its postmodern. Sort of. There is a difference between preferences and values. We should all eat some sort of food. But I really don’t care if you don’t like my sort of food. And I am not lessened in any way if you enjoy food that is not at all like mine.

As for the whole McWhorter thing, on good and bad music and all, you have to look at things in context. Im not saying that he does or he doesn’t. It was just a segue way. Most rap music is disrespectful toward women and authority. But Cross Movement is awesome, both in their technical musical skills, and in their message. I’m not judging context. I’m judging in context. I doubt that Mozart’s indiscretions were not reflected in his syncopations and chord progressions. And, oops I forgot, Wagner was appropriated by the Nazis, much to Lewis‘ chagrin. It‘s in God in the Dock. If music kills people, then it didn’t start with rap. So if punk rawk has a lot of yelling and like four power chords, then judge a punk rawk band by how well they capture the essence of the medium, and how well they use it to convey their message. And if Gregorian chants have like one chord, then do the same. Psalm 150, y’know. And the foolish things of this world. The pulse of a people can be found in their music. If you’re too cool to learn how to read that pulse, you will blind yourself to them. And the revolution may not be televised, but you’ll probably hear it on the radio.

It’s the same crowd that thinks using the word ‘problematic’ instead of ‘bad’ makes you smart, regardless of the content of your statement. Harvard-itis, I think it should be called. Just because you can inject obscure latin phrases doesn’t mean your argument doesn’t suck anymore. People want to say it’s booksmarts vs. common sense. I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it’s straight-up intellectual horsepower applied in a context. And I know some people who grew up surrounded by the practical who then applied their intellectual gifts toward practical uses, and excelled in doing so. And just because they don’t like expending 3.6 more seconds to use a word with more syllables to describe the concept of ‘bad’ doesn’t mean they’re one bit less smart. And they usually end up with something to show for it. Refer to Lewis’ ‘Good Works’ essay in God in the Dock.

Here’s another thing. I really dislike the ignorance of social scientists, ethicists and lawyers toward other academic disciplines. People who have no idea what a Fourier Transform is want to consider themselves the intelligentsia, and claim a lock on the ‘enlightened opinion.’ There’s one specific result of this I really don’t like: the stereotype of Evangelicals as uneducated. It is usually made by social scientist types, who took introductory college algebra at some liberal arts school, and would never make it through Georgia Tech or Cal Tech or wherever. If they had ever seen the inside of a Civil Engineering doctoral program, they would have likely noticed the significant number of Evangelicals occupying the adjacent seats. But whatever.

I’m so this. I’m so not that. Whatever. Poseurs all. Everybody’s so concerned with being better than each other. Its really stupid. Even if you could prove that you were better than everyone else, who would you hang out with? After all, you just proved you were too cool for everyone else. So now you get to be too cool for everybody alone. Have fun, schmuck. Just do what you like. Care less about what other people like and whether it sucks or not. It is childish to diminish other people’s identities in order to raise your own stock. Any identity based on that is impoverished.

So back to the ‘I’m retarded and I don’t care because I think it’s funny’ main theme, me and one of my friends who is still in training and his master’s program at the same time, because he’s crazy hardcore like that, and we were having a standard conversation that covered Augustine, Blade Runner, Quantum Physics, Epistemology, Gestalt, Race and Ethnicity, and Psychoanalysis within the course of five minutes, which includes a good amount of laughing and repeating things we found funny like fourteen times, and we started talking about how most philosophers were really talking about girls (except for Wittenstein, who was probably talking about guys. I’ll leave that one alone.) So, to the chagrin of the other guy at the table, who honorably endured an education in the classics, we start thinking of alternate titles for framing works of world history. Like ‘I’m okay even though I’m an Athenian general,’ by Thucidides, or alternately ‘Please don’t kill me.’ Also ‘I wish I hadn’t been a playa’ by Augustine. It was awesome.

Which brings me back to the title of the whole thing. ‘Awesomeness and Ontology.’ My and my friend decided that we would make a new philosophical system. It was almost as cool as the time some other guys decided to make up a rumor. No hostile intent, no slander, just pure social experiment. Just ‘cause it was stupid and it was funny. Anyways, so we decided that we could divide the world into ‘awesome’ and ‘not awesome.’ All things could be classified as belonging to one of the two categories. We’ll call it the ‘polarized dichotomy.’ So we decided that the best graduate thesis ever would be ‘How to Be Awesome: an Ontological Approach.’ And then we laughed about it a while. And then we repeated it. And then we laughed some more. And that all took about ten minutes.

So that should prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I am not a sage philosopher. Really, I think stupid things are funny. And I almost always think I’m funny. Hmm. I’m intentionally not going to do the math on those two last statements. Anyways, so that’s that. Seeya. Out.